He tried to neutralize his shame with excuses. Glass had called him an ape. You don’t call a Black man an ape. Next, he tried to neutralize it with logic. Could you really call it murder if your victim got up and walked away? Perhaps it was Chuck Corso’s honesty that gave Baseman’s lies teeth, which chewed on him just as he’d chewed on Glass.
No one knew what he’d done except Kwame in security, whom Glass had called from the stairwell, But Kwame posed no threat, at least in that regard. He was a ghoul, victim to whatever disaster had overwhelmed the CableCorp lobby, Baseman had no clue what went on in ghoul brains, but They seemed to remember routines. Like the Glass-thing returning to the anchor desk, the Kwame-thing had elevatored down to the studio level, where he raised some serious hell.
He’d arrived when the push for the elevators was at its bottleneck worst; Baseman saw Kwame bite ten or twelve people before he was forced into a janitorial closet, which the floor manager locked shut. Before she left, she gave Baseman her key ring, and he had used it to disable the lower-level elevators. With the stairwell barricaded shut—along with the incriminating pools of Glass’s blood—the studio was effectively sealed. The key ring went into Baseman’s left pocket, Item One. Item Two went into the right pocket: Kwame’s gun.
When Baseman heard people, living people, pleading to be let in from the stairwell, he hadn’t complied, for he could also hear the hungry moans of stairwell ghouls. He could have tried blasting bullets at Their heads, but he didn’t trust himself with Kwame’s gun. When you came down to it, as the base man liked to do, wasn’t a handful of frightful deaths against a locked door worth the thousands being helped by WWN’s ongoing broadcast?
He lifted the last of the bourbon to his lips but did not drink. He was trying to get drunk, proof positive he was not A-OK with letting innocent people die. If he let the pain in his cheek, hand, and heart howl, perhaps the sound would steer him true. He lowered the bottle.
“Forget the power grid, Face. How are you holding up?”
The Face licked cracker crumbs from his hand. “I feel different. Like I’ll never be tired again.”
“How’d you get so strong, Face? I swear I’ll never understand it.”
Chuck Corso shrugged. “Xander.”
“Xander? Who the fuck’s Xander?”
“My personal trainer. Taught me a lot of good habits.”
Baseman sputtered laughter, not caring about the pain of his face’s torn ligaments, and the Face, though he looked confused—perplexed, even—laughed too, and when Baseman held out the bourbon, the Face took the last slug. He probably only did it as a token of friendship, but if that were true, all the better.
All Mine
Charlene Rutkowski had imagined Luis and Rosa Acocella’s home a hundred times. A cute, gabled Swiss colonial, Luis in a straw hat wheelbarrowing garden produce while Rosa waves from the top half of a divided door. Or a tall French row house, Rosa sipping lemonade on a cast-iron balcony as Luis emerges from the porte cochere. Even a modernist nightmare of sharp angles and arbitrary windows, Luis and Rosa in sophisticated black, coolly ignoring each other from the ends of a monastery table. All homes into which she, Charlie from the Parkchester, did not deserve entry.
What she discovered in the cul-de-sac was a maroon-and-cream split level with bushes slightly withered in their red-dirt plot. The house had a sweeping northern view of the valley and distant hills, pretty in the dawn light. She swore the air was thinner up here. She leaned against the overfull, city-issued trash bins at the bottom of the Acocella drive, heaving the foul air. If Latino garbage collectors were getting blamed for all this, you could hardly blame them for halting pickups.
She could hear Acocella trotting up from half a block away. She should have kept him closer: sarcophages were not limited to house-fire bacchanalias. On the other hand, his distance gave her a chance to ditch him. I can drop this dweeb whenever the fuck he starts to look bad, she thought. The only reason I’m sticking is because, hey, where would this guy be if he didn’t have somebody to kick ass for him? She was kidding herself. She loved the guy, She’d keep letting herself be pulled along while knowing she wasn’t being pulled at all.
He arrived at her elbow, gasping for breath.
“The … lights are … off.”
It was true, a dismal sign, and Charlie fought the desire to say, Yep, that’s right, no one home, let’s run off together. But Luis’s face was slicked in sweat turned coral by the rising sun and distorted with a level of dread exceeding any he’d shown during the John Doe episode.
“Could be smart,” she whispered. “She could be hiding. Staying quiet.”
“That’s not Rosa. She’s not quiet.”
“The sun’s coming up, Maybe she’s even asleep.”
“She left a million messages. She wouldn’t sleep until she heard from me.”
“Well, fuck, Acocella, are we going to gossip about it all night, or are we going in?”
He gave her the same helpless look she’d seen on other men with their feet halfway off a cliff, They’d held up a corner store and gotten recognized. They owed money to a guy with bat-swinging friends. Luis was better than that, but Charlie felt the same acid-eaten diminution of being knocked to supporting-character status yet again. Her education, her job—fat lot of good they did. Meet Charlene Rutkowski, cowering behind trash cans, helping the love of her life rescue his wife.
Luis lifted the SDPD .38 revolver from his pocket as if it were a sleeping scorpion. Charlie’s heart thudded as she remembered John Doe’s skull blasting across the morgue floor. Luis was probably thinking the worst about Rosa, Charlie looked around. The neighbor’s garage was open, and she saw a golf bag inside. She dashed over, fifteen feet, and unsheathed a club. She didn’t know dick about golf, but the club had a good, heavy head. She returned to Luis with both hands choked up on the grip.
“Let me go first, all right?” she whispered.
He handed her his key chain by the front-door key. She took it, started up the drive, then paused at the walkway.
“Just don’t shoot me in the back, okay?”
“What?”
“You don’t look super comfortable with that gun is all.”
“Will you get going?”
Charlie drew a breath and peeked through the front-door window. A living room, a table with device chargers. The woman’s touches of a flamingo-colored sofa and tasseled lamps, A line of framed pictures, one of them askew by several inches. Did that little detail mean Rosa had been ripped to shreds by deathless marauders? Or did it mean the mounting hook was off by half an inch? The difference between total societal upheaval and trivial annoyance was cobweb-thin.
The turning of the bolt was the crunch of bones. Charlie had to open her mouth to keep from biting her lip. With a sucking sound, the door puffed open on its own, an invitation to Casa Acocella she wasn’t certain she’d have otherwise received. She shoved the keys into her jeans and entered. A duck-like creak—shit, hardwood floors, Her grimace-and-glance at Luis was rewarded by the sight of him holding the gun with two unsteady hands, aimed roughly at the back of her head. Perfect. Just perfect.
The crooked photograph was not an outlier; it was a harbinger. In the kitchen, everything was askew. Cookbooks slopped over the counter and stove top. The coffee canister lay shattered, beans spread over everything. The clock on the wall was now the clock on the floor, its upchucked batteries freezing time to the exact second of the room’s battle.
A woman dangled from the sink by her arm, scribbling her feet through puddles of blood, smacking her lips as she searched for food that wasn’t coffee beans.
It wasn’t Rosa; Charlie knew that right away. This lady was old, her eyes hidden by folded skin, Beneath her black hair band, sprouts of gray hair were visible. When she looked at Charlie, her eyes were as white as Elmer’s Glue, which Charlie guessed was attributable to the woman having cataracts before going ghoul. The woman pulled back her lips to show her few teeth and a sticky r
ed tongue.
Charlie held out the golf club to prevent Acocella from entering.
“Luis, no, don’t—”
But this was his home, where he lived with his wife. Her words meant dirt. He knocked the club aside and lurched into the room, right into the blood. The revolver was out, but he swung it behind his back as if caught with forbidden cookies.
“Mamá!” he cried. “Mamá, what are you doing here?”
Alarms went off inside Charlie. The only person she’d tried to call since leaving the morgue was her own mother, with the result being that ubiquitous dead tone. Mae Rutkowski did not possess an iota of her daughter’s survival instinct; on the other hand, three decades spent in the same apartment had fortified the place into a bunker, Charlie wished she were there now. She’d beat down any ghoul that got close, and Mae might finally appreciate her.
Luis swept toward the sink, his voice hitched into a whine.
“You’re supposed to be in La Paz! I was driving down this morning! What were you thinking?”
What Mamá Acocella thought no longer mattered, if she thought at all. What mattered was that Luis Acocella, clever enough to think of succinylcholine and the SDPD revolver when it mattered, had apparently quit thinking altogether, reduced to his mother’s child once again, his thoughts only of her.
He bent over the sink to investigate how his mother’s hand was caught, Mamá’s half-toothed mouth opened wide, and as she leaned into her son’s leg, green bile slid over her tongue. Charlie gagged with an abhorrent vision.
Mae Rutkowski’s crème de menthe.
Sweet peppermint swill, tough hairy flesh—both were disgusting goodies for revolting old people to whom this world no longer belonged. It belonged to Charlie now. She deserved it for scrapping, for surviving, for the bruises she’d taken, the books she’d studied, all the good things, Luis included, she’d resigned herself to never having. The gust of wind told her she’d swung the club.
The wooden head hit Mamá’s wrist with a marble-bag crunch, ripping her hand free from Luis’s leg. Luis whirled around, his face a child’s mask of betrayal.
“Charlie!”
“She’s trying to bite you, Acocella! She’s another John Doe!”
“Her hand is caught in the garbage disposal!”
“Rosa probably did that, trying to stop her!”
“No, they got along, they were friends—”
“Luis, wake up! That’s not your—”
Even better than the doctor and his diener knew the rattle of a pulverized wrist, they knew the carrot-snap of a broken bone, usually courtesy of Charlie and the two-handed rib shears. By all rights, the breaking bone should have been Mamá Acocella’s ulna in the sink, but it was not. Luis and Charlie looked down to discover that, during their squabble, Mamá had righted herself and chomped down on her son’s right thumb.
“Mom?” Luis asked in a whisper.
On some old instinct, her white eyes rolled upward.
Everything seemed to slam back into place for Luis Acocella; Charlie could see the change sweep over him. In a single move, he pulled back with his full body weight while kicking forward with a leg, and Mamá’s mouth, studded with a half-complement of teeth, fell away from his hand. Luis shot backward into a counter, yanked open a drawer, and pulled from it a big, gleaming butcher knife. He dropped to the floor.
None of the terrible things she’d seen equaled that of Luis Acocella holding out the knife to her.
“Cut off my thumb,” he said.
Charlie stared.
“Now! Cut it off!”
“Luis?” Her voice was as a squeak.
“If it’s blood-borne, I’m fucked! Take the knife! That’s an order!”
“We’re not at work. You can’t make me … Do it yourself, if you’re so—”
“I can’t do it with my left hand! Charlie, please! Now, please, right fucking now!”
It was a task she’d done a hundred times before, though always on the dead. Yet she’d been trained to obey medical superiors, especially Luis. She heard the golf club hit the floor, saw her knuckles whiten along the handle of the knife, felt the hard tiling beneath her knees. Luis’s hand was spread on a gray tile, the thumb’s distal interphalangeal joint ringed in blood. He’d never be able to do an autopsy again, type a report again, was he sure this is what he wanted, they didn’t even know if—
“Come on come on come on come on!”
Charlie chopped. The steel blade struck stone tile, an unkind cutting board, and the knife bounced out of her grip. Like a few frames snipped from a filmstrip, Luis’s thumb was attached, then wasn’t. Not a perfect cut, but the tool was no PM40. A hank of flexor pollicis brevis muscle, the size of a piece of sushi, had been severed as well, and Charlie’s brain free-fell through anatomy-text warnings of what this extra half inch of flesh would cost Luis, as the loss chain-reacted through the first carpometacarpal joint, the lumbrical muscles and palmar aponeurosis, the intertendinous mesh. Forget surgical instruments, would he be able to hold a cereal bowl? He’d have a hoof.
First aid training told her to insert the thumb into a bag and put that bag inside a bag of ice, hopefully to be reattached, but Luis kicked the digit away. Charlie watched it roll against Mamá Acocella’s foot, then looked away when Mamá picked it up and brought it to her lips. Luis was on his feet, his face yellow and wet, but cognizant enough to hold his gouting hand higher than his heart.
“Towel,” he squeaked, nodding at a drawer.
Charlie scrambled up, threw it open, and found a stack of soft, clean, heirloom dish towels hand-embroidered by someone who cared. The yellow, pink, and blue flowers all went red when she twisted the towel around Luis’s hand. She threw open the left side of the refrigerator.
“Rosa,” Luis moaned.
“We need that hand in ice.”
“Rosa,” he insisted and shambled away.
Charlie slammed the fridge and gave chase like a mother after a toddler, though once the signs were spotted, she conceded them too compelling to ignore. The blots of blood on the kitchen floor continued in dribbles through the small, sunny dining room, down a hall wide enough to fit a table of potted cacti, and beneath a closed door. Luis leaned against the wall, too faint to open it.
“Open,” he panted.
“Let me get the golf club.”
“Open.”
She cursed, scrunched valor into her face, and took the knob. Was a ghoul inside, ready for ambush? Or a frightened woman who would scream for this invading vixen to get out? Bad or badder: she pushed open the door.
Here it was, the Acocella bedroom. Sex was a red herring; a bedroom was the heart of any home, one that beat stronger, night by night, as two people reached maximum vulnerability and trusted each other not to behave like animals. Charlie smelled the intricate incense of a couple’s skin, hair, and breath, Two people could not blend together more completely unless one ate the other, and Charlie felt a rumble of appetite. This closeness, she hungered for it.
There would be no Rosa reckoning here. Red splashes dotted along periwinkle carpet and across a seafoam comforter, at which point bloody fingerprints took over, imprinted on the sill of a wide-open window.
“Not arterial,” Luis sputtered. “Not even expirated.”
Charlie leaned for a better look. Bloodstain patterns were not their specialty, and fabric surfaces did analysis no favors, but even a woozy Luis Acocella was sharp. These were not the wax-seal patterns of passive drops or the raindrops-on-cobweb mist of bloody coughs, These stains had the solar-system layout of being flung from limbs and the globby smears of being spread by hands. Charlie gazed out the window.
“Am I right?” Luis demanded.
The succession of events seemed evident, Rosa del Gado Acocella, more inventive than her husband painted her, had incapacitated her mother-in-law with the garbage disposal, and then, probably for good reason, had exited from the bedroom window, There was no hard evidence Rosa herself had been harmed—at least
not indoors. Twenty feet into the grassless, brick-orange dirt outside, a shallow gulley had been dug by an apparent struggle. The dirt there was soaked red. There the trail went dead, if dead was still a word one could use with a straight face.
“Am I right?” Luis repeated. “Is she safe?”
“I think so,” Charlie lied. “She’s gone.”
Luis collapsed at this, finally. It was a good twenty minutes later, after Charlie had locked every window in the house, blocked all the doors with furniture, and ruined a second embroidered towel by redressing his wound, that he roused to lodge a weak protest when Charlie picked up the golf club from the kitchen floor. From where he hunched at the dining room table, he had an unobstructed view of the kitchen, and though his face and lips were pale, his eyes were the same dark, pretty brown as always.
“You don’t have to,” he begged.
“You know I do,” she replied.
“What did we say at the morgue? Wireless rays? Cellular radiation? We could toss out our phones, all the chargers. Maybe she’d change back. We could try.”
“We’re the ones who have to change.”
“Would it at least be…” He strangled a sob. “Would the gun be faster?”
“Too loud,” she said, and she reared back with the club. “Look the other way.”
It took a lot of swings, maybe dozens, to kill Luis Acocella’s mamá. The old woman’s skull made hard sounds, then wet sounds; more prominent were the hard sounds of Charlie panting and the wet sounds of Luis crying. Charlie let herself get lost in the muscular burn of the twist, the hurl, the jolt, the retraction, and when her scared, exhausted brain wandered to dark, selfish places, she let it happen. This is not your son anymore, she thought, swinging, swinging, He’s mine now, all mine.
Graduation
The trip to the main doors of Bulk High School was the same as any other day, save for the gunfire. The loudest bang came from the student parking lot, but that might have been a backfiring truck; the lot was two-thirds empty, and vehicles were hauling ass out of there, ripping their own exits through the lawn. The crackle from the football practice field, however, was definitely guns—white sparks against green grass. Other gunshots, from inside the school, resounded like firecrackers.
The Living Dead Page 31