Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (3 page)

The house was dark and smelled of cooked cabbage. On the left, a small, messy kitchen was lit only by a fluorescent light over a counter, beneath a bank of cupboards. Straight ahead was a dark hallway. On the right was a cluttered living room with a wood stove. At the couch’s end nearest them, a lamp with a red shade glowed on an endtable. In the shadowy corner at the other end of the couch stood a large round cage, tall and fat, and inside on a perch was an enormous dark bird. The bird barked in throaty bursts, like a large dog. A small black-and-white TV with rabbit-ears stood on a TV tray in front of the couch playing the news with the volume high. The heat in the house was smothering.

Mrs. Kobylka went to the end of the sagging old couch by the lamp and grunted as she lowered herself onto the flattened cushion. She leaned forward and turned down the television’s volume. She had been crocheting when they knocked––the skein of yarn, the crocheting hook, and what looked like the beginning of an afghan lay beside her. She did not invite them to sit.

“We were on our way to a Christmas party last night,” Kirk said, “and we had a car accident.” He thought he’d cried all the tears he had to shed, but more burned his throat. He swallowed a couple times before continuing. “I… I was driving. We were hit by a drunk driver. He ran a stop sign. I was wearing a seatbelt, but… she wasn’t.”

Baltazar the dark, hulking bird in the cage shouted, “Stumbling bumblefucks!” in what sounded like the voice of an old man.

Kirk’s eyes had adjusted to the dull red-tinted light in the room and could see the bird in more detail. He had thought, at first, that it was a parrot of some kind, but it looked like no parrot he had ever seen. It was black, all the way down to its legs and wicked talons, except for red crescents beneath its black eyes, a curved, blood-red blade of a beak, and a patch of crimson feathers on its back and tail. But those seemed to be the only feathers on the bird. It didn’t even have feathers on its wings. Instead, its wings seemed to be folds of leathery black flesh. Almost like a bat’s wings. But that couldn’t be––what kind of bird had wings like a bat?

“Stumbling bumblefucks!” the bird shouted again.

“Hush, Balty,” Mrs. Kobylka said. She looked up at Kirk. “You hurt?”

“I got a bump on the knee,” Kirk said. “Natalie was… she went into a coma. She had internal injuries. And tonight, she…” He clenched his teeth and took a deep breath. “She died. Just a little while ago. In the hospital.”

“Too bad. Mrs. Kobylka feel sad for you. But what this got to do with me?”

“We’ve… heard things about you,” Kirk said, glancing at Randy.

Randy’s eyes widened and he spread his arms slightly, as if to say,
What’re you looking at me for?

Kirk cleared his throat, shifted his weight from foot to foot. “Um, well, since we were kids, people have said that you’re… that you can do things.”

Mrs. Kobylka sat as far forward as she could and rolls of fat pressed against her housedress. “Spit it out, boy, it’s late.”

“There’s a story about a dog,” Kirk said. “According to the, um, the story, years ago a boy’s dog got sick and died, and he brought it to you, and you, uh… well, according to the story, you… brought it back.” Kirk heard his own words and was suddenly embarrassed. He bowed his head a moment, then looked at her again. “Is that true, Mrs. Kobylka?”

“True?” Her laugh sounded like dry leaves being crushed. “What you saying?”

“Is it true that…” He took another deep breath, then let the words tumble out of him. “Is it true that you’re a witch and you can bring back dead things?”

She laughed again as she stood. She stepped in front of Kirk and cocked her head to the left, looked up at him with her round, watery eye. “You come here for my magic?” she whispered, smiling.

“It’s… it’s true, then?” Kirk said.

“Why you want I should help you bring this girl back?”

“Because… I love her. And I feel responsible for what happened. I should’ve told her to put her seatbelt on, I should have… I…” His voice dropped to a whisper. “We’ve known each other since we were in first grade. I can’t… live… without her. I love her.” He pressed his lips together hard and blinked back tears.

“Love,” she said as she turned away and left the living room. She waved a gnarled, liver-spotted hand in the air and said, “Love messes up your head. Scrambles the brains like eggs.” She flipped a switch on the wall and turned on the overhead fluorescent in the kitchen, then turned to Kirk and Randy again. “You want I should do my magic for you. Can you pay the price?”

Kirk said, “I don’t have much money, but––”

“I’m not talking about
money
. What about you two?” She pointed at them with the first two fingers of her right hand. “What you gonna do for
me
, I do this for you? Kids in this town––they egg my house, call me names, leave dog shit on my porch. And I should do this for you?”

Kirk went to her and said, “We’ll try to get the kids to leave you alone.”

“You can do that?”

“We can do that. I’ve got a little brother, and Randy, here, has a younger brother and sister. They have lots of friends. We can tell them to leave you alone. We’ll get the word out.”

“You tell them stay away from Mrs. Kobylka or I cut them up and feed them to Baltazar,” she said with a mischievous smile. Her laugh became a phlegmy cough.

The bird wailed like a baby crying at the top of its lungs.

“Baltazar, stop showing off!” Mrs. Kobylka crossed her small kitchen. “You know what you getting into, boy?” She opened a cupboard and removed a couple jars, put them on the counter.

“What do you mean?” Kirk said.

She closed the cupboard and came to him, stood close. He smelled her sour breath as she said, “This girl, she will be your responsibility, not mine. No one else’s. Just yours. And once it is done… there is no undoing it. You understand? She comes back, she is
yours
.”

“Your girlfriend… she’s no dog. I do this for you, boy, it is on your head. Whatever happens, you must live with it the rest of your life.”

Kirk suddenly felt impatient. He hadn’t slept the night before and his nerves felt raw. “Are you going to help me or not?”

“I do this for you, but I don’t know if it is
helping
or not.” She went back to the kitchen counter and unscrewed the lid off one of the jars. “I come here when I was just a girl, younger than you, I think. I live here ever since. My husband die. My baby die. I been alone since then.” She took the lid off the other jar. Leaning an arm on the edge of the counter, she bent down and opened a cupboard, and used both hands to lift out a stone mortar and pestle, which she put on the counter. “All this town ever give me was shit.” She looked at Kirk again. “I do this for you, but you remember––you
ask
for it.” Her thin, frayed lips peeled back over her few yellow teeth, and she laughed.

The bird shouted, “Stumbling bumblefucks!”

2.

Their first time together was on a hot summer afternoon under a small bridge near their homes. They lived only four houses apart on River Valley Drive, a rural area just outside Anderson’s city limits. The bridge was only three yards long and so low they had to duck when they walked under it. It passed over a small creek that ran all year long and sometimes flooded during the rainier winters.

It had been Natalie’s idea to come, and she had brought lunch in a brown grocery bag with the top rolled up. They found a sandy patch among all the rocks and she took a rolled-up towel from the bag and spread it out. They sat cross-legged facing each other with the bag between them.

Looking at her there in the shade of the bridge, it was hard for Kirk to believe she was the same girl who had climbed on the monkeybars with him when they were children. In second grade, he had dropped a live frog down the back of her dress and laughed hysterically as she danced around to get rid of it. In fourth grade, he’d put earthworms in her Power Rangers lunchbox and laughed at her shrieks.

But now they were both 15––his birthday had been the day before, hers a few months ago––and nothing about Natalie made him laugh. Smile, yes, but not laugh the way he used to. They’d been 13 when, as if overnight, Natalie had changed, and as a result, it seemed, so had Kirk. One day, he’d looked at her and had been unable to take his eyes off her ever since. Her smiles made his stomach flutter, and when she held his hand, he was unable to feel the ground beneath his feet. The two had been inseparable since then, and after two years, she could still make him clumsy and weak-kneed and stuttery.

Just an inch shorter than Kirk, she had long, thick hair so black it sometimes looked purple in the sun. It was early August and she had a golden tan. Her round breasts pushed gently against the tanktop she wore, her narrow midriff bare above a pair of white shorts, legs long and silky. When he looked at her now, he saw a young woman, not a girl––and yet, when he was around her, he still felt like a boy. They had been together for two years, and yet everything they did together felt new. And they did almost everything together. Except for one thing––until that summer afternoon.

Natalie moved the bag aside and crawled to him on hands and knees, grinning. She kissed him and their tongues played tag for a moment.

“Yeah, but I didn’t get a chance to give you a present, did I? So I’m giving it to you now.” As she kissed him again, she reached down and unbuttoned his denim cut-offs, slid her hand beneath his boxers and gently squeezed him.

Kirk nodded. He would have agreed to almost anything at that moment. His mouth hung open as he watched her stand and undress. Her breasts bobbed as she slipped the tanktop up over them and took it off.

They made love for the first time there beside the gently burbling creek, in the cool shade of the bridge.

3.

“She just got here a few minutes ago,” Luanne Richmond whispered as she let Kirk in through the back door of the Richmond Funeral Home. She closed the door, then led him down a short hall and through a doorway to the left. As they went downstairs to the basement, she whispered, “You can’t stay long. My dad could come down here anytime. You can have a couple minutes alone with her but no more.”

Luanne was a short, chubby girl with round eyeglasses, her brown hair cut in a pageboy. Natalie and Luanne had been good friends, and Natalie’s death had hit her hard. Even now, her eyes were red and swollen from crying. She had been at the hospital earlier when Natalie died, along with a number of other kids from school, and Kirk had taken her aside and asked her for this favor––a few minutes alone with Natalie before she was embalmed and prepared for viewing.

“They wouldn’t let me see her here,” he’d told her at the hospital. “Only her family. I just want a chance to say goodbye. Alone. Do you understand?” Luanne probably would have thought he was crazy if he’d told her the truth. Luanne had promised to do what she could. She told him to park down the street from the funeral home, where she and her family lived on the second floor. He was to come to the back door and wait in an hour, and be very quiet.

He had left Randy and Liz in the Focus parked at the curb around the corner from the funeral home. All the way from Mrs. Kobylka’s, Randy had said, over and over, “Did you see that fuckin’ bird? It was like Rodan’s short, ugly cousin.” Randy had wanted to come into the funeral home with him, but Kirk decided to do it alone.