Best New Zombie Tales Trilogy (5 page)

“Oh, shit,” Kirk muttered as realization set in. “You mean she might… still be dead.”

Randy raised his voice. “
What?”

Liz began to cry again. “Oh, God, this is so fucked up. I can’t believe this. I wanna go home.”

“What the fuck’re you
talking
about?” Randy said.

Wiping her eyes with a knuckle, Liz said, “There’s a big difference between a living person and a dead person who’s been, like, I don’t know… reanimated.” She laughed nervously. “Listen to me. I can’t believe I just said that.”

“
Reanimated?”
Randy said. Eyes wide, he glanced back and forth between the road and Liz. “Fuck, man. I saw that movie.”

“Are you insane? I’m sitting in a car with a walking dead person and you want me to surf the Web? We should be on the web, people would
pay
to see this shit.”

“Please, Liz.”

She brought her backpack up off the floorboard and into her lap. “Isn’t Rigor Mortis the name of a band? I’m probably gonna find a bunch of metalhead bulletin boards.”

2.

Randy killed the headlights before pulling into the circular driveway in front of the Mundy’s ranch-style house. Kirk unfastened his seatbelt and bent forward.

“Did you find anything yet?” he said.

Liz snapped at him. “Gimme a break, Kirk, I just started looking a few minutes ago.”

Kirk and Randy got out of the car and met at the rear door on the driver’s side, Natalie’s door. Kirk opened it. He and Randy whispered to each other.

“Help me carry her into the back,” Kirk said.

Randy nervously rubbed his hands on the front of his denim jacket as if wiping something sticky off them. He winced and said, “Look, dude, I’m not sure I wanna… y’know… touch her.”

“But she can’t walk.”

“I know, man, she can’t walk because she’s dead, which is why I don’t wanna touch her.”

“She walked to the car with me, you saw her,” Kirk said. “Come on, she’s wrapped in a sheet so you don’t have to touch her––oh, nevermind.”

Kirk slid his right arm behind her shoulders, his left beneath her legs and lifted her out of the car. She remained frozen in a sitting position.

Randy said, “She looks like a Barcalounger.” He followed as Kirk carried her past the garage and into the back yard. They walked around the covered concrete swimming pool and Kirk carried her into the small pool-house. He fumbled for the light, switched it on.

There was an old black vinyl-upholstered couch and an end-table in the pool-house’s concrete-floored main room, which was icy cold. But it was used primarily to store pool equipment, and as a place for people to change clothes or shower when they used the pool in the summer. No one ever went into the pool-house during the winter months.

He went to the couch, but changed his mind––the front window provided a clear view of the couch from outside. He carried her into the bathroom and set her down on the closed lid of the toilet. The tiled, pale-green bathroom was small, with a shower to the right of the toilet, a sink to the left.

“She smells,” Randy said, his voice unsteady. “I may be sick.”

“Well, try not to be,” Kirk said.

Randy stepped into the open doorway of the bathroom and faced Kirk. “Listen to me,” he whispered. “I’m thinking we did the wrong thing tonight, Kirk. She’s stiff as a board. That old woman––she was jerking us around, this is some kind of trick. She’s
dead
. This is a serious crime, stealing a dead body. I mean… well,
isn’t
it? It should be if it’s not, it’s a pretty gross thing to do, and dude, I think that’s what we’ve done.”

Kirk pointed to Natalie and said, “Randy, I saw her sit up on that table and look around. She looked at
me
. You saw her walk out of that funeral home with me. And she’s still making sounds. You heard them, didn’t you?”

“That was her? I thought it was you. Are you sure it wasn’t, like… gas?”

“She’s alive, Randy.”

“But she’s going to be stiff for about twenty-four hours,” Liz said. She stood just outside the bathroom, arms folded across her chest. “According to the Columbia Encyclopedia online, anyway.”

“She’ll be safe here tonight,” Kirk said as he and Randy stepped out of the bathroom. He pulled the door closed. “I’ll keep checking on her tomorrow.”

“You’re just gonna check on her?” Liz said. “What’re you gonna do if she starts moving around? Or if she starts to… you know… smell.”

“She already smells,” Randy said.

Kirk clenched his fists at his sides and closed his eyes a moment. He spoke quietly. “Please just…
stop
, okay? I… I’m not sure what I’m going to do.”

“You okay, Kirk?” Randy said.

He took a deep breath and opened his eyes. “No. But I will be. Thanks for helping out.”

Kirk walked them back to the car. As they drove away, he fumbled his keys from his pocket, but paused before unlocking the front door. He thought of Natalie sitting like a posed mannequin on the toilet in the pool-house. Leaving her there all alone made his chest ache. He put the keys back in his pocket and walked around the house.

He went to her in the small bathroom. She looked less like a human being sitting stiffly on the toilet than she had while lying dead on the stainless-steel table back at Richmond’s.

“Can you hear me, Nat?” he whispered.

She made no sound this time.

“I’ll come back out first thing tomorrow, I promise. Tomorrow’s the first day of Christmas vacation, so I won’t have to worry about school. We’ll be together, and we’ll… work this all out.” He wanted to take her in his arms and kiss her, hold her tight. But even in the cold, he could smell the odor––like meat that had been left out of the refrigerator and had gone bad. He could not bring himself to do it. Instead, he went out and got a folded-up old afghan from the couch and wrapped it around her over the sheet to keep her warm.

He left the pool-house, walked past the pool, and unlocked the back door of the house. As he passed the kitchen on his way down the hall, Dad said, “Kirk. Where have you been?”

3.

Kirk jumped at the sound of Dad’s voice. The kitchen was dark. Dad sat at the small oval table with a bottle of whisky and a half-full glass in front of him. He smiled wearily with his mouth, but not with his eyes.

“Nowhere,” Kirk said.

“You were nowhere?” Dad spoke just above a whisper and kept smiling in the dark. “Well, you had to be somewhere.”

Kirk’s voice was suddenly hoarse. “I was just riding around with Randy and Liz. We didn’t go anywhere, just drove around. Just talked. You know.”

“Sit down, Kirky.” Dad used to call him “Kirky” when Kirk was little, and sometimes it still slipped out.

Dad was Donald Mundy, but everyone called him Don. His old friends called him Donny. He was tall and slim, completely bald on top, with graying brown hair that grew around the back of his head from ear to ear. He ran a small advertising agency with his brother, Kirk’s uncle Matt. Most of the time, Dad was almost embarrassingly upbeat and cheerful. Everyone liked him. He was active in community organizations, went to church with Mom every Sunday. As far as Kirk was concerned, Dad was a likeable geek. He had never known Dad to raise his voice in anger or say a bad word about anyone––he was able to find something good in everyone he met. Mom, on the other hand, was a little high-strung, almost as nervous and hyper as Bud and Lou, her two ferrets, which had the run of the house. Dad was the level head in the family. But there were times when he couldn’t sleep well. This was not the first time Kirk had found him in the kitchen late at night sipping whisky. The first time had been when Kirk was eight years old. It happened maybe once or twice a year.

Dad wasn’t a big drinker––he got cheerfully tipsy on Christmas and New Year’s, but otherwise his drinking was limited to a couple beers when they barbecued in the back yard on summer weekends. The rest of the time, he drank Snapple. But on those late nights when he could not fall asleep––it went on for days, once as long as two weeks––he took the bottle out of the cupboard over the refrigerator. During those periods, Kirk noticed there was something different about Dad’s eyes. They did not smile when his mouth smiled. There was a sadness to them, a darkness. By the time he was twelve, Kirk could tell when Dad wasn’t sleeping simply by the detached look in his eyes when he smiled.

Kirk had wondered what it was that kept Dad from sleeping, but had never asked. He went to the table, pulled out a chair, and seated himself.

“I’ve told you in the past,” Dad said, “that you can always talk to me about anything, anytime you’ve got a problem, or even when you don’t. We’ve had some good talks, I think. I remember what it was like to be your age, and I’ve got no illusions about how you see me. I’m your goofy dad, maybe a little embarrassing sometimes in front of your friends. But I love you very much. I want the best for you, the best of everything. And I want you to know, Kirk, how deeply,
deeply
pained I am by what’s happened. Natalie was a wonderful girl. I know how much she meant to you.”

Kirk’s lips felt numb. “Thanks, Dad,” he said. “I appreciate that.”

“I want to make sure you’re not blaming yourself for what happened. It wasn’t your fault, Kirk. That drunk ran right through that stop sign, all the witnesses said so. You don’t, do you? Blame yourself, I mean?”

Kirk bowed his head. “I keep thinking I should’ve told her to put on her seatbelt.”

“Kirk, you can’t think that way. It’ll make you sick. The seatbelt might not have made any difference, you know. He slammed right into her. Look, I want you to promise me you won’t think that way. All right?” Kirk nodded as Dad sipped his drink. “So, where were you?”

“I told you. Just driving around with Randy and Liz. We talked. About Nat. We even cried a little.”

“Of course you did. You shouldn’t be afraid to cry, Kirk. You’ve experienced a horrible loss.” He turned his head slowly from side to side and looked for a moment as if he were about to cry. “Not the kind of loss you should have to deal with at your age.”

Dad smiled up at Kirk and once again, his eyes remained dark and unexpressive beneath a slightly furrowed brow. He lifted his glass and took a sip. “Just can’t sleep. That’s all.”

After a moment, Kirk nodded. “Okay. Well, I’m going to bed. Goodnight.”

“Goodnight, Kirky.”

- THREE -

1.

Kirk was slowly awakened the next morning by the chirping of his cell phone on the bedstand. He always left one of his windows open a few inches when he slept, and he could hear rain falling outside. He had slept little the night before. Twice he had gotten up, climbed out the window, and gone to the pool-house to check on Natalie. Her condition had not changed. He sat up on the edge of his bed and answered the phone. It was Luanne.

“Kirk, what did you
do
last night?” she hissed.

“What? Wait a sec.” He rubbed his eyes and shook his head to rid it of the dregs of sleep. He looked at the clock on his bedstand; it was 8:49.

Luanne whispered, “Natalie is gone, Kirk, she’s
gone
. A police officer was here, some woman. She’s going to come see you.”

“What? Me? The police?”

“You
took
her, didn’t you?”

“Well, I didn’t exactly
take
 her.”

“What the hell are you talking about?”

“Can you keep it to yourself?”

“Who am I going to tell? Do you know what my dad would do if he found out I was involved in this? He’d have
me
on the embalming table.”