Book of the Dead: A Zombie Anthology (6 page)

At last she found her wheel; it turned out to be Jack Pace. Women marry their fathers and men their mothers, some say, and while such a broad statement can hardly be true al of the time, it was true in Maddie’s case. Her father had been looked upon by his peers with fear and admiration—“Don’t fool with George Sul ivan, chummy,” they’d say. “He’s one hefty son of a bitch and he’d just as soon knock the nose off your face as fart downwind.”

It was true at home, too. He’d been domineering and sometimes physical y abusive… but he’d also known things to want and work for, like the Ford pickup, the chain saw, or those two acres that bounded their place on the left. Pop Cook’s land. George Sul ivan had been known to refer to Pop Cook (out of his cups as wel as in them) as one stinky old bastid, but there was some good hardwood left on those two acres. Pop didn’t know it because he had gone to living on the mainland when his arthritis real y got going and crippled him up bad, and George let it be known on the island that what that bastid Pop Cook didn’t know wouldn’t hurt him none, and furthermore, he would kil the man or woman that let light into the darkness of Pop’s ignorance.

No one did, and eventual y the Sul ivans got the land. And the wood, of course. The hardwood was logged off for the two wood stoves that heated the house in three years, but the land would remain. That was what George said and they believed him, believed
in
him, and they worked, al three of them. He said you got to put your shoulder to this wheel and
push
the bitch, you got to push ha’ad because she don’t move easy. So that was what they did.

In those days Maddy’s mother had kept a roadside stand, and there were always plenty of tourists who bought the vegetables she grew—the ones George
told
her to grow, of course, and even though they were never exactly what her mother cal ed “the Gotrocks family,” they made out. Even in years when lobstering was bad, they made out.

Jack Pace could be domineering when Maddie’s indecision final y forced him to be, and she suspected that, loving as he was in their courtship, he might get around to the physical part—the twisted arm when supper was cold, the occasional slap or downright paddling—in time; when the bloom was off the rose, so as to speak. She saw the similarities… but she loved him. And needed him.

“I’m not going to be a lobsterman al my life, Maddie,” he told her the week before they married, and she believed him. A year before, when he had asked her out for the first time (she’d had no trouble coping then, either—had said yes almost before al the words could get out of his mouth, and she had blushed to the roots of her hair at the sound of her own naked eagerness), he would have said, “I
ain’t
going to be a lobsterman al my life.” A smal change…

but al the difference in the world. He had been going to night school three evenings a week, taking the ferry over and back. He would be dog tired after a day of pul ing pots, but he’d go just the same, pausing only long enough to shower off the powerful smel s of lobster and brine and to gulp two No Doz with hot coffee. After a while, when she saw he real y meant to stick to it, Maddie began putting up hot soup for him to drink on the ferry ride over. Otherwise, he would have had no supper at al .

She remembered agonizing over the canned soups in the store—there were so
many
! Would he want tomato? Some people didn’t like tomato soup. In fact, some people
hated
tomato soup, even if you made it with milk instead of water. Vegetable soup? Turkey? Cream of chicken? Her helpless eyes roved the shelf display for nearly ten minutes before Charlene Nedeau asked if she could help her with something—only Charlene said it in a sarcastic way, and Maddie guessed she would tel al her friends at high school tomorrow and they would giggle about it—about
her
—in the Girls’ Room, because Charlene knew what was wrong; the same thing that was always wrong. It was just Maddie Sul ivan, unable to make up her mind over so simple a thing as a can of
soup
. How she had ever been able to decide to accept Jack Pace’s proposal was a wonder and a marvel to al of them… but of course they didn’t know how, once you found the wheel, you had to have someone to tel you when to stoop and where exactly to lean against it.

Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.

When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: “Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.”

Were there any others he special y liked?

The answer was no, just chicken noodle—the kind that came in the can. That was al the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and al the answer (on that one particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole damn
case
of the stuff out back.

She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actual y carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot al about asking why she had wanted al that chicken soup—a lapse for which his wife Margaret and his daughter Charlene took him sharply to task that evening.

“You just better believe it,” Jack had said that time not long before the wedding—she never forgot, “More than a lobsterman. My dad says I’m ful of shit. He says if it was good enough for his old man, and his old man’s old man, and al the way back to the friggin’ Garden of Eden to hear
him
tel it, if it was good enough for al of
them
, it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain’t—
isn’t
, I mean—and I’m going to do better.” His eye fel on her, and it was a loving eye, but it was a stern eye, too. “More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobsterman’s wife is what I intend for you to be. You’re going to have a house on the mainland.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“And I’m not going to have any friggin’ Chevrolet.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to have an
Oldsmobile
.” He looked at her, as if daring her to refute him. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it
mil ions
of times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them—or, hopeful y, both of them together.

“More than a friggin’ lobsterman, no matter what my old man says. I’m going to do it, and do you know who’s going to help me?”

“Yes,” Maddie had said. “Me.”

“You,” he responded with a grin, sweeping her into his arms, “are damned tooting.”

So they were wed.

Jack knew what he wanted, and he would tel her how to help him get it and that was just the way she wanted things to be.

Then Jack died.

Then
, not more than four months after, while she was stil wearing weeds, dead folks started to come out of their graves and walk around. If you got too close, they bit you and you died for a little while and then
you
got up and started walking around, too.

Then
, Russia and America came very, very close to blowing the whole world to smithereens, both of them accusing the other of causing the phenomenon of the walking dead. “How close?”

Maddie heard one news correspondent from CNN ask about a month after dead people started to get up and walk around, first in Florida, then in Murmansk, then in Leningrad and Minsk, then in Elmira, Il inois; Rio de Janeiro; Biterad, Germany; New Delhi, India; and a smal Australian hamlet on the edge of the outback.

(This hamlet went by the colorful name of Wet Noggin, and before the news got out of there, most of Wet Noggin’s populace consisted of shambling dead folks and starving dogs. Maddie had watched most of these developments on the Pulsifers’ TV. Jack had hated their satel ite dish—

maybe because they could not yet afford one themselves—but now, with Jack dead, none of that mattered.)

In answer to his own rhetorical question about how close the two countries had come to blowing the earth to smithereens, the commentator had said, “We’l never know, but that may be just as wel . My guess is within a hair’s breadth.”

Then
, at the last possible second, a British astronomer had discovered the satel ite—the apparently
living
satel ite—which became known as Star Wormwood.

Not one of ours, not one of theirs. Someone else’s. Someone or something from the great big darkness Out There.

Wel , they had swapped one nightmare for another, Maddie supposed, because
then
—the last
then
before the TV (even al the channels the Pulsifers’ satel ite dish could pul in) stopped showing anything but snow—the walking dead folks stopped only biting people if they came too close.

The dead folks started
trying
to get close.

The dead folks, it seemed, had discovered they
liked
what they were biting.

Before al the weird things started happening, Maddie discovered she was what her mother had always cal ed “preg,” a curt word that was like the sound you made when you had a throatful of snot and had to rasp some of it up (or at least that was how Maddie had always thought it sounded). She and Jack had moved to Genneseault Island, a nearby island simply cal ed Jenny Island by those who lived there.

She had had one of her agonizing interior debates when she had missed her time of the month twice, and after four sleepless nights she had made a decision… and an appointment with Dr.

McElwain on the mainland. Looking back, she was glad. If she had waited to see if she was going to miss a third period, Jack would not even have had one month of joy… and she would have missed the concerns and little kindnesses he had showered upon her.

Looking back—now that she was
coping
—her indecision seemed ludicrous, but her deeper heart knew that going to have the test had taken tremendous courage. She had wanted to be sick in the mornings so she could be surer; she had longed for nausea. She made the appointment when Jack was out dragging pots, and she went while he was out, but there was no such thing as
sneaking
over to the mainland on the ferry. Too many people saw you. Someone would mention casual y to Jack that he or she had seen his wife on
The Gul
t’other day, and then Jack would want to know who and why and where, and if she’d made a mistake, Jack would look at her like she was a goose.

But it had been true, she was with child (and never mind that word that sounded like someone with a bad cold trying to rake snot off the sides of his throat), and Jack Pace had had exactly twenty-seven days of joy and looking forward before a bad swel had caught him and knocked him over the side of
My Lady-Love
, the lobster boat he had inherited from his Uncle Mike. Jack could swim, and he had popped to the surface like a cork, Dave Eamons had told her miserably, but just as he did, another heavy swel came, slewing the boat directly into Jack, and although Dave would say no more, Maddie had been born and brought up an island girl, and she knew: could, in fact,
hear
the hol ow thud as the boat with its treacherous name smashed her husband’s head, leaving blood and hair and bone and brain for the next swel to wash away from the boat’s worn side.

Dressed in a heavy hooded parka and down-fil ed pants and boots, Jack Pace had sunk like a stone. They had buried an empty casket in the little cemetery at the north end of Jenny Island, and the Reverend Peebles (on Jenny you had your choice when it came to religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that didn’t suit you, you could be a Methodist) had presided over this empty coffin, as he had so many others, and at the age of twenty-two Maddie had found herself a widow with an almost half-cooked bun in her oven and no one to tel her where the wheel was, let alone when to put her shoulder to it.

She thought she would go back to Deer Isle, back to her mother, to wait for her time, but she knew her mother was as lost—maybe even
more
lost—than she was herself, and held off.

“Maddie,” Jack told her again and again, “the only thing you can ever decide on is not to decide.”

Nor was her mother any better. They talked on the phone and Maddie waited and hoped for her mother to tel her to come home, but Mrs. Sul ivan could tel no one over the age of ten anything. “Maybe you ought to come on back over here,” she had said once in a tentative way, and Maddie couldn’t tel if that meant
please come home
or
please don’t take me up on an offer
which was real y just made for form’s sake
, and she spent sleepless nights trying to decide and succeeding in doing only that thing of which Jack had accused her: deciding not to decide.

Then the weirdness started, and that was a mercy, because there was only the one smal graveyard on Jenny (and so many of the graves fil ed with those empty coffins —a thing which had once seemed pitiful to her now seemed another blessing, a grace) and there were two on Deer Isle, bigger ones, and it seemed so much safer to stay on Jenny and wait.

She would wait and see if the world lived or died.

If it lived, she would wait for the baby.

That seemed like enough.

And now she was, after a life of passive obedience and vague resolves that passed like dreams an hour or two after getting out of bed, final y
coping
. She knew that part of this was nothing more than the effect of being slammed with one massive shock after another, beginning with the death of her husband and ending with one of the last broadcasts the Pulsifers’ TV had picked up—a horrified young boy who had been pressed into service as an INS reporter, saying that it seemed certain that the president of the United States, the first lady, the secretary of state, the honorable senator from Oregon (which honorable senator the gibbering boy reporter didn’t say), and the emir of Kuwait had been eaten alive in the White House bal room by zombies.