Adan and I looked at the piskies and then at each other. Adan made a sound that was half choke and half sneeze, like he’d taken a deep drag on a harsh joint. The laughter bubbled up again and brightened the world for a while.
I ran down a senior citizen on the way back to my condo from the Carnival Club. Adan, Honey and Jack were all with me in the car when it happened-Adan riding shotgun, the piskies in the back doing whatever. We were cruising down Silver Lake and I was using the traffic spell to make good time when an elderly gentleman stumbled into the street between two parked cars, arms windmilling, right in front of the Lincoln.
Adan shouted and braced one arm on the dash as I hit the brakes, but the old man never had a chance. There was a loud thump and the car shuddered as the grille slammed into his left hip. He flipped over the hood, twisting like a stuffed toy tossed into the air by a pit bull, and smashed against the windshield before somersaulting into the backseat of the open convertible. The piskies bailed just in time to avoid being crushed by the limp, broken body.
The Lincoln’s tires squealed as I locked up the brakes and finally brought the car to a skidding stop. My hands gripped the steering wheel so tightly I thought my fingers might snap when I released it. I glanced in the rearview mirror. I couldn’t see the old man, but the white upholstery of the backseat looked like it had been painted red by a really sloppy tagger. I looked through the starred glass of the windshield and saw blood there, too.
Adan and I just sat there for a moment, neither of us speaking. Then the screaming started. We looked to our right. An old woman with curlers in her hair stood on the sidewalk, one clutched hand wrinkling the front of her muumuu. And she shrieked.
“Tell me that didn’t just happen,” I said quietly.
“Where the hell did he come from?” said Adan.
“Domino…” Honey said. She was hovering at the edge of the street, between the car and the old woman.
“Pearl, stop that wailing!” the old man said, appearing in the rearview mirror as he sat up in the backseat. “You’re like to wake the dead.” He made a horrible hacking, wheezing sound and his shoulders shook. He was laughing. The left side of his skull was caved in and a wet flap of skin hung down over his cheek. His teeth were broken and bloody, and a couple of the lower ones were protruding from his bottom lip. He was wearing a nightgown, an old-school Ebenezer Scrooge number.
“Henry, you bastard!” yelled Pearl. “You bit me, you miserable old snake!” The woman shambled toward the car, raising her arm above her head. She was holding a butcher knife. Blood ran from a wound on her neck onto the green-and-orange muumuu. At least he hadn’t gotten her ear. Adan and I jumped out of the car and backed away.
Henry twisted in the backseat and started crawling out onto the trunk. Most of his body didn’t seem to be responding very well, and he dragged himself along on his belly, using his elbows for leverage. Point to Pearl-he did kind of look like a snake. He was also smearing blood all over my car.
I held up my hands. “Chill the fuck out, Pearl,” I said. “Let’s see if we can talk this through.”
Pearl stopped and looked at me, still holding the knife in stabbing position. “Talk?” she shrieked. “You want me to talk? He tried to eat me!”
“I feel you,” I said, rubbing my ear. “Believe me. But I’m not going to let you stick Henry, okay?”
“He died already!” Pearl yelled.
“Twice,” said Henry. He’d rolled over on his back and lay splayed out on the trunk, chuckling wetly.
“Okay,” I said. “How do you know he died, Pearl?”
“The machine! He’s been hooked up to those damn machines for months, good for nothing except lying in bed shitting himself.” She shook with fury. “I had to clean it up!”
“And he died?”
“Yes! He flatlined. When you get to be my age, honey, you’ll know what it looks like. And he shit himself again!” Now that she mentioned it, Henry did smell a bit fragrant.
“Code Blue!” Henry said, cackling.
“Okay, okay. Then what happened, Pearl?”
Pearl calmed a bit and the knife dropped to her side. “I was feeling poorly myself, so I turned off the machines and went to lie down a bit. I must have dozed off, so then I got up and came back and unhooked him. And I was going to clean him up again, for the last time, praise Jesus, and he…he…he fucking bit me!” Pearl dropped the f-bomb like she hadn’t dropped one in a few decades. Maybe never.
I looked at Henry. It hadn’t taken him long to go cannibal. I had the idea he may have been homicidal even before he turned, at least where Pearl was concerned.
Henry returned my stare and bobbed his head, like he knew what I was thinking. “I ate the old bag’s terrible cooking for fifty-seven years,” he said. “Figured it was time I got a decent meal out of her!” He convulsed with laughter, blood and bile burbling over his lips.
“Charming,” Adan said.
“Let me dust this asshole,” said Honey.
“Wait!” Henry said. “That’s not even the funny part.”
A crowd had gathered. Cars and pedestrians had stopped and people stood at a safe distance, not understanding what they were seeing, unwilling or unable to either approach or run screaming.
“We’re on crowd-control,” Honey said. She and Jack buzzed over the onlookers’ heads, crop-dusting them with some discombobulating piskie glamour. The civilians began to mill about in confusion, some standing slack- jawed and others wandering in circles or just walking away. It wasn’t really control, if you asked me, but at least it would keep the rubberneckers from getting up in our business.
“The funny part is,” Henry continued, his torn mouth slurring the words, “when I bit her, she was already cold! Can you believe that? I finally get a chance at a nice dinner and the bitch serves it up cold!”
I peered at Pearl with my witch sight. What little juice she’d had when she was alive was settling in her tissues like lividity and just beginning to ooze from her skin. She stared back at me, her eyes wide and glassy. Pearl was dead as disco but she obviously hadn’t noticed it yet.
“Let’s just do what we have to do and get out of here, Domino,” Adan said. “No point in having a conversation about it.”
“Henry and Pearl are zombies, Adan,” I said.
“Well, I never!” Pearl protested. “I’m Presbyterian, young lady.”
“Yeah, so we have to put them down,” Adan said.
“We’re talking to a couple of zombies.”
“What’s your point?”
“Braaaiiins,” Henry said, giggling. He slid his broken body off the trunk and staggered to his feet.
“Let’s say your home computer wasn’t working, and you needed to figure out what was wrong with it. What would you do?”
“I don’t have a computer,” Adan said.
“Damn, you’re country.”
“I grew up in Faerie.”
“If you had a computer and it wasn’t working, you could run a diagnostic program…okay, skip the analogy. The point is, we need to figure out what’s causing the zombie outbreak. Here we happen to have a couple zombies. We could ask them.”
“That’s the worst analogy I’ve ever heard.”
“It’s not my strong point,” I allowed.
“You already talked to Terrence’s nephews. One of them, anyway. You said he really didn’t know anything. Pearl here doesn’t even know she’s dead.”
“I am not dead!” Pearl said.
“See?” Adan said.
“I never finished talking to Tony, because Pac-Man ate him. Plus, no disrespect to the mostly dead, but Tony wasn’t that bright. Pearl might have better answers.”
“What about Henry?”
“What about him?”
“He’s stepping up on you.” Adan nodded his head, looking over my shoulder.
