Home Improvement: Undead Edition

You were always the one.

“Oh God oh God oh—”

Whatever created us must want us here. This must be right.

“Stop it!” yelled Louise as she reached the first floor of the house with two dead bodies. “I’ve got to stop thinking so I can see what to do!”

Flashes. Bob’s calculations of probate problems after Parker’s death just need a good story and protracted conveyance keeps bulldozers away and might use who comes to clean up—No, Louise can do it. Say: Steve went stir-crazy, murdered Parker, raped Ali, killed Bob, crumbling house saved her I saved you keep the place, live in it, fix me up tell rescuers it’s like getting back on the horse. Could work.

Louise ran for the door before the house got what she realized.

She had the door halfway open when it snapped rigid in its frame.

But halfway was wide enough for her to fling herself out into the blizzard. Cold bit her as the door slammed shut behind her. Snow swallowed her legs up to her shins as she stumbled down the porch stairs. Cold so cold Oh my God yes wonderful because it’s real! Snowflakes wet her skin and tried to refreeze. Thick white afternoon light let her see Parker’s snowburied pickup. Its steel handles burned her bare hands, but the driver’s-side door swung open to her pull and slammed shut after she was in, behind the wheel. Parker’s corpse sat rigid on the seat beside her.

The dead man stared at the windshield as her shaking hands fished in his shirt pocket . . . Yes! Found his lighter, a half-smoked joint and a small plastic bag. Her trembling hands clicked open the metal Zippo lighter, thumbed a blue flame, lit and hoovered a deep hit.

“Staying stoned makes it harder for the thinking to get you,” the dead man beside her had said. Hope he was right about that.

She took another quick hit before she stubbed it out: So little left!

I am freezing in a blizzard-trapped pickup with a dead man.

She saw a bulge in the left front pocket of the dead man’s blue jeans.

Keys! She leaned the stiff corpse against the passenger window, wriggled her hand into those jeans. The chunk of wood jutted from Parker’s skull but she knew, she really knew, that out here, such wood had no power.

The pickup ground to life, blew heat into the cab.

A quarter tank of gas.

Even with the chains on the pickup, even with four-wheel drive, she’d need to rock the pickup back and forth to create tire tracks to follow. Even if she found roads in the whiteout, that vehicular effort needed a full tank.

Like an electric cloud softened other voices in her brain.

Can’t drive away. Can’t stay here. Enough gas to idle for a couple hours. Don’t look at the dead man, his open eyes. Don’t look at the board nailed to his skull. She searched his pockets, found a few bucks, coins, and in that shirt pocket, a plastic bag . . . with another joint! Could stay stoned for . . . maybe until dawn. She checked her watch: three fourteen P.M. Make that until midnight. If I come in and out of the house, run the engine . . . every three hours . . . My mind and I will make it to dawn, maybe to the end of the storm.

Told herself: It’s not what the house can do, it’s what I choose to do. Only junk in the glove compartment. Nothing on the floor but the thirty-foot orange extension cord Parker used to connect an old-fashioned headbolt heater in the pickup’s engine to any building’s electricity.

Three hours. Stoned enough, staying strong enough, I can survive three hours in there. I can keep me. Louise turned off the pickup, left the keys in the ignition: one less trick for the house to play.

She ran from the pickup, stumbling through the eye-stinging snow and the knee-deep white powder that slowed her stumble up the steps and—

The house door refused to open.

Arctic air shook Louise so hard she fell into the snow on the porch. She ran back to the pickup, turned the engine on to blast heat over her, melting the snow and dampening her clothes cold, that’s cold, too, but—

Louise closed her eyes. Like Parker’d said: If you gotta, you gotta. She ran back into the storm carrying the orange extension cord, her mind playing the movie of how she’d tie one end to the porch or the door, tie the other end to the pickup’s front bumper, and it wouldn’t matter that the pickup could only charge a few feet, its horsepower against old wood—

The house door opened.

“Fuck you,” whispered Louise. “You get one chance.”

She backed off the porch, dropped the extension cord end far enough from the last step that it didn’t touch wood, tied the other end to the pickup’s bumper to show she meant business, ran back into the house.

The door slammed shut behind her.

Louise ran to the living room with its dried pool of Parker’s blood, with its stacks of four friends’ suitcases that had flown full of dreams from Denver, and sacks with their packed lunches and old newspapers, sleeping bags and the portable heater with a generator and a red plastic jug full of fuel oil that wouldn’t work in a pickup. She closed her fist around the plastic bag with its one-plus joint and metal cigarette lighter as she switched her wet clothes for dry garments, unrolled a sleeping bag.

MIDNIGHT.

Louise sat rocking back and forth on the decrepit mansion’s living room floor. She’d smoked all but an inch of the last joint. Felt her still chemical-addled mind mostly free from capture. To help, she’d crawled on her hands and knees, lapped up drops of the mixed brew spilled in the jumble of broken glass on the dining room floor near Bob’s body.

What more are you than the home you build for your life?

Can’t have a baby without Steve and who would want you now even if some rescuer comes. No rescuer’s coming. Not in time. And when someone does come, someone with a weaker mind than Ali oh poor Ali.

Lucky Ali. She knew how to use what she had to get what she could.

There’s what’s real and there’s what you believe.

What’s real is that outside in the cold she’d die in an hour.

What’s real is she could feel who she was slipping away.

Here could be home.

The something to love forever that’s been her lifelong dream.

If she keeps this place fixed up, the place will fix what she believes. She can come up with a story for all this.

After all, it’s what works, not what’s real.

She clicked open the metal lighter. Knew that was real.

Clicked it shut. Knew she was still here. For now.

Forever is a moment.

Like now. Louise clicked open the lighter.

And now. Clicked it shut.

The imperative to survive is all the house cares about.

The metal lighter clicks shut.

This is the moment you click open the lighter.

This is the moment you click it shut.

This is a moment when you’re still Louise.

Not some species of zombie slave.

She clicked the lighter open.

“We’re all trapped in a house that needs fixing.”