He looked at me, “Torn apart?”
I nodded. “Yeah. By Mason Smith.”
The confusion on his face was almost comical. If it wasn’t for the whole, “Tamara’s family is dead” part I’m sure he’d have been laughing in the aisles.
“Mason Smith?
I shook my head sadly. “Unfortunately, I’m not saying that at all. We saw him there, Barrett. Just standing in the doorway to her parent’s room. He was very definitely, very definitively, dead. With a capital D. But still, he was standing there. And then he turned away and jumped through a window. It’s like he was playing with us.”
Barrett looked like he was about to collapse. He gripped the counter like his knees were weak. Undoubtedly they were. He looked at the couch behind us, glancing at Fannie Mae and then flicking his eyes to where my mom lay in the shadows.
“Are you saying he’s dead, but not dead? What? Do you expect me to believe that he’s what – a zombie?” His voice was rising toward the end, like he was about to crack.
“Yeah, I guess I’m saying that,” I said. “I hadn’t thought that far ahead on it. To actually put a label on it, but yeah, I guess I’m saying he’s a zombie. It’s about the only word that really applies. He’d eaten whole hunks of their bodies, Barrett. You should have seen -,” I shook my head. “No, be glad you didn’t see it. Tamara and her parents are all dead.”
“Are they really dead?”
“What?” I pulled my hand from the drawer, gripping the butcher knife tightly.
“Are they dead? Or undead like him? Zombies?” He gripped his hair tightly, yanking on it. When he was done his hair stood up in wild clumps. “Zombies in the trailer park? God, am I in a horror movie?”
I put my hands on his shoulders, shaking him gently, the knife still in my hands. “Why would they be anything but dead, Barrett? Barrett!” I almost slapped him full on the face, but his eyes finally focused on mine.
“Haven’t you ever seen a horror movie? Paid any attention to them, at least?” He searched my eyes and I could see the wild, crazed look in his. “Why do you think the world always gets overrun in zombie movies? A zombie’s bite is infectious. One touch from them and you’re damned. Even if you survive the initial bite and get away it’s already done. The virus, or whatever animates them, starts working in you and some amount of time later you’ll be dead, but not dead, and hungering for flesh.” He shrugged. “That’s the way it works.”
“They were most definitely dead,” I said. But were they? God, I hoped so.
He sighed. “We have another problem.”
“Great, what’s that?” I rubbed my forehead. I could feel a headache coming on. I was majorly dehydrated.
“Um,” he said. His eyes flicked over to the dark recesses of the couch, where my mom was still passed out. She was blithely unconscious during all this, thank God. “It’s your mom,” he finally blurted out.
“What about her?” I started pouring myself a glass of water. I really needed a drink.
“Well, um, I wanted to see if she had any booze left in her bottle. I couldn’t find her cache and I’d left mine outside. And I wasn’t going back out there.” He stopped.
I sighed and drank half my water at one gulp. God did that taste good. “Just spit it out, Barrett. We’re kind of in the middle of a crisis over here.”
“She’s dead.”
I dropped the glass in the sink. Thankfully it was a plastic glass or I’m sure it would have shattered all over the place and cut my eye or something. It was just one of those nights. “What?”
“She was stiff when I went to grab the bottle. I felt for a pulse and there was nothing. She’s dead, Duke. I’m so sorry. She must’ve had a heart attack or something after she passed out. The booze finally got to her.”
I barely heard him as I dropped the knife and raced over to the couch. I grabbed the flashlight as I went by the edge of the couch and flashed it on her. I dropped to my knees, not even feeling the pain throbbing from my leg. I gripped her hands, noting the coldness of her clammy flesh. I felt for a pulse on her wrist but couldn’t find one. There wasn’t one on her neck either. She’d been dead for hours. I shone the light on her eyes but they were closed. Barrett was right; she must have died in her sleep.
I felt a wave of something through my body. Fannie Mae’s hand dropped on my shoulder and it was then that I began to laugh. The wave that had threatened to turn to grief broke and all I felt was relief. She was dead. My mom was dead.
Fannie Mae put her arm around me and didn’t say anything. I think that she more than anyone else could understand what I was feeling. Barrett had heard the stories throughout the years but there was no way he could comprehend the amount of hate I’d had for that woman. Maybe her death didn’t deserve a laugh and a huge feeling of relief, but that was the legacy she’d left for herself.
I looked up at Barrett. He was still in the kitchen where I’d left him. No doubt he didn’t want to get any closer to her body than he absolutely had to.
“Let me have your phone,” I told him.
He reached into his pocket and pulled it out, gripping it tightly. “Why, Duke?”
That surprised yet another laugh from me. “You really have to ask? Should we count the number of things we need to talk to the cops about? Um, one, we have my dead mother here. Two, we’ve got a slaughtered family down the way. Three, we’ve got a murderous zombie on the loose. Don’t you think any one of those things merits an intervention by the police?”
“And what are you going to tell them? That you accidentally killed the guy who raped the girl you’re in love with and then he came back from the dead and trashed our car and then he murdered that girl and ate her family? Oh, and by the way, your mom just happens to be dead, too? The situation hasn’t changed, Duke. We still can’t call
