Undead and Unsure (2 page)

CHAPTER

ONE

The devil’s dead, and the Antichrist is pissed. That’s pretty
much the whole thing right there.

Well . . . there’s one more thing: I killed the devil. And the Antichrist is my half sister. (Two more things.) Because Christmas isn’t stressful enough, right? Take it from me: if you trick the devil into granting a wish and then kill her while the Antichrist screams at you to stop, family get-togethers thereafter are uncomfortable.

But I was up for the challenge! Of course, the trick is making the family get-together happen at all. Luckily I’d married rich (and dead). And even if I hadn’t married rich (note I’m not saying married well), my best friend and gestating roomie, Jessica, was also rich. It’s weird that I was dead and lived in St. Paul in a snowless winter with two zillionaires, right? Never mind.

I used to be so heavily dependent on Hallmark. It had a card for almost everything. Even better, it had a
funny
card for almost everything. But I couldn’t depend on a faceless corporate entity to convey my good wishes, condolences, birthday wishes, Mother’s Day howdies, and happy holidays in general, since there were some occasions the good people at Hallmark Cards, Inc., didn’t figure anyone would need to cover.

And even after the make-your-own-card phase popped up, there were some cards that just couldn’t be made, no matter how much money got pissed away at Archiver’s.

Side note: this DIY crap has gotten out of hand. Cards first, but followed by make-your-own pop (which is soooo hard to find, so of course people start making their own), make-your-own beer (see above, re: pop), make-your-own cheese, and make-your-own eggs by raising chickens. In the middle of cities, people are raising chickens! If you don’t believe me, check a Williams-Sonoma catalog sometime. Honest to God. It’s all right there: make-your-own vinegar pot, $89.95. The Reclaimed Rustic Coop with Painted Chicken, $399.95. (I assume the chicken was painted on the side in case there was any doubt that the coop surrounded by chickens was a chicken coop.) A Backyard Beehive and Starter Kit, $89.95, so you can start your own bees (“Gentlemen! Start . . . your . . .
bees
!”). Make-your-own butter kit: $29.95. Who makes their own butter? When did we all decide we were living in
Little House on the Prairie
reruns?

All this to say there wasn’t a card at Hallmark or a sticker at Archiver’s to convey “Sorry I killed your mom, who was also Satan. Also, Happy Thanksgiving.” I didn’t even bother looking. Instead, I turned to more sinister methods of getting my “again, so sorry I killed your mom!” message across.

Balloon bouquets. A minstrel greeting (good to see that the Renaissance festival weirdos are employable the rest of the year). Cookie bouquets. Singing telegrams (yep, they still do those, and for a surprisingly reasonable price).

Comedy Central sowed the seeds of my sinister plan by running a John Hughes marathon. Remember when the slutty nurse went to Ferris Bueller’s house to cheer him up and he was at a Cubs game so she ended up singing to his crabby sister instead (played by Jennifer Grey, who went on to ruin her career with a nose job)? John Hughes: creative genius and comedy demigod.

That was why the Antichrist was in my driveway, panting and glaring and stomping up the walk in her awful Uggs (what year did the Seed of Satan think it was? Also, even when Uggs were in they were not in) and shaking a fistful of balloons at me. “Stop
sending
these. They’re
following
me.”

Success! Family reunion, take one.

CHAPTER

TWO

The Antichrist stood fuming on the—wait, that was just her
breath showing because it was cold. And also, she was super pissed at me. So, literal and figurative fuming.

“You weren’t answering my calls or replying to . . . to my . . . my . . .” I nearly gagged on the word, then coughed it out: “. . . texts.” I hate that half the planet has become enslaved by their cell phones. I swore I wouldn’t fall into the sweet sticky trap of tech. But it’s like fighting a slow roll down a slope: you’ll eventually get to the bottom. You can go easy or you can go hard, but eventually you will text. “I’ve been trying to get you for days and you haven’t answered.”

“Because I’m not speaking to you!”

“I know! So I had to resort to texting and you know I hate it. In a way, I’m kind of a victim, too.”

Now she wasn’t just fuming; I could hear her perfect teeth grinding together. The Antichrist had never needed braces and had a cavity-free kisser. They must fluoride the hell out of the water in Dinkytown.

Laura Goodman (yep, you read that right and yep, the irony wasn’t lost on . . . well . . . anybody . . .) began to stomp up and down the cement walk just in front of the porch, the dozen helium-filled Mylar balloons trailing behind her. Early December in Minnesota could be awful, but we were enjoying a balmy stretch of low thirties. There’d been snow a few days before but it was melting. Not that it made a difference to Laura: with her feet cocooned in Uggs, she could have been scrambling for Noah’s Ark and her feet would have stayed dry. And why was I thinking about her feet? Answer: because they were pretty little feet trapped in huge ugly boots, and I felt sorry for them.

“I don’t want to talk to you,” she explained. Pace, pace, turn, pace. She turned so fast I couldn’t see her for a second until she batted the balloons out of her face. I bit the inside of my cheeks so I wouldn’t smirk. “I don’t want to see you. Thanks to you, I have to make some major decisions about my life. Thanks to you, not only my life but the lives and/or afterlives of millions might have changed or will change. I’ve lived with the fact that I am the Desolator since I was thirteen. Now I have to decide if I’ll take up my mother’s sword and I’m not even legal drinking age. Bad enough that I have to tolerate the situation at all. I won’t tolerate you, too.”

Don’t say anything about how “the Desolator” sounds like some kind of super food processor. Want your veggies pureed in a jiff? Try the Desolator!

When I was pretty sure that wasn’t going to come out of my mouth, I began. “Look, I’m sorry—”

“You aren’t.”

“—about the situation. You’re right,” I added with what I hoped she saw as a sympathetic shrug. “I’m not sorry I killed the devil. But I’m sorry you had to see it. And I’m sorry you’re stuck now. Yeah, it’s my fault. I’m owning it. I want to help you.”

She barked a laugh. “Help me?” She shook her head, and perfect blond waves obscured her eyes and then the blue headband forced it to fall back into place, framing her perfect face. “You’ve helped enough.”

I must, I must discover what she uses for conditioner . . . and moisturizer . . .

She stepped up, stepped close. Her grip on the balloon strings was white-knuckled; when she moved there was the sinister rustle of Mylar rubbing together. I’d come off the porch and was standing in our muddy driveway, cursing my cold feet but far too badass to bitch about my cold clammy wet muddy feet. When I’d heard her drive in I’d sprinted for the front door, which meant the neighborhood was treated to me in my tattered RenFest sweatshirt (“Dragon Bait”) and equally shredded purple leggings (it was laundry day, which meant if you thought my clothes looked bad, you did
not
want to see my underwear). And that was all. Since I’d already died I couldn’t freeze to death, but I was cold even when the temps were Texas hot. Standing in the cold with muddy feet was agonizing, but Laura had even bigger problems.

She was wrong to say I’d helped enough. I wasn’t done yet.

“Stay away from me,” she said evenly, her baby blues glaring into my baby blue-greens. Even though I knew what she was capable of, it was hard to take her seriously in her cream-colored merino wool sweater, jeans that were so faded and comfortable they probably felt like silk, Uggs (but I won’t go into that again), and the balloons streaming behind her. Completing the picture of corn-fed angelic innocence and beauty, her shoulder-length buttercup-colored hair was held back from her face with a thin powder blue ribbon. It was a lot like being menaced by a conservatively dressed Victoria’s Secret model (holding balloons). She looked gorgeous but it was impossible to fear her (even without balloons).

“Stay away,” she said again, “and
keep
away.”

“I think that’s redun—”

“I’ll be back when I know what I’ll do about you.”

“Well, don’t worry about calling first. Just pop on by anytime. Literally, even.” The Antichrist could teleport. But I, who hated the pop-in, was generously letting her know it was okay. See? I was trying, too!

She turned on her Uggy heel and started for her car, a used but well-cared-for ginger-ale-colored Fusion. Because the Antichrist was all about green, and gas mileage. Except, now that the devil was dead, did that mean Laura was the devil?

“But what about Thanksgiving?” I called after her. My trump card! Laura would turn down charity work before she’d turn down mashed potatoes and gravy, especially on a family holiday.

“What
about
Thanksgiving? It was days ago.”

“Yeah, we postponed it.” As she turned and her glare got ever more pissy, I continued. “Because it’s not Thanksgiving without blood relatives. And Jessica. And her boyfriend whom we’ve known maybe a year? And Marc, who’s dead.” Ah! My loyalty to friends both living and dead would show that deep down I cared about her, we all cared about her, and this latest awful thing would blow over and our bond as sisters would be ever more strengthened. It was just a matter of—

“You lying bitch.”

“Whoa!” Usually Laura’s idea of foul language was to pepper her exclamations with
dang
,
darn
,
doy
, and
ish
. “That’s cold. Like my poor frozen feet. Which you shouldn’t even think about because us working this out is way more important than my blue shriveled feet, which have gone numb in an agony of coldness.”

“You’re postponing Thanksgiving because you hate Thanksgiving,” she snapped, and dammit if she didn’t have a point. “Not because you’re waiting for us to be friends again. Not that we ever were.”

“My hatred is only one small factor,” I protested.

“You stay away.” She stepped back (to my relief, because she had a real Close Talker thing going, and I made it a rule never to give way to a Close Talker) and turned, and this time I knew there was no point in trying to call her back. Her blond hair twirled and swirled around her shoulders as she headed for her car. The balloons bobbed in her wake.

Wait. Blond? Huh.

One of Laura’s odder traits (and consider the source who called it
odder
for an idea of how weird it was) was, when she got super pissed, red-hot furious, her outside matched her inside, a soul trying so hard to be good when all of its instincts were to be bad. When she was angry her hair deepened to the color of blood on fire, and her eyes went poison green.

Not today, though. And I wasn’t sure if that was good or bad. Her coloring was a litmus test to gauge her temper. Blue eyes and blond hair meant that no matter what she said or how she said it, the Antichrist wasn’t furious. There was strong emotion there, sure, but it wasn’t anger. She was afraid.

Of me? Herself? Both? The latter probably, yeah. It struck me as a sensible reaction, and I had to face the knowledge that things between the (new) devil and me were gonna get worse before they got better.

CHAPTER

THREE

“I bet it was the minstrel greeting,” the zombie said from
behind me. “That would have sent me screaming over the edge, too.”

I turned and looked at my friend Marc and at first didn’t know what to say. I went through a dizzying mix of emotions whenever I saw him these days: relief and surprise and joy and fear and pity and exasperation and the simple gladness that after all he’d been through and seen and heard, he still wanted to be my friend.

Or he was too afraid of what might happen to him (he’d kill himself again?) if he left. But that didn’t bear thinking about.

“You’re one to talk.” I shivered as my sister raced to her car, wrestled the balloons into the backseat, leaped into the driver’s seat, started the engine with a roar, slammed it into reverse, and shot out of the driveway, then turned, popped it into drive, and howled down Summit Avenue, leaving a smoking tire trail behind her.

Naw. The Antichrist left like she always did: she carefully snapped on her seat belt, checked her rearview and blind spots as she started the car (took a while with the balloons), cautiously backed out of the driveway, paused to let a car a block away drive past, then pulled out, turned left, and headed for home via the speed limit.

“I’m telling you,” he insisted. “That’s what did it.”

“Nuh-uh.” My personal bet was the singing telegram. “And like your suggestion wasn’t a thousand times worse?”

“What?” My friend Jessica waddled out the front door and stood on the porch, one hand on the small of her back as she stretched and fanned herself with Marc’s
Entertainment Weekly.
“Ugh, it’s so hot.”

“It’s really not,” I pointed out, then sadly gazed down at my frosty blue toes.

“I’m sleeping out here tonight, it’s so hot.”

“It’s not hot!” Easy, girl. Jessica was wrong, but she was also crazy. As a rule I tried not to fuck with crazy people. Unless I wanted to, or didn’t like them, or was bored, or felt needy, or was looking for a rush, or was in pursuit of justice, or needed to kill time between sample sales. “It’s December,” I added, trying for calm. “It’s the polar opposite of hot. Literally. Polar opposite.”

Jess was a thousand months pregnant—at least, going by the size of her belly. Marc and I privately referred to her gestating fetus as the Belly That Ate the World, because we are catty and also love Daenerys on
Game of Thrones.
We talked about the Belly with furtive glee tempered with deep terror that she’d find out and make us die screaming. And also, show-Daenerys was almost as terrific as book-Daenerys. I was pretty sure. I was almost all the way through the first book. Okay, halfway through. The things are friggin’ doorstops and I’ve got this queen-of-the-vampire thing going on; don’t judge. Also it’s quicker for me to just follow along in the graphic novel. Marc must never know about that.

And me liking Daenerys didn’t mean anything, right? It wasn’t some commentary on my own experience as a nobody who has run from responsibility my entire life only to find out I was suddenly the queen of a bunch of people, some who loved me and more who didn’t, trying to bring change, hold my own, and fend off assassination attempts and also dying a few more times?

No. To paraphrase Freud, sometimes a made-for-cable book series is just a made-for-cable book series.

“Laura finally had enough, huh? Too bad I missed the scene. Takes a while to get to the front door when you’re . . .” She trailed off and gestured vaguely at her gut. “What did it? Dial-a-balloon-bouquet?”

“I think it was a combo. Hey, my choices were limited. Hallmark doesn’t cover ‘Sorry I killed your mom before she could kill me, and also, good luck with your new job!’”

“So you Said It with Flowers?”

“And strip-o-grams?” my zombie asked hopefully.

Argh. I’ve got to stop referring to him as
my zombie.
He has a name, dammit.
Two
names. Zombie Marc. Dammit! Marc Spangler. “Naw. The Antichrist is kind of a prude.” A virgin prude, the worst kind. But still. The important thing to keep in mind . . .

“The important thing,” I said, finishing my thought aloud, “is that she came over. We were talking, even if it was only for a minute. If I got her to do it once—”

“Aggravated her to do it once,” Jessica said while Marc nodded so hard he almost fell off the porch.

“—I can get her here again. We
will
have a family Thanksgiving, dammit!”

“That reminds me,” Jessica said. “I had turkey for lunch.”

“That’s fine.” But I had a bad feeling her casual news meant I’d be hitting the grocery store again.

“All of the turkey.”

Thought so. I didn’t dare make eye contact with Marc. He had a hand up in front of his mouth and coughed. Since zombies didn’t have to cough, I knew he was worried he’d crack up.

Jessica seemed to sense our restrained mirth, because her beautiful dark eyes got squinty and the beauty was replaced with suspicion. “Does anyone have a comment about my lunch?”

“Nuh-uh,” I lied, wondering if getting terrified would be an overreaction.

“It’s good that you’re eating lots of protein,” Dr. Marc Zombie added. In life he’d been an ER doc (though he always corrected me; apparently outside of TV they’re called EWs, which is just hilarious: “Ew, I’ve cut the whole thing off by accident! Ew, I’ve gotta get to the EW!”), but in death he considered himself an able medic.

He wasn’t movie-zombified. There was no shambling after us while moaning about his desire to partake of our delectable brains, he didn’t stink and wasn’t all gooky and covered with rotting slime, but he still didn’t trust his new-and-unimproved reflexes. “You need at least sixty grams of protein a day. And that entire turkey was . . . uh . . .” His eyes rolled up and he thought about it. “. . .  just over fifteen hundred grams of protein.” Pause. “So you’ve definitely hit your protein intake for the . . .” Pause. “. . . the day.”

She relaxed and smiled. Marc and I relaxed and smiled. I knew he’d been rejecting finishing his sentence with: for the week, the month, the decade, the century. He had made the wise choice, and lived to not live another day.

Besides, all anyone had to do was look at Jessica and know all was well. She was brooming with health! No, that was wrong. Blooming, that was the cliché I was groping for. I’d gotten mixed up because when she wasn’t pregnant, Jess was normally the shape and weight of a broomstick. Her collarbones were so sharp you worried you’d cut yourself if you fell on her. We’d known each other since our training bra days and she’d always been super slender and annoyingly pretty. Lovely brown eyes, with smooth dark skin that glinted with reddish undertones, which meant the jerk could wear shades like fuchsia and orange, lipsticks that would make me look a) like a bitchy circus clown, b) embalmed, and/or c) an embalmed bitchy circus clown.

She’d been (and still was) rich, too, but I did
not
envy her that. Not if it meant enduring what she had: a father who wanted to bang her, and a mother who didn’t much care
what
he did as long as he paid the bills. Jess was the richest person in Minnesota (not the richest woman, not the richest African American—the richest mammal) and I didn’t envy her that, either.

Content that we hadn’t been ready to snigger over her turkey intake, Jessica did that hands-on-the-small-of-her-back stretch thing again, then asked (I think rhetorically), “What do you get for the Antichrist who has nothing?”

“A family,” I replied at once. I’d been thinking about it a lot. Laura and I had several things in common. Dead fathers, ghastly white complexions that tended toward dryness in winter, shitty tempers, an inability to rock coral lipstick, inappropriately judging people, powers we feared and didn’t understand, a tendency to sunburn on cloudy days, and fractured families. “We’ll show her she’s not alone. That just because her mom—who she only met a couple of years ago anyway—is dead, that doesn’t mean she’s alone. She’s got me! Us, I mean.”

Now Marc and Jessica were trading glances.

“What? It’s true. Just because I killed her mom doesn’t mean we can’t be there for each other. One of her moms,” I corrected. The (late) devil was Laura’s mom (who had looked weirdly like Lena Olin); but my stepmother, the Ant, was the one who had been impregnated (by my dad) and carried the baby to term. Her body, I mean, because Lena Olin possessed the Ant for the pregnancy and birth. I know. It’s complicated bordering on idiotic. “Both her moms are dead, but only one by my hand. That’s something. Right?”

(. . .)

I sighed. “I knew you’d say that.”

“We didn’t,” Marc began, but I rushed to cut him off.

“Like I said, all that stuff’s bad, but that doesn’t mean we can’t be a family again. Or for the first time.”

“Bets, I love you, but I’m pretty sure that’s exactly what it means.”

I was too polite to argue with her. Also, I worried she was dead-on. Plus, she was smarter than me, so I’d lose the debate, unless she got tired or hungry and left before blitzing my half-assed argument. So I let it drop, and thought how nice it was to see Jess and Marc conspiring about anything, even if it was their mutual belief that I was off my rocker.

Not long ago (maybe two weeks?) Jessica had been all
Keep back, vile creature of the lamented undead!
I couldn’t blame her, as glad as I was to have Marc back. The prejudice against zombies ran deep, and there were no support groups for the living impaired. It took Marc days to convince her he wasn’t going to lurk around waiting for the chance to chomp on her baby’s brains. And before she could make it clear that, nothing personal, but
I won’t have you help me deliver; glad you’re back but keep the hell away from me once my water breaks
, Marc was the one who told her that though he remembered everything about being a doctor, he didn’t trust his new-and-unimproved hand-eye coordination.

“That’s why I was practicing surgery on Betsy’s dead cat!” he had explained, beaming, and added, “Oh, shit. Sorry. That was disgusting. Right?”

Yep.

He might talk about disgusting things, and sometimes do them, but Marc himself wasn’t at all disgusting. Like I said, he didn’t shamble and he didn’t stink. He was a little quieter, a bit more thoughtful. Sometimes when he paused before starting a complicated task, you could almost feel him willing his zombified neurons to fire, and when they did, he’d go about whatever it was—doing a crossword, making a playlist, rereading an anatomy text, building me more shelves in my closet (love the mansion, but the woeful lack of closet space was a real
problema
)—with a calm care that was reassuring. He wasn’t the same man, no. But I didn’t think he was a worse man . . . just different.

Sometimes his lively green eyes would cloud over and, again, you could almost hear him thinking,
C’mon, c’mon, you know how to do this, remember how to do this
, but other than that his appearance was unchanged. He was still lanky and cute, with brutally short black hair, a sharp, aquiline nose, and pale skin—because he hated outdoor activities and thrived under blaring hospital fluorescents, not because he had a hankering for braaaaains.

In fact, when I looked at my friends these days I was struck by how different they were now: Jessica, eating for seventeen, Marc, cutting up dead things to keep his brain limber. Both had undergone incredible changes only because they were my friends.

Whether it was for the better or not so much, I didn’t know and couldn’t know.
But please, God, let it not be what I fear: let me not be a curse to those I love.

And while you’re at it, God, let my sister forgive me and give us our happily ever after. We deserve one, dammit.