Passing Strange (18 page)

“Was this
your
idea?” I asked.

“Duke thought it was time we did something to shake things up. My old teammate is getting too much traction in Washington.”

By “teammate,” he meant Tommy, but that wasn’t the part of that sentence I focused on.

Duke. He said it was Duke’s idea. How many Dukes do you know?

“And it just so happens that someone did break into my house today. Right into my bedroom, but it doesn’t look like they took anything. Had to be zombies, right?”

“It probably was, Pete,” I said, touching his arm as though I was filled with concern.

He shook his head. “No way could a zombie have gotten out of the house that fast. The cops were there eleven minutes after the alarm on the window was set off. They probably had just enough time to get the window open and climb in before they heard the cops. I don’t even think the great Tommy Williams could have cased my house and taken off in eleven minutes. I think it was probably just some crackhead looking for something to pawn.”

Relief, sort of. But did he flinch when I touched his arm?

“I thought you said they didn’t take anything?”

“They didn’t, but probably because they didn’t have any time. My guess is that they would have grabbed the Xbox and games, those things are pretty easy to convert to cash. Maybe some stuff from my mom’s room, jewelry or whatever.”

“Was your mom scared?”

“Oh yeah. Especially when I told the cops that I thought there was some grave dirt on my carpet. They ate that up with a spoon.”

“Grave dirt?”

“Yeah. Probably just some loose soil from when the thieves crawled through the window. The ground was all packed down and a little muddy by the foundation.”

“Grave dirt,” I said. “Unreal.”

“Yeah. Two stories for the price of one. I ought to get out more often.”

As bad as I felt for the little kids he’d terrified, the good news was that Pete had given me another opportunity to expose him. If I could get that mask and give it to the right people, everyone would understand that it was Pete who scared the kids, not Tak.

“Anyhow,” he said. “What are you doing tonight?”

“I’ve got no special plans,” I said, thinking he was going to ask me out on another date. “Other than being with you.”

I could see the words forming in his head even before he said them. I don’t know if it was because my conscience could no longer live with all of my lies, if this last statement was the final crack in the wall that held back the blue fog, or if it was what I saw in Pete’s eyes, a crazed mixture of love and hate, as he looked at me.

“Good,” he said, smiling his insane smile. “Because Phoebe Kendall dies tonight.”

S
HE DIDN’T REACT THE WAY
he wanted her to.

Pete shook his head. “I can’t even believe I’m hearing this,” he said. “Here we are on game day, and you want to back out.”

“I want
you
to back out, Pete,” she said. The way she was looking at him was doing something to his insides.

He didn’t like girls who said no. Scarypants had said no to him, and the more he thought about it, the madder he got.

“Why? Nothing’s going to happen. She’ll die and I’ll make FrankenAdam look guilty. No one is going to believe
him
. Look how quickly everyone swallowed the Guttridge ‘murder.’ Everyone
wants
to believe that the zombies are guilty.”

“I’m still afraid she’ll come back, Pete. What if she does and she identifies you? Did you think about that?”

“I hope she
does
come back. Then I could kill her twice.”

“Pete, I’m serious.”

“So am I,” Pete told her. “And I’m going to make it so she can’t come back, trust me.”

She stared back at him, and for the first time since they’d met, Pete thought she looked scared.

“Christie,” he said. “Are you in or are you out? Because I can stop the car right here, kiss you good-bye, and call it a day.”

“Could you, Pete?” she said. “Kiss me good-bye?”

He looked away, fingers drumming on the wheel. He could and would if he had to. But he didn’t
want
to, so he stayed quiet.

Christie let his non-answer slide. “What about Reverend Mathers?” she said. “Does he know you’re doing this?”

“He’ll appreciate my initiative.”

Pete’s cell phone rang. He glanced at the number and answered, winking at her.

“You’re sure? Okay. Okay.”

He hung up. “It’s time, Christie. They’re all alone.”

“How do you…”

He lifted his hand. “Ah. Let me instruct you. Every Friday night, Morticia’s…”

“Morticia?”

He grinned. “Yeah, Morticia Scarypants. That’s what we call her.”

“Great.”

He continued, ignoring her sarcasm. “Every Friday night her parents go out to dinner and a movie. Clockwork. Mr. and Mrs. Typical America. And every Friday night Morticia curls up on the couch with her annoying yap dog and her corpse, and watches a movie from Netflix. Every week.”

“You’ve barely even been in town a month,” Christie said.

“Doesn’t matter. T.C. just followed her parents over to Winford Landing. He didn’t get close enough to see what tickets they bought, but he did see Mr. Scarypants pony up for the megatub of popcorn. I figure we’ve got about an hour and a half,” he said. “Plenty of time.”

She shook her head and crossed her arms over her chest like the petals of a flower at nighttime.

“Listen to me for a second,” he said. “I want you to do this with me. All you have to do is drive the car. You don’t have to go in the house, or do the deed, or any of that. I’ll take care of it. I just want you to drive.”

“Oh, God…”

“I’ll be quick. Very quick.”

“How? He’s going to try and stop you, you know. It isn’t like…”

Pete laughed. “He won’t even know.”

“What do you mean, he won’t know?”

“Every night, at eight thirty, she walks the dog. Lets the dog do its business. Every night except Friday, which is when she and Frankenstein play house. Then she lets
him
walk the dog while she makes herself a snack. Coffee, usually, even late at night.”

The expression she wore was either fascination, admiration, horror, or a combination of all the above.

“How…how are you going to do it?”

“Layman brings the dog to the backyard. While he’s out there with puppykins, I’m going to run into the kitchen, where little Miss Scarypants herself will be waiting for me, no doubt getting ready to put the cream in her coffee. By the time Layman gets back—and it takes him a long time, never mind the dog—I’ll be gone. And so will she.”

“Are you…are you going to…shoot her?”

Pete shook his head. “No. Right inside the kitchen, between the sink and the toaster, is a block of wood with a half-dozen carving knives stuck inside it.” He smiled. “I’m sure one of those will do.”

“You’re going to get caught,” she said.

“How? You haven’t seen how slow he is.”

“She’ll fight. What if you can’t get the knife? What if she isn’t in the kitchen?”

“She’ll be there. It’s a rendezvous with destiny.”

“I’m scared, Pete.”

“Don’t think that way, Christie. Adam’s going to be blamed. Don’t even think about it.”

“I just don’t understand why you want to risk everything over one stupid zombie. You’d risk us going to jail and never seeing each other again over this.”

“Christie,” he said, pulling into a gas station parking lot. He left the car running. “If we do this, we’ll be closer than ever. We’ll be bound by blood.”

“Pete…”

“I’ve got to know, Christie,” he said. “I’ve got to know right now if you’re with me. If not I can let you out right here, and neither one of us can ever look back.”

She didn’t even seem to be breathing as she wrestled with her answer. The moments dragged on and on for him, but he didn’t turn his gaze from her until finally, her voice a soft whisper, she spoke.

“I’m with you, Pete,” she said.

“Good,” he said, cupping the back of her head with his hand. “You drive.”

They got out of the car and crossed in the twin beams of his headlights. He stopped her, and then they embraced, and Pete held her close. The atmosphere seemed charged with electricity; the scent of diesel and asphalt filled Pete’s nose, the steady hum of his engine and the electric whir of the gas station sign-age filled his ears. She’d made fun of the idea, but as Pete held her, he really felt as though they had a rendezvous with destiny, that history was going to be changed irrevocably by his small but decisive actions.

“We’ll be closer than ever when tonight is over,” he whispered, her hair against his cheek.

When they separated she looked scared. He kissed her mouth, then kissed her cheek and told her it was going to be all right.

She pulled away from the station, and a light snow began to fall. He watched the tiny flakes appearing briefly from the darkness to reflect the glow of the headlights.

He reached under his seat and withdrew a plastic shopping bag.

“What’s that?” she asked him.

“Insurance,” he said, taking out his zombie face mask. “One way or another, a zombie is getting blamed for this crime.”

He pulled the mask on.

“Don’t be afraid to drive faster,” he said, his voice muffled by the latex as he fanned the long black hair over his shoulders. “The snow isn’t sticking yet, and this is a pretty heavy car. The tires are new, too.”

“Okay.”

“Don’t worry,” he said, resting his hand on her thigh. “Everything will be fine.”

She looked at him as though seeing his mask for the first time. He thought that she couldn’t look more filled with horror.

Under his zombie skin, he was smiling.

“D
O WE REALLY…NEED…
three of us for this gig?” Popeye asked. His pacing had cut tunnels into the frosted earth behind the tree line where Tak sat watching the house.

“You do not…need to stay,” Tak replied. “But…whisper…if you do.”

“They can’t hear us. Nobody can…hear us…except…the squirrels and the…raccoons,” Popeye answered, making no attempt to lower his voice. He walked next to Tak and stretched, his long torso shirtless beneath his jacket. Popeye had removed a section of skin from his lower abdomen, and Tak could see the exposed gray muscles contracting as he completed his stretch.

“Sit,” Tak commanded, yanking him down by the hem of his jacket. Popeye lost his footing and fell onto his back. “Nothing reflects…light…like…skin.”

Popeye swore. If he had breath he would have lost it. His sunglasses had gone askew, exposing yet another one of his nauseating bodifications, the one that had given him his name.

“What the…hell, Tak,” he said, sitting up and brushing snow off the sleeves of his jacket with his flipper hand. “The only ones…home…are Adam and…the beating heart. They won’t…even look out…the window.”

“Layman’s mother is…next…door. She…might. Now go…away.”

Grumbling, Popeye crawled off to irritate Tayshawn, who was sitting about fifty feet away, where he had a decent view of the front and the opposite side of the house. Tak wanted to watch the kitchen door, because it faced the driveway and was the one that the Kendalls used most often.

Peeking into the house, he saw Phoebe rise, then stop halfway across the room and look back over her shoulder to laugh or smile at something Adam must have said to her. Tak wondered what it was that they said to each other, and what sort of future they imagined together.

If they were both dead, like him and Karen, they could be together forever, but they couldn’t feel. If they were both alive, beating hearts, then they could feel. They could feel, they could grow older, and they could die. Die and not come back. Which was the better future?

A sparrow flew close and lit on Takayuki’s head. He didn’t move. As long as the sparrow didn’t intend to build a nest there, he thought that it was fine for her to take a short rest.

He watched Phoebe turn off the light from a switch on the wall, and then she was backlit by the flickering ghost light of a television screen. Adam must be watching from an unseen couch.

He wondered if they held hands. He wondered if Adam put his arm around her shoulders, and, in doing so, if he imagined that he could feel her warmth? And what of her reaction? How was it that she was able to put aside the revulsion that comes naturally to the living when being touched by the dead?

A truck passed by in the street beyond the houses. The bird flapped its wings, taking flight as he watched Phoebe walk back and then disappear. She was a beautiful girl. He couldn’t blame Adam for not wanting to follow him and the others under the ice.

He wondered if Adam’s condition allowed them to ignore the future and live purely in the present. So few people do, Tak knew. Most young people live in the future, always looking ahead toward the next big change they think will make their lives complete. “Things will be different when…I graduate, I get a new boyfriend, I get that job, that promotion, that new car. When my parents finalize their divorce.” Others lived entirely in the past, never able to move forward from the way things used to be—which, by definition, means the way things will never be again. Maybe Adam’s death brought them face to face with the realization that every moment you spend with another person is a moment that will never come again, and therefore should be treasured and cherished.

But, he thought, what about the future? Phoebe is sixteen or so, an age which gives her a two-year window, three years at the most, to decide if she wants to try to join the other side. Eighteen or nineteen seems to be the oldest a person can return from the dead. What will they do when Phoebe turns eighteen? Will she elect to try and join Adam, or will she miss her chance and allow herself to get older? Will she become a woman while Adam physically remains a boy of sixteen forever? What then?

A squirrel padded out of the brush three feet from where he sat. Seeing him, the squirrel raised its head and regarded him with suspicion, cheeks and nose twitching.

I feel the same way about you, he thought. The squirrel scampered back into the brush.

I should have discussed this with Karen, he thought. Martinsburg’s actions could prevent Phoebe and Adam from having to make the toughest decisions further down the road. There could actually be a positive side to Martinsburg’s plan succeeding.

There are many things I should have discussed with Karen, he thought.

Like her healing. She’d told him about the bullets and the cut. Why had her wounds gone away while everyone else’s—his, Popeye’s, Mal’s—remained?

Love, he thought. Maybe Williams was right.

The ghost light from the unseen television threw flickering shadows on the walls inside her home. The flickering—and her absence from view—gave the home a forlorn appearance. The cold, empty landscape and the silence contributed to a sense of loss. It was so quiet that Tak could hear an animal—another squirrel or a raccoon, maybe—walking around the side of Layman’s house. He could hear cars coming from miles away. Sometimes the wind played tricks on him, and he would think he heard random sounds, noises that sounded close but may have been from a distance: a chime, a baby’s cry, a car door.

The quiet was disrupted by the sound of Phoebe’s dog barking from inside the house. Tak had never been a fan of smaller dogs—his family owned cats, some of them nearly as big as Phoebe’s pet. The dog’s routine, at least, was predictable. Once outside in the morning with Mr. Kendall. Once when Adam and Phoebe came home from school, with Phoebe. And again in the evening with Phoebe or Adam, depending on if he was over or not.

The dog yapped again. It must be about that time.

Two mornings ago, the dog had looked in his direction. The wind must have been blowing just right to have brought Tak’s scent all the way over to where the dog pranced around on the end of his leash. He looked right at Tak, his ears back and a low growl building in his throat. Mr. Kendall told the dog to stop being silly. Tak didn’t shift a muscle throughout.

Inside, Adam rose into view, all but blocking the window. Phoebe rose as well, laying her hands against his chest. A moment later, Adam sat down. Phoebe bent low, as though she were talking to her dog. A moment later she crossed toward the kitchen and out of view, and a moment after that, the door opened and out trotted the little dog, leading Phoebe, who was coatless but sweatered against the nighttime chill.

Her sweater was white, although it had the same bluish cast to it that the snow had in the moonlight, and she was wearing blue jeans and sneakers. When they reached the center of the yard, she stopped, and the dog started pacing, his nose to the ground.

She hugged herself and turned away from the dog each time it looked ready to crouch. Tak didn’t often get to observe the living, but he was always fascinated with how fluidly they moved. Karen was the only zombie he knew whose movement even began to approach the traditionally biotic. Trads moved in curves, zombies moved in angles. As though to illustrate his thoughts, Phoebe sighed, and as she turned her head toward the opposite edge of the wood where Tayshawn and, presumably, Popeye were hiding, her long black hair fanned out over her shoulder and curled along her jawline, framing her pretty white face. He was so intent on watching her that he almost didn’t see a slant of light from the kitchen appear and disappear as the inner door was opened.

But the shadowy form wasn’t Adam coming out. It was someone going in.

Tak stood and started moving as fast as his injured leg allowed. The dog saw him first.