The Ultimate Undead Read online

  Mr. Death was in a Lazyboy rocking back and forth and looking at the television. “Gone be riots,” he said softly. “I just know it.”

  Uncle Will’s all, “Gosh, Daniel, I don’t know what happened. We were just cruising is all, and the road twisted and turned and we somehow ended up here.”

  “I been expecting you.” Mr. Death’s voice was all booming and hollow. On TV, the sun was setting and the streets were totally filling with angry black dudes and they were shouting and breaking store windows and beating up Koreans and shit. “You come for that service we done talked about.”

  “No, Mr. Death,” Uncle Will said, “I swear, we were just passing by.”

  “You at your wits’ end, Will. And Mr. Death he at the end of every road.”

  Now I was getting totally scared because the way Mr. Death was talking, it was like this house, this whole encounter, was supernatural somehow. And I was staring at TV, it was Fox 11, and I could see fire running down the streets of South Central, and once in a while they cut to the videotape of the Rodney King thing; I remembered us driving past Foothill Division, I thought of my dream and my grandfather’s shambling toward me with camcorder eyes.

  “Don’t be ashamed you come to me,” said Daniel Moreau. “You done tried everything you can. You a good man, Will, but you have one streak of darkness in you, and maybe this gone lighten your darkness, maybe not.”

  “I just … want to be able to love my son … you know. The way I love Ozzie, my nephew.”

  And the way he said it, it made me feel like me and Ferdie were more alike than I’d of ever thought; like Ferdie was my own self’s shadow, locked up in a dark room, sucking the hatred out of Uncle Will so that all that was left for me was his love. We were different like night and day, but the sickness in Uncle Will’s mind had made us Siamese twins, joined at the heart.

  “Give me a few minutes,” said Mr. Death, “and I’ll get all my tools.”

  “How much is this going to cost me?”

  “It against the law for me to charge for this kind of thing. But you make a voluntary donation, that’s fine.”

  “How much?” said Uncle Will, who always counted every dime, even when he was panhandling for change next to the freeway.

  “You will know what the price will be,” Mr. Death says, “and it will be the right price.”

  We followed him into the kitchen, which was totally filthy. On the counter there was a bell jar with a big old frog inside, and hanging from the ceiling where a light bulb should be there was a bunch of dried puffer fishes. At first I thought the frog was dead but he was only sleeping, and Mr. Death lifted the jar and made me hold him in both my hands, and then he jabbed it in the head with a needle, so it was dead and undead at the same time, and then he cut down one of the puffer fishes and got a whole mess of other shit off the shelves and then he throws everything, including the dead twitching frog, into like this big old blender, and he like turns it on.

  While it’s whirring all I can think of are frog-in-a-blender jokes.

  Okay so then he pours this gooey mass out of the blender and then he does something with it in the microwave and finally he’s all pounding it in a mortar and he’s all mumbling in some kind of foreign language. After a while the chemicals and the dead animals were reduced to about a handful of dark powder and Mr. Death used a flour scoop to fill a Ziploc bag with it. A black-and-white TV on top of the microwave was on the whole time and the riots were getting uglier every minute, but so far they hadn’t mentioned San Fernando; it was all like mostly downtown.

  “You know,” Mr. Death said, “if we cruise up to Mulholland Drive, we’d see, the whole city she a sea of fire.”

  He closed his eyes like he was remembering that sea of fire. But I knew that Mr. Death had been here the whole time. Maybe he had an inner eye for seeing things like that. Or he could send his spirit out hovering over the city. Maybe that was how we been led to his house … shit all I know is he scared me, and I couldn’t take my eyes off the things he was doing, and maybe it was the words he mumbled and maybe it was the two Valium, but my mind was all fuzzed up and I couldn’t see straight.

  Mr. Death put the powder in a black tote bag and took a human skull out of the refrigerator and he stuck that in the bag too. Then we drove back to the apartment and what was weird was it only took a minute or two to get back and I never seen the road we took before. In front of the complex there wasn’t nobody cruising, only a patrol car with its lights flashing at the corner of Aztec and Hubbard. We went indoors and the TV was on and it showed a helicopter view of the city and, like Mr. Death said, it was a ocean of flames and the people were streaming down the streets like termites.

  We went to Ferdie’s room and we found him exactly where he’d been sitting before, on the bunk bed facing the television.

  Mr. Death is all, “We must introduce the coup poudre through a cut in the skin; it has to get into the bloodstream before it start to work.”

  “Come here, Ferdinand,” said Uncle Will.

  Ferdie comes toward us. He’s thin as a shadow and there’s his eyes, clear blue and deep sunken and full of rage, and some of his welts are bleeding a little bit where he’s been picking scabs.

  “And now,” says Mr. Death, “please remember, my homies, there is no magic, no superstition. This an ancient and venerable science that come all the way from BaKongo times. The coup poudre gone send the boy into the sleep of no dreaming, and then, when he come back, he don’t be stubborn no more.”

  I’m all, “You’re gonna kill him, dude!”

  Mr. Death said, “Death is transformation.”

  Ferdie comes up to Uncle Will. He only comes up to his chest. His sandy hair is all matted. I’m all, “What the fuck do you think you’re doing, Uncle Will?” but he pushes me away real rough like. I never seen him be this rough to me before; he sends me reeling across the carpet and I hit my head against the bunk post. I’m all, “Why are you hurting me, Uncle Will,” but then I look across the room and I see a strange thing in the cold light of the street lamp through the orange tree that leans against the balcony: I see Uncle Will take Ferdie into his arms with all the tenderness that he shows me, sometimes, when I knows I’m going through a lot of pain, and he hugs him, and he’s all, “Ferdie, I’m only doing this because I want us to be a real family, I’m doing this for you as much as for me,” and while he’s hugging him his fingernail is searching out a long thick scab that goes diagonally all the way across Ferdie’s back like a burned-on shoulder strap, and he’s all digging his fingernail into it, flicking off the dry blood and exposing the quick, slick flesh. And the weird thing is there is a kind of love between them, or anyways a kind of dependency, because they are like each other’s liquid sky, they are each other’s addiction. Uncle Will still has Ferdie in his arms and he turns his back to me so I can see right into Ferdie’s eyes and them eyes are all shiny, like the contact lenses a monster wears in a cheesy horror movie. But Ferdie’s smiling too, like he’s telling me, This is what I’ve been waiting for. Yeah, maybe you like saved my life yesterday, but you couldn’t snatch me away from Mr. Death forever. And I’m all like standing with pain pounding in my skull from hitting the post and breaking out in a cold sweat because now Mr. Death has crept up behind Ferdie, with his cupped hands full of the powder, and even bending down he’s a head taller than them, and standing against the balcony door he’s all black and shadowy and big and terrifying, and then I guess when there’s enough raw flesh showing he like blows the powder all over Ferdie’s back and he begins to chant and the powder goes everywhere; it wraps itself around the three of them like a cloud for a moment and then it all gets totally swallowed up in the dust and darkness of the room.

  That’s when Ferdie starts to scream.

  Uncle Will’s all, “God damn it, bitch, stop whining or I’ll whip your motherfucking ass to kingdom come,” but Mr. Death puts his hand on Will’s shoulder and says, “It too late, my friend, you already have.”

  W
e left him screaming and went into the living room, and Uncle Will broke out a brand-new bottle of Jack Daniel’s. We drank the whole thing in less than fifteen minutes. Then we got totally fucked up on weed and downers. We had to. Because that screaming went on and on and it made me feel cold all the way into my guts. I don’t know how long it went on but when I finally woke up it was because Uncle Will was prodding me with an empty bottle, and he’s all, “Help me load him into the car, dude.”

  “Where’s Mr. Death?”

  “Gone already. But he’s left us a note.”

  The note read:

  Bring him to my house

  Bury him in my yard

  Wait

  And that’s what we did. We found an open wooden box lying out under the trees, all ready to receive the body, and we dug a hole and buried Ferdie, and we set up a pile of stones like we seen other places in Mr. Death’s yard. We hung around all day. It got to late afternoon and Uncle Will kept going up to the house and knocking, but the whole place was locked up. When the sun got near to setting Will was all pacing up and down and he’s all, “We can’t stay after sunset; there’s a fucking curfew on and we’ll have to spend the fucking night if we don’t leave now.”

  “But we can’t just leave Ferdie behind.”

  Just when Will was about ready to explode, this beat-up old Packard comes screaming into the driveway and there’s Mr. Death. He’s all dressed in black. He has a bottle of pills in his hand and he throws it to me and the bottle says on it, Datura. “Sorry I’m so late,” he said, “I had to see my pharmaceutical contacts. It difficult to trace anybody down with all them riots going on.”

  “What’s that stuff for?” said Uncle Will.

  “Insurance,” said Mr. Death. “Now let’s dig up your new son.”

  Digging him up took a lot longer than burying him because every now and then Mr. Death stopped to chant. Then, when the moon came out, he went into like a trance and his eyes totally rolled up into their sockets and he danced around us, hollering and shrieking.

  But we finally pulled the coffin back out of the ground and opened the lid, and there was Ferdie, his eyes wide open, trying to breathe, and his knuckles and knees were all bloody from clawing and kicking at the coffin lid. Mr. Death forced a pill down his throat and he calmed down, and Mr. Death’s all, “Ferdinand, you a zombie now. You one of the living dead. You understand what that mean?”

  Ferdie nods, slowly, and yeah, I can tell that he’s changed. It ain’t that he looks much different. There ain’t no smell of dead things on him, just the usual toilet smell because he didn’t have nowhere he could go in that box we buried him in. His eyes have that look though. The look I remember from my grandpa. The camcorder look. The eyes suck in, but they give nothing out.

  “Now,” Mr. Death says, “embrace your father, and don’t you be stubborn again, cuz next time you dead for good.”

  “I won’t be stubborn,” Ferdie says, and he sounds more like a toddler than a twelve-year-old. “I love my father.”

  We went back to the house and camped out on the living room floor because of the curfew. Ferdie lay on the floor and slept with his eyes open and didn’t move a muscle. Maybe Mr. Death was right when he said this was all science, not magic, and maybe it was true that Ferdie wasn’t really dead but had only been called back from a coma caused by the nerve poison in the puffer fish, but I knew that Ferdie didn’t think so. Ferdie had watched zombie movies before. He knew that he didn’t have his soul no more. He knew he was just an animated corpse.

  I didn’t ditch too much that week because of the riots and there was so much to talk about with my homies. A lot of them had taken the bus down to South Central and did their own looting and they were all telling me about their new watches, Sega Genesises, boomboxes, shoes they jacked. I couldn’t tell them I had spent the last two days raising the dead so I pretended I didn’t care. In fact, whenever they tell me about all the shit they stoled, I’m all, “Who cares? It ain’t no challenge looting a big old Circuit City with five hundred other people and the cops too scared to come in. Me, I can jack a CD player right from under the security guard’s eyes. I’m down and you ain’t.”

  So anyways I didn’t see too much of Uncle Will that week. But whenever I would go there, the apartment was totally different. It was all clean and vacuumed and all the forty-ouncer bottles were all neatly lined up against the wall ready to be recycled. The blinds were all up and the living room was flooded in sunlight. At first I thought Uncle Will must have a new girlfriend but actually she had dumped him and it was just him and Ferdie living there now. And it was Ferdie cleaning the house. One time I caught him at it. He was all dusting the blinds and he was dressed different, too, in freshly laundered Bugle Boys and a white T-shirt.

  “Yo, Ferdie,” I said.

  And he’s all, “Hello, Ozzie, can I get you something to drink?” like he’s a fucking waitress at Denny’s or something. I was amazed and I just let him fetch me a wine cooler from the refrigerator. Then he went back into the kitchen and I followed him. He didn’t walk like a zombie. He wasn’t all shambling. He held his shoulders back and stood straight and didn’t slouch around like a wuss. And he was all smiling. I mean, all the time. Only his eyes didn’t smile. His eyes took everything in, gave out nothing.

  I’m all, “What the fuck’s happened to you?”

  “I think I’m enjoying being dead.”

  “Ferdie, you ain’t dead. Mr. Death explained the whole process to us. The datura makes your mind all fuzzy, but you ain’t dead.”

  He’s all, “Of course I am. It’s what I been praying for all my life. I’m happy now and so is my dad. You should try it, Oz. I look at you and I see, you’re so unhappy.”

  “I seen dead people before,” I said. I thought of Grandpa. I thought of my brother, which I never saw dead but they all told me about his brains being splattered on the pavement and his eyeball impaled by the hood ornament of a parked Impala. “You ain’t one of them.” But his eyes, his eyes … “And I don’t want to be one neither.”

  “Suit yourself,” he said, and scrubbed the counter with a sponge, scrubbed it to death even though it was already shiny except the spots where his scrubbing had wore off the laminate.

  Uncle Will came home.

  Ferdie’s all “Daddy!” and he runs over to embrace him. Uncle Will kisses him on the cheek. He takes a pill out of his pocket and feeds it to Ferdie. They hug each other again. It’s kind of sickening actually, like The Waltons.

  “Shit,” he says, “last one. I’ll have to ask Mr. Death for more.” Then he sees me and he’s all, “Oh, it’s you.”

  I’m all, “I stopped by to see what’s up.”

  Uncle Will looks me over and then he’s all, “Look at you, Ozzie, jeeze you’re a disgrace. Look at them jeans. What are you doing wearing them jeans, they look like they’re about ten sizes too big.”

  “It’s the style, Uncle Will.”

  “Fucking cholo style. You want people to think we’re nothing but white trash?”

  I backed away in a real hurry. I looked at Ferdie but he didn’t seem to think anything was wrong; he was hanging on every word Uncle Will spoke, like a ten-year-old girl at a NKOTB concert.

  “And what are you doing drinking that wine cooler anyways?”

  “You always let me drink wine coolers, Uncle Will.”

  He knocked the bottle out of my hand and Ferdie dove after it, caught it one handed, got on his hands and knees to sponge the mess off of the carpet. While I was all standing there stunned, Uncle Will slaps me hard right across the mouth a couple of times. I can’t believe this is happening to me even when I start to taste blood.

  And Ferdie’s all smiling.

  “Uncle Will,” I said softly, “you never done this to me before.”

  “I’m seeing you with new eyes, you good-for-nothing juvenile delinquent scumbag.”

  “Come on, Uncle Will, you said yourself every kid has to steal a few cars and jack a few stereos on
ce in a while, and get drunk. You said it was just a phase, that I’d get over it, that it was like harmless.”

  “Don’t sass me.”

  But it’s hard to get out of the habit of answering back because it’s always been this close between me and Uncle Will and I can’t understand why he’s turned against me until I realize that it’s the Siamese twin thing, that Will can’t love his zombie son without hating me. So I’m all backing out of there real fast because I think any minute now he’s going to starting laying into me with his belt or his fists or a cigarette. I get out of there as fast as I can and I go sprinting up the stairs three steps at a time to my mom’s apartment, the place where I most hate to be.

  Mom was sitting at the counter and what was weird was she was actually making dinner when I arrived. The whole living room smelled of enchiladas. She was all dressed up, too. I realized she had been out looking for a job, and she didn’t look wasted. She was all shredding lettuce and watching television, which was showing the riots, naturally.

  “How’s the job market, Mom?”

  She’s all, “I actually got a job today, Oz, they’re going to train me to be a checkout lady at Alpha Beta.”

  “Coolness.”

  “I get a discount on food, too. We’re not gonna be hungry no more.”

  “We wouldn’t be hungry, Mom, if you would have spent them disability checks on food instead of—”

  “I know, I know. Let’s not argue about it no more. I want to start again. I done a lot of things I regretted in my life. And Jesus, I don’t know how to tell you this, but … there was this lady from the rehab program, she got my name off some mailing list, she was over here to talk about shared needles and … Jesus, Oz, do you think I have it?”

  “Don’t say that, Mom.”