The Ultimate Undead Page 9

  I have no need to rush things now, I tell myself. Her body is not a secret to me. We have begun our relationship topsy-turvy, with the physical part first; now it will take time to work backward to the more difficult part that some people call love.

  But of course she is not aware that we have known each other that way. The wind blows swirling snowflakes in our faces, and somehow the cold sting awakens honesty in me. I know what I must say. I must relinquish my unfair advantage.

  I tell her, “While I was ridden last week, Helen, I had a girl in my room.”

  “Why talk of such things now?”

  “I have to, Helen. You were the girl.”

  She halts. She turns to me. People hurry past us in the street. Her face is very pale, with dark red spots growing in her cheeks.

  “That’s not funny, Charles.”

  “It wasn’t meant to be. You were with me from Tuesday night to early Friday morning.”

  “How can you possibly know that?”

  “I do. I do. The memory is clear. Somehow it remains, Helen. I see your whole body.”

  “Stop it, Charles.”

  “We were very good together,” I say. “We must have pleased our Passengers because we were so good. To see you again—it was like waking from a dream, and finding that the dream was real, the girl right there—”

  “No!”

  “Let’s go to your apartment and begin again.”

  She says, “You’re being deliberately filthy, and I don’t know why, but there wasn’t any reason for you to spoil things. Maybe I was with you and maybe I wasn’t, but you wouldn’t know it, and if you did know it you should keep your mouth shut about it, and—”

  “You have a birthmark the size of a dime,” I say, “about three inches below your left breast.”

  She sobs and hurls herself at me, there in the street. Her long silvery nails rake my cheeks. She pummels me. I seize her. Her knees assail me. No one pays attention; those who pass by assume we are ridden, and turn their heads. She is all fury, but I have my arms around hers like metal bands, so that she can only stamp and snort, and her body is close against mine. She is rigid, anguished.

  In a low, urgent voice, I say, “We’ll defeat them, Helen. We’ll finish what they started. Don’t fight me. There’s no reason to fight me. I know, it’s a fluke that I remember you, but let me go with you and I’ll prove that we belong together.”

  “Let—go—”

  “Please. Please. Why should we be enemies? I don’t mean you any harm. I love you, Helen. Do you remember, when we were kids, we could play at being in love? I did; you must have done it too. Sixteen, seventeen years old. The whispers, the conspiracies—all a big game, and we knew it. But the game’s over. We can’t afford to tease and run. We have so little time, when we’re free—we have to trust, to open ourselves—”

  “It’s wrong.”

  “No. Just because it’s the stupid custom for two people brought together by Passengers to avoid one another, that doesn’t mean we have to follow it. Helen—Helen—”

  Something in my tone registers with her. She ceases to struggle. Her rigid body softens. She looks up at me, her tear-streaked face thawing, her eyes blurred.

  “Trust me,” I say. “Trust me, Helen!”

  She hesitates. Then she smiles.

  In that moment I feel the chill at the back of my skull, the sensation as of a steel needle driven deep through bone. I stiffen. My arms drop away form her. For an instant I lose touch, and when the mists clear all is different.

  “Charles?” she says. “Charles?”

  Her knuckles are against her teeth. I turn, ignoring her, and go back into the cocktail lounge. A young man sits in one of the front booths. His dark hair gleams with pomade; his cheeks are smooth. His eyes meet mine.

  I sit down. He orders drinks. We do not talk.

  My hand falls on his wrist, and remains there. The bartender, serving the drinks, scowls but says nothing. We sip our cocktails and put the drained glasses down.

  “Let’s go,” the young man says.

  I follow him out.

  BRINGING THE FAMILY

  KEVIN J. ANDERSON

  BOTH coffins shifted as the wagon wheels hit a rut in the dirt road. Mr. Deakin, sitting beside his silent passenger, Clancy Tucker, clucked to the horses and steered them to the left.

  The rhythmic creak of the wagon and the buzz of flies around the coffins were the only sounds in the muggy air. Over the past three days Mr. Deakin and Clancy had already said everything relative strangers could say to each other.

  Clancy rocked back and forth to counteract the motion of the wagon. A sprawling expanse or prairie surrounded them, mile after mile of green grassland broken only by the ribbonlike track heading north. Clancy looked up at the early afternoon sun. “Time to stop.”

  Mr. Deakin groaned. “We got hours of daylight left.”

  Clancy made his lips thin and white. “We gotta be sure we get those graves dug by dark.”

  “Do you realize how stupid this is, Clancy? Night after night—”

  “A promise is a promise.” Clancy pointed to a patch of thin grass next to a few drying puddles from the last thunderstorm. “Looks like a good place over there.”

  With only a grunt for an answer, Mr. Deakin pulled the horses to the side and brought them to a stop. The rotten smell settled around them. Clancy Tucker had insisted on making this journey in the heat and humidity of summer; in winter and spring, he said, the ground was frozen too hard to keep reburying his Ma and Dad along the way.

  Clancy grabbed a pickax from the wagon bed and sauntered over to the flat spot. By now they had this ritual down to a science. Mr. Deakin said nothing as he unhitched the horses, hobbled them, and began to rub them down. These horses were the only asset he had left, and he insisted on tending them before helping Clancy on his fool’s errand.

  Clancy swung the pickax, chopping the woven grassroots. His bright bulging eyes looked as if someone with big hands had squeezed him too tightly at the middle. He slipped one suspender off his shoulder, and a dark, damp shadow of perspiration seeped from his underarms.

  As he worked, Clancy hummed an endless hymn that Mr. Deakin recognized as “Bringing in the Sheaves.” The chorus went around and around without ever finding its way to the last verse. Over the hours, between the humming and the stench from the unearthed coffins, Mr. Deakin wanted to shove Clancy’s head under one of the wheels.

  When he finished with the horses, he pulled a shovel from between the two coffins and went over to help Clancy. To make the daily task more difficult, Clancy insisted on digging two separate graves, one for his Ma and one for his Dad, rather than a single large pit for both coffins.

  They worked for more than an hour in the suffocating heat of afternoon, surrounded by flies and the sweat on their own bodies. Mr. Deakin had run out of snuff on the first day, and his little pocket jar held only a smear or two of the camphor ointment he kept for sore muscles, which he also used to burn the putrid smell from his nostrils.

  Mr. Deakin’s body ached, his hands felt flayed with blisters, and he did his best to shut off all thought. He would work like one of those escaped slaves from down south, forced to labor all day long in the cotton fields. Clancy Tucker’s family had kept a freed slave to tend their home, and she had spooked Clancy badly, filling his head with strange ideas. Or maybe Clancy just had strange ideas all by himself.

  A month before, Mr. Deakin would never have imagined himself stooping to such crazy tasks as digging up coffins and burying them night after night on a slow journey to Wisconsin. But an Illinois tornado had flattened his house, knocked down the barn, and left him with nothing.

  Standing in the aftermath of that storm, under a sky that had cleared to a mocking blue, Mr. Deakin had wanted to shake his fist at the clouds and shout, but he only hung his head in silent despair. He had worked his whole life to compile meager possessions on a homestead and some rented cropland. It would be months before his harves
t came in, and he had no way to pay the rent in the meantime; the tornado had crushed his harvesting equipment, smashed his barn. After the storm, only two horses had stood surrounded by the wreckage of their small corral, bewildered and as shocked by the disaster as Mr. Deakin.

  His life ruined, Mr. Deakin had had no choice but to say yes when Clancy Tucker had made his proposition….

  “Make it six feet deep now!” Clancy said, throwing wet earth over his shoulder into a mound beside the grave. Fat earthworms wriggled in the clods, trying to grope their way back to darkness. Mr. Deakin felt his muscles aching as he stomped on the shovel with his boot and hefted up another load of dirt. “What difference does it make if they’re six feet under or five and a half?” he muttered.

  Beside him, standing waist-deep in the companion grave, Clancy looked at him strangely, as if the answer were obvious. The floppy brim of his hat cast a shadow across his face. “Why, because anything less than six feet, and they could dig their way back up by morning!”

  Mr. Deakin felt his skin crawl and turned back to his work. Clancy Tucker either had a sick sense of humor, or just a sick mind….

  Only a day after the tornado had struck, when things seemed bleakest, Mr. Deakin stood alone in the ruins of his homestead. He watched Clancy Tucker walk toward him across the puddle-dotted field. “Good morning, Mr. Deakin,” he had said.

  “Morning,” Mr. Deakin said, leaving the “good” off.

  “You know my brother Jerome recently founded a town up in Wisconsin—Tucker’s Grove. Can I hire you to help me bring the family up there? You look like you could use a lucky break right about now.”

  “How much is it worth?” Mr. Deakin asked.

  Clancy folded his hands together. “I can offer you this. If you’d give us a ride on your wagon up to Wisconsin, my brother will give you your very own farm, a homestead as big as this one. And it’ll be yours, not rented. Lots of land to be had up there. In the meantime, we can loan you enough hard currency to take care of your business here.” Clancy held out a handful of silver coins. “We know you need the help.”

  Mr. Deakin could hardly believe what he heard. The Tuckers had no surviving family—Clancy and his broad-chested brother Jerome were the only sons. Who else would they be taking along?

  Clancy nodded again. “It would be the Christian thing to do, Mr. Deakin. Neighbor helping neighbor.”

  So he had agreed to the deal. Not until they were ready to set out did he learn that Clancy wanted to haul the exhumed coffins of his recently deceased mother and father. By the time Mr. Deakin found out, Clancy had already paid some of Mr. Deakin’s most important debts, binding him to his word….

  It was deep twilight by the time they had two graves dug and both coffins lowered into the ground with thick hemp ropes. They finished packing down the mounds of earth, leaving the rope ends aboveground for easy lifting the next morning. Mr. Deakin built a small fire to make coffee and warm their supper.

  He felt stiff and sore as he bedded down for the night, taking a blanket from the wagon bed. Now that the cool night air smelled clean around him, with no corpse odor hanging about, he wished he had saved some of that camphor for his aching muscles.

  Clancy Tucker lay across the fresh earth of the two graves. Mr. Deakin grabbed another blanket and tossed it toward him, but the other man did not look up. Clancy placed his ear against the ground, as if listening for sounds of something stirring below.

  One of the townspeople had used a heated iron spike to burn letters on a plank. WELCOME TO COMPROMISE, ILLINOIS. The population tally had been scratched out and rewritten several times, but it looked as if folk no longer kept track. The townspeople watched them approach down the dirt path.

  The flat blandness of unending grassland and the corduroy of cornfields swept out to where the land met the sky. On the horizon, gray clouds began building into thunderheads.

  “Don’t see no church here,” Clancy said, “not one with a steeple anyway.”

  “Town’s too small probably,” Mr. Deakin answered.

  Clancy set his mouth. “Tucker’s Grove might be small, but the very first thing Jerome’s building will be his church.”

  Mr. Deakin saw a building attached to the side of the general store and realized that this was probably a gathering place and a saloon. Some townspeople wandered out to watch their arrival, lounging against the boardwalk rails. A gaunt man with bushy eyebrows and thinning steel-gray hair stepped out from the general store like an official emissary.

  But when the storekeeper saw the coffins in back of the wagon, he wrinkled his nose. The others covered their noses and moved upwind. Without a word of greeting, the storekeeper wiped his stained white apron and said, “Who’s in the coffins?”

  “My beloved parents,” Clancy said.

  “Sorry to hear that,” the storekeeper said. “Not common to see someone hauling bodies cross country in the summer heat. I reckon the first thing you’ll want is some salt to fill them boxes. It’ll cut down the rot.”

  Mr. Deakin felt his mouth go dry. He didn’t want to say that they had little to pay for such an extravagant quantity of salt. But Clancy interrupted.

  “Actually,” he looked at the other townspeople, “we’d prefer a place to bury these coffins for the night. If you have a graveyard, perhaps? I’m sure after our long journey—” he patted the dirt-stained tops of the coffins, “they would prefer a peaceful night’s rest. The ground is hallowed, ain’t it?”

  The storekeeper scowled. “We got a graveyard over by the stand of trees there, but no church yet. A Presbyterian circuit rider comes along every week or so, not necessarily on Sundays. He’s due back anytime now, if you’d like to wait and hold some kind of service.”

  Mr. Deakin didn’t know what to say. The entire situation seemed unreal. He tried to cut off his companion’s crazy talk, but Clancy Tucker wouldn’t be interrupted.

  “Presbyterian? I’m a good Methodist, and my parents were good Methodists. My brother Jerome is even a Methodist minister, self-ordained.”

  “Clancy—” Mr. Deakin began.

  Clancy sighed. “Well, it’s only for the night, after all.” He looked at Mr. Deakin and lowered his voice. “Hallowed ground. They won’t try to come back up, so we don’t need to dig so deep.”

  The storekeeper put his hands behind his apron. “Digging up graves after you planted the coffins? If you want to bury them in our graveyard, that’s your business. But we won’t be wanting you to disturb what’s been reverently put to rest.”

  Mr. Deakin refrained from pointing out that these particular coffins had been buried and dug up a number of times already.

  “You wouldn’t be wanting me to break a sacred oath either, would you?” Clancy turned his bulging eyes toward the man; he didn’t blink for a long time. “I swore to my parents, on their deathbeds, that I would bring them with me when I moved to Wisconsin. And I’m not leaving them here after all this way.”

  Seemingly from out of nowhere, Clancy produced a coin and tossed it to the storekeeper, who refused to come closer to the wagons because of the stench. “Are you trying to buy my agreement?” the storekeeper asked.

  “No. It’s for the horses. We’ll need some oats.”

  Though the graveyard of Compromise was small, many wooden crosses protruded like scarecrows. The townspeople did not offer to help Mr. Deakin and Clancy dig, but a few of them watched.

  Mr. Deakin pulled the wagon to an empty spot, careful not to let the horses tread on the other graves. As the two of them fell to work with their shovels, Clancy kept looking at the other grave markers. He jutted his stubbled chin toward a row of crosses, marking the graves of an entire family that had died from diphtheria, according to the scrawled words.

  “My parents died from scarlet fever,” Clancy said. “Jerome caught it first, and he was so sick we thought he’d never get up again. He kept rolling around, sweating, raving. He wouldn’t let our Negro Maggie go near him. When the fever broke, his eyes had a wh
ole different sparkle to them, and he talked about how God had showed him a vision of our promised land. Jerome knew he was supposed to found a town in Wisconsin.

  “He kept talking about it until we got fired up by his enthusiasm. He wanted to pack up everything we had and strike off, but then Ma and Dad caught the fever themselves, probably from tending Jerome so close.”

  Mr. Deakin pressed his lips together and kept digging in the soft earth. He didn’t want to wallow in his own loss, and he didn’t want to wallow in Clancy Tucker’s either.

  “When they were both sweating with fever, they claimed to share Jerome’s vision. They were terrified that Jerome and I would leave them behind. So I promised we would bring them along, no matter what. Oh, they wanted to come so bad. Maggie heard them and she said she could help.”

  Clancy didn’t even pause for breath as he continued. “I could see how bothered Jerome was, because he wanted to leave right away. Our parents were getting worse and worse. They certainly couldn’t stand a wagon ride, and it didn’t look like they had much time left.

  “One day, after Jerome had been sitting with them for a long time, he came out of their room. His face was frightful with so much grief. He said that their souls had flown off to Heaven.” Clancy’s eyes glowed.

  “He left the day afterward, going alone to scout things out, while I took care of details until I could follow, bringing the family. Jerome is waiting for us there now.”

  Clancy looked up. He had a smear of mud along one cheek. His eyes looked as if they wanted to spill over with tears, but they didn’t dare. “So you see why it’s so important to me. Ma and Dad have to be there with us. They have their part to play, even if it’s just to be the first two in our graveyard.”