Zombie Nights

this time a bit more controlled. He was shaking his head. Definitely. This could work.

  "That's a no, I take it," Ray said, and this time Dave lifted his chin and lowered it to signal a 'yes'.

  "And that's a yes," said Ray. "Now we're getting somewhere. More like twenty questions but better than nothing I guess."

  After a pause he asked,

  "Thirsty?"

  Again Dave shook his head 'no'.

  "Tired?"

  Another 'no'. He jerked his hand up again and tried to make a writing motion. It was clumsy, awkward, but Uncle Ray figured it out after the third or fourth pantomimed attempt, and brought him a pencil and a piece of paper. He sat back again and watched as Dave struggled to make sensible markings. It was not coming easily and several times he had to cross out whatever he'd scribbled. He shook his head and would have sighed deeply if only he could breathe. Eventually he managed to write one word - wounded.

  "Wounded?" Ray stood up. "Where? How? Let me take a look at you."

  He came closer again, holding his breath this time so he wouldn't have to smell the guy. He took hold of Dave by the shoulders and turned him out from the table so he could see him entirely. Dave stretched up a bit and tried to glance down at his side to give Ray a hint, but Ray saw the gaping hole in front and was already ripping away the shirt. When he'd exposed the wound to air he gasped and had to turn away and exhale deeply.

  "Holy mother of pearl," he exclaimed. "That's some wound, and hardly fresh, by the look of it. Man oh man! We've got to get you cleaned up, son. And I won't be taking any more of those shaken heads for an answer. I'm getting the tub started up right now," and he left to do what he said.

  Dave followed willingly to the bathroom and tried his best to cooperate as Ray removed his clothing and helped him into a heaping hot bubble bath. Dave didn't feel it, not the water, not the heat, not the soap. He felt he'd lost all sense of all his senses except for sight and hearing. Couldn't smell, couldn't taste anything but dirt. Couldn't feel any touch. Couldn't speak. It was strange. It occurred to him that maybe he was in a coma, that all of this was just a dream. How would he know? How could he tell for sure?

  Uncle Ray, the man said. My uncle? How is that? He didn't really remember him but something was very familiar; everything was. He felt at ease, without anxiety or worry. Uncle Ray was scrubbing his body, his face, his hands, his hair, the hole in his side.

  "This ain't normal," Ray was saying. "Some of this junk just won't come off and that bloody wound. It won't be cleaned. I ought to know a thing or two. Haven't I been a barber now fifty years? You'd think I'd be having some idea but no. Ain't never seen nothing like this before. Wish you were talking, son. Well, maybe you're writing will get better and you can tell me what the heck is going on."

  "Criminy. Look at that!" he nearly shouted and jumped back. While scrubbing Dave's face a patch of skin came clean off with the sponge, exposing the rawness beneath. Dave looked up at him with an attempt at a questioning look.

  "Where you been?" Ray shook his head, as he helped Dave out of the tub, got him dried off and wrapped him up in an old worn robe.

  "Still smells pretty bad," he muttered to himself, "and that wound, won't clean up at all, hardly. If I didn't know any better ..."

  He paused to consider the implications of his thought. He tried to laugh it off but kept looking back at his nephew and with each glance the notion seemed less and less strange - less strange than the appearance of the young man, and the stink, and the blood, and the skin.

  "It's like you were dead," he finally blurted out.

  They were back in the kitchen, seated around the table once more. Dave hadn't touched his coffee. Ray had had three cups. Dave was writing once more.

  'Under ground', he wrote, passing the note over to Ray, and then seizing another piece of paper and scribbling furiously.

  'Dug out night'.

  'In park', came the next note.

  'One day', he pushed across the table.

  Uncle Ray laid the notes side by side and repeated the words, then formed a sentence.

  "You were in the ground. Dug yourself out. Last night. Up in the park. Fulsom Park?"

  Dave nodded as best he could.

  "You mean to say you were buried up there?"

  Again a round of furious head bobbing. It was making sense now. After he had clawed his way out of the grave he had forgotten all about that. He had only been concerned with moving on. He had not been piecing together one moment to the next, but each moment was its own discrete reality. Now that he was sitting there, conversing in a manner, he was recalling the sequence, stringing together the facts. It could not be denied. He was dead.

  "That would make you what they call a zombie," Uncle Ray shook his head in disbelief. "Or I guess you could look on the bright side. Some people might say you've been resurrected, boy. Hallelujah to that!"

  Two

  "I'm going to need some bacon!" Ray declared, getting up from his seat and heading to the fridge.

  "I don't know what it is about bacon, but sometimes I just need it. How about you?" he asked, and turning, saw Dave shaking his head, more adeptly this time.

  "Oh that's right," Ray mumbled. "Not hungry. Don't suppose you'd be wanting any human flesh or nothing?"

  He smiled a bit uneasily and was reassured to see another head shake by his nephew, who was now writing again and pushed over a note that read - 'don't need food'.

  "Well, that's something," Ray said, starting to fry up his breakfast. "Guess I never gave it much thought. What it'd be like, and all. Course since it's impossible!" he snorted.

  "So it's pretty clear you were murdered," he announced, turning back to Dave. "Who did it?"

  Dave shook his head again.

  "Don't know? How can you not know? Stabbed you right in the gut, looks like to me. Must've been standing right in front of you. Maybe caught you by surprise, eh? That it?"

  "Don't remember," Dave wrote and pointed at the note.

  'Anything', he added.

  "Anything? Huh. Must remember something. Remember me, right? My house? You got yourself here, didn't you?"

  'Don't know you', Dave wrote, and then added. 'Don't know me'.

  He tapped his fingers on the table impatiently as Ray was too busy wolfing down his necessary bacon and didn't see the latest note at first. He pulled it across the table and looked at it thoughtfully for a few moments while he chewed.

  "But you found your way here," he murmured, and glanced up to see Dave's version of a shrug.

  "Body memory, maybe," Ray theorized. "Huh. Well, what can I tell you. Name is Ray. Already told you that, didn't I? Thought so. And you, Davey, are David Connor, my little brother's boy. Your dad, Harry, may he rest in peace. More peace than you, at least."

  Dave was getting used to Ray's attempts at humor, and didn't bat an eye at this one either. In fact, he rarely blinked at all, just enough to keep the eyes moist enough to function, it seemed. His whole body seemed foreign, behaving in ways he didn't expect and didn't understand. Ray was still talking.

  'Must be about thirty or so by now. That'd be about right. Your dad was about your age when you were born. Your mom, remember your mom? No? Chloe Simkatki was her name. Glad to be a Connor when she married your dad. Both of them gone now, sad to say. Taken too young. Cancer, the both of them. As for you ... got no brothers, no sisters. Used to come visit here sometimes on holidays. Or I'd go there. Yeah, that's right. You don't live here in Spring Hill, never did. Grew up in Wetford, down the river. Worked at some kind of storage warehouse last I heard. Been a few years since I've seen you, though. Not since your mother passed. I could say 'my how you've changed', heh."

  None of this information seemed especially interesting to Dave. He couldn't picture his mother or his father, but he thought if he saw a photo they would both seem vaguely familiar, like Uncle Ray. It didn't matter to him, though. The names and places brought back no concrete associations in his mind. He was aware of an increasing sense of
distress, though, and realized, when he glanced up, that it was the light of the dawn peeking through the kitchen window that was causing this unease. He reached for the pencil and wrote 'light. not good'.

  Uncle Ray didn't understand. It took several more notes before Dave was able to convince him to take him someplace where the light could not get in. Uncle Ray had a downstairs, a sort of converted den he'd built down there out of the garage and some storage space. There were no windows in it and Dave immediately felt better once he'd situated himself on the couch. The room had very little in it. Aside from the couch, a small table and a recliner chair, it had a television, a few books, and an old-fashioned radio kit.

  Dave had brought down the pencil and paper and wrote to Ray explaining that he would like to remain in that room as long as it was daytime outside, if that was okay. Ray told him he had to go to work - he still made a regular appearance at the barbershop down by the boathouse - but he'd be back after lunch. That was all right with Dave. He had a lot to think about.

  Ray did too. It wasn't every day you had a dead guy come to visit.

  Three

  He didn't really have to go in to work, but Ray Connor was happy to get out of that house. He was a bit worried, tell the truth. It only occurred to him now as he took the four block stroll that he might actually be in physical danger. On the one hand, he'd known Davey since the kid was a baby. On the other hand - heck, the man was a walking corpse! He'd seen enough movies to know this might not be a good thing.

  Of course, he didn't have any first hand experience with such a creature, until now, and so far it seemed pretty harmless, like an outcast alien from another planet. Hardly seemed to be the same person at all and yet, in all the little ways, he was, like how he held himself when sitting, and how he still had his father's eyes. It was going to be a tough morning, he considered. By profession he was naturally a talker, and here was something he didn't know how to go about telling, or even if he should. Just before he got to the shop he decided he wouldn't say a word, but that didn't hold up five minutes under the scrutiny of his long-time business partner, Clayton Jeffries.

  "Look like you seen a ghost," Clayton said, almost as soon as Ray came out of the back room with his smock on. They were known as "Ray'n'Clay" and had been for so long now they could hardly remember when it stuck. Ray'd been there first, apprenticed way back when with old man Harley when he still barely a man himself. He'd been snipping and shaving all sorts of people ever since. The neighborhood had gone through many economic and ethnic changes over those decades, each era leaving its relics behind, relics that became the regulars of the scarcely visited barbershop. Aside from all those leftovers, the only new faces were from the young rich kids who sailed their boats and yachts out onto the river.

  Clay was young, by Ray's count, only in his mid-sixties thereabouts. He liked to call him 'kid', as he did now.

  "Not no ghost, kid," he said. He figured now he'd tell some half-truths and see if that worked. "It's my nephew, Davey. Showed up early this morning. Been in some kind of a fight from the looks of it."

  "Harry's boy?" Clay queried, knowing darn well it was. They had no secrets from each other after all that time, and knew each other's families as well or better than their own.

  "That boy was always into something," Clay went on, getting up from his chair and putting the morning paper down where he'd been sitting. He paced a bit across the front door, peering out to see if any customers might show. He knew there wouldn't be any, at least not for half an hour, and then it would only be Richard, who'd come for his special ninety cent shave, as he did every Tuesday whether he needed it or not.

  "He's a good boy," Ray countered, pulling out the broom and sweeping at random illusions of dust on the floor. The place was spotless. The men spoke slowly, took turns going about their incoherent and unnecessary routines. It was a living, barely. If it weren't for social security and having paid off that house a long time since, well, Ray didn't even want to think about that. Now that he did, though, he had to wonder how long Davey was going to stay, and how much it was going to cost him.

  'At least the kid don't eat or drink', he said to himself. 'That'll make it cheap. All he really needs, as far as I can tell, is some clothes. Can't keep wearing that bloody outfit. Pants, shoes, jacket, shirt. Underwear, socks ought to do it', and he figured in his head how much all that might cost and when he would get around to it. Shame was that Davey was a good six inches taller and maybe fifty pounds heavier than Ray, so he couldn't wear any of his stuff.

  "So's the kid sticking around?" Clay asked. "He at your place?"

  "Yeah," Ray nodded. "Don't know how long. Long as he needs to, I guess. Neither me or him's got no other family, you know. Got to take care of your own."

  "Got to," Clay agreed. "Like my Willa. Keeps coming back, like a wooden nickel."

  He laughed and then added,

  "Is that right? A wooden nickel that keeps turning up?"

  "Think it's a bad penny," Ray told him, and Clay nodded and said,

  "A bad penny. Should've named her Penny in the first place. Then it'd make some sense at least."

  "She ain't left yet?" Ray inquired.

  "Nope. Says the husband's bound to beat her up again, she shows her face. Says 'papa I can stay right?' trying to make that little face she always made when she was six and begging for another ice cream. I say course so darling, even though she's more than forty now."

  "Kid will always be a kid," Ray said,

  "That Davey was a wild one," Clayton reminded him. "Remember that time he showed up in that Mustang with that gang of hoodlums?"

  "Wasn't no gang," Ray said. "Just joy riding is all."

  "It was too a gang," Clay disagreed. "Some of them later got popped for robbing a bank. Two of them guys it was."

  "Davey said he didn't even know them."

  "Davey said a lot of things," Clayton replied crossly. "How about that time he needed that three hundred dollars."

  "Sure," Ray snorted. "How can I forget when you remind me all the time. Sure he lied about it. Didn't want to talk about it. Girlfriend. Abortion. Kind of thing happens to people."

  "If that's really what it was," Clay replied. "I never was so sure to believe either the first lie or the second."

  On that note, the ever reliable Richard walked through the door and before he even took his seat, he removed his battered fedora, straightened up his old dark purple tweed jacket, studied Clayton's face with a serious look and said,

  "Always believe the second lie. Second lie's the one they're gonna stick to, so you might as well accept it."

  Then, after a laugh far outsizing the humor of the statement, he coughed and sputtered and sat down in the door-side barber chair. It was Ray's turn to do the shave. They liked to alternate customers, seeing as there were so few. They hardly ever had to work at the same time anymore. Ray got busy, spreading the cloak around Richard, fastening the collar, lathering the lather, soaking the towel in the warm water, picking out his razor. While he went about this business, Richard kept on talking.

  "I always prefer to come up with a good lie to begin with" he informed them. "Then I never modify. Never modify. I come home late and I'll tell Becky 'I was at the circus and caught a ride on a tiger'. She won't even bother to question my integrity, not after that. A man comes up with a good enough story, he don't ever have to worry about changing it."

  "Something outrageous, huh," muttered Ray, and it occurred to him that maybe all that stuff Davey said about digging his way out of the grave, but then he remembered the wound, and the smell, and the way that part of his cheek rubbed off. It gave him shivers to think of it, but also brought in the idea that he'd have to do something about the boy's appearance. He was going to need some kind of make-up if he was ever to go out in the world again. You couldn't go around like that, with the skin falling off your face in strips. And some kind of bandage to go around the waist. Yep, he was going to have to do a little shopping.

  "Cra
zier the better," Richard declared. "Why I'd tell my wife I was dead if I thought it would get me off the hook!"

  "She might even make it so," Clay chimed in with a chuckle.

  "She might at that," Richard agreed. It was all a bunch of talk, and everybody knew it. Becky, his wife, had once been Becky Jeffries - Clay's big sister - and they'd had one of the happiest and most easy-going marriages anyone had ever known. Three kids, all grown by now, and two of them with kids of their own, happy little squatters, every one.

  "Davey Connor showed up last night," Clay told Richard, who glanced up at Ray. Ray was about to commence with the blade and merely nodded, casually.

  "Been awhile, ain't it?" Richard asked.

  "Few years," Ray said, and hushed the customer by bringing the razor to his face. Ray really didn't want to talk about it much. He wanted to get things straight in his mind first. There was too much to think about and he wasn't getting any good thinking done yet that morning. He kept up the small talk as best he could, assuring his friends that Davey was fine, nothing was wrong, that he'd come around to see them anytime now, that Ray was glad to have him, had given him the spare room for his own.

  Topics soon turned to other matters, and after Richard had gone a few other customers appeared at sporadic intervals. The morning went by fairly quickly, and Ray knocked off at noon. By then he had already planned out his shopping expedition - the pharmacy, the thrift store, that should be enough. He moved slowly and considered his purchases carefully. Luckily it didn't amount to much, less than twenty dollars for a used but not too shabby wardrobe, as well as the make-up and bandages. It was going to take a few meals out of his week but he figured that was unavoidable. The kid didn't seem to have anybody else.

  Four

  Dave spent the day in the basement. For a long time he simply sat on the couch, staring at the small old television perched on its rickety plant stand. The room seemed fit for nothing; the dreariness of its darkness was matched by the ugliness of the furniture and the absence of anything of interest to look at. Above the couch there had been a ground level window at one time, but it had long since been filled in with cinder blocks and roughly painted over. The front wall was a garage door that would no longer open.

  He could not clearly remember this room, although he must have seen it before. Somewhere in the back of his mind was the notion that there had been family gatherings here, dull holidays perhaps, with trays and paper plates and plastic cups. Now and then he heard the echoes of voices in his mind, which he linked to the idea of his mother and his father, whose names were .... Ray had just told him but now he couldn't recall them. He tried harder, closing his eyes as if that would help, but only shadows came.

  There was a flash of a scene with a bicycle and a man with a narrow brown tie. The face of the man was a blur but his voice was harsh and bitter. Another