“This isn’t a huggy moment,” Ellen said, voice flat. “It is what it is, and all without the hassle of pro-lifers to complicate things. That’s pretty all right. I call that progress. Whattaya think the pro-lifers’ stance on aborting a fetus in a dead world would be? Would that still be so bad? Not that it matters, but we’re making conversation while we put off Abe’s expulsion from the building. I’m ragging on you. Don’t give me that look. He has to go. Neighbors who will eat their fellow neighbors are not to be permitted. I think that’s in the charter. What? What’s that look?”
Alan wasn’t aware of what look he wore, but he felt completely flummoxed.
“No look,” he said, his voice soft with apprehension. “No look. Just my face.”
“If you say so. So, maybe one horror show will take my mind off what’s on my mind, if you follow. You wanna go deal with Abe and toss him or what? I’m game if you are. I could use the exercise.”
Alan fidgeted for a moment, chewing his lip till he drew blood. The coppery taste was unpleasant. Abe was one of their own. But Ellen was right: no zombies allowed. Eddie would probably relish a go, what with some of Abe’s previous remarks at his expense, but Abe deserved better. He deserved to be put to final rest with some kindness. Some dignity, if such a thing was now possible.
“Sure. Let’s get it over with.”
“He’s feisty for a dead man with a busted hip,” Ellen observed as she forced Abe’s head down with a mop, the spongy pad pressed hard against the old man’s windpipe. Abe’s arms flailed impotently at his attackers.
“Maybe we should get the others,” Alan suggested, having second thoughts. “Eddie would…”
“No Eddie. We don’t need that throwback to help us.”
Alan looked at Abe. It wasn’t Abe any more, but it was. It still looked like Abe. He wasn’t some rotting thing. Not yet, anyway. His eyes weren’t glazed over and remote; there was rage in those undead orbs. Rage and confusion. Abe caught Ellen’s pants cuff in his spastic fingers and tugged, pulling her low riders a bit lower, exposing the elastic of her thong.
“Uh-uh-uh, you dirty old man,” Ellen scolded, but the humor was gone. This wasn’t funny, even in the sickest way. She pushed the mop harder into Fogelhut’s throat, the pressure precipitating a volley of excruciatingly thick, wet sounds of strangulation and cartilage being demolished. Alan fought the urge to retch or pass out and grabbed a large towel from the bathroom, which he quickly threw over Abe’s face, partly to muzzle him, partly to mask him. Alan didn’t want to see that mechanical simulation of life. With the towel firmly secured over the old man’s face, Ellen released the mop. Alan blinked away tears. This was so not right. Abe had probably slipped away into a peaceful, Valium-smoothed death, yet here he was, snapping at them. Abe rocked back and forth, his legs useless. That broken hip had hobbled him. He wouldn’t even be able to shamble around out there.
“Keep the towel over his face,” Alan snapped. “And sit on his chest. Something to keep him still.”
“What? Aren’t we going to toss him?”
“We are. But in a minute. Hold his arms.”
On the floor Abe undulated, the towel tied firmly over his whole head. He looked like a hostage, crippled and hooded. Alan looked around the room, then spotted a large burnt-orange alabaster ashtray. As he hefted it, feeling its substantial weight and solidity, he remembered his own mom had one similar back when he was a kid.
Alan stalked over to Abe’s wiggling recumbent form, lofted the ashtray in a high arc, then brought it down hard on the old man’s skull, pulverizing it. The sound, muffled though it may have been, was sickening, but to make sure, Alan repeated the motion five times until there was only crunchy pulp beneath the soaked terry cloth. Ellen edged back, mouth hanging open, her bout of grim wit quelled by Alan’s benevolent savagery.
Without asking for her assistance, Alan lifted the inert body, walked it over to the window and dropped it out. He stared as Abe’s body rested for a moment on the surface of the crowd below like a body surfer in a mosh pit, before it was absorbed, the new addition sinking to the pavement, lost, soon to be trampled into paste.
No eulogy.
Nothing.
Ellen let some tears escape, not even sure who or what they were for.
Alan offered no comfort.
They both retreated to their respective apartments and closed the doors.
And Eddie caught a big one on the roof.
Three rooftops away from the hump angling, Dabney stubbed out his umpteenth chain-smoked cigarette. Eyes watery and throat scorched from the combination of butts and booze he’d been consuming since Karl and Mona debarked, Dabney divided his fogged attention between the idiot antics of the meatheads and periodically looking for any sign of their return. He didn’t know how long it had been since they left. His watch had died.
Eddie had certainly gotten his recreational sadism down tight. The big greaseball would catch one and reel it in with almost no effort, then go to town on it with his trusty box of tools. Wrenches, hammers, pliers-the works. Did it count as torture if the victims weren’t strictly human or strictly alive? Dabney could imagine congressional hearings on that subject. The freckly mick, Dave, at one point had been cheerleader, spending time offsides shouting halfhearted variations on “Rah-rah, go team go!” Pathetic. But lately he just sat on the wall, head in his hands, brooding, watching his buddy.
Dabney jiggled the bottle by the neck, listening to the liquid slosh around. The bottle had been mostly full when the two had left. Now it was more than half gone. Either Dabney had gone through it fast or it had been a while. He looked over at the other roof. Three dismembered zombies lay in a heap. Catches of the day. Funny way to gauge the passage of time without a timepiece, Dabney mused, too drunk to take into account the position of the sun or other such time-honored pre-Swiss Quartz movement methods. He should have asked Karl to pick up a fresh battery.
Karl.
Would that naïve cracker make it home in one piece? Karl was a poor substitute for his own dead offspring, but Dabney’d made him his surrogate son and he hated the thought of losing him. He remembered ruffling Karl’s oily hair. Such a small thing, but he wanted to do it again. When Karl made it back he’d palm that boy’s head and mess that hair up good. And now that he’d been bathed a bit, it might even be like white-boy hair ought to be: dry and strawlike, like he imagined Opie’s would be. The thought made him smile until his brain converted “when” to “if.”
“God dammit.”
He tossed the bottle off the roof and, too loaded to go downstairs, tottered to his lean-to sleep it off.
Eddie yanked the last tooth from his catch’s mouth and flicked it from the pliers’ jaws onto the pile he’d made. He wore a necklace of ears around his tanned neck, having copped the idea from some ’Nam movie he’d seen. He reached over and retrieved a hacksaw from the box and commenced removing the forearm of the struggling wretch beneath his knees. Eddie hoped they felt pain. They made sounds like they did. Sweat dripped off his bare shoulders, the bandana stretched across his forehead keeping his eyes perspiration-free.
“Yeah, like buttah,” he grinned, as the blade sliced through the skin and muscle straight to the bone, then right on through that. These things were seriously malnourished. Sometimes their flesh fell away like well-cooked ribs, not that he had any appetite to try zombie meat. Certainly not since the Mona gravy train rolled in. But it was uncanny how some of these humps had tough, leathery hides and others fell apart like nothing. A few shredded to bits while they were still on the line. A couple of firm yanks to get them over the roof’s edge and they were meaty jigsaw puzzles. Disappointing.