Ten

“I’m locking up,” Misty said, and Crate looked up at her from his place on the bench. His rifle rested across his scrawny legs. Bilbo Baggins slept at his feet, snoring.

“Yeah?” Crate said, looking away, squinting.

“Yeah,” she said, lifting the neck of her shirt and covering her nose and mouth. “God. How can you stand it?”

The air reeked of cooked meat. When she was a kid growing up in Mississippi, her grandfather roasted whole hogs on the spit after church on Sundays. Folks would come from all around town, and the smell in the air brought her back. She need only close her eyes, and it was like she was there. But the smell on the air was the smell of what was left of the Willits family, and that was wrong.

“Eh,” Crate said, sounding a little confused. “It’s really not all that bad a smell, I’m sorry to say.” He looked at her. “Don’t you think?”

“I’m gonna lock up now, okay?”

“I still remember how to let myself in, woman,” the old man said, scratching his beard. “That piece of shit staying?”

“I think so,” she said. Crate was right. Charlie was a piece of shit, but he was a well-meaning piece of shit. And he was better company than her husband had been in years. “He isn’t admitting it, but I think he’s scared.”

“No shit,” Crate said, tapping his long fingernails on the stock of his rifle. “We’re all scared, honey. But being scared ain’t no reason to be a fucking coward, and that’s all he ever was.”

“I’ll be in the back, Crate.”

“I’ll try to remember to knock,” he said, looking up at her with that look in his eyes, the one that said he was about to say something hurtful. “Don’t really want to walk in on you sucking his little yellow dick.”

“That’s nice,” she said, deciding that defending herself wasn’t worth a whole hell of a lot. She messed around with Charlie sometimes, when both of them couldn’t really take messing around by themselves any longer; she couldn’t remember the last time Crate was interested in sex. None of them were very happy about the whole thing, but beggars could not be choosers, and sometimes you just needed to sleep beside someone other than yourself. “Try not to fall asleep out here, okay?”

“Yeah.”

“I’m serious,” she said. He slept out here all the time, sometimes so deeply that, upon discovering him, several of her customers had come into her store to inform her that the old dude on the porch had died. “It’s dangerous.”

“Really now,” he said, and the look in his eyes was the look she used to see just before he would hit her. She saw the look at least five times a week now, but Creighton Mumsford hadn’t raised a hand in anger to her in nearly two decades, long before they’d stopped fucking. “How damned stupid do you think I am? Get your ass inside before I shoot you and burn you for one of those things. No one would know, Misty.”

“Maybe you should just lie down and take a nap,” she said. With her shirt over her nose, she could still smell the burnt-hog aroma of Mark Willits and family, only mingled with the scent of her own body. Sweat and armpits and the burgeoning stench of old age. “You want me to get you a pillow?”

“Run along,” he said, pursing his thin lips and miming fellatio with his knotty right hand. He belched into his mouth, his sunken cheeks puffing. He blew it out and made a face. “Whoo,” he said, waving at the air in front of his face. “That’s rotten.”

She closed the door and locked it, wondering how long it would be before things got worse. On the television, things were getting worse everywhere, and she’d lived long enough to know that things never really got better. The bad shit merely took time off, every so often, giving you a chance to feel like things were looking up. But they weren’t. They never were. And now, well—there would probably be no more time off for the bad shit.

She turned the sign around, letting the world know that Misty’s Food and Gas was CLOSED, by God. Not that the sign would do any good. Locals knew to come around back and bother her, and, given the current state of things, newcomers looking to stock up in preparation for the end of the world would simply let themselves in. If Crate didn’t shoot them, of course. And judging by the look in his eyes after he’d taken out the pitiful things that had, only this morning, been the Willits, he’d almost certainly enjoy it.

After the kids from Fresno had driven away with Samson Niebolt, there had been no more dead visitors from Beistle. “Why would there?” Crate had said, an hour later, after she’d wondered aloud why that might be. “Mark and his kids were coming home. Whatever it was that they’d become, they still knew where home was, honey.”

“That’s…” she’d said, unable to finish.

“That’s goddamn awful is what it is,” Crate had said, his eyes haunted. He’d placed a hand on her knee.

It had been three hours since Junior had shown up and the kids from Fresno had gone up to the Niebolt property to smoke dope and mess around. The television said the same shit, only worse, worse and worse by the hour. She stepped behind the counter and retrieved the bottle of Jamaican rum she kept on the bottom shelf. She fished around for her glass, couldn’t find it, and opted to take her poison straight from the source.

“…can’t stress this enough, people.” An angry-looking man with a shiny bald head, thick glasses that seemed to catch and hold the studio lights, and a ratty salt-and-pepper beard yelled on the television screen. “These are dead people. How and why the dead are returning to some reduced form of life is something we haven’t figured out yet, but it’s a fact, despite what this godforsaken imbecile sitting across from me is saying. I know it—”

The godforsaken imbecile tried to cut in, but the bald guy ran him down with words.

“I don’t know why it’s so hard for some of you to believe this,” he said, looking into the camera. “I mean, how many people in this country believe that a Jew who died two thousand years ago is still alive and planning his big comeback special. Come on, people, let’s just look at the facts—”

Misty turned off the television. Bottle in hand, she went into the back.

Charlie lay across the bed. He’d taken off his shoes, and the bottoms of his socks were dirty. His shirt was tight against his large belly. The fingers of his right hand were closed around the neck of a bottle of gin. On the television, the guy she’d silenced out front continued his personal crusade against stupidity.

“...I am calm, you brick-headed son of a bitch,” he said, his upper lip curled back in disgust. “I just can’t believe what I’m hearing. With all you’ve seen, with all each and every one of us has seen, you’re going to tell me that—”

“I’m just saying that we don’t have the facts yet, is all.” His opponent said, leaning forward. “There’s no reason to be so damned belligerent. And there’s no reason to start blaming this on the supernatural. We can-”

“The supernatural,” the hothead screamed. “The supernatural? Who the hell said anything about the supernatural?”

“I’m sorry, Mr. Fallows, but the dead only come back to life in ghost stories, and there must be some other explan—”

Misty silenced the discussion once again.

“I was watching that,” Charlie said.

“And you can go out front if you want to keep watching it,” She said, walking over to the bed. He was lying on her side. She slept alone most of the time, but she still had her side of the bed. Charlie scooted over.

“I was waiting for the crazy one to punch the other guy,” he said, and knocked back some gin.

“There’s the door.” She sat down on the edge of the bed, drank deeply of her own bottle. When she’d had enough, she capped it, set it on the nightstand, and lay back, kicking up her feet.

“No,” Charlie said. He set his bottle on the other nightstand and, grunting with the effort, scooted over to her side and pressed himself close. She tensed.

“Not right now,” she said, closing her eyes and resting her forearm across her face. “Are you nuts?”

“That’s not what I mean,” he said, rolling onto his side and placing an arm around her. “I just need to be held.”

“Yeah,” she said, relaxing.

They were asleep within ten minutes. Less than an hour later, they were both awake.

“Jesus,” Misty said, sitting upright, her heart hammering. Crate stood in the bedroom doorway, rifle in hand. She blinked, realizing that the sound that had awakened her had been that of Crate hammering his fist against the bedroom door.

“Damn, Crate,” Charlie said, rubbing his chest.

“Sorry, you two,” Crate said, not looking particularly sorry about anything. “But you really need to wake up.”

“What is it?” Misty asked, sitting up and rubbing her eyes.

“Officer Tasgal is here.”

“He—who?” she said. Her mind felt like it was made of mud. She’d been dreaming, just seconds ago, though she could not remember of what. Images and sensations faded and were lost, and now there was only the bedroom and Crate and Charlie and dim evening light sifted through the curtains and the liquor on the nightstands. “Tasgal?”

“Yeah,” Crate said, nodding, talking to her as if she were a child. “Officer Tasgal. From Beistle. The one who looks like he’s sixteen. Ringing any bells?”

“Yeah,” she said, and of course she knew who he was talking about. She’d closed her eyes and thought of Eric Tasgal more than once while with Charlie. “I’m a little fuzzy. I was asleep.”

“He’s in trouble,” Crate said.

“Mnn?” she said, standing. Her head spun. The rum had put her down, and it wasn’t through with her.

“I think he’s been bitten.”

“Hey, Eric,” she said, stepping from the back and into her store. Eric sat at one of the tables, picking at the frayed and stained red and white checked tablecloth with his right hand. His left rested on his .357 Magnum, which lay on the table between the salt and the pepper.

“Miss Misty,” he said, looking up at her. Crate was wrong. Tasgal didn’t look sixteen. Typically more like eighteen, she thought, but today he looked a hard thirty. His skin, usually a healthy pink, was pasty. The flesh around his eyes was dark and puffy. The gauze bandage around his right forearm oozed blood.

“You okay?”

“I need a drink,” he said.

“Some coffee?”

“A drink.”

“Okay” she said. “Rum or gin?”

“Rum,” he said. He picked at the blood-soaked bandage and winced.

“Be right back,” she said.

She stepped past Crate, who stood watching Eric Tasgal with weary eyes. As she left the room, Tasgal said something to Crate. She wasn’t sure what it was.

In the bedroom, Charlie sat rooted to the edge of the bed with booze in his hand and fear in his eyes. She grabbed her rum from the nightstand.

“What’s going on?” Charlie asked, his eyes wide beneath a creased brow.

“He needs a drink,” she said, and left. As she walked down the hall, Charlie turned on the television. From the sound of it, the screaming lunatic with the giant glasses was no longer on. The bell above the door rocked back and forth. Crate was gone, no doubt hunkering down on the bench with Bilbo Baggins at his feet.

“Thanks,” Tasgal said, grasping the bottle of rum by the neck with his left hand. His right hand rested on the table. Misty twisted off the bottle cap and set it on the table. “Double thanks.”

He took a hit from the bottle, just a little one. He made a hissing sound.

“My pleasure, Eric,” she said, touching the back of the chair before her, steadying herself. She wondered if he could tell how drunk she was. “What happened?”

“Beistle is a madhouse,” he said, looking up at her and shaking his head, slack-jawed. “It’s just… it’s just gone.” He extended his left hand toward the chair. “Sit down.”

She pulled out the chair, sat down, and watched as he gathered his thoughts. He stared down at table, and she allowed her gaze to drop to the seeping bandage. There was blood on the tablecloth. Tasgal sighed, and the mother inside of her, the mother she never got to be, wanted to place her hand on his. The wound on his arm—the very fact that he’d probably been bitten by one of those things—dictated otherwise. She would not touch him.

She looked at her bottle of Jamaican rum with a sense of loss, wishing she’d grabbed a glass on the way into the store.

“They’re all dead,” Tasgal said. She looked up from his arm, worried that he noticed her staring at it. He hadn’t. His eyes were on the bottle of rum, which he knocked back once more.

“Everybody in town?”

“God, no,” he said, looking her in the eye. “Jim, Clark, fucking Cardo. Sheriff Kosana. Every cop in Beistle.”

“My God,” she said. She brought her hand to her mouth, mostly because it was what she was probably supposed to do. In truth, the news did not shock her. It saddened her, yes, but shocked? No. She’d watched the news for the past two days. She’d seen the mutilated dead bodies of three people who bought from her several times a week staggering through her parking lot. She was officially through being shocked.