Zombies: More Recent Dead (24 page)

Still, even though I didn’t scoop under it like I would have liked, and even though I was making contact with it earlier than I would have wanted, I gave it every last thing I had, gave it everything I’d learned, everything I had to gamble.

And it worked. The cover flapping behind it just like a comet tail, it was a thing of beauty.

Les being Les, of course he bit the dirt to get out of the way, and Gerald and Rory—second and short—nearly hit each other, diving for what they knew was a two-run hit. A ball that wasn’t even going to skip grass until—

Until left field, yeah.

Until Michael T.

And, if you’re thinking he raised his glove here, that some long-forgotten reflex surfaced in his zombie brain for an instant, then guess again.

Dead or alive, he would have done the same thing: just stood there like the dunce he was.

Only, now, his face was kind of spongy, I guess.

The ball splatted into his left eye socket, sucked into place, stayed there, some kind of dark juice burping from his ears, trickling down along his jaw, the cover of the ball pasted to his cheek.

For a long moment we were all quiet, all holding our breaths—this was like hitting a pigeon with a pop-fly—and then, of everybody, I was the only one to hear Amber Watson stop on the sidewalk, look from the ball back to me, exactly like I’d planned.

I smiled, kind of shrugged, and then Gerald called it in his best umpire voice: “
Out!
”

I turned to him, my face going cold, and everybody in the infield was kind of shrugging that, yeah, the ball definitely hadn’t hit the ground. No need to burn up the baseline.

“But, but,” I said, pointing out to Michael T with my bat, to show how obvious it was that that wasn’t a catch, that it didn’t really count, and then Rory and Theodore and Les all started nodding that Gerald was right. Worse, now the outfield was chanting: “Mi-chael, Mi-cheal, Mi-chael.” And then my own dugout fell in, clapping some Indian whoops from their mouths to memorialize what had happened here, today. How I was the only one who could have done it.

But I wasn’t out.

Michael T wasn’t even a real player, was just a body we’d propped up out there.

I looked back to Amber Watson and could tell she was just waiting to see what I was going to do here, waiting to see what was going to happen.

So I showed her.

I charged the mound, and, when Les sidestepped, holding his hands up and out like a bullfighter, I kept going, bat in hand, held low behind me, Rory and Gerald each giving me room as well, so that by the time I got out to left field I was running.

“
You didn’t catch it!
” I yelled to Michael T, singlehandedly trying to ruin my whole summer, wreck my love life, trash my reputation—“Even a zombie can get him out”—and I swung for the ball a second time.

Instead of driving it off the T his head was supposed to be, I thunked it deeper, into his brain, I think, so that the rest of him kind of spasmed in a brainstemmy way, the bat shivering out of my hands so I had to let it go. And, because I hadn’t planned ahead—charging out of the box isn’t exactly about thinking everything through, even my dad would cop to this—the follow-through of my swing, it wrapped me up into Michael T’s dead arms, and we fell together, me first.

And, like everything else since Les’s failed knuckle ball, it took forever to happen. Long enough for me to hear that little lopsided plastic ball rattling in Amber Watson’s whistle right before she set her feet and blew it. Long enough for me to see the legs of a single fly, following us down. Long enough for me to hear my chanted name stop in the middle.

This wasn’t just a freak thing happening, anymore.

We were stepping over into legend, now.

Because the town was always on alert these days, Amber Watson’s whistle was going to line the fence with people in under five minutes, and now everybody on the field and in the dugout, they were going to be witness to this, were each going to have their own better vantage point to tell the story from.

Meaning, instead of me being the star, everybody else would be.

And, Amber Watson.

It hurt to even think about.

We were going to have a special bond, now, sure, but not the kind where I was ever going to get to buy her a spirit ribbon. Not the kind where she’d ever tell me to quit smoking, because it was bad for me.

If I even got to live that long, I mean. If the yearbook staff wasn’t already working my class photo onto the casualties page.

I wasn’t there yet, though.

This wasn’t the top of a rocket, I mean.

Sure, I was on my back in left field, and Michael T was over me, pinning me down by accident, the slobber and blood and brain juice stringing down from his lips, swinging right in front of my face so that I wanted to scream, but I could still kick him away, right? Lock my arms against his chest, keep my mouth closed so nothing dripped in it.

All of which would have happened, too.

Except for Les.

He’d picked up the bat that I guess I’d dragged through the chalk between second and third, so that, when he slapped it into the side of Michael T’s head, a puff of white kind of breathed up. At first I thought it was bone, powdered skull—the whole top of Michael T’s rotted-out head
was
coming off—but then there was sunlight above me again, and Les was hauling me up, and, on the sidewalk, Amber Watson was just staring at me, her whistle still in her mouth, her hair still wet enough to have left a dark patch on the canvas of the sneakers looped over her shoulder.

I put two of my fingers to my eyebrow like I’d seen my dad do, launched them off in salute to her, and in return she shook her head in disappointment. At the kid I still obviously was. So, yeah, if you want to know what it’s like living with zombies, this is it, pretty much: they mess everything up. And if you want to know why I never went pro, it’s because I got in the habit of charging the mound too much, like I had all this momentum from that day, all this unfairness built up inside. And if you want to know about Amber Watson, ask Les Moore—that’s his real, stupid name, yeah. After that day he saved my life, after Les became the real Indian because
he’d
been the one to scalp Michael T, he stopped coming to the diamond so much, started spending more time at the pool, his hair bleaching in the sun, his reflexes gone, always thirty-five cents in his trunks to buy a lifeguard a lemonade if she wanted.

And she did, she does.

And, me? Some nights I still go to the old park, spiral up to the top of the rocket with a “Bury the Tomahawk” or “Circle the Wagons” spirit ribbon, and I let it flutter a bit through the grimy bars before letting it go, down through space, down to the planet I used to know, miles and miles from here.

Joe McKinney

“But this changes everything,” Isaac Glassman said. “You see that, right? I mean you gotta see that. We can’t . . . I mean, Steve, you can’t . . . I mean, shit, he’s dead. Tommy Grind is
dead
! How can you say nothing’s changed?”

“Isaac,” I said. “Calm down. This isn’t that big of a deal.”

He huffed into the phone. “Great. You’re making fun of me now. I’m talking about the death of the biggest rock star since The Beatles, and you’re cracking jokes. I’m telling you, Steve, this is fucking tragic.”

I let out a tired sigh. I should have known Isaac was going to be a problem. Lawyers are always a problem. He’d been with us since Tommy’s first heroin possession charge back in 2002. That little imbroglio kept us in the LA courts for the better part of a year, but we got
The Cells of Los Angeles
album out of it and that went double platinum, so at least it hadn’t been a total disaster. And Tommy was so happy with Isaac Glassman that he added him to the payroll. I objected. I looked at Isaac and I saw a short, unkempt, Quasimodo-looking guy in a cheap suit in the midst of a schoolgirl’s crush. “He’s in love with you,” I told Tommy. “And I mean in the creepy way.” But Tommy laughed it off. He said Isaac was just star struck. It’d wear off after a few months.

I knew he was wrong about Isaac even then.

Just like I knew Isaac was going to be trouble now.

Behind me, closed up behind the Plexiglas screen I’d hastily installed across the entrance to Tommy’s private bedroom after he’d overdosed and died from whatever the hell kind of mushroom it was he took, Tommy was finishing up on the arm of a groupie I’d brought him. The girl was a seventeen-year-old nobody, a runaway. I’d met her outside a club on Austin’s 6th Street two nights earlier. “Hey,” I asked her, “you wanna go get high with Tommy Grind?” The girl nearly beat me to my car. And now, after two days of eating on the old long pig, Tommy was almost done with her. There’d be some cleanup: femurs, a skull, a mandible, stuff like that, but nothing a couple of trash bags and some cleaning products wouldn’t be able to handle. Long as the paparazzi didn’t go through the garbage, things’d be fine.

I turned my attention back to the phone call with Isaac.

“Look,” I said. “This isn’t a tragedy, okay? Stop being such a drama queen. And secondly, The Beatles weren’t
a
rock star. They were
four
rock stars. A group, you know? It’s a totally different thing.”

“Jesus, this really is a joke to you, isn’t it?” Now he sounded genuinely hurt.

“No, it’s not a joke.” I looked over my shoulder at Tommy. He was at the barrier, looking at me, bloody hands smearing the Plexiglas, a rope of red muscle—what was left of the girl’s triceps—hanging from the corner of his mouth. I said, “I’m deathly serious about this, Isaac.”

“Yeah, well, that’s comforting.”

“It should be. Look, I’m telling you, I got this under control.”

“He’s a zombie, Steve. How can you possibly have that under control?”

Tommy was banging on the Plexiglas now. One hand slapping on the barrier. I could hear him groaning.

“He’s a rock star, Isaac. Nothing’s changed. He’s a zombie now, so what? Hell, I bet Kid Rock’s been a zombie since 2007.”

“So what?
So what?
Steve, I saw him last night, eating that girl. He looked horrible. People are gonna know he isn’t right when they see him.”

For the last three years or so, Tommy Grind and Tom Petty had been in a running contest to see who could be the grungiest middle-aged rock star in America. Up until Tommy died and then came back as one of the living dead, I would have said Tom Petty had him beat. But now, I don’t know. They’re probably tied.

“Nobody’s gonna know anything,” I said into the phone. “Look, I’ve been his manager for twenty years now, ever since he was a renegade cowboy singing the beer joints in South Houston. I sign all the checks. I make all the booking arrangements and the recording deals and handle the press and get him his groupie girls for him to work out his sexual frustrations on. I got this covered. The show’ll go on, just like it always has.”

“Yeah, except now he’s eating the groupies, Steve.” I thought I heard a wounded tone in his voice. He didn’t like to hear about Tommy’s other playthings, even before he started eating them.

“True,” I said.

“How’re you gonna cover that up? I mean, there’s gonna be bones and shit left over.”

“We’ll be careful,” I said.

“Careful?”

“Get him nobodies, like this girl he’s got now. Girls nobody’ll miss. The streets are loaded with ’em.”

I turned and watched Tommy picking the girl’s hair out of his teeth with a hand that wouldn’t quite work right. No more guitar work, that’s for sure. But then, that was no big deal. I had got him a cameo in
Guitar Hero XXI
the year before. Tommy Grind’s reputation was secure, even if he never played another note.

Finally, Isaac said, “Did he finish that girl yet?”

Good boy, Isaac,
I thought.

“Yeah,” I said. “Just a little while ago.”

“Oh.” He hesitated, then said, “And you’re sure we can do this? We can just go on like nothing’s happened?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

Tommy was always prolific. He wasn’t much for turning out a polished product—that part we left to the session musicians and the Autotuner people to clean up—but the man had the music in him. He’d spent fifteen hours a day playing songs and singing and just banging around in the studio we built for him in the west wing of the mansion. Just from what I’d heard walking through the house recently, I figured we had enough for three more full-length albums.

It’d just be a matter of having the studio people clean it up. They were used to that. Business as usual when you work for Tommy Grind.

Isaac said, “Steve?”

“Yeah?”

“Can I . . . can I come over and see him?”

“You’re not gonna screw this up, are you? No whistle blowing, right?”

“Right,” he said. “I promise. I just want to see him.”

“Sure, Isaac. Come on over any time.”

“And this is how he’s gonna live? I mean, I know he’s not alive, but this is how it’s gonna be?”

“For now,” I said.

Isaac didn’t look too happy about that. He was watching Tommy Grind through the Plexiglas, bottom lip quivering like he was about to cry. He put his fingers on the barrier and sniffled as Tommy worked on another groupie.

“He looks kind of . . . dirty.”

“He’s a rock star, Isaac. That’s part of the uniform.”

“But shouldn’t we keep him clean or something. I mean, he’s been in those same clothes since he died. I can smell him out here.”

He had a point there, actually. Tommy was really starting to reek. His skin had gone sallow and hung loose on his face. There were open sores on his hands and arms. The truth was I was just too scared to change his clothes for him. I didn’t want to catch whatever that mushroom had done to him.

“How many girls are in there with him?” Isaac asked.

“Two.”

“Just two?” Isaac said, shaking his head in disbelief. “But there’s so many, uh, body parts.”

“His appetite’s getting stronger,” I agreed. “He regularly takes two girls at a time now, sometimes three. So, when you think about it, he’s actually back to where he was before he died.”