Holiday of the Dead (39 page)

She’d said ‘no’ and remained my armour, and I swore that as I grew older, stronger I would take the baton and protect her as she’d protected me. But the opportunity never came. Ol’ Jack turned Daddy old before his time, made him decrepit and impotent and in this Lindsey, amazing Lindsey, dumfounded as she usually did by giving up any hope of college to support Daddy in his long suffering journey. I suspected pleasure in her actions, retribution. I told her my thoughts once. And she’d slowly shaken her head.

“I’m not looking after the man who beat on us, John,” she’d said. “I’m looking after the man before Momma died. The kind and gentle man who loved his family.”

A man I didn’t know.

Mother had died before I could walk. She was a shadow in my mind, given form in the pictures hidden in the cellar for a lifetime, until Lindsey rescued them and placed them on the dresser in her room. Initially Daddy Dearest was too consumed with his grief to allow it. Then he became too consumed by Ol’ Jack to care. For him it was medicine. For me it was just an excuse to camouflage the meanness.

When I heard he was sick at his own hands it pleased me. No one, it seemed, was immune to Daddy’s abuse. Over the years he’d even managed to fuck up his own body as well as ours. The night Lindsey called and told me that she thought Daddy was dying part of me screamed out with joy. But another part, the part still wearing the bruises and the fear and the guilt, began whimpering like a hungry, mangy cur searching for scraps.

We had occasional respite. How else could we have come through it so well adjusted? The one day a year ensuring we didn't allow history to repeat in all its medieval glory: Father's Day. 24 hours where the beatings and the bullying ceased as Daddy Dearest spent the morning post-oiled and coiled in duck and down, and the afternoon reclined in his old squeaking chesterfield, the man who would be king, allowing us to serve him ribs and fries, a root beer or two. And then there was the cake. Lindsey's handiwork, of course. A square slab of fruitcake, coated in white icing and adorned with a single candle and the words "Happy Father's Day". It came with pride and misplaced love, but it meant there would be no fresh cuts that day.

One day a year and Jesus fucking Christ how we all revelled in it. Not even Ol' Jack could turn Daddy Dearest sour. But the bile would always return. And the blood. Constantly, consistently. Just like Father's Day.

I expected Lindsey’s call, it was Father's Day after all, that hollow holiday for daddies everywhere, acknowledgement of their contributions to family holism. If my stomach wasn't so empty I would probably puke. I usually leave Lindsey to bake the cake and nurse the monster.

I knew she was sitting in Daddy Dearest's old Chesterfield, just as I knew that on a small walnut table scarred with silver half moon coffee-cup stains and butt end scorches there would be that motherfucking cake, with its armour plate icing and lone candle. It was a ritual. A harking to the too few good times.

“Yeah.” I rubbed at my brow and closed my eyes. I was fighting against the effects of half a bottle of Ol’ Jack. The legacy of Daddy Dearest, his one and only lasting gift: dependency on a bottle. “We knew it was happening, Lindsey. The quacks told us as much last month.”

“I can’t, John.” The voice was non negotiable, the kind of voice she’d used when the offer of college came through several years ago.

She knew. We all did. But no one knew why it happened or how to stop it. The Sickness came and went. But it always stayed a while. And when it did it played merry and it played hard; victims floored with a fever and then the bone quaking agony of multiple convulsions until they died, clawing at their throats as though attempting to rip it open and allow in precious oxygen.

Then the real problems began.

When those who had succumbed to The Sickness came back from the dead.

I could remember the first time it had happened. Hell, I was there now, my mind swirling back in time; no longer in the hall of my cramped apartment, but in a rail car; hand clamped to a smart phone watching the news, watching a small town on a small screen, cordoned off by a fleet of green military vehicles. Then shaky footage, the news crew letting the cameras roll; capturing the terrible yet incredible events and sending them out to the world.

“As you can see,” the news reporter said off camera, “it’s quite incomprehensible, but the dead are walking, ladies and gentlemen, the dead are walking!”

The screen filled with shuffling shapes, they came from homes, from stores, from vehicles scattered about the streets. These things were once human, but no longer. They were broken and malformed, each emitting a low pitiful mewling sound that combined to make an eerie sound track that drifted ominously from the speaker in the smart phone.

“The medical teams are going in, ladies and gentlemen,” the commentator continued. “Oh, thank the good Lord! The doctors are attempting to deliver any aid they can to these poor, unfortunate souls.”

On screen, medics moved amongst the military; white coats amid a sea of green fatigues. Tentatively the medical team approached the shambling throng of people heading towards the cordon.

I’m aware of people around me, other passengers peering at the screen, united in their fascination and, if they were totally honest, their revulsion of the scene on the screen.

And this was before the screams began.

They were thin and long, even in the confines of the rail car, but they were the sounds of agony and fear, bleeding into one another to create a cacophony that chilled the bones of those huddled around a smart phone five hundred miles away.

“Holy Jesus!” The commentator was back. The excitement in his voice gone, replaced by a hoarse rasping whisper, vocal chords taut with horror. “I can’t believe it! Oh, Christ on a bike, this is the most hideous thing I’ve ever seen. They’re attacking the medical team, wrestling them to the ground, biting them.”

Not biting the medical team, I noted. Eating them. White coats made red with gore, skin torn and ripped as cloth, in strands, in chunks, by mouths that were wide and mewling. I watched, dumbfounded, as the crawling image of a middle aged medic screamed silently at the camera as his head was pulled away from his body by a teen in a bloodied school uniform.

The screen shuddered and it was not the camera man this time. It was my hand shaking so violently I almost dropped the phone.

“Hey, keep the thing still, man,” a large black guy said; his eyes wide with fear. “We gotta know how this happened.”

But we never did know, did we? No, all that came out of it was a town cordoned and burned by the army. And “The Sickness”, a term that rendered the ultimate act of inhumanity into a sterile noun, two words to be whispered for fear they should suddenly become aware and return, reaping their terrible wrath.

There it was, Lindsey cashing in her dividends, recouping her investment when she needed it the most. Years of protecting her younger brother from the monster who was now destined to become a monster right there in the family home.

“What stage is he at?” I said; voice low. Accepting.

“Early,” she said. “The fever and tracking.”

Tracking. The veins coming up to the surface of the skin, blue tributaries that would turn rose red, morphing the skin into a lattice of livid wheals. Then the shakes would begin. Vicious and final.

I now understood her dilemma; the reason why she was determined to call in her chips from the past. Lindsey’s memories were forgiving enough to stay and play nurse maid to mean Daddy Dearest. She was dutiful enough to put aside her hate of him and mix in some duty to sweeten the taste and make her life more palatable. But when the man died and the monster emerged she couldn’t say with certainty she could do what needed to be done. She didn’t trust herself to go to the wood shed and get the axe from the shelf, next to the tacks and screws and cobwebs, and take it to Daddy Dearest, take it to his head until it was cleaved from his quivering, shivering body.

No she knew she may not be able to do such a thing. But she was sure that I could.

My sister knows me well.

The city lights were a memory, winking out on me over ninety minutes and a hundred and fifty miles ago. The view from the window was that of white lines in the yellow haze of my head lights and the twinkling blues and greens of the car’s interior dash splashed against the wind shield.

As I drove I listened to news reports and weather bulletins, flipping between channels to listen to any announcement suggesting that The Sickness had returned to our fair land. I found nothing. But I knew all too well that this meant little. There had been sporadic incidents since the village of the damned had chowed down on the three medics on national TV. The Sickness was often popping up, but the incidents were isolated, townsfolk raising the alarm as well as their axes and shot guns before things got out of hand.

The military would come, scientists in tow, and neutralise the site, either spraying the locale with a clear liquid that gave off the sweet aroma of liquorice, or the flame throwers would come and raise the site of the occurrence to the ground.

The family doctor. Our family doctor. The one who had resided over our cuts and bruises and breaks and said not one fucking word to the world.

“Now, son, I’ll be the first to admit that things were misinterpreted. But that stuff is done. We have to look at what’s being dealt out to us.”

“Keep an eye on Linz,” I replied, my words greasy with malice. “When I get there I want you gone, got that?”

I hung up, the road and a pack of cigarettes becoming my companions for a while.

The house appeared from behind a group of maple trees, the car headlights giving the broad leaves a sheen that writhed like flames as they were tousled in the breeze.

Its omnipotent image brought the kind of memories that I’d sought to bury over the years. The kind of memories that had driven an eighteen year old kid to bail and put distance between this house and its secrets. But the miles did nothing to blunt the experiences, not really. Not in a way that really mattered, the way that would allow me to move through life without the booze.

I pulled the car onto the short drive, alongside a blue Ford I presumed belonged to Conlon. No sooner had I switched off the engine, the porch door opened and the slim figure of Lindsey appeared and ran to me. I held onto her in silence, the moment filled with the tick ticking of the car’s engine blocks cooling down after their late night drive.

“Maybe. But this is different.” She stepped away from me, her face wan with embarrassment. I felt guilt pulse through me and I feigned a smile to soften the moment. She bought it, but only just.

“Come inside,” she said. “He’s in his bedroom.”