When the Dead (23 page)

            Rachel
had been blown backward against the hard cement of the building’s front wall.
Her gun had landed too far away for her to reach before Vaughn was in her lap.
She was screaming.    

“I come here armed to the teeth and you want me to punch a guy? Come on!”

            “But,
that’s . . . not fair,” Rachel managed to spit the words out with blood and a
few teeth.

 “All is fair in love and war and this certainly isn’t love, blondie.” He
pulled his handgun out.

            “Really,
though, who are you?” She coughed up more blood.

“Let’s just say that I’m kind of an important guy to miss,” Vaughn
answered. He removed the silencer from his gun and placed the barrel against
Rachel’s head.

“Ooops,” she said weakly.

“Ooops,” Vaughn said as he moved the gun from her head to her heart.

If
Vaughn could do things like leave the building without telling her why or where
he was going, Hayden was going to do what she wanted to as well. She went downstairs
to the common area in her skimpiest tank top and shortest shorts and lay on the
couch, pretending to read a book, waiting for a man to find her there. She
didn’t care which man it was as long as he was willing to play along. She heard
an apartment door open and soon Ben had joined her in the room.

            “Hayden,”
he said, acknowledging her as he went to sit in an armchair across the room
from her.

            “You
look tired,” she said to him, sitting up slightly to make her breasts hang and
appear larger.

            “It’s
not from a lack of sleep,” he said with a sigh.

            “What
do you mean?” she asked as she closed her book.

            “You
don’t want to hear about an old man’s pangs of the heart,” he smiled.

            “You
are
not
old, Ben.”

            “Then
what is it? Why doesn’t Isobel care for me?” he asked her with every
expectation of hearing the answer.

            “She
doesn’t know how to have fun. She is caught up in all the details and
controlling every moment. There’s no spontaneousness.”

            “The
word is
spontaneity
,” Ben corrected.

            “Oh,
professor! I do believe I am in love,” she laughed as she threw a hand across
her forehead dramatically.

            “But
you are right about her. She’s too high-strung.” Ben turned to look out the
dark window. “I wonder where Vaughn is right now.”

            “I
don’t,” Hayden said.

            “It’s
nice to get away from him for a minute, isn’t it?” He smiled knowingly.

            “He
won’t be back for awhile if I know him at all. Do you want to come upstairs
with me? Keep me company?” she smiled coyly.

            “Are
you asking me to bed?” Ben asked her, wide-eyed.

            “Exercise
a little
spontaneity
and come play a game. Can you get the keys to the
Cooper’s apartment?” Hayden got up off the couch and walked toward Ben. She
held a hand out to him and he grabbed it. His palms were sweating and he felt
like a teenager again, walking to a dark room with a girl, not knowing what to
expect.

            “Yeah.
But why there?” Ben asked.

            “Let’s
pretend we’re starting a family.”

            Ben
snuck back into his and Isobel’s apartment quietly and found the key ring from
the office. He took the key to 305 and walked with Hayden upstairs.

            “I’ve
never role played before,” he whispered.

            “It’s
not hard. Pretend I’m someone else.”

            “Isobel?”

            “Sure.”

            “This
is only for tonight. I don’t ever want her to know about this.”

            “It’s
my secret,” Hayden said and kissed him as he unlocked the apartment door. She
led him past the nursery where she could see the crib and changing table in one
corner and into the master bedroom. They lay down on the bed together and
started to undress.

 “Tell me how beautiful our baby will be.”

“She’ll be gorgeous, Isobel.”

“Don’t say her name,” Hayden hissed and smacked his arm.

“I have to; it’s part of the fantasy.”

“Ok, well I’m going to call you Tom then.”

“I’m alright with that. We’re Vaughn and Isobel and we’re making love and
having a baby together,” Ben said aloud to try and make it more real.

“Oh, Tom! I want you in me!” Hayden whined.

Ben took a second to think about his response. “Will I hurt the baby?” he
asked with concern in his voice.

“That’s good, that’s good,” Hayden said. “Don’t worry. The baby will be
fine.”

“I’m going to enter you now.”

“Ew, don’t narrate it! Just do it! Fuck me, Tom!” Hayden yelled.

Ben’s hands were softer than Vaughn’s. Hayden liked the difference even
if it took away from the fantasy. She felt like she could be loved by his hands
and, for a half an hour, she was.

When Vaughn
got back to Willow Brook he had a smile on his face, a graze mark on his
shoulder and a gift for Isobel. He had wanted to do something bigger, like
bring some of the zombies back with him to show the group but it was too much
work and too many blocks to cover. He knocked on her door but no one answered,
not even Ben. He tried the knob and it was unlocked. Inside, Isobel had fallen
asleep in the living room. Two cups of cold tea sat on the coffee table.
Where’s
Ben?
Vaughn wondered. The man usually followed Isobel like a loyal dog. He
had to be there somewhere.

            “Oh
well. I’m not here to see you anyway,” he said to the room. Isobel moved in her
sleep from the noise. He didn’t want to wake her so he set down his gift, a
lock of beautiful but dirty blonde hair, on the table along with a note bearing
three words:
we are
safe
. He left her apartment and made his way
back to his own on the third floor. Upstairs, he passed Ben in the hallway.

            “I
was just getting a snack,” Ben hurried to explain his being on the third floor.
He couldn’t stop smiling though. He looked guilty of something.

            “Do
you want me to tell you when I take a shit? I don’t care why you are here,”
Vaughn said as he kept walking to his door. Hayden opened the door to the
Cooper’s and stood in the doorway, she was wrapped in a bed sheet.

            “Goodnight
Ben!” She waved at him, making him blush as he continued to the stairs.

            “Don’t
you mean ‘hi Vaughn’? And why are you sleeping in there?” Vaughn asked her as
he grabbed her face, forcing her to look at him.

            “Don’t
touch me like that.” She pulled his hand from her jaw.

            He
slapped her cheek. “I’ll touch you how I want. Are you coming over?”

            After
being hit she didn’t feel like she had the choice to say no. She followed him
to his cold apartment and let his rough hands undo the soft work of Ben’s.

Isobel finally woke around noon that day. Ben sat on the couch across
from her, reading a book. Two new cups of steaming tea sat on the coffee table
next to something else.

“What is that?” Isobel pointed at but didn’t touch the bunch of hair.
“Or, whose is that?”

“Vaughn left it here. Ask him,” Ben said quickly before he returned to
reading his book. “Don’t waste this tea too. Take it with you.”

Isobel gulped the hot tea, burning her tongue and throat a little. She
stood up to the pain of her ankle and hobbled slowly to her bedroom to change
clothes. She dug in a kitchen drawer for a Ziploc bag to put the hair in.

“I’ll be back,” she said to Ben, who didn’t respond. On her way to the
stairs she passed Rob and Gabe in the hallway. They were playing with toys and
talking in whispers. Hayden was in the common area writing in a notebook and
staying out of view of the windows. Isobel nodded to her when she looked up.

“Do you need help up the stairs?” Hayden asked.

“No, that’s alright. I think I can do it. Thank you though.” Isobel
smiled at the teen. She took each stair one at a time and she could feel Hayden
watching her the entire five minutes it took her to make it up the first flight
of them.

As soon as Isobel was making her way up the second flight of stairs,
Hayden jumped up from the chair she was on and ran down the hall to Isobel’s
apartment.

“Isobel just left,” Rob called out to her. “Didn’t you see her?”

“Um, yeah. I wanted to ask Ben if I could borrow a book.” Hayden lied as
she let herself into the unlocked apartment and closed and locked the door
behind her.

“I see,” Rob said.

“Ben doesn’t like Vampire books,” Gabe said.

“That is exactly what I was thinking,” Rob said to his son. “Let’s go
have some lunch, what do you say?”

“Yum!” Gabe jumped to his feet from the hall floor.

“Bring your toys.”

Gabe harrumphed and picked them up. “You should help ‘cause you played
with them too.”

“Which ones did I play with?” Rob joked.

“You touched this one and this one,” Gabe said as he pointed to toys he
was leaving for his dad to clean up. “Oh and this one too!” He dropped one of
the toys he’d already picked up.

“Gabe! How about we each pick up half?”

Hayden
watched them through the peephole of Isobel’s apartment door. Behind her Ben
had closed his book and started towards her.

            “Isobel
will kill us if she knows you were in here. Vaughn probably will too. Do you
want
to die?”

            “Shh!
Rob and Gabe are leaving now.” She watched them finish picking up their mess
and disappear from view. Once she was satisfied that they had left, she turned
to Ben in the dark entry and kissed him. Ben pulled her from him.

            “Why
are you here?” he asked her.

            She
replied by unclasping his belt and unzipping his pants. “I want more.”

            “Ok,
well, it’s not that I don’t want more, it’s just, we are going to get caught.
It’s the middle of the day.” Ben was trying to pry the girl off of him but she
was making it difficult. “This is Isobel’s apartment! Not mine, not an empty
one, definitely not yours! We can’t do this!” Ben succeeded in pushing her
away.

            “Fine!”
she yelled. “Maybe someone else wants to play!”

            “You’re
not a toy, Hayden,” Ben said quietly as he kissed her forehead. “And there are
other ways to show love.” He caressed her cheek lovingly. She turned away to
unlock and open the door.

            “Not
in my world,” she said before running down the hall.

Ben stood for a moment in the doorway thinking about the choices he had
made and the ones he had yet to make. Life was becoming difficult when right
and wrong were becoming similar shades of grey.

“What did you do, Vaughn?” Isobel asked, holding up the bag containing
his ‘gift’ of Rachel’s hair and wincing from the pain in her ankle.

“Do you really want to know?” He tried to read her face.

“I know you didn’t go out at three in the morning to give free haircuts,”
Isobel said as she lowered herself onto Vaughn’s couch.

“I killed the anarchists.” He smiled like a proud child.

“All of them?” She looked amazed.

“Every. Last. One.”

“That was fifteen people.” She counted on her fingers everyone she could
remember on the truck yesterday.

“Twelve,” he corrected her. “But I could have handled fifteen easily.”

            Isobel
threw the bag at him. “Keep it. It’s your trophy.”

“Why’d you put it in a bag?” he laughed as he looked through the plastic
at her.

“I don’t know. It’s gross,” Isobel said as she looked at it again.

“It’s just dirty hair. We all have it.” Vaughn ran his fingers through
his own greasy locks.

“It belongs to a dead woman!” she screeched.

“She wasn’t dead when I cut it off.”

“Ok, stop there. I don’t want to know the details. As long as we are safe
and they won’t be coming back here, I’m good.”

“They won’t be coming back; not here anyway.” Vaughn smiled.

           
“Thank you,” Isobel said, standing up
and forcing herself to hug Vaughn. “Even though you may have just done it for
your own safety, we did benefit from your murderous rampage.”

            “The
‘thank you’ would have been enough.”

            “A
note
without
a pile of a dead woman’s hair would have been enough too,”
Isobel said and then made her way slowly back down to her apartment.

            Ben
awaited her nervously. He had his book in his hands but he wasn’t reading it,
only staring at the blank paper between the lines. Isobel entered the apartment
and Ben stood up.

            “I’m
not the pope,” Isobel said.

            “What?”
Ben asked, confused.

            “You
don’t need to stand when I come into the room. You can sit,” she assured him.

            “Oh,”
he said as he sat back down, not really realizing that he had stood to begin
with.

“Your fly is down,” Isobel pointed out.

Ben’s face flashed red as he zipped it up. He’d remembered to redo his
belt but not his pants.

 “We shouldn’t have taken in Hayden,” Ben blurted out.

“She just offered to help me up the stairs. What could
you
have
against her?” Isobel asked, thinking it strange that Ben suddenly cared either
way about Hayden.

Ben chose his words carefully. “She . . . came onto me.”

“She’s confused. She has all those teenage hormones racing around in her
and Vaughn treats her like shit so, you are the obvious next choice.”

“What do I do?”

“You do the right thing, the adult thing. You deny her. She’s underage,”
Isobel said.

Ben’s chest hurt a little. He hadn’t done the right thing. He’d followed
her upstairs and entered her and he had liked it.

“But Vaughn didn’t,” he said, looking for some sort of redemption.

“If we based our moral standards off of Vaughn’s, well, we’d be truly
fucked.”

“Didn’t you go upstairs to thank him profusely for being our savior?” Ben
teased.

 “I’ve never been a fan of him but you have to admit that it was a pretty
nice thing he did for all of us.”

“He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I just hope that last night he got his
fill of shooting the living.”