Book of the Dead (9 page)

Maddie had left the store with no soup and a throbbing headache.

When she worked up nerve enough to ask Jack what his favorite soup was, he had said: “Chicken noodle. Kind that comes in the can.”

Were there any others he specially liked?

The answer was no, just chicken noodle—the kind that came in the can. That was all the soup Jack Pace needed in his life, and all the answer (on that one particular subject, at least) that Maddie needed in hers. Light of step and cheerful of heart, Maddie climbed the warped wooden steps of the store the next day and bought the four cans of chicken noodle soup that were on the shelf. When she asked Bob Nedeau if he had any more, he said he had a whole damn
case
of the stuff out back.

She bought the entire case and left him so flabbergasted that he actually carried the carton out to the truck for her and forgot all about asking why she had wanted all that chicken soup—a lapse for which his wife Margaret and his daughter Charlene took him sharply to task that evening.

“You just better believe it,” Jack had said that time not long before the wedding—she never forgot, “More than a lobsterman. My dad says I’m full of shit. He says if it was good enough for his old man, and his old man’s old man, and all the way back to the friggin’ Garden of Eden to hear
him
tell it, if it was good enough for all of
them
, it ought to be good enough for me. But it ain’t—
isn’t
, I mean—and I’m going to do better.” His eye fell on her, and it was a loving eye, but it was a stern eye, too. “More than a lobsterman is what I mean to be, and more than a lobsterman’s wife is what I intend for you to be. You’re going to have a house on the mainland.”

“Yes, Jack.”

“And I’m not going to have any friggin’ Chevrolet.” He took a deep breath. “I’m going to have an
Oldsmobile
.” He looked at her, as if daring her to refute him. She did no such thing, of course; she said yes, Jack, for the third or fourth time that evening. She had said it to him thousands of times over the year they had spent courting, and she confidently expected to say it
millions
of times before death ended their marriage by taking one of them—or, hopefully, both of them together.

“More than a friggin’ lobsterman, no matter what my old man says. I’m going to do it, and do you know who’s going to help me?”

“Yes,” Maddie had said. “Me.”

“You,” he responded with a grin, sweeping her into his arms, “are damned tooting.”

So they were wed.

Jack knew what he wanted, and he would tell her how to help him get it and that was just the way she wanted things to be.

Then Jack died.

Then
, not more than four months after, while she was still wearing weeds, dead folks started to come out of their graves and walk around. If you got too close, they bit you and you died for a little while and then
you
got up and started walking around, too.

Then
, Russia and America came very, very close to blowing the whole world to smithereens, both of them accusing the other of causing the phenomenon of the walking dead. “How close?” Maddie heard one news correspondent from CNN ask about a month after dead people started to get up and walk around, first in Florida, then in Murmansk, then in Leningrad and Minsk, then in Elmira, Illinois; Rio de Janeiro; Biterad, Germany; New Delhi, India; and a small Australian hamlet on the edge of the outback.

(This hamlet went by the colorful name of Wet Noggin, and before the news got out of there, most of Wet Noggin’s populace consisted of shambling dead folks and starving dogs. Maddie had watched most of these developments on the Pulsifers’ TV. Jack had hated their satellite dish—maybe because they could not yet afford one themselves—but now, with Jack dead, none of that mattered.)

In answer to his own rhetorical question about how close the two countries had come to blowing the earth to smithereens, the commentator had said, “We’ll never know, but that may be just as well. My guess is within a hair’s breadth.”

Then
, at the last possible second, a British astronomer had discovered the satellite—the apparently
living
satellite—which became known as Star Wormwood.

Not one of ours, not one of theirs. Someone else’s. Someone or something from the great big darkness Out There.

Well, they had swapped one nightmare for another, Maddie supposed, because
then
—the last
then
before the TV (even all the channels the Pulsifers’ satellite dish could pull in) stopped showing anything but snow—the walking dead folks stopped only biting people if they came too close.

The dead folks started
trying
to get close.

The dead folks, it seemed, had discovered they
liked
what they were biting.

Before all the weird things started happening, Maddie discovered she was what her mother had always called “preg,” a curt word that was like the sound you made when you had a throatful of snot and had to rasp some of it up (or at least that was how Maddie had always thought it sounded). She and Jack had moved to Genneseault Island, a nearby island simply called Jenny Island by those who lived there.

She had had one of her agonizing interior debates when she had missed her time of the month twice, and after four sleepless nights she had made a decision… and an appointment with Dr. McElwain on the mainland. Looking back, she was glad. If she had waited to see if she was going to miss a third period, Jack would not even have had one month of joy… and she would have missed the concerns and little kindnesses he had showered upon her.

Looking back—now that she was
coping
—her indecision seemed ludicrous, but her deeper heart knew that going to have the test had taken tremendous courage. She had wanted to be sick in the mornings so she could be surer; she had longed for nausea. She made the appointment when Jack was out dragging pots, and she went while he was out, but there was no such thing as
sneaking
over to the mainland on the ferry. Too many people saw you. Someone would mention casually to Jack that he or she had seen his wife on
The Gull
t’other day, and then Jack would want to know who and why and where, and if she’d made a mistake, Jack would look at her like she was a goose.

But it had been true, she was with child (and never mind that word that sounded like someone with a bad cold trying to rake snot off the sides of his throat), and Jack Pace had had exactly twenty-seven days of joy and looking forward before a bad swell had caught him and knocked him over the side of
My Lady-Love
, the lobster boat he had inherited from his Uncle Mike. Jack could swim, and he had popped to the surface like a cork, Dave Eamons had told her miserably, but just as he did, another heavy swell came, slewing the boat directly into Jack, and although Dave would say no more, Maddie had been born and brought up an island girl, and she knew: could, in fact,
hear
the hollow thud as the boat with its treacherous name smashed her husband’s head, leaving blood and hair and bone and brain for the next swell to wash away from the boat’s worn side.

Dressed in a heavy hooded parka and down-filled pants and boots, Jack Pace had sunk like a stone. They had buried an empty casket in the little cemetery at the north end of Jenny Island, and the Reverend Peebles (on Jenny you had your choice when it came to religion: you could be a Methodist, or if that didn’t suit you, you could be a Methodist) had presided over this empty coffin, as he had so many others, and at the age of twenty-two Maddie had found herself a widow with an almost half-cooked bun in her oven and no one to tell her where the wheel was, let alone when to put her shoulder to it.

She thought she would go back to Deer Isle, back to her mother, to wait for her time, but she knew her mother was as lost—maybe even
more
lost—than she was herself, and held off.

“Maddie,” Jack told her again and again, “the only thing you can ever decide on is not to decide.”

Nor was her mother any better. They talked on the phone and Maddie waited and hoped for her mother to tell her to come home, but Mrs. Sullivan could tell no one over the age of ten anything. “Maybe you ought to come on back over here,” she had said once in a tentative way, and Maddie couldn’t tell if that meant
please come home
or
please don’t take me up on an offer which was really just made for form’s sake
, and she spent sleepless nights trying to decide and succeeding in doing only that thing of which Jack had accused her: deciding not to decide.

Then the weirdness started, and that was a mercy, because there was only the one small graveyard on Jenny (and so many of the graves filled with those empty coffins —a thing which had once seemed pitiful to her now seemed another blessing, a grace) and there were two on Deer Isle, bigger ones, and it seemed so much safer to stay on Jenny and wait.

She would wait and see if the world lived or died.

If it lived, she would wait for the baby.

That seemed like enough.

And now she was, after a life of passive obedience and vague resolves that passed like dreams an hour or two after getting out of bed, finally
coping
. She knew that part of this was nothing more than the effect of being slammed with one massive shock after another, beginning with the death of her husband and ending with one of the last broadcasts the Pulsifers’ TV had picked up—a horrified young boy who had been pressed into service as an INS reporter, saying that it seemed certain that the president of the United States, the first lady, the secretary of state, the honorable senator from Oregon (which honorable senator the gibbering boy reporter didn’t say), and the emir of Kuwait had been eaten alive in the White House ballroom by zombies.

“I want to repeat,” the young reporter said, the fire-spots of his acne standing out on his forehead and chin like stigmata. His mouth and cheeks had begun to twitch; the microphone in his hand shook spastically. “I want to repeat that a bunch of dead people have just lunched up on the president and his wife and a whole lot of other political hotshots who were at the White House to eat poached salmon and cherries jubilee. Go, Yale! Boola-boola! Boola-fuckin-boola!” And then the young reporter with the fiery pimples had lost control of his face entirely, and he was screaming, only his screams were disguised as laughter, and he went on yelling
Go, Yale! Boola-boola!
while Maddie and the Pulsifers sat in dismayed silence until the young man was suddenly swallowed by an ad for Boxcar Willy records, which were not available in any store, you could only get them if you dialed the 800 number on your screen, operators were standing by. One of little Cheyne Pulsifer’s crayons was on the end table beside the place where Maddie was sitting, and she took down the number before Mr. Pulsifer got up and turned off the TV without a single word.

Maddie told them good night and thanked them for sharing their TV and their Jiffy Pop.

“Are you sure you’re all right, Maddie dear?” Candi Pulsifer asked her for the fifth time that night, and Maddie said she was fine for the fifth time that night (and she was, she was
coping
for the first time in her life, and that really
was
fine, just as fine as paint), and Candi told her again that she could have that upstairs room that used to be Brian’s anytime she wanted, and Maddie had declined her with the most graceful thanks she could find, and was at last allowed to escape. She had walked the windy half mile back to her own house and was in her own kitchen before she realized that she still had the scrap of paper on which she had jotted the 800 number in one hand. She dialed it, and there was nothing. No recorded voice telling her all circuits were currently busy or that number was out of service; no wailing siren sound that indicated a line interruption (had Jack told her that was what that sound meant? she tried to remember and couldn’t, and really, it didn’t matter a bit, did it?), no clicks and boops, no static. Just smooth silence.

That was when Maddie knew—knew for sure.

She hung up the telephone slowly and thoughtfully.

The end of the world had come. It was no longer in doubt. When you could no longer call the 800 number and order the Boxcar Willy records that were not available in any store, when there were for the first time in her living memory no Operators Standing By, the end of the world was a foregone conclusion.

She felt her rounding stomach as she stood there by the phone on the wall in the kitchen and said it out loud for the first time, unaware that she had spoken: “It will have to be a home delivery. But that’s all right, as long as you remember, Maddie. There isn’t any other way, not now. It will have to be a home delivery.”

She waited for fear and none came.

“I can cope with this just fine,” she said, and this time she heard herself and was comforted by the sureness of her own words.

A baby.

When the baby came, the end of the world would itself end.

“Eden,” she said, and smiled. Her smile was sweet, the smile of a madonna. It didn’t matter how many rotting dead people (maybe Boxcar Willy among them) were shambling around on the face of the world.

She would have a baby, she would have a home delivery, and the possibility of Eden would remain.

The first news had come out of a small Florida town on the Tamiami Trail. The name of this town was not as colorful as Wet Noggin, but it was still pretty good: Thumper. Thumper, Florida. It was reported in one of those lurid tabloids that fill the racks by the checkout aisles in supermarkets and discount drugstores.
DEAD COME TO LIFE IN SMALL FLORIDA TOWN!
the headline of
Inside View
read. And the subhead:
Horror Movie Comes to Life!
The subhead referred to a movie called
The Night of the Living Dead
, which Maddie had never seen. It also mentioned another movie she had never seen. The title of this piece of cinema was
Macumba Love
. The article was accompanied by three photos. One was a still from
Night of the Living Dead
, showing what appeared to be a bunch of escapees from a lunatic asylum standing outside an isolated farmhouse at night. One was a still from
Macumba Love
, showing a woman with a great lot of blond hair and a small bit of bikini-top holding in breasts the size of prize-winning gourds. The woman was holding up her hands and screaming at what appeared to be a black man in a mask. The third purported to be a picture taken in Thumper, Florida. It was a blurred, grainy shot of a human whose sex was impossible to define. It was walking up the middle of a business street in a small town. The figure was described as being “wrapped in the cerements of the grave,” but it could have been someone in a dirty sheet.