Aftertaste Read online

  But we’re not there yet. That future can be avoided, maybe. Galavance hates the idea of fate. Fuck fate. I might be making this up as I go along, and sure, it looks like a mess from the outside, I totally agree, it does, but I can make this better. I will.

  While they wait for the light, one hand on the wheel and the other keeping her head up, Galavance says, “Talk to me.”

  “Hm?”

  “You’re getting a free ride here, the least you could do is make a little conversation—even if it’s about whatever crazy shit you claim to be up to. Especially since I’m having to suffer this commute to just go into work, get fired, and turn right back ’round and go back through it again. Not exactly worth the gas if you ask me, but someone’s gotta keep the boyfriend in Budweiser.”

  “You have a boyfriend,” Zilch says.

  “If you could call him that.”

  “I don’t think I follow.”

  “He’s a boy, that’s for certain. But as for that word ‘friend,’ well, friends don’t typically shit on each other.” Galavance smiles, weakly. She feels guilty bad-mouthing Jolby with a stranger, even if he deserves it.

  The light changes. They move along with the crush of traffic, then break off to take the two-lane running alongside the highway.

  “What does he do?” Zilch asks.

  “Farts around, says he’s building a house.”

  “For you and him? How Abe.”

  “No, for someone to buy. But it took them almost a year to get the frame up and now—Jolby says—they’re putting up the drywall.” She pauses. “But I’m pretty sure they’re just sitting around all day getting shit-faced.”

  Zilch is looking out the passenger side window and doesn’t reply.

  “What do you really do?” she says, snapping him back. “And no bullshit this time. Your face, before … I mean, I hit you, hard. Now it’s like it never happened.”

  “I told you.”

  She chuckles, shakes a smoke from the pack, and offers him one. He accepts. Taking the hide-and-go-seek lighter that facilitated their meeting, their fingers brush briefly. His touch is still cold, clammy. He says, “I tell you I’m a reanimated corpse sent back from the dead to hunt monsters, and you’re fine with it … and you giggle?”

  “I just don’t buy it, simple as that,” Galavance says. “And things I don’t buy I laugh at. Laugh, not giggle. I don’t giggle. But, a guy tells me he has a seventeen-inch trouser goblin, what am I supposed to do? Keel over from how impressed I am? No. Prove it. So you had some road-rash, before, and now you don’t. Maybe the light made it look worse than it actually was. Maybe you take your vitamins, I don’t know. Drink lots of milk or some shit. But a zombie monster hunter? That’s just a flat-ass lie, mister. You insult me. This blond comes from a bottle, you know.”

  “You asked, remember,” he says. “I told you because you asked.”

  “Don’t get loud with me. Ain’t nobody allowed to holler in this car but me.”

  “Sorry.”

  “Now, if you wanna tell me something true, I’ll let you bend my ear for that.”

  “I got nothing else to tell you. I’ve been doing this shit for so long I can hardly remember when I wasn’t,” he says. Galavance feels him look over at her again, and suddenly feels bad, gets the feeling that Zilch actually does believe his whole story.

  “Anyways, a monster hunter? You’ll have to try harder than that. I saw three things on the internet last week alone that were freakier than that. Jolby showed me this one website: there’s kids who post videos where they numb their stomachs and disembowel themselves. Call it scarfing, because the goal is to pull the small intestine out far enough to wear it like a scarf. Fun, huh? Then there was another thing where they found a piece of a spaceship out in Russia with a bunch of newspapers in it with all of their dates ten years from now. And on top of all that, there’s apparently Lizard Men stomping around swamplands jacking cars for parts in this very state. There’s no surprising anyone anymore.”

  “Wait. Lizard Men?” Zilch perks, sitting straight in his seat.

  “I rattle all that shit off and that’s the thing you find weird?”

  “Lizard Men? Plural?” he pressed. “Like, more than one? Are they sure about that?”

  “I don’t fucking know, mister. Go get online with the other crazies.”

  “So you do think I’m nuts.”

  “We established that. Look, fella, I went to school with this chick, Maybelline, who swore up and down she was a vampire. I know this other guy who swears when he gets really high he can walk on the ceiling, except it only works when nobody’s looking at him. So, not to be a bitch or anything, dude, but you’re gonna have to get over yourself—or try a little harder. You hunt monsters. You say you’re a dead fella. Okay. Sure, honey. Have fun with that.”

  “Turn here,” he says.

  “What?”

  “Turn.” He’s holding the side of his head as if trying to squeeze his brain out his ear like the last of the toothpaste. “Right here, turn.”

  “There’s nowhere to turn, do you see a road anywhere?” It’s just wetlands on either side; they’re on a manmade strip just wide enough for a road to get slapped down.

  Zilch’s fingertips are pressing dents into his temple. “Stop the car. Now.”

  He nearly climbs into the driver’s seat with her, peering out her window, past her. He’s close enough she can smell him; he reeks like dirt. Galavance turns to look where he’s staring. To their left, mere feet from the road’s shoulder, is brown stagnant water. Spindly trees, willows, cat-tails. Nothing more. Silence. The warm morning air makes it look like the water is steaming. It looks state fair fun house fake, it’s spookiness overdone. But she pulls over, careful to not dunk them into the water. Zilch scrabbles out before they’re even completely stopped.

  She watches him in the side mirror as he approaches the swamp’s edge, staring out across the water, but not at any particular thing—like throwing his gaze past what’s present. As the door ajar chime dings and dings, Galavance considers reaching over, closing the door, and taking off. Her heart starts to race at the idea. She could be rid of this weirdo, right now. But he knows her name, knows her car. Its front end is all goobered up from hitting him. She’s seen those forensics cop shows; she’s seen people get the electric chair from one little fleck of skin picked up with tweezers. She ducks her head out the window, watches him standing there in his filthy suit staring off across the murky water that’s probably full of snakes, leeches, and God knows what else. It smells bad, too, when the wind tears hot across its surface, like decay. He looks out over the bog for a while, maybe a minute, eyes pinched like he, too, had Three Buck Chucked himself into white zin oblivion last night.

  “What is it?” she asks.

  Zilch turns, only half paying attention to her, polished loafers crunching in the roadside gravel. “Thank you for the ride,” he manages, still squinting, “Much obliged.”

  He carefully moves alongside the bog’s muddy bank, steps squishing, head tilted as if he’s trying to avoid his ear drums being punctured by a siren only he can hear.

  The cicadas chirrup, the tiny frogs sing their overlapping glunk-glunk songs. Galavance’s patience bests her. “Seriously? That’s it?” she shouts at his back.

  “Yep.” He continues on, squish, squish. “Thanks.”

  “You know the Lizard Man thing is just some internet thing, right?” Galavance yells. “Like Slenderman or that other thing, the doll with people teeth.”

  “They’re just internet things now,” he says without turning around, squelching away.

  “Fuck does that mean?” she says. Her focus adjusts past him, and she realizes where they are. Directly across the swamp—Old Man Weatherly’s Pond as the locals call it—is Whispering Pines Lane. Jolby, quite likely, is only a mile and a half away, directly across that stinky water, or partly under it, trying to complete the house. She can see some roofs, shingle grit and new siding catching the sun,
glistening.

  The passenger door is still hanging open, the door ajar alarm singing. Fine, she decides. I didn’t have time for this anyways. Galavance reaches across the seat, pulls it closed, drops the car into gear, and takes off, throwing rocks for a dozen feet behind her. Back to reality. The suckiness closes in around her again. After that weirdness, it’s finally time to go get fired.

  Zilch hopes it works out for her. That she gets wise and breaks up with her lifeblood-sucking boyfriend before it takes her under completely. Despite the headache threatening to crack his melon open, he pauses, and recalls Susanne—and what he did to her. Galavance’s story had hit close to home.

  Not liking the taste of that particular memory, he turns to face out into the wetlands again and hopes there’s only one Lizard Man, if that’s what he’s here to find. And if it is, that it’s easy to kill.

  Led by the flickering needle of his pain compass, Zilch trudges down the road that borders the swamp, glad when the terrain evens out a mile down the road. He comes to a new development neighborhood, and stops to read the bas relief sign plastered on to a stack of bricks: The Whispering Pines of Picturesque Bay.

  There’s a dirt path with lots of truck tread running back and forth through the mud, no pavement yet. He walks in, avoiding puddles, listening to the sounds of electric saws and the whoosh-and-thwack of pneumatic tools. Some of the houses are almost complete, with siding and everything, while others still have their raw pink insulation exposed. Some porches still need railings, only a few houses have mailboxes staked out front. Some near the end of the cul-de-sac are just wooden frames on cement pads, lumber, nails, miles of spooled electrical wire, and so forth arranged in the front lawns. Oh, talk about those lawns. Rolled out like carpet, the gaps between sections still obvious and dark like fresh skin grafts. Unlike most new development neighborhoods, Zilch notices, these are not cookie-cutter McMansions. Each is different. If he were to ever be granted life for more than a handful of days at a time, this would be the kind of spot he might consider. It’s nice. Kind of place you could leave the doors unlocked.

  These pop-up neighborhoods aren’t a terribly new sight to Zilch; that sort of thing was just starting to happen when he’d died for real, for the very first time. But he’s never heard of draining a swamp to construct a neighborhood. That is a new one.

  At the cul-de-sac, the asphalt circle at the end of the drive is half-submerged in murky brown water. There are some trucks set up with long yellow ribbed hoses running out into the bog, gurgling as they pull the rancid water out a gallon a second. It looks like it will take months to finish, and when it rains again it’ll probably need to be done all over again. A collection tank sits nearby, he notices, a big swallow of the swamp in its semi-transparent tank belly. Next to it, a strange sight that makes Zilch frown. A backhoe, yellow and new, is up on cinderblocks like the mechanical victim of parking on the bad side of the tracks. All four massive wheels are gone. Is that deliberate or—did someone steal them?

  Something buzzes in front of his eye, a mosquito coming in for a fly-by inspection, nearly getting tangled in his eyelashes. Slapping them dead is pointless. He lets them smell him, get the idea, and take off. Nothing worth sucking off of this one, they determine.

  Zilch approaches the point where the neighborhood and the swamp start competing for territory. The pain is intense here. Whatever it is, he’s on the right track.

  He stares, listens. He has spots in his eyes, his ears ring as if he’s just left a concert, a watery thrum going and going. He takes a step forward and the pain arrow swings around to the back of his head. He turns to face it and it swings to settle in the corner of his left eye. Facing the swamp, and can see, through the cattails and willows, the road where Galavance let him out. The pain compass is spinning him around in a circle. Something in the center point, between over there and here, is calling. He waits, head throbbing, listening.

  “Sit still,” he murmurs. There is no accurate read. Just a general somewhere, close by or maybe not. Monster in a swampy haystack. Shifting the pain to the back of his head, he turns back around and examines the row of incomplete houses, all staring out from their lots with vacant, glassless eyes. There’s a realty sign posted in front of one building, its yard half-submerged in swamp water. Probably a tough sell, Zilch muses, until they can assure you that you won’t wake up one morning to a muskrat swimming in through your bedroom window.

  1330 Whispering Pines Lane. The tide, having reached halfway up the house at some point in the recent past, has left behind a filthy brown line. He crosses the lawn and when his footfalls begin to get squishy, he stops. Something catching his eye in the driveway, the rainbow glimmer of a prism, shifting through the color spectrum when he moves. Moving in closer, there is a fragment of a car reflector tucked between the panels of cement. He remembers Galavance saying the Lizard Men were stealing car parts.

  The garage stands as the most completed part of the house. On tip-toes, Zilch peeks in through one of its windows. Inside, he’s startled to see a big black shape crouched inside. It’s huge and gives him a start but after letting his eyes adjust, he realizes it’s just a car parked inside. Unable to make out any of its details or see if anyone’s sitting within, he heads back around front, stepping up the uneven front walk of the house. Without a door to knock on, he looks around and gives the plastic hanging over where a door will be someday a couple of howdy-do neighborly slaps. Maybe Lizard Man has a timeshare at 1330 Whispering Pines Lane.

  No one answers. And the pain compass starts to lose its keenness. He turns to try and catch it, but it’s fading too quickly. It winks out and Zilch, though released from the vice around his head, is now also without a trail to follow.

  “Fuck.”

  The gurgling of an outboard engine makes him turn to face the swamp again. He sees a small rowboat puttering along, leaving a broken line of smoke in its wake as it nears. The compass doesn’t flick toward the old, bent man driving the boat—but something about how the coot is staring at him as he runs his aluminum watercraft aground tells Zilch he should give this fella some attention. Zilch steps down off the porch and cautiously approaches, his steps sinking into the waterlogged yard.

  The old man limply tosses an anchor and its hook sinks into the mud. “Morning, young fellow,” he says, friendly enough but somewhat rigid, clapping his hands of dirt in a way that looks like community theater.

  “Morning,” Zilch says, eyes narrowing, studying the old man.

  “Mighty fine day here on the planet Earth today. Is it not, fellow human being?” the old man says. “Temperature levels are favorable and oxygen is low of allergy-causing particulates.”

  Zilch snorts a laugh. “You can stop anytime you like. It’s embarrassing.”

  The old man in his waders, flannel shirt, and colorful lures pinned to his rumpled bucket cap says: “It was the least conspicuous individual in the immediate vicinity.”

  “Which one are you?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Have we met before?”

  “Yes, four jobs ago.”

  “You never gave me your name,” Zilch says.

  “Eliphas,” the agent says, and pauses to look down at his denim trousers stained with the blood of bait. “Dungaree. Eliphas Dungaree.”

  “Rolls right off the tongue,” Zilch says.

  “I’d like to remind you, Saelig, that divulging employee information with the mass uninitiated is strictly—”

  “Prohibited, yeah, I remember,” Zilch says and pinches the bridge of his nose. “I had to tell her something.”

  “Not to split hairs, but you actually didn’t.”

  “Fine. It’d just be nice for once, to go on one of these fucking things and … not have it just be only about the job.”

  “That’s what you’re here to do. That’s why you were—”

  “I know. But, despite the details of how all of this—” Zilch gestures at everything standing in his shoes “—works, I’m still, b
y definition, human.”

  “You feel your emotion-part has become neglected.”

  Zilch blinks. “Yeah, if those are the words you want to use to describe what I’m feeling, sure. My emotion-part feels neglected, yeah.”

  “Perhaps this will help,” Eliphas says. “You are almost adequate at what you do.” He smiles. “Better?”

  Zilch sighs. “Yeah. Much. So, what brings you down to terra firma then?”

  “What is your compass telling you?”

  “It was around here a minute ago,” Zilch says. “Out that way.” He gestures until Eliphas makes the old man turn to look the way he’s pointing, over across the steaming bog.

  “Do you know how to swim?” the old man says.

  Zilch issues a sarcastic laugh, slaps his knee. “Hoo-boy, what a card.”

  The old man standing in the boat faces Zilch again. When one of them hijacks some poor nobody, it’s hard to tell sometimes but there’s a faint violet glimmer in the eyes that can be caught at the right angle and in the right kind of light. Zilch only peeks one small glimpse of Eliphas, inside, when the old man inclines his head, smirking, to say: “I’m not supposed to be here. I slipped off while my brothers were refueling the aircraft. I wanted to tell you I’m pulling for you.”

  “Meaning you’re trying to rig the bet, right? Fine by me. Then help me kill it.”

  “I cannot risk interfering other than to point you in the right direction,” Eliphas says. “Even so much as speaking to you after the assignment is in motion is against the mandate, other than to threaten.”

  “So you’re only here to tell me shit I already know. Great. Good work,” Zilch says. “How much?”

  “How much what?”

  “How much do you have on me?”