The Living Dead 2

Where the Heart Was by David J. Schow

David J. Schow’s most recent novels are Gun Work and Internecine. He is also the author of the novels The Kill Riff, The Shaft, Bullets of Rain, and Rock Breaks Scissors Cut. One of the early innovators of zombie fiction, he is the author of the notorious story “Jerry’s Kids Meet Wormboy,” which, along with several other zombie tales, appears in the collection Zombie Jam. Schow has done a lot of work in television and film, including co-writing (with John Shirley) the screenplay for The Crow and writing teleplays for Showtime’s Masters of Horror. Schow is also generally considered to be the originator of the term “splatterpunk.”

Our lives are full of things that we wish would just go away: worries, fears, doubts. Also bills, advertisements, and enemies. And also, of course, rotting corpses. Them most of all. Alas, in the case of zombies, these things we never wanted to see again have returned, and while they may run amuck in our streets, cause our civilization to collapse, and bite and convert our neighbors and friends, at least we can be consoled by the knowledge that they can be stopped by a bullet through the brain, and that this time-dammit-they’re staying down.

It’s troubling when something you’re trying to get rid of comes back once when all the laws of reason and common sense say it can’t, but how much worse is it when that same unwanted thing keeps coming back over and over again? As children, many of us were given nightmares by a Warner Bros. cartoon in which a family goes to ever more elaborate lengths to abandon its incredibly annoying dog, only to have the dog show up at the front door again and again and again. If the cartoonists thought this sort of thing was amusing, they were wrong-it’s terrifying, a fact Stephen King well understood when he wrote his story “The Monkey,” about a cursed toy that simply cannot be disposed of. Our next story combines these two ideas. It’s bad enough when a rotting corpse comes crawling home. But what if it turns into a habit?

Victor Jacks ambled through the back door to ruin their lives on Thurs-day. Which was a pain, since Victor had been pronounced dead the pre-vious Saturday.

“Stubborn sumbitch.” Renny reached under the bed for the ballbat. He was on hands and knees, forced to paw around until it finally came out with dustballs and hair kitties chasing it. Renny, who was allergic to animal dander, sneezed ear-poppingly. This trebled his rage.

Renny’s life was one that Victor’s back-from-the-dead encore was designed to ruin. Barb’s was the other. Just now she was backed into a corner, shrieking like an ingenue in a fifty-year-old horror film. Unlike those World War II heroines, she was naked. Renny still had his socks on. Apart from his Timex, he was garbless, but for the baseball bat. This, he refused to yield in the name of mere modesty.

Victor looked a bit shaggy, having been deceased for the better part of the work week. His shoulder blades, butt and legs down to the heels were blue-black with dependent lividity. His eyes were so crusty that one was welded shut. His hair was lank and wild, the most alive thing about him; his skin tone hung somewhere between catgut and bottled pig’s knuckle.

He crackled as he moved. That would be rigor.

He had obviously been walking for some time. At each of his joints the dry flesh had split into gummy wounds with chafed and elevated flaps. The distance from the morgue to Barb’s bedroom was about twelve pedestrian miles.

Provided, that is, Victor had come here directly, after sitting up on his slab and deciding to ruin their lives, Renny thought. And that pissed him off even more.

Renny’s next explosive sneeze spoiled his aim. He wiped his nose with his forearm. Barb kept screaming, totally out of character for her, and Renny wished in a mean flash that she would either faint or die.

Enough.

At the crack point it was the batting that mattered, not the invec-tive. The bulb end of the bat smashed Victor’s dead left ear deep into the dead left hemisphere of his dead brain. Victor wobbled and missed his zombie grab for Renny. He didn’t have a chance.

Renny was foaming and lunatic, swinging and connecting, swinging and connecting, making pulp. It was what he had ached to do to Victor all along. What he had fantasized about doing to Victor just last week, when Victor was still alive. His yelling finally drowned out Barb, who was still shrunken fetally into her corner, her eyes seeking the deep retreat of trauma.

Renny’s eyes were pink with rage. Flecks of froth dotted the corners of his mouth. He kept bashing away with the bat, pausing only to sneeze and wipe. Victor put up as good a fight as a dead person could, which is to say, not much.

While the Renny on the outside was cussing and bludgeoning, the Renny on the inside was smirking about several things. Number one-zombie movies. In the movies, reanimated corpses boogied back from the dead with all kinds of strength and powers. What a bagload. Cadav-ers had all the tensile strength of twice-cooked pasta. Even in the mov-ies, you could put them down with a headshot. What threat, where?

Deeper down, Renny was enjoying himself. He thought Barb watched too much cable. When he had first proposed murdering Victor-just as a hoot, mind you, nothing serious-she burdened him with probable cause and airtight alibis and where-were-you-on-the-night-of. Ridiculous, in a world where people simply dropped off the planet on a daily basis, never again a peep. You break his neck, you dump him in the first available manhole, the sewer is a disposal system, end of story.

Barb had wanted to play faithful and loving right up to the climax of the drama. Loving, hah. Faithful, not since she’d met Renny.

In the end it hadn’t come down to murder, but right now Barb sure was reaping some drama.

Things were so lively right now that Renny had busted a workout sweat and Barb’s vocal cords were rawing. He finally turned around and told her to shut up while what was left of Victor Jacks twitched in a pile on the floor. The business end of the bat was a real mess.

“Is he dead?” said Barb, cowering.

“I don’t think he’s gonna move no more right now.” Renny would have wiped his be-gored hands on his pants; his pants had been off since just after dinnertime. He let his hands hang in the air as he looked around, uselessly. He said sheeeit, slow and weary. It didn’t help.

“How? How did he? He…we…I don’t…it just.” Barb was still having a bit of trouble being coherent.

“Victor was always a stubborn sumbitch, you know that one, babe.”

Barb stood up and risked moving a little closer to what was left of Victor. “Maybe he, you know, didn’t really die. Went into a coma or some-thing.”

“Barb, Victor was dead. He was dead last week and he was still dead when he walked in on us. He is the deadest thing I ever saw.”

“You knocked his head off,” she said, dully.

“Stopped him, didn’t it?”

“What’re we gonna do, Renny? He’s all…ehh.”

“Shush. What we’re gonna do is call the morgue and tell them some pervert snatched the body and mutilated it, and dumped it here as a joke. Some old boyfriend of yours. You can make up a description. Nobody’ll bug us.”

“What makes you so smart?”

Renny had to stop a moment to ponder a good answer to that one.

“I mean, you think they’ll buy it?” There she went again. Barb was one of those people who strolled through life obliviously, thinking a call to the police would sling her free of any sort of trouble. Now she was just as convinced that the Authorities-capital A-would swoop down at any moment to point j’accuse.

“Babe, just dream up a good description. Say he was a Mexican in a green windbreaker.”

“But Renny, I’d never go out with no Mexican, and how come I have to say he’s my old boyfriend? I mean-”

Renny sighed, held her by the shoulders, met her eyes. “We’ll deal. Trust me. Please.” He forced a smile for her. It was like jamming a finger down his throat to chuck up an emotion. He needed to divert her, to say something that would get her mind off police procedure, so he said, “Uh-got any towels?”

Renny mopped off. Barb brought a big Hefty bag. Renny stuck the bat back under the bed. Touching it again made him re-experience the sheer satisfaction of pounding ole Victor right back into death, and this gifted him with a healthy and urgent erection.

Barb glimpsed what was coming up, and managed to finish him off before the police came knocking. Once again she told Renny that she’d never done that with Victor, and Renny smiled and stroked her head, keeping to himself the private notion that Barb could probably suck the stitches off a hardball through a flexi-straw. Victor Jacks would never have hung with a china doll. Renny would never have been tempted by one, either.

Then the Authorities arrived, and Renny and Barb set about making up stories.

Funerals never were much of a hoot. Neither Barb nor Renny had RSVPed many in their combined forty-odd years, but this time they dutifully duded up in basic black, and held hands, and dabbed at crocodile tears as the rearranged remains of Victor Jacks were boxed up and de-livered six feet closer to Hell.

Half an hour after the services, both of them were naked and neither of them was very depressed.

Most annoying of Barb’s bed-play habits was her wont of lighting off to the toilet as soon as…well, right after. Renny had once joked about it: “I make all that effort to give you something, babe, and you just go piss it away.” Barb had made a face. Crude, her face told him. Not funny. Then hi-de-ho, off to the can again.

Fine. Renny grunted manfully and rolled to his right side, his fa-vored side for dozing. Swell.

In the bathroom, Barb watched herself in the mirror for a long time, not quite sure what her surveillance was in quest of. Victor had hit her in this bathroom. He’d also done it to her, same day, in the tub, which was too small for love. Victor’s tendency to boil over all at once was fright-ening, a pit bull on a very iffy leash, thought Barb. Whether it got hos-tile, life-threatening, might depend on a dozen factors. When it last ate. Whether it was pissed off. Whether it liked you. Whether it liked your smell. Victor Jacks had been like that.

But when Victor got to the part where he put his big hands all over her, large, powerful, warm hands, unbuttoning and unzipping her, mak-ing her naked and telling her she was wanted, touching her in places only she touched-curve of ass, inside of thigh, underside of breast, smooth-shaven armpit-oh, my. He made her moist, filled her up; she would practically hallucinate and she had always slept gorgeously af-terward. The sex was never violent between them; only the occasional backhand was.

Barb knew she would never get around to enjoying the way men apologized, every time, after they smacked her.

When she had met Victor Jacks, she was a waitress-newly-turned-exotic-dancer. Petite-chested, with good hips and sturdy, if not long, legs, she figured it was virtually the same aggravation for better tips and weirder hours; she fancied she needed more weird in her life. She got Victor. All he lacked was a puff of smoke to appear in.

When Victor had met Barb, he was comfortably into pharmaceutical dexedrine pops and on the cusp of crystal meth. He made do with the odd frame-weld for RUBs-Rich Urban Bikers-and bashed big-blocks for muscle-car meatheads with too much leisure cash. He paid Barb to table-dance and made her sit, just sit, while he looked at her. Manage-ment did not approve. Victor did not make a scene. He merely smiled and showed Barb’s bosses more money. To Barb, whose concept of fore-play was someone bigger than her saying shut up and lay down, this was romance with a big R indeed. After a week of this bizarre courtship, she went out with him…and he stayed in with her.

When Renny Boone had met Barb, he was so chemical-free you could almost see his halo. To Barb, by this time shell shocked by two years of biker-speed tantrums and eight-ball insomnia, Renny’s well-cut bod and addictionless turn smelled like that myth come true, the Better Life.

“You look like you could use a rest,” Renny had told her, and so tell-ing her, he took her straight away to bed.

Five days later the two of them were still trying to dope out some rationalization that might convince, say, a jury that she, Barb, and he, Renny, were Meant To Be. But Barb lacked the heart to dump someone as spontaneous and romantic as Victor Jacks.

Truth was, Renny preferred Barb as a rental. And that Victor wasn’t such a bad dude. He’d even nailed the chronic carburetor wheeze suf-fered by Butch, Renny’s black ’66 Impala.

Truth was, Barb preferred Victor’s flash-fire spats to shaking her ass for the beery swine who bellied up to the runway at Nasty Tramps.

So Truth held sway, and Victor stayed ignorant, dangerous and sexy. Barb had Renny for the topics she could never broach to Victor. And Renny had Barb, the way cowboys have spittoons. And they all lived happily ever after for about two more weeks, until Victor came back to the house, unannounced, to fetch his set of Allen wrenches, and…

…well, you can imagine.

The “tool excuse” had been Victor’s cover story. That afternoon, un-beknownst to Renny and Barb, Victor had fallen in love again-this time, with a smokable amphetamine called ice. He was pretty saturated, on top of his morning fistful of vitamins, and when he walked through his front door and caught Renny and Barb doing the bone dance on his sofa bed, the speed made his anger instantaneous; his reaction time, zero.

Victor had snarled. Literally snarled, lip curling. He came for his betrayers, his face bright crimson, the sclera of his eyes pinking. Two steps closer he stopped, stiffened, pawed at his left arm, and fell stone dead of the most concussive goddamned heart attack his mesomorphic build could contain. Victor’s fulsome, romantic-if-crazy heart shut down like a phone sex line with no callers, and all that remained was for the coroner to scribble death by chemical misadventure into the appropriate box…while Victor himself was trucked away to fill up another appropri-ate box.

Which brings us back to Barb, in the bathroom.

She flushed the toilet. Flushed, then blushed, in a match-head flare of anger as she remembered Renny’s idiotic joke about her having to urinate after sex. She would never forget it. Crude, Renny could be so crude. Maybe dumb, too-dumb enough never to have heard of Honeymooner’s Cystitis, an inflammation of the bladder that was easy to get when you had too much foreign juice rammed up your tubes. And perhaps uncaring, as well-maybe Renny didn’t give a big manly damn what havoc forty-five minutes of the missionary position could wreak on even a healthy girl’s poor need to pee.

In her mirror, by nightlight, she spotted a hickey on her neck. Crude.

But she loved the way Renny liked to chew on her, just nibble and bite and suck all the right places, as though he was desperately hungry for her, physically starving. She always orgasmed first, even when she tried to outlast him, and once she was coitally zoned, she really did want him to leave marks. Little ones she’d see in the morning, when she felt the delicious residual ache of their workout.

She liked to tease Renny about all the women he must have learned his bag of tricks from. If she had a headache or a rotten mood, Renny could bang it right out of her. Victor would never even touch her at her time of the month; Renny did not have that particular cultural problem. He made her feel more desirable on her doggiest days, and feeling desir-able made Barb feel womanly indeed. Renny even understood about her having to go back to work at Nasty Tramps, now that Victor was no longer winning the bread. In fact, Renny had suggested Barb rejoin the working world. What a guy.

Crude, dumb, uncaring, and boy-howdy opportunistic. Yeah, Renny was a prize, for sure. Prize catch of the day.

Except that this day, somehow, Victor had found time out from his busy schedule to come back from the dead. This did not shock or be-fuddle Barb overtly. Maybe she’d seen too many monster movies, and lacked the emotional capacity for astonishment. She stared down her reflection eye-to-eye and reminded herself that Victor had done a lot of uppers in his thirty-odd years on the planet. Hell, he was probably spin-ning in his new grave right now-at 78 rpm.

The bathroom light was harsh. It made her feel lonely. She was for-tunate to know that it was a loneliness she could drive away. She wanted Renny on her, inside of her, the fastest way she knew not to feel lonely anymore.

She found him semiconscious and semi-erect. Renny functioned best with a five-minute nap between rounds. Barb woke him up with her mouth. She didn’t say a word, but he awoke anyway. They made a great deal of noise over the next half-hour. Renny always lasted longer once he’d “primed his pump”; his words.

They were both on their backs, kicking away sheets to let their own sweat cool them off, when Barb said, “Did you hear that?”

“Hear what?”

“Little scritchy noise. Like a mouse.”

“Probably that stupid cat of yours.”

“No, he doesn’t make noises like that.”

“Then it probably is a mouse. This house is-”

“No, listen.”

Renny listened. If the thing making the noise was a mouse, it was dragging off a dog for a bit of fun.

Barb pounded his shoulder. “It’s under the bed!”

“Jesus Christ.” Renny stayed calm and leaned overboard for a look-see.

From beneath the dust ruffle, the baseball bat shot out like a piston, hitting Renny foursquare in the chin and making him see night sky. It still had clots of Victor drying on it. Then something whip-snaked tight coils around Renny’s throat and dragged him down to tussle.

Renny made a gargling noise in the dark as he was reeled in. Discombobulated, he thought he was being engulfed by a giant wiggle-worm with a whole lot of little worms attached. He dug his heels into the rug and fought to breathe. Barb was already making those screamy gasps that truly bugged him, deep down.

It was a hand on his throat. He peeled it off. As he did, another ap-pendage trapped his hand.

Renny pulled back and dragged his rubber-limbed assailant out from under the bed-the preferred place of concealment for seasoned, traditional boogeymen.

It was Victor again.

Moreover, it was Victor as he had been buried that afternoon. Bones all smashed. No head.

Renny was instantly mummified in a barbwire-tangle of leathery muscles and nonliving rubber flesh; it was like trying to wrassle a waterbed. What used to be Victor’s arms and legs-now freed from bones and framework-coiled and constricted into tentacles that were much quicker than Renny’s fist. They slithered snug around his windpipe, his chest, his stomach, and Renny could feel it coming-the big squeeze that would make the life jump right out of him.

Now Renny was making those screamy noises.

He was clawing at his own face when Barb, no longer wailing, charged back from the kitchen, brandishing the biggest meat cleaver Renny had ever seen.

Victor had threatened her with the cleaver once; that was how she’d known where to find it.

And Barb had, in fact, seen too many monster movies. Especially the ones about psychos and kitchen implements; you could get every-damned-thing on cable nowadays. She hacked and chopped and slashed and hollered and only nailed Renny by accident once.

The grabby Victor-thing began falling to pieces faster than a clay vase run through on the wheel with a cutoff needle. Tearing a suffocat-ing creeper of skin free from his mouth, Renny flailed to a sitting posi-tion and sucked air.

“Barb-you cut me open, goddammit!”

“I missed, honey, I’m sorry, okay? That thing was all over the place!”

She helped him stand. He was wobbly, unused to needing help, to being nearly beaten. Their feet buried in the desiccated meat on the floor, she felt him shake. He hugged her tight and genuinely.

“I know. I know, babe…but that thing is ole you-know-who again.”

“Can’t be. No way.” She pressed her face into his neck, not looking. He lifted a scrap of now-inanimate flesh and turned it to the faint light, so Barb could see the tattoo. A cherubic, comic book devil-child looked back at her from a corona of flame.

“Aww, shit-it’s Hot Stuff, Renny!”

“Yep.” Jesus, wasn’t there anyone whose life hadn’t been touched by Harvey Comics?

Victor Jacks had gotten his ink at a Sunset Boulevard parlor called Skin Illos, at the behest of Nikki, who had been his girlfriend of record prior to Barb. Barb had heard you could bleach tattoos by using a laser. She hadn’t been able to work up the spit to suggest this to Victor prior to his very timely demise.

“Renny…hon…I don’t want to make you mad or nothin, but-”

“But?”

“What if Victor…you know, keeps coming back every time we, you and I…you know.”

“Victor ain’t coming back again.”

“What’re we gonna do?”

“What I wanted to do originally. Dump him in the sewer. What’s left of him. Let the rats chow down.”

“Guess we’re gonna need another Hefty bag, huh?”

Barb grimaced at the sliced-and-diced assemblage of tissue on the floor. It relaxed and settled, shifting softly. Renny stared at it, too, pant-ing, with shiny eyes, the sweat leaving his chin in droplets.

“But first, babe-hand me that meat cleaver.”

The manhole cover weighed ninety-five pounds, give or take. Renny had the advantages of a pry bar and good upper torso strength. Thus were the headless, autopsied, dismembered, broken-boned earthly rem-nants of Victor Jacks consigned to LA County waste disposal network.

Hacking Victor into itty-bitty bite-sized morsels had given Renny a peculiar thrill-the same excitement that had granted him a full-on chubby while bludgeoning Vic-baby the first time.

Sucker just wouldn’t give it up. Renny had to admire that, begrudg-ingly.

And if Vic-baby somehow managed to make a third curtain call, why, that’d be the tits, too. Because Renny was starting to enjoy the new, fun things he could do with his hands.

Like what he might do if Barb lost her marbles and started that gawdawful shrieking again…

Nahh. Just a vagrant thought. No problem, there.

Renny yanked his fingers clean and the lid seated with an iron clank. An old pal of his had once broken three fingers by not letting go soon enough, after chasing a frisbee into the sewer. That made Renny think again of Barb. Maybe it was getting time to let her go. True, she’d come to his rescue and handled herself well enough tonight, but what if Victor was some kind of curse or something, specific to her?

You don’t pull back your hand in time, you lose. And it wasn’t his fingers that Renny had been parking inside of Barb, most of the recent past.

Just now, in fact, he was up for another bout. His body urged him to hurry home to her. She would be fresh out of her bath, tasty and scented, and Renny wanted to ride her until she screamed for real.

“Do you hear something? A noise, or-”

“Oh for Christ sake, Barb!”

“I’m serious. Stop it.”

Feeling like a wiener, Renny backed out and listened to the double-time of his own heart, backdraft from his urgent need to climax, soon-sorta-like-immediately. Barb listened intently-she resembled a grade-schooler trying too hard to concentrate-not for sounds from the heart, but telltales of nearing monsters. She was still head down, ass up after coyly asking Renny to do her that way, and she clung to the mattress as though it could render her some psychic truth.

“I don’t hear anything, babe, except maybe your own paranoia bounc-ing back at us from the walls.” Fed up, he grabbed his smokes off the nightstand. Pretty glib, he thought, for a guy who was strangling on a rope of living dead ligaments about an hour ago.

“I thought I heard the seat fall down in the bathroom.”

“My fault. I left it up.” When Renny strove to impress, he could be the most courteous, thoughtful man on earth. Then, as he procured what he wanted, he let the courtesies slide. Like tonight: He’d left the seat up on purpose, a territorial assertion he knew she’d notice, yet tolerate. The brilliant trick of Renny’s life was that he made sure people always noticed him when he was being a swell guy, so there was less risk of him being singled out when he was being a turd of ethics. Voila-he was known far and wide for being fair, wise and trusty. No way he’d ever sleep with another man’s partner, or murder someone, or even think of doing the deed.

Even to someone already dead.

Renny could take blame artfully, too-whamming it back the way a tennis pro returns a smartass serve. Like the toilet seat thing.

“I admit I left the seat up, babe. Your house, your rules. But that fuzzy cover on the tank makes it fall down again, and-”

“Shh!”

He smoked in silence, having scored his point. Barb took the ciga-rette from between his lips, stole two quick puffs, and replaced it as though afraid of being caught tampering with the evidence at a murder scene.

Renny gave up and went to use the bathroom. He left the seat up.

“Barb, there’s water all over the bathroom floor. I think maybe your pipes are backing up. Roots, maybe.”

“Oh, no! Is it all-you know, messy?”

“Just water. Like a big splash, all over.”

“Renny!”

That brought him back quick enough. What a man.

As he skidded in barefoot, he caught Barb shrinking and pointing. Something had just moved near the juncture of wall and ceiling above her cosmetic table. Renny squinted. The something was low-slung, slid along lizard-fashion, and was now watching them both coldly from seven feet up.

“What the hell is it?” said Renny. “A rat?”

“You ever see a white rat with no hair, with eyes that big? Jeeezus, Renny!” Barb could see pretty well in the dark after all. “Where’s the bat?”

Renny almost chuckled. “I’ll get the damned thing. Whatever it is.”

She stopped him, open palm to naked chest. “No you won’t, either, Renny. Now, I’ve been doin some thinking, and you’re a nice guy and a good man and a good male protector and all that, and I haven’t been holding up my end on this deal, and like you said, this is my house…so let me do this. It’s my turn.”

When Barb let loose with stuff like that it stopped Renny deaf and dumb; how could he even consider dumping a woman this good?

She watched his cigarette glow near the bathroom door. “You just stay right there and hit the overhead lights when I tell you, okay?”

“Yes’m.”

“Go!”

The hundred-watter Barb kept in the ceiling fixture blinded them. The thing on the wall recoiled and dropped behind the mirror. Renny and Barb heard it hit the floor and scrabble into the shadows.

“See it?”

“I see it,” Barb lied. She shielded her eyes and groped around until she found the bat.

“I don’t see it.”

Renny could see the tail of Barb’s cat, poking from beneath the dresser. It was a miserable calico Renny felt was responsible for every one of his sneezes since he and Barb had linked up. When it wasn’t skulking around the kitchen trying to eat everything in sight, it was shedding pounds of hair and clawing the furniture to ribbons. It had some kind of inane cat name Renny could not retain. It didn’t listen when Barb told it no. It never had.

It had probably knocked the toilet seat over, numb little fart.

The tail twitched in that spastic way that announced the cat was revving up for the old chase-and-disembowel routine. Barb told the cat no, loudly. It didn’t listen.

She tried to block it with her foot, but the cat executed a tight dodge and zipped under the dresser, way ahead of her. There followed an un-seen, brief and violent encounter that sounded pretty awful, though nei-ther Barb nor Renny could see any of it.

The cat’s tail whapped Barb in the chest. The cat was no longer con-nected to it. Tufts of calico fur followed, held together mostly by blood.

Barb began making cave-person noises and wedged herself into the combat zone, dealing short, blind strokes with the bat. The bureau be-gan to scoot with each hit, bunching the area rug.

The intruder darted out from the far side. It looked like a hand.

“Barb, it’s a hand.”

“What!” Barb backed off, frantic and hollow-eyed. “What! What! A hand? I don’t care! It hurt my cat!”

“Barb, it ran under the bed.” Renny stepped back from the edge, just in case Barb started swinging again.

Hot for combat, Barb spun. “It hurt Rumplecatskin!” The kill light was in her eyes.

She swept aside the dust ruffle. Two eyes returned her gaze from about a foot in. Then it charged, before she could bring the bat into play, and got a tight grip on her throat.

It was Victor’s hand, all right. He’d grabbed her throat enough times for her to make a lightning ID. Whatever else had befallen Victor’s mor-tal parts, his right hand was still strong and mean as ever. Barb’s wind was cut and in seconds she’d see the purple spots. Victor knew exactly how to throttle her.

She collapsed into a heavy, spread-legged sit-down as Renny dived across the bed, not as fast as he could have been. He didn’t really want to touch it. The severed wrist terminated in a reddish-white bag of muscle, like the fat, nontapered tail of a Gila monster. Renny grabbed that end and tried to yank it off.

Goddamn it, but this was getting to be much more trouble than any-thing was worth.

Barb’s face had shaded to mauve. Renny crawled in tighter, bent back the clutching index finger, and heard it pop as he broke it at the base joint.

Shouldn’t he just let it polish Barb off? Would this all be over then?

Nope, he thought as he levered the middle finger out of the flesh of her neck. No way he was going to be beaten and humiliated by disorganized body parts. He cocked the finger away savagely and smiled when he heard it snap.

There were eyeballs on the back of the hand, and they swivelled a full one-eighty to glare at Renny. The pupils dilated. Barb was sucking wind in big horsey gasps, her face flushing crimson.

Renny remembered the first time he had ever shaken this hand. Howyadoo. Victor Jacks was the sort of guy whose very existence dared you to be better than him, and promised to humiliate you if you tried.

The thumb and ring finger could not hang on alone; apparently Barb had smashed the pinky, a lucky hit with the bat; it jutted crookedly, alienated from the choking operation. Renny pried the hand free and chucked it across the room as Barb fell down. The hand bounced from the wall to the floor, leaving red impact smears. Clumsily, it tried to locomote.

Barb stumbled over and started stomping on it. She got gook all over her heel, slipped and nearly fell again. This enraged her enough to bash the hand with the bat until it didn’t move anymore.

Both of them squatted down at a safe distance and got their first really clear look at it.

Apart from the killer hand and about four inches of forearm, there were Victor’s eyes. Eyes that had always been the color of pastel blue enamel, opaque eyes that did not deal in emotional shades, with the hair-trigger flecks of silver buried deep like vague rumors of madness. The eyes were seated across the first three knuckles on the back of the hand, and looked roped down by strings of muscle and threads of optic nerve. One eyeball had just been imploded by Barb’s death-dance. At last, Renny could recognize the bulbous bag that hung off the far end of the wrist.

“That’s his heart.”

The whole assemblage reminded Renny of something that Victor might jerry-rig on his auto workbench. He was known to be miraculous when it came to solving your vehicular woes with a bent coat hanger, spit and a soldering iron.

“His heart.” This was not the sort of news Barb was eager to hear. “His heart, oh godddd…how could it be his heart, they took it out, you beat him to pieces, didn’t you break his hand? Last time?”

Renny honestly could not recall.

“I mean…he didn’t have no head, Renny! What’d the eyeballs do, roll here by themselves-?”

As they watched, the heart-end caved in, voiding blood in a final death-spurt. It made a large, wet, wide stain on the finished wood of the now-exposed floor.

It appeared to Renny as though it had farted. It was kind of funny. “Wow. You really broke his heart.”

She began slapping him. The blows were openhanded and basically harmless. “Renny, goddammit, that’s not funny! That’s his fucking hand! It’s been around my throat plenty of times, and for a minute there I could actually see him, like he’d come back whole to beat me up again, and it’s not funny!”

Barb was a pace and a half from an asylum. Her tirade petered out and left her sobbing. Renny did the right thing and tried to hold her. She let him. If he had given her a Kleenex, she would have dislocated his jaw.

“Okay, okay. Sorry I’m such a jerk.”

Pangs of selfishness could occasionally make Renny feel guilt, or some-thing like guilt. More important right this minute was the abrupt de-duction he’d made while keeping an untrusting eye on the no-longer-moving hand thing.

Victor had been slabbed and gutted…and had come walking back. He’d had all his bones busted and he’d come blobbing back. And Renny had dumped Victor in the sewer and Victor had come back again, from the sewer. Up through the toilet, just like those urban legends about scuba-diving rats, and snakes, and crocodiles, all of which the eyeball-hand resembled.

“Look, babe-I know what this thing needs. I’ll make sure there ain’t nothin left this time.”

“And how do you plan on doing that?” Barb had regained enough of her equilibrium to peek at herself in the bureau mirror to ensure she didn’t look too messed up.

Renny lifted the interloper by its broken pinky. He could feel himself piling up jungle smarts by the minute.

“You got any charcoal starter out back?”

It stank. Truly. It sizzled when it burned, a roundly unappetizing spectacle that Barb forced herself to witness. They both watched it cook down and Renny periodically batted the chunks apart with barbecue tongs until it was reduced to black goo and bone ash.

Barb plodded back inside to take her third shower in twenty-four hours. There was just no washing Victor off her life.

Renny watched the goo smolder and bubble on the coals. Kind of like pork, the smell.

He rubbed the smoke from his reddened eyes and finished up, not really wanting to enter the house again. He no longer wanted to play bed games with Barb. He just wanted to get some sleep.

By the time Barb towelled off, she discovered Renny deep in slumberland. Igg, she’d have to change the sheets despite her shower. A job for tomorrow. She sat on what was, de facto, “her” side of her own bed, successfully not waking her partner in crime.

Renny was different, she knew. Their relationship had turned. Flow-ers decay. Banquets spoil. Water evaporates. And their sneaky victory had soured. At first it had been a delicious, shared secret; now it had become a horrid quickmire that bonded them like a pair of panicked dogs struggling to uncouple.

She felt, well, dead inside, to hammer a phrase. Blown out, wasted, spent, scorching at the edges. She did not want to feel anything so much as she wanted to feel nothing.

Renny was sleeping with his mouth unhinged, as usual, just begin-ning to snore. That snore would tell her that she was far, far away from his thoughts. She gently grabbed his nose and tilted his head so he no longer faced her. The incipient snore died with a gurgle.

She felt unusually sensitized, to the point where the dust on the sheets and comforter bothered her. Grit was in her eyes and she fancied more dust layered upon her soul, like wet snow. The thought that it might be the powder of dead bones made her start crying, and she never stopped.

Caught up in her own grief, she missed seeing the tenacious little gob of charred protoplasm as it wormed past Renny’s slack lips, to slide easily down his esophageal tract. Soon it would renew its work deep inside of him, where the heart was.