The Miniature Wife: and Other Stories (30 page)

For instance, say one of us would be crying in the corner, hunched over and sobbing and rocking, and another one of us would see this person in pain, and we would sigh in disgust at Roger and Mary and the security guard and Tyrone, all too caught up in their own drama to notice the rest of us, and we would walk over, gently place our hand on his shoulder, sit down softly next to him, and say something like, “It’s okay, it’s going to be okay, we’re going to make it out of this, I swear, I promise, we will,” and we would place our other hand on his knee, a sign of friendship, a sign of “You are not alone,” and he would place his own hand over ours, and we would say, “That’s right, it’s going to be just fine, don’t you worry,” but it would come out a little hesitantly, or distractedly, as we would be distracted by the queer texture of the hand on top of our hand, cold and wet and a little sticky, but we wouldn’t look down, not yet. We wouldn’t look down because we would feel guilty for thinking poorly of our comrade in arms, our newfound friend, desperately sad and in need of comfort.

“Do you have a family?” we might ask. “Do you have someone waiting for you?”

And he would nod, a gentle but increasingly vigorous nod.

“Oh yeah?” we might say. “Where? Where are they? Tell me, just tell me about them,” we would say, knowing that sometimes talking about something else, anything else, might distract us, if only temporarily, from the fear and the pain and the sorrow.

Then would come that too-late moment when we look down at the hand covering ours and discover it to be a rotting mass of flesh, at which point we freak out and the creature whips its head around and bites our face off, or when, pivoting off our question about his family, he whips his head quickly around and says something to the effect of “My family? They’re waiting just outside that door” before biting our face off.

Though, truth be told, zombie-like creatures aren’t known for their ability to speak.

Nor for their understanding of ironic timing.

Or even their understanding of delayed gratification.

So, really the surprising thing about Roger coming to me with information about one of us being infected is that there is one of us infected and we are not yet all dead.

Still, it’s a little disappointing to find this out from Roger, who has discovered it all on his own and in enough time to try to think of what to do about it.

“Really?” I say. “Who?”

“Not yet,” he says. “We screw this up, we’re cooked,” he says.

Then he nods seriously and gravely. Then he puts his hand heavily on my shoulder and nods again, and so I smile back at him, which I guess is all he needed from me, because then he moves on to the next person he’s going to tell about his plan.

For my money, I peg Tyrone as the one among us who is infected. Not that I’ve got anything against the kid. He seems like a nice enough kid, or did before he was turned into a mindless and brutal killing machine. He seems nice enough, but he’s also the one we might all least suspect, which is why I suspect him most.

There’s a small, bloody mass on the side of his head, which I originally figured for random brain matter or organ matter splattered there during the run through the maze of maternity clothes after we ducked into the department store. Now I am beginning to wonder if it’s not his actual brain I’m looking at. If that’s maybe where they got him, in his actual brain, not enough to kill him, not enough to really slow him down. But to make him one of their own, how much brain would a zombie need to eat?

Not much, by my reckoning.

The longer I stare at that piece of Tyrone’s brain sticking out of his skull, the more I wonder why no one else but Roger has noticed it, and then what I might be able to do to preemptively disable the thing that once was Tyrone. I scan the room for a piece of equipment that might quietly and quickly be transformed into some kind of specialized weapon, but the most threatening thing I see is the mop and mop handle, or the broom, or the disinfectant spray, none of which seem all that promising. As I’m trying to figure out if there’s some way I can take a roll or two of toilet paper, light them on fire, and turn them into some kind of something, though, Mary crosses over to Tyrone and pulls his head to her chest, to comfort him, maybe, or to comfort herself, or maybe both, and he hiccups one time and then sobs heavily into her, and I see the piece of brain matter slip off his head and fall into her lap.

When I first heard the screams, I was walking into the mall, and Roger, who had just passed me going the other way, was walking out of the mall. Then the screams happened and then we both turned around, and maybe he gave me the benefit of the doubt, maybe he saw in me what we all hope to see in ourselves—selflessness, bravery, willingness—because when he saw me turn around so I could walk back out of the mall, having decided that the new pair of shoes I hoped to buy wasn’t worth dealing with the kind of hysterical, pained, violence-ridden screaming coming from the far part of the mall, he grabbed me by the shoulder, a strange glint in his eye, and said, “Are you thinking what I’m thinking?”

Perhaps it was the tone of his voice, the surety of it, the assumption that I was like him, that everyone was like him, and how little room for argument there was in what he said and how he looked at me. Whatever it was, like an idiot, I followed after him.

Regardless, Roger is a guy I can’t make up my mind on. A guy I can’t get a good read on.

He’s a mystery, and that makes me nervous.

Take, for instance, that action he played with the Louisville Slugger. I didn’t see where he got it from, but I saw him wielding it with a fierce determination, watched him knock the head off one about to eat Mary’s brains out, saw him pose after the swing, as if for
Sports Illustrated
, as if he’d hit a home run, heard him, as he helped Mary to her feet, say, “That’s a stand-up double if I ever saw one,” and I’ll admit, since I saw him perform that nifty little trick, I’ve wanted to give it a go myself, except that, thanks to Tyrone’s dad, the bat’s gone.

Which was cool and all, what Roger did with the baseball bat, but then he’s earnest to the point of embarrassment. Like after Tyrone’s dad lost that bat, and we were all quiet and uncertain as to what to say to Tyrone, except for maybe “That was some kind of stupid, what your dad just did,” all of us quiet, that is, until Roger sat on his haunches and held Tyrone by the shoulders and looked deep into his eyes and told him, “That makes you the man of the house, now, Tyrone.”

Told him, “Do you think you’re ready for that?”

And then when Tyrone shook his head no, and while the rest of us, I’m sure, were thinking,
Roger, give it a rest, leave the kid alone,
Roger gave him a bit of a shake and told him, “I think you are.

“I think you’re stronger than you think.

“I think you’re stronger than all of us.

“But that doesn’t mean you can’t cry, that doesn’t mean you can’t be sad.

“Only really strong guys like you and me know it’s okay to be sad and it’s okay to cry, but that we still have to be strong, right?”

And Tyrone started to snuffle and started to nod, and Roger said, “Right?”

And Tyrone’s lips moved, but maybe it was a quiver and maybe it was him saying, “Right.”

And Roger said, softly now, “Right?” and then pulled Tyrone into a bear hug, which set Tyrone into a sloppy hiccuping mess of sobs and snot, at which point I looked around with a do-we-have-time-for-this-sort-of-thing? look on my face, only to find everyone else mooning over the scene, Mary with her hand pressed up against her chest and the security guard wiping his eyes in that way men sometimes do when they find themselves crying unexpectedly at the end of a movie.

I want to hate him, in other words, maybe because he’s everything that I’m not, or maybe because he’s the type of person who wants me to believe that he’s everything I’m not, but then there’s some strong and growing part of me that wants to admire him, too, can’t help but admire him, and that just makes me want to hate him even more.

The news has spread that we’re making our way out through the ceiling. I wonder what this means for the one among us who is infected.

Because he’s the biggest of us, the security guard is hoisted up first. Roger and me and two other guys, whose names I don’t know or don’t remember, heave him up there, and I watch him scramble and pull himself the rest of the way up, wondering why it is that I can’t remember or don’t know his name, either.

Then Roger turns to me and says, “Okay, Cowboy, you next.”

I’m not sure why he has decided all of a sudden to call me Cowboy, but, against my better judgment, I decide I kind of like it.

The plan is for the security guard, who is also the strongest (or so we’ve all assumed) to lower himself down enough to help lift up the rest of us. He tries it first with me, but the two of us together are too much weight for the flimsy ceiling tiles and supports. The whole thing starts to crack and collapse before he simply lets go of me and I crash down on top of Roger.

“That won’t work,” the security guard says, and it’s hard for me to believe, but I think that’s the first time I’ve heard him speak, and the sound of his voice, nasal and off-pitched, makes me for a moment reconsider his story. No longer a tough guy or a former addict trying to atone, he now strikes me as that kid, pale and a role-player, weak and trembling through high school, who discovered that the kind of devotion he heaped onto twenty-sided dice and gamemasters could be more beneficially applied to a gym membership. And while he might now be a much bigger geeky, trembly, insecure nerd, he’s still a nerd all the same, and I wonder why he hasn’t died yet.

“Good call,” Roger says, as he picks himself up. “Gonna have to figure something else out.”

Then he looks at me, and I don’t know what he’s about to propose, but I know I don’t much like the look in his eyes or the attention he’s giving me.

“All right, Cowboy, time for you to shine,” he says to me, and now I realize how stupid the name he’s given me really sounds. “This is taking way too long. I’m going to need you to scout ahead for us, find us the way out, so that once we get everyone up there, we’re not just a bunch of ants scrambling around in our ant pile.” Then he slaps me hard on the shoulder with his good hand, and then he looks up and calls out, “Okay, Francis, scooch on back, and we’re going to help Cowboy here the way we did you.”

Is Francis the security guard’s name? I wonder. Or is Francis a nickname?

And then, before I can think about it too long, I’m lifted and heaved and shoved upward, and I panic for a moment because there’s nothing for me to grab hold of or on to that hasn’t been bent or cracked or crumbled by Francis, the security guard. Then I see a rail within reach and lunge for it, or try to lunge for it, unleveraged as I am, and I hear one of the guys below squeal as I accidentally kick him in the face while lunging. I grab hold and pull myself into the ceiling, and I wonder what the hell I’m supposed to do next.