War of the Undead (Day One): The Apocalypse Crusade (A Zombie Tale) (4 page)

“I’m staying home,” she said, firmly.

“You are not,” Ms. Robins said with equal firmness. She held up her smart phone, and showed a text to Maddy. “I’ve already called Ricky. He’ll be by with the car in twenty minutes.”

Maddy’s hands had not budged from her skinny hips. “No. Tell Ricky, I don’t need him and his stupid limo today.”

Ms. Robins looked sad all of a sudden. She squared her shoulders and took a deep breath. “I didn’t want it to come to this, but you leave me no choice. If you don’t get ready to go right this instant, young lady, I’m going to yank down those pants and give you a paddling like you haven’t had in ages.”

The little girl was, quite unexpectedly, unsure of herself. “You can’t paddle me. You’re not allowed. I know it’s against the law. I saw it on TV.”

“Wrong. I can paddle you until your bottom is as red as a tomato if your mom gives me permission to, and guess what? She already did.”

Maddy took a step back. “No she didn’t. When?”

“When she got sick again,” Ms. Robins said in low voice. There were little tears in her eyes that she blinked away. “She told me to raise you like she would have.”

“But she never paddled me at all.”

“Yes she has,” Ms. Robins replied. “I have seen it with my own two eyes. I was there for the first. You were not even one. You kept playing with an electric outlet and you wouldn’t listen when she scolded you and so…”

“She spanked me?”

“Yes, ma’am, and it wasn’t the last time either, but you were a smart cookie just like your parents and your grandparents, and you learned early to listen to adults when they asked you to do things, like going to school.”

“This is different,” Maddy said, though now she was less convinced of the infallibility of her position. Ms. Robins was not a big woman but she could be sharp at times and right at that moment her eyes fairly sparked with determination. If she was going to be forced into spanking Maddy, it was clear she was going to make it count.

“You are going to school,” Ms. Robins stated as fact. “I’d hate for you to go there with a blistered bottom and tears in your eyes.” Maddy was about to interject but Ms. Robins held up her large, pale hand. “Your mom needs her rest, however I’m sure she’ll be up by the time you come home. You can help me then, ok?”

Defeated by logic and the threat of pain, Maddy rushed to get ready before the limo arrived to pick her up. She just managed to tiptoe into her parent’s bedroom with enough time to spare to give her mom a kiss on the forehead. Gabrielle Rothchild, in her seven hundred square foot bedroom, under her two thousand thread count Egyptian cotton sheets, didn’t stir.

“Love you, Mommy,” Maddy said, wishing more than anything that her mommy would open her eyes and say it back. And she wished her mommy could jump out of bed and be happy again and healthy. But mommy couldn’t, not even after three surgeries, not even when the best doctors in the country had been flown in to save her from the cancer.

There were some things money couldn’t buy.

Sitting in his kitchen on one of his mismatched chairs resting on cracked and faded greenish linoleum and sweating like a fuck-all pig, with only a crappy, old ceiling fan ticking overhead, John Burke tried again to add the numbers so that he could get them to come out the same. So far he’d fed the numbers into his ancient sixth-grade
Texas Instruments
calculator three times and somehow had come up with three different totals.

He was on the verge of chucking that ole’ Texas piece of shit at the wall, but he held back knowing if he did, he’d be fucked into summing up the math on a piece of paper; something he was none too good at.

“Lab work: forty-eight hunnert. Let’s see…bi-opsy, shit, seven thousand each, and there was, let’s see, six of those. The first hospital stay…fuck-all, twenty-one thousand…” The figures blurred as the tears started again. He took a swig of his beer, his third of that early morning. What did he care when he started to drink? What did he care if Mrs. Lafayette saw the can when she came to collect Jaimee? He didn’t care one stinking bit.

After a deep breath he went on, “One copper and teak casket: f-for-forty-one hunnert. Fuckin’ side-by-side plots…”

Jaimee walked into the room clucking her tongue like a mother hen. “Daidy, you ain’t supposed to be cussing none. Momma said so.” She had assumed all the motherly duties a six-year-old could attend to, which wasn’t much beyond picking up some and making her own cereal. She could also stick bologna and cheese on bread, only her daddy hadn’t gone to the store except to get beer and cough medicine. Sometime he went swig for swig, with a can in one hand and a bottle of nasty red syrup in the other, but still he would hack up strange looking hunks of who knew what.

John shuddered, wracked by another coughing spell. He was sure he was going to throw-up afterward due to the violence of the act, but he didn’t and when the fit passed he took a drink of beer with a shaking hand. “She ain’t here no more so I guess it don’t matter none.”

“We promised her,” Jaimee reminded him. “We both made blood oaths to take care of each other.”

That had been a year and half ago, and Jaimee who was having trouble even recalling what her mother looked like, remembered that oath like it was yesterday. So did John. It was why he was adding those hated numbers despite the cough that had sprung up and wouldn’t leave and the pain in his joints that felt as though his bones were rubbing together. There was something very wrong with him and he was afraid. The one doctor’s visit he'd had only made matters worse. Amy’s old Doc had poked and prodded and listened and whatnot, all with a grim set to his lips. It wasn’t good. No sir.

Amy Lynn Burke’s cancer had been a doozey, but she had been a fighter. She’d gone toe-to-toe with that fuck-all champ—eight rounds of chemo that left her bald and wasted like one them poor Jews in Germany. Then they took a lobe from her right lung and then a few months later, one from the left. There were also the lymph nodes the doctors popped out of her, like fuck-all grey, lumpy boogers. They tried radioactive pellets and when that failed they resorted to laser beams.

Amy Lynn was a fighter to the end and she could honestly say she had won a moral victory. Even when they lowered her into the dirt in that goddamned expensive teak casket that would never-ever see the light of day again, people were singing her praises. Look how brave she had fought. Look at the courage she displayed. She was a right paragon of motherhood and wifely virtue to the bitter end. She was a fuck-all saint, a woman to be adulated and emulated.

And look at John Burke, that turd of a husband she left behind.

Sure, Amy had died, but she didn’t lose her battle with cancer, John did. Her medical bills and hospital stays and pills and treatments had bankrupted them—and then she got sick again. They lost their home, their cars, their everything. John worked two jobs to pay for the fuck-all rinky-dink little place that was just a step up from a mobile home, and he wasn’t no white-collar turd who sat his ass at a desk all day. No, he was a mechanic by day and a stock boy by night. He worked like a man, just as he always had.

It hadn’t been enough and slowly their possessions had been taken from them and eventually, like a friggin’ third grader, he found himself riding a fuck-all ten-speed to work because there were always new bills. Jaimee went about in cast-offs and sometimes John went without eating for days on end, all so Amy could be “brave” in the face of cancer.

She was the martyr and he was the unshaven, bleary-eyed goon who went about all the livelong day with dirt under his nails and grease stains on his
Goodwill
rejects.

It was an honest to God relief when she finally died. That’s what he felt when he saw her monitor finally flat line. There were no tears or sorrow or grief. John never mourned, not that anyone could tell. He left the hospital by the front doors, got on his ten-speed and rode home. Once in the quiet of his living room he drank beer and watched
The Young and the Restless
with his feet propped up on the arm of the couch, and all he could feel was this great sense of relief, of liberation.

By the time Jaimee was dropped off by the sitter that day he had drunk all the beer in the house and was watching Oprah and not understanding the draw whatsoever. “Why do women like this shit?” he’d asked her.

“Daidy!” she had cried. She had an accent as thick as his and when she said ‘Daddy’ it almost rhymed with lady. “Momma’s gonna be real mad with you when I tell her you been cussing again.”

“About that,” he said. “I got some bad news. Momma died this morning.”

Jaimee was just like her momma and took the news like a trooper. Oh yes, everyone marveled at how brave this little four-year-old was. Look how she fought back the tears and look how pretty she was in her little sundress that John had dyed black. With her pale blonde hair and her pert nose she was the spitting image of Amy Lynn. Everyone just gushed and marveled at her. They remarked about her toughness and her spirit. They said:
Look at her strong jaw as she places them flowers on her momma’s grave
.
And look at that low father of hers out drinking away his paychecks
.

This wasn’t strictly true, however gossip was always better than fact. He had indeed begun drinking with the regularity of a Swiss watch, but he always made sure Jaimee was properly fed, that is when he remembered to stop by the grocery store. And he paid a local woman to sit for her and take her shopping for clothes. And he made sure she went to school and had friends.

He loved Jaimee just as much as he had loved her momma. Though no one could tell from his reaction to Amy Lynn’s death. He had loved his wife so much it had felt like torture. Her pain had been his pain every fuck-all step of the way.

Now he had to decide if he would allow Jaimee to be tortured just as he had been. His cough had started with a November cold and four months later it was only getting worse. It had been the same for his wife in the beginning and with each passing day he grew more certain that he had what she had. The symptoms were the same: a cough that wouldn’t leave, frequent sickness, pain in the shoulders and back.

The big difference was that he was afraid of going to the doctors, not in the sense that he was a chicken, but in the sense he would have to face up to the shitty truth: he had lung cancer.

“I won’t cuss no more,” John told his daughter. “Or I’ll try not to as long as I can get this fuc…I mean this ole calculator working.”

“Don’t use that one, Daidy. The seven sticks. I seen it. You should use momma’s coupon calculator. Remember that little one she always brung to the market?”

“Oh yeah,” John said, picturing his wife. Once upon a time, Amy Lynn could hold her shop list in one hand, her calculator in the other, balance a baby under one arm and fetch cantaloupes with the other, all the while guiding a left-veering cart with nothing but her breasts.

As Jaimee got her breakfast and fixed up her lunch, John went to fetch the calculator from Amy Lynn’s coupon drawer.

The drawer hadn’t been opened in three years. John didn’t want to think about the neat stacks of cut out slips that were ordered, first by date of expiration and then again by desirability of the offer. He didn't want to remember how much time Amy Lynn had put into making sure she got the very best deals for her family. Quick as he could, he grabbed the little calculator with its vinyl cover and shut the drawer again, as if afraid that some spirit of Amy’s would come wafting out of the drawer to berate him.

The great saint Amy Lynn would not approve of what he was planning.

He went back to the table and ten minutes and one more beer later he had his sums jotted in his childlike penmanship on a single piece of lined paper.

“What’s that, Daidy?” Jaimee asked, before picking up her bowl and slurping down the Captain Crunch flavored milk that sat at the bottom.

“Nuttin’,” he answered, suddenly embarrassed. He threw a forearm across the two columns. “Just some figgers. Budget stuff, money and the like.”

The column on the left was a list of his assets. There were two items jotted on that list: an eleven-year-old Toyota Corolla, the one thing he had splurged on since Amy’s death, and a savings account with a total of $107,254 in it. In a moment of pure ESP or precognizance or just plain maternal instinct, Amy Lynn, after a week with her strange new cough, had upped her life insurance to a quarter of a million dollars. The hundred grand was all he had left after paying the remainder of her hospital bills and her funeral expenses and that goddamned teak coffin.

Despite being church-mouse poor, he hadn't barely touched none of it.

The column on the right was a long list of bills he could expect to have to pay once he was diagnosed with the fuck-all cancer that was eating up his lungs and turning them black. When this was subtracted from the hundred grand, what was left was a depressingly large negative number.

“Fuck-all,” he whispered, feeling the need to cough. He didn’t, he was so tired of coughing. He just breathed through the nasty phlegm making a gurgling sound deep within his chest.

“Daidy, Mrs. La-fayette is here,” Jaimee said in an urgent tone. Her blue eyes went to the beer cans. She wanted them out of sight when Mrs. Lafayette came to take her on to school, but John didn’t bother to hide them. What was the use? He was already regarded as a good-for-nothing bum by the high-class rednecks of Izard County. What did he care what they thought?