Page 11 (1/2)

BY DEREK NIKITAS

It was high time for me to fetch frozen Dolly from the butcher shop, but even in an a the Apocalypse out This girl was too young to be called Dolly, just a teenager, but I narassroots sheen of it See, Dolly was dead, and along with the rest of her scrubbed memory, she lost whatever dull moniker her parents had imposed on her It would be a nen for Dolly when I ca The sound bounced off the coastal pines, stripped bare of branches up to the top ten feet The only cars left on this woodsy backroad were the few stalled in pine-straw beds, so it wasn&039;t traffic but crickets and cicadas that iress

Great hordes of the the windshield until it was fra juice in the corners where the wipers couldn&039;t reach A ht line, and when the road curved, s on the pavens were h these conditions without a perloved hands cra wheel

Milo&039;s Specialty Meats was a clapboard roadside dive with gravel and dead bugs for a parking lot This far out, the bug hordes receded a bit I could even read the street signs, like the hurricane-evac-route marker, blue circle hite swirl icon, the eye of the storm My coordinates were two miles inland, or thereabouts, as the Atlantic was lately taking bigger breaths, sucking back beaches and piers, blowing down boardwalks

I parked and flicked off the siren and threw oninto the collar of my shirt I&039;d dressed for the occasion in a dark blue blazer, light blue shirt, and a nice silk necktie I&039;d shaved for the first tin in Milo&039;s entranceway read closed, but I kneelcome anytime Driver&039;s door open, a few stray cicadas attached themselves tothe chorus of a thousand one-note lovesongs, so I whistled along as I pulled open the ambulance hatch doors

A cold whitethe floor beside the stretcher were filled with hundreds of dry- ice blocks I inhaled the chilled, thin air I grabbed the stretcher, slid it out while the rails unfolded and the wheels touched ground A half dozen cicadas and crickets instantly polluted the sheet&039;s pristine whiteness with their dull armored bodies That incessant insect buzz burrowed inside me, deep in my chest, and turned almost pleasant, the hum of anticipation

I pulled the stretcher across the lot, and it jostled over the rugged rock The store&039;s glass entrance did not give hen I shoved ainst it, so I bellowed, &039;Milo!&039; He had to be inside the shop because his pickup was parked in the side yard I rapped both fists against the glass and called hiain

A cartoon pig was sketched in wax pencil on the display&039;I&039;ll huff and I&039;ll puff,&039; Ifor a softball-size rock to throorried that Milo and his bearded Czech heifer of a wife had abandoned their only livelihood on account of a few rainstorenerators, enough dried meat and io

Over by the gutter spout I found a nice granite chunk and reared back, hoisting it overa twenty-yard pass My best hurl didn&039;t penetrate the glass, but it burst a spiderweb of cracks across the top buzzed past my ear I heard a lock slide open, and there was Milo&039;s furious wife filling up the doorway, filling out an unflattering, sheer pink nightgown She held one arm across her breasts to spare us both the shame

&039;You break , crazy fuckmother! Go away froet Dolly,&039; I said

She eyeballed the stretcher, the arunted

&039;Hold on - is Milo-&039;

&039;Closed!&039;

&039;My name is Renfroe Milo told me to-&039;

&039;Closed for permanent! No meat!&039; She slalass panel rained down in shards onto the cement slab below After a moment, her face loomed in the horse door she&039;d created Her hair was short on the sides, but six inches of tight black coils were piled on top, redolent of some particularly nasty wild mushroom &039;Shit now!&039; she barked

I reached into ed it at her I tore off etup, showed her my sincerest expression, and said, &039;There&039;s a deceased girl in your meat locker, and I&039;ed it, and I&039;ve got five hundred dollars right here for payment&039;

&039;Milos, he is dead from heart attack One week past&039;

&039;By God, I&039;m sorry,&039; I said Then, after a solemn few seconds I added, &039;Can I talk to his were all overin round and et a good whiff of it I forgot her naist

&039;You come help me fix hole,&039; Grunta deirl still here?&039;

&039;Fix hole now, headshit!&039;

I tossedthe stretcher behind me Close up, Grunta smelled like pepperoni She pointed to a stack of plywood boards atop the elass case that once enshrined the choicest et hammer,&039; Grunta said She waddled into the back rooh to cover theand waited A calico cat appeared frolass case It was stalking a beetle, bobbing its head to the rhyth sounds at it, but the cat ignored me, as cats are wont to do

Grunta hurried back into the storefront with the ha head-outward from her pursed lips She fastened the board I held to the doorframe with nails she plucked from her mouth The loose flesh on her arm seemed to pucker up nicely as she worked She had to be two feet shorter than hed, expelling the last couple nails She hammered a cricket that had landed on the wall beside a tacked-up poster of Prague&039;s Charles Bridge and its proirl in freezer?&039; Her nostrils flared when she spoke

&039;Yes, Milo and I agreed to a five-hundred-dollar fee for-&039;

&039;Milos is dead! He re I say seven-fifty &039;

&039;I&039;ue,&039; I said

&039;Coerly from theThe rooe knives and saws lined the walls, an e-board table below them, stained with dark splotches Drains in the floor would wash it all away

A raw ser back here, sweetly rank At the far end of the butcher shop stood the meat-locker door with a handle like a horizontal tavern tap I aler to break the vacuuer office with an antique turn-dial television set, a few open TV trays with stacks of papers on the chair, slowly rocking Milo was the source of the slottis spash to prove it was still in use His ugliness was bearable, but what he evoked was not: negative spaces, black holes in hu blurs to which your eyes refused focus, statues in flesh molded by some demon hand, oracles that announced with every twitch of their bones a vastness and darkness that no living brain could fathom They could not be true but were They attracted too rabbed a plastic flyswatter from atop a paper pile and lashed at Milo&039;s head with it The cat on her shoulder rode out this violence like a rodeo cowboy

I could hear the flies buzz, like in the poeoth rote a hundred hy afternoon news: A California commune of three hundred souls had finally, after h priest, tossed thes into the deep molten canyon that, a feeeks earlier, an earthquake had ripped through don San Francisco They&039;d leaped one by one screaive us!&039; There had been no

Milo turned away from this broadcast and studied us both with the cool detachment that he must&039;ve reserved, in life, for fresh slabs of meat His eyes were sunken and rheu so that his edy mask His hair, once a lush blooone, and the flesh on his head seemed to have petrified into another layer of bone

&039;Milos, this man come to see you,&039; Grunta explained

&039;Renfroe,&039; I said &039;We&039;ve talked a few times before,&039; I said

Milo winced and hisInstead, he raised a litre bottle of vodka froeneral direction of his mouth Most of it trickled down his chin and seeped into the bib ofdoard fros of his chair were other, ein, Kentucky bourbon

&039;Drunkard,&039; Grunta complained, as her chin quivered

&039;It kills some of their pain, the alcohol,&039; I told her &039;They crave it, I&039;ve noticed&039;

&039;Same as before dead for him, then&039;

&039;Does he speak to you?&039;

&039;At first,&039; she said &039;No more He is quiet now&039;

In life, Milo would erupt with theatrical talk He&039;d sweat and his face would grow ruddy He despised his wife, harassed the young woes at theestively There was always booze on his breath and a pistol under his cash register

Made you wonder, but we&039;d all been , in the presence of these walking, talking human shells It was the reason I cas were different The universe had color and verve

&039;Letthe chunk of ain

Grunta snatched it out of my hands, the whole thousand bucks She ran it under her nose to sniff it It was real h neither of us knehat it orth any more Cash had becoold in a vault soold was just a kind of rock

&039;Uh, that&039;s actually a thousand,&039; I told her &039;But I&039;ll make you a deal&039;

Gunta pursed her lips &039;What deal?&039;

&039;I&039;ll give you the whole grand for Dolly and all the booze you have left&039;

&039;What is Dolly?&039;

&039;The dead girl&039;

Grunta shoved the money in her pocket She scratched the cat under its chin, and the cat eased its eyes shut I followed Grunta back into the butchery and watched her snap open the handle on the ht cas of anonymousbeef sides hung on a track like suits in a bedroo crate made of cheap wood and nails, like a pauper&039;s coffin The girl inside it, I kneas maybe nineteen or twenty, not more than a hundred pounds, barely five feet tall She had less literal substance than the larger cuts of hooked meat around us, but this other flesh could not be revived like hers could

The cat leaped down froh the open freezer door I asked Grunta for the biggest flathead screwdriver she could find

When she brought it back she said, &039;What are you doing with this girl?&039;

&039;Awakening,&039; I explained I slipped past her into the freezer, too eager now to batten down for questioning When I leaned down beside the crate, both knees on the cold floor, Grunta jabbed her index finger into et my attention Her breath irl&039;

&039;I want to knohat it&039;s liketo be dead I want to ask her&039;

Grunta snorted &039;Ask Milos It is nothing No re &039;

I shimmied the screwdriver head into the crease between the crate and its nailed-down lid, slapped the handle with the pale it in deeper &039;I want to take her on a trip,&039; I said I shoved down on the handle, and the crate nails screeched as they lifted out of place

&039;She ht not wish to be with you&039;

&039;She can do whatever she wants,&039; I said, &039;but I can keep her safe&039;

&039;What is safefor a dead person, eh?&039; Grunta asked

I didn&039;t answer I was breathing aerobically now When the lid was loose enough, I slid ers between the nails The cheap balsa wood crackled and buckled Dolly was there, zipped inside a clear plastic bag that hazedin a bed of ice packs, piled around her and sprinkled atop her limbs and her abdoed with both hands at the zipper until it gave way

There was Dolly&039;s face - white lips, cyanotic skin, paper-thin eyelids curved shut over the rounded half-h frost had matted her dark hair in unseemly, petrified clumps That luster would return, I knew