Текст книги "The Marijuana Chronicles"

Автор книги: Jonathan Santlofer

сообщить о нарушении

Текущая страница: 6 (всего у книги 13 страниц)

D

EAN

H

ASPIEL

is an Emmy Award winner and Eisner Award nominee. He created

BILLY DOGMA

, illustrated for HBO’s

Bored to Death

, received a residency at Yaddo, and was a master artist at the Atlantic Center for the Arts. Haspiel has written and drawn many superhero and semi-autobiographical comix, including collaborations with Harvey Pekar, Jonathan Ames, Inverna Lockpez, and Jonathan Lethem. He also curates and creates for TripCity.net.

M

AGGIE

E

STEP

is the author of seven books. Her work has been translated into four languages, optioned for film, and frequently stolen from libraries. She lives in Hudson, New York.

zombie hookers of hudson

by maggie estep

One morning, his head looked too small and I asked him to move out.

Why? He stared at me.

“It’s just not working,” I said. I didn’t mention that his head suddenly appeared small. You can’t say that to someone. It’s not right. “I’m not happy,” I said.

Martin’s eyes drooped and then he shrugged.

He’d only been living with me three weeks.

He packed up his stuff and, just like that, he was gone.

We’d started as strangers, we were ending that way.

Then it was just me and Alexander Vinokourov, my one-eared pit bull, Vino to his friends.

I sat on the floor with Alexander Vinokourov in my lap, his head wedged under my arm. His head is too large for his body, but I like that. Imperfections in dogs are beautiful; in humans they’re a fault line that you want to put a jackhammer in.

I sat like that, numb and quiet, for about thirty minutes. I was like a cow needing to be squeezed for reassurance before going into one of the humane slaughter chutes designed by the admirable Temple Grandin. Vino was my sixty-eight-pound squeezing machine. Except I wasn’t heading to slaughter. At least not that I was aware of.

I stared at the empty drawers where Martin’s stuff had been. I thought about his last words to me.

“I really liked you, Zoey.”

“I liked you too, Martin,” I had said. This was perfectly true. I did like him. I just didn’t like his head.

Eventually, I made Alexander Vinokourov get off my lap so I could stand up. I opened the drawer where I keep my socks and underwear. I pulled out the powder-blue plastic wallet with Wyoming emblazoned on its side.

There’d been a time when I thought Alexander Vinokourov and I might move to Wyoming. I’ve had ideas about moving to many places and have in fact moved to most of them. Lately, though, I just keep drifting around a hundred-mile radius of upstate New York. It’s pretty here and the people aren’t all morons. My rent is cheap and I can get by doing odd jobs.

I put the blue plastic wallet in the back pocket of my jeans, attached Vino’s leash to his collar, and out we went.

It was hot outside and, even though it was close to dusk, the sun was a burning gold coin.

Vino and I walked up to the top of State Street where crumbling buildings rested their crooked frames against newly renovated ones.

The guy with hooks for arms was sitting on his porch and called out: “Beautiful dog!”

I said, “Thank you,” like I had made Alexander Vinokourov myself.

We reached the periphery of the cemetery, where the sign reads, Cemetery closed during hours of darkness.

We walked in through the oldest section, where half the tombstones have toppled and time has rubbed off the dead people’s names. We crossed to the far side, past the war veteran’s area where there’d been a big kerfuffle when vandals had started stealing all the flags off the graves. Video surveillance had been set up to catch the perpetrators in the act and had caught … woodchucks. They were stealing the flags and taking them to their woodchuck holes. They liked the taste of the cured wood the flags were attached to.

Vino and I walked to our favorite spot, a wooded, quiet area lying between the cemetery and the new artificial sweetener factory, the building which had caused nearly as big a kerfuffle as the flag-stealing woodchucks.

But something was wrong. An excavator had been here and dug up a huge swath of earth, maybe half an acre, and there was now a gaping maw where Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been.

We went to stand at the edge of this big mouth in the earth. I saw pieces of broken-up wooden boxes strewn around in the dirt below.

I didn’t like it. Didn’t like the artificial sweetener factory, didn’t like that Vino’s favorite grassy knoll had been dug up for reasons I wasn’t sure about—but probably had to do with the sweetener factory.

I didn’t like much of anything that day.

I took the Wyoming wallet out of my back pocket, sat at the edge of the hole in the ground, dangled my legs over, and, as Vino flopped down and started panting, I took my small stash of weed out of the wallet and rolled a joint. This was excellent weed. Had a tense, earthy smell, almost exactly like the big dirt hole I was staring at.

I lit the joint then coughed. Alexander Vinokourov’s head swiveled toward me, making sure I wasn’t dying. I’m never sure if his concern for my well being is entirely altruistic. If I die, he’ll have to go back to scavenging from garbage cans and escaping thugs trying to trap him and turn him into a fighting dog.

I took another hit and coughed again, but this time Vino merely flicked his ear, listening for sounds of serious distress before bothering to turn his entire head.

My own head was taking a beating from the inside out, the weed making me feel like I’d had an involuntary hemispherectomy, the two sides of my brain operating independently of each other which, I was pretty sure, would lead to something unusual and very possibly unpleasant.

Then, just as the letters of the word unpleasant drifted through my mind, something reached up from the pit in the earth and grabbed my ankle.

I screamed.

Alexander Vinokourov was next to me in an instant and we both looked down to see a horrible mud-covered woman with her hands around my ankle.

My heart hammered. Vino was trembling. Adrenalin coursed through me, but it was paralyzing rather than giving me superhuman strength. I stared at this creature with her fingers digging into the flesh of my ankle. I tried to shake my leg free before this freak pulled my ankle out of its socket.

I screamed for help but there wasn’t anyone to hear me.

Then, suddenly, the woman made a sound, like a cat coughing up a large hairball, and let go of my ankle.

I turned around and ran, slowing down only when I was about a hundred yards away. I looked back, expecting to find the muddy woman coming after me. She was not.

I stood there, my body flooded with fear chemicals, my mind burning with curiosity. Then I heard an unmistakable cry for help. The voice was reedy, small, pathetic.

“Please. Help,” she repeated.

I guess I was more stoned than I realized. I walked back over to the edge of that maw in the earth and peered down. The woman had dirt caked in her hair and was wearing what may have once been a dress but now looked like the Shroud of Turin.

Her eyes met mine. She looked very sad.

“Who are you?” I asked.

She didn’t answer right away and she was staring at something, maybe Vino, maybe something past me.

“May I have some, please?” she asked.

“Have some what?”

“Some tea,” she said, motioning toward the sky.

I looked up at the sky too. It was just past dusk, almost all dark up there, a lemon slice of moon starting to show itself.

“Tea?” I said looking back down at her.

“Tea,” the woman repeated, pointing, it seemed, at my hand.

I looked at my hand too. The joint. I was holding the half-smoked joint. I had some dim memory of pot being called tea. Like in the 1950s.

“You want a hit of this?”

The muddy woman nodded.

Was this really happening? I relit the joint and passed it to her, reaching down just far enough so she could take it but couldn’t pull on any of my body parts.

She smiled. She had dirt between her teeth.

She took an enormous hit. She didn’t cough, but her blue eyes bulged. Eventually, she tried passing it back up to me but I declined. She might be contagious.

“Could you help me get out of here?” she asked, then.

She had a strange way of speaking, not an accent really, but a lilt. She was reaching up toward me like a little kid wanting to be lifted up onto a parent’s shoulders. I actually felt sorry for her.

I reached down and took the woman’s dirty wrists into my hands and pulled.

One of my odd jobs is as a dog handler at the local animal shelter. I routinely lift very large dogs up onto examination tables. This woman didn’t weigh much more than Henry, the mastiff who was endlessly scraping himself up.

She clambered up, her bare feet finding purchase in the wall of earth. Then, exhausted from this effort, she fell belly-first in the grass. She looked dead. Alexander Vinokourov went over to sniff the air around her. I was about to nudge her with my foot when she rolled over and sat up.

“Are you all right?” I asked, squinting at her.

There was mud caked in her eyelashes.

“No,” she said simply. Again, she tried passing the joint back to me.

I looked all around. The woman was, after all, at least half-naked and totally covered in mud and we were just a few feet away from Newman Road, the street that skirts one side of the cemetery and leads to the dump. Some guy in a pickup truck was bound to drive by at any moment, get turned on at the sight of my muddy friend, and come running over.

There was no one around though. The road was quiet and my lust for the joint outweighed any concern about contagion. I took another hit and felt a little calmer.

“Do you want me to walk you over to the hospital?” I asked. If I took her to the cops, they’d eventually pack her off to the psych ward anyway. It would be kinder to just take her there directly.

“But I’m not ill, I’m dead. Or was dead.” She said it with a straight face.

“Ah.”

“You don’t believe me. But it’s true. I was dead. Buried. Then, two days ago, I woke. There were sounds. Earth-moving machines. Digging us up, digging up the pine boxes that we were buried in. In 1924.”

I sighed. I looked at my dog. My dog looked at me. “I’m sorry. I can walk you to the hospital if you’d like, but that’s all I can do.”

“Noooo,” she shook her head. Her muddy hair moved.

“Then I can’t help you.” I turned my back, even as she called out to me.

“My name is Annabelle,” she said, trying to humanize herself, imprint herself on me.

I ignored her, though I could feel her eyes on my back as I retreated.

I got home, took Vino’s leash off, then immediately smoked another joint. I usually don’t smoke at home for fear of attracting neighbors wanting to bum weed off me. But after you’ve had an encounter with a woman who claims to be dead, it is sometimes necessary to smoke at home.

I was hungry. I walked into the kitchen with its bright yellow linoleum tiles, relentlessly cheerful, even at night. I opened the fridge. There was meat for Vino, but not much for me. A shrunken head of lettuce. A pear. A jar of almond butter. Maybe I’d walk over to the tortilla truck on Warren Street.

I went into the bathroom and looked at myself in the full-length mirror. My black T-shirt and jeans were covered in mud and dog hair. My own hair, well past my shoulders, was in nests. I leaned over the big porcelain sink and threw water on my face. I ran my fingers through my hair. I put on lip gloss.

I was looking at myself in the mirror when suddenly Annabelle appeared there, standing right behind me.

I screamed, reached for the nearest object, and pointed it at her. It was a hairbrush.

“How did you get in here?” I shoved the hairbrush, bristles-first, into Annabelle’s stomach.

“Ouch!” She looked like I’d hurt her feelings more than her physical vessel. You left me there, left all of us there,” she said. Her eyebrows moved like muddy caterpillars as she motioned beyond the bathroom.

I craned my neck and saw two more muddy women behind her. I screamed again.

Vino barked.

“Get the fuck out of my house!” I attacked Annabelle with my hairbrush, backing her against the sink.

“Shhh, please, hush,” Annabelle said.

“I will not hush. You hush. And get out of my house.”

She didn’t move and the other two just stood there too, staring.

I felt nauseous. “What are you doing here?” I asked Annabelle. “You followed me?” I was having trouble breathing.

“We need help,” Annabelle said. “We’re hungry. Me and Birdie and Sophia.” She motioned at her compatriots. Birdie was tall and skinny, Sophia short and curvy. They were both covered in mud just like Annabelle. How they had walked through downtown Hudson without getting arrested or raped, I wasn’t sure. It’s a laissez-faire town, but not that laissez.

“And what, I look like a fucking soup kitchen?”

“Please help us.” This entreaty came from Sophia, the shortest of the women.

“Please get out of my house.”

Vino barked again but it’s not as if he did anything useful, like look menacing for example.

Now, Birdie, the tall one, started talking in an excited high voice telling me that all three of them had been murdered some ninety years earlier by a man named Giacomo.

“Giacomo?” I said numbly.

“He was our pimp,” explained Sophia, putting a fist on her hip and tilting her chin.

“You’re hookers?”

“Whores, yes,” Annabelle nodded. “And don’t go putting on airs, it’s not like you’re some sort of aristocrat, Zoey.”

“No. It’s not like that at all.” I didn’t remember telling her my name. “So you were hookers and your pimp named Giacomo killed you ninety years ago,” I said. “Why did he do that?”

“We stole money from him,” Birdie said. “And then he poisoned us.”

“It was a very painful death,” Sophia said.

“Can you excuse me a minute, please?” I said. “I need to pee.”

I pushed Annabelle out of the bathroom and closed the door, keeping my dog with me so they didn’t try doing weird dead-person stuff to him.

I took several deep breaths.

I had my phone in my pocket. Could I call Martin? Ask him to come back? Tell him that there were three zombie hookers in my house? Probably not.

I thought of calling my best friend, Janie, but she was two hours away, in Manhattan, and would probably be completely useless in this situation. Almost anyone would be. I peered through the bathroom door keyhole. They were still standing there. Like zombies. Staring at the bathroom door, willing me to come back out.

“We’re really hungry!” Sophia called out.

I wondered if they could see through doors.

I didn’t know what to do, so I fed them.

They ate ice cream, smoked all the pot in my Wyoming wallet, then passed out on my sleeper sofa.

As they slept, I sat in my armchair and watched them. I was fascinated, horrified.

I got up and tiptoed closer to get a better look. Birdie, bony and elegant with a sharp nose and cheekbones like knives, was lying on her back with her mouth open. Sophia, round and soft, was curled onto her side. Annabelle, the exotic, dark-haired one, lay flat on her stomach. They looked almost lovely, innocent.

I got my laptop and went back to the chair, Googled zombies. This yielded what you’d expect. The tongue-in-cheek Zombie Apocalypse Preparedness tips issued by the Center for Disease Control. Definitions of zombies as moaning, brain-eating monsters, spawned to popularity by George Romero. Viral ghouls that bore little resemblance to the sweetly slumbering dead hookers on my sofa.

I sent an e-mail to an acquaintance, Doon, a neuroscientist with an interest in things that science can’t easily explain.

I pointed my phone at the zombies, snapped a photo, and sent it with the e-mail. I don’t KNOW Doon very well. He’s the son of an Alzheimer’s patient I used to care for as one of my odd jobs. He would probably completely ignore my e-mail. Or maybe refer me to a mental health professional.

I wondered if my zombies were contagious. I wondered if there were more of them. If maybe dozens of dead denizens had been reanimated when the earth-moving machine had dug up that swath of land at the cemetery’s edge. Then I went to sleep.

When I woke, I had forgotten about the dead hookers. Vino was at the foot of the bed and wagged his tail when he saw I was awake. I scratched him behind the ear. He licked my nose. I was heading into the kitchen when I remembered. Mostly because there they were, on my sleeper sofa.

Fuck.

As they started to stir I noticed they didn’t look so good. All three seemed sort of desiccated, and as Birdie unfurled herself from the sleeper sofa, I could swear I heard her bones creaking.

“I don’t feel well,” she said.

“I don’t either,” Annabelle chimed in, propping herself up on one elbow.

“I have to get coffee.”

I walked into the kitchen and flipped the switch on the coffee maker. I can’t deal with anything before coffee. Certainly not zombies.

Alexander Vinokourov was dancing in anticipation of breakfast when Birdie came hobbling into the kitchen. She looked over my shoulder when I opened the fridge to get the plastic container of Performance Dog raw meat.

“I like meat,” Birdie said.

“This is for the dog,” I replied. “It has tripe and trachea. It’s not for humans.”

“I don’t care,” Birdie insisted.

I sighed. I filled Vino’s bowl and put it on the floor. Then I took a plate from the cupboard, spooned out some meat, and handed it to Birdie.

“Let me get you a fork,” I said, but the word fork wasn’t even out of my mouth before she’d started using her fingers to scoop the bloody flesh into her mouth. She ate every last scrap, then, holding the plate to her face, licked it clean.

“Do you have any more tea?” Sophia had wandered into the kitchen now. She was wearing my fuzzy slippers and a dingy white T-shirt. She was naked from the waist down.

“No, I don’t,” I said. “You guys smoked all my pot. And ate all my ice cream,” I added, a little resentfully.

Birdie and Sophia both looked at me like I had broken some law of basic decency by bemoaning their consumption of petty, replaceable things like weed and a one-gallon tub of butter pecan ice cream.

“We need tea,” Sophia said.

“I don’t have any more.” You weed-hogging dead hooker houseguest from hell, I thought. “And it’s illegal.”

“It makes us feel better,” Sophia said.

“It does,” Birdie concurred.

“It makes lots of people feel better,” I said. “But I don’t have any more. You smoked my entire stash. If you want more weed, you’ll have to go turn some tricks or something.”

“What?” Annabelle joined in, her delicate face pinched.

I was pretty sure I was going to have a nervous breakdown.

Instead, I decided to walk my dog, leaving the zombies in my apartment. Putting on my huge sunglasses so the world couldn’t see me.

Alexander Vinokourov and I had been walking for a while and were making our way up Warren Street, the main drag, when his ear shot straight up in the air and he started pulling on the leash.

He led me right over to the front of the drugstore where I saw none other than Sophia, leaning on a parking meter, smoking a cigarette. She was batting her eyelashes at a very large man who was grinning, showing off a gold-tooth grill. She was dressed in my clothes. A pair of jeans that clung to her, a button-down white shirt kittenishly knotted above her belly button, and, incongruously, my black combat boots that were clearly too big and made her look like a child.

Vino went right up to Sophia and licked her hand. As Sophia went to scratch Vino behind the ear, I reached for her elbow and started trying to lead her away.

“Hey!” the guy with the tooth grill said. “We were talking.”

“Too bad,” I said.

I dug my fingers into Sophia’s upper arm and pulled her away from the guy.

“You can’t do that, Sophia,” I said, when we’d gone half a block. “The minute you open your mouth, people are going to think you’re insane and they’re going to take advantage of you.”

“You told us to go turn tricks,” Sophia said.

Two passersby heard Sophia and their heads swiveled in our direction.

I smiled at them.

“I was joking, Sophia. You were complaining about needing more weed. I can’t afford to keep you three stoned for however long it is you plan to hang around. And, by the way, how long is that? Don’t you have anywhere to go?”

“Go? Where the hell would we go? Back to the cemetery? We have no one. No friends. No relatives. No one. We’ve been dead for ninety years, remember?”

I sighed. “Right.”

I’d barely closed the door to my apartment before Sophia kicked off the combat boots and started peeling off her clothing. Then, leaving the clothes in a pile by the front door, she tromped into the bathroom where I heard her start running a bath.

Annabelle and Birdie weren’t feeling that ambitious. Both were lying on the sofa bed, looking piqued.

“Something is wrong with us,” Annabelle said. Her eyes were puffy and her lips were cracked.

“Yes,” I said. “You think you’ve been dead for ninety years.”

“You don’t believe us?” Birdie asked. “After all this?”

“After all what? It’s not like you guys have walked through walls or started melting when sunlight hits your skin.”

Annabelle seemed vexed. Birdie ignored me.

By ten a.m., their faces were the color of skim milk. They didn’t have the strength to clamor, but were weakly begging for weed. I finally broke down and went around the corner to see Jeremy, my occasional supplier, the skate-punk kid who lives in a garage on Rope Alley.

“Whoa,” he said, pushing his white-person dreadlocks out of his eyes. “You’re really smoking it up, Zoey.”

“I have houseguests.”

“Oh yeah?” His eyes opened a little. “Female houseguests?”

“In a manner of speaking,” I said. I was out the door with my new stash of weed before he had a chance to ask more.

I got the ladies good and stoned, and they did appear plumper and pinker after smoking. Then it was nearly noon and I had to go to one of my odd jobs, teaching yoga to developmentally disabled adults.

I changed into yoga pants and a tank top then washed my face and hands so I wouldn’t reek of pot. I hadn’t even smoked, but the zombies had exhaled all over me.

“You guys please stay inside the apartment and don’t let anyone in. You can watch TV,” I said, flicking on the television, which had initially scared the hell out of them, but now seemed to soothe them.

“Okay?” I glared at Annabelle.

She looked up at me, all dreamy and stoned. “Okay.” she said in a faraway voice.

My dog was curled up next to Sophia, who was raptly staring at a talk show hosted by people wearing surgical scrubs.

The rec room where I teach the yoga class smelled like cabbage. Katie, a cheerful sixtyish woman, came bounding in.

“I brought you something!” she said brightly.

It was a dinosaur book. She had given me a dinosaur book the previous week too.

“Thank you, Katie.”

Will, a tall man with a vacant stare, told me his back was hurting and he wanted me to arrange him into a restorative pose. I did.

The class went smoothly until one of the men peed his pants. I had to go find an aide who took him to get changed.

On the way home, I stopped at the coffee store, Swallow, and bought two pounds of coffee. That was another thing. The zombies liked their coffee.

As I let myself back into the apartment, I heard a male voice. My heart sank. Had Sophia gone out and found her friend with the tooth grill and brought him home?

The voices were coming from the kitchen. I walked in and nearly walked back out. What I was seeing was too fucking weird.

Doon, the neuroscientist acquaintance I’d e-mailed the previous night, was sitting across the kitchen table from Sophia, apparently drawing her blood. Doon, as far as I knew, lived in Pennsylvania and was not in possession of my street address.

“What are you doing here?” I asked.

“I came as soon as I got your e-mail,” he said.

“Isn’t that enough blood?” Sophia asked Doon.

I stared at the blood swirling around inside the syringe’s cylinder. It was dark red, like any other blood.

“Almost,” Doon said.

“What are you doing to Sophia?” I was feeling protective.

“Just drawing blood.” Doon finally glanced up at me. “Hi, Zoey.”

“Yeah. Hi,” I said back.

Doon looked exactly as he had four years earlier when I’d helped look after his father: amiable, short brown hair, square jaw, deep-set black eyes, tidy clothing.

He started pumping the ladies for information. “What do you remember?” He was drooling in his eagerness to learn more about them.

Sophia was shaking her head, clearly not remembering anything, and Annabelle couldn’t do much better, her earliest memory of her new life going back only as far as awakening inside her coffin as it was being split apart by the earth-moving machine.

“What are you going to test their blood for?” I asked.

“Anything that deviates from the norm,” Doon said. “Ditto with their genetic material.” He pointed at a kit containing giant Q-tips and glass slides.

I didn’t like it. But the zombies were going along with it all. Presumably they were as eager as Doon to understand what they were.

It wasn’t until he’d taken off, nearly two hours later, that I discovered Doon had given the ladies the creeps.

“The minute you left the room he asked questions that had nothing to do with being dead,” Birdie said. “Questions about life as a hooker. Dirty, nasty stuff.”

Birdie was about as prudish as an undead hooker could be. Even one from 1924.

“Sorry,” I said.

“Can we smoke now?” Sophia asked. “I don’t feel well.”

“Did you tell Doon that weed makes you feel better?”

“No,” Birdie answered. “You said it’s illegal.”

“Right,” I said.

I handed over my bag of weed.

My phone chirped early the next morning.

“Zoey,” Doon said, “I’m assembling a team and we’re coming up there. Your friends are most certainly over a hundred years old!”

“Really?” I mustered. I hadn’t had coffee yet.

“Really. We will be up this afternoon. And we’ll take over.”

“Take over? We?”

“We’re going to take your friends to the lab at Penn State.”

“The lab? They’re not rats, Doon. Not that rats should be in a lab either. But these are people. Or … something.”

“We’ll treat them respectfully and give them comfortable accommodations.”

“What if they don’t want to go?”

“What else are they going to do? Live on your couch forever?”

“I don’t know, Doon, but I’m not sure they want to be experimented on.”

“Zoey, this could be huge. If we can figure out what brought them back to life and what is sustaining their lives, well, imagine the implications!”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“I’ll see you later,” Doon said, hanging up before I could protest.

I stared at my phone.

Alexander Vinokourov lifted his head, sniffed the air, then looked at me.

“They want to take them away,” I said.

Vino blinked.

I tiptoed into the living room. They were still sleeping. I went into the kitchen, fed Vino, and put coffee on. Eventually, Birdie came into the kitchen and I offered her a few spoonfuls of Vino’s meat.

She seemed surprised at my generosity.

“Why are you being nice to me?”

“What are you talking about? I’m always nice to you. I’m giving you shelter, food, clothes, and pot. What else do you want, a fucking kidney?”

“Kidney?” Birdie tilted her head.

Sophia and Annabelle made their way into the kitchen and started hovering. I waited till they’d gotten some coffee down then told them about Doon’s plans for them.

“Pennsylvania?” Annabelle said, wrinkling her nose. “I was born there. I have no wish to return. Not even ninety-five years later.”

“Does he think we’re like Frankenstein or something? How horrible of him,” Birdie said.

“Would we make money?” Sophia asked.

“It’s possible.”

“Would we go on TV?” Sophia pointed at the television set.

“Maybe,” I shrugged.

“Really?” Sophia’s eyes widened.

“Sophia, we do not wish to be put on display like zoo animals,” Birdie said.

“We don’t?” Sophia squinted.

“We don’t,” Annabelle said.

“Where can we go?” Birdie asked.

“Go?” I said.

“I don’t want to be experimented on. If we stay here, they will come for us.”

Birdie was right. But where could they go? They’d only been living in the twenty-first century for forty-eight hours. I couldn’t very well send them to, say, Maine, or New Jersey, and expect them to blend in, never mind survive.

“What do you know about Wyoming?” I asked.

“Like your wallet?” Sophia pointed at my weed-stash wallet open on the coffee table.

“Like the state out west,” I said.

“Cowboys?” Annabelle asked.

“Sort of,” I said. “I think nowadays the cowboys drive pickup trucks and wear helmets. The West isn’t that wild anymore, but nothing really is.”

All three looked at me blankly.

“Well?” I said.

“What would we do when we got there? We have no money, no nothing,” said Birdie.

“I’d get some odd jobs like I have here. And you would too.”

They looked at one another. Then they looked at me again.

“Okay,” Sophia shrugged. “I guess. But if it’s horrible, then I want to go be a zoo animal and be on TV.”

“How do we get there?” Annabelle asked, glancing all around, like maybe the twenty-first century had teleporting devices that she hadn’t noticed yet.

“We’ll drive,” I said. “My car fits four. And a dog.”

“When do we leave?” Annabelle asked.

“As soon as we pack up a few things,” I said.

I had nothing I valued in the apartment. As for my jobs, the developmentally disabled adults wouldn’t remember me for very long, and though I would miss seeing Henry, the big mastiff at the shelter, finally find a permanent home, it was about the only thing I’d regret.

What’s more, I’d have company.

I’d always figured I’d eventually rescue more pit bulls or try living with a man for more than three weeks. Now, instead, I had zombies.

At least they had normal-sized heads.