Five feet and a couple of inches. That’s as far as the Letter 13 team was able to advance before they were confronted with an impenetrable wall of four hideous, snarling zombies blocking the doorway exit. Their battle cry was replaced by gasps of terror as the ghastly presence of the vile ghouls with cankered, fungus-ravaged flesh, red-rimmed eye sockets, and blackened tongues unfurling from deformed mouths sopping with oozing blood stopped them dead in their tracks. Forging any further ahead was impossible. Retreat was their only option as they scrambled and tripped their way backward.
Munyon gaped at the repulsive foursome like they were no more threatening than a gaggle of village idiots who showed up a day early for a surprise birthday party. “NOOOOOO!!!!!” he howled and attempted to slam the door shut, but it was too late. The gruesome quartet crossed the threshold and forced their way past him.
The sartorial splendor of their retro wardrobe suggested they just stepped out of a time warp from the Roaring Twenties: A gang of middle-aged gangsters, all attired in dark-hued pinstriped suits with double-breasted jackets, black dress shirts, and white silk ties. Pearl gray spats covered their patent-leather shoes, red hankies were stuffed in their breast pockets, and glittery stick pins jutted from their lapels. Fingers were adorned with flashy diamond rings and wide-brimmed hats hung low over their foreheads. The fancy garb was wrinkled and blotted with dirt, but otherwise exhibited minimal evidence of wear and tear.
Their movements were herky-jerky and their gait plodding as they scuffled ahead, flailing their arms like blind men swatting at mosquitoes. The crew had nowhere to hide, nowhere to take shelter from the odious attackers. They huddled against the fireplace, lumped together in anticipation of an inescapable assault.
“Whichever one of you guys is Lulu, I just want to say that I’m really sorry for making fun of your stupid name!” Bryce squealed as he cowered behind Stan. His apology went unheeded, however: The undead continued the relentless advance without pause.
“Somebody DO…anything!” Dana screeched.
And Irv did. He broke from the group, raced to the stove, and scrambled back with Munyon’s pot of squirrel stew. He reared back, flung the slop at the four walking corpses, and drenched them with the soupy concoction.
“GAAAAARRRR,” they roared. The rancid mixture staggered them as they
groped and bumbled about, unable to see.
“YES!” Dana exclaimed.
Munyon had sequestered himself in a far corner to avoid any direct involvement in the confrontation, but the sight of the four macabre mobsters reeling from being doused with his homemade potion left him disgruntled and shaking his head.
As the blinded coven of zombies lurched and wobbled in a desperate attempt to gather their bearings, Keisha crawled away from her colleagues.
“Keisha, no, don’t!” Stan hollered.
She ignored Stan’s plea, crept over to one of the sightless fiends, rose to her feet, and launched a ferocious kick straight into his groin.
WHOMP!
Even Munyon cringed from the vicious impact of the strategically placed blow as the gangland ghoul doubled over in agony. “Dammit!” he yelped.
Stan and Irv were puzzled by the outcry. “I didn’t know they could swear,” Stan remarked.
“I didn’t know they could talk,” Irv noted.
They pondered the potential ramifications of this verbal capability for a moment, bumped fists, and bum-rushed their grisly foes. Following Keisha’s
lead, they delivered wicked boots to the private parts of two other assailants. Each was crippled and groaned in agony as their knees buckled and they sank to the floor.
“Stan, turn around!” Keisha warned.
One of the undead had regained his vision and was bearing down on Stan. Just as the zombie reached out to clench his neck, a teeth-rattling kick from behind aimed between his legs immobilized him. The foot belonged to Dana, who, for good measure, finished off the ghoul with a whack to his head with her backpack and watched him crumple.
Despite the dire circumstances, Stan managed to chuckle at his sister’s mettle. “Owe you one, sis!”
With each of the enemy combatants incapacitated, Bryce emerged from cover behind the sofa, swaggered forward, and sneered at the agonizing corpses. “Ha! You guys aren’t so tough!” he proclaimed.
Bryce’s cocky declaration was reduced to a hollow boast a second later when one of the zombie’s hands latched onto his ankle. “MOMMY!” he wailed.
Stan, Irv, and Dana raced to his rescue and tugged him free as Bryce wilted like a soggy asparagus shoot into their arms.
“What you waitin’ for?” Munyon shouted. “Go on, you fools. Now’s your time to get away. Beat it!”
With a clear path to escape, Stan, Irv, and Dana were dragging Bryce toward the open doorway when they heard a shriek behind them. It was Keisha, who was engaged in a vicious struggle to free herself from the clutches of one of the undead. He had her pinned atop the mattress and locked down in a chokehold. Stan raced across the room in a fit of rage and leaped at Keisha’s attacker. He barreled into him and freed Keisha, but trapped himself underneath the ghoul. Stan twisted and squiggled, but was smothered beneath the pudgy girth of the gangland heavy.
“Somebody help him!” Dana screamed.
“He’s your brother,” Bryce pointed out.
Dana elbowed Bryce aside, hustled to retrieve the ax and headed for Stan.
Munyon spotted Dana and recoiled in a panic. “No, not Bad D. STOP!” he ordered. As he scooted across the room to detain Dana, Irv stuck out his boom pole, hooked Munyon’s ankle, and tripped him, sending him plunging to the floor in a heap.
“Oops,” Irv deadpanned, as a woozy Munyon laid sprawled flat on his belly.
Dana lifted the ax high over her head and was prepared to bash her brother’s adversary in his skull. “Nobody messes with Stan but me!” she shouted.
JIIIING. JIIIING.
The distinct sound of a cell phone froze Dana and everyone else in the room. As it continued to ring, all eyes tracked the source to the mattress where Stan remained on his back with his shoulders imprisoned beneath the knees of the zombie. Dumbfounded by an electronic device in the possession of someone who supposedly spent the last seventy-five years residing in a coffin, Stan reached up, cautiously slipped his hand inside the ghoul’s inner jacket pocket and fished out the ringing cell. “Hello?” he answered. “Who?” Stan looked up. “Are you…Harry?” With a sheepish nod acknowledging his identity, he accepted the phone. “I, uh, think it’s, er…your wife,” Stan stuttered.
The rest of the Letter 13 cast and crew gaped in astonishment as the presumed bloodthirsty reanimated corpse from the twenties morphed into a meek, hen-pecked husband from the twenty-first-century named Harry. “Hello? Yes, dear. Okay, dear. I’ll explain later, dear. I won’t forget, dear. Good-bye, dear.”
Harry clicked off and shrugged at his confounded audience. Munyon staggered to his feet and weaved toward him, seething with aggravation. “Won’t forget what?” he demanded.
“Franny’s hemorrhoid prescription,” Harry revealed, his face flushed a deep shade of crimson, the tell-tale sign of embarrassment visible in spite of the thick coat of gooey makeup. “She left it in the mini-van.”
Munyon squeezed his eyes shut, lowered his head, and buried it in his hands. Harry rolled off the top of Stan as the other three zombies—Ned, Augie, and Gil—labored as they lifted themselves to their feet and flexed their smarting loins.
“I don’t get it,” Stan remarked as he raised himself to a sitting position. “Who are you guys?”
With the deception now exposed, Augie seemed almost eager to reveal the truth and assign blame for the fiasco. “Friends of Misty. It was all his idea.”
“Wait, Misty?” Keisha inquired. “Who’s Misty?”
Gil gestured toward Munyon, who plopped down on the arm of the sofa as if supporting a baby elephant on his back. “Munyon here.”
“HA!” Bryce blurted. “His name is Misty? M
isty Munyon?”
Munyon glared at Bryce. “It so happens my dear mama gave me birth on the aft deck of a tourin’ boat goin’ so close to Niagara Falls that the mist sprayed over me the second she squeezed me out. And so I became Misty from that moment on.”
“Well, that explains it,” Bryce chortled.
“Explains what?” Munyon asked.
“Why your brain is waterlogged!”
Munyon exploded off his perch and charged at Bryce who scampered around the table. “Why you snot-nosed—”
Ned, Augie, and Gil snagged Munyon, shackled him in their arms and restrained him from chasing down Bryce. “Settle down, Misty!” Ned ordered.
Munyon flailed about, but couldn’t break free. “I’ll rip his weenie off and stuff his whiny throat with it!”
“It’s over, fella, done with!” Augie yelled.
The fuming Munyon began to calm and his hostility gradually diminish to bitter resignation. Harry offered a hand to Stan and hoisted him up. “Sorry, pal. No hard feelings?”
“Nah, I suppose not,” Stan said.
Harry smiled. “Had you all goin’, though, huh? Did our own makeup, too. Turned out pretty good for a rush job.”
“Enjoy honkin’ my hooters?” Keisha asked.
Harry removed his hat. “I apologize, miss. I guess my hands sort of, you know, slipped.”
Keisha looked at Harry like he was an eight-year-old who just explained how an invisible dog ate all the missing Halloween candy. “Uh-huh.”
“We were only supposed to scare you away,” Augie admitted.
“When Misty called to tell us about the treasure and the chance to put on these suits again, it all seemed too good to pass up,” Ned explained.
“Again?” Irv inquired.
“Nothing like this, of course,” Gil noted. “We’re all actors with the Catskill Mountains Players, our local community theatre group. Performed Guys and Dolls for years, just not so recently. We still keep our wardrobe handy, though, for the next revival.”
Dana appeared perplexed by the reference. “What’s a Guys and Dolls?
“A famous Broadway musical about old-time gangsters and gamblers,” Augie replied.
“It was a movie, too, back in the mid-fifties,” Bryce added. “Marlon Brando and Frank Sinatra were in it. Takes place in New York City. Lots of colorful characters.”
Augie bowed and tipped his hat. “Benny Southstreet, at your service.”
“No, you were Nathan Detroit,” Ned corrected. “I was Benny Southstreet.”
“Wrong,” Gil stated. “I was Nathan Detroit.”
“You were Harry the Horse,” Augie claimed.
“He was Sky Masterson,” Harry pointed out. “I was Harry the Horse.”
“No, you weren’t,” Gil scoffed.
KAPOW!
The deafening blast terminated the argument, as everyone’s attention turned to Munyon toting his shotgun behind them. “WILL YOU PECKER HEADS JUST SHUDDUP!!!” he roared.
“I thought you were out of ammo,” Stan inquired.
“I lied,” Munyon admitted, as he tossed the shotgun onto the counter. “Matter of fact, lied about a lot of things. Like all them shots you were hearin’ in the woods? Nothin’ but blanks.” He started to drift through the room. “But there’s one truth I’m about to tell ya. Nearly a dozen years I’ve been huntin’ for the Dutch’s stash. A dozen years of diggin’ and not findin’ squat diddly. A whole bunch of my life spent searchin’ for—” Munyon gestured at the box. “That.”
Munyon genuflected and grasped onto the chest, wrapping his arms around it like he was coddling a newborn. “And now you’ve finally come to me, my beautiful, lost little papoose. Don’t be afraid,” he blubbered. “Papa will protect you.”
He embraced the box and planted several sloppy kisses atop it as the entire audience witnessing the somewhat kinky display of rapture reacted with a grimace. After allowing Munyon a respectful period to consummate his long yearned for liaison, Harry cleared his throat and tapped him on the shoulder. “Uh, Misty? Since these young folks here found it, only right that they should be the ones to open it.”
Munyon didn’t respond, other than to shoot Harry a look that was anything but agreeable to his suggestion. He gazed around at the faces surrounding him and, like any general outflanked and coming to grips with the futility of continuing to carry on a battle that was no longer sustainable, surrendered.
“Get on with it then,” he muttered and slumped back.
“Yeah! Let me at it!” Bryce exclaimed as he jostled his way forward to the chest and swooped down onto it like a pelican dive bombing for smelt. He puffed a few times onto his fingers in anticipation, encircled by his Letter 13 colleagues and Munyon’s co-conspirators. But instead of tearing open the lid, he vacillated, and his giddy enthusiasm of an instant before spiraled to a halt.
“Whatsa matter now, whiner?” Munyon groaned.
Bryce arose and turned to Stan. “You do it, Stan.”
Stan drew back slightly, thrown by the request. “Why me?”
“Because…you’re the director,” Bryce replied.
Irv and Keisha nudged Stan forward, and he engaged Bryce in an awkward man-hug until Munyon’s fragile patience was exhausted. “Will somebody just open the damn box!” he pleaded.
Stan settled himself on the floor and clamped his fingers around the beveled edges of the top. As he began to raise it, the circle around him grew tighter as every head craned for a view no one had laid their eyes upon in three quarters of a century. The lid creaked open, and they were greeted by a stale odor befitting the age of the trunk. Stan leaned over, dipped his hand inside, and poked around until his arm retracted to reveal the results of the excavation clutched in his fingers: A basic, nondescript, common, everyday…rock.
Stan might just as well have plucked out an iPod the way Munyon blinked his bewildered eyes. “What the...”
Stan reached down and extracted another similar rock. And another. And then another.
“NOOOOO! IT CAN’T BE!!!” Munyon wailed as he flung himself at the box and flipped it over. A jumble of rocks tumbled out, and Munyon rummaged through the pile and scattered stones aside in a mad frenzy. He clawed his way to through to the bottom, but there was nothing more to be found. No gold. No jewelry. No cash. No treasure. No luck.
Munyon sunk back, flabbergasted and devastated by the outcome of a quest that had consumed him for so many years. “That’s…all?” he sniveled.
“Not quite,” Irv responded. “Looks like there’s a piece of paper stuck under there.”
Stan sifted through the rocks and removed a small sheet of yellowing stationery. He unfolded it, read, and a broad grin lifted his cheeks.
Dana snatched the sheet from his hands. “I wanna see!”
She glanced at the paper and giggled before passing it on to Keisha.
Around the room it went and spurred the same immediate amused reaction from everyone. That is, until the note reached the last person to have a peek at it.
“Shush!” Munyon yelled. His eyes bore in on the letters printed in blue ink, and he read aloud: “F.U.” Underneath was a faded signature: “Dutch.”
As Munyon mulled over the implications of the vulgar message, Augie patted him on the back. “Sorry, Misty. Guess the joke’s on us.”
Munyon studied the missive a few seconds longer before he flicked it back down like it was a piece of junk mail into the rubble from where it originated. He stood, lumbered past his cronies, and pressed his nose to a front window.
“You okay, Misty?” Gil asked.
Munyon continued to gaze outside. “Do you know what this means?”
“Yeah,” Ned replied. “You’re paying for dry cleaning these suits out of your own pocket.”
Ignoring Ned’s jocular comment, Munyon whirled around, roused and rejuvenated. “Don’t you see? It’s out there. The treasure, it’s still buried somewhere around these here parts!” he exclaimed. “This was just to throw us off
the trail, but the real Dutch Schultz loot is so close I can smell it! So who’s with me? Who wants to help me track it down?”
Augie, Ned, Gil, and Harry mumbled a few unintelligible words and hung their heads as they tried to avoid eye contact with Munyon.
“Ned, you’re in, ain’t ya? Harry, good buddy? How ’bout you Gil? Augie, whadya say, pal?” Munyon’s overtures went unanswered as he sidled up to them like a used car salesman desperate to close a deal. “Okay, tell you what, when we find it, I’ll split it with you eighty-twenty. That way you can divide up your twenty share four ways. Nice and even!”
A partnership was not to be. Munyon’s compatriots broke rank and scurried past him without as much as a glance. “All right then, seventy-thirty and that’s my final offer!” he proposed.
Augie waved him off. “G’night, Misty. See you at bowling tomorrow night.”
“And remember we have our regular bridge game Tuesday night,” Gil added. “Your turn to bring the chips and dip. Don’t forget this time.”
Harry stopped and turned to the Letter 13 team. “You kids need a lift somewhere?”
Stan, Dana, and Irv hustled to gather their gear and joined Bryce and Keisha waiting at the doorway.
As the room cleared, Munyon remained behind and observed the exodus with the numbed look of a host whose dinner guests were departing before the main course was served. “Where you goin’? Come back,” he urged. “There’s millions to be found. Just waitin’ for us, beggin’ to be discovered!” He hastened ahead and snagged Stan by his shoulder. “How ’bout you, big cheese? Don’t you wanna be rich?”
He turned and brushed Munyon’s hand away. “No, thanks.”
“Well, why not?”
Stan shrugged. “I guess because…that’s not the way the script ends.” He winked and began to shuffle away. “See ya around, Misty.”
Stan reunited with Keisha, Irv, Bryce, and Dana as they slung their arms around each other and strolled out into the cool air of early morning. Munyon gawked at them until they were out of sight, then turned his attention to the chest. He bent down, raised it high over his head, and twisted the box upside down. As he gaped into it, a rock rolled out, bopped him in the nose, and bounced off his chest. It clattered onto the floor, lost in the mix of the other stones that were now all his to keep forever.
Epilogue
Three Days Later