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A Short Tale of the Undead
MR Graham
PROOF: A SHORT TALE OF THE UNDEAD
ISBN: 9781301232734
Copyright © 2013 MR Graham
https://quiestinliteris.com
This is a work of fiction. All characters appearing in this work are fictitious. Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, is purely coincidental.
All rights reserved.
This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form, without written permission from the author.
It’s been several years now that I’ve been meaning to write this and wasn’t able to find the words, several years since Connor came up to me in the library and shoved his Polaroid in my face with a “Check this out!” and blinded me with the flash. That wasn’t really when it started, though, only when it started for me. I suppose it had been going on for years before that, centuries or millennia that no one saw and no one knew. But that was when it started for me, on the sixth of May at three forty-four in the afternoon, squished into a hidden corner in the back of the public library with pink and cyan droplets spattering my retinas and the omnipresent stink of Connor’s Corn Nuts clogging my sinuses.
My vision gradually cleared, and I saw a pile of Connor in the chair beside mine. He was rummaging through his satchel, oblivious to me, with the camera sitting on the small table between us. An extremely unflattering image of me was developing, half-protruding from the Polaroid’s mouth. I snatched it up and hurriedly tried to shred it. It didn’t tear as easily as I had hoped, giving Connor time to laugh at me.
“Check this out,” he repeated, and handed me a stack of photographs held together with a green rubber band, which shot across the room the instant I gave it a tug. The picture on top showed only a shadow, person-shaped, standing on its own in the middle of a parking lot. I could see the shadow’s feet, where it should have been attached to a person, but there was no one there; it must have been painted on. I shuffled through the rest of the stack, but none of them were as interesting as the first. “Clever,” I complimented him. He frowned.
“It’s not a trick,” he snapped. “There was a guy standing there.” He snatched the photos back from me and spread them on the table, pointing to a similarly sourceless shadow in each one.
“Okay,” I conceded. “Is there a point to this?”
“Proof,” was his reply. Connor had been looking for Proof since we were both in middle school. Proof of ghosts, Proof of aliens, Proof that the principal was ex-KGB, Proof of just about anything that would have made his life interesting. It was his form of escapism, refusing to believe that there is a boundary between fiction and reality.
“Of?”
He smiled at me and shook his head. It didn’t matter to him what he was proving, only that it was out of the ordinary. It gave him some sort of validation, I suppose. That was how it started.
I didn’t think anything of it at the time. I couldn’t make myself care about the latest of Connor’s crazy obsessions. I should point out that we weren’t friends then, at least not in the traditional sense. He hung around because I never told him to shut up and leave me alone, no matter how pushy or annoying he got. I’m not sure whether it would be more appropriate to say that I was nice or that I was spineless, or some combination of the two. The point is that if I had suddenly grown a spine and told Connor to get lost, I wouldn’t be who I am today. I would never have understood the importance of Proof.
I didn’t understand, didn’t care, and actually managed to forget about Connor’s photographs until late August, when I woke up and trudged into my living room to find him caulking my windows shut with garlic paste. I still don’t know how he had gotten a copy of my key.
“I understand,” he muttered into the cup of coffee he snatched from my hands. “I understand, the modern reflection.” I understood, too. I understood that he had fumigated my apartment with garlic and Corn Nuts, and more importantly, I understood that he was off his rocker. I yanked my coffee back, begged him to see a shrink, and kicked him out. He must have come back, because when I got back from work, every crucifix in the county was hanging from my walls. I should have appreciated his effort. I should have appreciated his fear. I should have appreciated how much he must have cared. Of course, that hardly matters now.
It took me three hours to take all of the crosses down. It must have taken him at least six to put them all up. I kept finding more for days, tucked into odd places: between the towels in the bathroom, stuck to the inside of a lampshade, under my mattress. There was even a rosary attached to the frame of my door with double-sided tape. It became a game to see how many I could find, and every time I found one I thought of Connor, and how I’d always known that it was only a matter of time before he lost his mind.
In the end, it doesn’t matter that he lost his mind, because he ultimately was right. I see that now.
Connor showed up again in December, at two-fifteen in the morning. This time, he brought a friend. The friend had been shot in the head, but Connor had the presence of mind to lay out some garbage bags so that I wouldn’t lose the rest of my deposit over the carpeting. He also had the presence of mind to unplug and hide my phone and barricade my door before he woke me up with the news that there was a body in my living room. It’s difficult to call the cops when you don’t know where your phone is, but by God I tried. I also considered trying to wake the neighbors, but that didn’t seem terribly safe while Connor was brandishing a scalpel at me, demanding that I take a look at the body.
“Please,” he said quietly. I noticed for the first time that his eyes were green, and that the Corn Nuts smell had been replaced with that of dirt and blood. “Just trust me. I knew you’d need Proof, so I brought it. Just give me an hour. If I can’t convince you in an hour, you can call the cops.”
He worked hard at it. He told me how he had gotten more photographs, sneaking around for weeks with a camera until They noticed him. He told me about running away, being followed, finding out more. He told me that They had a plan, that They were tired of liminality, of living in the margins of reality, that it was only a matter of time before the silent coup. They were building Their numbers, he said, slowly and quietly preparing Themselves, because if there was one thing They had aplenty, it was time. And soon They would be Everyone, unless the world could be warned.
The body moved, and he shot it again, his gun making a soft little pop. “See? Don’t you see?” The gun went away and the scalpel appeared again. He sliced a strip of skin from the back of the corpse’s hand. The skin disintegrated the instant it parted from the body, and I had no choice but to believe.
“Connor...” He looked at me, but I could think of nothing else to say. I only nodded. Then he drove the scalpel into the corpse’s chest, between the ribs on one side of the sternum, gave it a delicate wiggle. I could envision the pleura shredding, the ventricles carved up like gravy bits. Seconds later, I was looking at a pile of fine, flaky white ash.
Three short encounters was how it started. The photographs, the crosses, the body. I kept a journal at first, documenting the steps we took to stop Them. The journal was destroyed, but that’s fine; I remember. It took years, because we had to be slow and methodical. There was no way to launch a campaign against Them. It had to be a stake here, a fire there, always hiding, always with the knowledge that we couldn’t beat Them, only delay Them, keep Their forces just below the magic number until They gave up Their plans.
We had friends. We picked them up as we went along. Bill, Jody, Mort, Don. There were others also. Some of them found us, were clever enough to have picked up on what was going on and sought out people who were willing to do
something about it, people like me and Connor. Some of them we found, rescued from being dinner or being infected. They fell away one by one. Some were picked off, some went schizo and had to be hospitalized for their own good and for ours.
Bill was just a kid, maybe seventeen or eighteen. He came fully equipped with paintball armor and a twenty-dollar flea market katana. He found us in Dallas and tried his best to take Connor’s head off before Connor tazed him. He wasn’t the brightest, but he was bright enough to know that something fishy was going on, and he more than made up for it with his wildly flailing enthusiasm.
I guess you could say we kidnapped him. We loaded his limp self into the back of the car and fed him tacos when he woke up. Connor explained while I held a gun to the kid’s head until he swore on his Grandma’s grave that he wasn’t going to try anything