47 John Schools Tommy on Zombies

Lesson finished Mabel and Tommy entered the house through the back door. She could hear a lively conversation going on in the living room. The Millie girl was here together with Reggie and John. All three showed up anytime day or night and often for dinner. She followed Tommy into the living room. Whatever they had been talking about was coincidently with her arrival no longer interesting. She smiled and said her greetings.

Teaching Tommy was fun and her Uncle Duane was generous as her bank account evidenced. The days could be long but her cousin was bright and picked concepts up easily. He was a little fond of the supernatural though. Lately he had gotten more open about having ghost friends. That was likely due to the isolation and trauma he'd lived through the past year. She ignored his little conversations with his two imaginary friends Ray and Lin, and sometime visiter Benny. She asked him once to describe Ray and Lin and she thought the combination odd. Ray was a big man who, when he was alive, according to Tommy, killed people for money, a hit man. The other one was a little Chinese girl, who, it came out, was murdered in her sleep by Ray no less. Tommy imagined that Ray was one of the men who tried to kill him and did kill his mom and dad. Morbid. She knew from her studies that this kind of imagination, these imaginary friends, showed a great deal of intelligence. She wouldn't call attention to it. She liked her little cousin and hadn't shared these little idiosyncrasies with her Uncle Duane at least not yet. She felt a little guilty about that. She asked Daisy about the two friends and explained her trauma theory and that he would grow out of it. Daisy agreed and thought he would grow out of it, too. She wasn't bothered in the least. Mabel let it go.

Daisy got up to prepare dinner. Mabel helped as she did most nights. Mabel could have been a stickler and refused clinging to her job description. Daisy actually never asked, but it seemed the right thing to do. Reggie and John had brought some Chinese food they picked up. The Millie girl brought a big bag of cinnamon rolls and pastries, for snacking and after dinner. Wait until she gets older. How she could eat so much and stay so skinny?

What Mabel found hard was the spying to find something to turn over to her uncle. She could tell they were careful around her. Errands for example. It was odd how they always talked about errands. Everyday they had errands. And they didn't want her to come to the Waffle Haus in the mornings. Oh, they were polite about it, and they worked hard to not make it so obvious, but she knew she was not welcome there. They often would leave her here and take Tommy so those days the lessons would get a late start. That was odd, but hardly illegal. Since that one time she told her uncle she thought they were drug dealers, well, she wanted to forget that one.

She still couldn't understand how the group fit together, or more to the point, why they were together, or how they connected to the Hesburghs or why Trip left his nephew here with Daisy and Mason. Most cliques had some common thread, but this group was an odd collection. Tommy regarded Daisy as his mother and Mason his father. And then when pushed he had an array of people who he'd call aunts and uncles, aside from his only real aunt and uncle, the Hesburghs.

John and Reggie were obviously a couple, but they lived with their friend, Millie, or Georgia, or whomever. Sometimes Daisy would call her Georgia and sometimes not. Tommy was the same way. Especially at first, if Mabel were standing right there Tommy would call her Millie, but if not he might call her George. That was unusual. This Millie, or George, friend looked to be just out of high school and yet she was always the presence in the room like she was punching way above her weight class. And Mabel still had no idea what she did for a living. But she had lots of errands, which is why she got so confused in the beginning. Sounded like a drug dealer. Anyone would have thought that. She never saw anything of drugs in quantity, although Mason seemed to have his own stash, which on occasion he would sample. When that happened Daisy would come down on him. He would apologize and be good for a while, depending on how long it took to find more. Daisy always destroyed anything she came across.

At dinner end, she helped clear the table and clean things up in the kitchen. John had brought some DVD's for the house entertainment pool and he laid them out in the living room coffee table. It was Tommy's turn to pick something and he chose some zombie movie or TV show. Mabel didn't care for horror at all. She wasn't going to sit through that kind of so-called entertainment. Her old roommate pushed that stuff on her and she didn't feel obligated to sit through it now.

She decided it was time to go to bed early and excused herself. She had the ground floor bedroom that used to be occupied by Reggie and John. She got ready for bed and on a hunch she pulled out the modified stethoscope her thoughtful uncle had provided her and put it to the wall. If she were very still she could hear the conversations in the living room pretty clearly.

Tommy said, "Uncle John. Are there zombies?"

"Yes, Tommy, there are."

Daisy said, "John, don't fill his head with nonsense. No, Tommy. There are no zombies."

"Aunt George, why are you smiling?"

John said, "She's smiling, Tommy, because she knows we found some ghost zombies last year."

Mason said, "Can she hear?"

Georgia said, "No, not unless she has the ears of a bat. This is an old house and the walls pretty thick."

John started talking in a story telling voice. "Last year when George and I went to California, George was sent on a special mission to an old abandoned graveyard. This graveyard was out in the middle of nowhere. The town that used to be there had become a ghost town."

Tommy asked, "They have towns for ghosts?"

"No. Not that I know of. It's what the living call a town where nobody lives anymore."

"If nobody lives there, then why would George go there. How can anybody die if nobody's alive?"

"Nobody was dying right then. That's just it. She was sent to collect the souls of people who had died many years before."

Mason said, "This sounds creepy. I do not think I will be able to sleep tonight. You sure you want to tell him about this?"

John asked, "George. What do you think?"

"Daisy, it's up to you, but you know it might be better if he hears about these things before he ever runs into one."

There was a pause with some cross talk.

Daisy said, "Ok. Go ahead."

John started again. "I was driving. George was sound asleep in the back seat. I got off on a two-track road and after a long ride through open grass fields filled with brown dead grass I came to a graveyard next to a church with only the front still standing. I could just make out parts of a few other buildings beyond. This little town was without people for so long all the buildings were falling back into the ground. It was getting towards the end of the day, late afternoon, so the sun was low in the sky. I drove slowly looking for a parking meter."

Tommy asked, "A parking meter? In a ghost town?"

"Well, I couldn't find one. But I stopped when I saw the first of them."

"A zombie?"

"Yes, a zombie. Then I saw another one and then another one and pretty soon there was a whole bunch of them and they were all coming towards the SUV. They heard me drive up and slowly started coming our way to look us over. I don't think they got many visitors and they were probably curious."

George broke in. "I seem to remember…"

"You were still asleep and out of sight."

There was some laughter.

"These were ghost zombies."

Mabel was getting an idea from whom Tommy picked up his preoccupation with ghosts.

"I started to get a little worried. As you know why. As they got closer and closer I pretended I couldn't see them. But that was hard - really hard."

"Why?"

"Because all of them looked like corpses rotted, in places rotted right down to the bones. Ghosts take on the form of the body when it's reaped, none of these people had been reaped."

"Didn't their reapers find them?"

"I don't know. But none of these people had been reaped. So, when they died, their souls couldn't leave their dead bodies. They were buried in their graves trapped inside their corpses deep inside the ground. By the time they could separate from their flesh the poor people were not right in the head anymore. One man came up to the front of the SUV and looked at me. He was missing both eyes and I could see most of his skull. The rest…"

"Do we need to go into every detail?"

"There were half a dozen close by and more were coming. And that's when George woke up."

John paused.

Tommy couldn't contain himself. "Then? Then what happened?"

"Well, there's scary and then there's really scary. They took one look at her and they all ran for the hills, bolted away."

There was more cross talk none of which she could make out over the laughing. Mabel didn't get the joke.

"Well, once George was fully awake." John paused for a couple of heartbeats. "She looked out over the cemetery and called all the zombies to come to her. And they came. At first I didn't realize what she was doing. It looked to me like the advance guard of a huge zombie army coming our way. But…it was George bringing them to us."

"Why did they run away when they saw her. I don't understand."

There was a longer gap with no cross talk, just silence.

"Oh. I don't understand that."

"Really? Lin, does George look different?"

Another pause. What the hell. The whole group was aiding and abetting in Tommy's imaginary friend delusions? That wasn't good.

"All the reapers, Ray? Wow."

Mabel pulled the scope from the wall. There was no way she was going to listen to this nonsense. She'd never be able to sleep.