Dawn and the Dead

  Dawn and the Dead

  Dawn and the Dead

  Midpoint

  Dawn

  And

  The

  Dead

  by

  Nicholas John

  Dawn Garcia overslept the day that the dead rose and claimed the world as their own.

  It was understandable enough – she’d had a bad week, (had, in fact, been going through a hell of a rough patch recently).

  She wasn’t sleeping well, her dreams realms of horror and pestilent, rotting death; tearing her down to hell every time that she closed her eyes and drifted off to sleep. In her nightmares, she saw his face. The face of Eddie Garcia, although in those dark and rancid dreams it was different, a ghastly death mask of decomposing corruption. In her nightmares, Dawn is in the kitchen. She’s making breakfast for her daughter Vickie and herself, frying bacon, when the sound comes from the garden:

  She notices that every other sound has become but echoes, distant and hollow as if retreating as that one sound, the music that consumed her with dread when Eddie Garcia was alive, once again, impossibly, pours in through the open kitchen window.

  She often thought (more in waking and recalling the dream than experiencing it) that it reminded her of a cowboy western movie. That pivotal moment when someone important strides into the saloon and all the laughing, piano music and tinkling of glasses, dies away instantly.

  The sound, which has merely been one of the multitude of the ambient noises of life, is now standing alone in the otherwise silence. It comes to her ears and she shudders, muttering a long, “No…” which folds into a tortured moan of despair.

  It is his vihuela; he is playing Somos Novios – and playing it badly.

  Eddie always plays his vihuela on the way home, late at night, after swallowing enough tequila to drown a whale. As always, it sounds alright for a while, happy, bouncy… but the closer he gets, the more mistakes he makes and she can make out a missed note here, the wrong note there, and then a total, drunken splash of frantic, angry, incorrect music.

  In her nightmares, the badly played vihuela strings sting her ears from their garden. Dawn walks over to the curtain, peels it away from the corner of the window and looks out nervously - just as she had when he was alive and returning home.

  Eddie has always been frightening in this state. Is wild and unpredictable. He beats her, almost killed her once. And if he didn’t beat her, he forced himself on her. Stinking tequila breath blasting into her face in bursts of gasps as she lay there motionless and staring away.

  As frightening as Eddie was in life, in the nightmares, and consequently in death - he is a very different monster.

  Death is feasting hungrily on the corpse of Eddie Garcia.

  He stands bare-chested in the garden. There are rips and holes in the thighs of his jeans, and in the strands of gnawed flesh beneath, insects crawl, writhe, scuttle and burrow, hiding sometimes behind the pale, bruise-dappled flesh and exposed bone that protrudes.

  The vihuela, hanging from guitar straps thrown over Eddie’s shoulders, hide the pestilent mess of his stomach. Yet that seems to make it worse, as instead of seeing his guts flopping and writhing sloppily back and for, she imagines it.

  In the nightmares, his hands move back and for with an eerie slowness, too slow in fact to be producing the notes that play from the Spanish guitar. Those hands, or those fingers to be more precise, they had been so slim, slender and dextrous - when he played, they seemed to shimmer magically, like the wings of a hummingbird. And they had been so soft and smooth as they lovingly caressed her skin or pushed an errant strand of hair from her eyes.

  They had not always been so soft.

  Not when they were curled spitefully into fists and crashing into her ribs, or chopping across her face in startling slaps.

  Now his hands are dead. Some of his finger still resemble fingers, except they are thick, rotten yellow and black - like overripe bananas; the fingernails on those digits are cracked and yellow and dry, dead flesh slips from them in flakes and he strums. Other fingers are simply skeletal; dusty, dry bones.

  Yet they play away slowly. The flesh of his forearms had been opened up, strands of spoiled sinew and bare muscle flicker sickeningly back and fore.

  Through the majority of the nightmare, she never sees his face. The peak of his sombrero hides it in shadow; but the climax of the nightmare, the absolute pinnacle in dread, is when he throws back his head, sending the hat flying and revealing his mangled face. It was always soon after that that she woke, shooting bolt upright in bed, screaming. The bed would be soaked through with sweat and her body dank with her own perspiration. Her long black hair matted against her clammy forehead. Then she would begin to shake.

  In her nightmare, when Eddie finally throws back his head and the sombrero flies off in slow motion, the face that stares at her accusingly is immoral.

  In the grave, his hair has continued to grow, but now the dark black is streaked through with white and grey, it hangs down to his shoulders, the wind blowing it and the cobwebs inside it, behind him. He stares accusingly with only one eye, as the other had been devoured by some animal, and all that remains there is a gaping, black socket. The one, surviving eye is pale blue, almost like a cataract. There is no iris.

  He appears to grin at her, or it could be a grimace, as his entire top lip, all the way to the nose, has been eaten away. Dirty, grey, tombstone like teeth imbedded in dark grey gum are stained, but not from smoking, and the gunk wedged between them is not plaque – in both cases it is congealed blood of a deep black colour.

  A huge laceration has left a jagged patch of rotting flesh missing from the pale, almost grey, side of his cheek. Dawn can see more teeth, gum and even his jawbone through it. She always feels sick as he begins to speak, and the jaw and teeth move in a twisted, gut-wrenching unison. The vihuela is gone, yet the song, Somos Novios continues to haunt the abyssal, otherwise silence of this nightmare world. He points at her, but not with a finger. Instead, the hand that points grasps a carving knife, the tip aimed at her.

  It’s a kitchen knife.

  The same one she used to kill him.

  “I’ll be back for you hembra!” he screams.

  Dawn woke with a gasp.

  It had been the nightmare again.

  She regarded the bedside table and the alarm clock sitting on it - 9.50a.m.

  She had slept late, but it didn’t matter – today was Saturday.

  Her heart was racing and she was damp through with sweat; but the fact that it was Saturday made her smile and those other things didn’t seem so bad. Almost immediately the dream was forgotten and she was on her feet, running a bath and looking forward to spending the entire day with Vickie. The nightmares might be bad, but they were just dreams, and despite his warning, Eddie would never return to avenge his murder; he would never hurt them again. The positive of his death was that Dawn and Vickie got to live a safe, happy life. Dawn had decided the nightmares were worth it. She supposed they were brought on by guilt, and she expected them to last for some time – she had only killed Eddie on Thursday night, after all.

  He had come home angrier and drunker than she had ever seen him. When his fumbling fingers had dropped his front door keys, he had simply kicked the door in.

  In the kitchen he had started pounding on her, punching her in the face instead of carefully aiming for the body to hide his abuse – that was when Dawn had realised she was in real trouble. She had started to think that she might not survive this time.

  As he tossed her across the room, she clattered into a pile of dishes that fell and shattered on the floor; they exploded into a thousand shards of china and the noise brought a sleepy Vickie dozily strolling into the kitchen, cuddling h
er, ‘blankey’ in one arm as she sucked the thumb of the other hand.

  Then it had happened. Eddie had spun around and punched Vickie in the face.

  The little girl had crumbled to the floor, as if she had fainted. The back of her head had slammed against the cold, hard tile of the kitchen floor and bounced with a sickening thud!

  Dawn had seen a single droplet of blood, a lone speck of red like an ink drop, sitting under her daughter’s right nostril. From there on it had been simple.

  Dawn had not tried to rationalise her actions as she pulled open one of the cutlery draws, tore out a long, sharp carving knife, and then plunged it into Eddies back. She had struck with such force that the knife had ripped through his chest, slicing his heart fatally. He fell to the floor and died.

  Cradling her daughter in her arms, Dawn had rushed her to hospital. Eddie had remained there on the kitchen floor. Vickie had woken in hospital with no memory of the incident a few hours later, she must have been close to sleepwalking, thought Dawn with relief, as she told the doctor that Vickie had fallen downstairs.

  The doctor had said that Vickie had hit her forehead. She had a slight concussion, but nothing was broken. He explained that concussion could be quite dangerous, so he wanted to keep the little girl in overnight, just for observation.

  “If you rushed her here, you might want to nip back home Mrs. Garcia. If you’ve not locked-up properly or left a candle burning or something. We can watch her for a little while.”

  Dawn was about to say no, that she would stay. Then she remembered her dead husband lying on the kitchen floor with a carving knife sticking out of his back.

  “I’ll be as quick as I can.” She told the doctor, and then headed for the car.

  On the drive home, she began to panic. What if a concerned neighbour had called the police, reporting a nasty sounding domestic argument? What if, as she rounded the corner to their house, there were police cruisers lights flashing and bouncing off the black-and-whites; armed police officers with handcuffs ready for her arrest?

  Then a stranger, deeper fear.

  What if he wasn’t dead? What if, when she walked into the kitchen, the body wasn’t there anymore? Was it possible that she had just injured him, and if she had, how angry would he be then? What would he do to her? In the heat of the moment she had acted, but if he was badly injured and not dead, could she, ‘finish him off’?

  Turning the corner, there were no police cruisers parked outside her house.

  When she stepped into the kitchen, the body was still there – and it was a body, because yes, Eddie was dead.

  The thing that had surprised her most on returning to the scene was that there was no blood. She had expected the body to be lying in a pool of red, but the terracotta kitchen tiles were unblemished. Unlike the man attending her daughter at the hospital, Dawn was no doctor; so she could only guess that she had done something to the heart when she pierced it to stem the flow of blood.

  The garden was a standard square of sand, picketed by a weatherworn, sun bleached yellowish picket fence which had once been bright white, when the house was new. Apart from a few scattered cacti (some flowering pretty yellow and purple buds, but not all), and a few stones, the yard was sparse. Their garden did boast something different however, and it was this that had saved Dawn having to dig a grave. The Garcia’s garden had a huge, three feet hole dug in the middle of it.

  “A pool?” she asked Eddie when he had dug it.

  “Yeah, just for paddling. Nothing huge. Dig a hole, brick-up the base and sides and then fill it with water. It will be nice and cool on really hot days, and Vickie will love playing in it.”

  That was the old Eddie speaking, the one she had fallen in love with and married.

  He had dug the hole, but nothing had ever come of it. Not until now at least.

  Grabbing the body by the wrists, she dragged it along the kitchen floor, out the back door and into the garden. Getting it across the kitchen floor had been easy, the body slid across the smooth tiles effortlessly. The sand was a different kettle-of-fish.

  Dawn had to use all her strength to pull it the twelve feet to, ‘the pool’.

  Once on the edge of the circle, she fell to her knees and rolled the body over into the hole. Finding a shovel, she tossed enough sand over the body to conceal it and then set about her alibi.

  Taking a bottle of beer from the fridge, she wrapped it in a dishcloth to silence any noise, and then smashed it on the kitchen table. Back at the car, she popped open the boot and used a pair of gloves to protect her hands, she wedged several pieces into the spare tyre. Now if anybody quizzed her on why she had been so long, and why she was so sweaty and covered in sand, she could simply explain that she’d had to change a flat tyre.

  “Vickie!” called Dawn, there was no answer, but she could hear her little girl laughing in the garden. Playing with her imaginary friend Pedro, no doubt.

  Opening the front and screen door, she stepped out onto the porch, took the newspaper that had been left on the step. It was only the local rag, but interesting when it came to all the local gossip. She took in a deep breath of fresh air and glanced along the street; it was dead. Like a ghost town. It was almost as silent as her nightmare, but she brushed that thought aside quickly.

  It feels like a Sunday she thought to herself, and was almost convinced of the fact when she noticed old Mrs Lopez dressed in her, ‘Sunday best’, church-going clothes, down on all fours, staring beneath a car. Coaxing her cat Hector out from under there again. That cat was always hiding there, they liked the heat of a recently run engine.

  “Morning misses Lopez!” she called.

  The old woman looked at her and Dawn felt sad. Her eyes were blank, she looked like she didn’t even know her neighbour. Poor Mrs Lopez, thought Dawn. She was getting on in years now, had in fact been getting confused for sometime. What struck Dawn as very sad, was that Mrs Lopez was wearing make-up; very over the top too.

  Mrs. Lopez returned her attention to Hector under the car, so Dawn slipped back inside.

  She checked on her bath, it still had a while to fill, so she poured herself a glass of orange juice and sat at the kitchen table, pouring over the stories in the local rag.

  It was five minutes later, when she read the obituaries that the glass of juice fell from her hand and smashed to pieces on the tiled kitchen floor.

  Dawn read the words again:

  ‘The funeral of Shelley Lopez, 90, took place on Friday…’

  Dawn re-read it a second time, then stood and walked slowly to the front door again. Delicately edging the door open ajar, she stared out through the gap and threw a hand over her mouth to stifle the scream. Ninety-year-old Shelley Lopez finally had her hands on her cat Hector.

  Dawn stared on in disbelief, bile rising into her throat from her stomach as she watched the thing that had been Mrs Lopez tearing the fur from the cat and chewing-down hungrily and greedily like a starving animal on the bright, fresh pink flesh of its torso. The cat wasn’t dead; it hissed, clawed, struck and wailed horribly as the blood gushed from it and down the front and throat of its owner.

  Dawn closed the door, wedged the back of a chair against the handle then ran to the kitchen. Her heart was pounding, it couldn’t happen. But sweet Jesus what if it had? Mrs Lopez was in her, ‘Sunday best’, because she’d been buried in it. The make-up was nothing to do with cosmetics; it was the undertaker’s doing. If Mrs Lopez could be back from the dead, then so could…- no, NO! she screamed at her own reasoning, it couldn’t happen.

  Her blood was running cold, her stomach painfully empty and hollow and somehow cold. Fingernails seemed to be tearing along her flesh, trying the pop the goosebumps there like bubble-wrap.

  At the window, she tore the curtain across and gasped. Her greatest fear was realised. He had told her the truth in her nightmares.

  Eddie was back for them.

  Despite being a few days dead, it must have been quite cool beneath the sand, because E
ddie looked nothing like the horror movie zombie of her nightmares. He looked almost normal; except pale, his lips were blue, huge black bags circled the pale blue eyes in the greying face. He paid no attention to Dawn at the window. He was too busy stumbling around drunkenly, trying to catch Vickie (the image of that cat being eaten came into her head in a flash) and Dawn was racing to the kitchen draw, pulling it open and dragging out that knife again. The very knife she had killed him with… the first time.

  Vickie was totally unaware of her predicament. Her Mamma had told her that Papi had gone away and would be back after a long time, but here he was, in the garden, playing their usual game with her.

  The game was fun. Papi would chase her around the garden, pretending he couldn’t catch her. She would get all excited, thinking he couldn’t get her, while knowing deep down (and looking forward to him doing it) that he could and would speed-up and catch her. As soon as he had her in his arms, he would cuddle and tickle her, smother her with kisses, blow raspberries on her belly, then hold her up in the air and spin her around.

  Vickie couldn’t wait to get caught.

  She didn’t realise it, but she was so excited about the game, because it had been so long since Papi had played it with her. Had in fact; played with her at all.

  Around and around she jogged, in a giggling, giddy circle. Papi was doing a funny walk, shuffling and awkward. As she jogged away from him, she never took her eyes off him.

  That was why she fell.

  Vickie tripped. Fell flat onto all fours, then still in a giggling fit, she rolled onto her back and looked up at her approaching Papi, waiting for her hugs and kisses.

  Little Vickie Garcia realised something was wrong as she lay in the long, mid morning shadow of her Papi, who loomed over her, swaying slightly.

  His eyes were wrong. They seemed to focus on her, yet bore through her dimly too. To Vickie, it looked like Papi was sleepwalking. Papi seemed distracted, almost confused and uninterested in her too, yet his cold, empty eyes never left her.