Judy and Norman
by Darby HarnOn the way to the cemetery, Judy found a badly dead frog in a rain puddle. His brittle, dry leaf skin hung over his bleached skeleton like a loin cloth as he dragged his way over toward a robin that by the looks of him had just died. Other birds splashed in the water with him, flapped about chaotically, erratically; Judy stood there a bit until the dead robin in the puddle woke up, shrugged off the wet and the furious ants crawling all over him, and then swirled away in a tailspin, like an out-of-control airplane.
She considered turning back. Her sisters all thought this routine weird anyway (“What, you’re supposed to creep the pounds off?”), but the cemetery was quiet, and it was half a mile front to back, so she got her mile in; as an added bonus, since the back gate bordered the baseball stadium, on summer nights like that one she got a couple innings in, too. It wasn’t so much baseball she liked (not really) but the giddy thrill of sitting among the headstones as they played “Shake, Rattle, and Roll” during the starting line-ups.
Judy didn’t like to stay too long after dark; it wasn’t so much the virus she was worried about, since she knew she couldn’t catch it (even though the NO TRESPASSING sign on the gate had been amended to say REPORT ANY INSTANCE OF VIRUS IMMEDIATELY, and that was in itself alarming), but rather the cops that only showed on her side of town on game night. There wasn’t much else for kids her age to do in town but tip cows and topple headstones, and though she’d never done anything like that, she knew from experience how easy it was to get busted for things you didn’t do.
Her mother Marlene was always looking for someone to blame for the six of them all in two bedrooms and a bath in the shadow of the old packing plant, and more often than not, her sisters offered Judy up as sacrifice. With just the food stamps every month and sometimes a little check from their father, food was always an issue. Without fail, come the middle of every month, when food and money was at its lowest, the sisters blamed her - because he left them, and because Judy, in all her ways, reminded them daily of him.
She lingered outside the cemetery gates, unsure, but she didn’t really want to go home, either. The ball game turned out good, with lots of hits (one sailed clear over the gate, over her head, and plopped down somewhere back in the plot behind her) so she stayed longer than usual. When she got up for the seventh inning stretch, what light was left in the sky lined the lazy clouds overhead silver and pink in their middles, like raw meat. She hurried through the scattered chalk-white stones dating all the way back to just after the Civil War, the ground uneven and rutted with roots.
Something ran out of the dark in front of her. Her walk became a run. She tripped and fell down. She cradled her bloody knee and looked back to see if it was an exposed root or some other heave in the ground, and that’s when she saw him, casually brushing the dirt off his light-brown polyester suit. He leaned down, sounding a bit like when people crush their crackers before pouring them into some soup as he did, and picked up the foul ball that landed behind her earlier.
“This yours?” He asked, and she screamed.
She tried to take off and run, but she hurt her ankle when she tripped, and she fell down again. She crawled across the damp, crumpled ground to move behind the biggest marble headstone she could find. She peeked over the stone a minute later, and he was still there, looking confused.
“You’re a frickin’ zombie!”
“Huh. I was afraid of that. Well. What’s a girl like you doing out here this time of night?”
“Walking.”
“Where to?”
“I’m on a diet.”
“Oh, you’re not that fat. Used to be a man liked something he could put his arm around.”
Besides the very sunken look to his face, and the waxy sheen his pale skin had in the moonlight, he didn’t look so bad either. His shock-white hair was fine and thin, and there weren’t any maggots on him she could see.
“You know in the movies…the dead don’t talk,” she says. “It’s more like, ‘Grr, argh.’”
“Yeah. Huh. What year is it, anyway?”
“2006.”
“Huh. Almost fifteen years…”
He chuckled a little, without looking very happy.
“I’m fifteen,” Judy said. Not feeling so afraid anymore, she sat on top of the stone to take a look at her ankle.
“You close by?”
“Just down the street, really.”
“Oh, yeah? I used to live over on Cunningham. You look like a girl I used to know over there… Marlene?”
“That’s my mom.”
“Is that right? How is she?”
“This is weird.”
“Yeah. Huh. I’m Norman, by the way.”
“Judy.”
“Pleased to meet you, Judy,” he said, and offered his hand, although she didn’t take it. “I thought it was a hoax…I mean, it had been on TV the last week and stuff, but… everywhere else. Not here.”
“There’s others? Like me?”
“All over the world. Mom says it’s because Hell is full or something. But she didn’t really believe it. You’re not going to eat my brains or anything, are you?”
He chuckled again. “No, honey.”
“What are you going to do?”
He whistled a sigh. “I don’t know. I don’t suppose there’s much for a dead man to do around town.”
It didn’t seem Norman was all that bad a person (for a dead guy), and more dead people crawling out of the ground didn’t scare her as much as it did a minute ago.
“You should just stay here. I won’t tell anyone I saw you. I’m supposed to, but…”
“What will they do to me?”
“I don’t know. Some places, they’ve been burning the bodies. They said it doesn’t work, but…I won’t tell.”
His eyebrows shot up. “Huh. I’ve been here fifteen years, what’s one more night?” He chuckled (every time the same) and she did, too, a little.
“Maybe I’ll see you tomorrow?”
“Maybe,” she said, and walked gingerly toward the gate.
It rained on the walk home. She thought about Norman, how he’d get soaked, and then she thought he probably didn’t care. And she thought that might not be too bad at all.
She didn’t tell her sisters about Norman. They sat convened in front of the television in the living room with their mother, a chorus of dissent against the evening news, grimmer and more bizarre each night. She did tell them about the frog, and the birds she saw, but they laughed at her.
“You know how many squirrels are out in the street right now? They’ve been lying there for days, you don’t know what you’re talking about,” Marlene said, almost sucking on her cigarette.
“I think it’s the water,” Judy said, softly.
“What do you know?”
Judy shrugged. “It was just the one puddle…might be the rain. Dad said once there’s stuff in the rain, like acid and stuff, and it can make animals sick sometimes.”
“Because he’d know.”
“I’m surprised she didn’t bring it home to eat,” her oldest sister Mary said, and the others snickered. “Hang it up on the wall like he would. Maybe she ate it already.”
Judy thought of plenty to say (there were always things to say), but she didn’t use any of it. She went to bed early, and the next day, she found Norman on a stone bench in the shadow of a pine tree, enveloped in a cloud of flies.
He shrugged. “My old man used to say, ‘When the flies are bad, the corn is good.’”
Judy covered her mouth. The nauseating stench of death wafted on the humid heat of the evening, and she saw other dead, some not so well kept as Norman, drifting through the stones, confused smokestacks pluming flies.
“I’ll go get some fly spray or something.”
“That sounds perfect.”
Judy ran all the way home (didn’t even realize she had until she burst through the front door and her sisters gasped in unison). She dug an old bottle of fly and tick spray out of the cupboard underneath the sink, where dead spiders spun near-plastic webs back in the corner. She ran back to the cemetery, sweating through her shirt and shorts, and found that while she was gone, two more dead people had come up.
“It says I’m not supposed to spray this on people,” she said, shaking the can. “It’s toxic.”
“I’m willing to take the risk.”
“Close your eyes.”
She sprayed all the flies away, emptying most of the can on Norman before remembering the others; she did her best with what she had left on the closest corpses, and then went back to sit with him on the bench.
“I wish I was a scientist or something,” she said, her chin in her hand. “I wish I could figure this out.”
“My girl Rachel, she wanted to be a scientist. The under water kind, you know. Smart as a tack. So smart.”
“I’m not smart,” Judy said. “Mom says when they start the draft, they won’t take me because I’m too dumb and fat.”
“Why would they start the draft?”
“The war.”
“What war?”
“Iraq.”
“We’re still there?”
“No, we left. But then we went back.”
“Why in the hell for?”
Judy shrugged. “I don’t know.”
“Huh. I did a hitch in Vietnam, you know. You think this would bother me, all this rotting flesh, but I’ve seen a lot worse. A lot worse.”
“My dad was in the army, too. I guess.”
“You could join, if you wanted,” Norman said. “Forget what your mom says. There’s nothing fat or dumb about you, I can tell you that. You got a good heart, Judy.”
“Thanks.” It was barely a whisper. “You, too.”
He laughed. “Actually, I don’t think I do. Sounds kind of hollow in there.”
Judy timidly touched his hand. He felt like an apple bruise. He was cold and rubbery, like the water balloons her sisters used to put in the freezer when they were kids.
“None of this scares you, Judy?”
“I don’t know what to think.”
“I don’t, either. I was never sure about God or heaven, but I thought we had souls at least. I mean, you see a thing like Rachel… my daughter, Rachel, something wonderful like that can’t not have a soul, you know what I mean?”
The way he spoke, Judy knew he thought he sounded foolish, or sentimental, but she knew exactly what he meant; there were things in the world you couldn’t owe to random chance or circumstance. The summer she was four, her father took her and her sisters for the weekend to go camping. They hated it, deplored the lack of a TV and the smelly, dubious outdoor toilets. But Judy loved it, especially sitting up late on his lap at the fire, listening to his steady, comfortable laughter, her favorite music. Early one morning, they found two dead deer in the woods, locked together at the antlers, their bodies twisted into desperate shapes. She’d never seen a deer before, and never anything so unique and incredible.
Judy stared at them a long time, deep into their opal eyes, eyes she thought sure would eventually blink. Her dad circled them, figuring out how to unlock them. She thought maybe he might want to bury them, but after taking a quick, self-conscious look around, he put down his rod and drew the knife he used on the fish they caught from his boot.
“You ever had deer, baby?” Judy shook her head. He laughed and said, “Yeah, you probably ain’t never had nothin’ you didn’t have to defrost first. You’ll like it.”
He knelt down beside them and she asked her father what happened, how they came to be like this.
“Probably fightin’ over a doe. You gotta ask yourself what’s a thing worth to you, if it means gettin’ all locked up in somethin’ you can’t get out of. Maybe it means you’re a lesser man if you walk away, a lesser person, but you’re still alive.”
She didn’t turn away as he opened them. Cutting the heads off catfish and gutting them on spread-out newspapers didn’t bother her the way it did her sisters, who all swore off ever going with him again (except Susan, who they bullied into submission). After they saw her pack without fail every Thursday night for camping trips that never happened, they belittled Judy for her likeness to him, and for her foolishness.
“I wonder if we’re not just this,” Norman said, pinching his slack skin, “just an old battery waiting to be recharged.”
The idea of people being batteries meant that people like her grandmother, who died of Alzheimer’s, and her cousin, who was left brain dead after a car accident, would never regain what they had lost in Heaven, or anywhere else.
“This sucks, Norman.”
“That it does.”
Judy looked down toward the stadium. “Rochester is in town tonight. I think so, anyway. You like baseball?”
He smiled. “I tried out once for the Cubs.”
“You did not.”
“Iowa Cubs. Local. Still the Cubs.”
The next day, Judy found the cemetery locked up and surrounded on all sides by the National Guard. Earlier in the day the president had declared a state of national emergency after cemeteries all over the country emptied over night. Gas prices shot up as people fled the bigger cities, but as Judy had already known for three days, death (or the lack of it) was everywhere. The soldiers wouldn’t let her cross the street to see if Norman was one of the hundreds of dead reaching through the bars of the gate, begging for release; a few climbed over the top, skewering hands and legs in the process, some of them getting stuck and dangling there as soldiers shot them full of useless bullets.
Friends and relatives of the most recent dead, undone already by the sight of their loved ones alive again, abandoned their perch on the corner across the street and rushed the gate to try and stop the soldiers from shooting; Judy went with them, running up and down the length of the gate, just out of reach of desperate hands, shouting for Norman. She saw him, through the rods of steel and of people, sitting alone on his bench, like he did every day.
“Norman!”
A soldier pulled her away from the fence just as he reached through to take her hand.
Then he trained his M-16 on Norman.
“No, don’t!” Judy shouted, knowing it wouldn’t do anything to him, but she not wanting to see it just the same.
“But he’s a zombie!”
“He’s my friend.”
“This is insane…”
Everyone one had friends and loved ones behind gates like these. The soldier did, too, including those that had come back home under flags. He lowered his gun, and backed away.
“You shouldn’t be here, honey,” Norman said.
“People are going nuts, Norman. They’re killing themselves, because they think it’s the end of the world.”
“But they’re coming right back, aren’t they?”
Judy nodded, and burst into tears, unable to escape the enormity of it all any more. Until then she had feared death like anyone else, but now she feared the virus, feared never being able to die; the news said the virus was in everything now, in people’s food, in the water, everything.
“We’re all infected…”
Norman touched her face gently, and wiped her tears away. “You don’t have anything to worry about, honey. Not for a long, long time.”
“But what is it? What’s causing it?”
“What was it you were saying about the rain forests? Maybe we’re taking out a lot more than we’re putting in, and now what we put back in isn’t good enough anymore.”
“I think that is it, Norman.”
“Don’t be silly. You’ll go to college, and you’ll be the one who figures it out. I can be your guinea pig.”
She smiled. “I’ll write a book, after. We’ll be famous. We’ll go on tour and give speeches and stuff.”
“You will. I’ll be cured.”
Her smile went away. She’d gotten used to Norman the last few days. He was dead and would never age and any further catastrophe aside, he’d always be there. And finding a cure was beyond her imagination; the thought of having to rebury all those bodies (millions now) seemed too big a thing to put back, even if the world expected it.
“Why aren’t you trying to get out, Norman?”
“Not much for me out there,” he said. “I’ll be fine. You should go home now, Judy.”
“What about you?”
“I’ll just sit and listen to the game later.”
“They cancelled the game, Norman.”
“Huh.” Of course they had. There probably wouldn’t be any more games. “Go on home. I’ll be fine.”
She didn’t want to leave, and she certainly didn’t want to go home, but with the dead trying to get out and the living trying to get in, and the soldiers not knowing who to shoot or why, she knew the cemetery wasn’t the best place to be.
She decided to take a walk down by the river on her way home. Normally this time of year the marina was full of small boats and fishermen and their buckets, but not today. Dead fish flopped weakly on the shore, thousands of them, even more in the water, as dead birds picked at them, only played at killing; flies swarmed every thing that moved, and every thing that didn’t. Wild dogs, possums and raccoons, all still alive and no longer needing the dark for cover, roamed the piles of dead things with abandon. Judy turned and ran.
She came home to find her sisters split between the TV and the window, anxiously watching both. A man on the news called from somewhere in China, he didn’t know just where at the moment (his voice was hoarse from fear and running), and reported to the twitchy anchor back in New York that the Chinese army had tested a new kind of chemical weapon on the dead. Some agent they brewed up in a lab somewhere in the hopes of retarding the virus, but all it did was kill the living nearby - who then they woke up, dead. Judy heard screaming and panic in the background, and gunshots too.
“Where were you?” Mary asked, just noticing her. She was still in her pink nurses’ scrubs, even though they had sent her home from the hospital hours ago when the morgue woke up.
“My walk,” Judy said, still at the door.
“Jesus, you went out there? You’re so stupid.”
“Really,” Susan said, but looked at Judy with guilt, guilt awash in barely-restrained fear.
Marlene sat forward in her recliner, rubbing her head with a burning cigarette in her hand. “What are they going to do for us? What are we supposed to do?”
“What do you mean?” Judy asked.
“What do you mean, ‘What do you mean?’ It’s the end of the world, for God’s sake! You got all these rich people flying to their islands in their jets and what are we supposed to do? They better do something, let me tell you.”
“There’s nothing to do. It doesn’t matter where you go, we’re all infected with it.”
They looked at her, quiet and fearful, until finally Mary laughed (nervously) and said, “It’s dead people, dummy. Dead things. Where you been?”
“Yeah, she works at the hospital, Judy,” Marlene said, shaking her head. “She’s seen it.”
Mary nodded. “You’ve been out on your ‘diet.’”
“Way to go there,” Marie said, and the others laughed.
“Really,” Mary said.
“Whatever,” Judy sighed. “Just don’t have any accidents until they figure the virus out, Doc.”
“Oh, shut up.” Mary sighed, and balled up in her chair.
Judy decided to go up to the room she shared with all her sisters (but Mary, who shared the other room with Marlene) for some quiet. She stopped halfway up the stairs.
“Has anybody heard from Dad?”
None of them made a peep. She went up to dial her father from Mary’s room (the only one upstairs with a phone jack in it) but he didn’t answer. She left a message, knowing if she said, “This is Judy,” he’d call back eventually, after he got home from the fire station. He was a volunteer fire fighter in Independence, and she figured they called everybody in. Of course that’s what he was out doing. Helping. She wanted to help too, but didn’t know how. She fell across the bed, tired from worry, and slept a while.
The tornado sirens woke her a few hours later. She didn’t hear the roar of strong winds or the pelt of rain against the windows, but the nonsense scat of gunfire. She jumped over Susan on her mattress on the floor to the window.
The dead walked in the middle of Shelly Street, through traffic, down the side streets into the city. The guardsmen spilled out into the neighborhood as erratically as the dead, torn between stopping them (thousands of them, unable to be stopped) and saving themselves from the spontaneous chaos that had erupted in their wake. A truck, standing room only in the back, sped down the street and ran right through the crowd in the middle of the street, some dead, some not, and kept on going into the intersection, where another truck hit it.
The Boyd boys across the street went at the dead with baseball bats and brooms, and down the block, someone dowsed dead as they walked past with lighter fluid. It was like bats screaming, the way their dead, dry bodies whistled with fire.
Judy threw open the window. “What are you doing?”
She ran over Susan again and out of her room down the stairs where Mary and Marlene stood at the window, hands over their mouths. Judy pulled on her shoes and opened the door. Mary shoved it shut again. “Are you insane?”
“I have to find Norman!”
“Norman – who’s Norman?”
“They’ll burn him!”
Judy pried the door open and ran around to the side of the house. She emptied a plastic flower pot nobody tended to, filled it with water, and threw it on the first burning dead person that drifted by down the walk.
She went back to fill the pot again and Mary ran out, still in her scrubs, her wet eyes the same pink now.
“Judy! Judy! Judy, what are you doing?”
She filled the pot without answering. People ran past with handfuls of meat, bread, bags of potato chips, Little Debbie cakes, bottled water, any and every thing they could grab from the gas station down on the corner.
“We don’t have anything,” Mary said, her hands in her hair. “They’re taking it all…”
Judy emptied her bucket on another dead man and then went back for more, passing Mary on the lawn, petrified. She filled and emptied the bucket again, and on the fourth trip Mary grabbed her by the shoulders and shook her hard.
“We have to get food! We’re on our own!”
“Get your hands off me,” Judy said.
“You don’t care! You never cared!”
“I have to find Norman.”
“You can’t just leave!” Mary said, almost on her knees as Judy dragged her along into street. “You can’t leave us!”
“I said get your hands off me!”
“What do we do? Judy! What do we do?”
Judy shook her loose and ran into the street. She shoved at the Boyd boys, unable to do much more, as they clubbed dead men and women, breaking their necks; the dead ran around in confused circles, their heads dangling around their shoulders.
“What are you doing?” Judy cried. “They lived here!”
She tried to grab the bat away from Bobby Boyd, but he was twice her size and he shoved her to the ground. One of the soldiers tripped over her. He pointed his rifle at her, probably thinking she was one of the dead; she thought, It makes no difference now if I get shot or not. It scared her that she thought such things. Of course it mattered; it would matter to her father, and it would matter to Norman.
“Christ, get out of here,” he said, and put his hand on her shoulder. “You’re going to get yourself killed.”
“Mom says you can’t shoot living people.”
“You listen to everything your mom says?” He said, and ran off with the rest of the troops into the neighborhood.
She crawled to her feet. “Norman! Norman!”
She ran down Shelly to the corner of Cunningham, where she always turned to go on to the cemetery, and stopped when she saw the mob fighting over the pumps at the gas station. Dead millers dive bombed the lights under the canopy, as people she knew for years as good and decent folk climbed over other people’s cars with buckets, bottles, anything they could get gas into; they hit and pushed each other, they drove into the cars at the pumps and shoved them out of the way, breaking the gas lines.
“Norman! Norman, where are you?”
The dead burned down to heaps of ash in the middle of the street. They meandered through their yards and into their old homes, shut up like old boxes, the entire neighborhood around the plant now some forgotten attic of the city. The dead wandered into houses with lights and families still inside. Screams broke out like fires everywhere, put out by shots, shots everywhere around Judy like the Fourth of July. The street lights wavered, and everything went dark.
She forced her way out of the crushing crowd on to the sidewalk, and found him on the front stoop of an old, white-sided box house at the end of the street, looking lost.
“Judy, what on earth are you doing out here?”
She put her hands on his. “I was so worried…”
“About me?”
“They’re burning people…”
“I saw,” he said. “I used to live here, you know. I thought… I just wanted to drop by and take a look, but of course they’re not here anymore…”
“It will all blow over,” she said. “Maybe there won’t be a cure, but things will calm down once they realize you’re no threat. Things will go back to normal.”
Norman nodded.
“And you can get a job or something.”
“Judy…”
“Yeah, because you know, the dead will need jobs, and you can learn computers easy, Norman. It’s the easiest thing.”
“I’m not going anywhere, you know.”
“Right.”
“I’m not leaving.”
“Right, so we have time. It’s easy.”
He patted her cheek a little and smiled, but she knew. The rate it was going, with the drinkable water and edible food dwindling, the only person likely to go anywhere was Judy, and not to some remote sanctuary from the virus.
“I’m not scared,” she said. “I mean…I am, but I would be more scared if it wasn’t for you.”
“It’s been nice, the past couple days. All things considered.”
It had been nice, nice in the strangest way, and as bad as it was, she didn’t want it to go back to the way it was.
“Listen, Judy: you need to get on home, and quick.”
“I don’t want to go back there.”
“But it’s not safe out here.”
“Nowhere is safe anymore. If I go back, I’ll never leave, and then I may as well be dead like everybody else.”
Norman nodded, sort of sideways. “Huh. Maybe you being gone a while will wake up ‘em up a bit.”
“I doubt it.”
“So. What would you like to do?”
“I don’t know. It’s kinda’ late, but we could go for a walk. Or we could go to the stadium. I don’t think they’ll mind if we let ourselves in. We could play catch or something.” She laughed. “That probably sounds stupid.”
He smiled. “That sounds perfect.”
©Darby Harn
Darby Harn's blog can be found here.