Read Online A Questionable Shape by Bennett Sims - Free Book Online Page A

wearing pajamas and hospital gowns, if they’re wearing anything at all.’ ‘But that’s my point: what if he’s stuck in his coffin and is too weak to free himself? Even if the undead that you see on the streets aren’t from the cemeteries, that doesn’t mean that there aren’t buried corpses reanimating too.’ ‘So, what? We dig him up and bring him here? You watch the same news I do—his skin flakes off into my glass of milk and I’m dead, dead, then undead and on my way to contaminating you. Even if we take all precautions, we’re still bringing a rotting body into our apartment, to generate filth and disease, to make us and all of our neighbors sick. And the neighbors! As if we could keep him here without their noticing! They’ll hear him moaning the first day, and it won’t be LCDC they call, it’ll be the police. Because what you’re proposing is a crime, Rachel—’ ‘You only ever say my name when you’re mad at me.’ ‘I’m not mad at you, I’m just trying to talk sense. Your father belongs first of all in his coffin and secondly in a quarantine, and if we house him here instead, we’re in violation of the law. This isn’t the Underground Railroad, it’s the Chateau Dijon apartment complex. And if in fact your father has reanimated, he is decidedly not a runaway slave. He is— in your own words , Rachel—a diseased and brain-damaged man, a dangerous man.’ ‘I don’t know where you got the idea that I want to bring him here. I never said that. I just need to see for myself that he hasn’t revived in that horrible box, and, if he has, I need to let him out of it. Then I’ll call LCDC myself and be the first to commit him to a quarantine.’ I sighed. ‘A quarantine,’ I said, ‘someplace safe. And that would be all? Check the cemetery, call LCDC?’ ‘It’s not as if there aren’t visitation rights. There would be no need to bring him to the apartment. If I wanted to see him I could just visit the quarantine. Actually see him, instead of relying on these dreams.’

    It was noon when we arrived at the cemetery. 27 Still abandoned after the outbreak, it was unsupervised by any guard or caretaker, and we were the only visitors—the only graverobbers—there. Alone among the green hills and the orderly rows of headstones, I stood by with the shovel while Rachel, kneeling beside her father’s grave, pressed her ear to the plot of grass above him, as if auscultating the ground for his heartbeat. She was probably listening for a faint and muffled moaning, or for clawing sounds at the coffin lid. She knelt like that for many minutes, then many minutes more, and the whole cemetery seemed deathly quiet indeed as I loomed uselessly above her, the shovel propped against my right shoulder. Whether she heard anything there she didn’t say. What I heard was her breathing and my own. I was thinking, then, about how Rachel would react to the sight of her undead father. The sight of his white eyes. If he actually had reanimated, I wondered, and if she actually did
end up hearing something; if she actually did insist on digging down and if she actually opened that coffin lid—would we see the same thing? Would Rachel see, with me, the awesome otherworldliness in those eyes? While she knelt there with her ear to the grass, I braced myself for anything, including the shock of a pale hand bursting out of the soil. Though what eventually ended up happening was just that Rachel stood up and stretched and suggested that we leave. She seemed disappointed, but then, she didn’t cry, and on the ride home she was even able to announce—as if weighing the other side of the thing—that by this point he was probably merely a skeleton anyway.
    So that is where Rachel is coming from. That is where she is coming from when in the kitchen this morning