Nocturne

a Shorting the Undead title

by Saul Tanpepper

Nocturne

a Shorting the Undead title

by Saul Tanpepper

Copyright © 2011, 2012 by Saul Tanpepper

All rights reserved.

1st Published December 12, 2011 by Brinestone Press, San Martin, CA 95046

Cover design Brinestone Press Copyright © 2011

PUBLISHER’S NOTE

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, business establishments, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form, or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book. The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book via the Internet or via any other means without the permission of the publisher is illegal and punishable by law. Please purchase only authorized electronic editions, and do not participate in or encourage electronic piracy of copyrighted materials. Your support of the author’s rights is appreciated.

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Tanpepper, Saul (2011-12-12). Nocturne

Brinestone Press Kindle Edition

Nocturne is a selected title from Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: a Menagerie of Macabre Mini-Fiction

(Dec 2011)

For more information about this and other titles by this author:

http://www.tanpepperwrites.com

Nocturne

When the Mayfly Nymph sheds his lacquered skin and spreads his nascent wings, so recommences the Imago’s frantic dance. But the Nocturne’s reel is quickly run. Dawn whispers upon the freshened World and, like sun-kissed wind on honeyed Dew, evaporates his mating song. Thereafter shall He falter, worn and tattered, nearly spent. He makes one last midflight conjugal stab, then flutters to the ground, to settle on winters’ past rotting leaves. And there, amongst the anonymous shells of those who danced before him, He dies.

—from La Danse Éphémères

by Jacobin G. de Bessieres, 1842

†   †   †

The Man had already cheated Death once this morning, so when he turned away from the radiant face of his wife and stepped off the porch and into the busy-bright flow of the September day, the crisp, loud clack of the hard rubber soles of his shoes on the sidewalk sounded to him like an affirmation of life and living and all things that are vibrant. The breathless air was crisp and clear. He held his gaze determinedly forward, in front of himself. A sort of a smile touched the corners of his face. Today will be different, he assured himself, even though he knew it wouldn’t be. Before he had even reached the front sidewalk, his footsteps sounded to him like the ceaseless ticking of a clock.

He cheated Death like a man cheats at poker, by knowing he will someday be caught; a man who plays at the game long enough and cheats often enough knows it is inevitable. Maybe not this hand or the next, but eventually. Sooner. Later. The game must end: win, lose or draw; whether by fair or by foul.

He didn’t fear the end of the game—not really—only the waiting, and the form it might take.

You don’t get to choose.

That he’d even woken up at all that morning, that he’d become aware that the night had ended and he himself was still alive and in apparent excellent health, had been a cause for some personal distress. But then again, just the idea of dying in his bed so ignominiously splayed was enough to propel him out of it, away from his still-beautiful wife and her tranquil face, away from her gently rising and falling breast. He slipped from beneath the suffocating blankets and out into the brittleness of a morning so frigid that it foretold what was sure to be a bitterly cold winter.

The temperature hadn’t fallen quite enough overnight to trigger the heater at six o’clock, but it was nonetheless cold enough. The thought crossed his mind that maybe he’d go ahead and bump the thermostat up anyway, but when he remembered that he hadn’t been down in the cellar to clean the filter since last fall, images of the accumulated dust flowing into the vents and carrying diseased mold spores made him stop. Besides, attempting to navigate the rickety cellar stairs in such a state—the inebriation of sleep still upon him, his muscles stiff and tremulous—would be foolhardy. Is that how he imagined his death? Lying on the clay earth at the bottom of a set of narrow wooden steps?

He’d clean the filter tonight, after a full meal, if he was in such a capable state and so inclined. He made a mental note to stop and pick up a face mask at the hardware store.

Arms held close across his chest, he hurried into the bathroom, naked but for his underwear and tee shirt. His hard, pale, bony feet resented the hard, bare, cold floor. He walked on the sides and balls of his heels, his toes curling up. The toilet seat was just as unforgivingly cold and hard.

After the usual morning ritual, which he always carefully inspected for blood that was perpetually never there, he was overcome with an almost manic sense of urgency. He’d tried masturbating, finishing what he hadn’t been able to the night before in bed. But the effort was barely worth it, hardly satisfying and laden with guilt. It was a waste of another precious five minutes, self-indulgent minutes that he’d have to hurry to make up. He hated hurrying; it made one careless, take reckless chances. It invited risks.

Using his underwear, he meticulously cleaned up the spend from the floor, then carefully folded and disposed of it far into the depths of the laundry hamper. He shaved at the sink using a fresh disposable razor. In the middle of his shower, finding himself still in an aroused state, he considered having another go of it. He gazed at the soap in his hands, but the thought of slipping on the wet floor quickly resurrected thoughts of hospital stays and beeping instruments with wires and tubes that intruded upon the body. The urge passed. By the time he was finished with the shower and dried, the bedroom was empty. He could smell fresh coffee drifting in from the kitchen. He dressed quickly, but carefully.

The couple passed a wordless breakfast. The empty highchair between them made it impossible to talk comfortably.

When he reached the end of the front walk, he decided he’d rather drive to work this morning, instead of taking the subway. He told himself it was half a dozen in one hand, six in the other, but that wasn’t exactly true. On good days, when the traffic was light, the car was faster. But there were always so many accidents. Still, he’d lost that five minutes; he’d be lucky to get to the station in time for his train.

The car was in the garage. He preferred to keep the rolling door open. Carbon monoxide could kill without warning. And there was also the risk of gas fumes evaporating off of the lawnmower. It had been a couple weekends since he’d spilled some onto the clippings bag while filling the tank, and the reek of the gas still permeated the air. One couldn’t be cautious enough, not when the fumes could accumulate in closed spaces such as the garage. A spark from the engine was all the fumes would need to ignite. So he kept the door open, even though, in this neighborhood, it meant inviting other risks.

The car was a modest, gray Nissan sedan, four-door, equipped with power steering and brakes but with manual windows and locks. One never knew when an electrical failure might occur, trapping the driver inside. He’d read about cars rolling into lakes, the water pressure sealing the passengers inside to slowly die of suffocation.

He checked the backseat through the window before unlocking the door and throwing in his jacket. He pulled his seatbelt tight, adjusted the mirrors. He inserted the key into the ignition, turned it, put the car into gear, backed slowly out onto the road. These were acts he’d performed a thousand thousand times before, but he was just as careful, just as attentive, this time as any other.

He was surprised by how little traffic there was on the road this morning, and so he decided to go ahead and take the highway. Usually, there were too many cars, too many of them moving in too many directions. Too little road. But today there were far fewer vehicles and the thought crossed his mind that maybe he’d forgotten a holiday or something. He wracked his brain trying to think what was special about this particular date, or this day of the month, or this day of the week. But nothing came to him. It was going to torment him the rest of the way to work unless he satisfied the question with some sort of answer.

There was no mention of a holiday anywhere on the radio.

His cell phone was in the inside breast pocket of his jacket, and the jacket was on the seat behind him. He reached over, still keeping his eyes on the road, felt for the jacket, found it. He flipped it over to find the pocket, felt it sliding off the seat. He brought the jacket up to the front with him, but it was no easier. The jacket was a tangled mess, the pocket lost somewhere in the middle of it.

He had to take his eyes off the road just for a moment. He didn’t like doing it, but the traffic was light, and there were no other cars within a hundred feet of him. He could feel the damn thing wrapped up somewhere in there, but where the hell was the pocket? His fingers fumbled. Ah, there! Finally his hand found it, slipped in and there was the familiar hard rectangle of the phone. He pulled it out, flipped it open, held the screen before him. The sun behind him was too bright; the screen was washed out, unreadable. He lowered the phone to finish punching in the numbers.

It was only a fraction of a second, maybe two, that his eyes were off the road, but it was just long enough and just at the wrong moment that he missed seeing the red pickup cut in front of him and slam on its brakes. A fraction of a second. A premonitory image passed through his mind, and he rammed his foot on his own brake, but even without seeing he knew he was too late. The gray Nissan slammed into the back of the truck, the front end diving underneath, the back end lifting up. The car catapulted through the air, up and over the pickup, shearing the truck’s cab off as it went.

This is what the man saw and thought and felt, almost as if he was watching from somewhere outside of himself:

The car twisted. It began to flip, rolling side to side: passenger, roof, driver, wheels, over and over again. And finally the car came to a rest on four flat tires, the hood popped open and steam gushing from a ruptured hose. The smell of gasoline filled the air. He could see himself, his face bloody, his glasses lost in the wreckage. Other than a bunch of cuts and bruises, he seemed to be all right. He somehow managed to release the seatbelt, kicked open the door—thank God for manual locks—and stumbled out into the flow of traffic.

He tried to yell at himself, to tell him to get back in the car. Traffic sped past him, blurs of color, horns blaring and tires screeching. He wanted to tell the man that was himself that it was unsafe to stand on the road like that. And then he was suddenly inside of himself again, realizing the foolishness of his mistake. As he looked up, a semi loaded down with logs barreled toward him.

They had had a son. He remembered this as the shiny silver grill of the truck grew large in his vision, blinding him in a white flash. They had had a son.

He began to weep.

“Honey?”

The sound of his wife’s voice in his ear startled him from the images passing through his mind. He blinked, saw that he was still on the highway. His exit was approaching. He was almost at work.

“Honey, is something wrong?”

He cleared his throat. “No…dear.” He decided that there wasn’t a holiday after all. “I just wanted to… I wanted to say I’ll see you tonight.”

He could almost see the look on her face, the confusion. He never called while on the road.

The line was silent for a moment, then: “Pick up a steak, would you, on your way home? I’ll barbecue it for dinner.”

The cancer warning on the side of the bottle of lighter fluid flashed through his mind. “’Kay, hon,” he said.

They had had a son and had given him a good, strong name.

He lifted his hand to wipe his face, but he knew his cheeks would be dry. He signaled for his exit instead, looking for a red pickup in his mirror. There wasn’t one.

†   †   †

On a normal day, the Man would process over a hundred claims. But it wasn’t a normal day. He spent the majority of the morning away from his desk, away from his computer. There were meetings of all sorts, tiring, redundant, useless meetings, during which his boss recited figures of little significance to him and which ultimately held no meaning anyway. Why was he here? His mind drifted.

It took him back to his office, which was on the thirty-fifth floor, just four stories from the top of the building. The window afforded a decent view of the city below, but there was nothing decent to see there. The iron tangle of the train yards far below him, the tracks knotted into an incoherent pattern of ins and outs, comings and goings. The thick muddy ribbon of river. And, in the distance, a wood which seemed to him overly dark and oppressive. The whole town, in fact, depressed him to his core; so deeply, in fact, that he was scarcely even aware of it. All he knew was that he was glad he didn’t live in this horrid town anymore. He had to work here, and that was enough.

The conference room was on the opposite side of the building. It was through this window that he now gazed, at that wretched, solitary hill in the distance, its bald crown reaching nearly level with his eye. There was a cemetery there; he could see the white stones shining there like stubble on a green chin, and he reflected that this was a town built around a shrine for the dead, and that the whole of it was sliced into halves by a river, and then haphazardly stitched together by train tracks, like some Frankensteinian monster clothed in the fabric of that melancholy wood. If there was a pattern to this, he was at a loss to explain it.

He contemplated the risks of spending his days in such a tall building as this, the tallest in this city. There were the obvious dangers: fires, lightning strikes, earthquakes. Although, if he was honest with himself, the last time an earthquake had struck the area, Truman had been president. But rather than reassuring him, this knowledge only made him more anxious. Did the intervening years of quiescence increase the risk of another trembler? He thought about the quakes they’d been having lately in other parts of the country: Oklahoma, New Jersey, Wisconsin. It was unusual to hear about them. Maybe the world was falling apart.

Someone got up and drew the shades and dimmed the lights. A woman he barely recognized and whose name he couldn’t remember, started giving a Power Point presentation. Her slides quickly grew tiresome, a collection of colorful pie graphs and charts with zigging and zagging lines, as if prophesying their own escape routes, and words that might as well have been written in a foreign language. But what had caught his eye was the laser pointer she was using. He watched the bright flicker of the dot as it danced across the screen, fascinated by it. It reminded him of a spark, a tiny spot of St. Elmo’s fire. He wondered if the laser would burn a hole in the screen if held against it long enough in one place, like a magnifying glass focused on a piece of paper in the bright sunlight.

Someone shifted restlessly behind him, coughed quietly, distracting him. He reached for his water bottle, and that’s when he saw the tiny flash of light in the sky, far out over the town. It was through a sliver of a gap in the window coverings that he saw this. A plane, he thought. It seemed awfully low.

But then it disappeared behind the blind.

He thought the woman might be finishing up. Someone was asking her a question and she was nodding thoughtfully, waiting for the asker to finish. No, wait, it wasn’t a question after all, but a long, drawn out comment whose point got lost somewhere long before the speaker gave up. The woman reached down to her computer and gave it a tap. Another image wiped across the screen: a table, more numbers. The red dot buzzed gnat-like over them, circling certain figures, ignoring others. The Man took off his glasses, pinched his nose. He set the glasses on his papers on the table. He stretched his fingers, re-crossed his legs, rotated his head, back and forth, removing the stiffness. Finally, someone got up to turn the lights on.

There was a blinding flash, a sound of thunder and tearing metal, incredibly loud, deafening. He was on his back on the floor, staring at the ceiling, and he could smell burning plastic, burning stone, molten steel, charred flesh. Papers drifted like snow through the air around him. He became aware of shaking; the building was swaying and trembling around him. People were screaming. Burning jet fuel dripped from the lights, down the walls, searing them. His clothes were on fire. His flesh was burning away, but he couldn’t feel any of it. He stumbled to his knees, then to his feet, not bothering to pat out the flames. The woman who had been giving the talk was gone, vaporized away. Only a negative shadow of her was left on the wall where she had stood, a bright red stain splattered on the blackened and tattered screen, and as he crouched there he wondered about her for the first time since meeting her that morning, this woman from Accounting who spoke with a slight mid-western accent and smelled of Irish Spring. Was she married? Did she have any children? Was it a son? He wondered what the boy would be like.

There was an awful screech as the building jolted, tilted. Someone reached up, tore down the blinds in its—he couldn’t tell the gender—attempt to stand. Its body was shredded by the shattered glass. The wind was a vortex sucking the paper out the window. A shadow streaked by, dropping out of the sky somewhere above them, plummeting to the ground somewhere below. Then there was another, this one a burning comet. It was screaming.

How could he still be alive? He looked at the charred remains of his hands, at the dull white and gray bone underneath. Numbness. His hands found his cheeks and pulled the hardened flesh away in chunks. How could he still be alive?

They had had a son. They had given him a good, strong name. And the son had been as strong as his name.

Someone tapped his arm. He looked up, startled.

“Any recommendations before we wrap up for lunch?”

The Man shook his head.

“Good, then let’s break. Everyone, meet back here at one-thirty.”

He gathered his papers, his glasses and his pen, and trailed the others as they filed out of the room.

†   †   †

In the past, he’d occasionally patronize the café on the ground floor of his building. They made good sandwiches there; good cookies, too. On the way in some mornings, he’d buy a coffee from the cart as a special treat to himself, but he hadn’t in a while; the coffee in the break room upstairs had a permanent bitter taste to it, metallic and thin, as if something toxic had leached into the water from the pipes.

These days he rarely ate or drank anything at all, opting instead to spend his break time at the window in his office, hands clasped behind his back or in his pockets. He’d watch the people far below him, thrilling at the feeling of vertigo that would pierce his belly the first time he’d look down for the day, trying to trick himself into re-experiencing that feeling again but never quite succeeding; he could apparently only scare himself once a day. So he’d give up and just stand there, thinking of all the people on the sidewalks as tiny ants, how easily they could be wiped into oblivion. He knew it was cliché to have such thoughts, especially when he remembered how resilient people could sometimes be. Then, as always, his thoughts would inevitably lead to his son.

But not today. Today, he would be one of those ants. Let the giants far above him crush him.

He passed through the glassed front doors and out from the stunted shadow of the building. Looking up, he thought he saw sheets of paper floating down toward him, dozens of white sheets, but the shapes whirling above him caught the updrafts and did not fall. He stood and watched them for a moment as the crowd swirled past him on the sidewalk. Then, as if aware of his notice, the gulls wheeled around the corner and out of sight, leaving only the hard, grid-like shapes of shiny silver and black rising into an infinity of blue and the blazing white spot of the sun reflecting off the adjacent building, so bright in the center that it looked like a black hole.

He didn’t have a plan for where to go. He turned right, though he could have as easily turned left, but since the flow of the traffic was mostly right that’s the way he went.

Where were all these people going? Where did they come from? What were they hiding?

He stuffed his hands in his pockets and wondered these things as he walked. And it was only after ten minutes had passed and he had waited to cross at several stop lights before he realized he was heading downhill. He had become like water, finding the path of least resistance. But where would he settle? The buildings were getting older and smaller and the alleyways narrower. There were fewer people out walking, and those he did see weren’t dressed in suits of black or gray as were those around his uptown office, but jeans and sweat shirts and puffy winter coats, more often stained or torn or poorly sized than otherwise.

His nose led him to a small diner scratched out of the side of a parking garage, its windows decorated with a winter scene, the spray-on snow so obviously years-old by the messages people had inscribed in it during lunches and dinners past. The air smelled of fried pork and hot chocolate and, for a moment, he thought of going in.

He looked in through the glass, at the cheerful red and white checkered tablecloths and the mismatched cheap metal and plastic chairs, and his stomach growled. But then he realized that he was being stared back at by a man with a black mustache and a dark look in his eyes. The Man stumbled away from the window, knocking a woman who was walking past so that she almost dropped the plastic bag in her arms. It was laden with groceries. He heard the clack of glass bottles come from inside of it. She grunted, stumbled, gave him a nasty sideways glance, then hurried on.

Minutes later, he found himself at the river’s edge. Silty water swirled past him, fifteen feet below the vertical face of the unprotected concrete bank. A car passed on the bridge twenty feet overhead, a hush of tires on stone followed by a rapid click-clack as it reached the metal junction of bridge and road. A wind blew stale and cold off the water; the place had a desolate, abandoned feel to it.

No, that wasn’t right. It didn’t feel empty, it felt…devoid of life. Devoid of life and yet not empty. He didn’t feel alone.

The tattered remains of old pigeon nests fluttered from the girders of the overpass, painted white by uncounted years’ worth of shit. But the nests were currently empty. The shadows beneath the bridge seemed to shrink and harden, becoming cold and secretive then graying as clouds cleared the sun. He thought of them as doorways. But for what kind of nightmare creatures?

On the water, a dead animal floated past. Possum. How did the thing die?

He heard a siren somewhere, and it grew louder. Soon, it passed overhead, and the red of its lights flashed in the windows of the warehouse on the opposite bank. Then it passed and faded into the distance.

That’s when he heard the laughter. It was soft and low at first, as if the breeze itself were chuckling, or the bridge was sighing. It was joined by another, this one louder and echoing off the cement wall opposite from where he stood. He still couldn’t see anyone, but he knew he was surrounded.

“Are you lost, old man?” the shadows teased. The words were a slap to his pride, but not because he was lost—he knew where he was, roughly, and how to get back—but because he didn’t think of himself as old. The voice had sounded playful, spirited.

A second voice called out to him, female this time, sounding sultry and distinctly more threatening: “Hello there, lover boy.”

“Who’s there?”

There was a round of barking laughter coming from no one place, a half dozen distinct mouths blending into one, sounding like a hundred braying dogs. The palms of his hands tingled; his scalp tingled. He turned to leave, found his way blocked.

The boy couldn’t have been older than fifteen. He was swinging a chain, and the Man could see attached to the end of it a tangle of sharp metal scraps. It looked like spiders at first, a giant cluster of newly hatched spiders. But then he saw that it was forks and steak knives and baling wire and random metal fragments, all twisted through the links of the chain, crumpled into a ball of torture. It was not meant to kill, but to maim.

“Going somewhere?” the boy crooned.

The Man turned around and there was the girl. He was struck for a moment by her appearance. Even beneath the makeup of dark circles around her bloodshot eyes and ratty hair and pale skin, he thought she might have once been pretty. The dirty white tee shirt she wore strained against her fulsome breasts, and there were holes in it through which he could see the telltale runes of ancient battles written on her skin. The nails on her hands were broken and had recently bled; there was no bleeding at the moment. Like the boy, the rest of her costume was an industrial mixture of black and metal, but her hands were empty. So were her eyes.

There was nowhere for him to run. There was only the river.

“Go ahead,” the boy said, as if reading the Man’s mind.

From cracks and holes in the walls, more of them emerged, six, maybe eight more, a jumble of young boys and girls made genderless by their uniform depravity. They looked virile and deadly.

“What do you want?”

The boy’s lips separated into a smile that showed amusement but held no humor. The chain in his hands rattled and clanked. The Man could hear the others approaching, eerily quiet, trapping him in the space beneath the overpass, blocking all but the one route of escape, as if testing him.

He stood his ground. Death, he thought. Is this how you show your hand?

They came then, quickly and without remorse, falling upon him like starved beasts, biting and slashing at his face, tearing the clothes from him. He felt the flesh on his arms tear away, felt the boy’s mace rake his back. He did not scream, and neither did his attackers. They brutalized him without a sound, just the grunts of their blows and the low hiss of their ecstatic breathing.

Then they were gone. He was left standing, broken and bleeding, pieces of him lying all about his feet, shameful that he had been unable to defend himself, too old and too frail. He felt himself begin to fall, out over the precipice of that concrete river bank, the water rushing up at him. Then he was jerked back by the collar of his jacket.

“Hey, man! You okay?”

He gave his head a quick shake, turned it toward his rescuer. He blinked in surprise.

“One too many lunchtime martinis, eh?” the boy said, chuckling.

“I’m not…” The Man cleared his throat. “I’m sorry. I was… Thanks. I guess I wasn’t paying attention to where I was going.”

The boy nodded. He was dressed in black slacks and a tan leather jacket. He wore an earpiece that blinked a bright blue dot every few seconds. “Lucky I happened to be walking by just now, or you’d have had a nasty swim. The closest place to climb out of the river’s not for a few hundred yards upstream.”

The Man gave the boy a wan smile and shrugged. “Thanks again.”

“Better watch yourself around here,” the boy called after him. He gestured at the river and the Man nodded as if he understood. “Not the safest place to be taking a stroll, if you know what I mean.”

He did.

He thought the boy might finish by calling him “old man,” but he didn’t, and he felt an urge to ask him for his name. But, again, he didn’t. What difference would it make?

The rest of the day in the office passed uneventfully. The meetings ended around two-thirty and he spent the balance of the afternoon at his computer trying to catch up. He managed to get himself into a rhythm, approving or denying claims with an almost mechanical fervor, barely glancing at the forms and the names, which meant nothing to him, emptying his mind of stray thoughts, welcoming the blankness of the job and the numbness it provided. Approve one, deny three; approve one, deny four. Deny, deny, deny.

At five o’clock, the timer on his watch beeped. He finished with the last claim and shut down his computer, waiting until the quiet whir of the hard drive stopped and the orange light blinked for the last time.

Outside, the shadows were long on the land; the sun—he could just see it since his window faced south—was low on the horizon. Taillights and headlights, blinking red and white, threaded their way over the distant highway overpass; beneath them, the bright white dot of a train’s engine pulling into the freight yard. He watched the scene for a while before remembering that he was supposed to stop and pick up a steak for dinner, and he sighed as he pulled his jacket from the back of his chair.

The halls were already quiet, the lights in many of the offices dimmed and the doors closed and locked. Somewhere he could hear the furious clack of fingers on a keyboard; a water jug gurgled. Lonely sounds.

He made his way to the elevator, waited for the doors to open, pushed the button for the basement. As he waited to descend, the elevator lurched. He imagined it falling, dropping him to his death. The car slid to a gentle stop, released him into the parking garage. As he crossed the empty space, he listened to the clack of his shoes on the pavement, the soft echoes and chirps and car doors closing in places out of his line of sight. He listened for sounds that did not belong, and his eyes scanned the shadows and columns where an attacker could be hiding. But he was soon at the side of his car, then safely deposited inside it (after checking first). Now he was making his way to the exit of the parking garage. Now through the gate and out onto the darkening streets.

The market where his wife did their grocery shopping was on the main road in Stepford, the next town over from where they lived. He took the exit before his usual one and made his way there. The street was packed with rush hour traffic, and it seemed as if every light was against him. It was after six-thirty by the time he pulled into the parking lot, and the first nimbuses of evening fog were beginning to appear beneath the streetlamps.

The market was small, brightly lit, stocked mostly with local produce and patronized mostly by young people whose jobs required multiple cell phones and frequent travel to eastern lands; the meat department was off to one side. He waited in line to be served, standing behind an obese woman with thinning blond hair and a grumpy Pomeranian in her arms. Despite the chill in the air, she was wearing only a thin dress, and her bra strap showed. It was paisley, he saw. He stared at the folds on the back of her neck, waiting as she ordered a variety of cured meats, asking for extra thick slices. Jingly music played over the ceiling speaker.

“Two steaks,” he told the butcher when his number was called. He gestured to the display.

“Sirloin or t-bone?”

He frowned, uncertain. “Sirloin, I guess.”

The Man watched as the butcher lifted a pair of the steaks from the tray and placed them on a sheet of waxed paper on the scale. The slabs draped over the side and the top one slipped off and onto the stainless steel countertop. The butcher moved it back. The Man could see traces of dried and congealed blood where the steak had dropped, deep red. So very red.

The tang of old meat and decay came to him, warm and sweet. He hadn’t noticed it before.

“That all?”

He took the wrapped steaks, shaking his head. “Thanks.” On his way to the cashier, he added a bottle of lighter fluid to his basket and some matches. He read the warnings on the packages while he waited to pay for his purchases.

When he walked in the front door of their house, his wife greeted him with a smile. She took his briefcase and the steaks and disappeared into the kitchen with them. He wandered up to their bedroom, avoiding looking at the closed door of the room that they had decorated with so much happiness and anticipation years before. He thought he heard a noise coming from inside it, but he kept his eyes forward, even though he was unable to think about anything other than the son they had had and how they had given him a good, strong name. About how strong the son had been.

It was they who were weak.

He changed slowly out of his work clothes, carefully unknotting the gray tie and folding it and laying it tidily next to the others in the top drawer of his dresser. Next, he pulled off his dress shirt and white tee shirt. He sat on the bed and untied the stiff waxy laces of his shoes. He placed them on the floor in the closet. Off came the black socks, then the trousers.

Now he could smell the meat on the grill, and he called down to the Woman to cook his rare.

“You sure, honey? You usually like it medium well.”

He told her he wanted it bloody tonight, knowing that she would oblige him by cooking both steaks the same way. In the past, he had worried about contracting mad cow disease—what was it called? Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, his mind whispered—but the threat seemed too distant anymore, too unlikely. It was a slow disease, not quick to the kill. They would go mad long before dying of it.

He wandered into the bathroom to drop the dirty clothes into the hamper, and the faint smell of chlorine drifted out if its depths, and he grunted. The man standing at the mirror looking at him was sorely middle aged, paunchy. His chest had a saggy look to it; the breasts were softened like cheese, and each came to a sharp point terminating with his pale and strangely pinched-looking nipples. The forest of hair had recently begun to sprout strange, kinky albinos, which he had harvested at first before giving up. He watched as the man in the mirror pulled on a Valley Tech sweatshirt that was a good fifteen years old by now. It smelled of him and a little bit of her. The man’s legs were white and thin.

He watched as the man in the mirror pulled off his underpants. He watched as he grew erect. The Man knew the Woman would expect him to make love to her tonight—she always did—and his erection nodded accusingly at him. It listed off to one side, as if it were some kind of divining rod pointing the way to Salvation. He watched as the man took hold of himself. He watched the man begin to weep.

There was no looking the Woman in the eye at dinner. She sat across from him and the empty highchair was there to one side. She had pulled it from the corner and it seemed to loom over them as they ate.

He wasn’t hungry. He watched as she cut into her steak, her arm sawing with relish, her jaw working the meat. He watched as the blood leaked from inside the slab and spilled onto her plate, warm and red and soaking into the potatoes, staining the pile of saltine crackers she seemed unable to enjoy a meal without. He watched her finish her supper with a glass of red wine.

Hours later, he watched as she winced with the first signs of discomfort, cramps turning to distress, pain becoming agony. She clutched her stomach, stumbling to the bathroom where she vomited into the toilet for a full half hour before calling to him. He stood in the doorway and watched.

The next two hours she spent sitting on the toilet, alternately groaning and crying out. Finally, exuding a sickly sweet aroma and bleeding from every orifice, she crumbled to the floor.

The illness emptied her out. The deadly bacteria had prepared its new home. She hung on for weeks; she wouldn’t die.

“Dinner,” she called from the bedroom door, startling him. He realized he’d left the bathroom door open. Had she seen the man in the mirror?

He sighed, looked down at the limp flesh in his hand. It was just as well. His shoulder was sore. He pulled up his underwear, pulled on a pair of sweatpants from the dresser, headed down to eat.

She asked him about his day. He provided a cautious answer, carefully gauging her response, her body language. There was no sign from her what she was thinking or feeling. She placed his dinner on the table; when he saw the blood pooling beneath the steak his throat constricted and he nearly gagged, but he said nothing. The highchair had been pulled back into the corner. He couldn’t stop looking at it.

They had had a son, some years past. They had given him a good strong name. And he had been strong, hadn’t he?

They were ones who were weak.

The Man was weakest of all.

†   †   †

That evening, after the dinner dishes had been scraped and washed and dried and put away, after the trash had been emptied and the table wiped cleaned, they found themselves in front of the television. Something was on, but the Man didn’t know what it was. His eyes were unseeing; his ears unhearing. He thought only of Death, of its various forms: radiation coming from the TV screen, leaking from the phone, spewing from the cell towers that surrounded them. He thought about radon gas seeping from the ground and formaldehyde off-gassing from the cabinets and carbon monoxide spewing from the stove. He thought about tree branches falling on them from hundred-year-old maple trees in the yard and earthquakes (even though the likelihood of one was vanishingly small) and of lightning strikes and floods. He thought of exploding gas mains and terrorists and home invasions. He’d given up thinking about food poisoning. That didn’t look like it was happening.

He realized, like a man realizes he is in a dream, that the Woman was talking to him. She said something, but all he managed to hear was, “nine o’clock,” which had meaning enough. Nine o’clock was their bedtime.

“I’ll be up soon,” he told her, watching her climbing the stairs in her nightgown, the red one tonight. He saw that she was still young and attractive, despite the hardness of the past couple of years, and something deep inside of him stirred, a longing to be with her.

They made love gently at first, tentatively, as if they were making love for the first time. There was a feeling of surprise in it, a newfound sense of discovery, of uncharted territory. Her hands were soft and warm, her breath hot on his neck and his chest and his thighs, and he sighed, arching himself into her, again and again. And the whole while, the blinking stop light outside their window cast dull shadows on their wall, as if keeping time.

The pain was not intense at first, just a dull heaviness in his chest, a hand holding him down. Listen, it seemed to say. Slow down. Wait. But soon its grip on him tightened. He felt as if it were a fist clutching his heart, ripping it from his chest. The pain radiated up and into his neck until it felt as if his jaw might shatter. At the same time, the pain expanded down his arm until his fingers were not his own but belonged to the pain.

He knew what was happening: he was having a heart attack.

So this, he thought, this is how the game ends. He closed his eyes and sighed as the Woman bucked and swayed over him.

Then, darkness.

He felt her shift in the bed next to him. He opened his eyes. The clock told him it was almost ten-thirty. He could feel her hand resting upon his chest, her thigh reaching over to settle upon his legs. He could see her looking at him, her hair falling over her pale skin, those delicate lines that had borne him a son. They looked at each other for a long time, not saying anything. Her hand slowly drifted down.

She finally managed to arouse him, despite his anguish, despite his resistance. And when she had finished, he rolled over, turning his back on her. He wondered if she knew he had held back. She had to know; she had to know why.

Later, he heard her get up and leave the room. He heard a sound like soft crying drifting down the hallway. He didn’t want to get up, but he couldn’t help himself. He followed the sound into the back of the house, into the room which they had turned into a nursery.

She was sitting in the rocking chair, the one he had gotten for her when she got pregnant with their son. Their strong son with the strong name.

The sound was coming from somewhere near her neck.

He remembered something he had once read. It was in a strange, old book found at a garage sale. It had been written in French, but he had learned the language. A book about insects. He remembered what it had said about mosquitoes and the voracious appetites of the newly hatched nymphs, how they would eat the carcasses of their parents.

He knew that the sound wasn’t crying, but suckling.

For a long time, he didn’t move. He couldn’t step another foot into the room, toward…that thing, that angry red creature they had created, that nymphic thing.

He was so exhausted, so very tired. He had cheated Death. Or maybe it was Death who had cheated him. The Man would call the bluff.

There was no red this time, just the cold gray of the gun in his hand.

And another way to die.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

My undying thanks to the devoted staff of Brinestone Press for their keen eye and gentle but firm touch in helping me bring this story to life, for believing every step of the way that I could raise the dead.

To my devoted fans and followers on Twitter (http://twitter.com/saultanpepper), especially the zombie apocalypse junkies. Everything’s better with the #zombie hashtag.

My deepest gratitude goes to my family for their unflagging support. Without them, I would not be able to create worlds with such richness to them.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Saul Tanpepper is a writer of speculative fiction for teens and adults. A former molecular geneticist originally from Upstate New York, he now calls Northern California home.

If you enjoyed Nocturne, please check out the short story collection Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: a Menagerie of Macabre Mini-Fiction, available in digital and print form from Amazon.com. Additional titles from this collection also available singly in electronic format.

Also stay tuned for his zombie pandemic novel Touch, with a planned release date of May 2012.

For more information about the author and his writings, please check out his website: http://www.tanpepperwrites.com.

Other titles available by Saul Tanpepper

Shorting the Undead and Other Horrors: a Menagerie of Macabre mini-fiction

Eight terrifying tales of the Undead and the Unliving.

Includes:

Occupied (a supermoto champion is trapped on an airplane with the Undead)

Mr. November (four boys, a haunted house, and the World Series on Halloween night)

The Headhunter (a story of redemption, salvation, and zombie hunters)

The Object of Her Obsession (a young woman's desire is so strong it reaches beyond the grave)

Nocturne (a man with a dark secret and an even darker obsession)

Outsourced (a dark comedy about the economy and zombies that crave more than brains)

Open Wide (payback comes in the form of a dentist's drill)

Golgotha (a scientist's attempt at a zombie antidote goes horribly awry)

Approximately 88,000 words

For older teens and adults

Available in paperback and digital formats

Other titles available by Saul Tanpepper

The Headhunter

A year has passed since the Zombie Uprising and Headhunter Bill Hawkins won’t rest until he finds the monster responsible for murdering his wife and fulfills her last request to take its head. But the constant danger, the hiding, the brutality of his profession, all wear on him. Soon after joining up with a preacher-turned-hunter who's convinced the Uprising was God’s Rapture, Bill's resolve suffers another major blow. He begins to doubt his purpose. Is he doing the right thing? More importantly, will he be able to act when he finally finds the young, female monster responsible for his wife's death?

Other titles available by Saul Tanpepper

The Object of Her Obsession

There's something about Felipe-Janssen knives, the fancy ones you used to be able to get at Milano's onTenth Street in downtown Grand Forks. My Uncle Phil got us a set of them for Christmas a half dozen years back, the ones with the guaranteed Eversharp™ blades that come in one of those fancy velvet-lined boxes.

Most of them are gone now. Misplaced or thrown away. All except the filleter. I was always so careful

to keep that one hidden away. I wanted to make sure it wouldn't get lost or misused like the others.

Three summers. That's how long seventeen-year-old Emma Harris has been secretly watching Jesse, the boy her uncle hires to fix the fences on their remote North Dakota ranch. Now, three years after her father's death, Emma is ready to make him hers. There's just one problem, and it's her mother.

Other titles available by Saul Tanpepper

A Thing for Zombies

It's funny, the things you get used to seeing, now that they've passed the Undead Amnesty laws. Funny how quickly you learn to ignore them. But then one of them walks in like this and you realize there are some things you'll just never get used to.

Like zombies wearing g-strings.

Seventeen-year-old Kevin Velasco is about to have his heart broken.

But if crushing on his lifelong best friend, Jamie, weren't bad enough, she's obsessed with someone else. Or...some thing: the Undead. How can a guy compete against that?

So, when an attractive young zombie shows up at the pool where they lifeguard, Kevin becomes desperate. But his pushing forces Jamie to make a mind-blowing confession, leaving Kevin to wonder how far she's willing to go for the Undead.

And, more importantly, how far is he willing to go to win her back?

Other titles available by Saul Tanpepper

Flawless

Beauty is fleeting, but dead is forever.

For Edgemont High senior, Claire Fontaine, being beautiful isn't enough, she has to be flawless.

After the horrific death of another Edgemont teen under suspicious circumstances, Claire finds herself in that most unthinkable of situations: single and with the senior ball just weeks away. Luckily, a new boy arrives in town just in time to rescue her. Not only is Trevor hot, like Claire, he's perfect. In fact, his perfection is almost unnatural.

But the closer Claire gets to Trevor, the more danger she finds herself in. The target of an unknown assailant with a mysterious agenda, Claire must decide whether being flawless is worth the sacrifice.