TWENTY-SEVEN

I found our friendly neighborhood zombie in the kitchen, where he was dismantling our toaster. "Don't start," he said without looking up. There were screwdrivers and other shiny things scattered all over the near counter. "It's not like you eat toast or bagels, anyway."

"Like I care what you're doing with an appliance? If you're looking for more braaaaain stimulation, how about tackling some of my laundry?"

Marc laughed, the first genuine laugh I'd heard from the guy since he went toes up in his bedroom last week. He set down the screwdriver and picked up a water glass filled with clear blue liquid. Half of it went down his throat in a few thirsty gulps, and then he picked up the tool again.

"I think you should lay off the Windex."

"This is cr��me de cacao, dope. My seventh. It's five o'clock somewhere, right?" He checked his watch. "Actually, it's five right now. What kind of a world am I living in when I can't get drunk after I'm raised from the dead?"

"Uh, but you've kind of had a problem in the past. With the booze." I could never figure out if he'd been an alcoholic or just a shitty drunk. Months would go by and he wouldn't touch a drop. Then he'd go on a two-day bender. Sometimes he went to AA meetings, and sometimes he didn't. I'm embarrassed to say I was always caught up in my own drama to worry about anyone else's. He was a grown man, I reasoned, and a doctor-much smarter than me! Looking out for him, taking his inventory, well ... not my job.

I know. Pretty shitty, right?

"Not that it's any of my business," I added somewhat lamely. "Uh ... I think. But you did have kind of a problem, right?"

"Yeah. When I was alive. I'm dead now; booze can't hurt me. Cigarettes: nope. I could inject myself with a pure strain of the AIDS virus and not even catch a head cold. And tell me this, Betsy: What's wrong with getting drunk after I've died? Huh?"

"I think you'd better lay off the Windex a lot."

"Forget it. What's up?"

"Where is everyone?"

"Well, Detective Dick, whom I've decided you should call DeeDee, made sure I had plenty to occupy my mind this afternoon before he headed off to catch bad guys. Jessica's been careful to stay the hell away from me. Sinclair's holed up in the library, and Antonia and Garrett haven't come down from their bedroom yet."

"Good. That's perfect."

"I dunno about perfect, but you gotta admire their stamina."

"Not them, idiot! It's good no one's around." I plopped into a chair across from him. He was wearing chocolate brown scrubs today, his hair was clean but messy, and he worked steadily while we talked. "You remember you asked me to kill you?"

"It was less than fifteen hours ago. Of course I remember."

"Time for you to return the favor."

"But you never actually got around to killing m-"

"Time to return the favor!"

I told him how it was. I was sort of amazed at how quickly I could run down all the problems of my life that began after my life ended.

"Hmmm." He paused in his work and set the tool down again. "That's your plan?"

"It's all I've got so far."

"We'd better get it right."

"Yeah."

"You're really hard to kill."

"Yeah."

"The last thing we want is you crawling back from the grave."

"Gross."

"That'd be ... just a disaster. So we have to thoroughly kill you. Decapitation or something."

"Or something," I agreed. Boy oh boy. God has the weirdest sense of humor. The Big Guy had some serious explaining to do. I guess the good news was, I'd be asking Him questions way sooner than I thought.

This. This is what my life was now. Getting decapitated so I could pin God down on a few issues actually sounded like a good plan.

"Funny how things work out."

"Huh?"

"Well. When you and I met, I was getting ready to jump off a tall building. Then we talked about you killing me just last night, and now you're asking me to kill you. Full circle."

"Lovely."

"What about chopping you up into bits and, I dunno, burning the body?"

"Burning me?" I was appalled. Stupid, but there it was. Dammit, I wanted to leave behind a good-looking corpse. One possibly without a head. "Not a chance! Forget it."

"Okay, okay. It's your grisly death, I guess."

"You're damned right it is! Look, I've given my suicide/murder a lot of thought."

"Well," he began cheerfully, "there's a first time for-"

"Shut up. I want to make myself good and dead ... with no coming back. So I should sneak onto a construction site and blow myself up with site explosives or be dropped into the middle of the Atlantic wearing only cement boots or fall on purpose into an incinerator. No, wait, then I'm burned again ... anyway, overkill is gonna be just right."

"This is the weirdest conversation I've ever had," he said, sounding more than cheery-downright happy, in fact.

"Glad I could bring some sunshine into your zombie existence. And listen, Sinclair cannot know about this."

"No shit."

"Good, we're on the same page. He won't approve at all. He'll be downright tiresome about it ... I'm gonna have to try really hard not to even think about it. Argh." I rubbed my eyes. "This is getting complicated."

"Complicated is good."

"Said the zombie," I replied dryly, and the zombie laughed and agreed with me.

TWENTY-EIGHT

We'd gotten off the subject of my murder, and I was just telling Marc to keep his screwdriver away from my iPod charger when Ancient Me walked in. I was on my feet in less than a second.

"Why. Are you wearing. My clothes?"

"My clothes, too," she said.

"Oh, hell no!"

She crossed to the cupboard where we kept the tall glasses, grabbed one, then went to the fridge and rummaged for a carton of milk like she owned the place or something. Oh, wait...

Screw it. "Ever hear of asking? Bad enough you're a foul undead dictator from the World on Ice, but you don't remember your manners?"

"It's also my house," she pointed out so calmly I wanted to rip out her highlights. "I know what you're thinking, and it's a good way to get your neck broken."

"Wow," Marc said respectfully. "All we need is a tumbleweed blowing through here and it's High Noon. Or High Late Afternoon."

"I thought you left."

"I did leave. Now I'm back."

"Why?"

She sat down across from Marc, who looked alternately fretful and thrilled. "I'm waiting for you to do something. Or not do something."

"Well, at least I don't get cryptic in my decrepitude. Get lost, this is a private meeting."

"Or I could get lost," Marc offered. "If this is private vampire queen stuff. I can wreck this toaster anywhere."

"You can stay because I don't know you."

"Uh ... what?"

"I don't know you." Ancient Betsy sounded almost bored. "You were never a zombie in my timeline. Never. You're the wild card now, Marc. I don't know how to play you."

"He's not yours to play, he's mine," I said sharply. Oops! "Um, I'll rephrase-"

"No need, since I agree a zillion percent," Marc said, grinning.

"Will you get lost already? This is private roommate meeting stuff. Also, it triggers my vomit reflex just being in the same room with you."

"Do you think it's any easier for me?" she asked sharply. She'd pulled her hair back into a low bun on the back of her neck, a dreadful look for us that made us look like we were growing a tumor of hair back there, and was dressed in one of my J.Jill purple sweaters and one of my pairs of black leggings. "Do you think I enjoy being here around people who, in my time, are long dead, or worse?"

"Boo fucking hoo. How about how I feel, knowing what you-we'll do to Sinclair?"

"You think I like seeing my husband as he once was? Brave and honorable and-"

"Stop!" Marc was holding up one hand like a zombie traffic cop. "You two could take the gold and silver in the Self-absorbed Olympiad, but I'm not sure which of you would walk away with the gold. Let's agree that it's hell for both of you, okay?"

At once Ancient Me smiled, and really, it changed her face. Or her eyes. It was hard to describe ... she seemed younger and happier all at once. It was almost as unnerving as her ice-sculpture thing. "I've missed you, Marc."

"Well, thanks, I guess. But listen, I hope you don't want any sympathy from me. I had a long talk with the Marc Thing, so I know some of the baaaaad shit you were up to. Will get up to."

"And that's why you killed yourself."

"Yeah, but it didn't take."

"Except you didn't."

"What?" we said in unison. "Could you drop the cryptic crap for five seconds?" I added.

"Don't you understand? That's why I'm here. He's why I'm here." She pointed at Marc. "He was never a zombie in my timeline! Not once, not for half a day or half a second. He was a vampire in my timeline, and now, in the new one, he's a zombie."

"Well ... because of you, though, right?" Marc asked, sounding as tentative and unsure as I felt.

"Yes, but it didn't happen like that in my memories. Do you truly not understand the significance? Satan's afraid, Garrett is more cunning than he ever was in my time, shoe designers will never have been born..." Creaky Me paused, and a spasm of pain crossed her face ... the first "human" thing I'd seen her do. But she made the expression go away and came back as bitchy and unpleasant as ever. "When Tweedle Dum and Tweedle Dumbass showed up in their future/my present, things started changing. Now Marc will never be a vampire. And that's wrong. What I did to the other you was wrong." She had now focused her full attention on Marc, who was staring at her like a deer gazing into the lights of an oncoming semi loaded with hogs. "Very wrong, and the fact that in my time you'd slaughtered indiscriminately, that you were too dangerous to let loose while too valuable to kill-"

"I really don't want to hear this," he whispered. "I got enough of it from the other guy."

"Slaughtered indiscriminately?" Whoa. Had Wrinkly Me kept Marc penned up because of something bad he'd done? "You know what? I don't care. It hasn't happened yet, and I'm fixing it so it won't." Somehow.

"At last we have goals in common. I persuaded the devil to take me back, and I resurrected Marc as atonement for what he had done to me and to others, and for what I had done to him. You changed things, however inadvertently. I'm changing things, too, but on purpose ... and only as a reaction to what you have changed. And though I loathe telling you something so shameful and personal, I only had the courage to try because you did things when you were in my present/your future that had not happened. You said and did things I had no memory of doing or saying when I was"-she flapped a hand casually in my direction-"you."

"Well, great. Thanks for the road trip to the past, we've got it all under control-"

"Ha."

"So run along or drop dead again or whatever it is you do when you're not stealing my clothes and sneaking around resurrecting my friends."

"Satan is afraid of you."

"And saying stuff like that! Stop it, will you?" I was tempted to beg. And shoot her. Or shoot her and then beg. Or just shoot her. A lot. In the forehead. A lot.

"Don't you find that at all interesting?"

"More annoying, I bet, than interesting," Marc volunteered.

"When I was you, I didn't truly understand the breadth and width of my power. I was constantly underestimating myself. It wasn't until years later that I realized I'd been my own biggest obstacle all along."

"What a lovely story," I said with faux admiration. "Does it end with you coughing up blood?"

"They're tools."

"What? Are you talking about actual tools, like the screwdriver, or are you being insulting again?"

She glanced at the ceiling as if praying for help from a higher power. "Try to pay attention. Your abilities. The strength, the speed, the fast healing. Those are the tools that can save you-and him, and them-but without the skill and experience to back it up, they're tools that could get you killed. Get them killed."

"You're the tool that could get you killed." Okay ... immature, but so satisfying. Though I could see her point. How many times had I hesitated, or not even known what to do, because I was a thirty-year-old unemployed secretary who'd never taken a martial arts class?

"Until you have the experience, you have to look to your strengths. You do have some, you know."

Marc was nodding like Ancient Betsy was making sense. "You need a Yoda! A vampire Yoda."

"I can't think of anything I need less. I really can't." Herpes flare-up? IRS audit? Both were better options than fuzzy undead Yodas cluttering up my mansion, and also my psyche.

"You aren't suggesting I become her vampire Yoda?"

"Um..."

"No," she and I said in perfect appalled unison.

"Don't get your fangs in a twist. It was just a thought."

"A dreadful one." She sucked down half her milk in three gulps. "Ahhh. I miss fresh milk." She looked up at us, then at Marc. "You look pretty good for a shambling zombie nearly a week dead."

"Yeah."

"Want to know why?"

"Uh ... yeah."

"It's probably a trick," I warned him. "Don't trust her. Remember the Marc Thing!"

"What Marc became was as much his fault as mine," she snapped. She made another of those visible efforts to calm down. "It's because she loves you..." Pointing at (ulp!) me. "And she's close."

"I don't follow."

"Me, neither, and I'm supposed to be the neighborhood expert in this stuff."

"Pity the neighborhood."

"Cow!"

"Dolt."

"Ladies! C'mon. What are you talking about, Ancie-um, Elizabeth?"

She sighed, as if greatly put upon. It was all for show, though ... she didn't have to breathe, much less let out with the long-suffering sigh. "As long as you're in general proximity with her, as long as she loves you, you'll always be freshly dead. As in seconds dead ... maybe only half a second dead. You've noticed you can think and feel, right? You're keeping busy ... staying occupied. So you're not decomposing. But if you were to, say, move to London, you'd start deteriorating. Always rotting, never all-the-way dead. If she ever decided you were more trouble than you're worth, however, if she no longer subconsciously values you, the rot steps up."

While Marc mulled that over, I asked, "But that poor zombie from the future ... she was a mess." She sure had been. And Ancient Me used zombies for slave labor in the future. Raised the dead and put them to work. Sweatshops! Of zombies!

She shrugged. "Well. I didn't know that woman. I didn't care about her. Why should it matter if she's a shambling mess, as long as the work gets done?"

"And just like that, I start not liking you again," Marc said, giving her a cold stare.

Ancient Betsy took it pretty well, I figured, since she yawned in response. "As I said earlier, which I will reiterate because you have the attention span of a fruit fly, I'm waiting. I'll know when it's time to leave. Until then, you'll have to put up with me."

"Want to bet?" I snapped.

"Uh, Betsy ... Betsys ... this is no time for a catfight. Or a vampire queen fight. Especially since it seems like you've got some of the same goals."

"Barf."

"I suppose." She drank the rest of her milk, then studied her empty glass for a moment, and asked in a surprisingly diffident tone, "When is Jessica due?"

"Next-" Marc began.

"None of your fucking business."

My venom didn't seem to bother her at all. Of course not. She'd dealt with much worse. She usually was what was much worse. "She's happy, though? With that man?"

"Sure." "That man"?

"I didn't expect that," she said in such a low voice, I had the impression she was talking to herself more than us. "That's ... nice. It's really nice." She looked at me again, and her eyes lost that look Sinclair had immediately noticed. For a second it was like I was looking at me, and not a shark with my face. "You've got to figure it out. You've got to fix it ... I don't want to go back to that."

"You get that you're not the victim here, right?"

She didn't rise to it. Just looked at me with eyes exactly like mine and near whispered, "Please help me. Please help yourself." She didn't even flinch when the glass exploded between her fingers, just looked at the mess of shattered glass splinters and milk and a little bit of her sluggish vamp blood. "Damn."

"Let me take a look," Marc said, extending his hand. He'd said it with such authority that even as she let him grab her by the wrist, she looked bemused. "Huh. Not too bad. Let's get it rinsed out first."

"I'll be fine. You must know that."

"Humor the Walking Dead Doc, willya? This is the perfect way for me to keep busy. It's not like if I fuck up I could do any real damage to you."

"How comforting," she said wryly, but suffered herself to be pulled to her feet, and obediently followed him to the bathroom down the hall, the one with the first aid kit.

Then I was in the kitchen by myself, with toaster innards all over the table and a mess of glass splinters and milk.

What just happened?