Sam rolled over and was awake. It was night. The car was chilled and someone had laid a blanket back over his and Katie’s legs. The front seats were empty. He sat up and spun around to peer outside. As he did, Katie moaned and yanked a handful of blanket over herself. Sam could feel moonlight on his face, its gleam tracing the outline of the window beneath his chin as he peered through the cold glass into the gloom.
There was a mumbling. A hacking cough. Someone spat into the dirt. Sam turned, slowly, and saw movement. Now there were two shadows. A metre or so from the back of the car. Two figures. One of them grunted, its hunched, gnarled shape elongating as it raised its head, stretching as if to howl at the sky. But smoke drifted from its mouth instead, and Sam could make out the spongy thatch of a beard elongating its chin. The second figure was squat and seemed to be pacing. It was Dettie and Jon, both with cigarettes, both talking. The trees behind them were twisted and still, their branches lit white. Sam allowed himself to breathe.
As he settled himself back under the blanket he recalled the uneasy feeling that had followed him out of his dream. There had been writing. Words, on some kind of paper. Or a sign maybe? Something he’d read? And something about his hands. A sensation of heat. His fingers. He looked down at them in his lap, grey in the gloom. As he turned them over, his watch face glinted.
His scratched watch.
Ted. Uncle Ted.
Ted called.
He was alive?
Dettie had always talked about Ted as though he had died. But as Sam thought about it, it occurred to him that there never had been a funeral. There was no grave to visit.
Ted had called Dettie. Even after he was supposed to be dead. Because he wasn’t. He’d left. He’d left her.
Like Sam’s father had left his mother.
Another cough—it was Dettie—filtered through the window. Sam crouched out of sight and crawled sideways over the handbrake to the front seat. Dettie’s handbag was tucked beside the pedals. Keeping low, he unfastened the clasp and slipped his fingers into the bag. Smoke lifted in thin clouds outside, and Katie lay sleeping, her skin tinted blue, cold like marble. Sam felt something jab his palm. He pulled a screwdriver out of the bag and laid it aside. Reaching in again, taking out her purse, he found Uncle Ted’s picture beneath a thin fold of cash and eased it free. Creases shone across it in the moonlight. The sticky tape at its edges rustled under his fingertips. He held the photograph closer to his nose and stretched his eyes wide, trying to focus. Ted was smiling, the hand holding his beer almost pointing at the camera. His cheeks were plump, and though it was too dark to make them out, Sam remembered the blotches of red that would always stand out on his face. He could still recall the heavy way his uncle would breathe, sucking in dramatically whenever he was about to speak. The way he talked loudly, and had a barking laugh. How he used to tell jokes at the dinner table that made Dettie slap his arm and say, ‘Oh, for goodness’ sake, Ted.’ The way that made him laugh even louder, until she placed her knife and fork together on the plate, excused herself, and left the table in a huff, Ted calling out to her that it was all just a bit of fun.
Dettie wasn’t next to Ted in the photo, but when Sam lifted it closer to the window for more light, he thought he could see the shoulder of one of her cardigans in the background, an arm carrying a salad bowl. Sam turned the picture over and saw Dettie’s handwriting in the corner. The words Ted—45th Birthday and the year had been scribbled over in red pen, and he noticed that one of the creases down the picture was actually a neat rip through its centre that Dettie had taped back together.
The car shook as Jon’s silhouette leant against the door. Sam stuffed the photo back into the purse, shoved it and the screwdriver in Dettie’s handbag, and clambered over to his seat to slip back under the blanket. He lay in place, eyes open and staring up at the unlit ceiling light. The murmur of conversation went on outside, a noise like a persistent guttural groan.
As though outside of himself, Sam realised that the very same sound, garbled and otherworldly, would have filled him with dread only one night ago, would have evoked images of rotten corpses and ravenous blood-drenched maws. He wondered if it was having Jon nearby—another set of eyes to keep watch, someone to help remind him it was just his imagination gone wild. Whatever it was, the thought of zombies seemed further away than it had for days, even as the car creaked and rocked beneath him.
Somehow the photograph of Ted tucked in Dettie’s purse—suspended in time, still smiling, and alive out there somewhere—was far more disturbing. He just couldn’t explain why.