Gary Brandner - Walkers

The old woman continued to stare at him. Slowly she lowered her finger from his face. "You choose wisely. There is no greater curse than to know when and how you will die."

Glen stood as though paralyzed. Joana nudged him and he came out of it and started for the door.

"Senora, how can I thank you?" Joana said.

"I want no thanks."

"Then at least let me pay you something." She started to open her bag.

"Money? Money has no meaning for me. Go now. I am tired."

Joana and Glen left the dim, musty room and walked down the flight of stairs to the alley. When they reached the street they stood for a moment breathing in the clean night air. The solid pavement, the palm trees, the boys around their flame painted car, all seemed part of a world apart from Senora Villanueva and her dark little room. It was a familiar world, a world of life.

They crossed the street and got into the car. Glen started the engine, then turned to Joana.

"What do you think?" he said.

"Think?"

"About the old lady."

"I believe her. What other choice is there?"

Glen put the car in gear and pulled away from the curb. "I don't know. She might have been setting you up."

"Setting me up for what? I offered her money, she wouldn't take any."

"Not this time, maybe. That's the way con games work. They hook you in by giving you something for nothing, then they come back with something even better, only this time it's going to cost you."

"Glen, pull over."

"What?"

"Just pull over and stop the car."

Giving her a puzzled look, Glen eased the Camaro over to the curb and stopped. He put the shift lever in park and turned in the seat to face Joana.

"Now what is all this about a con game?" she demanded.

He shifted in the seat uncomfortably. "Well… what do we really know about this old woman, anyway? Some girl, who we don't know either, claims she has mystic powers of some kind. It's all kind of hard to swallow."

Joana stared at him. "Glen, I don't understand you. You didn't say anything about having doubts before we came. You were just as eager as I was." A thought hit her. "Wait a minute, did you think it was part of the con game when she offered to tell you when you were going to die, and how?"

"I…" Glen turned away and looked out through the windshield. "No," he said in a different, subdued voice. "I believed she could do it. God help me, I still believe she knows."

"Then what…?"

"I was scared, Joana. Scared right down to the soles of my feet. When we got out of there and onto the street again and everything looked so ordinary, so unthreatening, I was ashamed of myself. A part of me could not admit that a little old Mexican lady had pointed a finger at me and scared me more than anything ever before in my life. I had to deny it somehow. I had to prove I was strong, so I started running off at the mouth and couldn't stop."

Joana pulled his head down and kissed him. "You are strong, Glen. You're strong and brave, and you're the man I love. Can we go home now?"

He laid a hand on her cheek and looked deep into her eyes for a moment. "Joana," he said, "you are a hell of a woman."

Dr. Hovde sat in a canvas chair across the coffee table from Joana and Glen in the house on Beach-wood Drive. He leaned forward listening intently as Joana described the meeting earlier that evening with the grandmother of Ynez Villanueva.

When Joana finished telling her story there was a long silence in the room. It was Hovde who finally spoke.

"It's fantastic. Even though indirectly it was I who sent you to the woman, this is a hard, hard thing to accept. The whole idea of witches and walking dead men is so completely foreign to everything I believe in."

"I know how you feel," Glen said. "I was there, and I'm still stunned by what I heard. God knows I don't want to believe these things are happening, but can we afford not to believe it?"

"If you have any other explanation, Warren, I'll jump at it," Joana said.

"I wish I had," said Hovde, "but I haven't. The only thing we can do is assume that everything the old woman told you is true, and get on with it. Do you have paper and something to write with?"

Joana brought him a yellow legal pad and a ball-point pen. He laid the pad flat on the coffee table in front of him.

"Sometimes it helps me attack a problem to write it down and look at it."

"You sound like an engineer now," Glen said with a brief smile.

"The first thing to do," Hovde went on, "is define the issue."

For a moment no one spoke, then Glen said, "Hell, that's easy enough. If we accept what the old woman said tonight, then someone, or something, is trying to kill Joana."

Dr. Hovde wrote at the top of the pad: Joana's life in danger.

"What do we know about the danger?"

"She said they could send four of those zombies, no more."

The doctor wrote: Maximum 4 Walkers.

Joana shivered, but said nothing.

"Three of them are used up now," Glen said.

"That's right," Joana agreed. "There was the woman in the car, the man who broke in here Sunday night, and the girl on the cliff."

Dr. Hovde made another note on the pad: 3 down, 1 to go.

"One to go," Joana said, reading. She closed her eyes for a moment.

"At least there's a time limit," Glen said. "The last one has to come by the Eve of St. John. That's Monday. If we get past that, we've won."

Deadline: June 23, Hovde wrote.

"Knowing that, I think it would be wise if Joana is not left alone between now and the deadline," he said.

"Definitely," Glen agreed. "She can stay at my place."

"Maybe you ought to think about getting her away somewhere, out of town."

"I could do that," Glen said. "Drive her up to San Francisco, stay there until after Monday."

"Just a minute," Joana said. The sudden sharpness of her tone made both men look at her quickly. "You two are making plans for me as though I'm not even in the room. I'm not a helpless child, you know. And I'm not some delicate glass figurine that has to be packed in layers of cotton."

"I'm sorry, Joana," Hovde said. "We're just trying to come up with the best way to protect you."

"We know you're not helpless," Glen added. "And you're certainly not made of glass."

"Okay," Joana said more gently. "I didn't mean to sound ungrateful. But let's look at the suggestions you're making. Don't leave me alone. That's fine, I'm not anxious to be alone right now, but we've got four days. Nobody wants to be watched every second for four days. And how do we know it will make any difference? I wasn't alone Sunday night, and that maniac still broke in here and came after me."

"But we have an idea what we're fighting now," Glen said. "That makes a difference. Sunday we were taken by surprise."

"That's true," Joana conceded. "But leaving town doesn't make sense to me. If something is making it possible for dead people to get up and walk and kill, it could happen just as easily in San Francisco or anywhere else as right here."

"Yes, I see what you mean," Hovde said. "We've got to expand our thinking beyond what we know as the natural world."

"It isn't easy when we don't know all the rules," Glen said.

"There are some things we know about the walkers," Hovde said. "They are not invulnerable. Again, taking the word of the old woman, if only a newly dead person can be turned into one, we won't have to worry about old corpses rising out of the cemetery."

"That's good news," Joana said.

"At least it tells us they have limitations. What else do we know about them?"

"They move easily enough," Joana said. "They're fast and they react quickly."

Dr. Hovde wrote WALKERS in the center of the page and underlined it. Below he wrote: Agility.