Bentley Little - The Walking

"I said I'm fine."

Hal held up his hands in surrender. "I'm just asking." Hal's attempts at cheering him up were as disjointed and disorganized as ever, but in a strange way, he found that comforting. He did feel a little better after talking to his friend. Maybe there was a way to keep the investigation going. After everything that had happened to him the past two months, Perkins would probably be willing to give him a leave of absence if he asked, some time off without pay.

AS if reading his thoughts, Hal said, "Still no news on your dad's body"

Miles shook his head.

"What do you think happened to him?"

He'd told Hal and everyone else that his father's body had been stolen, not wanting to share the truth of what had happened, knowing that they wouldn't believe him even if he did, And of course the coroner's office had kept it under wraps as well. They'd had enough scandals recently.

The last thing their department needed was for word to leak out that they were losing bodies because the bodies were get ting up and walking away.

"I don't know," Miles admitted.

"I hope it's not some psycho sicko who's doing, you know sex stuff."

"Thanks. That's just the image I need in my head."

"Sorry." Hal headed sheepishly back to his cubicle, and

Miles started sorting through the stack of files Naomi had given him.

There was a sixteen-year-old girl who had run away with the forty-year-old manager of the Taco Bell at which she worked, a woman who suspected her husband of having an affair with another man, a dowager who wanted someone to track down her stolen poodle because the police hadn't been able to find the dog, a man who suspected one of his employees of smoking marijuana even though the worker had passed numerous random drug tests. None of the potential cases appealed to him, and he thought for a moment, then went out to talk to Naomi and see if she could get him an appointment with Perkins this afternoon.

He was going to ask for some time off.

Two weeks without pay.

It was a week less than he'd asked for but a week more than he'd expected, and hopefully it was all he would need. He finished out the afternoon, tied up a few loose ends, and

made arrangements to contact Hal each day so that they could keep each other up on what was happening.

The telephone was already ringing when he arrived home, and he dashed through the living room to answer it.

Claire was calling to say that she'd be late--after seeing her last client, she had to attend a budget meeting with her boss, his boss, and a rpresentative from the county board of supervisors. She told Miles he'd have to make his own dinner, but she'd be back by nine.

He warned her to drive carefully and hung up. It was going to be a long evening without her, and he walked into the kitchen, already feeling lonely. He opened the refrigerator, leaning on the door, but the metal shelves were bare save for an old half-empty container of milk, a package butter, and a bottle of ketchup.

He realized that he hadn't done any serious grocery shopping since his dad had.." died.

The house was silent save for the electronic hum of the refrigerator, but he could hear in his mind the rhythm of his father's footsteps.

Boot heels on wood. The sound still reverberated in his brain" There had been me thing coldly impersonal about the rigid regularity of the tapping on the bedroom floor, and even thinking about it now made him feel frightened.

The house suddenly seemed much darker, much creepier. He needed to get out of here, and shopping for groceries gave him a practical excuse.

Switching on all of the lights on his way out so that he would return to a well-lit home, Miles hurried outside and quickly locked the front door behind him. Only here, in the open air, away from the claustrophobic confinement of the house, was he finally able to breathe easy and relax..

He looked up at the beautiful sunset created by the haze of pollutants in the air above Los Angeles, and he wondered

whether right now his father was walking somewhere under this same sky.

He drove to Ralph'sthe same store in which his father had collapsed

--and got a shopping cart, but he was not in the mood for shopping. His fear had fled, leaving behind an uncomfortable melancholy, and he wanted only to get the groceries he needed for tonight and tomorrow, then get out of here as quickly as possible.

He sped through the overstocked-aisles as fast as was seemly, grabbing a frozen pizza, a gallon of milk, a gallon of orange juice, a loaf of bread, and some lunch meat.

The registers were all crowded, but since he had less than ten items he could use the express line, and he pulled his cart behind that of an old woman wearing a too bright dress that might have been flattering to her when she bought it back in the 1960s. He glanced over at the tabloid news rack next to the checkout stand and felt his heart leap in his chest. :'

MY UNCLE DIED... BUT WON'T STOP WALKING!

He grabbed the newspaper and stared at the banner head line Underneath that was a grainy black-and-white photo of what looked like a typical middle-class house. A teaser for another story announced that Bigfoot was a descendant of Ancient Astronauts. Miles' hands were shaking, and he did not notice that the old lady had moved forward until he was nudged by the shopping cart behind him. He began placing his items on the black rubber conveyor, still holding onto the tabloid, working on automatic.

He opened the paper, riffled through it until he found the article he wanted. The story was a page long, with one bad photo of a stunned-looking young woman in the center. He didn't have time to read the whole thing, so he quickly scanned the first few paragraphs.

Apparently, a woman in Cedar City, Utah, had come home from work one day to

find her uncle dead and walking in a circle around the outside of their duplex. It had taken six men to stop him and tie him down to a gurney and transport him to the morgue.

At the sound of a throat clearing, Miles looked up. The clerk had already rung up his food items and was waiting for him to either buy the paper or put it away and pay for his groceries. Miles plunked the tabloid down in front of the boy, then paid the total displayed on the register's readout and hurried outside, where he sat down on a bench in front of the store and read the article all the way through. Then all the way through again.

The details of what this woman had experienced with her undead uncle were remarkably similar to his own. If the article could be believed, Janet Engstrom had recently moved to Cedar City in order to take care of her Uncle John, who was dying of cancer. She returned home from work one day to find her uncle dead, wearing only his pajamas, walking around the outside of their duplex in a continuous circle while neighborhood kids threw things at him. According to Janet, he had started walking inside the house several days before his death, and she had not informed anyone because she wasn't sure what to do about it.

Six men--three attendants from the coroner's office, the coroner himself, and two policemen--had been required to subdue the dead man and strap him to a gurney so he could be transported to the

/ morgue. A "source close to the investigation revealed" that the coroner could not stop the corpse from moving long enough to perform an autopsy, and that the body had been cremated in order to prevent the

"disease of the walking dead" from infecting any more dead people in the area of southern Utah.

Apparently, Janet Engstrom had approached the Insider because she could not find out what happened to her uncle. The county coroner's office would not release any information to her or the family and was denying that there had

been anything out of the ordinary in John Engstrom's death. As were the police. Even the parents of the neighborhood kids who had been throwing mud at the walking dead man seemed to have bought the explanation of the experts rather than the eyewitness accounts of their own children and were now telling Janet that she was merely suffering from "stress."