The Bear and Barnacle

"No," Jack says firmly as he pursues Val to drag him back from the dining room window.

"Wanna see!" Val protests with a hint of whine.

"You can see from back here."

"Phbbt," says Val.

They sit at the table -- well, Jacks sits at it, Val sits on it -- and watch over the hedge as the bodies shamble past, stiff-kneed, arms out straight and wrists limp.

"Zoooooombies."

"Put it in a sentence," Jack tells him automatically, as one of the stiff figures trips over a bottle in the street, goes down like a sack of rocks with no attempt to catch itself, and rolls out of view.

Val sighs dramatically. "They are zoooooombies."

"You think so?" Now that he thinks of it, he supposes they are a bit like that terrible Bela Lugosi picture Danny loved so much when they were in their twenties ... the blank stares, the directionless gait.

"Yup. Like berserkers only more rotten."

"They sure look rotten." Val scrambles off the table; Jack catches him and puts him back on it. "And just where do you think you're going?"

"To the roof to throw things at them."

"Fat chance," Jack says firmly, and redoubles his grip, avoiding a bash from Val's wing. They sit and stare through the window as the odd, morbid parade continues past.

Val says he will answer the door for alive people if anyone wishes to brave the zombie pub crawl.

Jack is on very good terms with the neighbors … even after Val's thieving of their post, Val's inventive torment of the little dog belonging to the Fitzwilliams in the next house on the right, and the time they let Val give Moira Brown, the girl from the family that lives on the other side, the flu.

The Fitzwilliams are an older couple and Jack doesn't know if they've caught on, or if they, like some of his older customers, have somehow gotten the idea that he and Zel are brothers – but the Browns definitely know that Zel and Jack are … together (he's never quite sure what their shared adjective should be, though he's pretty much settled on “partner” for a noun). They don't seem to mind, as Jack still tends to half-expect. Zel is still tutoring Thomas in maths, anyway, though that might be less a matter of tolerance and more a matter of the difficulty of finding someone else who can do parabolic equations in his head.

More strange is the fact that none of the neighbors have ever asked which one of them Val belongs to, ( but today ... )

Val goes into Jack's workshop, starts to say something, then gets a funny look on his face and goes back out again.

Five minutes later he's back, having extensively rehearsed this. His mental vocabulary is still larger than the bank of words he knows and can say aloud without unintelligible blurring, so this latest Margate warpedness is intolerable.

"You should be crying," he tells Jack.

Jack looks up from the tiny screw he's fiddling with, expecting that he's taken overlong to notice the latest prank -- stolen mail, laundry soap in the coffee, the usual tricks. "What have you done?"

"'m dying."

"That's not fun," Jack says, not terribly impressed by his melodrama.

( Read more... )



This needed to happen as dialogue, I'm afraid, so there you have it.

9:06 A.M.

“Hey!”

“Sorry! I'm sorry ...”

“How the hell did you --”

“Jack?”

“... Amy?”

( Read more ... )

They haven't left the house since the morning they woke up years younger -- Jack about twelve, Zelgadis about five. And apart from everything else -- the interruption to work, to their schedules, to, well, their sex life -- Jack doesn't think this whole hiding-from-the-world thing is healthy.

He's sure Zel will stop panicking at the notion eventually ...

But the days pass, and even the threat of running out of coffee doesn't seem sufficient to lure him out of the shelter of home, so at last Jack resorts to desperate measures.

He goes into the lounge, where Zel is playing his guitar by laying it flat on the ground so he can reach the frets with one hand and pluck the strings with the other. Funny how they seem to have kept the age difference between them even though the ages themselves have changed. "Come on," Jack says.

Zel gives him that narrow-eyed, infinitely suspicious look of his -- the one that makes his ears flatten almost indetectably. "Where?"

At this point Jack picks him up bodily (by some weird magic Jack has little hope of understanding, Zel's stone body only seems heavy when it's forcibly placed somewhere he doesn't want to be -- which is fortunate for the furniture. Jack's arms don't seem to qualify as not-wanting-to-be). Zel flails a little and squeaks but he doesn't struggle particularly hard.

"The Pub," Jack tells him, checks that he has his wallet and keys and goes out the front door.

Jack's one and only drug experience was in 1940, on the boat from Canada to London. He was sitting on the deck sharing cheap whiskey with four other pilots, two of whom would live to become known to history and two of whom, like Jack, would later die in action. Someone (he didn't later remember which one) produced a twist of newspaper full of white powder.

There was a brief stir, then Jack - eternal straight man, good listener, the man you ask when you need a loan till payday, and the only one present who hadn't lied baldly about his age or experience to get into the RAF - said, "What the hell. You know what the life expectancy is for us now?"

All of them laughed. It wasn't in the least funny, but they were young, and high on risk and glory, and about to get higher.

Halfway through the brownie, Jack suddenly recognizes that I-know-this-isn't-funny-but-it-actually-is feeling.

He stares at the bit of brownie for a long, long moment, then lifts his head to stare at Ivonka. She stares back, wearing that mess-with-me-and-I'll-make-you-suffer look. Jack smiles at her. She rolls her eyes.

Zelgadis is across the table from Jack, trying once again to convince Val that he can't bring his rat to the Pub. Val is too absorbed in the debate to have touched his brownie. Jack slides it from him to Zel.

"Just eat it," he says to Zel's questioning look and Val's protesting squeak, and chuckles. "Something tells me this one's not for Val."

This would be hard enough, he thinks, if it were only raining. The wind turning his clothes from protection from the elements into a nearly rhythmic series of cold wet slaps makes it about forty times worse.

At least Val was a huge help, crawling around the roof marking all the places where water was coming through (they can't keep him off the roof, so they figured he might as well be useful). The chalk is washing down the shingles in thin lumpy streaks, but at least he can follow them to their source most of the time. They had to wrap him up in twine and one of Jack's shirts so the wind wouldn't catch his wings and tear them off.

Sure, the estate agent warned them. "The roof's a bit leaky," she said. She couldn't have been expecting monsoon season ... but the fact remains that they had to venture out to the hardware store to buy more buckets.

The bedrooms are already mostly patched up. Now he's over the kitchen. "A bit leaky." Ridiculous.

He labors away, exhausted but determined and spurred by the knowledge that inside this house there is always, always hot black coffee.

Winter, 1940

He chooses a Sunday after dinner to make the announcement. Once the dessert plates are cleared up and most of the family is in the living room beginning a large, loud game of rummy, he comes into the kitchen to his parents. Mom's at the sink with an apron over her flowered church dress. Dad's sitting at the table with a cigarette. Jack knows from many Sundays that he'll he telling her over the soft clink of dishes about interesting points in the evening paper, or talking with her about the news their grown children have brought back this weekend.

Jack pauses at the door to watch them for a second in their peaceful comfort before he comes in to disturb it.

"Mom, Dad," he says, "I've been wondering whether to tell you this, and I think you deserve to know. ( There's something that I need to do. )