Chapter 8 Zombies
Zombies
Twenty-four hours later, Jack had written a thousand words. A pathetic output for twenty-four hours, but they were good words. He thought.
He hoped.
Regardless, they were a thousand words more than he’d written yesterday, or the day before.
He was standing by the microwave reheating a cup of coffee that had gone cold due to its obnoxious size when he heard a strange shuffling at the sliding doors. Upon investigation, it proved to be the dopey canine.
He slid the door open enough to stick his head out, looking for Blair, but she wasn’t there.
“Hey!”
Edward was slipping past Jack’s legs and into the pool house.
“Excuse me.”
Ignoring him, Edward trotted inside and started sniffing around.
“Sir,” he tried.
Edward discovered Jack’s suitcase, which he had yet to unpack, initially because he’d thought he wasn’t staying and more recently because he’d been extremely busy spending twenty-four hours writing a thousand words.
Edward started digging, and soon boxer shorts were flying.
“Oh, no you don’t.” Jack hustled over and grabbed the pair Edward had in his teeth. Edward looked like a dope, but he had stealth strength. “Let go, you menace.”
Edward did not let go.
“Edward Cullen!” Blair’s voice. “Drop it!”
Edward let go, which of course caused Jack, who had been exerting a good deal of counterforce on his underwear, to fall back on his ass.
Blair had that disarmingly low voice. It continued to seem anomalous coming from such a sunny, small person. Apparently it made dogs do her bidding.
“Edward,” she said, “be nice.” Edward immediately sat down and offered Jack his paw.
Jack stared for a moment, hoping the dog would take his inaction for the rejection it was, but alas. He didn’t see any way out of it this time, so he shook hands with a dog.
Was it too late to go home?
“I’m so sorry,” Blair said, quite obviously trying to hold back laughter. “I heard you from outside and I thought you might need rescuing.” He followed her gaze to the slobber-slicked boxer shorts he was holding. She winced. “Edward loves plaid.”
“Edward loves plaid?”
“Yeah. I probably should have named him after Jamie Fraser instead of Edward Cullen.”
He blinked.
“Jamie Fraser is the hero of the Outlander books. He’s Scottish.”
“We don’t read the same books.”
“We read some of the same books.” She bent over to leash Edward, and Jack considered the part in her hair.
Which was odd, he realized. He hadn’t set out to ogle her part, but now that it was in front of him, he couldn’t look away.
She had some gray roots. He didn’t know why that should be so surprising.
It wasn’t surprising. Lots of people dyed their hair, probably especially in LA.
But damn, there was something about knowing that the version of herself she presented to the public wasn’t the true her, or at least not all of the true her. It made him wonder if anything else about her, something that went deeper than hair, was also not as it appeared.
She stood, breaking his trance. “We’re going for a walk. You want to come?”
He was having trouble adjusting to the question. Think. Did he want to go on a walk with Blair and the canine underwear thief?
He did not.
But yesterday, the day of a thousand words, had begun with a morning walk.
Another question: Did he understand that going on a walk—or not going on a walk—had no bearing on his word count?
With his rational mind he did.
“Sure, I’ll join you.”
He followed her through the side gate, then out the front one. She checked each several times. She seemed preoccupied with making sure everything was locked. It made sense; she was a celebrity.
“And we’re off,” she said as they headed up the hill.
Four days later Jack had written another four thousand words, many of them by the pool. The pace needed to pick up in order for him to meet his deadline, but at this point, progress was progress.
He was waiting for Blair when she came out of the main house.
They’d established an unspoken routine whereby he joined her and the vampiric beagle on their morning walks.
At home, he wasn’t an early riser, hadn’t been since his teaching days.
But he was still on central time, so he’d just kept getting up at what was the crack of dawn here.
Or what felt like the crack of dawn. He had come to understand that such a descriptor was relative: he had learned that Blair put in an hour of work in the mornings before their walks.
They took the same route every day, up to the rich-people scenic overlook and back down.
Sometimes they talked a lot. Sometimes they didn’t talk at all.
They were always home in just under an hour, which meant he was caffeinated, clearheaded, and ready to work by eight.
Jack had written In Time in the evenings while teaching.
Here, though, he was able to bang out a good chunk of words—relatively speaking—before midday. It was novel.
Also novel: his back didn’t hurt anymore. He hated the fact that he probably had to attribute this to some combination of walking and stretching out by the pool.
Blair herself wasn’t around much after their walks.
She spent long days at her office, and that was after her morning session of work at home.
He wasn’t sure why he was surprised by her work ethic, which was downright Midwestern.
All those evenings she’d answered right away when he texted had made her seem less busy than she actually was.
When they reached the top of the hill, the crow flew by again.
Or a crow. He had no way of knowing if it was the same one; he knew only that they’d been seeing a large black bird every day.
He reached into his pocket and extracted a handful of the fancy granola Blair had left in his kitchen.
He walked toward the tree the crow was perched in, which of course caused it to fly away.
But he scattered the granola at its base nonetheless.
“What are you doing?” she asked.
“Feeding the crow.” When she didn’t say anything, he added, “The idea of a crow army was inspiring.”
He was kidding. Probably. Attempting to make her laugh, anyway, though he didn’t know why. That seemed like an atypical effort on his part.
It didn’t work; she took him seriously. “You’re going to really have to commit if you want a crow army. Come with food every day. And somehow figure out how to gradually lure them home. Even then, will you get an army, or will you get a lone crow warrior?”
Blair was in many ways an enigma. She could be funny as hell, but then she could take what should be a joke—the mustering of a crow army—and treat it with earnest attention.
He had been joking, right, about wanting his own crow army? What was a crow army going to be, should he be successful in raising one, but a distraction?
“Speaking of crows,” she said as they approached the house toward the end of their walk, “it’s Halloween.”
“I guess it is. Are you going out?”
“I was supposed to go to a party, but I bailed on it.” She paused, and there was a slight stutter in her steps.
For a moment, he thought she was going to say something else, something specific about her aversion to this party, but she just said, “I’m not feeling it. What do you usually do for Halloween?”
“I do nothing for Halloween.” Even in his teaching days, he’d refused to join in staff costume contests, or to accept candy from students. He was a Halloween Grinch.
“Esme and I used to watch scary TV on Halloween, in the years after she aged out of trick-or-treating,” Blair said.
“She’s watching The Last of Us in Portland with her roommate, and she’s been talking about it, so I’m going to try it myself.
I should have watched it ages ago. I’m friendly with some of the people who worked on it, but I’m a bit of a scaredy-cat when it comes to that level of horror.
But since I will desperately grasp at any means of connecting with my teenager, I will be overcoming my fear of watching people get their brains eaten.
You want to join me? Popcorn and zombies? ”
“TV’s not really my thing,” he said reflexively.
“Yeah, you said you didn’t own a TV.”
“I did?” He didn’t remember talking about it.
“On the Zoom of Doom.”
Ah. He didn’t know whether to laugh or wince at her epithet for their first interaction.
“I didn’t really watch TV growing up.” He tried to think how to summarize his relationship with TV, which was really a proxy for his relationship with his parents, but then he thought, why on earth would he do that?
“I just never got into the habit of it.”
She was staring at him with an odd sort of intensity. He was pretty sure she somehow knew his “I never got into the habit of it” was a more polite way of saying that he looked down on television. He had stopped short of quoting his dad’s refrain Television makes small minds smaller.
She finally shrugged. “Suit yourself.” She wasn’t going to call him on being a snob. She started toward the house. “Have a good day.”
The thing was, in addition to being a snob, he was also self-interested, and, apparently, superstitious.
He thought about how, so far, he’d been doing all his writing in the mornings.
Evenings here were more akin to what writing—or attempting to write—had been like at home: sitting and staring at a mostly unmoving cursor.
He thought about how the walks with Blair were getting him out of his head.
How the noncocooning method of writing seemed to be working.
What if he also got out of his head in the evenings, when he wasn’t getting anything done anyway?
“Zombies, you say?” he called after her, sealing his fate. He was already considering raising a crow army, what were a few zombies added to the mix?
“Yep,” she said from just outside the main house. “It’s based on a video game.” She held up a hand. “But before you get snooty, it’s prestige TV. It’s won a bunch of awards.”