He glanced at the Polaroid again. “Not sure I’d call it miserable, but…”
“There’s always a but. No, I didn’t take this.” She shook the picture in her fingertips. “Ghastly did. It was a sign of his approval. I’ve made it to the next step of the program.” She put the Polaroid back into her purse and took a wider look at her surroundings. “These are my digs now. I’m a wanted woman.”
“You live here?”
“I’m going to. It’s a part of the program. You really should consider it. No one else is doing it that I know of. I’m the only one here, at least, so I guess no one else is trying out for the Gorehounds at the moment. It’s a tough group of misfits to join. I know I’ve got the stuff, though. What about you, Cal? You got what it takes?”
“I don’t even know what it is.”
“Ghastly’ll tell you if you ask.”
“Maybe I will.”
“He thinks you have the stuff or he wouldn’t have invited you to the Hall of Hell.”
“I also have an invitation to a party or something that’s taking place here.”
She nodded. “Me too. See, that’s a good thing. Mr. Ghastly has an eye for the kind of people who will fit into his little group of fuck ups.”
“You’re really gonna live here?” Calvin asked.
Hazel shrugged. “Sure. Where else am I going to go? Can’t go home. Don’t know if anyone else saw me with you-know-who at the park yesterday. I’m sure there are cameras that caught us together. Police are probably already going through footage to find clues.”
Hearing her speak what she had probably been thinking for the past twenty-four hours was unreal. It was hard for Calvin to imagine living the life of the fugitive, harder yet to understand how this woman standing before him could take it with such stride, as if she had been preparing for this all her life.
“Where did you live?” Calvin asked. “How could you just drop everything like this?”
Hazel stepped closer to Calvin, close enough for him to feel a pang of nervousness. The look in her eyes was something he hadn’t seen in Ronnie’s eyes as of late. He hadn’t noticed passion in Ronnie’s eyes because he had been so fixated on the gash in her neck.
The slyest of grins curled the edges of Hazel’s mouth. “I can’t help but think that we were brought together for a reason.”
She grabbed the collar of his shirt in tiny fists. Her body was now close enough for Calvin to feel the curves of her breasts against his chest. Her breath smelled sweet and almost flowery. He had a moment of self-consciousness, fearing that the smell of his breath would start to melt her face.
She stared into his eyes like she was trying to put him under a spell. Her lips parted just slightly, just enough for Calvin to understand what she wanted, and though he knew it was wrong, he wanted her too. He had never been a cheater, not with Ronnie and not with any of his past girlfriends, but hazel was right. There was no way to deny that they had been brought together like this for a reason, and to disrupt fate would be a mistake.
Their lips met in a kiss that proved to be more explosive than Calvin had been prepared for. There was little tongue, but the feeling of intimacy gave him a rush. He could feel hazel in his veins like he injected her essence into his arm with a needle, and he liked it.
She pulled away first and smiled wide. “Now that’s what I’m talking about.”
Calvin looked like he just got off a roller coaster that was more intense than he thought it would be. He swallowed hard. He wanted more.
She said, “You know where I live. I’ve got to go, but you come back here and visit me, ’kay?”
Lost for words, Calvin nodded his head like a damn fool. He swallowed again and said, “Sure. What about the program? I want to join.”
She poked his chest with her pointer finger. “That’s between you and Ghastly.”
There was a pause that hung in the air. Calvin said, “Am I gonna have to…”
“I don’t have a clue what you’re gonna have to do. Don’t think too hard about it. I’m guessing you see everyone dead too, right?”
Calvin nodded.
“Yeah, and now you just go with it, right? You’ve learned to accept it. That’s a big part of your training. You’ll be surprised how easy it all is when you truly let yourself go. Now, I’m kind of hungry and I kind of have to get a bit incognito, so I’m going to have to ask you to leave.” She pondered what she said and added, “or not. This place is a safe place. You can stay here if you want to.”
“No, I better go. I have to get back to my apartment anyway.”
Calvin left. Outside, everyone was dead, or at least they appeared that way. It was like some kind of fucked up zombie apocalypse that lacked the general destruction and disarray one would expect to see. A withered world.
Calvin just went with it.
Chapter Seventeen
By the time her Anthropology class was over Ronnie felt like she could crawl into a corner and sleep for a year or so she was so bored. Ronnie had been having doubts about her major as of late. What kind of job could she get with a degree in anthropology anyway?
She’d always liked the idea of discovering the past and the people who came before. She fondly remembered learning about ancient Egypt back in fifth grade. That’s where the seed was planted in her mind. One of the activities she had to do was to take a chicken and put it through the mummification process. She and her best friend Georgina stuffed the bird with spices (Ronnie did most of the dirty work since Georgina was kind of prissy), and then they wrapped the bird with gauze. It was cute. They named it King Tutanchicken. When they took the bird home they decided to bury it so that they could dig it up when they were adults. Of course, both of them wanted the bird in their own backyard, so they flipped a coin and Ronnie lost. King Tutanchicken was buried at Georgina’s house. Ronnie suggested they bury it on the hill near their neighborhood, but Georgina insisted on her backyard. Ronnie had looked forward to exhuming the bird, but she and Georgia had a falling apart in high school. For all Ronnie knew Georgina’s family may have moved out of the house. Unless someone tilled the yard for a garden, King Tutanchicken was probably still buried there.
Now that she was going to school and learning about anthropology front to back, she sometimes found herself wondering what for. It didn’t help that her professor was about as animated as a dead tree. He could manage to make a course on sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll feel like underwater basket weaving. Didn’t do much for Ronnie’s recent lack of enthusiasm concerning the fine art of digging up bones.
Funny how death was a big part of what she wanted to do for a living and yet she had had such an adverse reaction when Calvin had shown her that image on his computer several weeks ago. It was one thing when the corpse had been buried or even mummified, but photos of a murder victim… she didn’t want any of that. There might be death in anthropology, but there was no blood. She wasn’t getting into forensics or something.
Walking from the auditorium, Ronnie decided to grab a soda from one of the machines. She had some time to kill before her last course of the day, after which she would call Calvin about dinner.
Ronnie rarely bought soda on campus. They were pushing two dollars for a sixteen-ounce bottle, which was highway robbery as far as she was concerned, but she had a serious thirst and the prescription was Diet Coke.
Soda in hand, she sat on a bench and people-watched. There were a lot of what she liked to call “kids”, eighteen- and nineteen-year-olds right out of high school. You could spot them anywhere based on their idea of fashion and how they treated college like some kind of contest. Yeah, it was just community college, but that whole I’m better than you attitude that so many kids harbored in high school had to go. No room for that shit here in the real world.