By Al Bruno III
September 19th: Victor Bisolglio spent most of his time either making meth or playing World of Warcraft, but his pursuit of one was always a detriment to the other. Sometimes, he missed raids because he was too busy cooking; other times, he was so fixated on his daily quests that he ended up making a useless batch.
Or two.
Or three.
He lived in a trailer on his parents' property, a weathered double-wide nestled among overgrown weeds and rusting farm equipment. They'd long ago given up on him, resigned to his presence like an irremovable stain. Victor had transformed the back corner of their once-tidy property into his own chaotic domain—a makeshift laboratory in a shoddily constructed tool shed a few yards away from his residence.
At ten o'clock in the evening, the door to that shed hung open, revealing a mad scientist's dream of tubing, containers, and smoke. A pungent stench, a cocktail of cat piss and nail polish remover, wafted from the rickety structure, carried on a faint evening breeze. Victor sat at a grimy picnic table nearby, hunched over the dim, multicolored glow of his laptop screen. Lost in the virtual world unfolding before him, he remained oblivious to the physical decay spreading around him—the scattered tools, the discarded chemical containers, the faint haze of smoke mingling with the evening mist.
Did Victor care that he was slowly turning his parents' once-pristine property into a small-scale toxic waste dump? Did it worry him that the last three batches of meth he'd delivered to Raevyn Legendre had been unsaleable garbage? Did he care that his friends, just like his family, had given up on him?
No, not in the least, not when he had reached a place where virtual achievement, where "respec," mattered far more to him than respect.
I was nearby, concealed behind one of the few trees that groundwater poisoning hadn't left leafless and bent.
A string of recent murders had unsettled Albany. Low-level dealers and cooks had been found savaged, their throats torn out, their entrails exposed to the night air, their skulls cracked open and emptied. Rumors swirled that the assailant was no mere mortal—a figure described as shambling, dead-eyed, and caked with dirt had been spotted near the crime scenes. Any mention of the 'Z word' was quickly silenced by the authorities, dismissing it as hysteria.
At a quarter to midnight, a shape emerged from the shadows, lumbering toward Victor's double-wide and the smoking toolshed. I fumbled for my iPhone, snapping pictures silently as I watched. Victor remained engrossed in his game, oblivious to the figure approaching him.
My conscience wrestled with my caution, and I shouted a warning, but Victor remained lost in the cacophony of music, sound effects, and online chatter blaring through his earbuds.
The dark figure overturned the picnic table, snapping Victor out of his virtual trance. The reality crashed down upon him as the figure swiped, narrowly missing Victor's scrambling form. It might have ended there, a tragic misunderstanding if Victor hadn't recognized his assailant.
"Earl?" Victor's voice cracked with disbelief.
Victor hadn't expected to see Earl Edmonds again, not since he'd buried him in the woods almost three weeks ago.
When the dark shape advanced again, Victor brandished what appeared to be a revolver from his jacket. He issued threats, but the figure kept coming.
I broke cover, sprinting towards them, arms waving frantically, pleading for restraint before things spiraled out of control. The shambling figure remained unresponsive, but Victor reacted.
He screamed and fired.
Not at me, thankfully, but at the man he'd once called a friend.
A bright ball of Fourth of July fireworks erupted from the barrel.
Yes, a flare gun. Victor's choice of sidearm had been a flare gun.
There was just enough time for me to think, What is this? I don't even...
Then, a sputtering ball of burning red bounced off the dark figure's chest, careened twice along the ground, and rolled into the toolshed.
Boom.
I had no idea what volatile mix of chemicals and God-knows-what-else was housed in that ramshackle building, but the blast tore through its walls and roof in an eruption of yellow and orange fire.
Victor was consumed by the explosion. Had it been a quick end, or did the pain linger long enough for him to realize what was happening? I hoped for the former.
The other figure wasn't so fortunate; engulfed in flames, it staggered and flailed. Then it screamed.
Perhaps, in those agonizing moments, Earl Edmonds realized he wasn't one of the walking dead after all...
###
...let the record show that if you are going to be an investigator in all things preternatural and uncanny, then you are going to find yourself huddling in the bushes more often than a compulsive masturbator in a nudist colony.
It was almost dawn, and I had been watching the comings and goings at the house on Lana Drive for half the day and most of the night. The air hung heavy with the musty scent of damp earth, and the distant hum of traffic occasionally pierced the quiet of the suburban night. When the owner left on an errand, I gave the place a quick once-over, something that was fifty percent reconnaissance and fifty percent breaking and entering. That done, I returned to my hiding spot in the woods. More waiting. Hours of waiting. Waiting until my knees were aching and my bladder was threatening to erupt. It wasn't until 4 a.m. that I thought the owner of the house was alone. That was when I made my move.
But not until I relieved myself on the side of a tree first. For what I was about to do, I needed to be full of less piss and more vinegar.
I made my way up the walk and knocked on the front door.
"Brian Foster," I announced.
Raevyn Legendre, half Bokor, half crime boss, didn't look at all surprised to see me. She stepped aside, her voice tinged with a community theater-level Jamaican accent, "Come in. Come in."
"Not surprised to see me?" I asked.
"I been expecting you," she said. Her skin was the color of coffee, her hair the color of bone, "They all said there was some guy in an ugly hat going around asking lots of questions."
"Well, you can't learn anything if you don't ask questions," I grinned.
We both smiled, but they were phony smiles, politicians' smiles. She led me past her parlor with all its faux Voodoo knick-knacks and a pair of very real Lorcin .380s on the center table.
It was very telling that she hadn't grabbed them; I guess she didn't see me as much of a threat. Her and everybody else in Albany.
There was a long hallway through the center of the house leading to a pair of bedrooms. My earlier snooping had revealed that Raevyn used the bedroom on the right for sleeping, and the one on the left was where she kept her ziplock bags of dried pufferfish, marine toads, and Hyla tree frogs, her Tupperware containers of Datura paste and lysergic acid diethylamide in crystal form.
I followed my host to her bare kitchen. There was a bottle of rum on the counter, her last bottle of rum, if I was correct. It was already half empty.
Raevyn Legendre, half Bokor, half crime boss, fully functioning alcoholic, poured me a glass and offered it, "Have a drink."
"I don't drink," I lied.
"Your loss," she emptied my glass, then refilled her own. "What you be wantin'?"
"I know you had Victor Bisolglio killed and a lot of other people too."
"You wearing a wire?"
I chuckled, "Why would I help the police?"
“You one of Bootsie Werdegast’s boys?”
"No, I graduated high school."
"Maybe you want to be a hero," she said.
"I just want the real story, for my dozen or so readers," I explained, "they love stories like yours. Do you know there are people out there that think you raise the dead to do your bidding?"
"Why you goin' believin' that nonsense?" Her accent slurred to an Irish brogue for a syllable or two then back again, "Everyone tells these crazy stories. I'm a drug dealer, I'm a witch, I'm an insatiable nymphomaniac..."
"Er... That last one is a bit of a surprise..." I didn't know whether to cringe or blush, so I did a little of both, "But back to the matter at hand. My sources tell me that Earl Edmonds O.D.ed at a party you held here almost a month ago. The same sources say that rather than get the authorities involved, you had some of your employees wrap him in an old rug and bury him in a shallow grave."
I paused for effect, but she just smiled.
"Now, someone dug up that grave a few days later, and I'm pretty sure that someone was you. Why did you do it? Because Earl wasn't dead. Oh, he looked dead, but he had been drugged with a little psychotropic cocktail people sometimes called," I made quotation marks in the air, "'zombie powder.'"
She raised an eyebrow and emptied her glass of rum. Then she poured herself another. The bottle was two-thirds empty now.
"This zombie powder causes a paralysis so severe that a layman might think the victim is dead. It's the stuff of Edgar Alan Poe's nightmares." I took a cautious step toward her, "And all the while, the poor bastard is in a state of living death. They're having nightmarish hallucinations. Imagine all that happening and being buried alive to boot."
She laughed at me, but I'm used to women doing that, so it's all good.
I continued, "I imagine the Earl you dug up was not the same man from just a few days before. I imagine it would have been easy to mess with his broken mind. How long did it take you to convince him he was a zombie?"
Raevyn emptied the glass again, but this time, she set it down on the counter beside her, "Why would anyone do something so... Theatrical?"
"Oh, I agree it is a very theatrical way to go about things, but then again, I'm not the failed law student from Wisconsin pretending to be a witch woman from Jamaica, so what do I know?"
That got her. She frowned and crossed her arms.
When in doubt, keep talking, so that's what I did. "Like they say on the Internet, Google is your friend. But don't worry, your secret is safe with me."
"Why-" she paused as if she was collecting her thoughts, "why would I go to all that trouble?"
"Because criminals are a cowardly superstitious lot."
I waited to see if she got the reference. She didn't, so I went on.
"You did it because you suspected there was a snitch in your organization. You used poor Earl to eliminate the usual suspects." I counted off on my hand, "They found what was left of Mordikai Aden in a dumpster. Shortly after that, a 911 call sent the police to Adrian Driscoll's apartment, but there wasn't much they could do for him. There wasn't much an undertaker could do for him either, if you get my meaning. Then there was Sandro Elsdon. He was killed alongside his girlfriend and two young kids."
"But why? Why not just put a bullet in their heads instead?"
"Because it taught your employees a very valuable lesson. Cross Raevyn Legendre and you will end up dead or worse." I took off my straw fedora and fiddled with it, "What are you going to do now that your pet zombie is really dead?"
"If what you're saying is true I would just make another. Maybe I got more waiting down in the basement. What would you do then? What if all I had to do to wake them up was just snap my fingers?" She tried to snap her fingers for emphasis, but her hand wouldn't quite obey her.
Panic settled into her eyes. Her legs failed her. All the while she slid down to the floor she kept trying to snap her fingers.
There was a handkerchief in my left pocket, I used it to pick up the bottle of rum and pour it out. I suppose you readers out there figured out what I did when I was snooping around her house.
Raevyn said, "Fa- fa-"
I'm not sure if she was trying to say my name or curse me out. I looked down at her, too disgusted with myself to gloat. My tone was almost apologetic, "You've got enough meth here to host a tweakers convention. I'm not sure if I gave you the recommended dosage of your zombie powder, so once I get a few blocks away, I'm going to make an anonymous call to 911 and let the chips fall where they may."
With that I started to leave, but I turned back and said, "I guess I got you dead to rights."
Then I left.
OK, so maybe I gloated a little...
###
...yep I just confessed to another crime on the Internet but once again my story in no way matches the way the powers that be want to portray events. If they arrest me it will raise too many questions as to what is really going on.
I did make the 911 call, just like I promised, but when the authorities got there, Raevyn Legendre was dead. They blamed the attack on pit bulls, which is an insult to all the well-behaved pit bulls out there and an insult to reality because the half-baked crime boss in question was allergic to dogs.
But something, maybe several somethings, gnawed her flesh down to the bone.
So I guess maybe she did have some spares somewhere in the basement, somewhere I didn't check. In their half-alive state, they must have heard my conversation with her.
And then? And then, sometime between me leaving and the police showing up, Raevyn managed to snap her fingers after all.
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