Chapter 12
Chapter 12
Jenga
“How do you drink so much? You’re big though, I’ll give you that.”
Jenga Cranston approached a rickety shelf that lay fifteen feet inside his rickety door. The door was nearly always open, even when it was cold or raining. The only time he bothered to close it was when a particularly exciting frog or fly or some other sort of vermin, wandered in and he didn’t want it to get out.
“Hnnnng.”
“That’s all you ever say, Atlas,” Jenga’s one slumped shoulder shook with laughter. “It’s almost like I forgot to attach your tongue.”
Glancing through a jar in which floated a newt, Jenga watched the golem of Jamesburg’s former alpha. He never got tired of how still Atlas was. As his shoulder twitched and one of his knees ached, Jenga vaguely wished he could be that motionless for any length of time.
“Ah, here it is,” he sighed as he pulled a choice jar from the rack. “Two bats, one rattlesnake. I imagine they’ve been sitting in this vodka for six... seven years by now. Should be nice and strong.”
He poured the foul looking, and even worse smelling, liquid into a large paper cup and half expected it to melt the bottom. Satisfied the concoction wasn’t going to melt his rickety table Jenga shuffled across the room and set the cup in front of Atlas.
With a groan of effort, the old bear turned his head. What would have taken most people a quarter second took him about four times as long.
Jenga tapped his fingernails on the top of the table. “Any day now,” he said. “You drink enough of this and I think you’ll be as good as new. Oh, hum,” he reached out and plucked a worm from Atlas’s ear. “Must’ve missed that one somehow.”
“Hnnnnng.”
“Yes, yes,” Jenga said. He deposited the worm in the cup full of liquor and then lifted it to Atlas’s lips. Jenga’s hands trembled as he poured the liquid down Atlas’s throat. Only a little went dripped over his chin. “Feel better, old friend?”
“Hnnng?”
“Oh good,” Jenga said. “I hear some inflection.”
He grinned widely, his beard heavy and jingling with chicken feet, dried up lizards, and countless other gris-gris he’d plucked from the swamp behind his house. Across his one-room abode, a loud noise from the television startled the crotchety old swamp-dwelling witchdoctor.
“They’ll never figure it out. Ancient astronauts, aliens from space,” his voice was rattling and loose, just like the junk hanging in a pile around his neck. “Didn’t this channel used to show nothing but programs about people in pawn shops? Those were better days.”
Atlas parted his lips in something that would have resembled a smile ten years ago.
“Is that... oh good!” Jenga switched off the television and came back to see Atlas still grinning. “I had a feeling that elixir would get you cranked up. Can you talk yet? Or is it still just the—”
“Hnnnnng.”
“Right, well, can’t win ‘em all. At least you’re moving. That’s better than I managed last time I got you out of the dirt. How are those new legs working? Can you stand?”
Wordlessly, the enormous werebear stood.
“Fine, fine,” the old man said. “Looks like we might be on the right track.”
He poured another cup full of horror. That time, half a bat fell into it from somewhere up above. Atlas didn’t seem to notice.
“You do it yourself this time,” Jenga said. He began tapping his fingers on the side of his rickety book case, which was completely devoid of any books from the last century, before consciously stopping himself. “Take... take your time, yes... yes like that, pick it up and...”
Deliberately, slowly, but surely, Atlas bent from the waist just enough to wrap his massive hand around the little paper cup. He brought it to his lips, drank, and then chewed.
“What are you chewing?” Jenga shook his head. “Best not to know,” he said. “More?”
Atlas grunted and then spat out something that resembled chewing gum, but black. Jenga scooped it up into a little vial and shook it under a ceiling fan that didn’t work, except for the light. Whatever his old zombie friend spat out had a bunch of legs – none of them working very well anymore – and some kind of shiny shell.
Placing it on the end of one of his many workbenches, the overhead light flickered and died. Just afterwards, a loud banging sound from behind his house signaled the last of his backup generator’s energy.
Jenga’s face went gray.
“I didn’t want to do this,” he said. “I wanted to have a nice long chat, fill you up with liquor. But here we are. Ill-gotten gains bought me this place, got the lights, got the power and even this cable run all the way out here from town.”
“Hnnng?”
“Yes, you remember?” Jenga’s eyes lit up as he reminisced. “You were much more convincing in those days. I doubt anyone would take you for being alive anymore. Well, regular alive. I suppose you’re... animated? I don’t know quite what the right word is. The Eastern Witchdoctors Conference says zombies are alive only insofar as they can think. And you, well, I’m not sure where you fall on that scale.”
Atlas arched his eyebrows, slowly, and let out a long, low groan.
“I’m glad for one thing, old friend,” Jenga said as he ran his shaking fingers along a cut circling one of Atlas’s fingers. “I’m certainly glad you decided to begin falling apart before we started in with our new plan. Gave me time to patch you up. And honestly? I think you’re better than before.”
“Unng.”
“How good! How wonderful!” Jenga was almost jumping with excitement. “That was a new word! Before long you’ll be speaking, albeit slowly and in halting, confused sentences. But it’ll be almost like old times. You’ve never been exactly eloquent. Won’t that be wonderful? And then we can get you back to town and we can start paying the bills again.”
“Ung.” Atlas’s eyes turned downward. Very slowly, he shook his head.
“I know, I know, old friend,” Jenga said, patting Atlas’s giant shoulder. “I don’t like it any better than you do – the stealing and the sneaking. But the fact is that I have no choice. I’m so old, and there’s so very little to actually do in Jamesburg, that I can hardly get a job. And, after what happened last time I had an open medical practice, I don’t think selling tonics is an especially good idea.”