I heard Bill joking with Frank when I got back to the bar and my beers.

“From the looks of things the kid’s going to get lucky tonight,” he said to his old friend. Frank laughed.

“Good to know one of us is.”

I shook my head.

I actually was still on the phone, and thankfully not speakerphone.

“Oh honey,” Toni was saying, “could you please do one thing for me?”

“Sure” I told her, “anything.”

“I know you’re a bit upset about what you saw, you’d have to be,” she told me, “but could you please not go down to that bar.”

And by that bar, she was talking about the bar I was in right this moment working on my second beer. I decided not to tell her that I was already in the place. or that I was on my second beer.

“Of course,” I told her, “See you tonight, sexy nurse.”

“See tonight, sexy apartment building manager” she told me, “love you.”

“I love you to,” I told her and hung up the phone.

Sexy nurse sounds a lot better, but I’d never be able to pull that off.

Then I turned back to the two old lechers.

“You know guys,” I told him, “My girlfriend doesn't seem to like you at all.”

“Well of course she doesn't,” Frank offered, “That's because she's young, has a brain and isn’t blind. And she doesn’t like how my friend here looks at her.”

Bill chortled about that one.

“Now if she was 20 years older,” Frank continued, “She wouldn't be able to keep her hands off me. Well, maybe 40.”

“I had to laugh at that, because I was buzzed and it was funny. And I finished my second pint.

I looked back up at the screen, and saw the clip of the three mayoral candidates for our ward talking about local issues. The MZC issue came up. Worthington’s opponents seemed to think he’d be light-handed with the city’s growing street zombie problem.

Remembering, I looked back at the window. That same zombie was staring in. At me? I wondered. Shit.

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“Hey, Bruce,” I waved a hand to get the bartender’s attention. “How often do you get that.”

He looked over.  I pointed at the Z.

“Every once in a while,” he told me, then reached down and pulled up his electric zombie prodder. “He bothering you? I could get the bat.”

I shook my head.

“No, never mind.” I told him. Then I had an idea, and grabbed a napkin and a pen from my pocket.

Confirmation.  I needed to know, to plan.  And it was easier to ask when I was drunk.

“Bruce,” I pushed the pen and napkin across the bar. “Can you spell my name.”

He cocked his head as though I’d mouthed nonsense.

“Humor me,” I told him. He nodded, picked up the pen started scrawling.

“It’s Smith, right,” he asked. I nodded. In a moment he was done, and he passed the napkin back to me. He’s spelled my name perfectly. Without any prompting at all. I glanced back out at the zombie.

Could the spell, all that blood, have worked? After two drinks and a promised booty call from my girlfriend, what I’d seen hadn’t seemed so real. But people weren’t supposed to be able to spell my name. They weren’t.  Not if it hadn’t been broken in pieces. 

I shivered in the warm pub.  I hadn’t felt so exposed in years.  And maybe that Z was part of it.

“Hey Johnny,” Frank was shaking my shoulder. “Look, the building’s on the news again.”

I turned to see that Asian Pulse247 reporter from this morning on the screen.

“…the police are being quiet on this one,” the reporter was saying. “But they are calling it a suspicious death. Building manager, Johnny Smith offered no comment.”

“What the hell,” I couldn’t believe what I was seeing. They were using my name! Even during the Grappo murder they hadn’t mentioned me.

Fuck.  I took another gulp.

“No comment eh?” Frank asked me.

“I didn’t talk to anybody.” I stared at the TV. “How could they put that on the air?”

“I guess that’s where the whole, no comment comes in,” Frank offered. “Still kind of odd that they mentioned your name specifically.  What did you have to do with it?”

Could Dr. Dave have possibly been right in his assertions? Could it have been a real sacrificial spell cast using that man’s blood? And all to do with me? The dream. The thirteenth. The blood. I looked down and stared at the dark wood of the bar. I did not want to believe it was happening. It couldn’t have been possible. There was no way it was possible that anyone would know who I was, what I’d done. I took another few gulps from my pint and the alcohol helped convince me that it was all just something that happened. It would go away. It would always go away. It had to.

The coverage went back to the municipals and talks about how a dead candidate showed how the re-animated were being normalized in society, could be productive, a value.

“They are no different than the rest of us,” the advocate was saying. “They need a roof over their heads, and they need a purpose in their existence. To know that they are an accepted part of the community. I think if we elect a re-animated mayor that this will show that the city is moving into the future and not part of the past.”

“But what about the living, shouldn’t the focus be on them?”

“The living are all going to be dead eventually. If we don’t start planning for how societal demographics are changing we are going to be left behind. Look at how they are handling it in Europe, South America. There the re-animated are already leading members of society.”

“And Europe has one of the most stagnant economies on the planet. Do we really want to emulate that?”

“At least they respect their dead. Can you really say that about us on this side of the Atlantic? What does that say about how we respect the living?”