Hope and Undead Elvis

chapter Thirty-Four

Hope and Shades





Hope screamed as the bird flapped its wings and hissed at her again. It dove from its perch and flew toward her with its talons outstretched, seeking soft tissue to rend.

She fell backward against the door, unmindful of everything except protecting her baby. The bird squawked in surprise as its momentum was checked. Undead Elvis had flung out his free hand to snag the bird's leg. He swung it around hard into the wall. It exploded into a puff of black sand that scattered across the floor.

For a moment, Hope was frozen, her heart pounding and clutching at her belly. Then she was at Undead Elvis's side, her arms around him, openly weeping. "I missed you. I missed you so much."

"I missed you too, Li'l lady. I'm glad you found me."

Hope reached up to her head and removed the sunglasses which had perched there for months. "I found these. They're yours, aren't they? I saved them for you." She handed them to him.

Undead Elvis smiled. "There they are." He put them on and a remarkable transformation came over him. His jumpsuit became whole and as shiny as when Hope had first met him. His skin repaired itself. His hair became perfect once more. "That's more like it. Uh-huh."

The door burst open, followed by Chris with the other guard, their guns drawn. "What the hell is going on here?"

"Please, you have to let him go," said Hope.

"He ain't goin' nowhere," said the first guard. "He's a machine, that one."

"We checked," said Chris. "You ain't supposed to be down here at all, bun in the oven or not."

"No, you don't understand," cried Hope. "You have to let him go. He's supposed to come with me!" She grabbed the chain holding Undead Elvis to the treadmill and rattled it, as if doing so would release it.

"Knock it off, girl," said the other guard. "You best come with us."

"No! You have to free him!" Hope grasped Undead Elvis like he was a life preserver and she was drowning. She hadn't come so far, lived through so much, just to lose him again. "Please!"

"Take her to Shades," said Chris. "Don't bother The Deuce at this time of night."

"All right," said the other guard. They wrestled Hope away from Undead Elvis until she could do nothing but scream in miserable fury. They pulled her away, as rough as they dared to be with her burgeoning belly.

"I'll come back for you," screamed Hope. "I'll come back—oh!" A sudden, sharp pain tore through her abdomen, sending shockwaves to the ends of her figures and toes. She stopped fighting the men and instead clutched at them for support. As quickly as the pain had come on, it subsided, leaving her gasping for breath.

It was a contraction. It had to be. But it wasn't time yet for her baby to come. Her anguish and stress was carrying over to him, and if she didn't calm down, it would lead to the exact circumstance she wanted to avoid: having the baby under Mr. Duce's watchful eyes.

She gulped and took a deep breath. "I'm sorry," she said to the men. "I'll cooperate. Just please don't hurt him."

"Hurt him?" Chris laughed in an unkind way. "He ain't alive, far as we can tell. He ain't stopped walkin' that generator for months. We wouldn't have any power at all if not for him."

"We're takin' you to Shades," said the other man, as-yet-unnamed. "He runs things down here. He's The Deuce's man. He'll decide what to do with you."

"Might be a fine." Chris licked his lips. "Might get to take it outta your ass."

The other guard shoved him. "Hey, be nice. She's gonna have a kid!"

Charlie was unmoved. "So?"

They came to a door with the words Shades Office hand-painted upon them, missing apostrophe and all. Charlie knocked. "Shades, man, you in there? We got us a troublemaker."

"Come in," said a masculine voice.

The other man opened the door into a small room with a large desk that was dominated by a huge ledger. Bare overhead bulbs cast the room in a dingy yellow.

The man behind the desk stabbed out his cigarette and stood up. The smell of his tobacco mixed with Old Spice wafted across the room and made Hope gasp in shock. Twenty years had put more lines in his face but the features hadn't changed, even with the leather-edged sunglasses hiding his eyes.

Hope managed to say, "D-Daddy?" And then she burst into tears.

The man called Shades leaned on his desk for support, mouth open in surprise. "Hope? Is that you?"

Hope couldn't answer; she was bawling like she was five again.

"She was messing around with that one guy," said Chris. "Wanted us to let him go."

"Out," said Shades. "Now."

"But—"

"Get out of my office. This is my daughter, for God's sake."

Chris and the other man looked at each other, and then left.

Shades sat down. "Jesus. What are you doing here, Hope?"

Hope sniffled, her chest hitching as she tried to calm herself down. Her heart ached. He hadn't hugged her, or apologized, or even been the slightest bit joyful. What was wrong with him? "I was l-looking for someone." She felt her baby kick and it gave her strength.

"And you're pregnant? Does The Deuce know?"

"Yes. Daddy, aren't you going to say anything? I mean, I haven't seen you in forever."

"Forever's a long time, Li'l lady."

Hope gasped. She'd forgotten that was her father's pet name for her as a toddler. No wonder she loved when Undead Elvis used it. "You shouldn't be here. It's not safe for you. Or for your baby."

"Jesus, he's not just any baby, he's your grandson." Hope felt her temper rise. How dare he be like this? Why wasn't he down on his knees apologizing for his twenty-year absence? "Why did you go away? Why didn't you ever call, or write? Or even send me a goddamned birthday card, Daddy?"

Shades bowed his head. "Because I'm weak. And I'm a bad person."

"No, don't say that!"

He looked up. Hope could see herself reflected in his sunglasses. Why was he wearing them indoors, in a dimly-lit room? It made her uncomfortable. "I've done bad things, Li'l lady. I hurt people." He rummaged through his desk. "I still do. It's my job." He found what he had been seeking. He leaned back in his chair, tipped his head back, moved his sunglasses aside, and dropped some fluid from a bottle into his eyes. Then he readjusted his glasses and sat up straight, regarding Hope as the droplets coursed down the lines in his cheeks.

"Why?"

He shrugged. "You do what you have to to survive. Even working for a man like The Deuce."

"He scares me."

"He scares me too."

"W-why do you wear those?" she asked.

"You know why The Deuce scares me? I'll tell you why. When I first came here, right after the world went to shit, he put me in charge of getting his power system up and running. No big deal. I've been an electrician forever. Problem was we didn't have any way to run generators. I was joking when I said we ought to just use the goddamn treadmills and stationary bikes and have people do it, but he thought that was a brilliant idea. And he put me in charge of that. Long as the power was flowing, The Deuce was happy. And when he was happy, so was everyone else." Shades shuddered. "But one day I let him down. Had a short somewhere and I couldn't find it. I must have spent a day and a half on my feet trying to find the goddamn thing. Finally I couldn't hack it anymore and curled up to get some shut-eye. He found me and woke me up. Said he didn't appreciate me sleeping on the job. So he took a razor and made sure he couldn't ever catch me with my eyes shut again when I was supposed to be working."

A sick, crawling horror began to squirm its way up Hope's spine, like a spider ascending her vertebrae one at a time.

"He cut my eyelids off. I can't close my eyes at all now. They hurt all the time. Sometimes so bad I can't see. I haven't had a good night's sleep in months. It's killing me, Hope."

Hope overcame her reticence and approached her father. For the first time in two decades, she put her arms around him, not just to seek solace, but to comfort him. He stiffened at first, but then he buried his head against her shoulder, careful of her belly. He sniffled and Hope felt sick at how much crying must hurt him now. "Look at you, all grown up. You're as beautiful as your mother was at your age."

"I'm all fat, now, Daddy. I look like I swallowed a beach ball."

"You look wonderful. Jesus, I didn't know how much I missed you until now, Li'l lady."

"I missed you too." She took a deep, shuddering breath, letting her anger go. She had to; it wouldn't do anyone any good for her to hold a grudge. "And I forgive you for leaving."

He pulled away from her and found his eye drops again. "You shouldn't. I should have stayed. Helped raise you and your brother. Have you seen him at all? Or your mother?"

"Not for years. They might be…"

"Gone, probably, like everyone else. I wish I knew what happened to everything. I didn't used to be this way. Callous. Hurting people."

"It's the world, Daddy. It's broken. But he—" Hope touched her stomach. "—He will fix it."

"I hope to God you're right." He tipped the bottle to his eyes once more. Hope caught a glimpse of angry red scar tissue and bulging orbs rife with crisscrossed veins before he pushed the sunglasses back into place. "Because it's only been getting worse."

"Daddy, as soon as the weather clears up, I'm leaving. There's a safe place I can go, and you can come with me."

Shades' laugh was bitter. "There's no place safe in the world anymore."

Hope squeezed his shoulder. "There is, Daddy. Graceland. The real one."

"Why there, of all places?" Despite his obvious doubt, Hope could see in his face that he was curious, even hopeful.

"Undead Elvis told me, and I believe him."

Shades sat back down again, clasping his hands on his desk and staring at them. "It's that guy, isn't it? He's not really alive. We've known that for months. But with the world all messed up, we weren't that surprised."

"So you chained him up and put him to work."

"Have you been upstairs? Had a little something hot to eat out of the storm? Seen the lights in the darkness? Those things couldn't happen without power, and we can't exactly just pay the power bill and get it from the wall outlets anymore."

"They're slaves, Daddy! Is that the best you can do? As soon as everything goes to shit, people turn into animals and whoever is the alpha male has free reign over everyone else?" Shades wouldn't look at Hope, so she turned his chair to make him face her.

"It's what we have to work with, Li'l lady. I wish it was different, but things have changed."

Hope stamped her foot in petulance. "So I guess it's pointless for me to even ask you to let Undead Elvis go."

"What is he to you? He's not the father…" Shades nodded at her belly.

"No. He's just… he's just my friend. He saved my life. I have to return that favor."

"But he's not even alive."

"He's a hell of a lot more alive than those people pulling slot machine handles upstairs, or those poor souls on the treadmills. You people are dying by inches here."

Hope's father stared up at her. She wished she could read his eyes behind the sunglasses, but knew she might never again see them, and that made her sad. "What's the alternative?" he asked. "Leave? Wander the wasteland and hope we don't starve?"

"You could come with me." Hope's voice was soft. "You and anyone else who wants to. Come with me to Graceland, Daddy. It'll be safe there."

He shook his head. "That's got to be a good three or four hundred miles. There's not a car here that can get you there."

"Mine can," said Hope, confidant. "And even if it couldn't, we'd find a way. There's always a way."

"You were such an optimistic little girl," said Shades. "It's nice to see you've retained that."

"More like relearned it," said Hope. "Being a mother-to-be has given me a new perspective."

"The father. What was he like?"

Hope felt her cheeks grow hot. "I… I can't really tell you."

The door to Shades' office opened. Duce's bulk filled the doorway, and Hope saw a few men behind him. "I can tell you what kind of father the baby will have now, Shades," he said. "I'll raise him or her as my own. An heir to the throne, as it were." His smile became predatory. "Doesn't that sound like a great future?"