I saw Joe Reed sitting in a booth in the back of Dugan’s Bar & Grill, sipping a beer, staring forward, minding his business. Problem was – Joe Reed was dead. Killed by a heart attack six months ago at the age of forty-eight. My age. I had attended his funeral.

After squinting back there for a time, I shrugged it off. I waved the bartender over for another beer and tried watching a ball game on the small color TV on a shelf above the bar. But every now and then, I couldn’t resist glancing over my shoulder at the Joe Reed look-a-like.

Finally, it was time to take a leak. The men’s room was in the back of Dugan’s, off a small hallway just past the booth where the Joe Reed doppelganger sat glumly sipping his beer. As I strolled by, I gave him a crosswise glance.

While pissing into an old urinal in the narrow john, I marveled how much the guy truly resembled Joe Reed. The very same Joe Reed whose corpse had laid so still and stiff only six months ago in a brass coffin in one of the viewing rooms at O’Connell’s Funeral Home, lifeless and pasty as a department store mannequin.

On the return trip from the john, I couldn’t help myself. I stopped at the booth and gave the guy a long, hard look.

“Joe?” I mumbled, “Joe Reed?”

He turned and looked up at me with a blank stare. Joe and I had once been best friends. After high school, we had gone our separate ways. By the time we got married and settled down into family life and lousy jobs, our friendship was a cold memory, nothing more than a couple of faded photographs of grinning, swaggering teens in a worn out photo album. The day I learned of his death, I hadn’t seen Joe Reed in over five years.

“Joe?” I said squinting at the guy.

But the guy didn’t respond. He just stared up at me.

“It’s me,” I said. “Don Kaminski.”

He frowned but that was it. If he wasn’t Joe Reed, which he couldn’t be, all he had to say was that I was mistaken. But all he gave me was a cold stare. I tried explaining as coherently as I could without slurring too much how much he resembled my late friend but it was obvious he didn’t want the company.

“Well, screw you then,” I said and stalked off back to the bar.

Back on my barstool, I gulped the rest of my beer and called the bartender over.

“You know that guy?” I asked, gesturing behind me with a thumb.

“What guy?”

“The guy back there,” I said. “In the last booth before the john.”

The bartender squinted that way.

“What guy?” he asked.

I swung around. The booth with the Joe Reed look-a-like was now empty.

 

There was no doubt that Joe Reed was dead. Six feet under. I had seen his casket being lowered into a hole at Lakeview Cemetery. I cried when the priest uttered those last somber words, ashes to ashes, dust to dust. I ate bacon and eggs and sipped orange juice and coffee at his funeral breakfast in the back room of Garibaldi’s Restaurant. After everyone else had long gone home, I downed four or five shots of bourbon and a few more beers with his brothers, Tom and Bill, and we laughed until our sides split telling stories about the old neighborhood and all the mischief Joe and I got into.

“A ghost!” Betty said. “What you saw was Joe Reed’s ghost.”

She smiled tucking me under the covers, glad that I had not stayed out all night and spent half my paycheck in some gin mill. Betty had become a plump and lonesome housebound woman as she approached her forty-sixth birthday. In high school, she had been a beauty. Blond and tart. Once, back then, she had dated Joe Reed. She said he had hands swift as water and rough as sand, and that she was not that kind of girl. She’d dumped him flat and started dating me not long after. But she had cried real tears at his wake and it made me wonder if she regretted not putting up with his swift, sandpaper hands and that crooked, daring smile that made most girls blush and giggle.

“No,” I insisted. “I saw him.”

I must have sounded like the complete drunk I had become.

“Joe Reed'” I slurred.

Betty patted my forehead and smiled knowingly.

“Optical illusion,” she said. She stood with a groan and headed out of my bedroom. (We hadn’t slept together in years). As she turned out the light, she added, “Sweet dreams.”

I fell into a deep, dreamless sleep and didn’t wake up until about ten that morning. The smell of coffee and bacon wafted up from the kitchen. I heard Betty humming to herself.

I stumbled downstairs, the hangover not all that bad. Betty smiled as I fell into my chair at the kitchen table.

“You okay?” she asked. “Hungry?”

“Starved,” I said.

I slurped up the eggs, over easy, with a slice of toast lathered with too much butter, and bacon on the plate Betty had placed in front of me. I gulped it all down with a strong cup of coffee. Betty sat down across from me with her own cup of coffee and watched me eat.

“Still think you saw Joe Reed?”

I looked up and explained how closely the guy resembled Joe.

“But it couldn’t have been him,” Betty said.

“Well, it sure looked like him,” I said. “And I wasn’t drunk.”

“What the hell where you doing all the way out there, anyway?” Betty asked . “In the old neighborhood? At Dugan’s of all places?”

I shrugged and sipped more coffee. I hadn’t been to that old gin mill in maybe ten years. We used to live in a dump around the corner from it before I got the job at Ford and we moved out to a better quality of suburbs.

Actually, I had gotten depressed after a couple of drinks at Dixie’s, my usual stop after my 3-11 shift with some of the guys from Ford. For some reason last night, I craved the old days, old faces. Somehow, I had ended up at Dugan’s staring into the face of a dead man.

“I dunno,” I said. “Miss the place, I guess.”

“But seeing Joe Reed,” Betty said with a wave of her hand. Then she was staring out the kitchen window, thinking of something. Joe Reed, perhaps.

 

That night, a Saturday, I told Betty I was going to the store for another six pack. But I went back to Dugan’s instead. And there he was – Joe Reed, sitting in the same booth in the back of the place as the night before.

After gulping down a shot of whiskey, I hopped off the barstool and strode up to him.

“Mind if I sit down?”

He regarded me without a hint of recognition. His eyes had that cold, empty look, same as yesterday. It was as if he was only half-awake.

I sat down anyway.

“You’re Joe Reed, aren’t you?” I was sure of it, persuaded.

But he remained noncommittal. Didn’t even shrug, just sat there circling the lip of his glass of beer with his right index finger, around and around. It was something the real Joe Reed used to do and I shuddered with the sudden recollection of that.

Finally, our eyes met. That gave me another fright. They were certainly Joe Reed’s eyes, blue and wide, but full of loss, not bright and confident as I remembered them.

He swallowed the rest of his beer, abruptly slid out of the booth. Without a word, he started toward the front of the bar.

A moment later, I followed after him.

He was a shadow walking down Maple Avenue when I first caught sight of him. It had rained earlier, and the wet pavement and dark puddles glistened in the cold glare of the street lamps.

Staying a safe distance behind him, out of sight, I tried to remember the way Joe Reed had walked. This certainly wasn’t it. He walked deliberately now, programmed, stiff, as if driven by something outside his control.

I stayed with him as he meandered down a series of narrow side streets. Old, grungy clapboard houses hulked so close together in the shadows of this old neighborhood you could almost reach between them. At last, he rounded a corner onto Colton Avenue. I knew the area from the old days when Betty and I had rented a lower flat in one of these clapboard monstrosities the next street over.

Joe Reed abruptly stopped in front of one of the old houses, 111 Colton, turned sharply to the left, and started up a narrow, cracked walkway. Crouching behind a tree across the street, I watched as he stepped onto the rackety porch, opened the front door and went inside.

Something warned me against following him into the place. But, of course, I had to do it. I knew I wouldn’t sleep again if I didn’t find out how Joe Reed had come back to life.

I started down the dark, narrow pathway, tip-toed up the front steps onto the porch and stopped a moment at the front door. Finally, I turned the knob and was completely surprised when the door creaked opened. Despite a torrent of misgivings, I entered an old, musty foyer. The smell of decay drove me back. It was as if I had opened a tomb and had inhaled the dust of dead men. I hesitated a long moment, struck by the silence and foreboding of this place. But I fought off the dread, stood my ground.

Instead of retreating, I heard myself shout, “Hello!” My call reverberated off the high ceilings of the foyer and long-abandoned inner rooms. I crouched tensely, waiting.

After another few moments, I again called out, “Hello!” Then, I added, “Anybody home?”

Nothing. Not a peep.

Frowning, I pressed deeper into the place. I had seen a dead man. His body, at least, had risen, whole and fresh, and walked among the living. I had to know how such a thing was possible.

I quickly found a large expanse of darkness, a living room of sorts, furnished with a couple lumpy chairs and a wide sofa with tables in between. I took a step into the room but stopped after a moment, sensing something lurking in the shadows. I leaned forward and squinted, listening. After a moment, I backed off and suppressed a gasp. I knew at once that there were things in that room.

Beings.

After a fretful sigh, my eyes focused upon them – shadows, shapes, a dozen perhaps, men, women. Some were standing back against the walls; others occupied the chairs and sofa: a few more sat cross-legged on the dank carpet. Doing nothing.

As I stepped completely into the room, there were glances my way, but none of the beings approached me. My sudden presence had been acknowledged, but that was all. Within moments, the beings returned to their silent brooding.

Then a soft voice behind me, at the threshold of the doorway I had just entered, said:

“They’re zombies.”

I jumped, naturally. My heart pounded. I whirled around and saw a rather unimposing, plump little man.

“Homeless zombies,” he added.

He introduced himself as Dr. Heinrich Hulbert, Henry for short. He reached out and offered a plump, clammy handshake.

After letting go of his hand, I asked, “Zombies? How’s that?”

“The creatures before you,” he said, gesturing to the assembly of listless folk occupying the living room. “They’re zombies. Homeless zombies.” He gazed out at them with a wan expression.

At last, he turned to me.

“You see,” he went on, “I have helped them escape. Brought them here.”

I thought that he must be mad and cursed myself again for coming here. I could be sitting in a warm bar, washing down another shot with another beer.

I gave the little impish man half a smile and half a sneer.

“What are you talking about, Mister?” I pointed to the roomful of beings. “Who are these people? Mental patients?” Then I remembered that Joe Reed had walked in here.

“I told you,” he said. “Zombies. Resurrected from death. We stole their bodies from the freshest graves, dozens of them. Then we used the most advanced procedures of regenerative medicine to repair dead, damaged tissue and reanimated them, brought them back to life with a zap of electricity.

“And, presto!” he snapped his fingers and laughed like a wizard in a magic shop. “To our astonishment, it worked! They woke up.”

Suddenly, he frowned.

“But what woke up is what you see before you: Mindless automatons, oblivious to their condition. Without a shred of memory or initiative.

“You see – ” and now he smiled sardonically ” – each of them has awakened physically, but without a soul.”

His wide eyes formed into a deep scowl as he gazed upon the alleged zombies.

“Because of this,” he went on, more to himself than to me, “the Army knew that the experiment had failed. What good would it be to resurrect a soldier but not his soul?

“So the project was aborted,” Dr. Hulbert went on. “We were sent back to the drawing board, to find a way not only to resurrect bodies, but souls as well – the essence of what the person was, had been.” He looked at me. “Is.”

Dr. Hulbert sighed as he turned to the twenty or so subdued beings before us in the living room of the old, dark drafty house.

“As for these poor creatures,” he said, “the Army ordered them destroyed. De-animated, was the word they used. We had to kill them and secretly put them back into their graves”

He looked to me again, his eyes full of distress.

“That was something,” he said, “I simply could not let them do. First of all, I disagreed with the assessment that they were completely soul-less. I thought I could detect a hint of something, some mental recognition of individual identity, however dim.

“So I helped them escape and brought them here. To this old, abandoned house, one of many owned in this city by my cousin, Max, that I was able to rent on the cheap. I hoped that when these zombies mixed into the general population, their souls might be reborn.”

I nodded, trying to understand what he was telling me.

“So,” I said, suddenly thinking of Joe Reed, my friend. Now resurrected. Now soul-less. “Do you think that can be done. For souls to be reborn. For them to remember who they had been?”

“We tried to do that, to retrain them, of course,” said the doctor. He leaned against the doorway and slid down it in a sullen lump to the carpet. “We tried everything.”

He looked up at me.

“Perhaps,” he said, “we failed because there is no way to resurrect a soul.”

“So now what?” I asked after a time.

“Back to the drawing board, I guess,” Dr. Hurlburt said with a shrug.

“No,” I said, and nodded to the dark room where the dozen or so homeless zombies dawdled. “What about them?”

His eyes flashed up at me.

“They can live here,” he said, then added: “Roam the streets like the thousands of other mindless, homeless waifs and mental cases that populate this city, ignored by the masses. For as long as they want.”

 

I wondered why he had told me this, revealed his secret. He seemed more than a little nuts himself, stressed out, and perhaps he just needed a friend, someone, anyone with whom he could confide and commiserate. That someone, that dark night, happened to be me.

Every night the following week, I snuck out after Betty went to sleep and headed for the old house in our old neighborhood where the homeless zombies lived. I said nothing to Betty about it. She already thought I was drinking too much and probably couldn’t take much more of my nonsense before she left me altogether and went to live with her sister in Phoenix.

Naturally, during those nightly visits, I sought out Joe Reed. Sometimes, he wasn’t there, having himself snuck out to Dugan’s to wet his whistle with his favorite brew. Dr. Hurlburt, I had learned, was well off and gave each of the twenty or so homeless zombies a small allowance for their nightly wanderings. Some of them, the dimmest ones, remained in the house, satisfied to sit in silence and darkness, while others, like Joe Reed, were impelled to seek out the world their death had left behind.

“Doesn’t that imply something?” I asked Hurlburt one evening. “That they are aware, at least of something.”

Hurlburt merely scowled and shrugged.

“That they have a little piece of their souls in them?” I said. “Take Joe, for instance. There must be a little piece of him that remembers Dugan’s, the taste of his favorite brew.”

Hurlburt grinned.

“Perhaps,” he said, nodding. “Perhaps.”

 

I also set about trying to help Joe Reed find his soul.

The first thing I did was visit Joe Reed’s older sister, Mary. At first, she didn’t recognize me. But after a few minutes she was laughing over the memories of being tormented by Joe and me with toads and earthworms in the old house where they had grown up.

“You two were holy terrors,” she remembered, laughing. “Little devils!”

I told her that I had stopped by because the old gang was planning a reunion and we wanted to get some photos of Joe for a scrapbook that could be fondly passed around.

She brought out a shoe box of old pictures and leafed through them while we sat at her kitchen table. It didn’t take her long to pull out a dozen or so pictures of Joe in various phases of his life. In one, he was a silly, grinning nine year old. There were a couple poses in his serious teenage years (one of which had me in my serious teenage years with our arms around each other’s shoulders in a defiant stance). Another was from his wedding day; and, later, with his two daughters, Sandra and Kim, and wife, Judy, before the divorce. “Bitch,” Mary muttered as she tossed that picture aside. There was, finally, the one from the last week of his life, in which, I had to agree with Mary, that he did look tired and forlorn.

“Too much work,” Mary said as she gazed at this picture. “Too much worry.”

The last photographs she pulled from the box, almost as an afterthought, surprised me: It was of Joe and a slim girl with long, silky blonde hair, standing in front of his father’s car. She was staring at him with unmistakable adoration.

It was my Betty, of course, before her first and only date with Joe Reed.

 

Joe Reed didn’t give any the photographs a second look as I shoved them one-by-one under his heavy gaze in the back booth of Dugan’s that night.

“Hey, Joe,” I said, finally showing him the one from our teenage years. “Look at these dudes. Two worthless punks.” I shook my head, marveling at our arrogance, our youth, our disdain for the world.

But Joe Reed didn’t flinch. His eyes held that same tedium.

“You’re wasting your time,” Hurlburt said. I had invited him to the bar, to see for himself what effect the photographs might have. “You don’t think we tried this in our therapies?”

I shrugged as I pulled the photograph from under Joe Reed’s eyes.

On the way back to the zombies’ house with Joe Reed in tow, Hurlburt seemed to soften a little and thanked me for my efforts to revive Joe’s soul.

In front of the place, he turned and looked up into the dark windows.

“Maybe the Army was right,” he said. “In wanting to destroy them.”

I shuddered. In that moment, with Joe Reed standing dumbly next to us, I almost agreed.

But in the next instant, Joe Reed turned to me.

“Don Kaminski,” he said, squinting. “Right?”

I looked at Hurlburt. His eyes were wide and smiling as mine.

I worked 3-11 the next day and rather than going out with my crew for a round of drinks at Dixie’s afterwards, I headed straight to the zombie house.

But Colton Avenue was blocked by fire trucks and ambulances and police trying to keep gawking neighbors back. Somehow, I slipped past the barricades to a spot across the street from the zombie house. By then, it was fully engulfed in flames with the firemen standing back watching it burn down. The whole street stank of smoldering wood and was thick with smoke.

I stood there among a few other neighbors mesmerized by the devastation of a raging fire, and then a wall tumbling down. I heard one of the neighbors tell another guy that it must have been a crack house. Weird strangers coming and going, the place always dark, sinister. Tomorrow, he said, the city would come and tear the place down.

After a time, I sighed and gave the zombie house a last glance before heading to Dugan’s.

And to my surprise and delight, there he was – Joe Reed, sitting in his favorite booth in the back of the place, sipping a beer. I hurried back there and slid across from him.

“Hey, Joe,” I said. “You there for the fire? What happened to that doctor guy? Hurlburt?”

He frowned and took a sip of beer.

“Hey, Joe,” I said. “Remember me? Don. Don Kaminski.”

“Yeah,” he said after another sip of beer. “Don.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Don.” I said. “So what happened? How’d the house burn down?”

“Army men came,” he said. “I was coming here. They didn’t see me.”

I guessed a platoon from the Army had somehow tracked the zombies down to Hurlburt’s cousin’s house and burnt the place down thinking all of them were inside. But Joe Reed must have been on his way to Dugan’s when they raided the place.

“Bastards,” I mumbled.

Joe Reed expressed no opinion. He just took another sip of beer and waited. For what, I don’t think he even knew.

“You’ll gonna have to come with me,” I told him with some urgency in my voice.

He looked across at me, but didn’t seem to care. He was content, didn’t have a worry in the world, and in that moment, I envied him.

I let him finish his beer, then stood and said, “C’mon.” I reached under his arm and he let me lift me out of the booth.

 

Betty’s eyes boggled when I walked into the kitchen with Joe Reed in tow. She wobbled away from the sink, letting the dish she had been drying fall and shatter within it, and plopped heavily onto a chair at the kitchen table.

It took her some time to get over the shock of seeing a dead man.

I explained everything to her, where I had been every night the last two weeks. And, finally, what had just happened to the zombies and Joe Reed’s good fortune at having been on his way to Dugan’s when the Army troops came.

“And here I thought you had a girlfriend,” Betty said with a laugh.

“Joe needs a place to stay a while,” I told her.

Betty looked at him and nodded agreeably. And for a moment, I thought I saw something of the old desire in her eyes. I thought it looked something like the way she was looking at him in that old photograph Joe Reed’s sister, Mary, had given me of their first and only date. But a moment later, I shook my head and thought I must be going crazy. I wondered if old Betty had any more desire for anything left in her life.

“Sure,” she said, and looked back at me. “For a little while. We got the room.”

We put Joe Reed up in one of bedrooms that was for the kid we never had when we bought the house twenty years ago. Somehow, after a couple of days, we got used to having Joe around.

I went back to work at Ford, and Betty went back to being housebound. Still, it bothered me that the two of them were home alone all day. During my shift, I started imagining them making love in his bedroom. All over the house for that matter. That would certainly go a long way to waking up his soul. And Betty’s soul, too.

Three or four days after Joe Reed had moved in with us, I confessed my concerns to Betty. She blushed momentarily, and waved a hand at me.

“Don’t be silly,” she said. “All he does all day long is sit in the living room, drink beer and watch TV.” She laughed. “Just like you when you come home.”

But I didn’t buy it. There seemed something different about Joe Reed after only three days. He seemed more alert, playing at being dumb instead of being dumb.

My fears were confirmed the next day. When I came straight home from work (I wasn’t even stopping at Dixie’s after my shift anymore), the house was empty. Betty and Joe Reed were gone. And all Betty’s clothes and toiletries and romance novels were gone, too.

After rushing around the house like a madman looking for a clue, I found a note pinned to the pillow on my side of the bed, in Betty’s neat handwriting:

Dear Donald,

As you should have figured out by now, I left you for Joe. It’s really for the best –

you have to believe that. Maybe, it was always meant to be that I would end up

with him, even after he died. It was as if my soul was as dead as his when you

brought him home. Now, maybe, we can resurrect our lives and start all over

again. Even you. I don’t think you really ever loved me. That’s why you drank

so much. Maybe now you will stop drinking and find someone who can make

you happy like I never could. So don’t be sad. This change will be good for both

of us – for all of us. I feel confident, I really do, that we are going to find

our souls.

Love,

Betty

I read the note a couple more times and let it drop to the bed. What a weird way life has in getting us what we really always wanted. I now knew that Betty had always wanted Joe Reed and I had been the consolation prize.

I suddenly realized that someone was banging at my front door. A moment later, they had crashed through. When I ran out to the living room, I was tackled by a couple Army privates.

“Hold him down!” urged a granite-headed sergeant.

Within moments, a few other privates were reporting that the rest of the house was secure. The sergeant scowled and gestured to the sofa.

“Sit him down!” he barked.

The privates dragged me over to the sofa, and put me on it.

The sergeant leaned his granite face into mine.

“Where is he?”

“Who?”

“The fucking zombie!”

I shrugged and almost laughed. It was funny to have to tell him that the fucking zombie had run off with my wife.

 

Hurlburt came to see me after a few days. I had been whisked off to some secret Army base and questioned for hours at a time by several mean-spirited agents who seemed to doubt every essence of my being. Some of them got impatient and shouted that I was a traitor. Others used the kindly approach, trying to be my buddy. Others used threats of severe physical or legal consequences.

I told them all the same thing – the truth. I didn’t know where that zombie, Joe Reed, was. He had run off with my wife.

“They’re never gonna believe that story,” said Hurlburt. He was beaming with a kind smile, as if he were innocent in all of this. “But it’s true,” I told him. “They can’t believe that a zombie could ever fall in love,” he said. That hurt. Joe Reed, and Betty, in love. “But, it’s true, I tell you,” I said. “It’s goddamned true.” Hurlburt sighed. “So, it’s true,” he said, “they do have souls.” I nodded. I had found that out the hard way. “But they’re still homeless,” I told him. “I guess.” Hurlburt looked at me and smiled. “Aren’t we all,” he told me with a wink.