Undead Older Brother

Zack had been trying to get back to the cabin for a year.

The last time he had driven this road, there had been beer in the passenger footwell, groceries in the back, and a paper bag from the gas station tucked between them because he had remembered the marshmallows after already leaving town. The road had been dark. Familiar. Two miles from the lake, headlights had appeared where they should not have been.

After that, there had been nothing anyone could reasonably call Zachary Ellis.

The police had known whose truck it was. Dental records had done what was left to do. Personal effects came home in a plastic bag. There had been a funeral without an open casket because there was no version of his body that could have been placed inside one.

A year passed. The cabin stayed empty.

Then the storm came.

Rain struck the roof hard enough to blur into one continuous roar, swallowing the smaller noises an old wooden structure made when the weather turned violent. Wind pushed through the trees surrounding the lake, bending branches until they scraped across one another in the dark. Every few minutes lightning split the sky wide enough to turn the windows white.

The Ellis cabin had never been elegant. It had been built for muddy boots, hunting season, wet towels, card games, cheap beer, and too many people sleeping two to a room. Four small bedrooms opened from the main living space, each furnished with twin beds and little else. The kitchen occupied one wall beside the stone fireplace. A trapdoor in the floor led down into the cellar. Everything smelled faintly of old timber, lake water, dust, and the cold mineral damp that settled into buildings left unoccupied too long.

The battered couch still sagged toward the middle. Someone had left a deck of cards beneath the coffee table the previous summer and never collected it. A faded fishing map remained tacked beside the kitchen. Hooks near the door waited for jackets belonging to people who had not been here in months.

One of them had once belonged to Zack.

Outside, the property disappeared into rain.

The cabin sat above the lake on a low wooded rise, warm windows overlooking the long stairway descending toward the water. At the bottom stood the dockhouse, barely large enough for two rowboats and the equipment accumulated around them over decades: fishing rods, life jackets, coiled rope, old canvas sacks, rusting tools, swim fins nobody admitted owning.

Beyond it, the dock stretched into black water.

Lightning flashed.

For one instant, the lake became silver.

There was a man standing at the end of the dock.

He was too far away for details. Only scale registered clearly: tall, broad, completely motionless beneath the rain. He stood with his feet planted apart and his arms loose at his sides, facing uphill toward the cabin. Dark flannel. Jeans. Work boots. Something pale and shapeless covered his head.

The darkness returned. Rain hammered the glass. Several seconds passed before lightning illuminated the property again.

The man had not moved.

Water streamed from him in sheets. The flannel hung heavily against a frame large enough to make the dock look narrower beneath his feet. One sleeve had been torn open along the forearm. The shirt itself was damaged in places that did not resemble ordinary wear, fabric darkened and puckered around wounds that should have mattered.

His head remained covered by an old canvas sack drawn completely over the face. No eyeholes. No mouth. Only wet, watermarked cloth cinched around the neck with a length of boat rope.

The material looked familiar. It should have. There had been a stack of those sacks in the dockhouse for years.

Lightning vanished again.

The dock disappeared.

Thunder rolled across the lake several seconds later, deep enough to make the windows tremble in their frames.

When the next flash came, the end of the dock was empty.

There were no footsteps audible over the storm. No engine. No boat moving across the water. Nothing crossed the yard. The rain simply continued.

Down near the shoreline, the dockhouse door stood open.

Zack moved through the property without hurry. There was no need for it.

He did not breathe harder when he climbed the stairs. His muscles did not tire. Cold rain collected against skin that no longer shivered and ran beneath clothing that had been torn open a year ago and never properly mended. Damage remained visible beneath it in brief, ugly suggestions: a shoulder sitting slightly wrong before settling back into place, scar tissue disappearing beneath the collar, seams of reconstructed flesh where impact had once reduced a human body to something incapable of coming home.

None of it slowed him.

The sack over his head had become saturated enough to cling. Wind pressed the wet canvas briefly against the structure beneath it. A brow. The long plane of a nose. The shallow suggestion of lips that did not move.

Then the fabric loosened again.

He did not need the holes that were missing from it. He knew where the cabin was.

More importantly, he knew who was inside.

A year of death had taken almost everything unnecessary. Language had gone first, or perhaps simply ceased to matter. Hunger no longer meant food. Pain had become impact, pressure, interruption. Sleep had no purpose. Other people had faded into categories so simple they barely required recognition: obstacle, noise, threat, nothing.

One thing had remained intact enough to drag the rest of him after it.

Get back.

The last intention of Zachary Ellis had survived the destruction of Zachary Ellis.

The thought no longer contained the ordinary machinery that had once made it harmless.

Once, it had meant returning with groceries. Opening a beer. Tossing a bag of marshmallows onto the counter. Catching you around the waist if you got too close and carrying you across the cabin because being several years older and twice your size had always made physical affection easy to disguise as annoyance. Throwing you over one shoulder while you protested. Wrestling until someone knocked into furniture. An arm around your neck. A hand on the back of your head. Any excuse to touch, none examined closely enough to become a question.

Protect. Carry. Keep close.

A living mind had known those were different things.

Whatever had come back did not.

Zack reached the porch.

He stopped outside the door. For several minutes, he did nothing.

Rain drummed against the roof above him. Water ran from the bottom of the sack and along the rope knotted at his throat. His hands hung at his sides, enormous and bare, scarred knuckles flexing once before becoming still again.

He could have opened the door. He remembered the lock. He remembered which window beside the kitchen had never seated correctly in its frame. He remembered the cellar entrance. The bedroom closets. The loose board beneath the second bed in the back room. The narrow space beneath the porch where someone much smaller than him had once hidden during childhood games and remained there so long he had finally pretended not to know where they were.

He remembered everything that mattered.

But Zack had not come back merely to enter the cabin.

Fear had become useful. Interesting. Something he could feel moving through another body even when so little moved through his own.

So he waited.

Inside, the lights flickered once.

Twice.

Then held.

Zack lifted one hand.

His knuckles touched the door.

Knock, knock.

A pause.

Knock.

The rhythm had belonged to him long before the mask did.

When they were children, it had meant Zack was outside the bedroom door. When they were older, it had meant he was coming in whether invited or not. After twenty-seven years of life, it had become so ordinary neither of them would ever have thought to remember it.

Zack lowered his hand.

He stood completely still in the rain and waited for you to recognize him.