<lj-cut text="The long awaited first of hopefully many Beanie Shay stories...">

Paper, Plastic . . . or Zombie Mojo??


Monday morning, in the middle of my shift at the local Value Basket, I was getting quizzed about zombies.

"Beanie, how much do you know about zombies?" Mitzi Fossiter, my co-worker asked, as she rang up Mrs. Tolliver's cat food cans and I tried to stack the cans neatly in the grimy canvas book bags she'd brought along. I'm all for being green and keeping the planet clean, but it helps if you keep the means thereof clean. Add to this, I never fail to have the cans tip and scatter inside the bags, which gets Mrs. Tolliver's dander up to no end.

On top of this, and my college studies, I'm cursed with an almost encyclopedic knowledge of all things spooky, an inheritance from my Irish grandfather, Malcolm Shay, the storyteller descended from a long line of druids. Thus, living on Massachusetts's North Shore in a small town next to Salem, which is arguably the spookiest little city in the state, if not the country, someone who knows me or has heard of me always duns me for information on things that go bump in the night.

"More than I care to know," I said. "Why?"

Mrs. Tolliver handed her food stamps card to Mitzi, which got her busy starting the usual ritual of explaining to Mrs. Tolliver that food stamps only work for human food, not pet food. Almost ten minutes passed, in which we had to call up Jay, the supervisor, to explain the food stamps program to Mrs. Tolliver and her usual responsory rant about how Cleo was the only family that she had and how the cat was as good as human. Mitzi's question must have burned a hole in her brain cells, because she repeated it to me even after all that.

"How much do you know about zombies?"

"Like I said, a lot more than I care to. Why?" Mitzi doesn't often ask me that sort of question, since it has nothing to do with cooking, gardening or Desperate Housewives, her usual topics.

"I'm just curious. I mean, how do those things happen? A virus?"

"You've been watching too many George Romero movies," I said. "It takes a lot more than that, and it isn't that easy."

"Okay, what does it take?"

"By all accounts, it's either heavy-duty necromancy -- which is black magick at it's blackest -- or some voodoo mojo, which is a mix of dried raw fugu fish and several hard to find herbs with a voodoo spell thrown in for good measure."

"Doesn't sound hard to use, and if someone gave it to Rick, no one would know the difference," Mitzi said, referring to her husband. "He sacks out on the recliner with the remote when he isn't at work, and about the only thing that gets a response from him is if he smells something cooking in the kitchen. Our yard is a mess and the paint is startingn to peel on the house."

I tried not to laugh. "Sounds a lot more like TV addiction than zombieism to me." I couldn't say more at the moment: a woman with a cartfull of bird seed bags came through the lane. By the time her order went through, hopefully Mitzi would have forgotten about her zombie question.

The birdseed woman had hardly turned her carriage toward the door, when Mitzi turned back to me. "It's true you can get things like that to work for you, right?"

"True, but only if you've administered the mojo to them." I bit my tongue. Too late. I could almost mouth her next question word for word.

She leaned in a little closer and lowered her voice as Rathbert, the front end manager walked past the end of the lane. "So... where do you get this... mojo-stuff?"

"I wouldn't know where, and even if I did, I'm not allowed to tell you." Not the whole truth. I know where to find the stuff, but I wouldn't -- and couldn't -- tell her where to get an insta-zombie kit.

She narrowed her over-mascaraed eyes at me. "Wouldn't or couldn't?" she asked.

Busted. "Well... wouldn't. This sort of thing is very dangerous, and if anyone found out I'd had a hand in someone getting their hands on this stuff, my uncle and I would be in a lot of trouble. It's pretty much a controlled substance, despite how hard it is to get it." Rather than explain the political and judicial network among the paranormal and preternatural community, I started to suggest she make -- and keep -- an appointment with a marriage counselor.

I hardly had the words out when Pandora Hathaway -- nee Susan Brown -- swept into the lane, trailing a reek of incense and patchouli along with the skirts of her violet caftan-dress. Oh, go away *now*, I thought. Get your side-show charlatan brand of phony magick out of my lane before I sic the Wizard Council on you for misleading the mundanes.. Without moving my head, I looked around to see if any weres happened to walk through. I didn't detect any of their auras, except for the group of wolfish-looking teenaged boys loafing in the greeting-card/candy/nuts/paperbacks/magazine aisle, rumpling the auto magazines as they paged through them.

"Lady Mitzi, what troubles your spirit and flesh? I sense a disturbance in your aura," Pandora said, laying her ring-heavy fingers on Mitzi's hand as my co-worker tried to ring through one of Pandora's bags of organic wheat flour.

"Well, uh, what do you know about zombie mojo?" Mitzi asked, innocently.

Pandora emitted a gasp that visibly startled the old guy behind her with the jumbo bag of peanuts. "Speak not of such dark things where the ears of the unsuspecting common folk may hear of it. Come unto my parlor this evening after sundown, that we might speak of it in confidence."

"Oh, okay. I'm not doing anything tonight," Mitzi said, as Pandora released her hand and let her finish ringing up the order. An anorexically thin college girl with a carton of Slim-Fast cans had joined the line and both her and Peanut-Guy shuffled impatiently.

I sighed and refrained from pretending to sneeze into Pandora's eco-friendly totebags, which at least didn't leave my hands grimy, but they left them reeking of more incense. I'm completely copacetic with people using their preternatural talents to pay their bills, as long as they do it in a way that helps both the mundanes and the paras, and as long as they don't act like the charlatans that have given the paras a bad rap since the days of the phony alchemists who hid gold dust inside of coals to make it look like they'd discovered the philosopher's stone. It's the difference between being someone like Harry Dresden and someone like Silver Ravenwolf.

As soon and Pandora had swept out through the automatic doors, I turned back to Mitzi. "You know she's just going to tell you what you want to hear."

Mitzi blinked. "And what's wrong with that?" she asked.

"Because what you want to hear may not be what's really going to help you. You're getting into some heavy stuff here and I'd hate for you to get burned by it."

"I'll be all right. Mitzi's a good friend of my mom," Mitzi said. I would have come back with a smart and snappy retort to that, but at that moment, the guy I think of as "the young Liam Neeson clone" approached with his usual daily order of sirloin steak and chicken hearts and gizzards. The guy has more manners than a dozen other customers put together, but I haven't tried to get to know him better. Something about the black leather gloves he wears all the time, even on the hottest summer day, and the bulge shaped like a holstered pistol under his black suit jacket and his Egyptian cartouche tie-clip make me hesitate.

After he'd passed through, Rathbert sent me out to help with a multi-carriage order which three woman-caretakers from a local half-way house tried to wrassle toward the doors and out to their van. Thankfully, when I got back inside, he put me on a different register for the rest of my shift, but I couldn't shake the thought of Pandora getting her claws into Mitzi, taking her for a ride up to and including the glowing acclamations posted on Pandora's website, followed later on by the knock-down, drag-out lawsuit for damages and emotional duress.

The thought weighed on my mind all the way home and it must have showed as easily as if I'd had a grimoire balanced on my head as I let myself into the garage attached to the house I share with my uncle Ciaran and his wife Siobhan.

Ciaran looked up from the beaker of liquid and half-dissolved powders he stirred; from the odd scent, I suspected it was a depilatory for a werewolf client of his. "Has Pandora been snuffing around work again?"

I shucked my coat and my work smock. "Yeah, I just wish she'd limit her predations to the impressionable tourists and leave the locals alone."

He stopped stirring and turned down the flame on the Bunsen burner under the beaker. "Only catch there is she's more likely to spread her disinformation pandemically that way rather than limiting it to a small area where people are likely to eventually build up an immunity to it, or where an antidote can be developed."

"True," I said, considering what he meant. "Only catch is, we still have to listen to people parroting her nonsense."

"She's right about a few things, but her presentation leaves that information about as nutritious as cheap hot dogs. Could you find me a roll of silk thread?"

I glanced over the shelves of boxes, buckets and containers that packed the shelves lining the walls of the garage. "Any particular color?" I asked.

He wrinkled his brows and adjusted his protective goggles. "Make it white."

I found a box full of silk embroidery thread skeins and digging out a white one, handed it to him. He took the labels off it, then dropped the bundle of thread into the beaker. He murmured a phrase in Gaelic, and I felt the small amount of will he put into it snap. Most people expect potion-making to involve pyrotechnics, but when it does, it means you either didn't mix the right elements or the practitioner feels it necessary to resort to such tricks to impress the onlookers. I could only imagine the kinds of smells and whistles Pandora used to impress Mitzi. What I wouldn't have given to be the fly on the wall for that.

I swear Ciaran has telepathy but won't let on to it. He smirked at me as he poured the potion into a sieve over a clean beaker, then poured the liquid part into an clean, empty Gatorade bottle, capped it, then jotted something on the plain white Avery label slapped on its side. "No, I am not giving you a veilling spell so you can eavesdrop on Pandora's little soiree."

"Curses, what's the point in having a wizard for an uncle," I groused, smiling. I knew he'd turn me down if I'd dared to ask, but I already had a backup plan in mind.

******************************************************************************

"Beanie, I am not breaking into Pandora's little witch-shack for you," Gavran snapped. The full moon a few days away made him snappier than usual, but at least the human characteristics from his mom keep his lycan aspects from his dad in check so that he rarely goes through a full change, but it does make him tough to hang around with at times.

"I didn't mean break in, I meant take a listen under her window or something and set your hearing on high," I said.

Gavran sighed and his irritation made the cellphone connection crackle with static for a moment. "Tell me why you're doing this?"

"I'm just trying to keep Mitzi safe from that crazy woman."

I could almost sense him narrowing his amber-colored eyes as he spoke. "Why? Isn't Mitzi the dizzy one that drives you crazy when she's babbling about Eva Longoria?"

"Point, but still, this is one time we can keep Pandora from suckering someone and making us paranormal types look like a bunch of money-sucking liars."

Gavran drew in a long breath and let it out through his nostrils audibly, which he always does he isn't entirely convinced.

"Look, I get tired of people dismissing me as a girl who watched Supernatural too much, I bet you get sick of people thinking you're nothing more than a kid who needs to shave more often than the average guy."

I heard his leather jacket creak as he probably shrugged. "Let them think I abused steroids or something. But all right, just this once, I'll help you out."

A little while later, once the sun had gone down, we parked at the top of Pandora's street in a residential area just outside downtown Salem. Gavran got out and after locking up the car, padded out of sight between some bushes. I would have gone with him, but I don't have his lycan ability to walk quickly and quietly through even the densest hedges.

It seemed like he'd hardly left when he came back and unlocking the driver's side door, slid into the seat.

"Too late," he said. "Mitzi was standing on the stoop, talking to her on the way out."

"Nuts, Pandora works fast," I said. "Sorry I bugged you to drive here."

"Yeah, bit of a time-waster. But she did have this package with her when she was walking to her car."

"Big or small?"

"Small enough to fit into her coat-pocket."

"Did you manage to get a whiff off it?"

He wrinkled his nose by the dashboard lights. "Enough to wish I hadn't," he said, starting the car.

"I'll make it up to you: I'll buy you a nice steak dinner."

"Heh, guess tonight wasn't such a bust after all," he said, backing out of the street.

*****************************************************************************

Mitzi kept wierdly quiet at work next day, aside from her usual vapid chatter with the customers. Not a single question from her, not even about my love-life ( or lack thereof), not even an offer to set me up for a date with her jock-wannabe nephew (Never mind that the kid was in diapers when I was learning long-division). I almost wondered if she'd taken the stuff by accident, but then the shoe dropped later in the lunchroom.

As I bit into half of a slightly smooshed corned-beef sandwich from the deli, Mitzi came along and sat down across from me, before she leaned across the table, conspiratorially.

"I got the zombie-poweder from Pandora last night; I was afraid I'd have to say some sort of evil spell, but she told me I just had to put it in his food."

I almost spat the mouthful I was chewing across the break room. "Whut?!" I murfled.

"Don't talk with your mouth full," Mitzi said. "I put it in Rick's scrambled eggs."

I grabbed my bottle of ice green tea and took a long swig to moisten my suddenly dry mouth and throat before attempting to swallow my bite of sandwich. "You didn't. Already?" I tried to keep my mind from forming horrible images.

"Of course I did, Pandora went to the trouble of getting that stuff, I couldn't let it go to waste," she said. "Why are you looking at me like that?"

"Did Pandora tell you about the... side effects?"

She looked at me puzzled. "There's side effects?" Only then did she start to look worried.

"Don't let him eat meat: it'll make him nasty," I said. I somehow forgot to tell her what the cure was, but in hindsight, I doubt she would have listened anyway.

She widened her eyes like she'd finally gotten her brain cells to process and comprehend just what she'd gotten herself into. "Nasty how? Like in the movies?"

"Hopefully not," I said. Somehow, my sandwich didn't taste as good as it had...

I kept an eye open during the rest of my shift, for any sight of zombie!Rick, thank my lucky stars he didn't show up. I had my usual momentary jolt when a smartly-dressed guy about seven feet tall came through with a bottle of metal polish, and I looked up into his fearsomely pierced face, with an unlit cigarette clamped between his lips as a not-very-effective camouflague for the thin wisp of smoke trailing from his nostrils, around the heavy silver ring through his septum.

I hitched a ride with Gavran ans headed to the Magick Boxe in Salem, a novelty/gothic/magic shop carrying everything from trick card decks and whoopee cushions to herbal preparations and hard to find grimoires. I sidestepped a group of kindergothen (those teenaged girls who try too hard to look "gawthyckque" or however they spell it on their MeMeMeSpaces these days) squeeing over a shelf of paranormal romances and pretended to browse a rack of incense.


Janelle, one half of the couple that runs the shop, looked up from the mortar and pestle she was using to grind what definately smelled like ginger as she perched on a stool behind the counter. "Come here for your tea, Beanie?"

"Busted," I said, approaching the tea nook she'd set up beside the counter. She took a just-starting-to whistle tea kettle off its hotplate and putting a hand-made teabag into a mug, poured the hot water into it.

"Something on your mind?" Janelle asked as we waited for the tea to steep.

"Yeah, Pandora Hathaway has made another convert," I said.

"Mm, your uncle was in here this morning telling me how flustered you are over it," she said.

I opened my mouth to start my litany of complaints, but something in the way she eyed me made me bite my tongue.

Janelle divined my thoughts. "I don't like it any more than you do, and I agree, it's people like her that, who make it harder for the rest of us who see what the ordinary folk can't or won't see the things we do."

I eyed the shelves of herbs, then asked in a low voice so the baby-bats couldn't hear me, "You wouldn't happen to have anything to cure Rick, besides salt, would you?"

"That's about the best there is, I couldn't give you anything that would work better or quicker," she replied.

I looked out through the cluttered display in the window, a shadow in trailing violet robes floated past. "Why do you put up with her? Why not find a way to shut her down?"

"People like her tend to have a bit of genuine talent, but after a while they burn out or they get burned. Sooner or later, something happens to take them out of the running."

"What goes around comes around?" I asked.

"A lot like that. Were you expecting some divine or preternatural  force to come down from Olympus and smite her?"

I tried not to shift nervously in my chair. "Maybe," I admitted.

"Fate moves slowly most times. She'll get her come-uppance soon." She took the bag from the mug with a small spoon and held the mug out to me. I took and sipped it, tentatively.

"Doesn't hurt to be instrumental in that come-uppance, though."

Janelle wagged her head. "True, but you have to be sure  you aren't interfering with the balance of things."

I snorted. "Yeah, but I'd say she's disrupting the balance feeding her line to people and making a harmless guy into something he isn't."

The kindergothen had approached the counter to pay for their paranormal romance novels and other gewgaws. Janelle got up to wait on them. "Hold that thought," she said.

When the kindergothen had tittered out of the store, Janelle came back to the tea nook. "You've babysat, haven't you, Beanie?"

"Not for long and it was my cousin on my mom's side. Why?"

"Things like this are a lot like helping a baby learn to walk. When she falls down, you have to let her figure out to pick herself up, otherwise, she won't learn to be independant and self-reliant when it comes to problem-solving. Only time you can let yourself intervene is when she gets herself into a threatening situation."

"So unless she goes toddling into the street, or towards an open cellar door, you have to let her take her own falls."

Janelle smiled, narrowing her grey eyes a little. "You said it."

"I guess in that case, I gotta figure out when she's running for the street," I said, drinking the last of my tea and getting up to leave.

I spent the next day, my day off, running errands I hadn't got a chance to take care of between work and classes during the rest of the week. That didn't keep me from finding a way to take a long shortcut down the street where Mitzi lived., past the row of ranch houses some slow-witted developer had plunked in with the salt box houses and Georgian structures that form the local architecture.

I spotted Rick on the driveway, getting the lawnmower ready to go. From a distance, he looked all right, but as I got closer, I realised his movements looked a little too precise, as he emptied a plastic gas can into the tank on the mower and replaced the cap with neat, exact turns.

"Hey there, Rick," I called as I walked by, trying to sound normal.

Rick looked up at me, his eyes blank, a bemused little smile quirking the corners of his mouth. Usually, he has a goofy, good-ol'-boy smile, and his small, Irish eyes are sparkling with hearty mischief, which made his transformation even scarier. "Hello, Beanie," he said, his voice sing-songy and considerably softer than usual.

I had to tear myself away and keep on walking. As normal as the scene looked, it felt too normal, in a Stepfordian sort of way. He should have been goofing off with a beer handy, talking to the Kingstons over the back fence.

The powder had obviously taken its effect, and in the worst way. I'd almost rather have seen him end up like a Romero zombie, then I could have justified putting him out of his misery.

"You look like you saw a ghost," Ciaran said, as I entered our kitche, where he had started to literally throw together a stir fry.

"I wish I had," I said, dropping my shopping tote on the kitchen table. "I just saw a zombie-fyed Rick Fossiter."

Ciaran quickly set down the wok-ful of peppers, bean sprouts, chicken bits and mushrooms on the burner. "Merlin's shorts, I didn't think Pandora could pull it off."

I nearly snapped back at him, but I said, "Is there anyway we can slip him some salt? I'd rather have him as his usual self than the way he is now."

Ciaran wagged his head. "There's ways to trick him, but it's highly unlikely you'll get the chance to do it. How often do you actually see him?"

I shrugged. "At work every so often, at church."

"Not the best times to try and break out the Morton's," he said.

"So what do we do? Let him be a Stepford until the rest of the women in the town get the same idea? Maybe even their kids? What happens when they take the munchkins to MickyD's? Instant zombie apocalypse?"

"The salt in the french fries might counteract it, but I think it would still be too saturated with grease and ex-potatoes," Ciaran said. "Hopefully the change in Rick is so off-putting that nobody else is tempted to try it on their loved ones."

Next day, I got put on greeter duty, which relieved me of having to bag for or listen to Mitzi burbling over Rick's new lease on ... life? (Technically, since the mojo had jacked his free will parameters and dithered with the connection between his soul and his physical consciousness, he was in a state between life and death, usually reserved for vampires, only without the sanguinary needs...) But that left me worried: I had no way to gauge how he'd adjusted, and the next day, I had a solid day of classes. No chance for eavesdropping.

I got a glimpse of him Sunday, during the coffee hour in the basement of  Immaculate Conception Church in Salem (Yes, gentle reader, not all persons of Irish extraction who claim some preternatural talent follow the Old Ways, some of us are run-of-the-mill Catholics). What I saw looked innocuous to anyone who didn't know better, but it made me cringe. Usually, Rick would hang with some of the guys, laughing and chatting with them, while Mitzi stayed with a group of her school chums. Today, he dogged Mitzi's very footsteps, walking when she walked, stopping when she stopped, talking to people only if they spoke to him first, and if someone sensed something amiss and asked hin, he replied with a sing-songy, "Oh, yes, I'm perfectly all right." Haley Joel Osment as the kid-robot in "A.I.: Artificial Intelligence" acted less wooden. Is it a game? Oh no, it is not.

Monday found me helping Judy Trumbull restock the candy and gum racks at the registers; when we reached the higher-numbered ones -- further away from the front end manager's podium -- she took me aside and asked me, "Beanie, do you have any idea what's up with Rick Fossiter? Arlene thinks he drank one of your uncle's potions, but I told her didn't make stuff that hurts people."

Arlene, another cashier, has had it in for my uncle since he'd moved into the area as an apprentice wizard. "Not my uncle's stuff, but Mitzi gave him something Pandora found for her."

Judy widened her eyes. "Pandora? I thought she just sold crystals and tarot decks."

"Looks like once in a while, she hits on the heavier stuff that no one with any sense should mess with."

Judy peered around, making sure Rathbert didn't have an ear honed in on us. "Is there anyway to get him back to normal? I saw him at church and it creeped me out."

"You and everybody else. The trick is to slip him some plain old table salt."

"That should be easy, I'll mix margharitas the next time Paul and I have the Fossiters over for a cook-out."

I shook my head. "Not enough salt, and by all accounts, it has to be undiluted."

At that point, Rathbert called Judy aside, sending her to one register, and me to another, which ended that conversation and that possible chance at finding a way to pass the salt to Rick.

And then something wierd happened at the end of my shift that day.

I was taking off my smock and about to head for the time clock to punch out, while Rathbert was finallizing Mitzi's drawer. Normal ending to a typical boring day.

Then Rick walked in and stood right at the end of the register. Didn't shamble in calling out "braaaaains" of course. Just stood there, staring at her with that goofy little smile and that blank look in his eyes.

"Oh, hello, Rick," Mitzi said, trying to keep up a front of normalcy. That front didn't stop Rathbert, the lackidaisical teenager who'd taken the slot Mitzi had occupied, and any customers nearby from staring back at Rick with the usual "What the heck?" look usually reserved for tantruming two year olds flailing on the floor, or old ladies getting shrill about our not having a senior citizen discount, or the odd young person with too-pale skin. I saw a woman with a toddler in the kid seat of her cart steer away to another register, further away from Rick and Mitzi. I didn't blame her. Typical zombie behavior: they finish their chores and go looking for more commands from their controller, viz. Mitzi. Only, unlike your typical Haitian zombie who just had to walk across the sugar plantation to his master, this guy had to go through the complex rituals of modern life, including driving a car and negotiating traffic and roads. A testament to how powerful the stuff had taken effect.

Tuesday passed without much incident. Well, I really should count spotting Pandora passing through Mitzi's register. Rathbert had put me on a register too far away to listen in on the conversation, but I could tell from Mitzi's body language that she'd started to have second thoughts about just what she'd gotten into. Pandora, on the other hand, did nothing but pat Mitzi's hand and reassure her, but the way Mitzi leaned a little away from her, suggested she didn't trust her mom's old friend as much as she did.

I bought a box of Morton's that afternoon and put about a cup of it in a Ziploc bag to tuck into the pocket of my work smock. I doubted I'd get a chance to pop the stuff into his mouth, but who knew if the oppurtunity would present itself.

I had just come from a coffee break when I spotted zombie!Rick  come in at the door and select a shopping cart, then head toward the aisles like the bemused biological robot he'd been turned into. The image of Nicole Kidman at the end of what should have been the end of the remake of The Stepford Wives popped in there and stuck there as I saw him pass by from time to time as he wove his way through the aisles. People passing by him stopped and stared or moved past him quickly. I didn't blame the, but I saw Mike Loisel, the grocery manager and his assistants pass by Rick and give him a look as if they'd pegged him as a trouble-maker.

Rick headed for the checkout, going right for Mitzi's register. As I bagged a bunch of baby-food jars for a harried-looking mom with twins, I honed my hearing to eavesdrop.

"What are you doing her so early, babe?" Mitzi asked.

"The boss said I didn't look so well, so he sent me home to rest," Rick replied.

"But the groceries... I would have picked them up," she said.

"You had a list started and I'm here to help you," Rick said, in that oddly cheery but soft tone. When he had paid, he took the bags and went out; as soon as he'd passed out of eyeshot, I thought I saw Mitzi shiver.

Next day, as I went in to pick up my check, I realized Rick had followed me in. As I headed for the tail end of the line to the courtesy booth, I watched, out of the corner of my eye, as he approached the long park-bench we keep for any customers who need a seat. As usual, a trio of old ladies camped there, chatting about pies and the latest scorcher by Lauren H. Emrillton (she who seems to think all vampire hunters want some hot stuff from their targets; all the vampire hunters I ever met had gotten kicked out of the Army, or the FBI, and consquently treated the work like another job). But after a moment of having Rick sitting next to them at the far end of the bench, they got up and went out. As soon as they moved, Rick got up and sat in the middle of the bench, which brought him level with the end of Mitzi's register.

Margret, the courtesy booth manager peered over my shoulder. "What is Rick Fossiter doing here in the middle of the day? And what's he on? I've never seen him this quiet."

"Some potion from Pandora Hathaway," I said.

She raised her eyebrows and adjusted her glasses. "Who gave him that?"

"Mitzi did, after Pandora got her hooks into her," I said.

"Well, can you wiggle your nose or something and make it go away?" she asked.

"It's not that simple, and I'm not a practitioner, not like my uncle," I said.

"Well, if he's hopped up on something, maybe I should call Mr. Raphello and have him escort Rick from the building," Margret said, but she didn't sound convinced even by her own argument.

At leas the next day turned out less busy than usual: Rathbert put me on putting away overstock -- aka, the stuff people decided they didn't want or which they'd abandoned in wierd places -- or "unshopping" as my uncle Ciaran calls it. I started to suspect that Mitzi had complained about my attempts to get her away from the zombie mojo, and Rathbert had decided to keep me out of the front end to keep us seperated. At the very least, guessing by the fact that he hadn't taken me aside to give me the third degree on my quirks and the people I associate with, she'd kept her mouth shut about it.

I never found out how he got fed the meat, unless Mitzi forgot or someone offered him a sandwich, but I as I turned a corner into the meat department in the back main aisle, I spotted Rick walking along, only the bemused look in his eye had turned to something cold. The guy was a walking powder keg and the least annoyance could trigger him. I felt for the salt in my pocket, just in time for Mrs. Tolliver to come zipping up the aisle on one of those ride-on carts, running full tilt towards me. I jigged my cart to the left to avoid getting rammed, but hindsight would larer cause me to wish I'd let her hit me. She swerved to avoid me, and rammed right into Rick, pushing him against a spot-cooler in the middle of the aisle.

Rick glared down at her and lunged, punching her in the shoulder. Mrs. Tolliver screamed and swung her cane at him, catching him across the chest.

I abandoned my carriage and ran for Mencino the meat manager, whom I spotted at the far end of a row of cooler cases. "Mack, we've got a situation," I said and pointed toward the scuffle.

"Good lord," he rumbled and went for the intercom to page "security" (Translation: the higher-up guys on the managerial totem pole).

Customers had started to gather around Mrs. Tolliver and Rick as they kept swinging at each other. A baby in a stroller than looked almost like an SUV started to howl. I spotted the Liam Neeson Clone with the Black Gloves look up from the steak case, his pale eyes growing intent, while a slender, too-pale young man in black paused in his quiet conversation with one of the meat clerks. Someone muttered about the way men treat women these days, a moment before Raphello and two muscular young guys from the backroom approached.

"What's going on here?" Raphello asked.

"He's been drugged," I said. Not a lie.

One of the backroom guys tried to pull Rick away from Mrs. Tolliver. Rick punched him in the face, sending the guy flying into a pyramid of Ritz cracker boxes. Out of the corner of my eye, I spotted something large and dark rush toward the spot cooler. I turned in time to see the Liam Neeson Clone vault over the case and body-slam Rick from behind. In one smooth movement, he tackled Rick, pinning Rick's arms to his sides in a bear-hug ad pinning Rick's legs together between his thighs, then turned on his side, making it harder for Rick to squirm.

"Better give him that salt you're hiding in your pocket, clerk-girl," the Liam Neeson Clone said, looking up at me.

I looked at Raphello. "Can one of you hold his head?" I asked.

"I will," Raphello said and knelt to grab Rick by one ear, and yank his mouth open with the other hand. I pulled the bag from my pocket, bit the corner open and dumped the salt into Rick's mouth. Rick coughed and sputtered, but after a moment, his eyes fluttered and he looked around, confused but himself again.

"Ugh! What's with the salt? Hey, get this guy off me! What happened? What day is it?" Rick cried.

The Liam Neeson Clone released Rick and stood up, then stooped to help him up off the floor.

"You've been under the influence of zombie mojo," I said.

Rick looked at me, baffled. "Okay, even if that stuff is for real, who slipped it to me?"

"I did..." Mitzi said, in a scared, small voice from the back of the crowd. "We needed so much stuff done around the house and you weren't getting it done, I just felt desperate."

"You could have asked me," Rick spluttered.

"I did, but you always blow it off, somehow."

"No, I don't," Rick snapped back, but his eyes darted around, guiltily. "So you drugged me with something to make me do it?!"

"I had to do something..."

Rick swayed a little on his feet. "Why do I feel so tired...?" he asked. Raphello whispered to the non-stunned backroom clerk. who disappeared into the back room and came out with a folding chair, which Raphello unfolded and guided Rick onto.

"I heard from Jacky that you were working on the yard all day and well into the evening for the past week," I said.

"No wonder I feel beat," Rick said.

At this moment, Barris, the store director approached the scene. After assessing the situation, asking the right questions and sending for some ice for the clerk who got shoved into the cracker pyramid, he sent a clerk with Rick to help out to a taxi he called for. Then he sent Mitzi up to his office, with a look on his face that spelled trouble. Finally, he turned to the Liam Neeson Clone, who'd gone back to the steak case, and said, "If you need any compensation, if you need any help after all that, we'd be more than happy to help, Mr....?"

"Theristus. Amnon Theristus," the Liam Neeson clone replied, bowing his head slightly. "And while I appreciate the offer, I'm fine. I just did what needed to be done."

The excitement passed, I headed for the front end, trying not to trail Theristus as I did. When I reached the front end, who should I spy entering but no less than Pandora herself. Theristus narrowed his pale eyes as he turned in her direction and approaching her, took her aside. I thought I heard him say something about the weight of her heart, but I didn't get much more. Whatever he said to her, when he'd finished, she turned away pale as a ghost and she slunk away like a kid trying to sneak past a yard with a big mean-looking dog.

I didn't see Mitzi for a week after that. I heard in a roundabout way that she got suspended because of the incident in the back main aisle, and Richard got banned from the store. I also spotted management giving Pandora the eagle eye whenever she came to do her shopping. Gavran came by and told me the immaculate Better Homes and Gardens look had faded from the Fossiters' lawn and the yard looked more lived-in.

After her suspension had passed, Mitzi came back to work, seemingly as if nothing had happened. But her face had a slightly drawn and desperate look to it.

Next time I had to bag for her, Mitzi turned to me and asked, "Are there there any love potions that don't have any wierd side effects?"

Here we go again...


THE END