“Mmmhmmm.”
“Have you been having dreams about your mom again?”
I swallowed hard. “No,” I told her honestly. “I haven’t.” The last thing I saw of her was when I had that vision of us in the boat, when she told me she loved me, the cryptic things she said about Michael.
“You seemed to be dreaming about her last night.”
This was news to me. “Oh?”
“It wasn’t necessarily bad. You were just calling out for her. You sounded…upset. Like sad.”
I held her closer to me. “I don’t remember.”
“I don’t blame you. You’ve been through so much. I don’t know what New Orleans did to us but…god Dex, I’m going to be having nightmares for weeks to come, I know it. Finding you buried in that coffin…” she trailed off and let out a sob, shaking slightly.
“Hey, baby,” I murmured into her neck. “We made it. I’m alive. You’re alive. We’re here. We’re home. We’re home.”
I held her like that until the end of the show when my cell rang.
I peered at it. A New Orleans area code.
“Hello?” I asked.
“Dex,” Maximus’s drawl came through the air, thicker now that he was with his adopted brethren.
“Maximus,” I said. “How’s life? How is Rose?”
A pause. “She’s better. She still doesn’t know who I am, not really, but I’ve got an apartment set-up for us in the Quarter and I hope to move her in there soon. I’ve got some of her managers handling Nameless for us, so at least that will stick around for her in case she regains her memory soon.”
“Well that’s great,” I told him. “You can still go drink your face off for free.”
Perry rolled over to face me. “Tell him I say hi.”
“Perry says hi,” I told him. “She also says you’re ugly.”
“Shut up,” she said, hitting me again.
“So violent,” I mouthed at her.
“You need to get a room,” Maximus said.
“We have one, you’re the one intruding.”
Silence. He cleared his throat.
“Have you told her about me?” he asked. “I mean, what I am?”
My eyes nervously flitted over to Perry who was back to watching the DVD. “No,” I said carefully. “I haven’t. I was planning on it one day, when things calm down a bit here.”
“Good. I reckon she should know the truth. About everything.”
He was meaning the baby thing too, the holes in the Thin Veil. I had no plans to tell her that part, not for a long time. There were some things she just didn’t need to know. Not yet.
“Well, listen,” I started.
“Yeah, I should get going. Just wanted to see how you were holding up.”
“Almost fully healed. Back to full f**king capacity.”
“Now, I’m not sure if you mean the capacity to f**k or…you know what? I don’t want to know.”
“No, I don’t think you do.”
“Have you spoken to Jimmy yet…I haven’t called him.”
“We’ll be dealing with him soon. You just take of Rose. Give her our love, okay.”
“Will do.”
I was about to hang up the phone but quickly said, “Bye, ginger balls” at the last minute. Things were going back to normal.
***
It turns out that even though Maximus left us under noble circumstances, that didn’t mean that Jimmy saw it that way. In fact, Jimmy was right pissed off (though that was no surprise).
“I don’t f**king believe it,” he muttered into his hands. Perry and I were sitting across the table from him in his office. We’d decided we had to tear ourselves away from our marathon sex session to finally have the meeting and fill Jimmy in on what happened. I hadn’t given him the footage yet, wanting to torture him a bit with Maximus’s sudden departure from the Experiment in Terror team.
“Well, that’s the truth,” I said matter-of-factly. “He’s staying in New Orleans to look after his sick ex-girlfriend. Kind of f**king noble, if you ask me.”
“No one is f**king asking you, Dex,” he grunted, face still buried.
Perry and I exchanged a look. She didn’t even want to come to the office, saying we could just tell him over the phone, or at least I could go in by myself. I knew she was afraid of him, but I wanted to prove that we really were a team. And to be honest, I wanted to prove more than that.
But first things first.
“So, this is great,” he went on caustically. “All this sponsorship and we once again have nothing to show for it. Do you have any idea what this means? They won’t want to deal with Shownet again.”
“Who are the sponsors, anyway?” I asked out of curiosity.
He sighed, his breath fluttering the papers on his desk. “Enerbomb. An energy drink company.”
I snorted. “Well nothing says ghost-hunting like having a f**king cardiac arrest. Are you sure Jack Daniels wasn’t interested?”
He looked up at me sharply. I’d never seen his eyes so viper-like. His glasses should have been fogging up. “Is this the time to make jokes, Dex? You’ve ruined the show. You’ve ruined me.”
“Don’t be so dramatic,” I said pulling out the USB stick from my pocket and sliding it across the table. “Here. This is what we shot. You can show your Red Balls sponsors that.”
He picked it up like it was a wriggling insect.
I nodded at it. “Go ahead, take a look. We’ll sit here and wait.”
Jimmy shot me a wary look but did as I suggested. He put the USB into his laptop and went through it. Maximus had already picked out all the shots before we left NOLA, so it was easy putting it all together. It wasn’t everything, just cropped shots of the exterior of the house intersected with NOLA stock footage and Perry’s narration, then everything we’d shot in the interior, ending with the zombie coming after Perry. We ended it in a fade to black, fudging the truth a little and saying that Perry was attacked and then the zombie “ghost” just disappeared in front of our eyes. It was a little bit better than saying he was a real person who jumped out the window to his death for the second time. RIP, Tuffy G.
When he was done, he looked over at us in awe. Well, maybe “awe” was a slight exaggeration. But he looked more impressed than he did ten minutes ago.