Hope and Undead Elvis - By Ian Thomas Healy Page 0,3
He handed her the beer. The cool glass sweated like it had been in a freezer. His fingers brushed hers as she took it. They were cold like a corpse's. "Maybe the water went away when the world ended."
"Stop saying the world ended!"
Undead Elvis shrugged. "Drink your beer. Might be the last one for awhile."
She did so, and rounded on him. "What are you doing here anyway? You're supposed to be dead. You died thirty years ago."
He shrugged again. "Seemed like the place for someone like me to be." He went up onto his toes in a classic Elvis pose. "Uh-huh."
Hope shook her head. "This is just too weird for me. I'm out of here." She stalked to the door of Yancy Cleveland's and flung it open.
Beyond, instead of the dusty main street and Rock Shoppes of Nowhere, New Mexico, she saw nothing but sand dunes for miles and miles in all directions. She shrieked and slammed the door shut. Her heart hammered as she opened it a crack to peek out once more. Still nothing but sand. A few grains dislodged from a nearby dune to roll down and trickle beyond the threshold of Yancy Cleveland's. Shrinking back from them as if they were infectious, she turned to Undead Elvis. "It's gone. It's all gone, out there."
He struck another classic Elvis pose, up on his toes and arms spread wide. "It's the end of the world. Uh-huh!"
Chapter Two
Hope and the End of the World
"I'm not going to stand for this," said Hope. "We've got to do something. Call somebody and tell them."
"What are you going to tell them?" Undead Elvis leaned back in his chair and kicked his booted feet up onto the tabletop. Bizarre, mismatched playing cards flew in every direction. "The world ended. What am I supposed to do now, go find a helmet?"
"You're no help," said Hope. She picked up the old, rotary-dialed bar phone. As she'd expected, there was no dial tone. Still, she hit the cradle button a few times, because she'd seen that in the movies.
Something fell into her ear. She yelped and dropped the phone, brushing frantically at the side of her head. Whatever it was fell out. She stuck a finger in her ear to check for anything that shouldn't be there.
"What happened?" asked Undead Elvis.
Hope picked up the phone and shook it. Grains rattled inside the hard plastic shell and some bits of sand fell out through the holes in the ear and mouthpieces. "God, how long has it been since anyone's used this phone, anyway?" She started to set it down, but sand still streamed from the holes. She shook it again. It seemed heavier.
She set it back in its cradle and sand poured out in two neat little piles on either side of the phone. "What the hell? Hey, Elvis, come check this out."
Undead Elvis sidled across the barroom floor, like he was listening to a beat nobody else could hear. "What you got, Li'l lady?"
"Sand, like what's outside." Hope held up the receiver as evidence. Tiny torrents of sand rushed from it, far more than it could have held. She wondered if the sand was pushing its way in through the phone cord. The way the world had changed and gone all wonky in the past few minutes, she wouldn't have been surprised in the least.
"Huh," said Undead Elvis. He poked an unnatural finger at the sand and looked at the few tenacious grains that clung to his skin. "That ain't natural."
"Says the undead guy."
Undead Elvis didn't reply. Instead, he yanked on one of the beer taps by the bar. Damp sand splattered into the drain tray. He went down the line: Coors, Coors Light, Budweiser, Bud Light, Miller High Life, Miller Lite, and Fat Tire. Every single tap released sand. As Hope watched, the trickles became torrents that didn't shut off when Undead Elvis let go of the taps.
Hope took a step back from the bar as sand overflowed the drain tray and spilled onto the floor. "What's going on?"
A wave of sand pushed out from the bathroom door. They retreated from its onslaught. Inside the bathroom, through the dust in the air, Hope could see fountains of sand spewing from every spigot and every drain. She looked at Undead Elvis in real fear. Behind him, sand was trickling out of an outlet on the wall and the windows were beginning to darken from the bottoms up.