Tales of the Decay

by James Barton

  Once upon a time, Wesley had led a pretty simple life. Then, one night, as he lay curled in a restless sleep, he found himself wandering an isle in a gigantic grocery store. As far as he could see in both directions, there was nobody else in sight. As he pushed his nearly full cart along, past shelves full of every imaginable food product, he kept calling out, trying to find any other person who could help him find the exit. No one answered. But, after what felt like hours of searching, he began to sense that he was not alone. He stopped walking and listened as attentively as he could, and when he finally heard a noise, he opened his mouth to shout, and the lights went out. The complete darkness and a growing sense of something … something awful moving toward him froze him to the spot, speechless. Suddenly, the lights reappeared, only to reveal an endless row of empty shelves and his empty shopping cart. Still frozen there, now engulfed in a feeling of immense dread, Wesley heard a grunt behind him … and woke up to sweat-soaked sheets and the echo of his terrified scream still bouncing off of his bedroom walls.

  The nightmare lingered for days. It scared him to his core and a part of him thought it was a sign, or maybe even psychic precognition.

  He couldn’t explain the dream, and a quick Internet search on its meaning pointed to his insecurities of being unable to rely on people. There were other theories online that pointed to some sort of sexual attraction to groceries, but he quickly dismissed those. The dream made him think about how fragile society really was. He didn’t have a garden or any type of food production. What would happen if the stores simply stopped? The day he asked himself that question was the day he changed.

  He spent weeks on the web searching through conspiracy and doomsday warnings. He chatted on forums to handfuls of people who had been preparing for a major world-changing disaster. They all had one basic question in common, why wouldn’t you prepare? It was a question that made absolute sense. Some kept it extremely simple, like buying extra cans of food and water during each grocery trip. Others went further, with bunkers, traps, weapons, stockpiles, hazmat suits, and all kinds of crazy things like that. The more he thought about it, the more it made sense to him. Wesley had made it this far alone, it only made sense to prepare for a disaster that could leave him cut off from the rest of the world.

  Wesley lived in a small, two-bedroom house outside the city. It was nestled between a thick plot of trees and located only a mile from the port. There was only one other house in sight, practically a mirror image of his own, located about fifty yards to the south separated only by three large oak trees on the property line. On a breezy day, he could smell both pine trees from the surrounding forest, and the English Channel. He had contemplated moving, but after chatting with other preppers, he was convinced that his fairly secluded location and distance from the port would work to his benefit. A few months ago, he had looked at his fully stocked pantry and realized that it wasn’t enough.

  There are multiple levels to prepping, and almost physical measurements of how far a person was willing to go. Wesley was ready to advance to the next stage. With a surprisingly small amount of effort and a few clicks on an auction site, he was able to purchase a shipping container. The large metal cargo container would become his makeshift bunker. With a small loan he was able to hire a crew to dig out a hole and place the container inside. The crew didn’t ask many questions, but he could see the look on their faces. This guy is one of those crazy preppers. He understood how they felt, because, months before, he would have thought the same thing.

  That was when Mandy, his ever-nosey neighbor, took interest. Probably around ten years younger, Mandy had only ever spoken to Wesley a few times since she had moved in just over a year ago. She was short and a little past the slim stage, but still miles out of reach for a guy like Wesley, even with a face that looked older than it should have with her younger age. When she first moved in, Wesley briefly fantasized having some sort of relationship with her, but that was squashed as soon as she opened her mouth in his proximity. He wasn’t sure if it had ever actually closed after that. It didn’t seem to deter the other guys that she occasionally brought home on Friday and Saturday nights. Long story short, the snotty little bitch had nerve enough to laugh at his preparations just like everybody else.

  Meanwhile, the more he put into his bunker, the more his credit card bills began to pile up. As his debt grew, so did his readiness. He focused on the most obvious of human needs – food, water, air. A hatch and air vents were installed. As he stood in the yard staring at the hatch and vent pipes jutting out of the fresh dirt, he felt a wave of anxiety roll across him. Sweat began to bead up in the wrinkles of his forehead and he wiped his brow with the back of his hand.

  “It’s a bunker,” he said to himself.

  “I can see that,” he responded.

  “Well, that’s the problem, Wes. If I can see it, so can everyone else,” he said aloud.

  “I have to hide it. People won’t try to break into something they can’t see.”

  Wesley had been an only child and he periodically talked to himself. It was a habit his mother tried to break him of and he found himself doing it less, but still frequently enough to warrant strange glances if he did it in public. He stared at the back door to his small custard colored house. Below the door were three concrete steps descending into the fresh dirt.

  “I figured it out!”

  A few weeks later, he sat on his new back porch drinking a bottled lemonade. He leaned back in the brown lattice chair and smiled. He finally, for the first time in a while, felt ready. Beneath him, under the new porch, was the bunker. It was stocked with enough supplies to keep him alive for months. It was hidden well enough that thieves would never find it. To Wesley, it was his ark.

  Most nights, he would crawl under the porch, open the hatch and descend into the steel darkness. Once inside, he would seal the hatch, flick on his torch, and walk along looking at his shelves filled with jars of rice, beans, lard, jugs of water, cans of fruit, vitamins, and other important supplies. The calm satisfaction that he felt was almost Zen-like; it was his meditation. He would spend almost an hour down there and even turn off the torch occasionally and just listen. Silence surrounded him. Only once did he hear a noise, but it was padded and muffled by layers of dirt. He was swaddled in darkness and, in a way, it comforted him. After his subterranean meditation, he would return to his living room and watch TV, often falling to sleep in his recliner to the drone of the local news. Which would explain why he missed a news report about a gas leak that led to the destruction of the local hospital.

  Tonight, Wesley had been sitting on his porch drinking orangeade. He had seen the bottle sitting next to his favorite drink and he felt adventurous. It was time he tried something new … and he regretted it. With each sip, his face contorted into a disgusted pucker. He leaned back in his chair and a cool breeze caught his thinning hair. He began wondering how it would all happen. The question was no longer, will there be a disaster, it was when?

  He caught a whiff of cigarette smoke in the evening breeze and looked over toward Mandy’s back porch, where she was sitting with her bare feet propped up on a small upended wooden crate, wearing short denim shorts that exposed a lot of leg. He wasn’t sure from this distance, but her pink blouse appeared to be only half buttoned, which made him turn away, afraid she would catch him staring, not that there was anything to see from here. Smoking was another strike against her for Wesley, although he did appreciate that if she had a smoke in her mouth, she wasn’t talking – at least most of the time.

  He forced his thoughts back to the bunker. “You did good Wesley, you’re ready for anything,” he said quietly to himself. He looked above the tree line and took in the sunset. He had just bought a few more supplies and after he finished his dinner he would go down into the bunker. It had become a nightly routine lately.

  Suddenly, the woods erupted with feathers as a panicked flock of birds flew past his house. He put down his drink and stood up. He scanned the tree lin
e and something made him feel very uncomfortable, almost as if he was being watched. A flutter of movement brought his eyes into the shadows of the trees – was that a human figure staggering toward him?

  His mind raced. Do I run in the house or head for the bunker? He needed to know what he was dealing with, but if it was an armed raider, it was probably too late. A moment later, the figure detached itself from the shadows as a young man stumbled out of the woods. His arm was covered in blood and the way he staggered forward; Wesley instantly knew what he was dealing with.

  With all the research he had done and all the friends he had made online, he felt that this was a movie he had already seen. “Stop standing there and get in the freaking bunker,” he said to himself. The sound of his own voice prompted him to move. Off to the side, he heard Mandy gasp in surprise. He had forgotten all about her, but as much as he detested her, he instinctively shouted a warning to her. “Run, girl, run!” As he hustled off the porch, the young man in the yard locked his eyes on him. It was chilling how the bloke, who had previously wandered aimlessly, seemed to home in so quickly on Wesley.

  Wesley tripped and fell hard into the moist grass. He crawled under the porch and looked behind him. The guy, obviously a zombie, was a good thirty steps behind him, but the fear still gripped him hard. He struggled to get to the hatch as adrenaline flooded his body, gripped the handle on the hatch and turned it with sweaty hands. Wesley nearly fell into the dark hole, but caught himself on the rungs. He made one last look outside and could see the bloody young man dropping to his knees to climb under the porch. Also, amazingly, he could see Mandy’s feet and ankles crossing the ground between her porch and his as she was apparently trying to get to his bunker as well. He knew she would never make it … but, to his own surprise, he wanted her to.

  “RUN!”

  In the next second, he knew it was too late for her. The creature had become aware of the girl, her own movements giving her away as she tried to scramble past his focused gaze. Just when Wesley reached out to grab her outstretched hand, the creature clamped down onto her leg and snatched her out of reach.

  Staring into her horrified eyes, Wesley pulled the hatch shut with a thundering clang, her piercing scream following him to be trapped with Wesley in the bunker’s darkness. As Wesley turned the locking lever, his shaking legs gave out and he fell past the last two rungs to the hard metal floor, knocking the wind out of his lungs and bending his left wrist unnaturally when he tried to break his fall. He wobbled to the wall and slid to the ground, shaking like a newborn fawn.

  “You should have listened to me,” he said into the darkness, tears and sweat rolling down his face. He covered his ears in a futile attempt to block the screams that somehow made their way into his fortified shelter. “YOU SHOULD HAVE LISTENED!”

  Hours later, long after Mandy’s final agonizing cries had been replaced by the muffled attempts by zombie-boy to solve the Wesley puzzle, Wesley finally began to take stock of his situation.

  It was so dark inside the container that, for a moment, he questioned if he had simply gone blind. He sat in the corner, his breath echoey and deliberate. There was a lamp on the shelf, somewhere at least. Wesley’s heart was pounding and he decided to calm down before getting any supplies together.

  As he sat with his back against the cold metal wall, he listened to the movement from above. It was a low dragging sound, that while muffled, still gave him chills. There was a light scratching at the hatch and he could just picture that creature running its fingers along the metal. He was emboldened by the thought that he was protected inside his fortress.

  “Scratch away, you’re not getting in,” he whispered.

  He had previously spent many hours in the bunker. It was a place he went to for relaxation. He enjoyed being hidden away from the rest of the world. Although, this time it was different. His choices had been stripped from him and now this safe-room could be his tomb.

  Surviving a disaster in his bunker had been a calculated idea. In each one, he thought about the problems he could encounter, but he hadn’t planned for this. There were certain things he had assumed, like the ability to occasionally exit the bunker to dispose of accumulated waste. He had watched a few zombie movies, for research purposes, of course. One thing that seemed to be in common with these films was that zombies never gave up. They would pursue someone until they rotted from the weight of time itself. He sat in the dark and wondered if he would ever be able to go outside. He began to fear that this one zombie could attract raiders to his spot and they would seal his airways or use smoke bombs to drive him out.

  Nearly an hour went by and Wesley hadn’t moved from his spot. Like a child hiding under a blanket, he hoped that if he ignored it long enough, it would just go away. There was a terrible scratching sound that echoed through the room. It was followed by a low and elongated moan. That monster had made its way to one of the air vents and had been scratching and biting at it for nearly half an hour. Wesley let out a whisper-volume sigh and stood up. There was a hiccup of a moan and the pawing and scratching sound seemed to grow faster. He groped around blindly in the darkness and waddled toward the shelves. He needed light; he was growing increasingly disoriented without it. Wesley ended up kicking the metallic shelf and it made an echoing clang. Above, the zombie went into some sort of frenzy. Short excited moans wafted into the room and it made his skin crawl.

  Wesley softly placed his hands on the shelf and grabbed at items, like those claw games in arcades. He finally felt the base of the small camping lamp and pressed its rubber-coated switch. The light was harsh as it exploded into the room. He shielded his eyes for a moment as they adjusted to the brightness. After a moment, he began to scan the room for anything out of the ordinary. He questioned what he thought could be down there, but as the moans continued to assault his ears, he knew. It was paranoia, sure, but the sound was so close, he had to make sure he was alone. His LED lamp proved that he only shared space with supplies and white buckets of beans. He looked over at the empty cubby hole that he had labeled batteries.

  “You bloody wanker,” he mumbled to himself. The pack he had bought was sitting on the kitchen counter. That would have been enough juice to last weeks. Instead, he was now reduced to only the batteries currently installed. What made matters worse was that he had been using that lamp ever since his first visit into the bunker, so he wasn’t sure how much energy was remaining. Irony was having the time to label the cubby, but not actually stock it. The creature above had gone into another flurry of sounds and scratching at his mumbled words. Wesley rolled his eyes.

  “Guess it’s just you and me,” he mumbled.

  “Shut up Bob,” Wesley said. His voice was met with frantic scratching. Wesley had decided to name his new neighbor. It seemed only fitting.

  Wesley had placed his sleeping bag on the floor and tried to get some rest. Each time he nearly drifted off, Bob would let out a grunt or moan into the air vent. It wanted to remind him that it was out there, waiting for him to open the hatch. After a few more hours, he finally fell asleep, despite the constant interruptions. There was something about the darkness down here that made him uneasy. It wasn’t like dark rooms in his house. This was absolute, to the point that when he opened his eyes, he sometimes wondered if they were still closed. He constantly began switching the light on for confirmation. It soon came to the point where he left it on throughout the day. He needed the light and even though he knew it was wasteful, he continued to leave it on.

  An entire day went by, or at least he thought it did. He had failed to bring a watch, so time became impossible to measure. He ate some rice and beans that he cooked over a camping stove. He drank water, organized the containers, and counted the number of grooves in the ceiling. He used the bathroom bucket and sealed it tightly after he was done. He dreaded any future trips to that bucket. Without the ability to go outside, things would get … unpleasant. Wesley tried to drown out the sound from above, but it was hard. At first it began to ble
ed into the background, but after hours upon hours of the noise, it took over his thoughts. It was as if every other thought was simply, ungh or sometimes even unnghh!

  He couldn’t believe that he had stocked all the things that he needed to physically survive, but nothing that would make him want to. No books, no movies, no entertainment. He lay there, wrapped halfway in his sleeping bag, counting the number of buckets and multiplying them by beans. “Yeah, that’s probably at least 34 thousand beans,” he whispered to himself. The moaning from the zombie grew in response to his words, but he didn’t even notice. Wesley nodded his head in approval. Day two complete and it was time for bed. He curled up into the sleeping bag and flicked off the lamp. As the darkness swirled around him, he closed his eyes and attempted to dream.

  What he didn’t know was that this was not the end of the second day. Wesley was unaware that he was experiencing a bit of time travel. As Einstein had theorized, time is relative – so Wesley’s brain, deprived of nearly all physical senses, lost any useful concept of timekeeping. His internal clock spun wildly around its imaginary face without a single spring coiled to reality.

  He had only been underground for about eighteen hours. He had gone through three meals in the first seven hours and his sleep had consisted mostly of him staring at nothing. The few times he genuinely slept were brief and inconsistent. While Wesley patted himself on the back for his survival foresight, a radio would have served him better.

  The town of Ashbury had been quarantined and a military blockade was preventing anyone from entering or exiting. The zombie that was clawing at the hatch was the son of one of the few soldiers who had left the base before the infection had caused a complete lockdown. Wesley was far enough from the city limits that he would have been largely unaffected, at least for a while longer. His other neighbors, whose homes were not even in line-of-sight of Wesley’s house, had no reason to check on him or Mandy. His boss, before things got completely out of hand in the store, had called him multiple times, but chalked up the unanswered calls to an unannounced quitting, rather than an emergency. His phone, the latest smart device on the market, lay uselessly on his kitchen counter. It had occasionally vibrated like an angry bee during the early hours of Wesley’s entombment. Now, it lay strangely silent, either from lack of interested callers, or perhaps from a government-induced lack of interested satellites.