As he paces up the stairs, he fights the temptation to run straight up to the ladder leading up to the roof-space, and forces himself to continue in secret agent mode until he has checked each room. It doesn’t take long; as with downstairs, all of the doors on the second floor are wide open bar two; the room in which he had seen the dying woman, and one of the bedrooms on the other side, both of which have also been nailed shut with boards. As he reaches the former armory, his heart sinks; it too has been stripped clean. He stands still for a few moments, listening to the increasingly frantic scraping coming from downstairs as Venus desperately attempts to shred the living room door open, and endeavors to settle his breathing. Tucking his gun back into his belt, he walks slowly over to the ladder to the attic. As he reaches the top, he briefly considers taking his weapon back out of his belt, and then decides he can’t be bothered: the house is as silent as a grave. Lifting himself free, he sees at a glance that the room is clear. The crates still remain, but he knows before he reaches them what he will find; every one is empty. After checking each crate in turn within the attic and finding nothing, Lowell returns to the first floor and checks each of the open rooms in turn, and then repeats the search on the ground floor. Whilst all of the food and weapons, and the majority of the bedding and smaller possessions have been taken, several of the bulkier items remain, suggesting the former occupants have left in some haste. The valuable generator and water collection setup in the garage are still in place, as is the heavy cast iron wood burner and steel pan they had set up in the kitchen.
Returning to the hallway, he discovers Venus, no longer worrying the door but lying still with her nose pressed to the gap. It is clear that whatever has caused the group to flee is shut inside these secured rooms, and Lowell knows without looking what he is likely to find. Nevertheless, he has to make sure, and so he leaves the house, edges around the perimeter and peers in through the window to the living room. It takes him a moment to locate what he is looking for as his eyes slowly adjust to the gloom, but then he sees them; two bodies, one concealed by a tarp in the far corner, the other by the door. The corpse on display is stretched out in an unnatural position, twisted backwards in the final agonizing moments of his death. The man’s body is too bloated for Lowell to be one hundred percent sure, but he is pretty certain it isn’t Walter, or any of the others he has encountered so far.
Returning to the house, Lowell is at a loss as to what to do next. He has no desire to go back to town and scavenge, and has little confidence that they will find enough food to see them through the winter even if they somehow manage to avoid the pack lurking within the ruins of the town. On the other hand, the only significant stockpile of food that he knows of is now gone, driven off to who knows where, along with his hated nemesis, the imagined vanquishing of whom was the only thing left that was keeping him going. Wandering back through to the garage, he eyes his car thoughtfully. He had always avoided driving in the past, but if Walter’s group has managed it, then surely he can go wherever they have? The first issue is clearly going to be fuel. With the group running both a vehicle and the generator, he guesses they will have already siphoned-off and used the majority that was to be found in any car within a decent radius of the house. Lowell himself used to keep a canister in the garage, as well as a smaller one in the boot of his car, but a quick check of both places confirms that, as expected, these are both now gone. He is about to give up and return to the main house when a thought occurs to him, and he walks back over to the boot of the car. Flipping open the concealed space that held the tire repair kit, he lifts out the box and then reaches into a concealed cavity off to one side. A moment later he lets out a satisfied snort, as he pulls out his winter emergency kit, still pristine and unopened from where he had stowed it all those years before. The contents: torch, hi-viz vest, shovel, foil-blanket and two self-heating emergency meal kits.
A few minutes later, Lowell and Venus lay sprawled out upstairs in Walter’s former bedroom; Lowell using one finger to extract the last morsels of slightly funky tasting bean juice from the now empty packet of the first emergency meal, Venus chewing the corner of the plastic pot Lowell has used to portion out her share. Still he has no plan, and he has misgivings about spending a night in the house along with the infected bodies, but with the sun beginning to set they have little choice. He has managed to scrape together enough discarded bedding materials from around the house to ensure that at least they will be guaranteed a warm night, and with a small amount of food lining his belly, and another meager meal ready for the next day, they are now in at least slightly better shape than when they had arrived. With that moderately comforting thought, he turns over and lies his head down on the folded jacket that serves as his pillow.
He is just about to close his eyes and go to sleep, when; off to one side, just visible poking out from underneath a small table by the window, he notices the corner of a book. Reaching over, he pulls it free, and glances at the cover - Kafka by the shore - one of Beth’s favorites. Sighing wistfully, he opens the book at random and then flips slowly through the pages, picking out passages here and there. At length, as he flicks to the end, he sees a photograph drop free and flutter to the floor. Reaching across, he retrieves it from the ground and turns it over.
It is a polaroid, a family scene – mother, father and young child – the expressions on each are every bit as happy as those featured in the photograph taken outside Disneyland that Lowell had found months earlier, but the setting couldn’t have been any more different. The family are standing inside the wired fence of some compound or other in which they have taken refuge, through the fence behind them and off to one side is the entrance to a mall, half collapsed and burnt out, to the other is another wreck – a car that has been stripped of any usable parts and then burnt too, but then in the middle of this destruction and just off to the left of the family stands a huge stag, gazing at the camera with no fear. The father, Walter, is smiling proudly down at his daughter, and Bea – Lowell guesses she must have been no more than four or five when this was taken – is captured half turning and staring upwards, utterly captivated by the stag.
Lowell is entranced, not by the people themselves – his eyes flicker only briefly to the peoples faces – but by the way that they fit into the background. He recognizes the place, it is an old mall over by Willoughby - The Argon Center he thinks - which he has visited himself over the years. He remembers the way he had skulked through the twisted wreckage of the mall, slipping unseen and alone in the shadows. Lowell leans in to get a closer look at the picture, and spots a dumpster over by a service door, a sanctuary in which he had hidden for hours to avoid a large male black bear that had been stalking him – cowering, shaking and praying that the smell of the putrid waste that engulfed him would throw the animal off his own equally repugnant scent. Finally, his eye is drawn to Lucy. Walter’s wife is staring straight at the camera. She is smiling too, but hers is a fixed grin, behind which she seems to be willing the person behind the camera to get a move on and take the picture. One arm is cupped protectively around her daughter’s shoulders, her other hand hovers over a holster at her waist. Lowell finds himself imagining that he is the one taking the photograph, his own family waiting patiently in turn for a Kodak moment of their own.
There is something else though. Lowell can’t quite put his finger on it, but he finds his gaze drawn repeatedly back to Lucy, to her fixed, intense gaze that triggers a memory somewhere in Lowell’s mind, until suddenly it becomes clear, and he remembers the same glare, the same penetrating stare on the face of the grotesquely bloated face of the dying woman he had encountered in this same house weeks ago. Walter’s wife is dead. Lowell wonders how he has not until now questioned her absence. It occurs to Lowell, briefly, that this is some sort of justice, some resolution, and he tells himself that he should be satisfied that Walter will be feeling some measure of his own pain, but the feeling is hollow. With the picture staring him in the face he cannot stop the wave of s
adness that engulfs him, overtaking him until he feels he can’t breathe and gasps for air, and all along another part of his brain screams at him to resist, to reject the grief and damn Walter all the more for forcing this undeserved sympathy onto him. It is too much. Lowell grips the photo violently and flings it to one side, and then hunches over to his knees, sobbing, and as he does so a small mouthful of rancid bean juice forces its way up his throat unexpectedly, catching him by surprise. Lowell blinks with surprise, spits the acidic liquid onto the carpet in disgust, and then falls forward onto his hands and vomits copiously onto the floor.
Chapter Thirty-Five
Lowell stays in the same position on his hands and knees until he has long exhausted the contents of his stomach and then continues to dry-heave for several more minutes, as all the while a series of animal wails and heaving sobs wrack his body. Unseen, Venus approaches cautiously, whimpering softly in distress at the sight of Lowell’s grief. As she draws nearer, she licks him gently on the nape of his neck, and then, receiving no response, she sidles off and proceeds to quickly hoover up the sick that Lowell has discharged onto the floor before settling down to watch him sadly from a few feet away on the floor.
For the next half hour Lowell barely moves, as a maelstrom of conflicting emotions whirl through his mind, and then suddenly and without warning he stands up and strode decisively out into the hallway and down the stairs to come to a dead stop facing the front door. Behind him Venus pads hesitantly down the stairs and then she too comes to a nervous halt a few meters behind him. Several times over Lowell reaches out for the door handle, then fingers his gun, then grips his cheeks and strikes the sides of his head with balled up fists and bends over and dry-heaves. All he has possessed for the longest time is a thirst for revenge, but now that has been colored, tainted, first by this new knowledge of shared loss, and more practically by the realization that to kill him now will be to deprive Walter of the opportunity to experience the same despair that Lowell has lived with for so long. Still, the strength of his feelings continues to overwhelm any actions he determines to take. Again and again he retches, stumbles and mumbles incomprehensible ravings as the memories of his life with Beth, the memories of her death, the memories of Walter – his cowardice that has matured into innate malice in Lowell’s mind - all that has both sustained and tortured him for years shifts and whirls and fragments.
*****
“During the last few months before the outbreak, when she was pregnant, I had thought that our relationship had turned a corner. We were happier than we had been at any time since we were first married. Or at least, that’s how I’ve chosen to remember it. Looking back now, she was happy, certainly, and she had stopped getting on my back about a lot of those little things that I did that used to bug her, and that made me happy, or at least less stressed. So many of those issues we had were my fault. If I were to say that I was often a bad husband that would be irrefutably true. I did so many of those clichéd things that executives are supposed to do; I worked long hours, I brought my work home with me. On the few occasions that I actually made it home for dinner, I droned on about business, because that’s all I had to talk about. In addition to those things, I had many other traits that were equally irritating, if perhaps less clichéd: firstly, my forgetfulness, a fault which would often drive her to distraction, on more than one occasion I can recall arriving home to an empty house and wondering vaguely where she was, only to remember an hour or so later that I was supposed to meet her at some social event or function or other, after a while her embarrassed calls home to beg me to come petered out. My selfishness; she was always trying to get me to use some of our money to help those less fortunate, I would always counter her with some facetious argument, with the sole intention of entering into a broader debate to distract her from her original request. My thoughtlessness; the most obvious example that springs to mind being the fact that, for three years running, I bought her the same present for her birthday, a gift that, in retrospect, breaks my heart; a spa day for one. On top of all of these faults, I could list, among many others, clumsiness, greed, petulance, excessive flatulence, irritability, intolerance and a habit of repeatedly using excessive amounts of her fancy shampoos and conditioners despite her repeated pleas that I should leave them alone. But then, that was always who I was, and Beth always thought she could change me. Maybe she thought that she could make me into something more until, one day, she just stopped trying, or even worse, stopped caring enough to try.
I had thought that, maybe, pregnancy had changed her outlook, but I see now that something had changed well before that happened. I’m still angry, even now, but a small part of me is glad that she had those few months of happiness before the end. Then again, the bigger part of me was full of a murderous rage; I had grown, sure, but not that much. My emotions cam in waves: first rage, then a great sadness as I remembered all of those things I had looked forward to doing with out child. Those Hallmark moments – little league games, and Lego and driving lessons. Then, right on cue, the rage would build once again.”
Chapter Thirty-Six
The next morning, Lowell wakes cramped and shivering still curled up on the cold hallway floor. Only Venus’s warmth has ensured that he has not got dangerously cold, something that could very well have been fatal in his weakened state. She has spent most of the night snuggled up close to him and then, as is her habit, has crept away at his first stirring and is now lying regarding him with an unblinking stare a few feet away on the floor. At the sight of her, and in the few seconds before his memories from the night before come flooding back, his mouth twists into something vaguely approaching a half-smile; to have someone with him now feels good, even if he is still unsure as to the exact manner of their relationship. He is no master, not hers, nor anyone’s, and she in turn is certainly no pet. That same adaptability that has allowed dogs to slot so perfectly into all aspects of human society has worked just as well in allowing them to survive on their own. As he recalls his despair from the night before, his smile quickly fades, and is replaced by a bitter grimace before his jaw sets into a hard line, and he affects a determined expression. He has made a decision at last, flawed maybe, he knows, but a decision of sorts. He has decided that he cannot ignore the coincidences that have led him to this point, the random pinball of fate that have led him back to Walter. Lowell has no idea what he will do when he catches up with him again, but it is as good of a purpose as he is likely to find. He feels that he can be happy for now with not knowing, and so he leaps to his feet with a fresh sense of purpose; he is ready to hunt.
Once he has determined that he and Venus will leave to follow the group, Lowell flies into a frenzy of preparation, desperate to get on the road quickly before another snowfall arrives to cover the vehicle tracks on the road. Although he is still tempted to attempt to ready his car to follow them, the realization that he has no idea where his keys are, and the fact that he is sure that hot-wiring the vehicle will not prove to be as easy as the movies have led him to believe forces him to reject the notion out of hand. Without a vehicle though, the going will be hard, and so he locates a small tarp in the garage to provide them with at least some shelter from the elements in case they are unable to find a place to stay while they are out on the road. This found - his next concern is food. After a thorough ransacking of the house he eventually turns up a single tub of dried milk powder; not nearly enough for the way ahead but at least it is something. Some further rummaging secures him a large jumper; thick with material as well as grime, and a pair of heavy work pants, both of which he puts on over his current outfit, as well as a long black trench coat which he feels is appropriate both for the weather, as well as his new role as man-hunter.
An hour or so later he stands by the front door ready to go; his pack filled and hefted onto his back, Venus up, alert and eager to leave. As he lifts one hand up to open the door though, a thought suddenly occurs to him; he has no idea which members of the group have left the house, and w
hich still remain, lifeless, within the locked rooms. He has to know, there is no way that he can allow himself to embark on such a perilous journey whilst for all he knows Walter’s body lies slowly putrefying, a few feet from where he now stands. After considering the problem for several minutes, he comes up with a solution as to how to enter the rooms, check the identity of the bodies, and get out without risking exposure to the virus. Returning to the kitchen, he soon finds what he is looking for - a packet of freezer-bags in various sizes. Tucking a few into the pockets of his coat, he moves from room to room, prying free the boards that secure each door before moving on to the next. With this complete, he returns to the living room door, and then stands outside, breathing deeply and psyching himself up, and then as a final thought he removes a few of the smaller bags and slipped one on to each of his hands, then tucks the ends into his sleeves to secure them in place. With his hands covered, he removes the largest bag in the pack, takes a few deep breaths, holds them in, and then jams it over his head and launches himself into the room.
Moving quickly he heads straight over to the body that lies in the corner, concealed beneath a sheet. Bending down, he whips away the covering to reveal the inflated corpse of the elderly guard who had abandoned his post to allow Lowell to escape several weeks before. Not wanting to waste a second, Lowell races from the room, slams the door behind him, and rips the bag from his head to gasp for air - one down, and two to go. Not wasting any time, Lowell moves upstairs and tackles the next two rooms in quick succession. The first is the nursery. Lowell steels himself and then opens the door quickly, frowning sadly as he scans the room. Alongside Lucy, another woman has now been entombed. From the look of her, he guesses it is most likely that of her sister, now joining her in the afterlife. The last room holds the bodies of a man and a woman. Lowell can’t be sure, it is now impossible to tell for certain, but he feels there is a chance they had once been his two nemeses, Heather and Bill. Whatever the case, the man is not Walter; he has a full head of hair, not Walter’s distinctive encircled dome. Back out in the hallway, Lowell pauses for a moment, panting and recovering his breath. His emotions still rage back and forth, caught in a battle between sympathy for Walter’s loss, and the deeply engrained hatred for the man that feels like Lowell’s last link to Beth, and the man he used to be. Despite this internal battle, Lowell is thrilled that Walter has made it out. Whatever happens, Lowell needs it to be on his terms. In addition, one other thing has buoyed his spirits. Taking another bag from his pocket, he gulps another lungful of air, replaces the bag on his head and then dives back into the room for a moment before emerging triumphantly a moment later, with a smile on his face and three tins of corned beef secured in his sack. With the reassuring knowledge that Walter is likely still somewhere out there waiting for him, and some good food to sustain them for a day or so at least, Lowell skips quickly back down the stairs, whistles for Venus to follow, and then slips out of the front door and on into the cold.
The Darkness and Dogs Page 17