Our Dead Bodies [Anthology]

by Wright, Jerry

  “My mom,” Jaime replied, “Any idea where she is?”

  “Yeah, sure,” Joe ran a hand through his gray and thinning hair, “Her and Ted went down to Jill’s a couple weeks ago. I’ve been checking on the house every now and then. They should be back on Sunday.”

  “Thanks, Joe,” Jaime said and turned to go.

  “Hey, Jaime, you hear about what’s been happening up in the cities? You live in New York now, don’t you?” Joe asked before he could walk away.

  The bar fell completely silent. Jaime could feel everyone’s eyes on him. He wished he could slither out of there like a damned snake.

  “Some kind of virus,” he cleared his throat, images of that woman gorging herself on the cop’s flesh flashing through his mind, “It’s not safe there.”

  “What’s the government doing?” someone asked from the other side of the room.

  “Probably nothing, as usual,” someone else answered him.

  Questions and answers were shot back and forth across the place as Jaime retreated back into the blinding heat of the day. He was just about to start the bike back up again when Joe came running across the parking lot.

  “Jaime, wait up,” he wheezed, wiping his face with the cloth he used to keep the counter so nice and shiny.

  “Don’t hurt yourself, Joe,” Jaime said, not unkindly.

  “Jaime, listen…” Joe took a few seconds to catch his breath, “The reason Florence is outta town… It’s your dad, Jaime. He was released early. He’s been back a couple weeks.”

  For all the heat of the day, Jaime’s blood still ran cold. He stared at Joe, unable to even fathom a reply. His dad, out of prison, and in Redding Falls. What were the odds?

  “He’s staying at Marcy’s,” Joe said, even though Jaime hadn’t asked.

  The Harley roared to life.

  “Stock up on some supplies,” Jaime said as he fastened his helmet, “You know, water, food, fuel. I think shit’s going to get ugly with this virus.”

  He sped down the road, unsure if it was sweat or tears running into his eyes.

  Sunday

  Jaime let the curtain of his motel room fall into place again. For the third time that morning he saw a loaded up truck speed down the road.

  Where are they even going? he wondered. People from the city fled to towns, people from the towns fled to smaller towns, people from the smaller towns fled to even smaller towns, and people from even smaller towns fled to places like Redding Falls. Where the hell did people from Redding Falls go?

  The small and nearly useless TV sitting on the cabinet next to the bed was on mute, but Jaime didn’t need to hear anything to know what was going on. The virus had spread rapidly. It was spreading over the entire country like some massive brooding storm. People were dying in drones, but they weren’t staying down. Nope, they got right back up a few hours later. Only, they weren’t the same. For one, they seemed to lose all manner of coherent speech. Oh, and they seemed to have an insufferable craving for human flesh. Zombies. People were finally beginning to use the damn term. None had been spotted in Redding Falls yet, though. Well, at least none that Jaime had heard of, but it wasn’t like he was socializing with the locals. He’d been keeping to himself, waiting for his mom to get back so they could plan their next move together. She might not even be coming back, he thought. If he had known that his dad had been released early, he sure as hell wouldn’t have set a damn foot in this shit hole, no matter what manner of undead things were chasing him.

  He packed up his stuff and headed back to his mom’s place. He was feeling paranoid and on edge. Every person in the street looked like his dad. Jaime didn’t know what he would do if he came face to face with the bastard. The gun he had picked up back in the streets of Manhattan suddenly felt like it weighed a hundred pounds in his backpack, but it made him feel better. Even if he never pulled the trigger, he would still love the opportunity to point it at his dad’s face.

  Jaime noticed Ted’s car in the driveway as he pulled up to his mom’s house. Florence came running through the front door, her face knotted in concern. He could see from the bags under her eyes that she’d been crying.

  “Jaime!” she shouted as she ran up the sidewalk.

  “Hey, mom,” he said as she threw her arms around his neck.

  Her back was bonier than he remembered, but she still wore the same perfume he remembered from when he was a kid. Some things never changed. He suddenly felt like vermin for not visiting her more often. It took him a moment to realize that she was crying on his shoulder.

  “Mom, what’s wrong?” he asked, holding her away from him to get a better look at her.

  Mascara was running down her cheeks. She seemed so unlike the woman who had raised him.

  “It’s Ted,” she sobbed, “He’s hurt, Jaime. Something horrible happened. Your aunt is dead.”

  He crushed her to his chest again and stroked her hair, trying to soothe her but unsure of what to say. His aunt Jill was much older than his mom, and she had been struggling with cancer for years. The news wasn’t altogether surprising.

  “Mom, where’s Ted?” he asked when the sobs subsided.

  “The bedroom,” she said shakily, taking a deep breath and putting her nothing-is-wrong-anymore face on. There she is, Jaime thought bitterly.

  The bedroom was dark and stuffy, the curtains drawn against the harsh glare of sunlight streaming through the windows. Ted was lying on top of the covers, his face drenched in a sticky and unhealthy looking sweat. His breaths were short and shallow, and his eyelids kept fluttering open like he was on a bad acid trip.

  “What happened?” Jaime asked as he sat down next to him.

  He pressed the back of his hand to Ted’s forehead, expecting it to be scalding hot, but it was ice cold.

  “Your aunt Jill,” his mom began, her voice on the verge of cracking again, “She came home one day with this… this wound on her arm. She said someone at the bank attacked her. She said he… he bit her, Jaime! She got so ill, just like… just like Ted. She died, during the night. We didn’t know. The next morning, Ted went into her room and found her. She was dead, Jaime. I felt for a pulse. She was dead! But, a short while later, while we were waiting for the ambulance, she… she came back to life. But she… she was so much stronger than she had ever been. And the noises she made… We didn’t know what to do. Ted tried to calm her down, to get her back into bed, but she attacked him. She was like an animal! Whatever it was, she wasn’t my sister anymore. She bit him, Jaime!”

  Jaime felt his stomach sink lower and lower with each word which came out of her mouth.

  “And now, Ted is like this, and…”

  “Mom,” he interrupted her, “be quiet for a moment.”

  She shut her mouth with the trained precision you could only get from having been married to a bully. Jaime knew it well because he had it too.

  He looked at Ted’s paling face. Blue vines were criss-crossing over his cheeks and nose like his skin was becoming thinner and thinner.

  “Show me where she bit him,” he told Florence as he went over to her.

  “Ted, honey,” she said softly and soothingly, “Jaime is here, he’s going to take a look, okay?”

  If Ted heard or understood what was happening around him, he gave no indication. He wasn’t dead yet, Jaime could see his heart racing in his throat.

  Florence rolled him onto his side, revealing a bloody soaked rag stuck to his left shoulder. Jaime stepped closer for a better look but regretted it as a sickening stench washed over him. She removed the cloth, holding her breath, probably to stop herself from retching. Jaime felt the color drain from his face when he saw the bite mark. The wound was massive and bloody, and it looked badly infected. The skin around the teeth marks was black like he had gotten frost bite or something.

  “Mom,” Jaime said as she put a fresh cloth on Ted’s shoulder and eased him back onto the bed, “This is bad.”

  She didn’t answer him. She just kept patting Ted
’s face with a wet cloth, soothing him with soft words. Jaime left the room and its stench for the cooler and better smelling kitchen. Everything in the house was different, all the old furniture had been sold or simply carted off to the dump. The photographs of him and Claire were the only things in the house which reminded him of the life he had there while growing up. He couldn’t look at the photos, though. Fifteen years after his sister died, and the wound felt as fresh as the one on Ted’s shoulder.

  “Your father got released early, you know,” his mom said from behind him as he was pouring himself a glass of water.

  “Ted’s going to die, mom,” he said simply.

  “I know, Jaime,” she replied softly, “I know.”

  Monday

  The power went out that morning. Afterwards, Jamie wondered if he would ever have known what was happening upstairs if the power hadn’t cut out exactly when it did. His life was beginning to seem like a series of strange coincidences, one shit event leading to the next even shittier one.

  He was watching the news, trying to figure out where, if anywhere at all, the virus hadn’t managed to spread yet. He wanted to get his mom out of town before Ted died, or rather before he woke up again. The broadcaster was just repeating the same bulletins over and over again, though, like the whole bloody world had gotten stuck on the same bit of information.

  The TV suddenly died, plunging the whole house into silence. A soft shuffling noise was coming from the room above him – his mom’s bedroom.

  “Mom?” he called nervously.

  He had expressly forbidden her from going into the room without him. It was too damn risky. Christ only knew when Ted would finally shove of his mortal coil for a flashier, deadlier version.

  He took the stairs slowly, straining his ears for any new sounds. More shuffling, more moving about.

  “Mom?” he called again, unnerved by the fear he heard in his own voice.

  The bedroom door was closed, but his mom was nowhere to be seen. He pressed his ear to the door and heard more shuffling from within. This can only be bad, or really, really bad, he thought.

  If he’d been smarter he would have gotten the gun from his bag, or he would have at least gotten one of Ted’s golf clubs from the garage. But concern for his mom and what might be happening to her seemed to make him a little bit stupid, kind of like when he was standing in the middle of the street while everyone around him was running away because he didn’t want to leave his damned car behind.

  He turned the knob as softly as he possibly could. The door swung open silently, revealing the hellish scene within. The white carpet, curtains, and walls were covered in dark red blotches. Florence was lying on the floor. Looming over her, his face pressed to her chest, was Ted, or whatever remained of Ted. His mom’s eyes were staring into the nothingness of death, her face fixed in an almost serene expression of complete oblivion. Her head rolled from side to side a bit every time Ted lifted his mouth from her body. A distant part of Jaime wondered if she had tried to call out to him before she died.

  The slurping, sucking and chewing noises Ted was making as he ripped into his mother’s flesh nearly made Jaime puke. As if his mouth wasn’t enough of a weapon, Dead-Ted was using his nails to claw at her stomach, peeling off layer after layer of skin to get to what was inside her.

  Jaime felt a sickening rage he had never known before. His mother was dead. His father was free, and his mother was dead. Ted was dead. Ted was eating his mother. The edges of his vision were beginning to grow dark.

  “Get off her you fucking bastard!” he screamed and ran across the room.

  Dead-Ted lifted his head in a confused daze before Jaime shoved him off of his mom’s body and into the side of the bed. He wasn’t down for long though, and came lurching at Jaime as soon as he got to his feet. Dead-Ted’s eyes were a sickly yellow color, devoid of all traces of life or humanity. He was making those same disgusting noises the woman riding the mechanical bull-cop had made.

  “Get the fuck away from me!” Jaime screamed as he shoved at Dead-Ted again.

  But Dead-Ted wasn’t Ted anymore. He was Ted 2.0, much stronger, much sturdier than the old man had been. He grabbed Jaime’s arm in a steely grip, and before Jaime could even try and snatch it back again, he felt the searing pain of teeth ripping into his skin.

  Tuesday

  “Another useless day,” Jaime said as he stumbled through the cemetery.

  He was horribly drunk and in horrible pain.

  “You know what,” he said to the bottle of Jack Daniels clutched in his good hand, “I don’t remember where she was buried. Isn’t that fucking weird?”

  He wound his way through the gravestones, much as he wound his way through traffic just a week before in Lower Manhattan. That part of the world seemed light years away. Now he was in Redding Falls, probably the most useless town which had ever existed in the history of towns, drunk out of his mind despite the one promise he had made himself fifteen years earlier to never ever get drunk again, a chunk of his arm was missing and probably rotting inside the stomach of the man who had brutally killed his mother, and he was trying to find the grave of his sister, who, fifteen years ago, was savagely beaten to death by his father. Oh yeah, life was fucked up.

  The sun was already low in the sky by the time he finally found it.

  In loving memory of Claire Michaels,

  Loving daughter and sister, always remembered, always loved.

  Jaime stared at the words for what seemed like hours. For the first time since she died, he allowed the memories of his sister to wash over him unchecked. She’d been such a bombshell with her blonde hair and green eyes. She made all the guys swoon like a bunch of idiots. But she was never a slut, she never led any of them on. She was what Jaime thought of as the purest shit under the sun. Her smile could make your head explode. But above all, she was kind. Older than Jaime by five years, he shuddered to think of what life must have been like for her before he was born, with no one else to soak up some of their father’s thrashings.

  He took another swig of the whiskey, not even feeling the burn in his throat anymore. He had started to sweat the same sickly sticky sweat he’d seen on Ted. He knew he didn’t have much longer. But he’d be damned if he was gonna skulk through town like a damned brainless eating machine only to kill some granny hiding in her house. He still had the gun, and he was planning on using it on himself to end it all.

  He read the inscription over and over again, tears rolling down his cheeks.

  “Loved by all,” he snorted, “Loved by all!”

  He threw the empty bottle at the gravestone, sending shards of glass flying in every direction.

  “She wasn’t loved by all, you fucking liars!” he shouted, “She wasn’t loved by the one man who was supposed to protect her!”

  He fell onto his knees next to the stone, not caring that the pieces of broken bottle were digging into his skin. He clung to the gravestone like it was Claire. He so desperately wanted it to be Claire.

  “I’m so sorry,” he whimpered, “Claire, I’m so sorry… I should never have left you alone with him. I was such a stupid asshole! I knew what he was like. I knew… Please, Claire, please forgive me. Forgive your baby brother…”

  His tears rolled down the as he cried with his face pressed to it. All the pain and anger he had kept so well under control for the past fifteen years just came streaming out of him. His skin was ice cold, but inside of him it felt like the fires of hell were raging in a relentless battle with whatever the virus was doing to him.

  In his mind’s eye, he saw his sister’s face, again and again. So often she would stay home from school because of a busted lip or a bruised cheek. So often he would hear her cry out when his dad was feeling particularly irate, just as she must have heard him cry out too. They became each other’s rocks, confiding in each other, cleaning the wounds, bandaging the limbs, stitching the cuts. She was his best friend, and he left her at home that night, alone, so that he could go out dr
inking with his friends, just like his dad would go out drinking with his. He left her, and the next time he saw her she was lying dead in a puddle of her own blood on the kitchen floor, her hair red instead of blonde.

  “You bastard,” he whispered as he saw his dad’s face flash before his eyes, “You sick, twisted fucking bastard.”

  He stumbled back to the road and allowed his feet to carry him to what he knew would be his death.

  Marcy’s house was dark and silent as he walked up the cobbled steps to the front door. Would he knock? Can I borrow a cup of sugar? he thought, laughing out loud despite the seething anger he felt right down to his very soul.

  “Who’s there?” he heard the familiar voice call from inside the house.

  The sound of it was somehow even worse than the sounds Dead-Ted had made.

  “It’s me, dad,” he replied, trying to keep the contempt out of his voice but failing, “It’s Jaime.”

  Footsteps. The lock on the door clicked, and suddenly Jaime was face to face with the monster under his bed, the villain in every nightmare, his father.

  “Jaime,” his dad said, surprised, “What… What are you doing here?”

  “Shut up,” Jaime said, pleased to see the color drain out of his dad’s cheeks.

  “What did you say?” he knew that tone all too well – it was the you-better-shut-your-mouth-right-now-or-I’m-gonna-break-your-teeth tone.

  “I said, shut up!” he shoved his dad back into the house, half expecting the same resistance he got from Dead-Ted.

  But his dad was fat and soft, and totally caught off guard. He fell back onto the floor.

  “Jaime, what the…”

  “I told you to shut up,” Jaime said as he took the gun from the waistband of his jeans.

  He’d only ever fired a gun at the gun range before, but he knew where to aim. His dad’s face paled even more.

  “Not very nice, is it?” Jaime asked, “Being trapped on the floor, cornered by someone stronger than you.”