Those Who Lived

by Poss, Bryant

  “My kingdom for some conditioner,” she said out loud, and paused when she saw the boy turned toward her watching. The sight was one she could only imagine. He was upside down to her since she saw him under her arm looking back with her head ducked down in the sink, standing there naked, feet shoulder-width apart, not an inch of her concealed, and he just watched. The look on his face was priceless.

  “You enjoying the show?” she asked while continuing to run the water over her hair. He jerked a little then turned the other way like he was asleep. She smiled and finished up. The pokies must have heard his movement because now they shook the doors more violently. She grabbed her clothes and put them back on with a grimace, how much she really wanted to wash them, then she went over to the boy.

  “How you feeling?” she whispered, handing him a bottle of water. “It’s the Tylenol and Advil making you able to sit up. The Percocet doesn’t hurt either. You’re not well yet.”

  “Who are—”

  “Whisper,” she said calmly, putting her finger to her lips.

  “Who are you?” he whispered and coughed a little before taking another sip of water.

  “I’m Lo, but we’ll do introductions later. Right now, you really need to rest so we can move. It’s almost time for your Tylenol. Are you hungry?” He nodded his head, and she brought him some pepperoni and chips. “I know this isn’t home cooking but it’s all we’ve got right now. I want you to eat these olives too even if they don’t taste very good.”

  He began scarfing down the food, but he slowed when she told him. Several minutes went by before his mouth stopped working.

  “Why do you have so many tattoos?” he finally whispered while she adjusted his makeshift pillow. A smile found its way to her face at his lack of couth. The young were great like that.

  “Do you not like them?” she asked as she covered him with the clean cooking aprons she’d found. “I like them myself. That’s why I have so many.”

  “They’re different.”

  “That’s the idea.”

  “Is that a tree on your back and your—your booty?”

  “It is,” a stifled laugh. “It’s a leafless tree with a serpent intertwined—all the way down my booty.”

  “Oh.”

  “What’s your name, kid?”

  “Cillian,” he said and coughed again. “It sounds like a K but it’s spelled with a C.”

  “Okay, Cillian with a C, I need you to rest now. Our friends out there are going to eventually lose patience.”

  He opened his mouth to ask her something, but she shushed him with a finger to his lips, his dark green eyes sad from underneath the dark hair that swept across his forehead. Reluctantly, he closed his eyes while she propped herself up on the other side of the counter to watch the doors with her revolver in lap. She pulled out her rolled-up book of Robert Frost poems and passed the time.

  3

  “Cillian,” the hiss was sharp and contrasted the low moans of the pokies at the door. “Cillian, look at me.”

  “Is it time for my medicine?”

  “Listen to me, kid,” Lo was whispering, but her tone was anxious. “I need to know if you can walk. Do you think you feel well enough to move?”

  “Is something wrong?”

  “It’s been two days since Ben was taken or ran or whatever. I think you’re finally starting to turn a corner too. The antibiotics are working. I’m not asking you to run a marathon, but we need to move. We’ve got at least five pokies out there now—”

  “Why do you call them pokies?”

  “Because they’re slow pokes unlike the fast ones which are spastic, the spazzos—it doesn’t matter right now. Can you move? I’m going to give you half a Percocet for an extra boost.”

  “Can I get up and walk around the room a bit first then give you an answer?”

  “Hurry. I waited as long as I could, until I saw the first sign of morning.”

  Cillian stood up and stretched while she broke the pain pill and handed it to him. He looked as if he still felt pretty weak but he had certainly come a long way. Arching his back, he rose up on his tiptoes groaning with the stretch then put his hand on the counter to steady himself. Chin on chest, he took a few deep breaths, looking over at her and giving a weak smile. He tousled his own dark brown hair, blew out hard, and began lightly jumping up and down on the balls of his feet before walking over and downing half a bottle of water and opening a bag of chips. Lo was looking at him impatiently, but she didn’t say anything. There was a loud bang at the door that made him jump.

  “I can move. What do we do?”

  “We go out the back,” she said nodding toward the opposite door. “The only thing we have going for us is that these things are not intelligent.”

  “And slow.”

  “These are slow, but they’re strong. Spazzos are fast, really fast but seem to be no stronger than a normal man, or at least one in the worst fit of rage you can imagine. How much interaction did you have with them before your fingers?”

  He held up his left hand and looked at the bandage covering the stumps where his ring and pinky fingers used to be. He clenched his teeth and nodded a little, the color leaving his face from shock and nausea as he looked at what would never be again.

  “Well, my brother did this. My mom was—dead I guess, in the parking lot of the hospital. We went there without my dad. Something—something was wrong with him. I remember that now. Something was wrong, and we left him locked in the garage. I remember that there were so many people at the hospital, that she couldn’t even park. We were in the van on the grass. People were acting crazy, all yelling and throwing things because there was no more room in the hospital. She got really sick, Mom did. She got sick fast. She got really red and was sweating through her clothes. She started breathing really fast. Then, she stopped. She was breathing so hard, so fast. I don’t know how long. It seemed like Time was sick too. I couldn’t keep up with how long. There were so many people that we were scared to get out of the van. Everyone was acting so crazy, so we just sat there. Liam began looking like Mom, but he didn’t die. He went to sleep and when he came to he had turned into—whatever he turned into. When he attacked me, I opened the door and got out, but he bit my hand as I closed the door. I shut him in the van, and he couldn’t get out. He just didn’t know how to anymore. Then he went to Mom and—”

  “Your hand got infected,” she said pointing at the hand, trying to get past that part so the boy wouldn’t relive it. “I came in on the life flight to that hospital and got stuck. Everyone was too far gone. It all happened so fast. I found you inside the hospital lying behind the counter of the front desk. It’s a miracle I saw you breathing. You were severely dehydrated, had lost quite a bit of blood. I’d been holed up in the hospital for some days. That’s where I came across Ben. He’d brought his mother into the hospital for treatment. That’s when we first started paying attention to what was going on.”

  The door banged again, some of the glass falling to the floor.

  “We can talk about this later, kid. We’ve got to go right now. Once the glass is gone, it won’t matter what’s in front of the door.”

  As if to prove it, an arm came through the new hole in the door without any regard for the glass. Skin slid back like a banana peel on the arm, the sharp point of one piece of glass refusing to give way. Back and forth the arm went, and Lo gritted her teeth at the sight. A flap of skin sticking to the glass, muscle, nerve, and tendons showing. The blood did not flow as profusely as it should.

  Lo stuffed as much water and chips as she could get in her pack and placed Luck in her coat pocket. Watching the boy for a few minutes, Lo made sure he really was going to be able to handle this then she slowly and as quietly as possible began sliding the oven out of the way of the back door. She stepped through, trying not to pay attention to the dried blood on the floor and think about where Ben could be, but she stopped before she could get her hand to the door to open it. A shape moved past the bulle
t holes, momentarily blocking the light, and there was a scraping on the other side. Putting her fingers to her lips, she told Cillian to stop where he was before stepping back to him and putting her mouth to his ear.

  “I need you to back up into the doorway behind you. If something bad happens, you go in there and lock yourself in. Climb up onto the stove and into the ceiling. You can figure out an escape from there.” He opened his mouth to speak, but she shook her head. “I think there’s only one. I’m going to handle this, but it’s got to be quiet. I don’t want to shoot if I can help it, so we can still get out of here without attracting all the others.”

  Lo stepped around him, back into the kitchen and came back a moment later with a rocking pizza cutter in her hand. Gently pushing him to the side she made her way back to the bullet-holed door. Pulling her revolver from the holster and checking the loading, she stepped to the door, re-holstered the .38, and put her hand on the knob before looking back at him and nodding. He returned the gesture nervously, making his way just inside the kitchen door. Once she saw he was out of the way, she made her move. Lo snatched the door open quickly and stepped back, the poky following her in clumsily like some late-night drunkard. There was time to look past him for an instant to make sure there was only one then she drew back the pizza cutter, the two-foot blade glinting in the morning light, and slung it with an arc toward his head, but his staggering movement threw off her aim and the blade caught the poky in the shoulder, burying itself in the soft meat then the bone where it became stuck. She pulled back once, but with no more than a budge, the makeshift weapon was released. Recognizing her mistake, she stopped struggling, since second guessing yourself in the world now led straight to death.

  With a step back, she swung her leg around hard, her right foot blurring with a roundhouse kick, and caught the poky in the side of the knee. Its next step saw it go down hard, the leg collapsing under its weight, and the thing fell on its side, dislodging the pizza cutter in the process. Lo leaned down and picked it up, but the poky grabbed her ankle, a rattling groan escaping Lo’s mouth, a stifled yell, the grip of the poky tremendous even with one hand. This time the blade swung true, catching the poky just above the ear, the metal buried full width into the brain. It twitched for only a moment then its grip slackened and Lo backed up limping a bit. Cillian walked up beside her, she taking his shoulder for support.

  “Felt like my leg was in a vice,” she huffed and looked over at him, her dyed red hair fell in her face down below her chest. “That’s the first time one grabbed me. It was insanely strong. Like, unrealistically.”

  The shift in light along with the breaking of the wood brought both of their heads around. The second poky’s gaze fell upon them like ice water, and Cillian fell back from reflex. Lotus stood firm, looking into the eyes of what used to be a man, a young man at that, letterman’s jacket shining brightly up in the morning sun. One sleeve was gone at the shoulder, the arm showing healthy and muscular underneath, the other side covered equally with sleeve and blood. The eyes of the poky caught on hers, and time stopped for a moment, as was often the case as of late. The breathing of the pair seemed to match. The expression on its face seemed painful, like every second brought it misery and loathing. Perhaps that’s why it wanted to harm her, to release some of its own pain. Why would such thoughts come to her mind now? Lotus was nervous to the point of fear, but she stood firm, watching the poky that stood in the door, waiting to see if it would move first.

  Cillian stepped up, her hand instinctively coming out to stay him. Both looked at what used to be a kid, a highschool student never again, and waited. The smell of it was carried from a breeze through the door, the smell of filth, of feces, of grime. It smelled like a filthy person, some hobo in a gutter, but that was all. There was no smell of death here, no foreign odor to set it apart from anything else that walked around and sucked in the air around it, converting oxygen to carbon dioxide, consuming biological matter. The moment was a strange one, three bodies in a confined space. Lo had the image of being trapped in a closet with a rattlesnake. All you wanted to do was break through the door like a cartoon character, but the only thing you could do was wait and see what it would do first.

  “This isn’t like the movies.” Cillian whispered half to himself, but it stirred the room like tossing a pebble into still water.

  The poky’s head tilted like a dog with a Victrola, and it came forward, its feet shuffling, a sleepy old man going to the fridge for some milk. It seemed that way, but Lo knew better. It would be strong to the point of crushing bone with its grip. Lo looked around quickly, keeping Cillian behind her. It was too close. This happened too fast. How do you let something this damn slow corner you? Stupid. With clenched jaws, she pulled the .38 snub nose and leveled at the poky’s head. The noise would be deafening in this enclosed room, but worse, it would draw everything within hearing distance to this spot, but there was no time for anything else. If this thing grabbed her, she very well might not be able to get away this time.

  “Cover your ears,” she let the words out, pulling the trigger on the last syllable.

  The explosion of the bullet might as well have been inside her ear, the concussive force shaking her vision, and she immediately opened her jaws wide, flexing them, trying to alleviate the pain. A Surprisingly pleasant smell of gunpowder filled the room, but it couldn’t take her mind off the ringing. What used to be a kid lay on the floor, its legs grotesquely contorted underneath its torso. A trickle of blood snaked innocently from the hole in its forehead, an opening in back the size of a tennis ball. Brain matter and bits of skull decorated the wall like a madman’s artwork.

  “What now?” Cillian was actually breathing heavily with her. His voice came from far away, but he was standing right there.

  “Now we find somewhere else,” she said slinging her pack over her shoulders and shaking her head. “Stay close. We’ve gotta get out of here right now.” And with that, they left the four walls and stepped into the morning sun that would seem like nothing more than an attractive day as little as a fortnight ago.

  4

  “I’m not from here, so we can’t go to my home. We need a place that is safe and secure, with food preferably. Do you have any ideas, kid?”

  “I wish you’d stop calling me kid.” Cillian reached in her bag for another bottle of water.

  “Does it bother you that much?”

  “Well, it’s just that—you know we’re the only people around as far as I can tell. We haven’t seen another living soul all day, like a real person. It may just be that I’m the closest thing to an equal you have right now. I may be the closest one period.”

  She turned and looked at him for some minutes while he drank his water and looked back at her a little anxiously. After some time, she finally nodded her head. This boy—this person surely seemed a bit more aware than the average person his age, which was an awkward one, that time when one foot had been placed outside the domain of childhood, when self-discovery of the person you would be was just in front of you. She didn’t want to say smarter. That was too vague, but aware for sure.

  “That’s an excellent point, Cillian. Is there something else you’d like me to call you, or is Cillian sufficient? I’m not being sarcastic. You make an evolutionary point. That’s the old world talking when I call you kid. I’ll stop.”

  “Cillian is fine, I guess,” he responded rather sheepishly. She walked over to him and put her hand on his shoulder, looking down directly into his eyes. He was nearly her height. She placed her hand on his head to check for fever. The pain meds were keeping him up fine.

  “Cillian then,” she said. “How old are you?”

  “I’m thirteen, almost fourteen.”

  “Well, I’m twenty-six. Now that that’s out of the way, we’re equals,” she held out a hand toward the road and they continued on.

  Fall was coming in well, and the temperature was nice, but the newly fallen leaves made it difficult to listen out. Cars spotted the
roadside along with the dead. Power lines lay across the blacktop and in the grass from a fallen pole struck by a car. No men in hardhats surrounded it. No bucket trucks sat with the lights on putting the world back in order. The lines lay like dead serpents, nothing running through them anymore to give them purpose. How many years would Earth require to take them all the way back to the state they had been before made into wires? How long would they rot? Would they rot, or would the men come eventually to fix them? They would rot, she thought. Any electricity that necessitated the metal and the rubber for transfer would have to be made anew, if ever there was someone to make it. The wires and the electricity alike.

  “My mother is—was Irish,” he said as they walked, breaking her chain of thought rather blessedly. “My brother and I have Irish names.”

  “My father was Cambodian,” she responded. “He was a practicing Buddhist, and my mother was an agnostic, but she grew up protestant. Lotus was the only name they could agree on.”

  “What’s an agnostic?”

  “Someone who—well, someone who really doesn’t have enough information to believe. I think she just more so didn’t believe in organized religion.”

  “My parents were Catholic,” he said, kicking a rock as he walked.

  “I figured,” she said smiling.

  “There hasn’t been a spazzo all day,” he said, kicking the rock into the grass and looking up at her. “Any idea why?”

  “I have no idea about any of this, ki—illian,” she glanced at him and he nodded at her, squinting his eyes. “I don’t know enough about these things to say one way or the other. I’m just staying close to cars, so we can jump in one if necessary. When we were at the hospital, Ben and I, when it all went down, we saw a spazzo or two and plenty of pokies, but at the time there was plenty for them to do, people to go after. There were plenty of bodies, and I suppose other people.”

  “Why aren’t they eating the bodies left?” the boy asked, pointing to a rotting corpse face down on the grass, its feet still in the car. “They’re everywhere.”