by Jones, K. J.
“What if he was a Christian?” asked Pez. “Not supposed to burn Christians.”
“I don’t know what he was,” said Chris. “But he was a warrior. I like this idea. Let’s find some wood.”
“We’re gonna make a funeral pyre in the nice old couple’s yard?” Pez asked, disbelief obvious.
“We fucked up their house,” Chris said. “Might as well fuck up their yard.”
“Is he always like that?” Pez asked Brandon.
“Yeah, pretty much.”
“I heard those beyond the wire Iraq war vets were crazy. A different breed.”
“Yeah, they pretty much all are of this group. Very brave, all of them.”
“Hmm. Okay. If this pilot disapproves, I hope he haunts them and not me.”
* * *
In between building a plywood wall to replace the window, they built a funeral pyre, platform and all. While they did those tasks, Phebe led a looting party to the nearest houses. Her wrought iron fireplace poker came in handy to bust door locks and pry open boards. They returned with black garbage bags filled with loot. On the front lawn, they distributed warm clothes, woolen toboggan hats, gloves, and boots for the boys.
Marge no longer was so nice and welcoming of them, especially after seeing them put Cogan’s body on the platform and realizing what they were about to do.
She yelled at them, “He needs a Christian funeral.”
Chris responded, “Ground frozen.” To him, that was enough said.
Frank probably did not want to be left with a dead body in the shed to bury when spring finally arrived in western Pennsylvania, so he didn’t protest what they were doing.
He said to them, however, “When you are finished with burning him, would be best if you moved on your way.”
They knew it was coming.
“We’re never gonna fit in in Boston,” Brandon said. “We scare people.”
“The norms, yeah,” said Pez.
Lighter fluid on a cloth wrapped around a stick created a torch. Chris did the honors, setting the branches and tinder beneath the platform on fire with the torch. They had used up all of Frank’s lighter fluid. The branches and tinder caught fast. A roaring fire lapped up around Cogan’s sheet-wrapped body.
Peter put his arm around Phebe and she leaned into him as they watched the flames engulf the sheet. Tyler watched with fascination, standing in front of them. He smiled back at them.
“That’s what I want.”
“Yeah,” said Phebe. “Let’s not talk about your funeral, mister.”
When the flames began burning hair and flesh, they covered their noses.
“Oh, they left this part out of the movies,” said Pez, sounding nasal from pinching his nose closed.
* * *
They decided to break into a house that had a fireplace and stone outside walls and stay the night. Too late in the day to set out.
“Nobody wreck this place,” said Pez. “It’s a historic house.”
“We’re good with historic houses,” said Tyler. “We lived in one in Charleston. Historic Charleston. It was built before … how old was it?”
“Eighteenth-century,” said Emily.
She found spare bedding and made pallets for the boys in front of the fire.
“This house,” said Pez, “is older than that.”
“Really?” Tyler seemed amazed as if older than the eighteenth-century was when the dinosaurs roamed. How can people have houses when T-rex roamed around? Craziness to the boy.
“This house is the seventeenth-century, I bet,” continued Pez.
“Whoa.”
Phebe injected, “Too bad we can’t get him to Europe. Things are a lot older there.”
“Wow,” Tyler responded. “Older than the seventeenth-century? How old is that?”
“Well, we’re the twenty-first century.”
“But we’re in the two thousands.”
“It’s calculated on the alleged birth of Jesus Christ.”
Phebe heard Matt snort behind her and decided to ignore him.
“That would be century one,” she continued.
“Really?” Jayce’s voice. “The alleged?”
She rolled her eyes. Now, she had two of them.
Chris chuckled. “Uh-oh. Somebody gonna get in trouble with this talk. Thinking it’s y’all guys. She badder than y’all.”
Pez said, “I’d appreciate it if you didn’t say alleged, Phebe.”
Correction, three of them.
Peter joined in on Chris’s amusement. “Bet you she’ll be burned at the stake before dawn.”
“Nuh,” said Chris. “Nobody wanna smell that burning body shit so soon again.”
“See, babe? You’re saved.”
Pez said, “Christians don’t kill people.”
Peter choked on the statement. “Ah, not good on history, are ya, son?”
“What?”
Chris smiled. “You with the wrong crew to not know history good. These people got encyclopedias shoved up their asses.”
“Very poetic,” Phebe said. “Thank you.”
He shrugged and beamed a smile at her. “I do what I can.”
“No,” said Peter. “We got YouTube documentaries shoved up our asses.”
“I knew that shit was nothing but trouble.”
“Chris believes everything he doesn’t like is communist.”
“It all is.”
Pez chuckled. “You’re a full-blown redneck, Higgins.”
“Oh yeah, he is. I think there’s training seminars they go to.”
“Fuck all y’all.”
“Perhaps subliminal messages in country music.”
“Hey, now. Leave country music alone.”
Peter continued, ignoring Chris, “Since I don’t see how pickup trucks could do this to their minds.”
“Aw, hell no. You going after pickups too, Yankee?”
Pez leaned closer to Emily. “They do this a lot?”
“Oh, just every day, at least once a day, yeah.”
“Matt doesn’t get involved?”
“No. Except for stereotypes about cowboys and Eagle Scouts. Those two are really into stereotyping, even on themselves. But Matt doesn’t often insult back like them, so I guess he’s not as fun.”
“Pell?”
“They get him on political correctness, all the time. Call him snowflake and sensitive and stuff.”
“Is he?”
“Um, yeah, I guess. I mean, it’s our generation.”
“I’m a Millennial,” said Pez.
“Well, maybe they’ll insult you, too. God knows, they do it to me.”
“Huh.” His brown eyes showed thinking. “Are you politically correct?”
“Um. I do not like offending people. Whereas those two seem to have made offending people their hobby.”
“They could be much worse if they wanted to be.”
“I’m grateful they’re not.” Her hazel brown eyes shot over to Kevin, who leaned against the doorframe of the front sitting room. “There’s enough of that here.”
Pez dropped his volume lower and stepped closer to her. “What’s with youse guys and that guy?”
Emily whispered in his ear, “He’s a white supremacist of a Charleston tribe that was our enemy tribe. His people tried to kill our people and kidnap Phebe and me and another girl. Phebe had to jump from a moving car to escape them and a friend of ours of an allied tribe was injured and the supremacists were gonna kill her because she’s African American.”
“Oh.” Pez’s eyes grew large. “I see. That’s some shit.” He scanned around the room.
Jayce came up behind Kevin. His voice cold, “Excuse me. I’d like to enter.”
Kevin stepped aside, giving the teenager a large space, his gaze looked elsewhere. Phebe glared at him, watching as if waiting for him to look at Jayce the wrong way so she could attack.
“Wow.” The scout sniper observed it all. “One more thing to deal with.”
Pez stepped closer to Emily again. He was a short guy, standing at five foot eight, only two inches taller than her.
“Phebe?” he asked. “She really that dangerous?”
“The Army thought so.”
“The Army thinks a lot of things from what I saw. But, I mean, really?”
Emily whispered, “If you’re asking would she kill Alden, I have no doubt she would. I would, too, but she’s better at it than me.”
“Youse some real tough girls.” His mouth didn’t know whether to grimace or smile and instead seemed to have a spasm from indecision.
“Everybody’s tough in the Zone, you know that.”
“It was just us and some kids. Didn’t see how adult females would react. Saw some ghetto girls, but they were already kind of tough. I mean, sort of. The South doesn’t have the same kind of ghettos as the North.”
“No, you’re right on that. I know good neighborhoods in the North that are equal to Southern ghettos.”
Pez chuckled.
6.
Plumbers candles were pilfered from under the kitchen sink at the historic stone farmhouse they infiltrated for the night. A flame illuminated the bathroom for Peter, casting dancing shadows along the walls and shower curtain. The area still had running water, which was nice. Toilets that flushed were always a nice luxury, especially since it meant not going outside, which had vastly more complications beyond the cold. An outhouse poo with rabid bears running around could make constipation.
Finishing up, he washed his hands, enjoying the sensation of soap suds on wretchedly dirty hands. Permanent dirt lived under his nails. He realized his nails had grown too long. Not freaky ‘man with long nails’ long, but enough to need a trim down. He opened the medicine cabinet on the search for nail clippers.
Shaving cream. Blue female deodorant. Hair gel. Ear wax remover. Saline nasal spray. His gaze hit a prescription bottle on a medicine cabinet shelf. He told himself to leave it alone but found his hand moving towards it. A turn of the bottle to see the label. He lifted the candle to read it and spotted the words Percocet. He inhaled sharply.
The pill contents of the bottle would take away the pain.
He shook it. Three pills. The milligrams were high, but not extended-release. About four hours of relief each. Twelve hours total for three pills and the pain would be back, possibly even reigniting withdrawal.
He closed the medicine cabinet and left the bathroom, trying not to allow his candle to do anything crazy. It sat in a mug that advertised a corporation’s logo.
The bedrooms on the second floor of the historically listed stone farmhouse were icebox cold. They dragged mattresses to the front room downstairs and made a floor of sleeping pallets. It suited everyone fine to sleep in the same room, except for Kevin, who feared he’d wake up dead. He opted for guard patrol.
“Don’t rile any zom-bears, dude,” said Chris.
“I’ll leave ‘em alone if they come.”
If anything infected came, there would be little they could do, since the window plywood boarding was on the outside and the nails easily popped out with hyper strong, no pain feeling, lunatic effort. The boarding hadn’t much strength to it, being sheets of pressed wood. It appeared the owners did this to protect windows from potential long-term abandonment, and not for zom proofing, first-line of defense. If no one was inside, why would the infected be interested in getting in? Who knows what they did when not trying to bite or kill people?
Since no raccoons had gotten into the house either, this bespoke the place hadn’t been abandoned long. The opportunistic omnivores with their dexterous hands could get in anywhere. The group discovered food in the kitchen pantry, and a bag of dry dog food in the lower cabinet.
“I wonder what they did with the dog?” asked Jayce.
They scavenged for food that didn’t require cooking. Jayce ate from a cereal box, shoving large handfuls into his mouth, and flakes dropped to the floor, engulfed by the shadowy dark.
“Can dogs be evacuated?” he asked.
“Seriously doubt it,” said Emily. “But the Comfort did take Dock Cat, so who knows.”
“Or else it’s buried out back.”
“Horrible thought.”
“Huh?”
“That they’d kill their dog.”
A flash memory of little Mango leaping out of her father’s luxury Hummer and attacking the zom coming at her back that horrible night at the marina. She shuddered and shook off the memory.
“Hey.” Tyler stomped in. “You’re eating.”
“There’s more cereal in the pantry.” Jayce pointed.
“I’m starving.”
Tyler newly looted boots were a few sizes too big for him. The way he grew, he’d outgrow them by morning.
“Okay,” said Emily. “Children being fed. What would Phebe and I eat?”
“There’s always the dog food,” said Jayce.
“Oh, no. Been there. That shit tastes awful. I’m not that starving.”
“How do you know the babies are still alive?”
“What?”
“I’m just asking,” said Jayce. “After the radiation exposure. That could mutate them, right? It happened to those exposed to Chernobyl. Do you know what that is?”
“Um, yeah.” Emily sarcastically chuckled. “I do know what Chernobyl is.”
“They evacuated the area after it happened.”
“Yes and no,” she responded. “My understanding is they waited too long. A lot of exposure. Long-term effects are also seen in the animals and fish. I once heard about fish with too many jaws. Birds are affected quite badly.”
“The pine trees turn red,” Jayce shared. “They turn red and die. Chernobyl has, like, a forest of red pines.”
“I don’t know,” said Emily. “We were definitely not exposed to that level.”
“What happened to the people after Hiroshima?”
“Well, that was atomic, different from hydrogen.”
“I know that. But y’all are the YouTube documentary fanatical watchers.”
“Whoa, that’s them, not me. The ole P and P couple.” Emily felt proud of herself for her cleverness on the new nickname for Peter and Phebe.
“I was monitored by my family,” Jayce continued. “In case I saw something inappropriate. Naïve bullshit. Life is inappropriate.”
Jayce was banned from YouTube by his helicopter mom. Now he lived in something documentaries would be made about.
“I do know something about the topic, though,” said Emily. “From my classes. But the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki were continually exposed thereafter. It was a sketchy situation. An experiment to see what would happen to them. Yup, an experiment done by the US government to see what the atomic bombs would do to living people. Oh, wait. I guess I did get that from a YouTube doc.”
“All that overprotectiveness and preparation to be successful,” Jayce ranted. “What good was any of it? Couldn’t go out with my buddies when I wanted to. I had to practically write up a permission slip with my mom.” He punched a cabinet door.
Emily recognized he may be entering the angry stage of mourning, albeit, starting to sound like he’d direct it at his family. She pushed on anyway, despite he was punching inanimate objects.
“Who the fuck needs Latin?” Jayce demanded of her.
“Um. Well, I know it’s useful in science.”
“Now?”
Tyler laughed. “A gun is all that’s useful now. Oorah!” He shoved cereal into his mouth and snooped among the homeowner’s possessions, opening drawers.
Emily’s brow rumbled with a grimace. Did the delinquent think he was a Marine now?
“How were you raised?” Jayce asked her.
“Um, what do you mean? I went shooting with my dad. But other than that ….” She trailed off, not knowing how to answer and not eager to go down memory lane.
“Was your dad overprotective of you?”
“My dad was a little traumatized.”
“By what?”
“Nine-eleven.”
Jayce frowned.
“You weren’t even born yet,” she said.
“Weren’t you little?”
“Well, yeah, I was very little. But, um, he was in a neighboring building from it. He saw the whole thing and it freaked him out. He was never the same again. Or so I was told.”
“Wow.” Jayce’s eyes showed he was thinking. “Imagine how traumatized we are.”
“Actually, I think a one-off trauma may be more traumatizing than a constant like we’re in. We’re Vikings now.”
“What?”
Emily shrugged. “Something Pheebs and I talked about. Did Vikings have PTSD? We decided they did not.”
“Why not?”
“Because it was their lifestyle and supported by their culture and community. Violence is a lifestyle. It’s only a problem when warriors have to transition into an unsupportive society that condemns violence. Like the Roman Legions had trouble when returning to Rome.”
“That sounds documentary.”
“Well, yeah, I guess.”
“But how can we go to Boston, the way we are? If we’re now Vikings? It’s normal there, right?”
“That’s a good question, Jayce. A lot of people are asking that question.”
“We’re not normal.”
“Well, the upside is, Sully’s father is an expensive criminal defense attorney.” Emily chuckled.
“For when we kill normals in Boston? Or is it for when they catch up to you and Phebe?”
“Hmm. Hopefully, they still have civil rights in Boston.”
“My family would probably still be alive if we had civil rights in Fort Jackson.”
“Hmm.” She felt at a loss for words. “I’m sorry Jayce. I lost my parents, as you know.”
He nodded.
“If you ever need to talk or a shoulder, ya know, I am here.”
He nodded, staring off.
“I lost my mother,” Tyler randomly voiced.
“Yeah,” responded Jayce. “That was probably a good thing for you.”
“Hey now. That ain’t nice, Jay.”
“Your mother was a bad influence. She did not take care of you properly.”
Emily squirmed at how mercilessly blunt Jayce was being. He wasn’t wrong, but still, some sugar coating goes a long way.