Both of these reasons are proven wrong as I rub my finger across the toothpaste. It is dry, mummified. The head of the toothbrush is dryer than this, and the faucet only sputters and chokes when I turn the knob.
Darlene pops her head around the door frame, her blonde hair no longer bouncy and voluminous, but now clinging to her scalp and face in clumps. “Everything okay?” she asks.
I nod.
But she knows. The rest of her body, noticeably thinner, yet still gorgeous enters the view. “No, it’s not, Jack. You look like you saw a ghost.”
We’ve all seen ghosts.
Darlene stares at me expecting an answer so I have to give her one. I say the first thing that pops into my head. “No. No ghost.”
She nods as if she knows exactly what I’m talking about, and in a sense, she does. The last six months have been harder on her than the rest of us. She — unlike Norm, Abby, and me — had stakes in the old world. She had family and friends. Now they’re gone. Sometimes, I hear her sniffling in the night. Sometimes I hear her calling out for her mother or her sister in her sleep. It hurts me more than anything else to see her upset and broken. Sometimes, I don’t know what to do. I hold her and kiss her, but those gestures can only go so far.
We leave the bathroom and head for the bed. The first angry grumbles from the storm begin to make themselves heard.
I fell asleep at three in the afternoon, and I dream of Eden. Of walls and food and safety. Of seeing whoever wrote the sign on the roof we saw with a smile on their face. It’s a semblance of the old world, and it’s the reason I wake up. I have to get there for my family, for Darlene and Abby and Norm.
But for some reason, I wake up sweaty and scared.
Outside, it is raining. The storm has passed. I have slept through the worst of it. Distant rumbles of thunder can be heard, streaks of lightning can be seen, but other than that, the field of dead crops and the surrounding woods are quiet and silent. I wake feeling rested, ready to take on the whole dead world by myself.
Darlene is gone next to me, twitching softly every minute or so as I sit there looking out the window. I hear her murmur a name, but it’s impossible to tell who it belongs to. I lean over and kiss her on her sweaty cheek. I hope she is having pleasant dreams. I hope she is escaping this fucked-up world, if only just for a minute.
I get up, head downstairs to use the restroom. The plumbing doesn’t work in the house as I discovered earlier, but I’ve not stooped low enough to take a piss in a waterless toilet bowl in a house that’s not mine. Plus the storm has settled down enough for me to see the surrounding fields. No fog. No yellow eyes.
The air outside is fresh, that smell of wet soil and leaves. No rotting corpses drifting this way today. I reckon it’s around eleven at night. I’ve gotten my doctor recommended eight hours, but I also reckon I’ll sleep for eight more hours, barring a major setback.
I do my business off the back porch where I can see the tops of trees swaying in the faint moonlight breaking through the dark storm clouds. It’s calm out here. It’s fresh. You can almost forget about all the bullshit you’ve been through over the past few months. All the hate. All the death. All the darkness. For this moment, the world is how it used to be. I stand, watching the leaves, hearing them rustle for what seems like only a short time.
“You all right?” Norm says from behind me.
I hear his voice through a wave of longing. I am at the bottom of the pool of my pleasant memories, drowning, and Norm is standing on the edge, shouting for me to grab his hand.
“Huh?” I say, shaking my head.
“You’ve been out here for ten minutes, man,” he says. “Can’t sleep?”
“I slept like a rock,” I say.
“I was getting worried,” Norm says. “You were a statue.”
The sky has begun to take on a purplish, bruising color. The world is hurt. This disease has pummeled it, and no longer do we see the blackness. Now, we see its wounds.
“I was just thinking,” I say, looking at the sky beyond the trees.
“Yeah, about what?”
I don’t answer. Norm is not the same guy I remember from my childhood. He doesn’t boss me around or hit me or bully me. He’s grown up. Still, I don’t dare spill my feelings to him. It would not be manly. It would be the kind of stuff only ‘pussies’ talk about. I don’t exactly know why I feel like this. We’ve both grown in ten years, and I like who we’ve become. Maybe I’m afraid if I say what’s on my mind, I’ll break that fragile illusion.
“Jacky,” he says, waving his hand in front of my face. Without much light, I barely see it, just the gleam of the moon in his eyes.
“I…was just thinking about what our next move is,” I say.
A lie.
“Easy,” Norm says. He walks up next to me, places his hands on the railing of the back porch. “We get to Eden.”
“It’s not that easy anymore,” I say. “It’s so bad out there, and it gets worse every passing minute. There’s times when I don’t think we’re going to make it to the next town.”
He claps me on the back. “But we do, little brother! Don’t we? Besides, we only need to make it to one more town and then we’re home.”
He says home like we’ve been on an extended vacation, not like we are showing up to some fabled safe haven with our hands out expecting food, water, and shelter. We don’t even know where Eden is for sure. It’s like the lost city of Atlantis in this zombie-ravaged world. We just know it’s past Sharon or so we hope.
“Together, Jack, we can do whatever the fuck we want. Screw these deadheads man. Screw them right up their rotten assholes.”
I smile, let out a small chuckle. Norm has always had a way with words. I’m glad the military didn’t beat that out of him.
He smiles back.
“Think the girls are going to be okay?” I ask.
Norm nods. “Yeah, they’ll come around. Abby already has. Darlene will, too. It might take some close call or tragedy — God forbid — to snap her out of the world we used to live in, but she’ll come around.”
“I hope so,” I say, knowing my hope is misplaced. If a zombie apocalypse can’t wake her up, then I don’t know what can. There’s mourning, that’s okay. Things happen and you get upset about them, but you keep moving on, and so far, Darlene has showed me she’s not moving at all, not even trying to move on.
“Don’t worry, little bro,” he says, then turns to look to the dark forest.
I can’t help but think of the creatures lurking around out there, watching us with golden eyes. It brings goosebumps up all over my flesh. Zombies are one thing in the Florida daylight, but at night, they are a different beast. At night, all your courage disappears, your past zombie slaying experience with it.
I turn away from the forest, leaning my back up against the railing.
There’s a drawn out silence. A calm, perhaps. I turn to Norm, already feeling the words bubbling from my lips, already mentally preparing myself for a right-handed slug in the chin or a sucker punch to the gut.
“Why did you leave?” I ask.
He arches an eyebrow. “What are you talking about? I never left. God knows I wanted to after the shit we saw in Woodhaven and Indianapolis.”
I shake my head. “That’s not what I’m talking about,” I say. Now, I can’t help myself. The words just come pouring out. Over a decade of questions sit inside of my head, piling on top of each other. I’ve been quiet for the six months we’ve been together, but now the damn bursts. “I’m talking about me and Mother. Why did you leave us? Why did you leave me?”
Norm snorts, rolls his eyes. “Oh please, Jack, you didn’t like me. I was a shit brother.”
“No, I didn’t like you. I loved you. You’re family. I’d love you no matter what. But you didn’t have to leave. You didn’t even say goodbye! You just left. Do you remember? Do you remember, Norm?”
He recoils, the overconfidence usually lighting his eyes up dimming.
“Do you realize what you did to Mother, to our little family unit? Dad left us, you left us, then I left Mother.”
“I had to, Jacky. You don’t understand.”
I don’t know whether to be sad or angry or plain-fucking-ecstatic that I’m finally broaching this subject. So I must look like a madman. My fists clenched, ready for a fight, a misplaced smile on my face, tears threatening to spill down my cheeks.
“Make me understand,” I say. “Make me!” My voice is loud. If there are any zombies in the woods looking for their next meal, I pretty much give them an open invitation.
“I can’t,” he says.
“Was it Mom? Was it me? Was it that fucking town?” I say, my voice shaking. It’s now I realize I’m inches away from Norm’s face. He is taller than me, not by much, but it’s as if I’m towering over him, looking down at a scared, sheltered, seventeen-year-old version of himself.
“Jack, I can’t…it’s too — ”
“What? Embarrassing? Painful? Stressful? Open your eyes, Norm, this whole world is all of those things and more.”
Norm takes a deep breath and looks away from me to the wet wood of the back deck. I’m beginning to feel like a grade-A asshole. Like a bully. Freddy and Pat Huber come to mind. Norm over a decade ago. I’m not that. I strive to not be that.
My arm reaches out to Norm, but he turns his back on me. “Fine,” he says. “You really want to know? You want to know my deepest, darkest secret? The reason I had to get away from Mom and you—from Woodhaven?”
“Norm, I — ” I start to say, but he cuts me off.
“You remember Tim Lancaster?” he asks me. The overconfidence usually in his eyes is not back, but is replaced with a fire instead. The same fire that fills his eyes before a kill.
Tim Lancaster, I think. That’s a blast from the past if I’ve ever heard one, but it’s a name that brings up a wave of emotions. He was Norm’s best friend for as long as I remember. They were inseparable in middle school. Late-night Nintendo, guzzling Mountain Dew and shoveling pizza, sleeping over all weekend at each other’s houses type of buddies. Then when they got to high school and people started to sort off into different social factions — the nerds, the geeks, the jocks, the drama queens — like I experienced first-hand a year after Norm left us, Tim and my older brother remained as inseparable as they always had been. I remember Tim coming over the day after Norm had gone, long before the first letter from basic training in Fort Benning arrived. He asked why Norm wasn’t answering his calls, why he stood him up for basketball at Red’s Park. I said I thought you knew. Knew what? That Norm left. I handed him the scrap of paper he left on the kitchen table, the paper that mentioned nothing of Tim Lancaster. And Tim nodded as if he understood all of this, then he started crying. I was thirteen. I wouldn’t cry, though I wanted to. I was stuck in that weird limbo between childhood and manhood. Too afraid to show my emotions. That was the last time I saw Tim Lancaster. He moved that summer to stay with his grandparents in Lansing, Michigan. Last I heard, he had gone on to an art school in New York. I hope that worked out for him. I hope he had a decent life before all of this happened.
“Yes, I remember,” I say. My voice is weak. A million scenarios are playing out in my head. Maybe Norm and Tim killed someone. I know in high school they’d picked up another hobby — drinking — and Tim had a pretty nifty, hand-me-down, shit-brown Mercury they cruised around in. Maybe they were drunk driving, struck a homeless man, buried him, and Norm’s guilt and fear caused him to run. Maybe —
“I was in love with him,” Norm says.
This is a very confusing slap to the face. Love?
“Like friends?” I say.
Norm shakes his head. He looks ashamed, now. There’s a chair a few steps behind him, rain pooled in the cushion. He falls onto it, crumpling his normally rigid, soldier-like stature into a ball, and sending small sprays of water in every direction. “No, I was in love with him. Love, Jack. Love like you and Darlene’s love.”
“Norm…you’re gay?” I feel my brain practically explode. My macho older brother…gay. Who would’ve thought?
“Yeah. Whoop-dee-freaking-doo.”
“I-I’m not judging. I’m just — ”
“Surprised? Yeah, I bet. There, are you happy?”
I hate to shake my head, but I do. “What does that have to do with you leaving?”
Norm sits up, his elbows on his thighs, face in his hands. He pinches the bridge of his nose as if whatever he’s about to tell me is so obvious that I must have developed a mental handicap after he left.
“You know Mom — Mother, ” he corrects himself. “She would shove the closest sharp object in her ears if you said the word ‘Penis’ around her. Don’t you remember that one Thanksgiving at Grandma and Grandpa Dean’s house when we were all going around saying what we were thankful for, and I got you to say you were thankful for big tits?”
“Yeah, you told me they called grandparents big tits in France and everyone would be impressed with me knowing a second language. Mother just about passed out, then she whooped my ass out in the garage, hitting me and clicking the automatic door opener over and over again to drown out the sounds of my screams. I was only six, dude!”
Norm is beside himself laughing. If the sun was out, I think I’d see tears streaming from his face. I can’t help but smile with him.
“Exactly,” he says. “She was uppity. I wanted to tell her for the longest time how I felt about men, but I had no one to talk to. No one would understand. And then one Saturday when she was working a double at Gerry’s Diner — or so I thought — she caught me and Tim with our pants around our ankles.”
I try not to picture this.
“She didn’t react how I’d expected,” he continues. “Hell, if I caught my son doing that with another fella, I’d probably cut his balls off.” He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands as if trying to rub the image of our mother’s silent fury from his retinas.
I inch forward. “Well,” I say, “what did she do?”
“She didn’t do anything. Her jaw didn’t drop to the floor, her eyes didn’t catch fire and melt from their sockets, she didn’t scream. She kind of just stood there shaking her head, giving us that look — you know the look I’m talking about — while me and Tim tried to cover ourselves up.
Then for the next couple weeks, months, she wouldn’t talk to me. She wouldn’t hear my apologies. I was lost, Jack. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do, I just knew I had to get the fuck out of there and away from her.”
I feel a spark of anger, remembering how my mother was when Norm left. But I can’t blame Norm. There were times when I wanted to leave, too. Ultimately, I did.
Norm stands up now. He stands like his normal self. Rigid. Poised. “I know,” he says. “I know I fucked up. I was young and stupid. Scared. Impressionable. One of those Army recruiters stopped me at the mall not long after Mother caught us. I’d just graduated high school — barely, I mean by the skin of my teeth, Jack — and I knew I wasn’t going to college. I wasn’t like you, man. I don’t have a way with words. I ain’t a math geek. The world map to me is the USA, Mexicans, Blacks, sissy Europeans, and Terrorists. I can’t tell you where Iraq is or where the Queen of England sits on her throne. I’m dumb, and the Army had a lot of great benefits for a dummy like me. I met some great people, went to some great places, but I also did some bad shit. Shit I’m never going to live down. If I could go back in time, I would, Jacky, believe me.”
I don’t know whether to feel angry or sorry for my older brother. So I don’t speak anymore. It doesn’t bother me that Norm is gay; it just bothers me that he left us out to dry. I look him square in the eyes, and I can tell he’s expecting me to punch him in the jaw. Maybe he’d accept that punch graciously, I don’t know, but I have no urge to do it.
Instead, I hug him, and he hugs me back.
“You gonna be okay to stand watch?” I ask.
“Yeah,” he says. “Abby will take over prett
y soon.”
“Good,” I say.
Norm and I split up. He must linger on the back deck for awhile because I don’t hear him come back inside. I go upstairs.
Darlene turns her head to me, says in a sleepy voice: “Everything okay? I heard shouting.”
“Yeah, darling, it’s okay, go back to sleep.”
She does.
I stare up at the ceiling, thinking of Tim Lancaster, of my mother, and of my brother. Sleep comes easier once Darlene’s steady breathing fills the quiet. She no longer murmurs. I fall asleep feeling better than I ever have because I know Norm and I have cleared the air. There are no more secrets. It’s a good feeling.
Seven
When I wake up, Norm isn’t on the back deck anymore. It is early morning, sunlight streams in through the blinds. Dust floats around the entire room, like small snowflakes in the middle of a hot, Florida summer.
Darlene is gone. I hear footsteps downstairs, laughter. Dishes clank off on another. The girls are fixing a breakfast, out of what, I have no idea. If I had to guess, I’d say it was stale Doritos and flat Coca-Cola. Gone are the days of fresh bacon and eggs and orange juice. None of these sounds are what caused me to wake up. What did it was the sound coming above me.
Clunky footsteps and out of tune whistling.
My heart drops to my stomach for a second, thinking the real owner of this farmhouse has come back, then I hear Norm’s gruff voice. “Fuck me,” he says.
I cross over to the window, open it. It squeals slightly but other than that opens just fine. Norm is sitting near the red chimney, his pants covered in powdery rust, legs almost hanging off the roof.
The Dead Collection Box Set #1: Jack Zombie Books 1-4 Page 22