“Hey,” he suddenly yelled, making everyone flinch. “Why are we whispering?”
They all turned to stare at him. “Come on,” he said, “what is this, a library? It’s too fucking creepy walking around this empty place as it is, and all your hushed little voices are just adding to it.”
“You’re right,” said the Professor in an interested tone. “There is something kind of quiet and spooky about this place.” They had all been feeling it. Aside from the absence of other people, the store had a concertedly deserted air that was getting on everyone’s nerves, but that none of them had fingered until now.
“Music,” said Leanne. Now all eyes swiveled to her. She looked nervous at the attention and cast her eyes to the ground.
“You know,” she explained. “There’s no music. Every store you go into, there’s always music.”
“She’s right,” said the Mule. “I don’t know if I’ve ever been in a store that didn’t have some sort of background music playing.” He looked up at the ceiling, locating the round speakers that would have pumped music into the room before the Fall. “I wonder what kind of music they played here?”
“Country music,” said Bait with a smile. “I’ll bet you a dollar it was country.”
“Country music,” snorted the Professor. “Probably so. A never-ending anthem to a hick culture that hasn’t actually existed for years.”
“Come again?” asked the Mule.
“You know. All that ‘I just wanna be ridin’ in my pickup truck with my dog and sittin’ on the grass at the local fishing hole’ crap. It’s all about a lifestyle that people like to dream about but that nobody lives. All those country music fans drive their pickups home to eat dinner with the family and watch Monday Night Football, while the kids play Call of Duty on the X-box upstairs, just like everyone else.”
“What?!” cried Bait in mock outrage, “How could you not like country music? What are you, then, Professor?” he asked, squinting his eyes and taking a hard look at the him. “Jazz? No, wait. Folk music? Acoustic guitars, tambourines, and that Peter, Paul, and Mary hippie-crap?”
The Professor pulled himself to his full height, putting on an exaggerated scowl. “I’ll have you know that Peter, Paul and Mary were artists who…”
“Ha!” crowed Bait, bouncing on his heels. “I knew it!”
Mule spoke up. “Talk about a culture that doesn’t exist anymore.”
She knew what they were doing. It was banter, bonding, forming the ties of a group. She wanted no part of it, and turned away to continue her search for a jacket in her size. The good-natured conversation continued to flow around her as she immersed herself in her search for the perfect apparel.
She ignored the others so successfully that she didn’t hear Leanne coming up beside her until the woman spoke at her shoulder.
“Hey,” Leanne said, making her start. “I can fix that for you.”
She looked at the woman, then back to the jackets she was browsing, not seeing her meaning.
“No,” said Leanne, “your arm.” Now the woman held up the little satchel that had been slung over her shoulder and across her chest all morning. It had a patch on the front showing the crossed snakes curled around a staff—the symbol of all things medical. “It’s still bleeding. I can fix it for you.”
She looked at Leanne for a moment. Then she turned away, walking to a rack displaying bandanas of various colors and snatched one at random. Walking back to Leanne, she unfolded it, rolled it, and tied it around her upper arm across the deep wound the knife had left, using her teeth to help pull the knot tight. It hurt, but she was not about to share this fact with the others.
“Fixed,” was all she said, turning back to the rack of jackets.
Leanne said nothing more. In time, she felt the woman move away.
When they were done, everyone had found something useful. The Professor, the Mule, and Leanne had all found new boots for themselves, all in black leather, with rugged tread. The Mule’s were higher boots, with the addition of armored shins and shiny chrome steel toes. She had kept her own hiking boots, already sufficient for what she was doing, and Bait had kept his running shoes, claiming that the boots would just slow him down.
Bait was also the only one that didn’t pick a new jacket for himself, again on the grounds that the heavy leather would slow him down. He did, however, discard the hoodie he had been wearing, happily trading it for a new one with a flaming skull drawn brightly across the chest.
The Professor and Leanne each picked out jackets in a basic brown, his looking more cowboy-ish and hers in a more fashionable cut. Mule picked out a great, hulking thing, with actual armor plates built into the back, shoulders, chest and elbows, and built-in padding all over the rest of it. She thought it looked vaguely ridiculous on him, with the padding on the front molded into patterns to suggest abdominal and pectoral muscles, sort of like Batman. But it was his choice. She picked out a more modest black jacket, but appreciated the fact that it was advertised as being waterproof as well as having something called “CE-approved level 3 armor” on the back, shoulders, and elbows, with padding along the front as well.
Many of them scavenged an assortment of other items as well. Armored gloves for the Mule, to match his jacket, sunglasses for several of them, and a selection of bandanas went into Leanne’s medical pack. The dog was the only one that didn’t pick out something new for itself. Then again, it was already very well-dressed for a dog.
After some time, they were ready to proceed again. She signaled her intent to leave by picking up her backpack, stepping to the door, and cautiously looking outside. The rest picked up on her cue, and with varying degrees of complaint and muttering shouldered their own burdens.
Letting the dog out first, she watched it. It looked around, sniffing the air and cocking its ears in various directions, but seemed to find nothing to worry about. After a moment, she stepped out herself, followed by the others. On the highway, she headed East again, towards the mountain. Why? She did not know. But it was someplace to go. Perhaps someplace better than here.
A person has to have a destination.
She walked, and the rest followed. The dog was the only one that would sometimes range ahead, trotting a little ways down the road to investigate what was coming, and once or twice disappearing into the trees or fields beside the road, but always coming back in a matter minutes. At one point, in a place that looked no different from the rest of the highway, they stopped again for a brief rest and a bite of lunch, sharing out what they carried with them, confident they would find more in the next town.
Sometimes the group walked in silence. Sometimes they chatted, mostly about inconsequential things.
At one point, she tuned in to listen to Bait as he spoke to Leanne. She wondered about the woman, who seemed to drift along beside the group, as she led it herself. Both of them were near the group but perhaps not truly a part of it. For her, it was as she preferred. She wondered if Leanne felt the same way.
“You don’t talk much, do you?” asked Bait.
Leanne gave a half-smile, looking nervously unapologetic. “I’m sorry, I guess I just don’t have much to say.”
Bait smiled. “Neither do I, but I still talk anyway.”
This time Leanne’s smile was perhaps more genuine, though it didn’t seem to go all the way to her eyes. “I’ve noticed that.”
“So did you know the Professor before?”
“No,” she said. “We just happened to hide in that same barn. I’ve done a lot of hiding since, you know…” she trailed off.
“I bet,” replied Bait. “We all have. So what did you do before the Fall?”
“I was a nurse, working at the Kaiser hospital[9].”
“I know that one. Never went there myself, though. So where were you when it happened?”
At this, Leanne began to sound more timid. “You mean the Fall, when everything went wrong?”
“Yeah, what were you doing? What’s your day-of-disa
ster story?” Bait said this in a light-hearted way, but the conversation of the others had waned. They were each curious to hear another person’s story of the day everything fell apart.
“I’m sorry,” Leanne said, “I’d… I’d rather not talk about that.”
Bait looked around the group in silent appeal. Then he looked to her at the head of the group. “Coyote,” he said. “You think she should tell us her story, right?”
She wasn’t sure, yet, what she thought of the name the group had given her. But then again, what did it matter? She doubted she would be around them for long, so she didn’t protest it. But still Bait stared at her, as if waiting for a decision. Why must she be the one to decide? And come to think of it, why would she wish to hear this woman’s story?
“The woman does not wish to speak of it,” she finally answered.
Bait’s disappointment showed on his face, but he didn’t argue.
“Uh, yeah, OK,” said Bait. “Just asking.”
Leanne gave her a grateful look, then looked to the ground again, trudging forward. It seemed the conversation was over.
---
That day was a long one. They walked, always east, always on guard. She was fairly fit before the Fall, as much as any athletic teenager, and had grown fitter as she traveled, but even her feet and legs were sore and tired at the end of the day. By the time they reached the town of Sandy[10], they were all ready to stop. By then the last of them, the overburdened Mule and the out-of-shape Professor, were lagging a good fifty yards behind the rest of the group.
The highway was turning into what looked like downtown for this small city. From what she could see, the town was a mixture of small storefronts designed to have a cutesy-western feel, and plainer, more modern businesses, with their faux-brick façades and large glass windows for shoppers to gaze into. It was getting late, and she did not want to pass into what looked like it could be the most populated part of town right now. In her experience, the more populated a place had been with people, the more populated it was now with the things that hunted people.
She turned left off the main road, intending to find an abandoned business or home to hole up in for the night. After walking a block, she noticed a high school down the street. Coming up to it, a sign proclaimed this to be the home of the Sandy Pioneers, with the ultimate touch of high school pride: a large row of bushes cut into the shape of a giant S.
A high school should have plenty of places they could bed down, and she liked that the plain, blocky classroom layout of a school wouldn’t hold all the nooks, crannies, basements and attics of the average home. The more nooks and crannies, the more things they might find in those nooks and crannies. Also, the greater a chance that they would miss searching one and whatever had been in that cranny would come out and find them as they slept. The thought made her shudder.
She approached the front doors of the school, waiting for the others to catch up. Nobody commented or asked where they were going. They were all tired enough to follow her anywhere.
Pulling on the main doors, she found the first few to be locked. Trying each one, she did find that the last one on the right was still unlocked. It was odd. In her own school, the main doors had all been kept locked during the day, except for the last one on the right. She wondered if it was a universal school thing. Maybe a bureaucrat somewhere had decided that locking all but one door was somehow safer. She had always wondered why schools had banks of four or five doors, if only one was to be used.
Of course, now it didn’t matter. There was so much that didn’t matter anymore.
She opened the door, letting the dog in first, then following it. The others trailed in behind them. She stopped, looking about. The dog cocked his ears and sniffed, giving a low rumble, but then quieted. To her, all seemed still and deserted. There was a faint smell of rot or mold in the air. Probably a hundred sack lunches left to spoil inside the lockers that lined the walls.
The others started to remove their heavy packs, and Bait was even now slumping down one wall to sit on the floor with a contented sigh.
“No,” she said. “Keep your things. First the school must be checked, to see if it is safe.” There were some surprised looks, and a few glances around the hallway, as if to check if some unnoticed thing was sneaking up on them, but again nobody complained. Their complacency was disturbing.
Looking up and down the hallway and seeing nothing to recommend a direction, she chose to go left. She would scout the building before they picked a classroom to settle down in for the evening. She and the dog walked down the hall, glancing into classrooms, finding nothing of note. There were some overturned desks, and a fair number of textbooks and notebooks scattered about (textbooks weren’t something the students had felt they needed to take with them when the world ended), but again no bodies and no sign of survivors.
After passing several classrooms with the dog trotting alertly ahead of her, she came to a large set of double steel doors without a window. By her own experience in schools, and by the sign beside the door, she guessed that this was the gym.
Relaxing in what was turning out, as she had suspected, to be a completely deserted building, she pulled open the doors to the gym and walked in.
Her first impression: the gym was not empty. It was a moment before her eyes and her brain could identify the scene before her. It was a moment before she took her first breath and the smell hit her. It smelled like death. Something or somebody was rotting in this gym. Many somethings. Then her mind began to make sense of the confusion in front of her. They were piles of bodies. Hundreds of them.
There was no blood and no sign of trauma on the corpses. Just an enormous collection of bodies, filling the gym, stacked eight or ten high. Flies rose from the bodies in clouds as the newcomers disturbed the air.
The others followed her into the gym, all making shocked, gagging noises, but none able to resist seeing what the others had found. They all stood just inside the doors, contemplating the meaning of this.
She had been wondering, as had all of them, where most of the people went. They saw relatively few survivors, and found too few bodies. Here it looked like they had found a sizeable chunk of the town’s population. Not just the teenagers that had populated the school, but people of all ages, from children to old women, all piled atop each other like refuse in a trash dump. It was a horrible sight, but one that none of them could turn away from.
They all stood gaping. Even the dog was transfixed by the carnage in front of them. Then, in one section toward the middle of the gym, the bodies started to gently heave, as if they were a sea of flesh. The dog began barking and growling, as the others started to back slowly toward the door. Something was moving beneath the pile. Something was rising up from among the bodies. Casting her eyes across the pile, she could now see movement in several places, a slow, surging kind of movement. Many things were rising from the pile.
“Go!” she shouted, breaking the others from the morbid spell that had held them in place. They all turned, running out the doors to the gymnasium. The dog was the last out, backing out as it barked at whatever was beneath those bodies. Then it came tearing past the rest of the group as they ran down the hallway.
Having no real plan or direction, they followed the dog. It skidded around a corner and headed for the main doors, which had swung closed behind the group when they entered. It leapt at the doors, pawing and pushing at them, and soon coming in contact with the bar that worked the latch. As the door moved, the dog shouldered it the rest of the way open and disappeared into the night, the rest of the group straggling after it.
They ran across the parking lot and down the street, passing six or seven houses before they slowed, stopping to bend at the waist, pant, and look behind them. Nothing pursued them. They looked at each other, each silently asking the other what that it was that had been moving amongst the pile of corpses back there.
Predictably, it was Bait who spoke first.
“Zombies!” he almost
yelled.
“What?!” said the Mule and the Professor almost in unison.
“Fucking zombies! I knew it! Every other weird thing is out there in the world, and now it’s fucking zombies coming to get us!” He seemed seriously rattled.
“I don’t think so,” said the Professor. “Did you actually see anything?”
“I saw zombies, I tell you! The fucking bodies, moving around crawling up out of there… Shit!”
“I don’t know what was in there,” said the Mule. “All I saw was that something was moving around in that pile, and then I got out of there. Never saw anything come out.”
“Me too,” said Leanne.
“I don’t think any of us really saw what was in there,” said the Professor. He looked down the street from where they had come. “Personally, I think I’m fine with that.”
“I tell you, man, it’s zombies!” responded Bait. “I know it.”
No one came up with a good explanation of how hundreds of bodies ended up in that place, or what may have been in there with them. Finding out would have meant going back, and none of them had the stomach for that. It was just as well—there was no chance that anything burrowing in a pile of bodies was going to be good news.
A lot of things were like that in the early days—strange things, bad things, with no good explanation. All that could be done was to witness and to move on.
---
As the adrenaline produced during their flight from the gymnasium-cum-abattoir drained from their bodies, they each began to feel how tired they were. It was time to bed down for the night. They were tired, and it felt somehow just wrong being out in the streets on this deserted night. It was the same spooky wrongness they had felt in the motorcycle shop—even at night, the streets of a town should have the occasional car or pedestrian, the occasional parking dog. Here, there was nothing. The whole world was haunted by this emptiness.
No longer interested in what might be around them, they picked a house to bed down in by the simple expediency of heading for the first house they saw that had the front door open and swinging in the breeze, but no broken windows. (It was surprising how many houses along this street had broken windows. Another mystery.)
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