by Youers, Rio
* * *
Come lunchtime, Robert and Kenny sat at a wooden bench in the park. Smoky Joe was parked nearby, engine idling, furnace chugging away, doing its best to reduce Blue Suit to a sooty smear. It wouldn’t take long.
Joe was expensive to operate, especially these days when fuel was difficult to come by. But the town council thought Joe was worth it. The truck might not be as efficient as gathering deaders in the back of a pick-up, taking them outside of town and burning them en masse––something the hunting patrols did whenever there wasn’t enough fuel to run Joe––but it was more psychologically comforting. Joe was like a slice of life from the time before, when cities and towns were able to provide trash service, recycling and yard waste pick-up. That’s why they’d given the truck a nickname, to make it friendlier. The kids in the town had even come up with a song which began Here comes old Smoky Joe, huff-puffing down the street…
Robert knew they couldn’t keep the truck going forever. The fuel would run out eventually, and so would replacement parts. But as long as Joe still rolled, Robert intended to be behind the wheel, huff-puffing along.
Both men had brought their food in plastic grocery bags; they could be used over more often than paper ones. Kenny had a hunk of coarse bread, an apple, a bit of cheese, and a bottle of water. Robert had the same, with the addition of a small piece of jerky.
Kenny made a face as Robert bit into the dried beef. “I don’t see how you can eat that with the truck so close by. I can barely choke down my food as it is with that smell in the air, but there’s no way I could keep down any meat.”
Robert shrugged. “Man’s got to keep his strength up. Besides, it doesn’t have much taste anyway.” He held out the rest of the jerky. “Want to try it?”
Kenny paled and held up a hand. “Hell, no!”
“Suit yourself.” Robert took another bite and chewed methodically. He liked eating lunch in the park. Not only was it pleasant––though since the place hadn’t been kept up for years, the grounds had become overgrown with weeds and bushes––it was safe. At least, relatively so. There weren’t as many roaming deaders as there used to be, thanks to the efforts of the hunting squads who patrolled the town day and night, executing any deaders they saw. Pick-up men (like the two of them) helped too, disposing of the deaders the patrols left in their wake, along with those put out at the curb by individual residents. But if you were going to be out in the open for any length of time, it was only smart to pick a place where you could see around you in all directions, so you could spot a deader before it got too close. They usually moved slow enough that you could avoid them if you saw them in time. If.
Robert looked at a nearby swing set. There were two regular swings and one baby swing. Kenny noticed where he was looking.
“Thinking about your kid?”
Robert nodded. “It’d be nice to be able to take him to a park so he could swing, go down the slide, play in the sandbox…”
“Maybe someday. They have to find a cure eventually, right?”
“Sure.” But Robert didn’t believe it. Supposedly there was some semblance of a government in D.C. again, but since there were no network broadcasts anymore, just a few local radio channels that transmitted infrequently, news was hard to come by. If there was a government again, he guessed they were probably working on a cure, but that didn’t mean they’d ever find one. Maybe whatever it was that brought the dead back couldn’t be cured, not by science anyway.
“How’s he doing? Your kid, I mean. What’s his name again? Bobbie?”
“Yeah. He’s fine. Just started crawling last week.”
Kenny frowned. “I thought he was already crawling. I remember when we first started working together, you said––”
“Walking,” Robert interrupted. “I meant he just started walking.”
Kenny looked at him for a long moment, his expression unreadable. Finally, he said, “Sure, man,” and turned his attention back to his lunch. After several minutes, he said, “There’s gonna be a dance in the basement of the Methodist Church Saturday afternoon.” Not at night, nothing took place at night anymore. “You think you’n Emily might come?”
“I doubt it,” Robert said. “Emily doesn’t like to go out much. She doesn’t feel safe outside the house, you know?”
“Yeah. Too bad, should be a good time.”
They continued to eat in silence, and when they were finished, they climbed back in Smoky Joe and resumed their rounds.
* * *
It was closing in on dusk by the time Robert turned onto Mapleview, the street where he lived. It felt as if his bike were harder to pedal than usual, and he made a mental note to put some air in the tires before he left for work tomorrow. He had a small bag of groceries in the basket attached to the handlebars––nothing vital: a couple light bulbs, some more jerky, a mason jar full of moonshine––and he cursed himself for taking the time to stop at the general store set up in the city building. He should’ve waited until his day off to go shopping. Now he was still out as the sun dipped toward the horizon. Deaders, while active twenty-four hours a day, were harder to see at night, and therefore that much more dangerous.
He pedaled harder, passing houses with boarded-up windows and lawns wild with tall grass. Deaders could break through glass, and lawnmowers needed gasoline, which no one would dare waste on something so frivolous as cutting grass. As he rolled by the houses, he wondered how many of them were still occupied. He realized he had no idea. People tended not to leave their houses anymore unless they absolutely had to. He hadn’t seen some of his neighbors for months, a few not for years. The only ones that were gone for sure were those he had picked up during his rounds and fed to Joe’s furnace.
He turned into his driveway, stopped, and got off. He carried the bike up the front walk and onto the porch. His windows, like so many others, were boarded up. Not for the first time he thought what a depressing sight they were to come home to. Like his house had been abandoned long ago, and he was a ghost that had come to haunt it.
He unlocked the door, carried the bike and his groceries inside, then closed and locked the door quickly. No one let doors stay open and unlocked for longer than they had to, not anymore. He propped the bike against the wall next to the door, then moved through the gloom to the dining room. He lit the oil lamp that sat in the middle of the dining table and turned the flame low. Deaders were attracted to light, probably because they knew that light meant live folks were about. Robert was confident deaders couldn’t break into his home, but he didn’t want to take a chance, so he made sure to keep the lights to a minimum at night.
He walked into the kitchen and put the plastic grocery bag––the same one he had carried his lunch in––on the counter. He heard a soft, high-pitched sound, not unlike the one that had issued from the throat of Blue Suit this morning. But it was muffled and he was able to ignore it. He opened a cupboard, took down a plastic jug of water, and poured himself a glass. Water was distributed at the high school once a week, and going to fetch his share was one of the few times Robert drove his car.
He got a baggie of dried peaches, took them, some jerky and his water into the living room. He set his dinner, such as it was, onto the coffee table. Then he walked to the entertainment center and turned on the battery-powered stereo. First he tried to see if any of the few remaining radio stations were broadcasting, but none was. He switched the stereo to CD and put in a David Sanborn album. He kept the volume low, of course, and returned to the couch to eat his supper.
He listened to the music, closing his eyes to concentrate on the sound of Sanborn’s sax more fully. He wondered if the musician were still alive, wondered if he were playing somewhere right now, knew there was no way he’d ever know. He considered breaking out the shine he’d picked up today, maybe getting a little mellow before bedtime, but the thought of alcohol (especially the paint stripper that passed for booze these days) didn’t sound good just then, so he just sat and listened to Sanborn play.
As the music continued, he became aware of another sound intruding: that soft keening, almost like the sound a cat might make, but higher, more…human. He tried to shut it out, even risked turning up the volume on the stereo, but no matter what he did, he couldn’t ignore it. Finally, he switched off the stereo in frustration, which in the end was probably a good thing since it would extend the life of the batteries. He walked into the kitchen and stopped at the basement door. He hesitated for a moment, then put his ear against the wood and listened.
At first, he didn’t hear anything, and he began to hope that maybe tonight he’d be able to pretend there was nothing in the basement. But then the keening started again, louder this time. That meant they were closer to the door.
He went into the kitchen, fetched a flashlight from a drawer, and returned to the door. There was a small panel set at eye level, and he undid the latch and slowly opened it. He took a step back––he always did––even though there wasn’t any need. Before he’d installed the panel, he’d removed the basement stairs. There was no way they could get to the door. Not unless they stacked boxes to climb on. There were all sorts of boxes down there, junk they’d never gotten around to unpacking when they’d moved. But he wasn’t especially worried; deaders’ bodies still worked, after a fashion, but their brains stayed dead. They retained enough instinct to hunt for food, and to hide from the patrols, but that was about it.
Still, taking a step back didn’t hurt, did it?
He waited a moment, and when greenish-gray skinned hands did not thrust through the open panel, he stepped forward, clicked on the flashlight, and shined it through the opening. As always, his nostrils detected a faint odor that reminded him of a reptile house at the zoo. It was the stink of seasoned deaders, ones that had been around for a while, and kept in an enclosed space. It was the stink of his family.
Emily stood directly beneath the door, looking up at him. Her dead eyes didn’t reflect the flashlight’s illumination. She wore the tatters of a flower-print dress he had gotten her for one birthday or another; he couldn’t recall which one. Once or twice he’d tried tossing down different outfits for her to put on, knowing it was foolish but unable to help himself. She ignored them, of course. Her mold-colored flesh was dry and tight against her bones, and she had lost several fingers on each hand over the years. They’d snapped off, like dried twigs. For some strange reason her blonde hair had retained its color, though it was now tangled and matted. Her face…
He didn’t like to look at her face too long.
She reached her hands up toward him and took a couple feeble swipes. Sometimes he fantasized that she was beckoning to him, that in some dim recess of her rotted brain, she recognized him, missed him. Wanted them to be together again, as husband and wife. But he knew better: if Emily got hold of him, she’d tear into his flesh like a starved rottweiler. Her keening grew louder, and though he wasn’t certain her dead eyes could actually see him, he had no doubt she knew he was there. More, that she knew his presence meant it was feeding time. Scattered on the floor around her were small bones and clumps of fur, evidence of past meals.
He heard a second, softer keening in the darkness behind her, and he knew he shouldn’t do it, but he shined the flashlight in its direction. A small green-gray thing lay on the basement floor, tiny arms and legs flailing, mouth opening and closing like a fish gasping on dry land. His son: Robert Anthony Tollinger, Jr. His son who had never known human life, who’d been miscarried during the seventh month of his wife’s pregnancy and who’d actually Gone Bad inside her womb. Bobbie (as Robert had come to think of him) hadn’t been able to do any real damage without teeth, but he had been connected to Emily by his umbilical cord, and through that conduit or by some other means, he had managed to infect his mother before her body expelled him.
There had been no hospital to take Emily to at the time. Now there was a makeshift one set up in the city building, but Robert knew the lone doctor who practiced there wouldn’t have been able to do anything for Emily even if he had set up shop before she changed. There was no cure, no way to halt or reverse the process once it had started.
Robert had been a pick-up man then, though he’d been new to the job, not much more experienced than Kenny. He had known what to do. But like so many others, he couldn’t bring himself to do it. Instead, he’d used the hours before they Went Bad to take them down to the basement, bring down some furniture and some toys for Bobbie, though he knew damn well they’d never be used. Then he dismantled the stairs, tossed the wood into a corner of the basement, and hauled himself out. He locked the door, but he didn’t barricade it, even though that would have been the sensible thing to do. It would’ve been too much like he was putting them in a cage, as if they were nothing more than animals. He installed the panel opening right away, finishing it just as his wife and unborn child began to stir. That had been three years ago.
He knew keeping his family like this made him a hypocrite, and worse, that it prolonged their travesty of an existence. Or rather, non-existence. He often lay awake at night, wondering if they were aware of what they had become, at least on some level. Did they know what they had once been, what they had lost? Within the dead lumps of flesh that used to be their minds, did they suffer? Did they long for release?
If so, it was a release he was too weak to grant them. He needed them if he were to keep his sanity in this hellish nightmare the world had become. Providing for his family’s needs gave him a purpose in life beyond driving a traveling crematorium. Not much of a purpose, maybe, but it was something.
He turned away from the door, turned off the flashlight, and stuck it––handle first––in the back pocket of his worn jeans. He walked into the kitchen and opened the refrigerator. There was no light inside because there was no electricity. There hadn’t been any for years. He didn’t use his fridge to keep things cold, though. He used it because it sealed tight when it shut, holding in the odors of the provender he gathered for his wife and child.
The stench was rank, worse than what he had to put up with on the job. But he didn’t care; he’d gotten used to it by now. He reached into the fridge and pulled out a plastic garbage bag. Inside were the remains of a dog he had found two days ago on his bike ride home from work. Deaders preferred human flesh above anything else, but when they couldn’t get it––and people had gotten pretty damn good at learning how to avoid getting munched since the plague or whatever it was first struck––they turned to animals. Some deader or other had taken a few bites out of the dog, but not many. Either the deader had been satisfied with what it had taken, or more likely, something had scared it off. Perhaps a hunting patrol cruising the streets.
At any rate, Robert had picked up the dog, which had been relatively fresh then, put it in his bike basket and brought it home. He hadn’t given it right away to his family, though. He didn’t like to feed them too often. It made them more active and restless, Emily especially. Besides, dog was a treat. Most dogs were wild now, and hard to catch. Normally he fed his family squirrel or rabbit caught in snares he’d rigged in the backyard, though the animals weren’t as easy to come by as they had been before the deaders appeared.
He took the dog to the basement door, feeling something squirm through the plastic. Maggots, most likely; the dog had lain out for a while before he’d picked it up. While he’d seen and done too many things since the world changed to be squeamish, he’d rather not touch maggots if he didn’t have to. So he left the dog in the bag, though he did untie it. He squeezed the animal, bag and all, through the panel opening. It was a tight fit, but he managed to get it through.
He heard the rustle-thud of the bag hitting something, and then another, louder thud. He realized with horror that the dog had struck Emily and knocked her down. He shined the flashlight through the opening and confirmed his guess. Emily lay on the ground, arms and legs waving in the air like a turtle that had rolled onto its back. Her nostrils flared, and she turned her head toward the plastic-wrap
ped dog. Quick as a crab, she righted herself and scuttled over to her prize. As she began tearing at the plastic, Robert was amazed anew at how fast normally slow and awkward deaders could move when they were starved and within striking distance of meat.
She pulled the dog out of the bag, lowered her head to its maggot-covered body, and took a bite. As she chewed, worms fell from her lips, pattering to the basement floor like fat, white raindrops. The baby, scenting meat, shrieked, the sound so near to that of a living infant as to bring tears to Robert’s eyes.
Emily looked at the baby as if she’d never seen it before and couldn’t quite figure out what it was. Then she bit off another hunk of dog and crawled on hands and knees toward little Robbie Jr. Once she reached the baby, she chewed for a moment, then lowered her face to the baby’s and kissed its mouth.
Back when there had been TV to watch, Robert had seen a documentary on human evolution that claimed kissing began when mothers chewed up food to feed their infants. He wondered if Emily was following a basic maternal instinct so deeply hardwired into her genes that not even death could alter it.
The sight should’ve sickened him, but it didn’t. Yes, it was an obscene mockery of a mother’s tenderness, but it still touched him. He’d never had the chance to hold his son, not alive at any rate. He knew Bobbie wasn’t a living being, that his movements were due to whatever force––mystic curse or perverted science––animated his dead flesh. But he wished he could touch his boy, just once. Wished he could be a father to Bobbie, a real father, and not just a man who threw down dead animals for him to eat. Food he could provide, no problem. But if his wife and son still had any emotional needs (and didn’t their keening cries always seem to hold a touch of sadness and loneliness mixed in with the hunger?) there was nothing he could do for them.
He’d tried talking to them on and off over the years, but the sound of his voice always enraged them. They only grew calm when they were fed––or, in Bobbie’s case, on those rare occasions when his mother remembered he existed and touched him, sometimes even cradling him in her arms and stroking the dry, dead flesh of his forehead. Robert had often wondered if he would be able to soothe them with his touch, had even contemplated making the attempt once or twice, but he knew he’d never survive it.