by Joe McKinney
“Damn it.”
A low, stuttering moan behind her caused her to whirl around. Mr. Harris was there, still dragging her mother’s leg.
She turned to the gate and rattled the bars, calling for Greg.
A moment later, Greg opened his front door. He stared at her, then his eyes widened with recognition.
He hustled down the front walk.
Greg Sutton had gained a little weight since high school, but it had only served to fill him out. In his flannel shirt with rolled-up sleeves and faded jeans, he actually looked better than Rose remembered.
“What are you doing out there?”
“Greg, open the door. Hurry, please!”
He looked over her shoulder to where Mr. Harris was staggering into the street, the severed leg leaving a gory trail across the pavement to mark his progress.
Greg nodded. “I got the key here somewhere,” he said, and pulled a large carabineer key chain from his pocket and started flipping through the keys.
“Jesus, Greg, hurry!”
“This is it,” he said.
The lock sprang open and Greg pulled the chain free from the bars. Rose pushed past him, into the yard. “Close it,” she said. She was out of breath, blood pounding in her ears. “Hurry!”
She started babbling, telling him about the zombie that had attacked Mr. Masello while he was mowing the lawn and how they had gotten into her house and how her mother had pushed her into the closet and closed the door and tried to fight the dead men who had managed to get inside the house and how her mother had died and was eaten.
Greg grabbed her shoulders and shook her until she stopped.
She closed her eyes and breathed deeply, collecting herself.
“We have to get inside,” she said.
“Uh,” he said.
He looked terrified, though Rose hardly noticed. She thought it was because Mr. Harris had finally made it to the gate. He still held her mother’s leg in his right hand, but now he was beating on the metal bars with his other hand.
And he was starting to draw a crowd.
“We have to get inside,” Rose said again.
“Uh, yeah.” He looked like a man steeling himself against bad news. “Come on. It’s easier if we go in through the kitchen around back.” He led her around to the back, where a short, covered walkway connected the back door to the garage.
“Watch your step,” he said, and opened the door onto a mudroom. There were boxes stacked along the walls, most of them showing pictures of police and hiking boots. Coats piled high on the washer and dryer.
At first Rose thought that Greg had hastily attempted to barricade the door, but then she saw the kitchen and the living room beyond that, and she gasped. Everywhere she looked there were piles upon piles of boxes, stacks of clothes, plastic storage bins, clutter everywhere. But not just clutter, she saw. The clutter was made of tents, backpacks, portable camping stoves, sleeping bags, jackets, medical first-aid kits, plastic buckets marked 72-Hour Disaster Kit, jumper cables, more backpacks, machetes and knives and pistols and ammunition, nearly all of it still in the original boxes and stacked three- or four-feet deep in a jumbled mess that resembled a junkyard after a tornado. It was everywhere. There weren’t even lanes through the clutter. It was simply one large amorphous mound of stuff. Greg Sutton, the guy she had once dated, was a hoarder.
“Greg,” she said hesitantly. “What...is all this?”
“Watch your step,” he said. “It gets a little tricky. Here, come on, there’s a spot on the couch where I sit.”
He held out his hand, but when she didn’t take it he climbed onto a pile of boxes and crawled over the clutter toward the living room.
“Hey, Mom! Somebody’s here!”
His sudden scream jolted her loose from her thoughts. She blinked at him as he climbed over the piles of survival gear, testing his footing before putting his weight down, one hand out to steady himself on a teetering stack of plastic storage bins.
She had seen this on TV, on those reality intervention shows, but seeing it now, like this... for the moment, the zombies were forgotten. Even her dead and mangled mother was forgotten.
Her nose crinkled in sudden disgust. There was a rotten-food smell that she was only now noticing. Greg didn’t seem to notice, though. He had made it to the couch and was giving her a wounded, apologetic smile.
“You’re the first person I’ve let in here in four years,” he said.
She didn’t know what to say. She tried to speak but couldn’t find her voice.
“I’m sorry about your mother,” he said. “I remember her. She was nice.”
Rose guffawed. It was a crazy, hysterical sound.
Greg frowned.
He tried again. “I’ve got some water, if you’re thirsty. Food, too. Some of those MREs, you know, the Meals Ready to Eat? They have like thirty-five hundred calories each. Enough for one meal to last all day.”
Greg slid down the side of a stack of boxes and shifted some ponchos and rain-proof tarpaulins to one side. He lifted a cardboard box labeled ASSORTED MEALS—READY TO EAT and dropped it onto another stack of boxes. The bottom of the box was wet and split when it hit. A brown, sludgy goo ran down the side of the stack, giving off a vile, rotten smell.
Rose gagged and pushed the heel of her hand against her nostrils, trying in vain to block out the smell.
“Oh, man,” Greg said.
He peeled away the side of the box, lifted a ruptured bag of something rotten between his index finger and thumb, and dropped it to one side.
Rose saw flies buzzing around his head.
“Some of this stuff is probably still good,” Greg said. “Yeah, I can save some of this.”
Rose gagged and nearly vomited.
“You can’t eat that, Greg. Oh, God.”
“No, no, it’s okay. This is military stuff. It’s made to keep the food inside safe. Really, it’s okay.”
She shook her head.
“We should leave here,” she said. “It isn’t safe.”
“Yeah, those things out there,” he said.
“Do you have a car?”
He nodded. “A ’74 Bronco. Four-wheel drive.”
“Has it got gas?”
“Yeah,” he said, the word coming out as a part chuckle. “I got plenty of gas. I’ve got gas cans and spare tires and enough gear to rebuild that thing three times over if we need to.”
“That’s good. Maybe we could, uh, pack up some of this stuff in the Bronco and leave. I don’t know, go into the country someplace, away from the big cities. I heard it was happening everywhere, but that it was really bad in the big cities.”
She was nearly babbling again, but something about the look on his face made her pause. He was horror-stricken. He looked as frightened by what she was saying as she had been when Mr. Harris stood up from her mother’s groin, blood running down his chin, strips of flesh hanging from his teeth.
“What?” she said.
He shook his head. “No, you don’t understand.”
“Huh?”
“I can’t leave... here. I can’t leave this stuff. It’s my stuff. I need it.”
“Your stuff? Greg, most of this is trash.”
“Trash?” He laughed. It was a whiny, delirious sound. “No, it’s my stuff. I have lots of stuff. I’m protected.”
She didn’t like the look on his face, the way he was looking at her. It was all wrong. She felt suddenly nauseous.
“I have stuff,” he said. He tone was becoming defensive, angry. “Do you have stuff? You don’t, do you? That’s why you came here. You’re not prepared, are you? But I am. I have all this stuff. You may think it’s trash, but it’s not. It makes me feel safe. I am safe. Are you safe?”
She stared at him, utterly dismayed. For the first time she noticed the TV was on, some news show, the same spreading red circles on the map she’d been seeing since earlier that morning. The light from the image cast half of his face in a flickering yellow glow. It made his skin loo
k sallow in the dimness of the living room.
“Greg, what happened?” She gestured at the piles of crap all around them. “How did it get like this?”
“This is the way I like it.”
“Yeah, but, what purpose does all this serve? How could you possibly expect to use all of this stuff?”
He seemed honestly perplexed by the question. He pointed toward the street. “You just came from out there. How can you not see that all of this stuff has value? Those zombies can swarm for years out there. I can hold out. I have all this stuff. And if things get really bad, I can bug out.”
“But that’s just the thing. You won’t bug out. You so tied to this stuff you can’t leave it behind, even when it’s the right thing to do.”
“Stop trying to get me to leave my stuff!”
The sudden fury of his words shocked her. He looked savage and cruel, like she had just threatened something he held sacred. It scared her. She wanted to leave. Or least not be around him.
“Greg, I... I need to use the bathroom.”
Gradually, the heat left his eyes.
“Yeah,” he said. “Yeah, ok. Um, it’s through there. Down that hallway. Can you get through there?”
She climbed onto a pile of boxes and worked her way back to the hall that led to the rest of the house. Boxes were stacked floor-to-ceiling down the length of the hallway, though a narrow lane had been left to allow access. If she turned her shoulders sideways and shuffle-stepped, she could make it.
She came to the end of the hallway and looked around. The power was out or the lights didn’t work, Rose wasn’t sure which. Either way she was standing in the dark, wondering why in the hell she was doing this. It was ridiculous for her to be groping her way around this horrible house, but she was doing it just the same, going deeper and deeper into the outward manifestation of Greg’s insanity. Anything to be out of his presence.
There were several doors back here and any one of them could have been the bathroom. Each one was nearly blocked by trash and for a moment she thought again of the hoarder shows she’d seen on the TV, the way some of those bathrooms looked. She didn’t know if she could handle something that disgusting. Clothes and junk—that was one thing. Even the spoiled, oozing food she could sort of deal with. But to walk in on a bathroom spilling over with mold and human waste, that would put her over the edge.
She opened a door next to her and coughed. The smell of rotten food was even stronger. Rose was closing the door when she heard a faint rustling, like a chain-smoker breathing.
Something moved in the darkness.
“Hello?” she said. “Mrs. Sutton?”
She put a hand over her mouth and stepped as far into the room as the stacks of survival gear allowed.
“Mrs. Sutton?”
Again, something shifted in the darkness. The smell was awful. Rose turned her head to one side in a grimace and saw a flashlight poking out from beneath a pile of coats. She picked it up, turned it on, and pointed it through the stacks of the boxes.
A desiccated woman, long, long dead, nearly mummified, stared at her through a bird’s-nest tangle of gray hair. She looked brittle, dusty, and when she moved, a swarm of flies moved with her. She opened her blackened mouth and a gravel-rough gurgle escaped her throat. A gnarled bony hand shot through a gap in the stacks, and Rose stumbled backward, tripping over something and landing on her butt in a box of medical supplies.
Mrs. Sutton was really struggling now, raging against the boxes that trapped her in the far corner. Rose stared at the woman’s leathery arm, the sliver of her face visible through the crack, and then turned toward front of the house. This was Greg’s mother, for God’s sake. How long had she been back here, dead? Was this some weird A Rose for Emily thing, or did he even know she had died? Rose couldn’t decide which alternative was worse.
The boxes toppled. They crashed at Rose’s feet, and Mrs. Sutton stumbled forward, the gurgle in her throat rising an octave, becoming urgent.
Rose scrambled from the room, tripping over boxes, groping along the wall until she found the hallway in the dark. Mrs. Sutton was right behind her, the flies murmuring angrily around the gummy pits that had been her eyes and the blackness of her mouth. Rose pulled boxes down behind her, hoping they’d prove a barricade against the woman.
Then she was out in the living room and Greg Sutton was there, standing exactly where she’d left him in front of the TV, staring after her.
“Gonna head out on my own,” she said to him. “Thanks for taking me in.”
“You’re gonna what...?”
He crawled onto the boxes and tried to go after her, but she was already dropping down into the kitchen.
“Rose, wait.”
She didn’t slow. She waved once over her shoulder without turning and headed for the mud room. She had her hand on the back door when she heard him say, “Mom, what are you—?”
His screams were cut off by the slamming of the door.
She crossed the yard to the driveway, not bothering with the front gate. She didn’t have the key, after all; and besides, there were plenty of those things out there, hovering around the front of the house. Better to jump the side fence and slink into the darkness, unseen.
She was impressed by how calmly she decided this. All things considered, she had every right to behave like a stark-raving lunatic right about now. But she wasn’t going to do that.
Rose reached the brick wall and climbed over it, taking her time to make sure she landed safely. There was no point in rushing this. Rushing would get her hurt, and a sprained ankle right about now would be as almost as deadly as a bite from one of the walking dead roaming the streets.
But being careful wasn’t the same thing as being quiet, and she ended up making a lot of noise. She turned the flashlight, still clutched in her hand from when she’d taken it from Greg Sutton’s back room, on the front of the house and was not surprised to see Mr. Harris rounding the corner, still dragging her mother’s severed leg. It was the kind of day, after all, when mothers kept coming back for more.
Ethical Solutions
Ben Richardson saw his first zombie from the window of a registered charter bus on the Gibbs-Sprawl Road as they entered San Antonio. She was strangely sexless, not at all what he expected. Standing barefoot by the weeds that had grown up at the edge of the road since the city had been abandoned, her greasy, stringy hair hanging over her face, her body thin and rickety-looking in a bag-like, blood-stained hospital gown, she reminded Richardson of an emaciated meth junkie. It disturbed him. But the most bizarre part of it, the strangest thing, was that she never looked up, not even as the bus drove by. She stood there, hugging herself with her bone-skinny arms, oblivious to their presence. Richardson had the feeling she’d been there for hours, maybe even days, and that she might go on standing there until her body simply gave out, and she dropped.
She caused quite a stir on the bus, all the college kids rushing to the windows, gawking, saying, “Wow, look at that!” and “My God!”
A pretty blonde sitting in front of Richardson cupped her hand over her mouth and said, “She looks so sad.”
Richardson glanced at the blonde, then back at the zombie, receding as the bus pulled away, leaving it in a veil of road dust.
Gradually, the kids went back to their seats, restless with excitement. They were the University of Texas at Austin’s branch of People for an Ethical Solution, and they were finally here, in San Antonio, amongst the zombies.
A woman stood up at the front of the bus and clapped her hands. “Listen up, everybody.”
The woman, an English professor in her late forties, a little older than Richardson, but quite attractive with her brown hair pouring over her shoulders and her snug green blouse and blue jeans showing off her small-breasted but still impressive curves, told them they were going farther in, to the downtown area. She wanted to get plenty of photographs of the zombies around the Alamo, she said, it being the most widely recognized symbol of Sa
n Antonio’s past, and, she hoped, a symbol of its future. She wanted the world to see these zombies weren’t monsters but living people, with a sickness. People who needed help.
Her name was Sylvia Carnes. Richardson had heard her bit back in Austin and thought it pure rant, nothing worth writing down. When he turned his notes into the finished article he was writing for the Atlantic, he planned to characterize her as a passionate college-campus liberal—sincere, and honestly devoted to making things better, but almost completely lacking in real-world common sense.
Carnes, talking to a young girl and her boyfriend standing near the front of the bus, said, “Christy, you and Michael need to take your seats now, okay?”
Richardson chuckled quietly at the scene. At times, Carnes could sound more like a grade-school teacher taking her fourth graders on a field trip to the museum than a hot-blooded political activist.
“Yes, ma’am,” the girl said. Her name was Christy Carter, and her lip-smacking East Texas drawl was obvious in only a few words.
Her boyfriend, Michael something or other, was nothing special. A little under six feet tall, an uncombed mess of blond hair on his head, brown eyes sleepy and bloodshot from the joint he’d smoked behind the convenience store bathroom where they’d stopped to pee before crossing the roadblocks that led into San Antonio, Michael looked to Richardson like your run-of-the-mill frat boy. He was well-muscled and slow-thinking, a freshman beer belly starting to spread at his beltline.
But the girl was something else. She was a Lolita if he’d ever seen one. She bounded down the aisle between the seats with a playful skip. She wore a shear, tight-fitting, white camisole and a short, green, pleated skirt. The camisole was cut to show a lot of midriff, and every time she bounced, the skirt rose at the hem to show a few extra inches of well-tanned thigh.
Richardson didn’t even notice when the boyfriend, Michael, sat down on the seat across the aisle from him.
Christy leaned against the seat in front of Richardson, swiveling her shoulders a little one way and then the other with the gentle rocking of the bus on the uneven road, her smile beaming at him with a curious mix of innocence and temptation.