Paranormal Double Pack: Gomers & Blooded

by Dixon, Chuck

  “My uncles more like. How’d you know?” she said and looked away.

  “I hear the Carolina when you talk. Only that’s no city accent on you.”

  “You neither. Alabama?”

  “Close. Florida panhandle. I thought you said you were moving on,” he said.

  “Yeah. I plan to. Still figuring that out, I guess,” she said and took a seat on the stool to peer through the viewport at the front lot before the store. Caz stood by her, watching the shifting shadows moving in their endless circuit below.

  “It’s a judgment. That’s what my mom said,” Mercy said after a while.

  “What?”

  “All this. The dead rising. Everything falling down. The whole world crashing down.”

  “Smash believes something like that. Not biblical. More horror movie.”

  “Can I look through the scope?” she said.

  He handed over the rifle. She flipped the lens caps up and brought the rifle tight to her shoulder, right eye to the scope, lashes barely brushing the rubber cup. She kept her left eye open, he noted. She wasn’t telling stories when she said she’d been hunting. The lot was all harsh white and blurry green through the night lenses. The dead looked even deader, pale verdant shapes stumbling and shambling around in the bilious snow. The moonlight turned their eyes to twin opal glares when they faced the scope.

  She handed him back the rifle.

  “I better leave you to it,” she said and moved to the door.

  “What did you really come up here for?” he said.

  “It’s none of my business.”

  “What’s none of your business?”

  “Why you gave your dog a girl’s name?”

  “You’re right,” he said and opened the door for her to climb down onto the rooftop.

  53

  To Jim Kim, it was like traveling to some hostile era of prehistory, a barren place where time weighed heavy and there were no friends to be found.

  The internet in the Gomerland was a bitch. Most sites were either down, frozen, replaced by error notices, or vanished as if they had never been.

  His father had told him about the wait times that computer users faced in the 1990s. How you kept a magazine by your PC to fill the moments waiting for pages to load. His dad would be feeling nostalgic right now as the speed of the available connection wafted and waned in unpredictable patterns. It certainly wasn’t from the bandwidth being overcrowded.

  Jim Kim had set up a techno lair in the Tool Town office on the level over the warehouse area. He plugged up a pair of PCs and monitors as well as a space heater. When not on watch or asleep, he spent time on the web. He did it in secret mostly because of how Smash had scoffed at the idea that there would still be any internet at all after the shit that happened. Now he slipped away unnoticed and guarded his connection jealously because it was something private.

  Something that was his alone.

  He accessed the web through Tool Town’s server site, which was still up and running even though it had not been updated since the previous spring. Mega-huge sites like Google were up but inactive. Facebook had locked up sometime shortly after the pandemic went public. Jim Kim could go back and look at posts from that day and back. He could not post or receive new posts. He reviewed his home page to see requests for prayers mixed with the usual snark. Memes about the undead were still being created even while the dead rose to walk the streets. Dozens of Willy Wonka, Grumpy Cat, and Kermit the Frog memes with ironic jests about the end of times.

  Amazon. eBay. Twitter. Yahoo. YouTube. All were replaced with dead screens or notices that they were under repair or down temporarily for technical review. The major news sites simply stopped having new entries on various days. As if the events were equally too repetitive and horrifying to continue to report on. Oddly, he could get to the South Park site and every episode was still available.

  He could access only a few sites in South Korea. Mostly the bigger news and entertainment sites like Star and Yonhap. Neither was interactive. And social networks remained available with sparse, cryptic entries ending months ago. From the news that remained available to read, he knew that the pandemic had reached Korea and swept the dense population with ferocious speed.

  The odd site here and there remained up but inactive with postings as recent as a week ago. Mostly message boards that Jim Kim found through random words typed in the web address box at the top of the Tool Town home page. He found hobby sites, hunting sites, singles pages, personal blogs, and fan pages that became places where survivors continued to communicate with each other from all over the country. Stories of people bunkered up on farms, in gated suburban communities, and high-rise condos. Some were survival tips, and others were observations of gomer behavior.

  There were disturbing stories of huge hordes of the dead on the move in more populated areas. DolphinsFanDan in Miami posted on a fantasy football message board and reported seeing a mass of thousands of gomers moving along the MacArthur Causeway visible from his twentieth-floor condo. He posted that they crowded all six lanes, marching inland, their numbers continuously growing as more gomers came off of feeder roads. They took hours to pass, moving with one mind on a course carrying them inland.

  Jim Kim found the suicide postings the most troubling. Every day there were more and more farewells as posters signed off for the last time, leaving prayers for those who remained or for those already gone on. People who probably once posted things like what they had for breakfast or pictures from their vacation were now sharing their final moments with the community of strangers offered by the ever-shrinking outlet of the World Wide Web.

  He could not understand this compulsion to disclose the most intimate details of one’s life. Jim Kim rarely posted anything on social sites and certainly nothing intimate or personal. And here he was reading people’s final moments written as thousand-word manifestos or haiku-brief departures. The saddest of them stayed with him. He wished he’d never seen it.

  Linda came to the door. Except it wasn’t her. Going out to meet her. See what comes next.

  The boards never went dark; they simply went quiet. Weeks without postings but remaining active through the actions of the ghosts in the mysterious machine of digital connectivity. Jim Kim searched for the living on a dying web.

  On a singles site, he typed in his old zip code, the one from the condo he and Smash had shared.

  A string of posts appeared with dates ranging from three months prior to the last one only two hours before. They were posted by DeeDeeKatt and varied between memories of the world as it was before to poems to plaintive requests for a reply from anyone, anywhere. The location of the poster was a street he was unfamiliar with in a neighborhood near a Thai restaurant he’d visited a few times with other kids from school. He recalled blocks of modest single homes and duplexes. Nothing special. Just another neighborhood of homes built generations before. A neighborhood midway between decay and gentrification.

  The posts gave no indication of age or gender. But the kitten in the profile picture and the tone of the posts and poems (poems!) led him to believe that DeeDeeKat was female. The poetry was terrible, which only made it sadder and more revealing. The syntax of her texts was from someone young, or young-ish. He stayed up most of one night reading her posts, becoming absorbed in her small joys, like finding a can of pumpkin pie filling, giving way to depression as the isolation of her hiding place began to weigh on her.

  The following day, he fell asleep on his post up in the lookout shack. He dreamed of DeeDeeKatt. In his dreams, she was blonde and petite, with delicate hands and sad eyes. She looked like Mercy.

  Smash shook him awake.

  “You’re lucky it was me had next watch, not Caz,” Smash cautioned.

  “Yeah.”

  “He’d have kicked your ass,” Smash said, taking his place in the shack.

  That evening, after a short and troubled nap, Jim Kim made excuses and crept back to his techno lair. He found a new post from
DeeDeeKatt, put up less than an hour before.

  I never felt so alone or so hungry. The pains in my stomach have stopped. I know that’s not a good thing. When you’re not hungry anymore that means you’re starving to death. I have clean water but not much else. How long can anyone live without eating? I’m going to have to go out before I’m too weak. I’m afraid to go out but I’m more afraid to die here alone. I see the dead on the street from my windows.

  I heard the motorcycles on the streets all around. Which is worse? To be found by the living or the dead? If only I knew someone heard me. If only I knew someone cared. Even a little bit. Even for a little while.

  Jim Kim read the post through four times. His hands poised over the keyboard. His eyes locked on the cursor blinking inside the reply box. His fingers descended to the keys.

  You are not alone.

  54

  Smash and Jim Kim moved into the same cubicle, surrendering the largest of the private rooms in Gomer Manor to Mercy. They installed an actual ceiling to her room and rigged blinds over the windows to give her additional privacy. She half-joked about wallpaper. In addition, they walled off the shower area and tiled the floor and interior walls.

  Outside their little house, and outside Tool Town, the weather was growing colder. Beyond the heated spaces, they could see their breath while they moved around the store. Additional space heaters were needed in the house and shower area. They spent several days insulating pipes to prevent them from freezing and bursting. The added demands on the generator were bringing their gasoline stores down. The generator was a flex-fuel model that would run on almost any flammable liquid, but even their supplies of kerosene, paint thinner, and wood alcohol weren’t unlimited. The one resource they had in abundance was lumber.

  Caz, with Jim Kim’s and Smash’s help, installed a wood-burning furnace (Aisle 24) and vented it through the roof. It could burn cut lengths of wood from the vast lumber stacks or bags of charcoal from the patio department. They would load it only on overcast nights when the smoke would not be as visible. Luckily for them, the skies grew lower and the days shorter as winter deepened. Mercy would keep watch on the roof while the boys worked.

  They were securing the last section of the stories-tall smokestack in place when the walkie squawked to life.

  “Anyone hear me?” Mercy’s voice was tinny from the speaker.

  “What’s up?” Smash said, picking up a radio.

  “Come on up here. All of you.” She sounded like she was smiling.

  “What is it?” Caz said after yanking the radio from Smash’s hand.

  “A surprise. Get your asses up here.”

  It was the first snow of the season, falling thick and feathery. There was already a half-inch coating on the roof by the time they reached the lookout post. Mercy stood beaming.

  “Pretty cool, huh?” she said, her toque and hair dusted with white flakes.

  “It’s snow. Happens every year.” Smash shrugged.

  “Yeah, but I don’t see snow that much. We usually were back south by winter,” she said, stooping to scoop up a handful of white into her gloved fingers.

  Caz walked to the edge of the roof. The trees looked like they were made of white pipe cleaners. The gomers were leaving black trails through the dusting as they kept on keeping on over the slick asphalt. Some had fallen and were slithering in the wet stuff to regain their footing. He raised his gaze to see that the snow created an enveloping fog that enclosed the world all around them in a dense dome of gray and white, turning the stillness of the dead world to a palpable hush.

  He turned to the others who were throwing snowballs at one another like kids. Mostly they were tossing dashes of loose flakes since not enough had accumulated.

  “This would be a good time to break you in on the Savage,” he said to them.

  Jim Kim swung the crosshairs over the lot, searching for shopping mama. The movement made him dizzy, and he raised his eyes from the cup and blinked hard.

  “Slow your transit,” Caz said. He’d taken off the night sight and replaced it with a strong 30X scope. The power of it was vertigo-inducing if he panned too swiftly.

  “Pick a target, Jimmy. I want a turn,” Smash said.

  Unable to find shopping mama after seeing her a dozen times on every watch, Jim Kim settled the posts on a gomer in a canary yellow running suit stomping over the lot close to a hundred yards out.

  “Take a deep breath,” Caz said. Jim Kim sucked air.

  “Let it all the way out.”

  Jim Kim blew his lungs empty.

  “Now, squeeze.”

  Jim Kim drew his finger back slow. The gun bucked hard into his shoulder. The cough from the suppressor was flat, with a short echo muffled by the snow-thick air.

  “I get him?” Jim Kim said, bringing the scope down to re-find the guy in yellow.

  “Close. Try again,” Caz said, touching Jim Kim’s shoulder.

  Jim Kim worked the bolt, found the jogger, and put a round through his center mass. The gomer spun to the snow in a sloppy pirouette. Black gunk sprayed from the wound to darken the snow. The guy was up on all fours, struggling to rise.

  “Do it again. Try for a headshot.” Jim Kim felt Caz’s hand squeeze his shoulder.

  Charged, sighted, and shot. The jogger dropped to the snow again, his head blown apart like a ripe melon. A couple of gomers stalled their march and looked about dumbly for the source of the barking noise of the rifle.

  “You could have hacked it at Pendleton, Jim,” Caz said, taking the rifle from him.

  “Looks like hours of Call of Duty weren’t wasted.” Jim Kim beamed. He had no idea what a Pendleton was.

  Smash went next and took five tries to bring down a gomer in a fast-food uniform. He finally succeeded in knocking off a leg, leaving the former burger chef to creep around in circles in the deepening snow, unable to stand. Caz finished the slowly rotating gomer with a headshot. The serious .308 slug removed the skull from the lower jaw upwards.

  On Mercy’s turn, she went three for four, bringing down three gomers with single headshots at seventy-five, one hundred and one-thirty yards. The fourth took a round through the neck that failed to sever the head from the body. The last shot in the mag was cleaner, turning the gomer’s cranium to mist. She handed the rifle back to Caz after throwing the bolt open.

  “Told you I could shoot,” she said and wrinkled her nose at him.

  Caz took the rifle without a word, his gaze on Mercy a curious stare.

  55

  Jim Kim never talked much anyway. He talked less now, waiting for watches to end so he could get back to his ongoing conversation with DeeDeeKatt. It’s not as if Smash noticed. He talked enough for both of them. Never noticed whether Jim Kim was responding or even listening.

  DeeDeeKatt shared more of her life with him. He followed her from the singles site to Loops, a private message site with servers still up and humming.

  He was SoKoBang. No real names.

  She was eighteen. She moved away from her parents after getting her GED. She moved in with an uncle and aunt to find work in the city. The best she could do was Starbucks, which wasn’t terrible. What she really wanted to do was write for magazines. She was saving for college to make that happen. Her aunt and uncle went out to scavenge in the early days of the pandemic and never came back.

  She was more Star Wars than Star Trek and was into ’70s prog-rock, thanks to her uncle’s huge collection of vinyl. Though, with the power down, all she could do was read the jacket sleeves by candlelight. She confessed to being a little on the chubby side. Stubborn baby fat, she called it. Though that wasn’t a problem anymore, what with starving most of the time. Down to a hundred and three pounds before the batteries in the bathroom scale went dead. She called it apocalypse chic.

  Jim Kim revealed his own life. Star Trek all the way, and his musical tastes were more toward Bach and Mahler. He told her some of his background but was wary of sharing too much. He was only a year older than h
er. Their birthdays were in the same month. They both liked Japanese candy and New York pizza. They both preferred cats to dogs. McDonalds to Burger King. Subway to McDonalds. Family Guy to Simpsons. They both liked Macs, and shared their misery at having to use a PC.

  And they were both scared.

  That was their most intimate secret. Their fear.

  Though, in the secure sanctuary of Tool Town, his fear was more abstract than hers. She was alone in an apartment building open to intruders both living and dead.

  I don’t sleep much. At least I don’t think so. Sometimes it feels like hours, then I see the time on the laptop and it’s only been a few minutes. Sometimes noises wake me up. Sometimes it’s the quiet. That ever happen to u? So tired.

  He didn’t know how to answer that. Here he was in a safe place with food and fresh water and electricity and the sense of purpose that the work and the watches gave him. This girl was only a few miles away, living on the edge with nothing to look forward to. For her, every effort to survive brought new dangers.

  No water. No food. Have to go out. I can see the street. It looks empty. I haven’t heard any cars or bikes for a while. I think just before dawn would be the best time. There’s a market two blocks away that still had some stuff.

  Hours went by with no posts. The fear clawed at his throat. It was all he could think about. What if she never posted again? He’d never know what happened. He’d be left to imagine her taken by gomers or one of the roaming bands.

  Mercy sensed something was wrong with him.

  “Jimmy, are you feeling all right?” she said, finding him sallow-faced at the table they shared for meals. An uneaten breakfast of ramen noodles grew cold in front of him.

  “I’m okay. Maybe a little flu or something?” he said.

  “Who the hell would he catch the flu from?” Smash hooted. Jim Kim shrugged, looking away.

  “Look, I’ll take your watch. I’m not sleepy anyway. You go lie down,” she said.