The World Itself Departed

by J. B. Beatty

  Maggie pulls the truck close to the pharmacy doors with its nose pointed south. Quick getaway. No zombies in sight. Justin tells her to keep the keys in it.

  “No way. I’ve seen other survivors steal trucks that way.” Again, she means on TV. We let it go. The front door of the CVS is unlocked. All seems quiet.

  “Shhh,” I say, in case there are lurking zombies.

  “Hell no,” says Maggie. “We want to draw them out quickly and get it over with in the front of the store where we have a good killing space and we’re ready to go. Ambushes are only cool on TV.”

  While Justin and I consider the wisdom of this tactic, Maggie puts her fingers to her mouth and lets out a piercing whistle. Then she says, “Here, zombie, zombie!"

  Then a woman emerges, zombified of course. I don’t want to get into body-shaming here, but she’s kind of large in a way that suggests that there might be issues with diet or exercise or perhaps simply has another medical issue that has put her in this position in life and it’s really a cause for sympathy more than anything else. It’s certainly not for me to judge. And so if I note that her CVS employee frock looks like it barely can button because it’s stretched so fiercely, it is not in the spirit of ridicule.

  Of course, maybe she overindulged the previous day eating customers. Her face and frock are covered with drying blood and my initial thought is that it is not her own blood.

  That’s all the assessment I have time for as the young woman has now entered into our killing zone. But we never put forth a protocol on who does the killing. We can’t all have the first swing, because tangled garden implements would be the result, with dangerous consequences for all of us. I step back because I’m polite that way. I assume Maggie will step forward because she seems fairly comfortable with killing—and not just that, but she’s good at it, too.

  But Maggie visibly hesitates. I think she was hoping for a meaner, faster, more threatening zombie. Instead we have a junior varsity zombie. In any competitive zombie team, this one would ride the bench. So Justin says, “Got it,” steps forward, and swings hard.

  In slow motion, the sound is unearthly. The woman’s body seems to stay in place while her head snaps so sharply that I hear what must be the neckbones shattering. He doesn’t actually behead her, but when the head stops flopping around and the body finally succumbs to gravity, it’s apparent that the only thing keeping that head attached is the skin of the neck.

  “Ew,” says Maggie. Then all is quiet and the store is clear. We head to the pharmacy. Rows of shelves and we quickly determine that their organization is alphabetical. Justin is shouting out drug names:

  “Ciprofloxacin.”

  “Erythromycin. It might be under its brand name, which is E-Mycin).”

  “Clarithromycin… check under Biaxin.”

  “Azithromycin, brand name Zithromax.”

  I have a small shopping cart, which I am filling up as fast as I can. “Slow down,” I say. He’s reeling of the names of the fourth drug while I’ve barely found the first.

  “Oxycontin.”

  “Viagra—there’s no generic.”

  “Cialis.”

  All the while Justin is busy filling up a cart of his own.

  “I’m full,” says Maggie, pointing at her overflowing cart. “I’m taking it out.”

  “No,” says Justin. “Just take it up to the front door but keep it inside. Grab another cart. We’ve got to be fast.”

  And that’s what we do. Fill carts like crazy. After we clear out all the good stuff, we start in on bandages and hydrogen peroxide and toothpaste and aspirin and Tylenol*.

  [*=All these brand drug names are the fictional versions and should not be confused with the legal real versions, which are also much more effective.]

  Finally, we have seven carts overflowing near the front door. It’s time to move. “Do we have room for it all?” I say.

  “I cleared out the back,” says Maggie. “We can repack when we get to the house.” So we peek out the doors and we see a few zombies roaming around. Attracted by the sound of the truck? Could be.

  “Wait, I have an idea,” I say. I run over to the toys area, and sure enough, find a basketball. It’s not regulation, but it’s blue and inflated and will do the trick. I come back to the front door. The electric eye opens it for me. A couple of the zombies start to swivel their heads in the direction of the noise. I launch the blue basketball as high and far into the air as I can. Their eyes don’t follow it, but when it hits in the middle of the intersection, they all look that way. And then it bounces loudly. And they start moving toward it. And it bounces again and again. And we see more zombies emerge from random directions, and as the ball bounces toward the east, they all generally meander in that direction. From the inside of CVS, we watch as the area around the truck grows a little more safe.

  “We still have to be quiet,” Justin warns as he pushes the first cart toward the truck. We try, but we’re attracting attention as we unload into the bed of the pickup. Some of the drugs are in their larger cardboard shipping cartons, but some are just loose containers, and they rattle a bit too much. Soon the zombies are looking our way and turning toward us. The closest is about 40 yards away. One breaks into a run. “Shit.”

  “I’m on it,” says Maggie. “Forget being quiet. Just hurry!”

  She takes her AK off her back, switches off the safety, and starts aiming and taking single shots. She’s calm. I’m not, blindly throwing drugs and bandages into the pickup and pushing the empty shopping carts out of the way. I can see that she’s targeting the closest and the fastest. But their numbers are growing as more emerge from the north and the west. We can’t keep this up forever. But we don’t have to.

  “There,” says Justin. “Get in.”

  I hop in the truck first. Justin, clutching a shopping bag closely, stands in the door. He grabs the pistol that he left on the seat. “Get in!” he shouts at Maggie. She flips her gun to full auto and starts spraying bullets as she backs her way to the truck. She wipes out the dozen or so that have made it into the parking lot. Then she ducks inside, aims her gun out the window and fires another burst while turning the key. We explode into movement, my head snapping back as the tires squeal. We run over one man as we enter the street and then sideswipe a pack in the intersection. The noise that the zombies make is like something a sick dog would howl. It fades behind us and we’re on our way with no casualties.

  Justin opens his bag and then a pill bottle. He pops a couple into his mouth and downs them with a Gatorade he took from CVS. I don’t ask.

  17→MYSTIFYING AND EXASPERATING STORIES

  He stands behind the door of his pickup truck, window rolled down, shotgun pointed at us. The only witnesses, stalks of corn crowding the fields. Four-way stop. The man had the right of way, having stopped his truck moments before we pulled up.

  We had been blowing through stop signs all day, figuring that traffic laws don’t apply during the end of the world. No one seemed to be getting pulled over. Early that morning, we saw a police cruiser with its lights flashing, driver’s side door open, no one there. The front right corner of the car dangling over a ditch. We looked around inside. Took a shotgun and some handcuffs.

  “Easy, guys,” warns Justin. Maggie had slowed down a bit for this intersection, because the corn fields gave us little visibility of any cross traffic, however rare that might be now. When she saw the pickup stopping, she slammed on her brakes and reached for a pistol. Justin popped the safety off his rifle. I watched.

  The man looks to be in his 60s. He’s got a ball cap on and a tattered white dress shirt above jeans. He cautiously raises one hand and gives a strange little baby wave. “I don’t want any trouble,” he yells. “I’m just passing through.”

  “He might be okay,” Justin says quietly. “Let me talk to him. Cover me.” He starts to open his door.

  “Not good,” I say. “Just seems an unnecessary risk.”

  “I got you,” says Maggie.
<
br />   “Guns down,” yells Justin. “Want to share information? Then go our separate ways?”

  The guys seems relieved. “Guns down,” he says. He takes the shotgun out of the car window, lowering the barrel. Justin steps out of our truck, leaving his rifle leaning against the seat. He still has a sidearm holstered. He steps into the open. The man in the dress shirt slowly sets his shotgun on his car seat, and steps out into the open. He, too, is wearing a holstered pistol. He raises his hands, not in surrender, but just half-heartedly, to show he’s safe. Justin does the same. They both walk to the center of the intersection.

  “Name’s Ray,” the guy says. The other half of the introductions follows. I eventually get out of the truck also. Maggie stays behind to be our safety net.

  We share Wikipedia versions of our stories. Ray’s a financial planner, though he thinks he’s just taken early retirement. That was his joke; he laughs, we smile politely. He lived in Oakland County, which has its pockets of the wealthy. It was good for business. Then the flu hit. His wife, eight years younger, turned monster on him. He killed her with the handgun they kept in the nightstand next to their bed.

  After a day of grieving he noticed that the packs in his neighborhood seemed to be growing larger. He packed up the truck and escaped. He couldn’t find his retriever when it came time to go.

  “Herman,” he says. “Black lab. We had a signal, a special whistle I do. He always comes to that, but he didn’t come this time. I whistled for a half hour, I think. He was gone.

  “I wasn’t the only one getting out. I was just about forced off the road at one point. A convoy of big black Suburbans, three of them. They barreled down the road at twice my speed. It looked like they were going to just barrel into me, so I pulled over as quickly as I could. Someone in a passenger seat had a gun pointed out the window at me as they went past. They were flying, heading north on Dix toward I-75.

  “What’s funny,” he says, “what’s funny is that wasn’t the first convoy like that I saw this week. Tuesday or Wednesday I saw, I think it was Wednesday, two black Suburbans just like that coming out of one of those gated communities in West Bloomfield. They were going fast too, but not quite so fast as the ones on Friday.”

  “But Wednesday was before all this crap started happening…” I say.

  “Exactly,” he turns to me. “I mean, I could be totally wrong, it could have been some billionaire taking his kid to soccer practice a few minutes late, but it seemed weird to me, weird enough to notice. There are a few of those Suburbans around, but all black? That’s like government, or private security. That’s not soccer mom.”

  “Paranoid soccer mom?”

  He tilts his head at me and shrugs. He says, “It was a weird week all around. A lot of cancelled appointments. A couple of my biggest clients moved all of their funds out of stocks and into a private bullion fund. And one guy didn’t want paper, he wanted bullion delivered to his house. I had to arrange for an armored car. I wasn’t there for the transfer, so I stopped by his place. Thursday. No one home. Couldn’t reach him by phone all the next day. And then Saturday, our world falls apart.”

  “Timing is everything,” says Justin.

  “Maybe,” Ray says. “But it’s like these guys knew something I didn’t. Meanwhile, all of my funds are tied up in mutuals and bonds, and the ATM would only let me get $1200. This must be what swimming upstream in Shit Creek feels like.”

  “I don’t really think cash is going to matter much anymore anyway,” says Justin. “I mean it‘s just paper. People are going to want food. Booze. Women.”

  “You’re probably right,” says Ray. “Gold and silver, that might have worked. But I never wanted to go that way with my savings. That’s for tinfoil hat crazies and Tea Partiers.”

  “Maybe they were right,” I say.

  Ray scowls at me.

  He tells us he has a place Up North and is heading there until things sort out. He hopes we’ll be hearing from FEMA soon.

  “And planes,” he says. “What’s up with that? No one in North America is answering their phone, the government seems to be completely unresponsive, law enforcement seems to be dead, yet we still see the occasional plane go over? I’ve seen fighter planes and even one large passenger plane, but mostly it’s small private jets.”

  I shrug. The wind blows cold. We’ve got nothing left to say. Justin tosses him a “Good luck with everything.”

  Ray nods, looking at the sky. “You too,” he says. “Stay safe.” He walks back to his truck but halfway there he turns to add, “And watch out for the people who know more than we do. I think they might be a bigger problem than these poor, sick cannibals.”

  18→THROUGH THE THICK HAZE OF THE FUTURE

  We avoid Grand Rapids, bearing north. A little utility trailer is now attached to our truck as we gather more food. We also knock over a brewery in an industrial park, loading up kegs and taps, as well as a few million cans of beer and some crates of bottled beer. Maggie keeps saying, “This is the good stuff. Perrin. You know how much this costs in stores?” She takes a T-shirt and a hoodie with the brewery logo on it. She has to kill the zombie manning the gift shop. Two shots to the chest. “Totally worth it.”

  She opens a beer in the pickup. With her teeth. I grimace and say, “That is so not good for your teeth.”

  She just glares at me briefly and then continues driving. Drinking and driving. Finally, she says, “All the dentists are dead.”

  “All the more reason not to sacrifice your choppers. They had a huge selection of bottle openers in that gift shop.”

  “Phhhhhht,” she says, immediately taking a swig. “Anyone else wants one?” she adds, “we’ve got plenty.”

  “I don’t drink,” mutters Justin.

  She cocks her eyebrow and looks at me. “Maybe later,” I say.

  That night we hole up in a house that must have belonged to the caretaker for a youth camp. The sign above the entrance drive says, “Camp Attignawantan.” The long driveway curls through a pine forest, leading to a large lodge with an array of smaller bunkhouses behind it. The caretaker’s house is nestled against the forest across the lawn from the lodge. The door is open, no one’s home. The rest of the camp appears to have been shut down for the season, with the water and heat shut off in the other buildings.

  We find the remains of a woman not far from the house. She’s been gutted and mostly eaten. I shovel some dirt on top of her in lieu of actually burying her.

  As darkness falls, Maggie opens up one of the big bottles and pulls from her bag a carefully wrapped pint glass with the brewery logo. She has another one also. She offers it to Justin, “You sure?”

  He shakes his head and returns to looking at a laptop he borrowed along the way. She pours the second beer and hands it to me. “Vietnamese Imperial Porter,” she explains.

  “I never took you for a beer snob,” I say. “I thought you’d be PBR.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “When I want water.”

  The wifi is slow here. Apocalyptic first world problems. We’ve not found any reliable news, just repeats of what we saw over the weekend. Something’s going on with Twitter. My feed is flooded with nonsense tweets, all coming as retweets from friends and people I obviously follow. It’s the same messages over and over again, coming from the state police and various other government entities. “Stay inside, help is coming” … over and over again in quantities that are frankly unbelievable. The system has been hacked, I have to conclude, if I’ve gotten a few hundred such messages like that in the last few minutes. Fuck it. Twitter is useless.

  Facebook, only slightly better. I actually find one post that looks like it’s from a real human. My Aunt Nicole is praying for everyone as she locks herself in her bedroom with a dying phone battery and no charger. Her status update has no likes and no comments. I like it with a heart, but since she wrote the status a day ago and her power’s probably gone, I don’t waste time commenting. Plus, she was real big on the whole, “Arvy’s probably
on heroin” thing that resulted in my mother giving me another pain-in-the-ass intervention last spring.

  Here I just wrote a nasty sexist slur for her and I delete it because now that the world is ending I am trying to be a bigger person. For all I know, I am one of the few role models remaining in the world all because I have not eaten any loved ones. Responsibilities. Pressure.

  Someone is at the door, pounding and breathing. No words are used. Maggie peeks out the window and says got it. She checks the safety on her pistol, opens the door, and fires three quick shots into the head of the man whom we take to be the camp caretaker. Then she shuts the door. “Wife-eater,” she says in disgust.

  She gets a nice fire going in the fireplace and the room starts to get cozy. Justin sits on the couch with his laptop and she joins him there. I glance over with the intent of giving her a weird middle school-style look to tease her. Instead, she’s the one gesturing with her head and eyes for me to leave the room.

  Whatever. I leave them alone and find a back bedroom. It’s a bit cold, but I wrap myself in a blanket and plug in the phone charger and search the world while sipping the beer that Maggie gave me. It doesn’t taste very Vietnamese.

  Where are we even heading? We need a plan and we’ve got nothing. Winter is coming, and we need to be somewhere we can be assured of having heat even if the infrastructure starts to break down. And food stockpiles could end up being important, especially if none of the pizzerias are delivering.