The World Itself Departed

by J. B. Beatty

  Zombies still flow toward us, drawn by the possibility of a fresh meal. I start walking closer, shooting all the while. My ears grow numb but I hear Justin shouting, “Give me a hand!” I create as much of a margin of safety as I can around the truck and see him trying to bring Maggie out the back window. There’s not much clearance, but I duck in and help guide her head and arms out and onto the ground. He follows and guides the rest of her out. She’s unconscious and bloody. I think she’s dead but I can’t bring myself to say anything. I need to set her down and start shooting again to clear a pathway.

  Justin gathers Maggie up in his arms and says, “Now.” We make our way back to our rides; I take a few clumsy pistol shots as we move. “In the back of the SUV,” he says. I open it up and we lay her down there. “I’ll be right back with the med kit,” he says, running back to his truck. I return to shooting—I’m on my last clip. I make my way around the truck to the driver’s seat. A woman, a zombie woman, somehow comes around the corner of his truck and throws herself at Justin as he is just emerging with his med kit. He pushes her to the ground and runs back to the SUV. His arm is bleeding. He jumps in the back with Maggie. “Drive,” he says. “Drive!”

  He shuts the back door and I execute a quick U-turn. We leave his truck behind as he starts to tend to Maggie. “Straight home. Fast,” he says, though I kind of already had that one figured out. I hit 90, then 100 on the back roads. The drive back is long and straight. I worry about the soldiers. What if I run into them? Then we’re all dead. What if there are more swarms coming? I’m pretty much out of ammo. What if the bite causes Justin to turn?

  Over my shoulder, I say, “Justin, you’ve been bit.”

  “Not a priority.”

  Still it panics me. But what really gets me is the part I’m not ready to think about. What if Maggie is dead? I look back and see her long hair tangled over her face. Justin is wiping her with a cloth, cleaning the blood, assessing the wounds.

  “How is she?”

  “Alive.” He’s breathing heavily, still working. “Took a massive beat-down. I fear most of it’s internal, and that’s not good. I’m may be good with the cuts and bruises, but I’m no surgeon.”

  “Concussion?”

  “Probably the understatement of the year.” But by the time we get back to the camp and are carrying her in, she’s mumbling. Mostly obscenities, but a good sign. We lay her on the table. “Get something thin we can use as a pillow. The thinnest pillow we’ve got,” he says. I end up bringing a blanket that I fold a few times. “Perfect.” He gently lifts her head and I slide it under. He rips open the front of her shirt and continues examining. I look away.

  “No time to be shy,” says Justin. “This is medical.” He provides a running narrative. “We’ll need stitches here… Get me some more hydrogen peroxide… Two broken ribs… Head trauma…Surprised we’re not getting more blood.”

  She moves and mumbles. “Don’t you worry, Maggie,” he says calmly. “We’ve got you. You’re going to be completely fine. We will rebuild you. We will make you stronger…” I look at him.

  “Didn’t you ever watch that?” he says. I don’t know what he’s talking about.

  “Man, your arm is bleeding where you got bit.”

  Justin finally takes a look at himself and says, “Oh dammit!” like he’s personally offended and ticked off. Because he is, I guess. “That woman had some choppers on her!” He focuses back on Maggie, running his hands along her limbs. “I can’t believe nothing else is broken,” he says. Finally, after he gives her a couple of injections, he says she’s at the point where we just have to wait.

  “Now you’ve got to stitch me up,” he says, smiling. I turn green at the thought but he guides me through the entire process, from cleaning up his wound to threading the needle. First, though, he gives himself a dose of powerful antibiotics.

  “Any chance you’re going to turn?” I ask. I’m not even sure I have a legit concern, but it’s the fear that’s at the top of my mind.

  “Maybe I’ll get rabies or tetanus. The human mouth carries some nasty germs. But I doubt I’ll turn into a zombie. That’s TV. If I start showing flu symptoms, you have my permission to shoot me. But outside, only outside. You do not want to get blood all over this lodge after I spent a week dusting and cleaning.”

  That’s how I find myself stitching a human up. My mom once said that I would be a good doctor. She was always encouraging me to achieve things that were way beyond my level of initiative and perseverance. My stitching, though, is kind of crooked, which I blame on Justin because he thought he had a topical anesthesia but he can’t find it, so he tries to stay still with no pain killers at all. He doesn’t stay very still. And his syntax gets somewhat colorful by his standards as several times he appears to call me “Jesus, Mary, Joseph Sonofabitch!” Not sure what that means, really, but now is not always the best time for discussion.

  24→THIS WILD CANNIBAL

  Later that night, we’ve moved Maggie to her bed, but we stay beside her. We have an icepack on her head and another on a wrist that Justin thinks might be fractured.

  “How’s the arm?” I ask him.

  “Stings,” he says. “Bitch.” He shakes his head. “I hate that word,” he adds. “It’s a word that shouldn’t even exist, like Nigger. It’s all about hate against a group of people. But man, she bit me. She tried to eat me. I didn’t even see her coming. Bitch… I reserve the right to deploy that word on cannibals.”

  “I didn’t see her either. I’m sorry.”

  “No, it’s not on you. I hate to say ‘Shit happens’ because it’s so overused…”

  “But shit happens.”

  “Especially in the end of the world… Jesus, still can’t believe that bitch bit me.”

  He shakes his head and looks at Maggie for a while. He gently brushes some of her hair off her forehead. For a while she still mumbles now and then, but he put her on a painkiller and a sedative. “She’ll be out till morning,” he said at the time.

  Now he looks a little bit worried. “What the heck happened out there?”

  “Her truck got blown up by an RPG.”

  “Not a direct hit, I don’t think. I saw some of this in Iraq when I was a medic. I think the RPG maybe hit under her truck. Was she backing up then? Either way, that would explain why it flipped in the air. A direct hit would have just blown the truck up. And her.”

  “Who were they? Army?” I ask.

  “I’m still trying to sort it all out,” he says. “Regular militia types, even gunhuggers, aren’t going to have RPGs. Yeah, they got to be military. Or some kind of private military. That and the 50-caliber are serious black market weaponry. Kind of thing you can buy in an alley in Baghdad, not in Benzonia.

  “The other thing,” he adds in a more sober voice, “Those weren’t children. Or old dudes. They were all 20-something soldiers. What the fuck are they even doing alive?”

  I lean against the dresser, all part of a slow-motion shrug.

  “And where were they going in such a hurry?”

  25→THREE DAYS LANDED

  “H

  ey,” she says. I jump, not having realized she was even close to being awake.

  “What? How are you? What can I get you?”

  “Toooo many questions,” she yawns. Her arms levitate as she goes to do a big stretch, but she hits her limitations in the form of pain, which is probably everywhere.

  “Let me get Justin,” I say, rising.

  “No. Just you,” she says, closing her eyes. “I feel like I’ve been sleeping forever. Have I been sleeping forever?”

  I move to her side, sit on the edge of the bed. “Yeah, well, only…”

  “Only?”

  “Two days or so. Three. Yeah, three.”

  “Three fucking days?!” Maggie sounds a little alarmed. “Did I eat?”

  “We gave you a little broth that you were able to swallow. And Justin has had you on an IV.”

  She looks, notices the tube i
n her arm for the first time. She stares farther down. “Did I…?”

  “Did you what?”

  “Three days, I’m sure I must have…”

  “What?” I hate these kind of trivia games.

  “Make a mess?” she says awkwardly.

  “No!” I reassure her. Then, “Oh, that, yeah, well, that. Justin took care of it. He’s got lots of experience with that, he says.”

  She closes her eyes again. Outside, it is dusk, and before long we’ll only see our reflections in the window. She seems to have fallen asleep again, but just when I start to rise to alert Justin, she softly mutters, “What happened? I’m trying to remember what I remember, and all I can come up with is that we were making a drug run. Cornfields everywhere.”

  “You were leading and you got stopped by a giant swarm of zombies, and just when we thought it was looking bad for you, it actually got a lot worse. Some Humvees, maybe military, came through. And they nailed your pickup with an RPG.”

  “My pickup is dead?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Fuck. I hate people. Who were they?”

  “Not sure. We’ve got a million questions.”

  Her eyes are closed still. “I haven’t felt this bad since…”

  I wait, but she never finishes the sentence. I finally stand to get Justin.

  He examines her—even does the light in the eyes thing. He quizzes her on how she feels, what she can move, what she remembers. He asks her if she’s feeling pain.

  “Only when I try to do anything like breathing. Or anything bigger.”

  Mostly, though, she complains of just feeling weak and awful.

  Justin gives her a shot and she fades out again. In the living room of the lodge, we sit by the fire. I ask him, “Is it the concussion? Is it really bad?”

  “Actually, I don’t think it’s bad at all. But what she’s describing doesn’t make a lot of sense with her injuries. Maybe the pain killer isn’t right for her. That happens with some people. You know, with my mom, they had her on hydrocodone. And everyone who’s had wisdom teeth out or back surgery always talks about how wonderful that drug makes them feel. But my mom, it just made her feel lousy, nauseous and tired. She refused to take any more after the first day.”

  “She could have sold it at a high school and made a nice profit.”

  Justin looks at me. Doesn’t respond.

  “Joke.”

  “Yeah,” he says. He looks back at the fire. “I wish we could run some tests. Some simple tests might tell us what’s wrong. I might even be able to figure out how to do some of the tests with the Internet, but we don’t have a lab, so…”

  “There might be a lab nearby. Maybe we can find one and do those tests.”

  “If she’s not feeling better by tomorrow, sure thing. I need to do some homework on what we need to find out.”

  “I’ll get online, see what we have in the neighborhood.”

  26→AN UNKNOWN STRANGER

  Another three days later, she hasn’t improved much. We haven’t left Camp Attignawantan, because we’ve decided no one should go anywhere alone, and we can’t leave her alone with no ability to defend herself. We’re also down to one SUV.

  We found a few labs that Justin thinks might have the right equipment. Trouble is, they’re all in heavily populated areas. The nearest viable lab is on the outskirts of Big Rapids, a mid-size town about 50 miles north.

  And Justin is the one who needs to run the tests. And I should be with him for whatever meager protection I can provide. And we can’t leave Maggie 50 miles back at the camp. Throw in Justin’s concern about heavily armed Humvees zipping through the neighborhood, and we fumble our way to our next decision.

  It’s time to move. Time to find our bunker. That’s the option that reality has chosen for us. We simply need to hunker down and be safe somewhere until Maggie recovers. Winter is coming, and if it’s just us two doing the defending, we need to be in a place that is easily defendable. But what are we even looking for?

  Military installation? Probably good fences and walls, but also probably on the radar of the Humvee boys.

  Jails? Possibly very secure. Possibly also a nightmare to clean out the zombified residents. Also, difficult to decorate in a way that’s not unrelentingly bleak.

  A small school? Would have a kitchen. But too damn many windows.

  Other needs?

  “Food supply,” says Justin, “so we don’t have to do much scavenging. And a good heat source. Winter is coming.”

  “Away from any highways,” I add. “We want to not be on any route the Humvees might be using. And we don’t want to be in any place that would be attractive to any other groups of survivors. Think dirt roads, think remote.”

  “A good line of sight, for seeing anyone sneaking up on us?” he asks. “Or under the radar completely?”

  “Being as we’re probably outmanned by anyone who’s still out there, I vote for under the radar.”

  “Then we’re looking for a house or a building, in the woods in the middle of nowhere. Minimal windows…”

  “We can brick them up.”

  “Yeah, so windows we can brick. Hey, maybe a good call in terms of defense that the whole thing be brick or cinderblock.”

  “Not a lot of cinderblock houses out there. At least not without wheel-less pickups on blocks in the front yard, a zombie dog on a chain, and a yellow tea party flag flying overhead.”

  “Off the grid,” he adds. “As long as we’re talking wish list, we want a place that doesn’t have to depend on utilities for heat or electricity.”

  “I think most places up north will have their own fireplace or propane furnace. But we probably should make sure we have Internet access.”

  Justin leans back and laughs deep. “I wonder,” he says. “I wonder if any realtors survived the flu.”

  While he nurses Maggie over the next few days, I bang my head against the Internet looking for leads. Sometimes I just look at Google maps, following dirt roads into the woods, and taking a good look at every isolated building out there. Other times I just do searches for our dream home on the realtor sites. Eventually I follow a glimmer of an idea I have, that maybe there’s an out-of-the-way technology firm. Maybe they’re progressive enough to have solar power and a wonderful Internet connection.

  And then I find it. It appears to be a radio tower with a small building next to it. A caretaker’s place? It’s connected to a college, so maybe there’s Internet. Yet it’s on a hilltop in the woods, miles from town. A few isolated cabins in the woods, but nothing of concern nearby. We would have to do some major supply runs for food and supplies.

  “That’s a long way to go for an iffy proposition,” says Justin. “You better find some back-up places in the same area.”

  That’s what I do. Some billionaire’s luxury fishing lodge on the Sand River. A small elementary school that was built with narrow slits for windows—during the energy crisis of the 70s? A tech firm in a small industrial park—not too far from a grocery distribution warehouse. And any number of cabins in the woods.

  “Isn’t that where people go when they retire?” he asks. Yeah. They might just be occupied by gun-wielding senior citizens. Scratch those, but in the end I have a list of 10 possibilities, all in the same corner of the north of the state.

  “We’ll need medical supplies. A serious quantity of some serious stuff. And maybe facilities for more testing,” he says.

  I point out there’s a medical school 5.7 miles away. And three more hospitals within a 50-mile radius. And plenty of pharmacies and urgent care clinics.

  I decide that we need to make the move as soon as Maggie’s well enough. Justin tweaks that concept a little bit until it’s clear that we’re going to go as soon as possible—time is of the essence with winter bearing down on us. He also gives me the impression that he’s not so optimistic that she’s going to back to her normal self any day now.

  He wants to make our way up north, settle into our bunker, an
d then run the tests on Maggie. “Otherwise we’re just too exposed, both en route and even when we’re roosting here.”

  “Who says ‘roosting’ anymore?”

  “I do, motherfucker.” He smiles. He very rarely swears, and it’s even rarer that he says anything that sounds like the way white folks imagine black folks talk down in the “D.” [That means ‘Detroit.’ It’s a Michigan thing.]

  We need to retrieve his truck from where we left it when Maggie got blown up. We decide to travel light—bug-out bags, gasoline, emergency food and supplies for a week, lots of guns. And all of our drugs. And Maggie… we can’t leave her behind.

  We race back to that fateful site, taking a few detours that put us on dirt roads and hopefully keep us away from Humvees in a hurry. On the way there, I say, “What if it’s not there?” Of course, that guarantees it will be gone.

  We roll up to the scene to find that Murphy’s law still applies. Justin’s truck is gone. Maggie’s pickup lies on its back like a violated turtle, scorched and empty. The bodies of the dead undead stretch for a hundred yards past the automotive corpse, looking like nothing so much as the accumulated litter of mortality on an unswept floor underneath a bug zapper.

  “Now what?” says Justin.

  “The dealership,” mumbles Maggie. I nod, and we turn around and make our way into town.

  Our eyes are always scanning. Everywhere. We look at every structure. Every stumbling flu victim. Every flag. Every sign of life. We note what buildings still seem to be occupied and what buildings may have something we eventually need. But since we’ve also decided to move farther north, I get a little sloppy on the reconnaissance. It’s not as if we’re going to be raiding these cellars looking for cans of artichoke hearts and sardines anytime soon. Plus, the old folks around here need something to have on their crackers.

  That’s when we see the guy. Not that it is hard to see him. He stands next to the road and waves. Old guy. Seems pretty fit in the sense that he’s walking along quite briskly, and instead of an oxygen tank on wheels he has a backpack, and pistol in a holster, a walking stick, and a sweatshirt that says “Aerosmith.”