by McCloud, Wes
An entire day goes by. I don’t sleep. Not one wink or nod off. I keep checking my pulse like I know what the hell I’m doing. I have no damn clue what my pulse rate even means, but I keep placing my fingers on my wrist like I’m a nurse, nodding my head like “yes, yes, that seems right.” In addition to that, I’m taking my temperature every half hour. I’m still butt-naked, by the way, because I have this irrational fear that putting on clothes is somehow going to trigger something bad. Like the fabric is gonna make my skin fall off, or break into hives, I have no idea. What I can tell you is this, I was losing my shit, because after the fifth day of sitting in my house, I had used every last shred of duct tape and electrical tape I could rummage and lined every window and door edge with it. I had also shut off the AC for fear it would suck the powder in through the vents. Keep in my mind I’d already breathed a hefty amount of the stuff in, so how in the hell was breathing anymore in going to change anything? I had no clue, but I wasn’t going to risk it. To top that off, I had dug through grandad’s old closet and found a gas mask in this chest he kept pinned to the back of the wall. Why he had that thing in there I have no idea, but I just recalled seeing it as a teenager when he was digging some old war photos out to show me. I placed it on my face and proceeded to listen to Jeff bark at me for thirty minutes. I didn’t even try convincing him I wasn’t someone else, I just laid on the couch and let him give hell to the masked man that looked suspiciously like his master.
A whole week passes…Jeff has been shitting and pissing all over the floor. I know he didn’t want to, but I left the poor dog no choice under the rule of my ever-growing insanity. I felt like a prisoner inside my own home. Granted, the sentence was self inflicted, but it made it no easier to stomach. I began to wonder if this was just how things were going to be. That I was going mad. Had me cutting myself off from everything and everyone been the harbinger of this psychosis? If it was psychosis. I’d heard and read that isolation does odd things to people. Makes them irrational, paranoid, and just general crazy shits. And I was the perfect candidate. I had no real human interaction besides the sheriff that made sure I wasn’t dead. I mean, I had Jeff, but did dogs even count? He was a companion, but he wasn’t exactly one for deep conversation. I vented to him on the regular, but he’d just smile and wag his tail. I felt like he was a bit of an enabler to be honest.
At the height of all this madness, I began to wonder if the dust had even been real. Had the choppers been real? But Jeff had seen them. He’d coughed from the dust and so did I. Didn’t we? Was Jeff even real? I might want to mention in the ENTIRE week of sitting around naked and eating cereal and water, I had not had one symptom of any kind of physical illness. Neither did Jeff. So you would certainly think at this point I’d be ripping the gas mask off my face and tape off my doors and running back out into the glory of the sunshine, not to mention putting on some goddamn pants and letting the dog piss on something that wasn’t the floor. But no…I still sat there, raccoon-eyed and watching. Peering through the glass of the mask, out the drapes, watching the skies.
Another three days went, and something happened. A thing that hadn’t happened the entire time I’d holed myself up in that house…it rained. It really put down, one of those pre-summer downpours that fills the air with that glorious aroma. It was a smell I could only imagine as I sat behind sealed window, watching the heavenly liquid drench the yard and wash away the powder that I so feared. I leered with an almost animalistic fascination, watching the powder being stripped from every plant and rock by the rain. It pooled into serpent-like tines that floated upon the surface of the water, whisked on the watery back of the god-sent torrent that finally died down to a gentle symphony. And it was gone. The dust from the metal sky-birds, had been cleansed from the yard. The sound of peeling tape was followed fast by me slipping on my loafers. I pulled off the gas mask and walked out into the kiss of the cool mist that was now giving way to a parting cloud over the horizon in the west. The sun sliced through the air, casting the shadow of one naked man and one hunkering dog taking his first outside shit in ten days. I’m about to get cliché as hell, but that sun felt like it was literally melting away every bit of paranoia I had thrown on my back since the day of the choppers. I smiled…things were gonna be okay.
Things were back to normal…well, I thought they were. That entire day I heard a LOT of sirens. Ambulances…I think. I guess I brushed it off. I went back to my own little world. I started busying myself with things other than walks and reading. Mainly because my library was quickly running thin. Imagine my disgust when I realized all the one-hundred-plus books and graphic novels I’d bought over the past seven years were gone. Gone along with the magical cloud they floated around on. Instant gratification had slain tangibility and my phone had taken them to the grave.
I dusted off the shelves and benches in the pole barn. Ahh, the good old pole barn. It was grandad’s place of retreat. A place where a man could be a man. Build things. Fix things. But to generally just fuck about to avoid your wife. And though I never had a wife, or much of a girlfriend for that matter, I still understood it. I was enjoying this whole solo thing. Maybe a bit too much. Grandad worked at a factory called Priddy Insulation pretty much his entire life. He was lucky enough to retire from the place before it took a hefty shit some five years after. He spent most of his spare time around metal, tinkering if you will. He was a self taught welder and fabricator. It really had nothing to do with his day job, but he was drawn to it just the same. He made extra cash from welding anything from lawnmower decks to truck frames. He collected old tractors, and cars, and trailers, and god knows what else for spare parts and dabbling. He never really charged people all that much, I think he just did it because he genuinely enjoyed it. The skeletons of most of what was left of that shit was still sitting round the property, rusting back into the earth from which it came. God forbid he’d part with any of that stuff. He was a bit of a hoarder, but what man from that generation wasn’t? He was one of those guys who wouldn’t sell you something because he was “planning on fixing it up?” I must’ve heard that sentence come out of his mouth a hundred and fifty times. There was ( and still is ) a Plymouth Barracuda rotting in the back field. For years, the same guy kept coming round wanting to buy the thing, I think his name was Craig…maybe it was Kevin, anyway, you’ll never guess what grandad told him EVERY time. I figured his tenacity would win over grandad’s heart at some point, but it never did. Finally, a damn tree had started growing up through the car and Craig/Kevin comes over and asks again about this Barracuda. Grandad say he would sell it, but now he cant, because he doesn’t want to kill the tree to move the car…I haven’t seen that poor guy since. But back to the pole building…his pole building was also filled with the bones of his past, though most it was in a much finer state of being. And by finer, I mean not quite as rusted. The place was a mess, of course I don’t know exactly how you’d go about organizing this shit. There were mower blades, truck rims, steering wheels, boat anchors, pipes, buckets, deer antlers, belts, ropes, bottles, eighteen shop vacs, EIGHTEEN shop vacs. Was the man planning on hooking them all together to create a vacuum powerful enough to bend time and enter other dimensions? Don’t ask me, I guess there was a method to his madness that only he understood and took to the grave with him. God how I missed him.
I busied myself the entire day trying to clean the place up, you’d be astounded to know that the first six shop vacuums I tried using didn’t even work. After countless hours and beads of sweat, I got the place in a somewhat habitable condition. I started finding old pictures of his. For some reason he had them hidden away in old tool boxes. I kept coming across them as I further organized the mess he’d left behind. No one took pictures anymore. It was like it was so damn convenient that it was inconvenient…Does that even make sense? Our version of “it happened” was checking in somewhere on Facebook. Family get togethers in days of yore you’d have 100+ pics of people hanging out and smiling, throwing horseshoes, playing
volleyball. Now you had one pic, if you were lucky, to even remember. Most times it was a post “Had a blast at the family reunion!” Did you though? Because lets face it, all the aforementioned activities horseshoes, volleyball, they really didn’t exists anymore because they required physical effort. You know everyone at that reunion was on their phones and they’d take their faces away from those phones just long enough to shove pie in there. Anyway, where was I…grandad’s pictures…I found a picture of him and grandma on their wedding day. I was reminded of how time changed the face. I barely recognized the people in the photo before me. My grandma was a looker, if I dare say such a thing. And grandad, was a suave young man with a grin that could pull down the stars. And now? Well they were both gone, nothing but dust and memories in the minds of the lives they’d touched in the short time they’d been upon this earth. I know saying “short” sounds incredibly odd. They were both in their 80s when they left, but think about the world and time and eras bygone and the age of the earth itself and you begin to realize that our lives, the lives of human beings, are unfathomably short. Our existence, even the lives of those who reach a century or more, are nothing compared to the life of time itself. Kansas was wrong, we aren’t even dust in the wind, we were the dust on the dust in the wind. And even that, was a stretch.
As I thumb through more pictures, I began to come across ones in color, ones of my brother and I. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t missed him. Or maybe I just missed the boy he was then. The one who hadn’t riddled his life with drugs and drink and unforgivable stupidities. I don’t exactly know when he went astray, but he never returned. Neither him or my mother. I couldn’t help but notice my mother was absolutely absent from every photo grandad kept hidden. I didn’t blame him. But despite all of the bad times, I couldn’t help but wonder what her and my brother were doing at that very moment. Had they too breathed in the dust? I also wondered if they’d tried to get ahold of me since I unplugged. I’m going to guess not. But the thought still lingered. It always would. The pictures, all in general, reminded me of simpler times. “The good old days”…And then there were those people on the internet that found a way to shit all over that saying. “Yeah, we really miss the good old days of segregation, discrimination, and bigotry.” Yes, because that’s the first thing I think of when I think of the good old days. It isn’t people actually communicating face-to-face with one another or reading books instead of Twitter feeds. It’s seeing people get attacked by dogs and sprayed with firehoses…Honestly, there was nothing you could post, no matter how good your intentions, without at least one person dropping drawer and shitting all over it. Wow, I really didn’t miss social media. Not at all, I saw what it was doing to people, not only mentally but physically. I think one of the first times I really started waking up was when I was driving the back way home one day ( this was actually last summer ) Through there is what used to be a tiny burg before the highway bypassed it. It was now all older residential housing, most of which used to be tiny businesses, I think one of them had been a funeral home at one point. At this one house I see five kids, probably all siblings, red hair afire. Like the bars on a cellphone, they vary in age and size, all lined up on the sidewalk of their house, backs facing me as I drive towards them. It warms my heart a bit to see kids out on such a beautiful day, but as I pass, I see each and every one of them is holding a smartphone or tablet, noses buried, seemingly unaware of the fact that their brother or sister is sitting right next to them. Looked like a modern day, tragic Norman Rockwell painting. We’ll call it Smartphone Siblings. Whatever you choose to call it, it stuck with me. And it was the main image I saw when I bashed my phone into hamburger meat not that long ago. But I digress…I’m sure I will write that a lot. I digress. Why? Because I like that saying. I picked that one up from Sophia Petrillo. And if you don’t know who Sophia Petrillo is, you might have been one of those five kids sitting on that sidewalk. But I won’t hold it against you. Seriously, though, where was I? The pictures, the pole barn…yeah, I guess I was done talking about that.
Over the next few days I’d switched gears from my typical shenanigans. If you want to call reading books beneath trees and taking walks in the woods, shenanigans. I was now obsessively working away in that pole building. It started off as some crusade to tidy the place up, but it had transformed into me apparently taking my grandfather’s helm. I started tinkering with things. He’d taught me the basics of welding and such, so I started messing around with all that for days on end. Making things from metal that really made no sense. We’ll call it abstract art, I suppose. There was no thought to it, no process, just me welding and screwing things together all while Jeff laid down on a old rug beside the work bench. In hindsight, it was probably my way of turning my brain off as I heard the ever-growing chaos on the horizon. I heard the sirens, the screams, the booms I almost presumed to be gunshots in the far distance. They would wax and then wane, but they would always return on some level. I knew deep down something was wrong. Some awful shit was going on out there in the beyond, but for some reason, I just ignored it all. I watched as several vehicles flew up and down our road going over 90 m.p.h. like they were leaving and never coming back. I even saw ambulances scrambling about, but I would just go back to the welding and the sawing and the grinding and the ratcheting until I couldn’t. No literally, I couldn’t, the power went out. I was right in the middle of using the chop saw and the blade stopped on the descent. At first I thought it was fried, but then I noticed the lights on the workbench were hosed.
“Well shit.” They were probably the first two words I’d spoken for days. I walked out into the heat and threw my gloves off and waited for it. Soon a click and hum arose round the backside of the house. My grandad was forever the cheapskate and frugal Fred during his life, but one thing he did fork out money for was that godsend of a machine that I now watched go to work. A natural gas-fired, whole house generator. The thing was rad. There was just no other word for it. I remember years back we had a windstorm come through and knock our power out for two damn weeks straight. Right after that, he went and bought the generator. “Never again,” he said. But of course, we barely had the electric go out ever since that thing was installed, because you know, the universe knows you have it and don’t want you to use it. Anyway, I see the lights come back on in the garage and I decide to go back to it, but before I can even grab up my gloves, Jeff is bitching about something. He’s doing that low growl thing. And it’s not that annoying one where you know damn well there’s nothing around and you just keep saying “Shut up. Stop it,” over and over. It’s guttural, like a tone I’m not sure I’ve ever heard emanate from that dog. It sends a chill up my spine. I feel the goosebumps chasing one another across my flesh as I look towards the road and see someone walking up my drive. Honestly, I didn’t know what to expect, despite all my ignorance towards the sounds of mayhem in the distance, I still knew those noises were very much real. And now there was possibly a physical manifestation to go along with them…and it was sashaying right towards me. I wanted to yell out the stereotypical property owner B.S. “Who’s goes there?!” or “Not another step, mister!” and then I’d brandish a shotgun and spit some chewing tobacco on the ground. But since I didn’t have a shotgun nor chewing tobacco at the moment, I just started walking towards the person, not a word on my lips. The sounds of Jeff’s unnerving growling fades off as I take my journey down the drive, not fully knowing what to expect. I’d surely thought the figure walking at me would’ve said something by now, but obviously they made a habit of just walking onto people’s land like everyone on the planet knew each other. I keep squinting my eyes and grimacing and then I get a sigh of relief, but only for a brief moment. It was Ted, only it wasn’t Ted. He was what I now refer to as Dead Ted. From where I was standing, he looked bad. And by bad I mean it looked like someone had tried to put clothes on a meatloaf. His shirt and pants were tattered, he was covered in blood, dirt, and judging by the smell of him, possibly his own shit. (
I feel like that’s a part the movies and books leave out of zombie lore. When you die, your body almost always releases your bowels. ) He was still twenty paces away and I could already smell him. I start to panic at this point. My initial thought was founded in common sense. He’d been in a wreck. The man had ran into a telephone pole right down the road and managed to crawl out of said wreck, only to find himself disoriented and stumbling down my drive for help. They say 70% of car accidents happen within a mile of home. I just made that statistic up, but I’m pretty damn sure it’s a high number.
“Ted? Ted?! Jesus Christ!” I start jogging towards him and by the time I get close enough to help, it’s too late. He jumps on me like a rabid raccoon on a half-eaten hotdog. All I’m seeing is crazy eyes and gnashing teeth as I’m trying to fight off his death grip on my shirt. I’d like to tell you something poetic was going through my mind right at that moment. Like my life began flashing before my eyes, or all the things I never got to do screamed louder than the crazy man that now had me pinned to the gravel of my drive. But that’s all bullshit. Nothing was going through my head. NOTHING. It was me, panic, and a screaming maniac on top of me. And I gotta tell you, as much as the old Ted annoyed me, this new version of him downright sucked. He was all hands and teeth. I missed the guy that used to ramble on about the Big Ten Conference and constantly remind me my culvert needed unplugged or tell me my grass was getting a tad too high. I rolled around and tussled with this bastard for what seemed like an hour. I’m sure it was only ten seconds, because that’s how these fight or flight situations were, time slowed down like the goddamn Matrix, letting you relish every nanosecond of the hell you were in. Finally, I start to tire out and all I can see is Ted’s teeth coming right down on my face as my burning shoulders finally give out, but it wasn’t the end. He spews out some pathetic squeal and lets go of me. I roll back and all I can see is Jeff laying into his ass. Literally just ripping through his pants and into the meat beneath. I didn’t know the dog had it in him. With my window wide open, I grabbed the first thing I see, a steel grade stake pinned near the drive. I ripped it out of the ground and proceeded to blast Ted right upside his head. He hits the ground and I go into some kind of primeval animal mode. They say you blackout at times like this, when you go into a rage and lay into someone, I think that’s bullshit, I remember every single blow, all seventy-two of them. Jeff is barking the whole time, almost like he’s saying “Dude, stop!” But what the hell does he know? He’s just a dog. By the time I was finished, Ted no longer had a head, it was what I can only describe as watermelon salad someone had thrown a toupee on. The clang of the bloody grade stake leaving my hand and hitting the ground is the only thing that snaps me out of the rage. I stumbled backwards as the sight of what I had done embeds into my memory forever. I fall onto my ass and do the only thing I can at that moment. I cry. I sob like a child until nothing comes out. I had just killed a person. Well, what used to be a person. Regardless, in my mind right then I was a murderer. It didn’t seem to matter if it were him or me, it just seemed wrong and regretful and infinitely disgusting. Jeff just sat there in between us, seemingly as concerned for me as he was for what used to be our neighbor. But he didn’t make a move in either direction, he just let me vent and process until I was as ready as I could be to move. When the proverbial smoke finally cleared and I started coming around to my better senses, a thought jolts me. The choppers. The goddamn choppers. The DUST. And then I’m right back in my dark place; the naked guy that holed himself up in his house for days with duct tape on every crack, shoveling cereal into his mouth under a gas mask. I began rocking back and forth where I sat as my mind was consumed with the terrifying thoughts of “I’m next.” This is what the dust does, it turns you into a mindless beast ready to gnaw the face off of every living thing you come across. All I could hear was a ticking clock in my head, it mirrored the thump of my pulse as my heartrate elevated in the fearing thoughts of how it would start. Would I begin losing my memory? Would I just fall ill like the flu, throwing up and pissing out my ass until I was a piece of beef jerky that died and was reanimated by whatever the hell was in that dust? Or would it happen, BOOM, just like that? And then I thought about Jeff….Jesus Christ, would it turn him? I’m not sure what was worse, the thought of me turning and eating him or him turning and me having to pummel his head into lasagna with a grade stake. Good lord…I had to get my shit together, and NOW.