by McCloud, Wes
“It’s okay…it’s okay. You’re gonna be okay.” And she’s not gonna be okay. She knows it. I know it. All I could do is weep along with her, silently cursing both god and the dead as I toil away at this fruitless, reverse disembowelment that’s just making things worse. Suddenly, her hand shoots down and grabs mine, slowly leading me out of her stomach. She’s missing fingers. They’ve been bitten off. Then I see the bites going up her arm and I know right then she’s absolutely finished. Our eyes meet and she mutters something I don’t expect,
“It’s not your fault.” Her hand becomes as tight as a vice on mine. I was convinced she was going to break the bones beneath as her whole body starts to go into convulsions. And I remember what Frank had said, about his granddaughter and the seizures. She was turning. I garnered enough strength to rip her hand away and I began walking backwards, watching her convulse until she fell from the table into the grass. I’m sick to my stomach from the guilt, she said it wasn’t my fault, but it was my fault, she was becoming one of them before my eyes and once again I was helpless to stop any of it. I should’ve ended it all right then and there. Dropped the sword down and released her. I owed her that much. But I couldn’t. I pulled the mask back down over my face; a sick sense of curiosity overtook my human side as I kept watching her flail around on the ground, listening to bones breaking amidst the violence of her transformation. Blood poured from her eyes, nose, and ears. Her bowels released. She was well on her way. Two minutes feels like a day’s worth and she once again becomes animate. She’s much like Ted. Soiled and slow moving, already eyeing me like lunch as she rises to stand and her guts fall all over her bare feet below. Still, I can do nothing. She can’t be a day over thirteen, and even though there’s nothing left behind her eyes, I still see the innocent, terrified kid she was not but moments before. She takes her first stumbling steps in my direction, they sound like thunder, even though my entire existence is engulfed by the screeches of the dead and the ravenous barking of dogs, her steps are deafening. I had never seen anyone change, and I thought I never would. But yet, here I was. Her arms stretch out for my neck, fingers curled in growing hunger. It’s time to let her go. The sound of her severed head hitting the ground is the only thing louder than her approach. As I watch her limp body crumble, all the noise around turns into a hushed death-hum. I can’t hear anything now. And this goes on for a time I can’t even begin to guess. It only ends when I feel a hand on my shoulder. All the screaming and barking sucks back into my senses. I’m jarred back to reality. The hand on my shoulder belongs to the one surviving girl, or so I’d hoped. I turn to see that I have backed up all the way to the property line and I’m being grabbed by the dead. Once again, I go insane. I start hacking and slashing down the line, attacking the forefront of the horde with the help of the dogs.
It’s only when I begin to tire, that I remember the greatest weapons I wield are still sitting in the refrigerator. I run to the house and retrieve several squirt guns. I walk back out, both hands raised, spraying the dog spit right into the faces of every zombie I see. It’s like the 4th of July all over again, only its guts and innards spraying into the summer skies as I don the smile of the devil beneath my mask, thinking about the girls I couldn’t save. There are hundreds of them. Far more than I battled at Route 40. It takes us hours and HOURS, to dispatch every last one of them, but we do it. By the end, I had exhausted every last drop of dog saliva and had resorted to the old fashioned divide and conquer method with the help of Orion. I ended up passing out on the lawn from exhaustion.
I jerk awake to the sound of barking dogs and a buzzing hum in my ear. My eyes pop open to see a drone hovering only a foot above my face. It looks just like the one back at the dollar store. But since I don’t have an eighteen inch zombie dong to take it down this time, I use my sword instead. I sit up and watch it go spiraling out of control, blasting into the side of my house where it takes a face plant right into a bucket of dog shit. I was only sure of two things about the person/s that were operating these things; they weren’t that bright and, I’d say, they were beyond pissed with me. I walked over to the bucket and watched the fading props of the drone as they flung dog poo in every direction, sinking further into the brown below. I shoved my boot in there, pushing it down until the aircraft bubbled out its last buzz of death. I was still out of it. I didn’t really care about the drone at that moment. I just started walking the yard, taking in the sights of the piles of dead bodies. They lined the entire, immediate property line, arranged in one unending mound so high you could take a kneeling refuge behind it. There had to be a thousand of them, maybe more, math was never my strong suit. There was not a whole one among them. It was a gelatinous mound of torsos, guts, legs, arms, and severed heads. It smelled so bad that it didn’t even have a smell. It was like the odor was so intense, that the human nose could feel it more than smell it. A noxious gas you swore you could light on fire. I pulled my mask back down to block it out. I couldn’t even imagine what it smelled like to the dogs. I owed my life to them yet again, but I’m sure they weren’t keeping count.
I spent the next hour filling their bowls and patting their heads in a silent show of appreciation. If it hadn’t have been for their pee all round the property, the zombies would’ve taken me out that day. When I went back in the house, Jeff kept whining. He was driving me insane. I fed him for god’s sake, what more did he want? He followed me into the bathroom and started pawing at the shower curtain. A little chill ran up me. Since I was about six years old, I always made a habit of pulling back the shower curtain to check for goblins, or knife wielding murders, you know, rational things that could be hiding in my tub waiting to take me out the second my ass cheeks kissed the seat. And this age-old practice hadn’t changed because of the apocalypse. In fact, it seemed more practical than ever. And now that my dog was pawing and whining away, I was convinced there was a goddamn gremlin hiding in there. As I went to grab the curtain, I felt something was off. Every time I’d done this before there was that part of me that knew damn well there was nothing behind there, but this was different. I felt a presence. I ripped the vail away and jumped back. I couldn’t even let out what I’m sure would’ve been an emasculating shriek. I wasn’t even sure what I was looking at at first. It was a bloody human…but she was alive. I don’t know how old she was fifteen, sixteen, it didn’t matter. In my eyes she was still a kid. A terrified one. She couldn’t even scream. She just sat there against the wall with her arms wrapped round her knees, trembling uncontrollably. All I could make out amongst the stains of blood and rot were her white-haloed pupils staring up at me in dread. I’m sure I wasn’t helping. I was donning my mask and the innard juices of a thousand zombies I’d forgotten to wash of. Jeff jumped right up, whining, trying to lick at her hands. I grabbed him and pulled him away.
“She doesn’t need your help, bud.” I usher him out the door and remove my mask. I have no idea what to say to this girl. Especially given the circumstances of how she ended up in my tub. I mean, what icebreaker do you throw out? “Hey, that was crazy wasn’t it? You want some pizza?” Yeah, no. I didn’t want to say anything, but after about a solid minute of us just staring at each other, that was becoming much worse than saying something stupid. I finally put my hand out and spoke,
“I…I’m not going to hurt you. You’re safe.” She said nothing. So I went on. “I’m going to leave you alone now. I’m gonna walk out, shut that door, and you can come out when you’re ready. Okay?” I thought she nodded, but I wasn’t sure. Hell, maybe she didn’t even speak English. I had no idea. But I left her there. I felt it was the best thing. I knew when traumatic shit happened to me, I didn’t want anyone around me for awhile. As I gently shut the door, I immediately began thinking about the other girls I hadn’t managed to save. The looks on their faces. It was something I was never going to be able to erase from my memory. I hadn’t lost anyone. I mean I had, but not in the midst of all this. I hadn’t lost someone I loved to the dead. I quickly rea
lized it was a blessing that not only had I not had to make the decision on whether or not to bash the brains of a loved one in, but I also had the luxury of not seeing a single person be taken down by the dead. I had only seen them after they’d been turned. In the scope of half a day, that had all changed.
I went outside and rinsed myself off with the garden hose as best I could. I sprayed the rest of the dogs, trying to turn their coats back to a normal shade. It seemed June, Jeff, and Pete’s coats would always be stained with a tinge of red. There was just no getting it all, it was part of them now. As I rinsed, I felt the familiar sting on my arm. You guessed, it, I’d been bit two more times. How in the hell? It had to have happened out there in the field. They weren’t that bad, but still. I was lucky I hadn’t been dragged beneath the sea of the dead along with those girls. It saddened me further to think that they were still out there, buried somewhere beneath those mounds of macerated flesh. Then I remembered her. The last one I lost. The girl who turned. She was still out there in the yard were I’d left her. I went out to her body and looked down in remorse and regret. I went to gather her up, but noticed something odd. In the midst of the mayhem I hadn’t seen it. There, next to her body laid a steel ring with a length of chain attached to it. I grabbed it up, looking it over carefully with the gears grinding away inside my wondering mind. It was a collar of sorts. A homemade shackle meant for going around the neck. She’d been wearing it. There were only two things that went through the mind when you thought of a person wearing a collar, bondage, or true enslavement. And since this girl appeared far too young to be consenting to some form of sexual bondage, it was definitely the latter. Not only had I liberated her from zombification, I’d apparently freed her from captivity. I threw the collar into the pile of the dead and moved her body into the garage, covering her with a sheet. New fears started flooding my brain. Who had she been with? Who had any of these girls been with? Were they all slaves? I wanted to rush back into the bathroom and demand answers from the cowering girl in my tub, but I calmed myself. She would emerge when she was ready.
A few more hours fell down as I sat in my living room, staring at the stain on the wall where my 65 inch LED TV used to hang. I’m sticking my hands into the couch, pulling out crumpled piles of the cash that I’d liberated from my savings accounts before the world went ass up. That green paper was exactly that, just green paper. It was absolutely worthless now. It might as well have been couch stuffing. I spent the next few hours folding it into shitty origami pieces a child would laugh at. There were hundreds of dollars in paper airplanes and cranes crash-landed all over my floors. Finally, I hear a few dogs whine and the latch on the bathroom door sings out. I freeze. Nervousness overtakes me. Even in the mouth of the end of the world, I’m still some bumbling introvert. She walks by me with a broken gait and sits in the chair next to the couch. She’s looking at me, but she can’t see me, nor I her, her blood matted hair is hanging over her face. June runs up to her and starts licking at her hands, I go to shoo her but I see the tiniest smile grace the girl’s face then go away as she pets June’s head for a brief moment. It never ceases to amaze me, the power of a dog. In the face of this hell, she managed to plant a sliver of peace in this poor girl’s heart, if only for a second, simply by licking her hand to show her she cared. She didn’t know her, but it didn’t matter. Unfortunately I, as a strange human, didn’t have the luxury of a dog. I couldn’t just walk up to her and hug her and say it was going to be okay. I wanted to, but I couldn’t. It wasn’t appropriate…right? I was a thirty-seven year old man sitting there shirtless in a room with a fifteen year old girl who was wearing a tattered nightgown and a human dog collar, complete with chain. It didn’t look good. But not the internet, nor society, was there to judge me, so I push it from my mind. I want to ask her so many questions. Questions even beyond the obvious, like her take on what started this all. But I just sit there in silence, hoping, with absurdity, that she is going to be the one to speak first. I was about to ask her if she was hungry, how stupid was that? I sure as hell knew I was the farthest thing from it, and she’d definitely been through even worse, I doubt she wanted a pop-tart right then. The horrible silence looms and looms and it looms, until even the dogs in the house are getting nervous. I finally cherry-pick the most obvious inquiry I can,
“What’s your name?” She’s quiet. She still doesn’t even look at me. Not that she was required to answer, but I again start wondering if she speaks English or maybe she’s deaf, or mute. A couple seconds later I start seeing her shoulders bounce and she’s weeping. This soon transforms into sobbing. I’m not sure how asking her name had evoked this, but I still felt one-hundred percent responsible. I rose up and placed a hand on her shoulder, trying to calm her. That didn’t go well. She recoiled from me and it made me feel like a monster for a moment. It shouldn’t have, but it did.
“I’m sorry.” It was all I could say. Then I just walked away from her; she needed more time. Just as my fingers went to touch the door, I heard a noise amongst the sniffling. “Maddie.” She squeaked out her name. It was a start. It was something. I walked back and stood over her, repeating the name. I then said mine,
“Cleaver.” She looked at me oddly for a moment, but hey, she was finally looking at me. I’m quite sure she knew that couldn’t be my actual moniker, my first name anyway, but I let it ride just the same.
“Who put this on you?” I leaned in and grabbed the chain that dangled from her steel collar. She looked at the floor as if she were ashamed, and simply answered.
“Daddy.”
My disgust elevated.
“Your dad did this to you? Why?” She replied with something that seemed rehearsed,
“To keep me safe.” Little good that did. I didn’t say that, but I wanted to. “My sisters?” She asked. It sent a wave of nausea through me. I just shook my head.
“They didn’t make it.” I expected a new wave of sobbing, but she just nodded, I think she already knew they were gone, she just needed someone to say it.
“C’mon.” I beckoned for her to get up. “Follow me. It’s okay.” She did, though it was quite reluctant. I grabbed a bucket of ice water and led her out the back door. I watched her eyes grow to saucers as she viewed the piles of corpses and body parts strewn along the property as we walked the yard. But she kept a hush about her. Once in the barn, I grabbed an angle grinder.
“I know you don’t know me, but you need to trust me. Do you trust me?” She gave me this terrified nod as she stared at the tool in my hand. I handed her ear plugs and instructed her to lean down over the bench and then I went to work. “Close your eyes.” For the next minute I went to the task of cutting through the metal that bound her, stopping for a moment or two to pour the icewater to keep the steel from burning her from the friction. Soon, the severed shackle hit the ground. She rose up, pulling out her ear plugs and rubbing at her neck. That thing had been on there for quite some time. Her flesh was stained and permanently bruised from its presence.
“Feel lighter?” I asked. She nodded. Her eyes seemed to say thank you, but her face was conflicted. It was as if she’d worn that thing longer than she hadn’t and had no idea what to think about it being gone. I didn’t even want to know what she’d been through. I watched as she turned and saw the sheet I’d placed the other girl beneath. She walked over, but I grabbed her wrist before she could throw the blanket aside.