Cleaver

by McCloud, Wes

  Morning came. I watched the sunrise with Jeff at the window and it reminded me of when it was just him and I in our own little world of ignorant bliss. It hadn’t been that long and yet it seemed like it had been years.

  The same things were repeated that morning. Though Maddie barely eats and I don’t touch a bite of food. My heart is still numb from all the horrors, most of all, my behavior. I would never not be a murderer in my own eyes from that day hence, no matter how much I told myself it was justified. Words are in short supply between Maddie and I. Even more than they had been. It’s odd, it’s like two people that are right beside one another yet a million miles away, both for similar reasons. You’d think our equally shared trauma would’ve made us more talkative, but it hadn’t. We just needed time.

  We cleaned the house and fed the dogs and I set out to the permanently stained roadside that had become an altar of offerings to the deadeater. It’s cleaned nearly the whole pile of bodies up yet again, but there are still hundreds left to haul. What was left of the Daddies were all gone as well. Like they never existed. My mind started replaying the gunshots and the pink mist and the screaming that I couldn’t even hear, but it all seems fake now that I don’t see them. Almost like it was some dream or sick indulgence I conjured inside my head. The only things left behind to prove they ever were real are their guns, their burned out camper, and Maddie. I remember finally shaking my head of all the grimness as I watched the dogs ravenously sniffing round the area where the deadeater frequented. It seemed odd just how little I knew about this creature despite all the times I’d been within three stones throws from it. All I knew was it appeared to be nocturnal, it drug off the dead, whether infected or not, and it was big. If I had been a scientist, and I’d only had those three things to report after months of being around it, I’d be back to working at a corner coffee shop. It had instilled two fears inside of me. The first was what it could do to me or the dogs, the other was the fear that I’d never get to see its true form. It was a sick curiosity that was easily solvable. All I had to do was set out the bodies and hide behind something, yet I seemed to lack the fortitude to do so. So I shoved that scenario into my pocket for another day and went to work, piling enough bodies to appease it for another night.

  I was finished with the task not long after noon. The bright side of this whole ordeal was the fact that it seemed like free trash removal. Otherwise I would’ve had to move these bodies much farther away and possibly set them on fire to get rid of them.

  I parked the backhoe and found Maddie in the backyard swinging my sword around with an audience of panting dogs watching her. I had barely touched it since I’d hacked that guy to bits the day before, so to see her playing with it unnerved me for a moment. I stood behind grandma’s old azalea bush for awhile, watching her spin around and hack at imaginary enemies, grimacing and grunting. She was a hot mess. She had no idea what she was doing, but neither did I when I’d first picked it up. I guess it didn’t help that that sword weighed almost as much as she did. I finally walked out and when she caught sight of me she threw Orion to the picnic table and put her head down like I was about to admonish her for what she’d done. Unfortunately, maybe she was used to that sort of thing.

  “You got an interesting technique there, kid. But I wouldn’t go running out looking for zombies just yet.” Her eyes lit up a bit.

  “Will you teach me how to use one? Like Obi Wan?” Wow, she had been listening. I remember I just couldn’t hold a grin back on that one.

  “Maybe…for now we gotta get you some clothes…” I looked down to her bare feet. They were stained red from the yard. “…And some shoes.” And we did that. We set out on foot with a group of about two dozens dogs and began searching the nearby houses. I’d already gone to a lot of them before this, but I hadn’t been looking for girl’s clothing, just food, mainly. Just two houses down, we hit paydirt. Not sure who’d lived there but she was close to the same size as Maddie. She filled a trash bag full of bras and underwear, pants, and tops. Unfortunately this woman didn’t have the same shoe size, but we found a match for that after a few more houses. We returned back to the house with a decent sized wardrobe for her. She had this beaming smile that I’d never seen before as she proudly carried those bags into the house. I led her upstairs and gave her a room. She acted like she didn’t quite understand the concept. Perhaps she’d never had her own room before. I showed her the closet and dresser inside of it and told her she could put all her stuff away. She just took the bags and dropped them inside the closet on the floor. It was right then and there that I realized this girl had no concept of putting away clothing.

  “No, kid, here.” I grabbed a hanger and handed it to her. She looked at it oddly. I took down another hanger and hung a shirt on it. “There.” She lit up a little and repeated my actions herself. I then showed her how to hang pants and put socks away. She was on her own on folding, I had the folding skills of an armless, blind man. “Now you got it.” I stood there in the doorway and watched her toil, putting all her clothes away. It was a little sad watching it unfold, to be honest. She obviously had no one to show her these things. Someone obviously had always picked her outfits. And again, I just didn’t want to know. If she ever trusted me enough to tell me of the life she’d lived before this, I would be there to listen. Though I did ask her one question while I watched her put her shoes away.

  “Maddie, did your mom never show you how to do this?” I imagined myself being skewered on the internet over the insinuation that it was a woman’s place to show kids how to fold clothes. How dare I? But the internet was dead, and I know that headless dude in the belly of the deadeater wouldn’t have ever showed her how. She just shrugged.

  “You had a mom, right?”

  She shrugged again. I knew it was time to leave her alone.

  “Okay, get some of the those clothes on. I’ll be downstairs.” And I left her to it. I imagine she felt just a little bit more human again when she slipped those garments on her body, but what was funny was her choice in shirts. She come back down the stairs wearing a Star Wars shirt, only it wasn’t the first one I’d given her, it was another one of mine. She’d got it from my closet, but I didn’t say anything about it. I had plenty left for the both of us.

  Evening returned and the same uneasiness swept in with the setting sun. We gathered the dogs and lit the lantern and did our nightly ritual, continuing Lucas’s saga, only this time she didn’t fall asleep by the time I’d wrapped up Empire, she just sat there with wide wondering eyes.

  “And then what happened? Was that the end?”

  “No…still a little ways to go. I’m done for tonight though.” Her disappointment was palpable, but I didn’t want to burn her out. Actually the real reason was I couldn’t even remember how episode six opened. If I was being honest, I think I’d not only taken liberties the past three nights, but I’d also omitted quite a few things because of my foggy memory. I loved Star Wars, but I was rusty nonetheless. As the silence crept in, I started thinking about the fact that maybe this was the only way these stories would ever be told again. Through spoken word. Passed down from me to her to who knows who in the future. Were these iconic tales going to be nothing more than folklore passed down between the last pieces of the human race? Eventually fading out or becoming something else entirely? It was weird to think about.

  “Cleaver?”

  “Yep?”

  “What happens when we run out of stuff to feed the bad thing?”

  The more I was around her, the more I realized she seemed to have the mental maturity of a girl more like the age of eleven or even ten, but she wasn’t dumb. That question was living proof of it. She knew what was going on. It was an inquiry that gnawed at me every second, and I didn’t know how to answer it. I sat there quietly, almost hoping she would drop the subject if I didn’t answer her.

  “Will it come for sis? Will it dig her up?” That made my stomach drop. It would eventually come for her sister’s body if ther
e was nothing else left. And all my fallen dogs. I had to end this.

  “Don’t worry, kid. Nothing’s taking your sis. I’m gonna make it go away.”

  I managed to catch a few winks that night, maybe because the thoughts of planning the deadeater’s send off were easier to stomach than the dark place I went every night when things went quiet.

  Dogs and Monsters

  Morning came, and so did the cleaning of floors and the consumption of pancakes. Thank god for Hungry Jack. Just add water. After the chores were complete, I didn’t rush right out to refill the deadeater’s plate. Instead, I went out to the barn and started toiling away there. I gathered up as much steel as I could, primarily anything rod-like in shape; pipes, rebar, and so on. Through trial and error I began heating and bending various metal stock, forming a series of giant hooks that I sharpened the points of. Maddie watched me in wonder, sitting atop a high stool, her legs swinging beneath a mouth often agape. She had no idea what I was doing, and neither did I, in a sense. Somewhere amidst my sleep deprivation I concocted a plan, and this was only the first step of it. After I fashioned half a dozen of the large hooks, I began cutting lengths of thick cable off a roll I found in the back of the barn. I rigged the sections to the backs of the hooks, creating large leader lines; I was going fishing. I loaded the whole mess into the front bucket of the backhoe and drove out to the rank and rot of the hellmouthed cornfield the beast used to enter and exit the buffet line. I dropped my hooks and lines and returned with six fairly intact zombie corpses to use as bait. I cringed as I slipped the ends of the hooks just inches into the rotten flesh and sinew, looping them through tendons of the arms and legs so they’d have a better anchor point. I then straightened out all six cable runs back into the field on the other side of the road. I went and fetched more bodies, scattering them amongst the baited ones, trying to make the situation less suspicious. Maybe I was overthinking that part, but I wasn’t taking chances. After that, I parked the backhoe at the end of the lines and tethered them to the steel hook points on the front bucket. The hook, line, and reel was set, then I brought in the net. Well, maybe ‘net’ is a bad analogy for the massive gun I’d laid nearly a dozen men to waste with days before, but you get the idea. I used the Bronco to drag it through the field and placed it right beside the backhoe. And that was that. It was all over but the waiting.

  I burned the last six hours of daylight back at the barn, cutting and pounding metal like I’d done on the cusp of the dawn of all this. It was just me and the tools and the steel, it was the only thing I could do to keep my mind free of the task that lie before me. Maddie had since disappeared, I’d handed her my sword and told her to have fun. Wow, if I had been a parent, my kid probably would’ve lasted six years tops. She was a teenager though, no one ever did anything stupid during that part of their lives.

  Right about dusk, I rounded up my work and closed up shop in the barn. I didn’t see Maddie at first, I’m not going to lie, I started worrying that maybe she’d lopped off a leg and my idea of letting her play with a weapon wasn’t as brilliant as I’d hoped. I rounded the front of the house and stopped. She was there by the picnic table. She was knelt down on the ground on the far end of it, staring to the opposite end where my sword sat all by itself. Her arm was stretched out towards it, fingers spread wide with an intensity burning on her face that I’d mirrored myself as a kid. I knew exactly what she was trying to do. She was trying to use The Force. She was convinced she was going to be able to make that sword take flight across the table and into her waiting hand, all she had to do was believe. As I stood there leaned against the corner of the house, I almost envied her. I envied the time in my life that I thought all things were possible. That I could fly, or move objects with my mind, or lift a truck over my head. I truly missed that beautiful ignorance. I remembered being her. I’d tried the same thing oh-so-many times as a kid. But alas, the objects never moved. Of course there was that small part of me that thought, “What if she does move that sword?” I’d probably shit myself, but I wouldn’t be sad about it.

  I let her attempts go on for several minutes before I finally cleared my throat and broke her concentration. She jumped up from the ground like she’d been kicked, desperately trying to behave as if she was up to something completely different. Her face was flushed red with embarrassment, but I acted as if I’d seen nothing.

  “I have something for you,” was all I could say, because I did. I held a gift for her behind my back, a thing that I’d worked on all day. You see, I hadn’t spent that entire day forging abstract art or making steel rods into stick people, I took the time to make something useful. At least that was the hope. I pulled my hands round and held out a small sword I’d forged much in the likeness of Orion. I held it out to her. Her eyes lit up.

  “You made me a lightsaber?” Not quite, but I nodded just the same as she ripped it from my grasp and started swinging it around. I could’ve only wished we had actual lightsabers. The damn zombies wouldn’t stand a chance, I’d just be running through herds of the them, swinging as crazily as Maddie was at that moment, and they be falling apart like stale gas station cookies.

  “Careful, now,” I scolded as she accidently took a chop out of the corner of the picnic table. She stopped and started looking at her sword with admiration.

  “Does this mean I’m a Jedi now?” I wanted to laugh but resisted for fear she’d take it wrong. But I also wasn’t going to stand there and say she was worthy enough to take on the great dangers of the universe all by herself. It was the equivalent of a mental participation ribbon.

  “Not quite, kid. I’d say you’re more of a padawan right now, but one day you’ll be a Jedi.”

  I spent the next hour trying to show her moves and blocks with her new weapon. I wasn’t exactly the right person for that job, but the world was fresh out of traditionally trained sword fighters at the moment, so I did my best. We playfully crossed swords and mock dueled our way across the yard. We smiled, we laughed, and the world and all the death inside of it, just seemed to melt away for a beautiful moment.

  My attention soon drew to the firebrand of dusk burning the tips of the trees and I knew it was time to wrap up our training. We went to the normal tasks of rounding up every last dog and sitting in the living room, but Maddie would be spending most of this night by herself. There’d be no continuation of her favorite space saga. Not until I rid us of the thing that forced us into the house like rats every night. She nervously watched me from the couch as I began rounding up a spotlight and various other items, strapping them to myself. She knew something was different about that night, how could she not?

  “Where you going?” She finally spit it out.

  “Don’t worry. I’m not going far and I’ll be back.” I tried saying that with the utmost confidence, but I was potentially lying. I went to grab the door handle as she spoke,

  “But what if you don’t come back?” I have to admit, I didn’t expect that level of pragmatism to come from her. So I quickly decided to get aboard the same train.

  “If I don’t come back, you have to promise something,”

  She nodded with fear in her eyes.

  “Take care of these dogs. Okay? Never leave this house without taking some with you and never stop letting new ones come here. They are the key to surviving, and one day, they might be the key to ending all of this.” I truly believed that. If there was still a population of humans left, then surely there was one among them that could figure out a way to use the blood of these dogs to stop this hell once and for all.

  “I can help. Let me go with you,” she pleaded.

  “No. You’re staying here. I can’t risk both of us not being around for the sake of these dogs. You and me are the only two people that know how special they are. Without us, they’re all just strays in someone else’s eyes.” She had nothing to say. Her eyes just glistened in the light of the lantern as I left her behind. I walked out to the backhoe and sat down. It was just a waiting game at th
is point. I knew that thing would be here, it was just a matter of time.

  Hours slipped by as I stared through the darkness at the bodies scattered across the roadway. The night was darker than usual, barely a moonbeam showed through the cloudy canopy on high. My ears fell numb amongst the symphony of crickets and other insects that shuffled through the grass. As expected, my eyes and mind began playing tricks. I swore at times the baited bodies would move, ever so slightly. I swore I’d hear the crass flittering of cornstalks moving about in the distance. I swore and I swore, but I kept completely still, always reassuring myself that my imagination was now my worst enemy.

  I had no way of knowing the time, but I guessed it was somewhere in the 2 a.m. hour when I finally heard it. A noise. There, far out in the corn where the field crested a hill. It started off subtle, but then quickly escalated into what sounded like an entire herd of deer making their way through the maize. It was a sound I’d heard before, especially right before harvest time, so maybe it was actually deer. There was this part of me that prayed that it was, anyway. But the closer the noise came, the more I heard other sounds amongst it. The hair raised on the back of my neck at the sounds of grunting and wheezing, and before I could even decide just what the hell I was listening to, it was shattered by the sounds of something exploding through the stream. I jumped up to full attention and readied myself, one hand on the steering wheel and the other on the ignition. I sat there, straining my eyes, but all I could see was a giant blob of a dark figure, bobbing along to the edge of the roadway. It was quite large. Maybe eight feet tall by my initial estimation. Jesus Christ, it was there. The thing, The deadeater. Within a stones throw, it was right there, and I froze solid. I wanted so badly to flip the lights on, to reveal its true form unto my tired eyes, but I knew such a thing was imbecilic at best. Even if I chose to be so stupid, I doubt I could’ve mustered the fortitude to even go through with it right then and there.