by David Smith
He affirmed my worst fears about a lot of things and my first instinct was to go upstairs and put a bullet it both of them but thinking it over, I was almost relieved. When you have such a fear eating away at you then it comes true and you feel yourself still breathing, you can put it away after that.
"Old men like to tell stories, right?” I asked him. “Well, you’ve got my attention.”
Chapter 11: The Farmer’s Story
Before the outbreak, I had a farm about thirty miles from here. New York City was gone by the time I even knew anything was going on. When I heard, I thought we were far enough away from any major roads that no one would come looking to cause trouble, being so far out in the sticks. I had eighty acres surrounded by public land. The nearest neighbor was five miles away and the nearest highway was more than ten down a bunch of curvy back roads.
I wasn't born into farming though. My Dad was a no good drunk who never worked a day in his life. Momma's thing was pills and men who could get it up. We had electricity sometimes, water most of the time and food whenever Momma could find a boyfriend who was married. She'd threaten to tell their wife and we'd have grocery money for a week or two. When I got old enough though, I'd steal her pills and sell them to my stoner friends at school and buy groceries with that.
When I was in ninth grade I had a science teacher though, Leon Ferguson, who caught me selling. I was too invisible at home for my parents to ever be abusive but I thought this might be the one time I really got a beating. Instead, he flushed them down the toilet and made me a deal. He said if I would join the football team he wouldn't tell anybody and I figured I might as well. It wasn't like I had anything better to do.
I was taller than anybody on the team and even though I didn't know the first thing about football, I had a pretty good arm so they made me second string quarterback. I never really fit in though. They liked to drink and party after football games and see if they could screw each other's girlfriends. I wasn't really into all that so I'd usually just go home. The popular kids knew who I was now but they didn't like me, which was okay with me. I didn't really like them much either.
I didn't even get to practice much, mostly just threw the ball back and forth to the quarterback to help him warm up. Then, in about the seventh game of the season, he got hurt. We were already up by three points and our defense wasn't too good but I managed to throw three touchdowns to keep us ahead and we won it. I wasn't really paying attention but it turns out it was a district game or something so I was the big hero for a couple hours.
The needed a place to party after and one of the guys said, "Hey, you live out in the woods in McNeil, don't you?"
"Yeah." I answered.
"Can we party at your house?"
I knew, by that time, Daddy and Momma would both be in a coma. "Yeah, I need a ride anyway."
So, for two hours I sat in my back yard, all of us around a fire in a rusty old drum, listening to all the guys take turns telling their stories about what great thing they did in every single play while their girlfriends sat in awe of their heroics. Each story that was told was more detailed and amazing than the last and the teller, more of an unstoppable force and important in their own mind. I realized that night that when somebody says, 'ask so and so' or keeps insisting that they're not lying, they're lying. Finally, one of the guys pitched it to me. "Tell 'em, Nick. Tell 'em."
"Well. You ran to the end zone and I threw it to you."
"Tell the truth though! There was three defenders on me wasn't there?! Wasn't there?!" He was jumping around and pointing at me.
"Well if you say there was...I guess there was."
All of a sudden, one of the guys came running out the back door with a naked cheerleader chasing him, holding her skirt over her chest. He was videoing her with his cell phone, held back where she couldn't reach it and she was screaming at him and crying. Her boyfriend and the quarterback, with his fingers in a splint, came out in their underwear laughing and slapping each other on the back and a few of the other guys started laughing while the girls just sat there giving them dirty looks.
"Oh man, this is going on YouTube." He said as her boyfriend held her back and told her to quit being a prude. "Hey man, where can I get signal out here?" He asked me.
"Here, let me see it." I said. He handed it to me and I started walking down through the woods behind the house toward the creek. Half of them followed me as I was looking down at it, like I was trying to get a signal, and as soon as I got to the creek I chucked it downstream as hard as I could. It was a beautiful sound, that phone sailing through the leaves and splashing down in the water.
I turned around and for a moment, everybody was just standing there looking at me. I just waited for a response. It came in the form of being tackled into the water. Thank God it was only a foot deep because he tried to drown me. Him, and two other ones, stomped me so bad I couldn't stand up straight for three days.
I never played football again but Monday morning I met Alicia Smith. She walked up to me as soon as I stepped of the school bus and introduced herself. She was a cheerleader but wasn't at the party. She said her Dad always made her come home right after the game.
"I heard what you did Friday night after the game." She said.
"Well. I did what I could. I didn't really think it through." I kinda laughed.
"I'm glad you didn't."
I saw the girl and her boyfriend walking from the parking lot, his arm around her. I hardly recognized her with her clothes on.
"They still together?"
"Yep."
"Hmm, should've saved myself an ass whoopin'."
"No. You did the right thing. It won't make a difference to them, but it does to me."
Long story short, we were together from then on. I don't know what she saw in me. She was the prettiest girl in school and that's not even a matter of opinion, that's a fact. She was from a rich family, compared to mine anyway. Her Daddy was a baptist preacher and she was one of God's Angels, she really was.
That summer, as part of our deal, since I had quit the football team, I worked for Mr. Ferguson on his farm and I found my second love. There was just something special about working in the dirt, being able to get food without having to steal or hurt anybody for it. For the next seven years I worked for him and when Alicia finished college we got married.
She got a job as a physical therapist and after living with her parents for a couple years we bought the land.
She had been a cheerleader in high school and played softball in college so I knew she was strong, for a girl, but I didn't realize how strong till that first year we lived out there on our own. She worked in the clinic all week and on Saturdays, would stay out there driving fence posts and bailing hay till I was too tired to keep up with her. I don't think she ever realized just how much she saved my life. Mr. Ferguson showed me a way to live but...she gave me a reason to. We never had any kids. I couldn't but she didn't hold it against me. We were just fine being just the two of us.
He lit another cigarette and took a long drag.
I didn’t think they would find us, only gun I even owned was a shotgun I used to run off coyotes. But I was wrong. They came down Highway 59 and spread both ways across Highway 10 like a flood and when everyone in the towns and cities were dead or ate up, they filtered on out and down the back roads. Once they broke through the state line from Alabama, it only took them two weeks before they found our place. There were only about fifteen or so at first but that was enough. They moved a lot quicker back then, especially once the rigormortis started to fade.
I was out in the field and saw them coming down the road like a band of drunks coming home from Mardi Gras. I watched, not believing they could still move with their guts hanging out and limbs missing, until they came into the front yard. I called for Alicia as I ran to the house, yelling for her to get the shotgun. I came in through the front door and locked it behind me but she wasn’t there.
After grabbing the shotgun myself,
from the coat closet, I ran to the back door. When I opened it she was almost there. She was limping on one leg, bleeding from just above her knee, her boot and sock all bright red and wet. She was squeezing the bite on her leg with one hand and holding onto that arm with the other hand just below the elbow, blood pouring out from between her fingers. She wasn’t crying or screaming, just had this pissed off look all over her face like someone had left the lid loose on the salt. Nothing could scare her, nothing could hurt her, nothing could…
She hobbled right past me, into the house and behind her, out by the water pump shed, fifty feet or so from the house, was one laying face down in the dirt with a shovel sticking out the back of its head. Another was halfway to the back door and closing in fast. I shot it in the chest and it fell to one knee, blood pouring down its front. It bounced back up to its feet and came on. I shot it in the face this time. The meat peeled back and its eyes turned to mush. It came on without even slowing down, its lips hanging, teeth broken and bleeding. It was almost to the back door so I ran out to meet it. I aimed for its mouth and let it run right up on the barrel of that shotgun and fired. That blew the rest of its head clean in two, the top of it flipping in the air like a pancake full of hair.
When I went back in, she was standing by the sink, washing the bite on her arm. It looked bad, a deep gash that kept filling up with blood as fast as she washed it out. The one on her leg was even worse. It had took a chunk of her. Her sock and boot were already full and were making a puddle in the floor where she stood. I grabbed a dish towel and pushed it into the wound as the ones in front of the house started beating on the door. I knew I needed to shore up the front door and the windows so I carried her to the back bathroom, laid her down in the floor and told her to hold pressure on it but she was already white as a sheet and too weak to hold much.
On the way back up the hall, I heard a window shatter in the front room and went went straight past the ones climbing through it and into the kitchen to get the shotgun. I had heard on the radio that you had to shoot them in the head. After blowing the heads clean off two of them that had come through the window, I tilted the couch up on its end and walked it over to block the hole they had come through. Others started pushing against it and I knew it wouldn’t hold so I slid the recliner over to brace it up then ran back down the hall. When I got back to the bathroom, she was passed out, blood pooling around her in the floor.
As soon as I put the rag back on her leg I heard the couch bang against the floor in the living room so I picked her up over my shoulder and made a run for the back door. They were already coming down the hall, four of them I think, so I ran into the bedroom across the hall and locked the door behind us.
I looked out the window and didn’t see any. Apparently, they were all in the hallway. They beat at the door as I wrapped her in a bed sheet to lower her out the window. I kept looking back over my shoulder and every time I did, the old nails in that door facing were pushed a little further out. It was only five or six feet to the ground but I was very careful with her. Just as I got her down, the first piece of the old wooden door splintered off into the room. They weren’t smart enough to reach in and unlock it but just kept beating at it till there was nothing left but the hinges. That’s probably the only thing that gave me enough time to climb out the window myself.
I threw her over my shoulder, still wrapped in the sheet, and took her and the shotgun through the fields and into the woods. There were a few out there and I used my last few shells to slow them down enough so we could make it across the creek. It was deeper than usual, almost up to my waist and the current was so strong that every time I lifted one foot to take a step, the other slid downstream in the sand. I made it to the other side though, with her up over my shoulder and when the ones I had blasted in the field caught up, only two of them made it across, the rest falling and being swept downstream. I dropped her and I swung that shotgun like a baseball bat, holding it by the barrel, and caught one of them just right, killing it on the spot, broke the gun in half, I hit it so hard. The other one grabbed me and tried to bite but I pulled it toward me and threw it down then stuck what was left of the gun in its mouth and clean out the back. I sunk it so deep that I was barely able to pull it up out of the ground.
I rolled her over, there in the dry leaves, to check on her and she was already dead, bled out. I sat with her a few minutes, just holding her, brushing her hair back from her pale face, trying to memorize it. I had seen the news, I knew people were coming back. That’s what had happened to the ones at the house. That’s why the ones in the field just got back up after I shot them full of holes. But after a minute, I started thinking, hoping, she wouldn’t.
Then her eyelids started trembling, then her whole body started jerking, like when you shoot a deer and it’s dead but when you start to cut it open, it twitches sometimes. When she did finally open her eyes, her mouth came open with it and she went straight for my arm, grabbing it and pulling it towards her mouth. I pulled away from her and scrambled back till I hit a tree. I could see right then, there was nothing left of her. I could see it in her eyes.
She jumped up quick and lunged right for me like a linebacker going for the sack. Stepping back from her, I put the shotgun barrel up between us and she bit into it, trying to get my fingers I guess. I twisted it up against her head and then pushed her down in front of me. She was scrambling on all fours like a wild hog, me holding her head down so she couldn’t bite at me. Finally, she slipped and went down just long enough for me to lift it and drop it on the back of her head. That layed her out flat and I had to drop it three more times before she quit moving.
I’ve had to put down rabid dogs, sick horses and mules and I’ve never shed a tear. But putting down another person, especially someone you love, that’s a whole different story…even when they aren’t there anymore.
I sat there for two days, holding her busted head in my lap. I didn’t sleep, didn’t eat, just sat there, blaming myself for her dying. Finally, I decided it was time to go, before I starved. I didn’t want those things eating on her so I drug her out in the water and downstream a little, to where it got deeper, right by a big fell oak tree. I shoved her up under the limbs of that tree, said a few words to myself and a little prayer, then I went on downstream. She was 29 years old.
I was hoping if I stayed in the water, maybe they would lose my scent. I walked and swam a couple miles, staying in the creek till I came to where it went under the highway. It was about twenty feet from the water to the bottom of the bridge but I could see one car, the front of it and its front tires hanging over the edge, a big chunk of concrete that it had knocked off laying in the water.
I crawled up the bank by the foot of the bridge, through the briars and when I got close to the top, I could hear them. Hundreds of them were passing over the bridge, between abandoned cars, tripping over bodies that were too ate up to get back up and join the herd. They looked like a river heading to the gulf. Some had been dead for what looked like weeks, others only a day or two. There were cars on the highway as far as I could see to the top of the next hill, in the ditches, even up in the woods. It looked like the bedroom of a four year old whose Momma stayed too drunk to clean house.
Then one fell on top of me. I never saw it coming. It didn’t get me though. I managed to kick my way out from underneath it before it could bite. Luckily, that one had been dead a long time and was mostly decomposed, weak and slow so I was able to get to my feet but the ruckus started a chain reaction. They all started taking notice and heading my way, some much faster than others. I ran all the way back to the farm, zig-zagging back and forth across the creek once they were far enough behind me, hoping they wouldn’t be able to track my scent back home. I was a young man and a lot quicker on my feet back then.
When I got back to the farm, there, sticking his head out the top of a Humvee with a .50 caliber mounted on top was Jennings, all decked out in military fatigues, covered in dried blood and looking scared as a littl
e boy who’d just lost his Momma. He drew down on me with that machine gun at first but once he realized I wasn’t dead he poked his head back down in the Humvee and drove up to me. “Get in if you want to live.” He said, like some kind of action movie hero.
He told me he was the commander of a seal team and lost all his men fighting a horde some forty miles away. I’m no soldier, I’d never been to war, so it never occurred to me to question how he had lost all his men and still had a truck full of unopened ammo cans and his life. He asked if it was my farm and if I knew how to run it and we made a deal.
He knew of a place that was a lot bigger than my farm and more defendable, this place you see here. So, I was to raise the food and he would take care of keeping the dead out. It didn’t take much convincing for the family that lived here either.
When we showed up, the gates were wide open and there were a few dead out in the front yard walking toward the front doors. When they heard the truck though, they turned around and the rest started pouring out of the house like we had kicked over an ant bed. Jennings handed me a pistol and told me to watch our rear while he started wiping them out with the .50 cal. It took about ten minutes of him shooting that loud son of a bitch and reloading till the yard was stacked two of three deep and only a few were still moving, reaching up but unable to move, mostly. There were a few who were blown in half and were struggling to crawl over the rest but they were too messed up to be any danger.
As we walked on top of them, careful not to step on any that were still snapping their teeth, more started coming out of the woods across the road, around the corners of the house from the fields. When we got into the house I followed him into the kitchen where he grabbed a heavy cleaver and a butcher knife. We had to fight our way back into the living room and up the stairs. That man is a coward but when he's backed into a corner he can definitely hold his own.