Chapter 22
My dad wasn’t doing well. He stayed in bed, and at times had a bad fever. We knew he wasn’t going to make it, and I was worried all the time about what I was going to do about him. I went up to see him, and it was shocking to see how much he had changed in just a few days.
“Hey, Josh,” Dad said. He was covered in sweat, and his arm was swollen around the bite mark. His eyes were red and glazed and he was breathing heavily. “I’m glad I can remember your name,” he said. “I can feel my mind slipping away. It’s like I’m losing my memories one at a time.” He took a small drink of water from the canteen by the bed. “I can’t remember anything from my childhood. I tried, but I can’t.” He closed his eyes. “It’s all going away. Nothing to be done for it.”
I looked down not wanting him to see me cry. It was a few minutes before I could look up again. “Does it hurt?” I asked, worried about the pain.
“No, it doesn’t. I don’t feel any pain at all. I would get up, but I can’t seem to remember how. It’s all just flowing away. It’s like my mind has a hole in it, and all the thoughts are leaking out,” he said.
I hesitated, not wanting to ask the next question. “What do you want me to do, Dad?” I didn’t want to hear the answer, but I knew I had to.
Dad sighed. A long, deep, soul-wrenching sigh. It was a moment before he answered. “I don’t want to be one of them, Josh. They’ve turned me, but I don’t want to be one of them.”
I knew that was the answer, but it didn’t make it any easier. I didn’t say anything, I just let my tears fall on the floor. They hit with a wet smacking sound that seemed loud in the room.
“Your mom isn’t doing well, Josh. You’ll need to look after her when I’m gone,” he said. “I think she might be going over the end.” A spasm hit and he gasped, bringing his hand up to his head.
I watched through my tears, and I just slowly shook my head. “What can I do, Dad?”
My father slowly breathed in and out, and it was a while before he spoke. When he did, it was measured and deliberate. “I’m sorry, son, but I need you to be a man and to do what needs to be done. There’s no one else.”
In a way, I knew he was going to say that, but the spoken words just shook me worse than before. I didn’t want to let him down, but I didn’t want to have to kill him, either. And I really didn’t want to let him turn into something that would try and kill me. Part of me wondered if it would be easier to kill him when he was fully gone, but I shook that thought out of my head. My dad didn’t want to turn; he was clear on that.
“Better do it soon, son. I can feel it moving through my head. Remember I love you, and remember what I told you before. Like your books say, you’ll do to ride the river with.” Dad sighed again and closed his eyes.
I knew for certain that he wasn’t going to open them again as my father.
I went downstairs and told my mother. She nodded, then looked out the window. She hadn’t spoken much in the last week of the Tripper wave, and I couldn’t blame her. Everywhere she looked she saw her husband. I told her it might be a good idea for her to go check on the horse for a bit or to go into the garden.
She looked sharply at me, and I held her gaze. She slowly nodded and moved to the back door. Once she was there, she looked back. “Thank you, Josh. I’m sorry for what you have to do. And I’m sorry for what may happen next.” She left before I could ask what she meant, but I was distracted in a minute by a deep moan that came from upstairs.
I ran up the steps and turned to my room. I pulled out my Colt and loaded it with five live rounds. Snapping the loading gate shut, I made sure a round was ready to go, then went down the hall towards my parents’ room.
Every step felt like I was moving through sand, and my gut was a twisted mess. The Colt felt like it weighed a thousand pounds as it slowly swung in my hand.
When I reached the door I looked in, and I knew I had to act. My dad’s face was starting to get the splotches common to Trippers, and he was breathing quickly. In another few hours, he was going to get up on his own and go looking for people to kill.
I walked over to him and had a moment’s hesitation as to where I should put the gun. I realized I couldn’t shoot him in the head. As much as I knew it would kill him instantly, I couldn’t do it. I decided on the next best thing. I knelt on the bed, next to my father, and placed the muzzle of the Colt over his heart. I pulled the hammer back, and the four clicks were the loudest things I had ever heard.
“Good bye, Dad. I love you,” I said. I closed my eyes and pulled the trigger.
My father jerked from the impact, and I nearly dropped the gun. But I cocked the hammer back and waited to see if I needed to do it again.
As it turned out, my father was dead. His face was relaxed, and he looked more at peace than I had seen him in several days. I slid off the bed, uncocked the gun, then went to the bathroom to throw up.
I knew the job wasn’t finished, because I couldn’t just leave him there in the bed to rot. After I cleaned myself up, I went back into the bedroom and flipped the quilt he was lying on over his body. I flipped the other side over him and grabbed the blanket up by his shoulders. I pulled, heaved, and cursed as I levered his body off the bed. My dad fell with a huge thump that shook the house, and it was then I realized just how heavy the man really was. The craziest thought I had just then was how dangerous a Tripper he would have made.
I pulled him away from the bed, dragging him across the floor. I took a glance at the bed, expecting to see a hole and a lot of blood. I was surprised to see nothing. I guess the bullet didn’t make it out of his body.
I got my dad’s corpse out of the house, and the only trouble I had was when he got away from me on the stairs and thumped down to the landing. Other than that, it was just a heavy drag out into the side yard. By the time I reached the bed of hostas, I was exhausted. But I still had work to do, so after I took a quick drink, I got the shovel out of the garage and started digging.
It was late afternoon by the time I had finished. The grave wasn’t all that deep, but it would have to do. I didn’t think Dad would mind much; he probably would have appreciated the effort. I rolled his body into the grave, never bothering to take another look at him. I didn’t want to have any more memories of his death than I already had, and I felt in some way it was my fault. If I had gone when he said to, if I hadn’t been so far away when the Trippers attacked that house, I might have been able to buy him some time—something.
I cried again as I filled the grave, mounding the dirt slightly, and putting the hostas back where I had dug them up. They would look after him like they did everything.
I turned to put the shovel away and bumped into my mother.
“Jeez, mom! You scared me. How long have you been there?” I asked.
Mom just stared past me at the grave. She was holding a small handful of flowers, and without a word, she walked past and knelt down next to the grave. I wanted to comfort her, but I didn’t know what to say. Nothing my dad ever taught me prepared me for this.
I put the shovel away, and I walked back to the house. I couldn’t shake the feeling I was going to have to do more grave digging—and soon.
Chapter 23
Of all the chores I had, without a doubt the one I hated the most was removing bodies. It was slow, heavy, and smelly. I couldn’t do it on my own; I just wasn’t strong enough. But I wondered if any twelve-year-old would have been strong enough.
Fortunately, Trey was willing to help me if I was willing to help him. He was smaller than I was and even less likely to be able to move some of the bodies, so we had to work together. Especially since the last wave gave us about an even hundred bodies to get rid of.
Trey’s dad was setting up the burn pile, so he was unable to give us a hand. My mother had withdrawn into herself for the last two days after my father died, so she was out of it. Trey had a younger sister, but she would have been a nuisance under the best circumstances, so here we were. Trey’s
older siblings were helping his dad.
“You got it?” Trey asked, readying the wagon.
“I got it. Get that thing over here; this one looks like it’s leaking,” I said, holding the arms of a dead woman. Her eyes had rolled up in her head, giving her a nasty appearance. The small round hole in her forehead didn’t improve her looks.
“Ew.”
“Exactly.”
I pulled the body forward, doubling it over its waist. Trey tipped the wagon so the leading edge was on the ground. We both then took an arm and tipped the wagon back, ending up with a Tripper neatly riding a four wheeled cart. We then pulled it down to where Trey’s dad was building a pyre.
It was a squat affair with several large logs forming a kind of hut. Trey’s dad was finished with the base and was putting dead Trippers all over the logs.
“Drop the next bunch on the other side, boys; this side’s full,” he said, pulling up an older Tripper and placing him on the pile. Trey’s dad would pile the bodies up around the structure, then put more logs on top, then more bodies. Hopefully he wouldn’t have to go higher than two levels, but once we had to go as high as four. The logs were soaked with kerosene, and once lit, the blaze was going to be fierce. But it had to be done, and since we didn’t use kerosene for anything other than lamps, we had enough to spare.
Towards the end of the day, we finally managed to get the last of the Trippers up onto the pyre. Trey’s dad had set up a system where he could ignite the pyre from a distance. It wasn’t anything fancy, just Trey’s crossbow firing a flaming arrow into the heart of the structure. After that it was just a lot of burn time.
Evening came, and Trey and his father went back to their home for supper. We weren’t going to light it at night unless we wanted to attract every Tripper for miles. The wave had moved on, but that didn’t mean we were fully safe from them coming back.
I met my mother in the kitchen, which surprised me. She had holed herself up in the spare bedroom upstairs, and the last time I saw her she was just looking out the window at my father’s grave.
“Hey, Mom!” I said, trying to sound somewhat cheerful. It was strained, and we both knew it. The gloom of my father’s death hung over us like something unsaid.
“Hey, Josh. Looks like you’ve been working hard. Wash up, and we’ll have supper,” she said.
“Sure. Be right back.” I went to the back room and quickly washed my hands, noting the level of water and making a note to head to the creek tomorrow for more.
At supper, we didn’t have much to say, and I saw how thin and frail my mom looked. If we had another wave of Trippers come through, I wasn’t sure how she would make it.
I had just finished eating when my mother spoke.
“Josh? I wanted to talk to you about something,” she said, clearing the table.
“What about?”
“I think we should leave the house.”
I was surprised, but at the same time, not really. I had been expecting something like this.
“Why? Where would we go?” I asked.
“One of the larger communities where its safe. This isn’t safe anymore,” she said.
“What’s not safe? We have the wall; we have the water. The last wave didn’t get us, and neither did the one before that,” I said. I didn’t want to go. I didn’t want to leave my home and everything I knew.
“What about next time, Josh? And the time after that? Your father died…”
I didn’t let her finish. “Dad died away from here. If we had stayed here, we’d have been fine.”
“That’s true, sweetheart, but he’s gone, and we can’t get him back.” Mom looked down, and when she looked back up there were tears in her eyes. “Please, Josh. I don’t want to lose you, too. Let’s get out of here and go where there’s other people; where you have a chance at a future and not just survival.”
I gave it a thought. “Not right now, mom. I can’t go right now. I don’t think Dad would have wanted me to just up and leave.”
Mom shook her head. “He wouldn’t have wanted you to hold on to something that wasn’t there, either.”
I had nothing to say to that, so I just left the table and went upstairs with my mom calling after me.
Chapter 24
The next morning I went over to Trey’s house, and together we headed out to our trap lines. It had been a long time since we’d been out that way, so chances were anything we had caught was inedible. But we would have to clear them out, so off we went.
As we reached the woods, I told Trey about my mother and what she wanted to do.
“Community?” Trey said. “Man, that’s crazy. You ever been to one of those places?”
I shook my head. I had seen them, but never went to one.
“Dad took me over to the one out west. Can’t remember the name, ended with a ‘fort’ or something. Anyway, it was all rules and regulations, and sharing everything, and people walking around just scared of their own shadow.” Trey spat in disgust. “They made us check our weapons at the gate, and they meant everything. My little skinning knife, you know the one with the red handle?”
I only nodded, stunned at what I was hearing.
“Well, they took that and never gave it back. When my dad demanded it back when we were leaving, the men at the gate laughed in his face. Couldn’t do nothing about it on account of them having heavy rifles.” Trey looked at me. “They didn’t keep it because they needed it. They kept it because they knew they could. When I look back on it, I think we were lucky to have left at all.”
Well, this wasn’t what I wanted to hear to help me change my mind about leaving. As a matter of fact, it made sure I wasn’t going anywhere. I couldn’t imagine having the knife my father gave me taken away.
The day seemed especially bright as we made our way up the hill towards our lines. The grass was much lighter green than it had been, a signal that the days were going to start getting colder. I was going to have to lay in a supply of firewood before too long, something my dad used to do. There were a lot of things I was going to have to take up now that I was the one to take care of the house. But my first priority was to make sure we could eat, so I was out here.
The trees were quiet this morning, only making noise with their top branches. The wind tried to stir things up a bit more, but the trees weren’t having any of it. These were the old guard, the ones who were old long before we got here. My dad told me that they were likely around when the first colonists decided to rule themselves, and they were here for the big war between the states. There was respectable space between them, and I often wondered what they whispered to each other in the night.
A quick walk through the woods got us to our trap lines, and every single one was full. And every single catch was inedible. That was what I was expecting, and I hoped the carcasses didn’t scare away the game to other trails. Trey and I worked our lines for the better part of an hour, and we reset them with new grass. I had to repair a couple, but other than that I figured it could have been a lot worse.
On our way back, Trey and I talked about the wave. “What did you do with yourself?” I asked, using the knife my dad gave me to slice off the tops of weeds.
“Played cards a lot, read some books, shot arrows at some fool who kept shooting them back,” Trey answered. “Same stuff as last time.”
I laughed. “Sounds like my house, only I was more productive since I made arrows.”
“I don’t miss as much as you, so I didn’t bother,” Trey said.
I laughed again, then got sober. “I killed my dad.”
Trey looked at me, and his big brown eyes were sincere. “Sorry about it, man. I know it was rough. My dad said in his eyes you were a full-growed man to do that.”
I liked that a lot, knowing Trey’s dad, who I liked a great deal, was willing to count me as an equal. It didn’t make me feel much better, but at least it didn’t make it any worse.
On our way down we decided to make a small side trip. Neither of us ha
d been out and about for the last several days, so we weren’t willing to just stroll back and go inside. Trey and I decided to pay a visit to The Simpson’s to see how they made out during the wave. We followed the road up around the hill and walked along the edge of the forest. The brush was impassable along this stretch with huge thorn bushes dominating the edge. Several had reached out across the road, and we were careful not to get scratched. With all the Trippers that were walking around here, the last thing I needed was to get sick because of some stupid shrub.
At the entrance to the subdivision we turned in, and immediately I wished we had gone home. Two Trippers were under the pine trees there and started crawling out when they saw us.
“Damn, man, what are we going to do?” Trey asked, hopping from one foot to the other.
I looked at the Trippers, and all I could feel was anger. I was mad at them for being what they are. I was mad because they were here, and my dad wasn’t. I don’t know what I was thinking, I just acted. I ran over to the nearest Tripper who was still on his hands and knees. He was a young one, maybe a few years older than I was, and he was thin, very thin in his stained t-shirt and jeans. I kicked him in the side of his head, knocking him to the dirt. I kneeled on his back, keeping him on the ground, and stabbed him in the back of the neck with my knife. The point slid in with nearly no resistance, and the Tripper ceased moving immediately.
The other infected man, a larger person wearing what looked like a formal suit, charged from the right, growling with rage. I waited until he was nearly on top of me, and then I dove out of the way, letting him trip on the body on the ground. He fell forward, cracking his head on the big limestone rock that once was used as a sign. He slumped to the ground, leaving a bloody trail down the rock. I waited for a minute, then figured he had managed to kill himself. I shoved the blade into the ground, then wiped it off on a relatively clean part of the Tripper’s pants.
Born In The Apocalypse Page 9