So I am not surprised.
“Don’t go down there!” Tony shouts again.
It’s too late.
My right foot already hits the first step. It creaks beneath my weight, and dust and that basement smell wafts up to meet me. It’s not the smell that surprises me the most, but the look and feel of the basement. The steps seem to stretch on into the darkness forever. Once I’m on the cobblestone floor, it starts to get weird.
Muted sunlight comes in through a sliver of a window. It’s enough for me to see the trail of black blood, and I think that’s what the smell that punches me in the nose is.
I try to keep my back to a wall, but this basement is a vast as the house above it. There’s hallways and corridors, shelves full of useless trinkets — old oil cans, ancient soda bottles, a mallet, nails, a packet of molding muffins — that stretch to the ceiling where cobwebs hang from a series of interwoven pipes and air ducts. I turn around and the steps seem to have moved to the other side of the room, that’s how lost I am already. A pile of old, rotten furniture sits in a corner. Chairs, tables with missing legs, a La-Z-Boy recliner.
I walk on.
The smell grows thicker now. That dead, rotting smell now mingling harshly with the smell of mold and dust and dirt. I almost bring my hand up to cover my nose, but I can’t. I have to remain strong. I have to find the weapons. I know they’re here.
I turn down a corridor and push a door open with the gun. It creaks loudly, though I can hear my breath above the sound.
As the door opens, I freeze.
These are not guns.
These are bodies. Dead bodies. But not human bodies…dead zombie bodies. I almost start to scream as I look away, trying to get ahold of myself.
Two bodies strapped to wooden tables.
What in the actual fuck?
I raise the weapon at them. They could be alive — well, you know what I mean — and I don’t want to be caught by surprise, attacked because my initial impression is wrong. I try to walk closer to them as quietly as I can, but it’s dark and I kick something.
A tin can goes skittering across the floor and bangs into the wall on the other side of the tables.
I hold my breath, watching for any movement.
There is none.
These zombies’s eyes do not glow yellow. They do not make that death rattle deep from their throat. They do not turn their heads and stick out their arms to try to grab me.
They are dead.
I walk closer. The smell of them is like an invisible barrier I don’t want to break through.
The little bit of light streaming in through the hallway and into this room shows me who they are — or who they used to be. Had I not seen the photograph on the upstairs mantel, these two would just be another couple of zombies. I almost wish they were because I wouldn’t feel so sad…so pitiful.
The woman with her long and now brittle, blonde hair stairs up at the ceiling with wide eyes. Her lower jaw has been completely ripped off. The dress she wears is new, however, something that looks unworn. She did not die in this dress, I can tell you that. Her face has this sunken-in quality that still somehow tells me she was once beautiful.
The man laying next to her wears an unblemished suit and tie. He is missing an eye. There is a bullet hole in the middle of his forehead caked with dry, crusty blood. He has no facial hair, not like his twin brother upstairs.
This is Brian’s twin and his mom, Tony’s wife.
I feel like sobbing.
I know what it’s like to lose a mother, but I couldn’t imagine losing my mother and my brother. Screw the guns, they can wait.
I turn out of the room, saying a silent prayer in my head, and go back upstairs.
Norm looks a little better as I walk back into the kitchen. Brian is awake, but I try not to look at him because seeing his dead twin is like seeing him dead. Abby and Darlene watch me eagerly.
“No guns?” Abby asks.
I ignore her and turn to Tony who is still up against the refrigerator. His face is wet, his eyes are shiny.
“You didn’t touch them, did you? You didn’t touch them?” he says to me.
I shake my head, then squat down to look him in the eyes.
“What the fuck is going on?” Norm says behind me. He almost sounds normal. I ignore him, too.
“I want to help,” I say to Tony.
His face transforms from hurt to angry, the color rising in his cheeks. “You can’t help! They’re already dead! Spike did it to them. It was fucking Spike. You can’t help! You can’t — ”
I put my hand on his arm and squeeze. He looks like he wants to hit me, wants to pounce on me and tear me limb from limb. Rightfully so, I guess. I have invaded his privacy, have stumbled upon something he didn’t want anyone to see.
“I want to help, Tony. I will do anything, okay? Then we will be even.”
Tony blinks once, tears fall from his eyes.
“Just stay out of our business,” Brian says.
I ignore him like I ignore the others.
“Let me help you lay them to rest,” I say to Tony.
“I-I can’t. I don’t want to. I don’t want to. I love her. Wendy has been with me forever. And Benny, oh my sweet Benny. I can’t, Jack. I just can’t.”
“I understand, Tony. I do. But you will never move on if you keep them there. And you have to move on. That’s what this world is all about. Things happen — bad things, terrible things — but sometimes good things happen, too. If you’re stuck in the past, you can’t enjoy the future.”
“Nothing good is gonna happen. You don’t get it, son. You’re too young,” Tony says. He points to the gun in my hand. “Just put a bullet in my brain. Let me move on that way.”
I shake my head.
The tears are streaming down his face. I feel everyone’s eyes staring at us.
“I know, I know, it’s hard to believe good things can happen now. They might not, and that’s true, but we can’t say for sure. The only thing I can say for sure is that good things won’t happen if you’re dead, Tony Richards. You have a son who loves you and respects you. You have to be strong for him.”
Tony wipes his eyes with his grimy fingers, takes a deep breath, and nods. “You’re right, kid. Damn it, you’re right.”
“There’s a beautiful tree out back. A tree with all its leaves, standing tall and vigilant. It’s a perfect place to lay them to rest, Tony. I don’t know why I feel that way, but I know if we bury them there, that tree will watch over them for eternity,” I say.
Tony lets out a sob mixed with a laugh. I stand up and extend a hand down to him. He takes it, and much to my surprise, he pulls me in for a hug. “Thank you,” he says. “Thank you.”
Then we part and his son comes over and hugs him.
I look over to Darlene, Abby, and Norm. They are all looking at me with shocked expressions on their faces. I just shrug and head out to the backyard where that big, beautiful tree sways in the light breeze.
I find a shovel near the shed, and I begin to dig.
I dug until the sun started to go down. Not long after my shovel had hit the dirt, Abby, Darlene, and Norm came out to help me. We dug two graves, side by side, right in the tree’s shade.
At first, they questioned me, but once I told them about the bodies in the basement, they understood and went right to work. Tony and Brian Richards, like the rest of the world, have begun to lose their sanity. Their loved ones rotted away in the basement of an abandoned farmhouse. If it isn’t for us, I believe they would take their own lives. Norm, Darlene, and Abby agree with me.
There is already enough death in this world. If we have any hope of surviving this plague, we must help each other out, we must keep each other alive.
Norm and I helped Tony and Brian wrap Wendy and Ben Richards into sheets. They said their goodbyes. We helped carry them up the steps. They weighed next to nothing and I hardly noticed the smell.
We laid them to rest before the sun went down.
&nb
sp; Tony and Ben helped cover them up.
We all cried.
And the remaining members of the Richards family moved on.
As the group gathers up what remaining belongings we left in the farmhouse, Tony and I stand on the front porch. He has two beers in his hand and he gives one to me.
It is cold.
It’s been too long since I’ve had a cold drink. I almost cry.
“Thank you,” I say. I down it in three big gulps.
He smiles at me. I notice how much younger he looks. In just the span of a few hours, it seems as if a huge weight had been lifted from Tony Richards’s shoulders. “No. Thank you,” he says.
He shakes my hand.
Darlene comes out with Norm and Abby behind her. We have all our stuff ready to go. Eden is our next stop. I don’t care what stands in our way. We are getting to safety — true safety, not a farmhouse without borders, but a safe haven.
Tony looks them up and down, the happiness on his face melting away. “Anyway I can talk you guys out of it?”
I shake my head. “We’ve come too far. If it’s like you say it is, then we will fix it.”
“It is, Jack,” he says. “And you might not be able to fix it.” He pauses, sensing my seriousness, then says, “You may be able to scavenge in Sharon. I don’t think Spike and his army have taken much from there yet. Grab all the weapons and medicine you can find. You will need it.”
“We’ll see,” I say.
“Sorry I can’t offer you more help, but you understand.”
I nod.
Tony did not have weapons to spare aside from a sniper’s rifle none of us really knew how to use. Norm claimed he did, but I think that was the booze talking.
“What about the car? You sure you don’t want to take it?” Tony asks.
I shake my head. “No, you keep that sweet ride. Walking is good, less noise, less attraction.”
“True,” he says.
“Well,” I say, “it was nice to meet you and your son. May your days be long and prosperous.”
Tony smiles. “And yours, too,” he says as he begins to shake our hands and say his goodbyes to Darlene, Norm, and Abby.
“Got anymore of that booze?” Norm asks.
Tony chuckles.
Abby grabs Norm’s arm and drags him away. “You’re never drinking again,” she says.
I walk off the porch, and give Tony one last wave.
I am leading my group to the small town of Sharon. Beyond that is Eden and what Eden holds in store for us, I do not know. But we will find out.
12
We walk in silence down the same dirt road we entered. All we have are two guns between us and a bag of blunt weapons.
All signs of last night’s storm have vanished. That’s Florida for you. Back in Ohio, a summer thunderstorm would leave the ground sopping wet and the sky a depressing gray for a couple of days. Not the case here. Now, the sun shines and the sky is a clear blue. There’s a few clouds which look like puffs of white smoke floating lazily above us. No storm on the horizon.
I think that's a good sign.
The perfect sign to combat the bad ones I saw in the farmhouse. Seeing the two corpses and seeing how it affected Tony — bringing him to a sobbing shell of a man — and Brian hurt me more than I care to admit. In The Deadslayer, Johnny Dunbar is a character I tried to write without emotional attachments because that is the perfect character to go around bashing zombie skulls. Turned out, that I couldn’t do it in fiction so how could I do it in real life?
Everyone cares about somebody — something — and to try to deny that would make us as bad as the zombies themselves.
But it’s so much harder trying to survive with the people you care about. Any small thing can ruin it — an impromptu stay at a crazy man’s farmhouse, a morning stroll in the fog, a bottle of pure absinthe that fucks your militarily-skilled older brother up beyond recognition.
Abby breaks the silence as she is so apt to do. “What if he is right?” she asks. “Like what if this Spike guy is crazy and Eden is a madhouse.”
I look at her, my face a stone slate of seriousness. “Then we’ll deal with it. We didn’t come all this way and go through all this shit to give up now.”
“Damn right,” Norm says. “It happens and we deal with it. We all saw it back in Indianapolis. People go crazy when shit hits the fan, it’s a basic law of the universe. That’s why we can’t let it get to us.”
I nod.
Norm smirks. “By the way, little brother, that was a good thing you did back there with Tony.” He scratches his sunburned neck, a gesture that tells me he’s going to give me praise. He’s never really comfortable when it comes to that. “Helping them, I mean. If that would’ve been me who saw a couple of mutilated corpses in the basement of the house I slept in the night before I woulda shot first and asked questions later.”
“Thanks,” I say. “I just saw how bad they were, how bad they were getting. I remembered when I buried Mother, I felt a little better. Not a whole lot, but it took me in the right direction.”
Norm nods and claps me on the back. “You’re a good man, Jack. Smart, too. Always have been.”
I smile at him.
“Sorry, that booze messed me up. Haven’t drank like that since Bangkok. Whew. My head is still spinning.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I say.
Abby and Darlene snort, holding back laughter. I look at them and they both are grinning ear-to-ear. “Still,” Abby says, “it was funny seeing you like that.”
Norm smiles back and gives her a playful punch on the arm. “Can it, Abby,” he says, then starts rubbing at his head.
We walk for what seems like half an hour, joking, laughing, and almost forgetting what dangers lie ahead of us. But through all of this, our eyes are sharp, always scanning the surroundings for enemies — human or zombie.
The neglect of these roads is clearly visible in they myriad of cracks running through them. The white line in the middle faded. Grass grows from between the deeper splits in the asphalt. No car has driven these streets in a long time. A tree has fallen across the way about thirty feet ahead of us.
We go over it carefully. It reminds me of the tree behind the farmhouse where Wendy and Ben Richards are now buried beneath.
Darlene puts her hand on the small of my back, leans in and kisses me on the cheek. She can always read what’s on my mind. Sometimes I hate it — it never lets me win fights…never — and sometimes I love it.
Especially now. Maybe everything will be okay.
13
We get to the town about fifteen minutes later. The town is called Sharon, but someone has so cleverly crossed out the name on the sign with bright, red spray paint and wrote DEATH.
A town called Death. I like it. Sounds like it’s from a Clint Eastwood western.
As we pass the empty buildings, I notice more signs and symbols spray painted on the bricks and the show windows.
Mostly it’s religious babble: JESUS SAVE US, GOD’S WRATH. But one in particular catches my eye. It says, SPIKE IS GOD! SPIKE IS ANGRY! HIDE YOUR HANDS! and it’s written across towering church doors. I don’t point it out to anyone else, and I hope they don’t see it. We don’t need to be demoralized. Not now.
It gives me chills. As Darlene turns her head to read the sign, I grab her chin and kiss her. I feel her lips turning to a smile beneath mine.
Farther up ahead, as we break onto the Main Street, the town seems almost untouched. Frozen in time. We walk down the road where the business and bars stand on each side of us like silent watchers. There’s cars parked in the diagonal spots in front of them, their windshields dusty and dirty. A large and faded Coca-Cola sign is painted on the side of the tallest building which is only two stories. This was probably the most popular bar in town. The sign on the door reads OPEN.
“Well, take your pick,” Norm says to us, motioning to the buildings. “Which one of these do you think has weapons or medicine?”
“None of them,” Abby says.
“Probably right,” he says. “But it’s worth a shot.”
“Why don’t we split up?” I say.
“I don’t think so,” Abby says. “Might not be a good idea.”
Norm waves his hands around to the empty street. “Look around! Ain’t nobody here.”
I think of the signs. I think of Tony’s warnings.
“Me and Norm and you and Darlene?” I say.
“Fine,” Abby says. “Darlene and I will take the shops over there,” she points to the side opposite the large Coca-Cola sign and Sharon’s most popular saloon, “and you two take over here.”
“Sounds good. Ready, little brother?” Norm says.
I watch Abby and Darlene disappear into the dark shops.
“Hey, don’t worry about them, little bro,” Norm says. “That Abby’s got a mouth on her, but she’s tough as nails. Darlene’ll be all right. Let’s go find us something useful.”
14
The first thing I notice is the smell. That always seems to be the first thing you notice nowadays. It’s not the rotten smell of decaying corpses, but it’s a clean smell. A smell of the old world. It’s spilled beer long since soaked into the wooden floor and bar top, of stale cigarette smoke, of puke, and bad, drunken decisions.
It’s a smell I relish and welcome.
The stools are empty. The televisions are black except for the faint reflections of ourselves and the outside light behind us. I’ve never been in a bar in the early morning. It’s something as a writer I always expected to do. Don’t get me wrong, I love the occasional drink, especially when times are tough, and there hasn’t been tougher times than now. Without Darlene in my life, the occasional drink would’ve become the occasional no-drink. She keeps me grounded. She makes me better.
“Huh?” Norm says. “End of the world and all, I would’ve thought more people would’ve come to drown the pain with some whiskey.”
“Maybe you got people wrong,” I say.
Really, they were probably too sick to go anywhere.
“No, we’re all the same,” he says as he walks behind the bar and grabs a dusty bottle of Jack Daniels off the shelf. “We cry when we’re upset, piss our pants when we’re scared, and drink ourselves to death when none of the other shit works.”
Jack Zombie (Book 2): Dead Hope Page 6