by Joseph Souza
Of everyone in this house, it was Gunner who worried me the most. While everyone seemed to be adjusting to the situation as best as could be expected, I noticed that Gunner’s mood had become more sullen and withdrawn as time went on. Caring for his kids had taken an obvious toll on him. Of course, watching his wife become sick and die had had a traumatizing effect as well. It was a good thing he didn’t know that Rick kept her captive down in the basement, studying her every move for the benefit of science. Blackness ringed his eyes, and he often spoke despairingly of the situation we now found ourselves in. We all tried to encourage him, give him pep talks, take his kids off his hands for a few hours so he could relax, but it didn’t seem to help. He responded only to Rick’s cue. Rick was his leader, and he would follow him to the ends of the earth. He seemed completely unfit for the difficult future that lay ahead, and he lacked the mental discipline required to maintain his bearing amidst the crisis enveloping us. I couldn’t blame him. We all struggled with the horror in our own way, compartmentalizing our lives for self-preservation. We needed a reason to go on, to live.
That left Kate and I to pair off. In the beginning, we found it difficult to connect. Kate kept to herself and stayed busy performing her chores in the kitchen, which everyone happily ceded to her. She preferred to be alone. As time passed, however, we began to sit together at the dinner table and converse about matters that interested us in better times. Kate had little interest in watching movies at night, choosing instead to sit in the dining room and read one of the paperback novels that Susan had kept around. At first I found her to be somewhat plain in appearance. She wore her blonde hair up in a bun and never wore any of the makeup in Susan’s bathroom. She was thin but athletic, and surprisingly stronger than I expected. Rarely did I see her smile. But the more we hung out together, the more appealing she became. I found myself fantasizing about her at night, the erotic confused with the horror. My vows to my wife meant everything to me, but I felt vulnerable and in need of a woman’s touch. I chalked up my growing attraction to her as a product of the barbarity of the situation, being cooped up in this house day after day, the intimacy a by-product of proximity. A selfless and a tireless worker, she had a curious mind that made our daily conversations a wonderful respite to the brutal nightmare we’d been living through. And yet, she revealed nothing about her personal life. I tried to get something out of her, but when I probed, she either walked away or buried her head in her book. So I stopped asking.
The snow proved to be our savior. Never a fan of the snow, I came to appreciate its beauty and utility, and the fact that it protected us from the inhumanity outside these walls. It provided us with water and helped us stay clean and hygienic. I loved the way the sun’s rays reflected off the icy wall surface and reflected heat back into the house—a brilliant move by Rick to plow it into a fortress. It kept hidden the dead buried under the icy mountains. Like clockwork, Rick plowed the freshly fallen snow every day. Any diseased stragglers left standing disappeared into the massive mountain of snow, out of sight and out of mind.
One day it hit me. I feared the arrival of spring. Spring meant that everything would melt and the frozen corpses would emerge from the ensuing thaw. The arrival of spring would make it easier for the dead to travel freely and attempt to gain entrance into our fortress. Liberated from the shackles of winter, I envisioned them parading en masse onto the driveway, overtaking the house and flooding it with their shuffling and unearthly moaning. I suffered terrible nightmares where the monsters reached out for me, tearing at my limbs and trying to take bites out of my head and body, and often I would bolt up out of sleep, my face covered in sweat.
From time to time, Rick kept me updated on the world situation. Tumult and chaos had ensued, though news was getting harder to come by. The rumor floating around was that the president had enacted martial law and had blocked all flow of traffic. But no one knew for sure because all television broadcasting had been halted, except for a government-sponsored program that ran twice a day. The program, political propaganda designed to ease citizens’ fears, tried to put a more positive spin on the crisis. Soup kitchens and bread lines had been set up at various locations in most major cities. Armed forces stood guard and tried to keep the peace. And yet violence ensued everywhere. Armed civilians set up in abandoned buildings and fired at soldiers randomly. Military snipers set up in buildings and killed anyone they deemed suspicious. Tensions between citizens and the government grew to the point where rebels were setting up bases all around the country. Secret anti-government groups were forming at a rapid pace, and the government didn’t have enough forces to combat them all, especially when troops began to defect en masse after their paychecks bounced. Toilet paper had more worth than the almighty dollar. Alternate currencies spawned. Governing on a national level was becoming untenable.
The situation in other parts of the world seemed worse. Many of Rick’s contacts on the CB radio simply stopped communicating altogether. Others gave brief descriptions of horrors too unfathomable to contemplate, then suddenly that contact would never be heard from again, and the worst was assumed. Rick reported that the shortwave signal was degrading with each passing day. Something seemed to be scrambling the signals and making the airwaves incommunicable. Governments around the world had been violently repressing their citizens. Food riots became ubiquitous. One woman in Germany claimed that her family was living off the turtles, grasses and fish from a nearby pond. A man in South Africa claimed that the local bird population had been decimated. An Asian contact said that a swine flu epidemic was killing many people in his city and that vaccines were not being offered.
All of these personal accounts led me to the conclusion that Rick had made the correct choice by moving up here to northern Maine, where it was cold and snowbound, and only the resourceful would survive.
Rick spent most of his days holed up in his basement, conducting research on the various plant and animal samples he’d collected. He recorded all of his findings in a large journal he kept stored in a bookshelf in his lab. The vast database of genetic information stored in his computer allowed him to contrast and compare the various genetic data he’d gathered out in the field. He maintained a separate generator designated solely for his computer, and it was as powerful as the one that he used to run the house. He filled this covert generator with gas twice a day to insure that the computer would run nonstop comparing the DNA strands. He compared these computations to finding a needle in a haystack, but he was convinced that he could narrow the possible suspects to a manageable few, depending on the size and species of the genetic sampling.
The sight of Gunner’s dead wife never ceased to offend me. On the days Rick allowed me inside, I would often pull up a chair next to her and simply observe her peripatetic jerking and fits of mastication. It seemed with each passing day she weakened and became less animated than before. She began to move in what seemed like slow motion. Her eyes did not fluctuate as wildly as before, and she never made eye contact with me, instead staring off into the distance. I assumed that her brain was being starved to death, but Rick held a different view. He’d taken samples from her and had discovered that far from dying, her cells were going into what could best be described as a state of hibernation. In this hibernating state they were busy replenishing and fortifying with a new form of cellular activity he’d never before seen—a cellular activity that appeared so strange and complex that even he couldn’t understand the dynamics of the process. Rather than stimulate my intellectual curiosity, it made me want more than ever to put a bullet in her brain and end her misery. I envisioned her soul to be in a state of flux until the time came when the entirety of her being could be laid to rest.
Other than these developments, I had no idea what other discoveries Rick had made down there. He was not forthcoming about his findings. His massive journal filled me with both trepidation and fear—and made me optimistic that a cure might be discovered. I found myself wondering about the ideas, formulas an
d theories he’d written in that book of his. I began to regard his journal with an almost mystical awe, wondering if he would ever let me read it. And yet at other times, I had no interest whatsoever in reading it, fearful that it might reveal a Pandora’s Box of horrors, of which I was not mentally equipped to handle. A nonbeliever, Rick was able to keep an open mind and be as unbiased as possible when it came to learning what nature had in store for us, both good and bad. In my case, ignorance was bliss, and I prayed constantly, begging God to watch over us. It was faith that got me through each day. Faith was my crutch, and I was glad to have it.
Thorn continued to avail himself of Rick’s supply of alcohol, which he kept stored in the barn, and which he had to bring back to the house in order to thaw. Thorn was a sloppy drunk, and when Rick found out that his stash was being looted, he put a lock on the barn door and controlled all access to the beer, wine and spirits. At first Thorn complained about getting shut off, but when he realized that this was how it was going to be, he stopped drinking altogether and embraced a more militant attitude toward his health. He took up exercising with me in the morning. When we finished, he would go outside and shovel snow for hours on end. Exhausted, I would stare out the window and watch him. Some days he tossed snow for hours, eventually staggering inside, his clothes drenched in sweat. Thorn’s body underwent a noticeable transformation during this period. Where before he was tall and lean, now his biceps began to bulge, and his lats formed a perfect V that tapered down to a thin waist. In short, he resembled an Olympic swimmer.
This was how we spent the winter. Did I mention that there was much crying? We cried all the time. After a while we stopped being ashamed about crying in front of each other. The kids cried loud and often. Kate and I often leaned on each other’s shoulders and wept in long, sorrowful sessions. Rick did it in the privacy of his basement when he thought no one was listening. But I would sometimes wander downstairs, where I could hear his hyperventilating gasps. He grieved for his wife and the future they had lost, and he hoped to find part of her remains come spring so that he could spread her ashes on her favorite part of the farm. Surprisingly, Thorn cried as much as anyone, though his crying jags were usually quick and violent, and then followed by an act of bravado that was a veiled attempt to disguise his vulnerability.
The only one who didn’t cry, or who I never witnessed crying, was Dar. She moved inward while the rest of us hung out our emotions for all to see. It was almost as if she were using this crisis to gain strength and vitality from the cruelness bearing down upon us. Her self-confidence soared. Where before she harbored many fears and insecurities, the outbreak appeared to give Dar a reason to live. Everything from her past fell away as easily as a snake shed its skin. Her history got erased—only the present existed. She became a secular zealot and wanted nothing more than to save the world by killing the dead.
Thorn tattooed the words BORN TO KILL across her back. “I was born to kill fuckers,” she could often be heard saying. She said it so often and with such passion that it soon became second nature to us to refer to the dead as fuckers. The term became as much a part of our vocabulary as anything else in the wintry days that we were holed up in the farmhouse. I wanted them to disappear from the face of the earth so that the world could revert to its normal state and we could return home and reunite with our families. The resumption of normalcy was my ultimate goal. I wanted to sit behind my desk and write novels. But Dar wanted nothing to do with her previous life. She had her own plans for the future, and I had a sinking feeling that they didn’t include me.
“It’s never going to be the same once this situation dies down,” Rick said to me one night, shaking his head. “In fact, my belief is that it’s all going to get worse—a lot worse—before it gets any better.”
“You’re such a pessimist.”
“Not a pessimist, Thom, a realist. A scientist who looks at things objectively and without bias.” He laughed. “Think that big fat bank account of yours is going to be waiting for you when you return to Boston? You can forget about that nest egg.”
“Once the government gets control over this situation, the financial system will return to normal, and everything will revert to the way it was.”
“Ha! That’s even more farfetched than your belief in an afterlife. You’re truly naïve if you believe that, Thom. The almighty dollar is gone, a relic in the footnotes of monetary history. Only food, water and fuel will be currency in the new order of things.”
“Why do you always have to be in competition with me, Rick? Just because I’ve made more money than you?”
“It’s not about competition or money. The truth is that you wagered all your money on a losing pony. But the good news, brother, is that you’re alive and well with someone who wagered correctly.”
It killed me inside to admit it, but my brother was right. Rick had made the correct call in moving up here. He’d gone back to the land where food, shelter and water reigned supreme. My millions of dollars were worthless, other than fuel for the fireplace or wiping the shit out of my ass. But I had faith on my side, and I spoke directly to my creator. Faith was the currency that kept me spiritually and mentally afloat.
And then the snow started to melt.
And I knew we were all screwed.
Chapter 15
SPRING BEGAN NEAR THE END OF April. We woke up to the sound of water dripping off the roof and into the melting snow. Ice dams cracked like thunder along the gutters and shingles. The sounds all resonated with the song of spring. Even the sun’s rays began to feel warmer and more inviting. But behind it all lay a sense of dread.
I slept very little by the time spring arrived. What sleep I did get was filled with terrible dreams and nightmarish visions of those creatures breaking inside the house and reaching for me. My brain whirred constantly and never seemed to let up. It felt as if it was operating independently from my will, manifesting an innate desire to detach from this terrible reality. Although I knew that this was my mind’s attempt at preserving itself, in the end, this prolonged state of disassociation was causing me great, irreversible harm.
We’d manage to keep most of the fuckers at bay throughout the winter and early spring. Occasionally a few slipped past the formidable snow barriers, but they were easily dispatched. Dar typically did most of the killing. She wanted nothing more than to put a bullet through their brains, and shooting just one never satisfied her insatiable need to kill. The glint in her eye made us all leery, and we kept our distance from her. Otherwise, she kept a low profile in the house, knowing full well that her time was soon to come.
I made my way downstairs one morning and saw Kate sitting at the table and staring out of the window. Kate usually got up before anyone else and set the table with cold cereal, powdered milk and re-warmed coffee brewed the previous night. Gunner and the kids got up next. Rick, Thorn and Dar typically slept in until mid-morning. Rick stayed up until the early hours of the morning, working in his lab and then writing in his journal, and usually operating on only a few hours of sleep. I would often see him sitting at the dining room table in the morning, writing copious notes in his journal.
I stood next to Kate, who stared numbly out at the melting, white landscape. The sun shone brilliantly in the sky. The birds gathered up in the bare branches of the elms and maples and began to take to the air in droves. The constant drip drip drip off the roof seemed never-ending. Shimmering sheets of ice reflected the sun’s rays and radiated outward in every direction. The massive wall of snow and ice encircling the driveway began to slowly diminish with each passing day. Kate turned and glanced at me with a look of concern.
“I’m scared, Thom. I thought I’d never say this, but I don’t want spring to come.”
“Spring has always been my favorite time of year, when the plants would poke up out of the ground and the snow would give way to budding leaves and rivers of mud. A time when everything reawakens.”
“I used to love spring as well. God, I never thought
I’d hear myself say it, but I wish it would stay winter all year long.”
“Don’t you have any family members to meet up with after this situation is over?”
“Apart from an estranged brother in Houston, I don’t have any family to speak of. I moved to Maine less than a year ago.”
“Why?”
She turned, crossed her arms, and stared out the window. “It’s going to get worse. Those things will soon be coming out of the woodwork. I used to love spring, but I despise it now. They’ll be waiting for the snow to melt so they can come for us.”
“Kate,” I said, turning her around and gripping her arms. “We’re the lucky ones. Look at all we have. We’re still alive and well.”
“Lucky? Ha!”
“We’ve got food, water and ammunition. We’ve got a roof over our heads. Those dead things can’t last forever. The government will come any day now and rescue us from this hell.”
“The government?” she retorted, snickering. “If you believe the government’s going to save us then I’ve got a winning lottery ticket to sell you.”
“No, you’re wrong. I believe in our government. You watch and see, they’ll send in the military and help us out of this mess.”
“Wake up, Thom. This isn’t one of your dreamy novels with a happy ending. The government’s not going to help us. Not now, not tomorrow, not ever. Besides, how long do you think we can last like this?” She turned away from me.