by James, Guy
Alan climbed a ladder to the platform that had been sitting, parked in its space against the outer gate, waiting for them to be done with the first part of their work. He went to the edge, aimed the Voltaire II, and fired.
Flames leapt from the flamethrower’s muzzle and spilled eagerly through the chain link, engulfing the corpse and window as Alan swept the Voltaire II from side to side, the stringy muscles of his arms and upper back drawing taut under the strain.
Beads of sweat grew on his face and glimmered in the firelight, which illuminated his brown hair, giving it a reddish tinge. When he was satisfied that enough of the zombie had caught, he let go of the trigger and gestured for Rosemary to join him up on the platform, though it made him near sick to do it.
Was there shame in making a child look at this? Maybe, but what choice did they have?
She had to see it, to be desensitized, gradually, and that was why he’d climbed the ladder and ignited the zombie without her, because she didn’t need to see the full extent of it, not yet.
She’d probably seen more than enough through the fence tonight, but maybe not, and if she saw all of it before the fire could drown it out, there could be questions that were better left for another time.
Why did they look like that? What did the virus do to their bodies, to their bones, to make them look that way?
Yes, it was better to talk about all of that later, after she’d had a chance to digest this fine morsel of experience. It was a wonder there were children at all, and ones who’d grown up in settlements without ever seeing…without ever knowing…
There would be questions either way, he knew, about what she’d heard, what she’d smelled, what she’d done and why. But that would come in the future, when she was no longer too scared to ask them, and that would buy them all some time, for a while, anyway.
Rosemary climbed the ladder and got up on the platform next to Alan. Without being prompted to look, she craned her neck toward the flames while keeping her feet away from the platform’s edge.
The corpse let out a series of pops, spitting embers at the fence, like a poorly-timed salute of moldered fireworks.
Frowning, Alan looked at the tree line once more. There was no movement there other than that of the shadows, which were creeping back and forth as their conductor, the moon, floated in and out of cloud cover.
He looked behind him, making sure Senna was still there, then up at the watchtower, where Corks was, glancing between them and the forest. Something wasn’t right. But that was a matter to bring up later.
Alan turned back to Rosemary.
“You did fine tonight,” he said.
He wanted to ask her if she was alright, and tell her that she’d been brave, but it was better not to weaken the girl’s resolve with talk like that. She could do better than she had tonight, and she should. She would need to be far better if, God-forbid, she was ever outside, or if the perimeter was breached.
7
“The virus is in the soft matter,” Alan said, “in the skin, meat, organs, and bone marrow and it doesn’t go away when we kill them. It stays there and if we eat the meat or if we have an open wound that comes in contact with the meat, the virus gets in us, and we become like them. That’s why we burn them, and we keep burning them until we can see that the bones are charred and all the soft matter, everything that can have blood or liquid in it, is gone.”
Rosemary was looking from Alan’s face to the burning corpse, doing an admirable job of keeping her trembling down to a minimum and entranced by the image that his glasses were reflecting, that of a burning carcass shooting sparks from its grizzled remains.
“Do you understand, Rosemary?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good.”
He noticed movement in the periphery, turned to track it, and his eyes found the tree line, but he could still see only the shifting of the shadows there. Apparently, musical chairs in the autumn moonlight was a game they didn’t tire of. He turned around and watched as Senna moved to the window at the far end of the alley and looked through it. After a moment she turned to him and gave a brief, puzzled expression, and he nodded. She’d seen it too.
“All the meat has to be burned away,” he said, turning back to Rosemary and reiterating the point.
The creature’s hide, now a burning patchwork of matted fur and ulcerated flesh, was beginning to show the sinew and bone beneath it. The fire was working its way into the muscle meat, and thin smoke trails rose up into the night air when the flames pressed into a moist spot.
He wondered how there could be any moisture left in the zombies after all these years, but it was no more unlikely than a virus that killed its hosts and animated their bodies after death.
Probably from soaking up the rain, he thought.
A gust of wind snatched up the smoke, lifting it to the platform, and the heavy odor of rotten meat burning made him grimace.
Trying to avoid the smoke with no eye to what was behind her, Rosemary stepped backward and though the ball of her foot was met by the wood of the platform, her heel found only air. She screamed as she began to fall and immediately clapped her hands over her mouth, so much stronger was her training to stay quiet at the fence than her instinct to grab hold of something to stop her fall.
His jaw clenched, Corks saw Alan catch hold of Rosemary’s elbow with one hand, and pull her back onto the platform effortlessly as smoke from the corpse billowed around them.
Alan was only slightly taller than average and wiry, but years of carrying the Voltaire II and his survival gear had made him stronger than his size suggested. Even if Rosemary had been a full grown man, he would have had no trouble.
“Be careful,” he whispered. “No matter how bad the smell may get, no matter how unpleasant the situation you find yourself in, you always have to stay focused. It’s better to hide in the most disgusting hole than to show yourself to the virus because you’re uncomfortable.”
“I understand,” Rosemary said, stammering. “I’m sorry.”
“Now look,” he said, pointing through the chain link at the zombie. “Do you see how the bones are turning brown and opening up in places?”
Rosemary nodded, stifling a cough. Unabated, the smoke was continuing to surround them.
Senna looked on, her face wearing an expression of familiar distaste. She and Alan both knew the girl had asthma, and they were trying to be as quick about it as possible, but these points were vital, and had to be made crystal clear.
“That’s a good sign,” Alan said. “It means that the fire is getting in them and purging the virus from the deepest parts of the body.”
Rosemary wheezed, and Alan knew he had to cut it short.
“It’s hot enough now to burn all the way through without us watching,” he said. “Alright. That’s enough for tonight. You can climb down now.”
The wind shifted, directing the acrid smoke to the tree line and then westward along it.
Rosemary began to climb down from the platform on unsteady legs. Senna stood behind her in case she stumbled, but she managed to climb all the way down without help. Alan descended the ladder after her.
Senna put an arm around the girl and they backed away from the gate. When they were aligned with the sentry’s tower, Senna signaled to Corks, who nodded and began to open the gates gladly, relieved that the exercise was over.
Alan stayed behind for a few moments, looking through the window while the middle gate was opened, watching the flames eat away the zombie’s carcass. The putrid meat had disintegrated quickly, and with it now gone, the bones were winking at him, seeming to want to discuss something. That was all in his head, he knew, but he sometimes got that way when he watched them burn.
The bones, he thought. God, the bones. What the virus did to them, seeing it could drill madness straight into your brain.
The break. The fucking break, over and over and over until they looked like this.
8
Alan turned away from
the flames, and, after closing the window in the fence, caught up with Rosemary and Senna, who were already through the middle gate and waiting for him to catch up. Senna still had her arm around Rosemary’s shoulders, and the girl was trembling. When Alan was beside them, the middle gate closed and the next one opened, allowing them all to slip into New Crozet proper, where they belonged.
Rosemary was walking warily, taking small, hesitant steps, as if she suspected the ground might give way under her feet. There was a wheeze here and there, but her breathing was under control.
“What was that?” she asked, with only a slight tremor in her voice. “What animal?”
“A deer,” Senna said.
“A deer,” Rosemary repeated thoughtfully. She was trying to drown the strain of what she’d just done in rational thought, understand and have everything explained so it wasn’t so frightening anymore, and perhaps less ugly.
She’d been too scared to look very closely at the zombie, or rather, to really see what was there, and that was for the best, at least for now.
She asked, “Did you ever eat a deer, a healthy one I mean, before the virus?” The children had heard of meat-eating from the adults, and knew it was something from the past.
Senna nodded. “Yes.”
Rosemary considered this. “Did you eat all of it, all the parts?”
Senna thought she understood the question, because children born during or after the apocalypse, who’d never eaten meat, didn’t have much of a concept of what parts of an animal were eaten. “Only some of the meat,” Senna said, then shrugged, thought about telling Rosemary that pretty much all animal parts had been eaten or put to some commercial use, but said nothing.
“Was it good?” Rosemary asked.
Alan was walking behind them, curious about what Senna was going to say because he thought she was a lot better with children; he always seemed to say the wrong thing.
Raising his right shoulder as he listened, he tried without success to work the crick out of his upper back.
The Voltaire II flamethrower he was carrying was a light model as far as throwers went, but he felt the strain in between his shoulder blades all the same, and the muscle pain always came with a sharp, poking feeling at the base of his spine. Now, as always, it was the inside of his right shoulder blade that was giving him the most trouble, reminding him of the toll the Voltaire II had taken on his body in the three years he’d carried it after the outbreak.
Ignore the ache was the name of the game, and he played it a lot. He certainly didn’t feel young anymore, not in any sense of the word.
Senna frowned and shook her head. “Not at all. Bitter and tough. Not a bit of fat on it, barely worth the effort of hunting and eating. I don’t miss it.”
Pursing her lips, she glanced back at Alan, and he nodded, understanding that answering with a lie was the right thing to do, and he knew he would’ve screwed that up. She had an empathy that he couldn’t manage, and which he wasn’t sure he understood in the first place.
That’s the problem, Alan thought, I’m too honest. But shouldn’t they know? Maybe not yet. Digestible bits, here and there, one at a time. There had been more than enough to chew on tonight.
Alan remembered meat well, and dreamt of it often. Apple smoked bacon shone through as the one he missed the most, but he’d take anything these days: burnt and stringy chicken, an old egg, blue mold-infested cheese, anything with some animal protein.
Some survivors lost their minds over it, killing and eating the zombie animals and knowing full well that the tainted meat would infect them with the virus. It hadn’t happened in New Crozet for almost five years, but before then, one to two meat-eaters a year had been the name of the game.
We’re due for another one, Alan thought grimly. Past due.
The Voltaire II was radiating a good deal of heat outward, still purring, baby, rolling waves of hot air out through the slits in her heatproof chassis. This feeling of warmth was familiar to Alan, who was holding the Voltaire II at a practiced distance from his body by her insulated bits.
The heat had once been uncomfortable, but not anymore. He’d burned thousands of zombie corpses, and the cooling flamethrower recalled the feeling of walking away from the infernos, intact, more or less unscathed—though far from untouched mentally—and, most importantly, uninfected.
“What about when the others say they miss meat?” Rosemary asked. “Were the other meats better?”
“No,” Senna said, wishing the adults would stop bringing it up with the kids. What the hell was the point of that anyway? “They just say that because they miss the option of eating it.”
Rosemary frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes, when something isn’t around anymore, we miss the possibility of having it, even if we don’t like it that much. Grass is greener sort of thing.”
Rosemary looked thoughtful. “Oh.” She had the ability, usually reserved to children, to switch gears rapidly, and now that she was focused on the meat eating question, the traumatic experience she’d just gone through felt dulled. Being easily distracted could be a real asset at times.
“Come on,” Senna said, putting an encouraging hand on Rosemary’s shoulder, “let’s get you inside where it’s warm.”
It was past ten, and a fresh autumn chill had entered the air.
“Okay,” Rosemary said, looking somber, but no longer distraught. She’d done what she was supposed to do, and it had been horrible, but, with Senna and Alan’s help, she’d been able to will herself through it. Rosemary hoped that she would never have to do it again, but if she did, she would be more prepared for it than she’d been an hour earlier.
From his post in the sentry’s tower, Corks had nervously watched the trio of townspeople pass through the middle gate, then he’d closed the gate behind them and opened the last one in the sequence, and after that he felt a brief upsurge of calm because Rosemary and Senna and Alan would return to their homes unharmed.
There were holly bushes at either side of the innermost gate, planted there by Amanda Fortelberry and Betty Jane Oswalt, two of New Crozet’s founding stalwarts, with the aid of some of the younger folk, of course. The bushes’ glossy, pointy leaves were drawing luminescence from the moonlight, giving the bushes a faint aura of silver, and when Rosemary, Senna, and Alan had passed through this last gate, Corks saw Rosemary and Alan, who were walking to either side of Senna, pick up some of the holly luster.
Corks rubbed his eyes, and now that Senna, Alan, and Rosemary were well inside, he shut the inner gate and watched them walk away until their forms began to merge with the shadows cast by New Crozet’s dimly-glowing lights. Then he turned back to the town’s entrance and flipped the heavy switch that controlled the spotlights.
The big lights blinked off their beams with only a flicker or two of delay, seeming to say to the seasoned watchman: there’s still a long shift ahead of you and we’re sorry about that, but we’re done so goodnight. He nodded, used to it as he was, and watched the afterglow of the spotlights hang in the air like a wicked half-grin until it was vacuumed up by the advancing dark.
9
The deer’s burning corpse was casting a shallow, shifting light on the path into the woods. As the fire receded, the darkening skeleton winked up at New Crozet’s gate and elevated watchman, the bones sizzling and gasping almost invitingly when untapped treasure troves of marrow or gristle, or likely both, were licked up by the fire’s diminishing tongue.
The flames wanted more, were asking for more, but there was hardly anything left. The bones that were now being crisped had formed the framework of a living animal once, with ample meat and not an indecent amount of fat for burning, but that was more than a decade ago, before the end of the world.
Corks watched the changing pattern of light play in the clearing, his trained eyes searching the ground for other zombies, but none appeared. He’d expected them to come a while ago, and now, as they kept on not showing themselves, his agitation g
rew. Squinting at the fire, he knew that Alan’s flare and the charging deer’s noise should have been more than enough to attract others, and the fire’s crackling should have been enough, too.
What did it mean? Where were the other zombies? Market day was still two days away, so it was too early for the traders’ caravans to be attracting the forest zombies.
Corks thought that Alan and Senna had been surprised by the lack of zombies too, but he was too far up in the watchtower to tell for sure. He’d been the night sentry on many nights when children were brought to the outer gate for this exercise, and he couldn’t remember a single time when Alan’s flare had brought only one zombie from the forest.
Definitely too early for the traders to be getting close, Corks thought. Where are the animals? The zombies, he corrected himself.
The more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Why hadn’t Alan and Senna made more of a fuss? He hadn’t seen any discussion take place, but that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either, because Alan and Senna had been focused on Rosemary.
It wasn’t that he wanted more to come, of course. It was bad enough that Rosemary had to deal with any at all. At her age, she should have been excited about Halloween coming up in just a few days, putting up ghoulish decorations with her family and thinking about the costume she’d wear and all the candy she’d get to eat.
Did she even know that it was October, or what year it was? For that matter, did Senna and Alan know? Sometimes Corks thought he was the only one who still tracked time on a calendar. And was that a strange thing to do now, rather than just live by the sun and seasons?
Shaking his head, he wished that Rosemary wouldn’t have to see any more than what she’d just seen, or to do any more than what she’d just done. But it was necessary, and she would likely be required to kill again in order to survive, in an uncontrolled environment much more dangerous than the practice field to which she’d been brought tonight. Childhood had to be cut short for her to survive, or at least to stand a better chance.