by James, Guy
It was something the children had to experience, something they had to see with their own eyes and do with their own hands. Their small fingers had to be the ones pulling the triggers, because that was what it took to really understand the world beyond the fence, and that it and the zombies living there were real, and always trying to get in. If his own son had had such training, Corks knew, he might still have been alive.
His thoughts turned back to the scant response to Alan’s flare, and he decided he might bring it up at the town hall meeting the next day. He told himself that it was nothing, a meaningless coincidence, but trying to dismiss it, unusual as it was, made him even more uncomfortable.
Might as well get settled into unease now, he thought. There was a long shift ahead of him to dwell on what he hadn’t seen.
The thermos of chicory coffee caught his eye and he picked it up. Unscrewing the top to let the earthy smell of the fake coffee reach him, he began to pace.
10
Aside from the crackling of the zombie deer, the night was sounding only with the rhythmic chirp and wing beats of insects. The watchtower’s dim light was attracting moths, mosquitoes, and their many winged friends, some of whom were unsettlingly large. But Corks was used to that, for the most part.
A moth flitted and fluttered around the glow of the light as he watched. Would the insects be next? The virus had already taken all the other animals, and if it jumped to insects, how could the town be protected then?
Even if insects lost their ability to fly following infection, as the birds had, they’d likely keep their ability to climb. And even though their climbing would become clumsy, they’d probably make it up the concrete and through the chain link after a few practice go’s, and then that would be all she wrote.
The coffee’s smell was wafting up at him, but it gave him no comfort.
That won’t happen, he told himself. It’s been too long since the last mutation already, so there won’t be any more. The insects can’t get it, because they’re too different. They can’t.
It was difficult to rely on that sort of logic, because a great variety of animals had succumbed to infection. After humans, the virus had jumped to other mammals, and then to birds, and then to fish. Corks couldn’t be sure that insects and fish were more different than mammals and birds. Maybe insects were just as different from mammals as fish were.
Perhaps all that was worth knowing was that the virus was smarter than the world and all of its creatures, and where it had found ways of entering new species, it would do so once more.
Briefly, he felt gripped by a panic-fueled urge to exterminate all the damned bugs and insects in the world. His breathing became more rapid and uneven. This was when it always became hard to control.
“I’m watching over the town, over New Crozet, my town,” Corks said as calmly as he could between gasps for air. “I have to keep it together. I can keep it together. I do keep it together. Everything’s under control. Everything’s okay. It’ll be another uneventful night, and New Crozet will go on another day. We’ll go on.”
Hardening his resolve, he stood up straighter and reminded himself of the job he had to do, and that he was going to do it extremely well. He wouldn’t allow himself anything less.
As the wings beat frantically around him, he took a tepid sip from his thermos, and then another, before screwing it up again and putting it back in its place under his chair. He often fell victim to anxiety attacks when he was in the watchtower, but rarely this early in the night. They usually began just before his shift ended, when his time at his post was running out.
The anxiety came to him on most of his shifts at that time, just before first light. The attacks were characterized by an overwhelming feeling that the world was out of control, and that he couldn’t control anything, not even the smallest of details around him, but that he had to try. As the end of his shift drew nearer, this mania would metastasize progressively, causing him to close his eyes for set intervals, reopen them briefly and then close them again, the sight of the reality that surrounded him too much to bear.
On this night, the anxiety took a different turn. Rather than shutting his eyes for counts of five or ten or fifteen as he was prone to do, he found himself staring at the dirt road toward the forest, unblinking and unable to shift his attention away. He felt that the image of the road was burning itself into his mind, carving its dust and gravel into the soft matter of his brain to create an indelible impression there, crisscrossing the folds.
Corks tried to look away but couldn’t even turn his neck.
Beads of sweat formed at the fringes of his receding hairline and ran down his brow, collecting over his eyebrows in preparation for the next leap. Moments later he was hyperventilating, and a sheen of sweat was draping his forehead, then sweat was soaking through his shirt at the armpits and lower back. Although the pressure to wipe his face was great, his arm seemed to be made of lead.
The unmistakable buzz of a mosquito nestled in his ears, and then another, and another, until the movement of the bloodsuckers’ wings was all he could hear. A swarm was surrounding him, attracted by the delicious scent of his sweat, which was seeping out of him in profuse fashion. There was bug spray in the tower with him, just a foot away, and he should have reapplied it, except he couldn’t reach for it, or, for that matter, move at all.
The winged party-crashers closed in and landed and sunk anchors in his skin where the blood was closest to the surface. These were the best tethering points, if you asked them.
They couldn’t get at his ankles, which were covered with socks and pants, and there were some darned good spots there, but they had easy access to his face and neck and wrists, with which they’d have to make do. There was more than enough hitching space, so they docked to him and slaked their thirst while their winged bodies were caressed by the gentle stirring of the unseasonably chill night air.
11
While something in Corks’s mind, some protective wall that had enabled him to function in spite of what the virus had done, got yet closer to breaking for good, Senna and Alan walked Rosemary back to her house and said their goodbyes.
The girl opened her front door, spilling light from the house onto New Crozet’s carpet of semi-dark, then went in and pulled the door shut behind her, leaving the spilt light stranded on the porch. It could’ve fled to Senna and Alan for comfort, but instead resigned itself to its fate and floated upward, finding a place for itself on the border of one of the moon’s ashier cheese holes, where it would toil until daybreak.
Rosemary said a perfunctory hello to her mother, Elizabeth Clark, who’d stayed up waiting for her daughter. In New Crozet, parents or those serving in that role usually didn’t go with their children when Senna and Alan took them to the fence for training. If there was trouble, the parents would likely only get in the way.
Elizabeth had much on her mind and much to do, responsible as she was for organizing the market, but she’d been unable to focus on any of her tasks while Rosemary was away at the fence, so she’d spent the evening worrying. It would have been easier for her to keep distracted if Tom Preston, Rosemary’s father, had been home, but he was out on a routine perimeter patrol, so there had been no one to fuss over while she waited. Elizabeth tried to engage her daughter in conversation, interested to know how the night had gone, but Rosemary made little attempt at a response.
Dazed and nauseated, and having fended off her mother’s questions, she slunk up the stairs, went to her room, and closed the door.
The Preston house was two stories and spacious, and having her own room was a welcome extravagance for a girl like Rosemary, who valued her privacy and spent much of her time alone. She had a place to escape to, as well as some disused rooms on the second story, and the attic to stow herself in when she really needed to vanish without a trace.
When she was by herself, she liked to think about the world, and about solitude. She wanted to believe that there was a reason for what had happened, and
that there was some meaning in it. She always tried to believe that.
The fact that the animals had been taken away from people in particular struck a chord with her. She’d seen pictures in the magazines and books in the library of people with cats and dogs and horses and other animals, sometimes even lizards.
She wasn’t sure if she’d ever seen a picture of a deer before, but it wouldn’t have surprised her if she had. The pictures of animals she saw in books didn’t stick in her mind. They were abstractions, unreal constructs whose images failed to bear them out into flesh and blood concepts for Rosemary.
The creature that she’d killed tonight likely bore only a basic, structural resemblance to its living predecessor. The virus changed animals and people so much, made them so ugly, that they were hardly recognizable for what they’d been before.
It was the breaking. It was all that horrible breaking. Thankfully, she’d been too preoccupied with her fear and focusing on shooting the thing to let her eyes really sink into the details and see all the...
She’d been taught these things early on, had been shown pictures of what people looked like when the virus had taken them. She hadn’t spoken for a week after looking at the first set of pictures. But, with time, she’d grown used to the images, which returned to her throughout her waking life, and when she dreamed.
Seeing a zombie in real life, however, had shaken her in a way she hadn’t been prepared for, and she’d barely even seen it. Why was everything so much worse when it was off the page and moving?
Until tonight, Rosemary had wanted a dog. She’d been in love with the fantasy of having one. According to the books, dogs seemed to be the most fun of the animals to play with.
Cats seemed good, too, but Rosemary had wanted a dog more. She’d known that she would never have one, and she thought the closest she would get to that daydream would be an encounter with a zombie dog, and she would have to kill it, and, if she didn’t, it would kill her.
Now, her recollection of that fantasy was sickening. It seemed somehow disgusting that she’d ever entertained the idea in the first place. There were no dogs, not anymore. It was wrong to keep thinking about it, unhealthy.
The room was sparsely furnished. It was lit by the light of a lamp that was too small to do much good, whose shade had gone missing long ago and rotted away in an unknown somewhere. The wire mesh on which the shade had once sat was tarnished and bent out of shape, and had been that way for a long time.
It was more bent out of shape than it had been when Rosemary got it, however, because she’d dropped it twice. She knew that it had made her mother cross with her, because she could tell those things, but her mother hadn’t yelled or punished her.
A coloring book was on the bedside table at the base of the lamp. The outlines in the book were scenes from fairy tales, most of which no one had read to her, and she hadn’t read herself. She did know about the one with the sleeping princess, but that was the only one, and she wasn’t sure if her version of the story was correct. All the pictures had been colored in by the time Rosemary received the book. It had been a present from Alan for her sixth birthday.
Rosemary sometimes wondered if there was any unfilled picture left in any coloring book in the world, or if the pictures remained unfilled only in the memories of some of the older people, and, when they died, there would be no unfilled pictures left anywhere, in people’s memories or otherwise.
She sometimes wished that she could live in the world before the virus. It seemed so wonderful: the people, the animals, no perimeter fence, buying food at stores. Stores. Can you believe that?
She could hardly imagine a world so perfect. She’d never seen the world that way, and it made her wonder if there was a way to travel inside another person’s memory, so that she could live in some older person’s recollections.
If only there were a way to make the leaves fall upward and turn green again, and to repeat the cycle until she was in a place where the progression of the seasons hadn’t known the apocalypse’s bitter austerity. She would stay there in that place, indefinitely, if she could.
The concept of memory had begun to fascinate her soon after she’d received the coloring book from Alan, but she wasn’t aware of the connection. Did people and animals and events continue to live in memories? Or were they gone forever? Had they ever existed at all if the memories were the only evidence that remained? Were the memories embellished or inadequate or was it different for each memory? If the pre-apocalyptic world did live on in people’s minds, was there a way to restore what was remembered?
They were odd, precocious thoughts, stirred in her by a world that made its children grow up far too quickly.
She spent a few minutes standing by the bedside table and trying to imagine what it would be like to have this night in her distant past. She was moving her perception of her life forward in time, until what she’d done tonight was so far away that she could no longer feel the gun’s weight in her hand, or its recoil, or hear the muffled shots or the sounds made by the thing that had once been alive, or feel the sting of the burning rot in her nostrils and taste its sour and acrid flavor in her mouth, or its stabs deep in her seizing lungs.
She wanted to forget, and realized that she probably never would. She sat down on the floor and leaned her right side against the bedside table and her back against the bed. Her clothes smelled like the burning corpse, and she could still taste the hot air that had risen up to her from the fire. She knew that she should shower, but she didn’t have the strength, and she wasn’t sure she wanted to, either.
Maybe if she drew the feelings in even closer, if there was any nearer for them to get, this evening would more quickly become a distant memory, grey and faded and odorless, like pulling back a string on a bow and letting your arrow fly.
Familiar noises were filtering up through the floor, the sounds of her mother tidying up. Elizabeth cleaned when she was nervous, and that was a lot of the time, so the house was immaculate. On a normal night, she would have been able to sleep with Tom out on patrol, but worrying about both him and Rosemary had wound her up too much to go to bed.
Feeling slightly comforted by her mother’s movements downstairs, Rosemary got up, pushed the curtain aside, and looked out the window. Seeming to be keeping their distance from the moon, there were patches of velvet in the sky where the stars’ glimmers couldn’t reach.
She frowned as she squinted into the darkness. The clouds looked stupidly happy—that was the only way she could think of to describe it—they were fat, fluffy, and unhurried, as if they were strolling leisurely across the sky, without a care in the world. Rosemary pressed her lips into a thin line, and thought of Senna and Alan.
A cloud, the happiest looking of all, was on a course to collide with one of the velvet spots in the night, the darkest Rosemary could see. She stared at it for a moment, unable to imagine a blacker dark, then looked away and closed the curtain.
What would happen when they met? Would the cloud be sucked into the darkness, caught by an unseen vortex and absorbed, spinning, into nothingness? She didn’t want to see it.
She took a deep breath, exhaled slowly, bit her lip, took one more deep breath, and got in bed with her clothes on. After pulling the comforter, which was a lesson in patchwork and tatter, over her, she turned out the lamp.
Her asthma wasn’t too bad right now, just a bit of trouble catching her breath, which was normal for her. It was a lot better than it had been at the fence, and even that was nothing compared to how it sometimes got in the spring when the air was thick with pollen.
Closing her eyes and pushing her face into the worn pillow’s rough surface, she began to cry silently. What passed for a pillow on her bed was a flattened relic, more like a drab towel. As she wept quietly into it, the feelings and smells that had come home with her from the fence gathered in around her, seeing how close they could get, knowing that she didn’t understand what they were, and knowing that she knew that, too.
12
Rosemary dreamt her usual dream that night. She was sitting in the shade of an old barn—channeling the past life of the blown-down barn on the way to Senna and Alan’s house, perhaps—listening to a fenced-in herd of cows low.
They were lowing and chewing on grass and swatting at flies with their tails and tromping about and lowing some more.
They were nice cows, pretty and colorful, with wonderful brown and black and white spots, and quite happy in their sun-drenched chewing and lowing, in spite of the tail-flicking that was required. But maybe that didn’t faze cows. It probably didn’t, her dream-self decided.
It wasn’t like she’d ever heard a cow moo in real life, but this was how she imagined cows lived and breathed based on what she’d heard from the adults. There were some movies lying around New Crozet that she could’ve watched for a more realistic portrayal, but neither her parents nor Senna and Alan had watched them with her yet. They were holding off until she got older, so that the stark differences between pre-outbreak and post-outbreak life would be easier for her to process.
She was just sitting there in her dream, watching them and listening to their cow jibber-jabber. They were hemming and hawing, she could tell, that much was obvious. Maybe this and maybe that. She liked that kind of talk, the sort that went in circles around and around and around the answer without touching it.
That way the cows could talk for much longer than if they just spat the answer right out along with their happily green cud. But what would be the point of that? Cud was only digested partway, and therefore required further chewing, and the hem and haw tactic was conducive to just that. There was plenty of time and nothing to rush for, anyway.