The Seven Habits

by William Todd Rose

  The blood had dried on her face overnight and her skin felt stretched too tightly over her skull. She was sticky and dirty and wanted to throw up, but could only wretch and heave as traces of bile stung the back of her throat.

  “You’ve got to do the rite of the dead,” she told herself. “You’ve got to give Mama the rite.”

  The strange yet somehow familiar voice in the back of her mind whispered again. What? She was going to kill you! You had to do what you did, even if she was you mother. She doesn’t deserve any type of burial ritual, don’t you get that? Mothers don’t try to kill their own daughters…

  Ocean wiped her eyes with the back of her hand and stood, brushing the dirt from her clothes. She closed her eyes for a moment and took a deep breath of cool, clean air. The clearing within the circle of cars was so silent that there was a faint ringing in her ears, so she cleared her throat and spoke her thoughts aloud.

  “I’ve got to do the rite. Mama did it for Daddy. And I have to do it for her. That’s all there is to it.”

  She walked across the shelter and felt as if she were moving through a dream. Somehow, her arms and legs didn’t feel as if they were actually connected to her, like she were going through pre-programmed movements that she was powerless to control.

  She snaked her index finger through a dark hole in the trunk of an old Cadillac until she felt the little lever dig into her skin. After a slight flex, the trunk popped open with a click, and a musty odor wafted out from the interior. Her father’s things were folded neatly inside, his glasses atop the stack as if he might someday come back to lay claim to them. But I’m not here to think about Daddy… not now.

  Reaching into the darkness, her hand closed around cold, smooth metal. She raised it tentatively, surprised at how heavy the slender rod actually was.

  “I’ve got to do this.” Even her own voice sounded as if it were coming from someone else, as if there were someone standing just behind her shoulder who narrated her thoughts.

  “It’s the right thing to do.”

  The trunk closed with a thud and she walked back to her mother’s body. There, she dropped to her knees and placed one palm against the woman’s cheek.

  Cold, so cold, people shouldn’t be so cold….

  Ocean thought she would just be able to lightly push her mother’s head to the side, that it would roll over slowly and easily. But the muscles had stiffened during the night and she had to put her weight into it. Finally, there was a sound, something between a pop and crackle, and the woman’s head rolled to the left.

  Ocean pushed the thin locks of hair away from her mother’s face, revealing the little dip of skin between the corner of her eye and her ear.

  She took the tire iron in both hands now and took a deep breath. She held it… counted to three… and then drove the beveled tip down into her mother’s temple. The crunch of the bone seemed to rise up through the metal and tingle her palms. There wasn’t as much blood as she expected, nothing more than a dark sludge that oozed slowly out of the hole.

  Ocean practically leaned on the tire iron, driving it deeper into her mother’s head and, when she was satisfied it had gone far enough, gave the entire thing a twist by pulling on the end that was bent at an angle.

  “Rest in peace, Mama. Rest in peace.”

  Standing, Ocean took a final look around the only place she had ever called home. The rising sun was just beginning to filter through the tarp which usually infused their living area with an almost magical quality. On this morning, everything looked as flat and one dimensional as some of the paintings she’d found scattered through the debris of the city. Whatever had imbued this space with light and emotion had fled during the night, running far, far away from the horrors it had witnessed.

  She knew she couldn’t stay here any longer. There were too many memories… too much pain.

  “Goodbye, Mama… I… I love you, Daddy.”

  She didn’t know where she would go, but there had to be somewhere, out there. Somewhere safe where she could try to put all this behind her. She would take her figurines and the few clothes she owned and make her own way in the world, now. There really was no other choice.

  She was just beginning to squirm into the backseat of her room when she paused for a moment. Crawling back out, she ran across the clearing and scooped up the dead rat her mother had dropped the night before.

  At least she wouldn’t be hungry. Not for a while, at least.

  The rest of the day passed in something of a daze. The once familiar gridwork of streets and landmarks were nothing more than a blur that existed in some fuzzy dimension outside her own body. Ocean was aware that her belly was full and that the greasy taste of rat still lent its tang to her saliva, but other than that, she was numb. She drifted along aimlessly without even the odd voice in her head to keep her company.

  Even though it had been left back in the clearing, she could feel the weight of the tire iron in her hand.

  By the time the sun had begun its descent in the sky, the first traces of normality had begun to reassert themselves. It started with the slow realization that she had no idea where she was. None of the buildings looked familiar; the faded graffiti on the walls and buildings that still stood were not the recognizable loops and swirls of her childhood… the names of streets on their bent signposts sounded foreign and usual.

  But maybe that was for the best, a fresh start, a new area. She’d have to be more careful, of course. She didn’t know all the hiding places in this section of the city, all the secret places that she could scuttle through in an emergency.

  The smell hit her, almost as though her thoughts had conjured it into existence, thick and stagnant, forcing its way into her mouth and nostrils, filling every inch of the hollowness she still felt inside.

  She could hear them. That shuffling scuffle and scrape. So close.

  Her body tensed and the rat seemed to sour within her stomach.

  How the hell could she have allowed herself to get so close? Where the hell had her head been?

  She turned to run and felt the fear squeeze tightly around her neck… they were there… right behind her.

  There looked to be between fifteen to twenty rotters in the pack. They walked forward with a limping gait, stretching out their arms as if they could somehow claw their way to her even more quickly. Hints of bone contrasted with dark, shriveled flesh, somehow looking brittle yet leathery at the same time. One of them had a jagged, gaping hole in its chest and slivers of broken glass jutted out from its face at odd angles. Mummy-like carcasses that had dehydrated slowly in the sun, wheezing with escaping gasses, reaching out while their teeth gnashed and clacked… they stumbled toward her.

  Shit.

  Ocean spun around. She was still weak, but her rodent breakfast had given her system a shot of protein so maybe she could get away from them and—

  Another group of rotters shuffled around the corner, blocking her only path of escape.

  You shoulda kept the tire tool, damn it. Why did you drop the tire tool?

  The rotters were closing in quickly, tightening the ring about her as Ocean spun in slow circles, hoping to see some chink in their offensive, some way that she could break through the cluster of walking corpses that surrounded her, but there weren’t any.

  They were packed so tightly together that by the time she pushed one out of her way, three others would already be grabbing at her shirt and hair. She knew exactly what they would do, she’d seen it countless times before. They way they’d tear into her flesh would make what she did to her mother’s throat look like play acting.

  She wanted to scream for help, to shout until it felt like her vocal chords would snap beneath the strain, but that wouldn’t do any good. Even if there was anyone around to hear, they wouldn’t come. They’d stay safe within their hiding places, would remain as silent and still as possible, as they alternately whispered a prayer for the person screaming and gave thanks that it wasn’t them out there.

 
No… she was on her own, with a pack of rotters rapidly closing in, nowhere to run and nothing to fight with. She was staring Death right in the face, for the second time in as many days, only this time, she really didn’t see a way out of it.

  She would die out there on the street; maybe at some point in the future, some little girl would sit and envision pictures from the stains her blood would leave upon the dirty concrete.

  Maybe it was what she deserved. She had, after all, killed her own mother hadn’t she? She certainly deserved to be punished for such a horrible act. She’d killed her mother and stole the dead woman’s rat—maybe this was the universe’s way of setting things right.

  Ocean closed her eyes, bracing herself for the first touch of rough, decaying flesh, for the first scratch and bite. The first flair of pain.

  She readied herself for death.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  I know what you’re thinking. It’s written all over your faces—dude’s seen too many Romero films, read too many books by David Moody and Eric S. Brown. You’re thinking Hollywood nightmares have fed my delusions, right? But that’s only because you haven’t been through the Eye of Aeons, man. It’s because you’re not willing to admit, even for a fraction of a second, that this cosmos is far stranger than your narrow little minds give it credit for.

  You cling to linear time, you bow before the altar of flawed science and religion, and subscribe to this view of reality that society has this unspoken pact to accept The Way Things Are. Once you’ve stepped outside those prefab boxes, once you’ve risen high enough to tell it’s not even a box at all, not really, then—and only then—can you start seeing the true nature of things.

  You guys are even worse than your average citizen. You know why they used to call you black and whites? Because that’s the way you see things, man. In the eyes of Johnny Law, everything is either right or wrong, good or bad. It’s rigid, inflexible, and not at all in accordance with the natural order of things.

  There’s all these gray areas, see? All these ethical dilemmas that just aren’t as clear-cut as your ordinances and statutes would like them to be. Out there, in the real world, things get fuzzy really fast, and you just kinda bumble along, trying to do the right thing as best as you can.

  Say for example you got all the money in the world. I mean, you’re so loaded someone could swipe a card down your crack and your ass would spit out hundreds. So you’re just loungin’ around the mansion one day, doin’ whatever the fuck obscenely rich people do, and there’s this knock on the door, right? Turns out to be a bunch of pasty scientists out there, and they’re sayin’ how they’ve had this breakthrough… they’ve discovered the cure for cancer or some shit, dig?

  But they ain’t got the funding to distribute this miracle drug to the masses, so they’re going door to door, selling these boxes of prepackaged brownies to raise money. Yeah, that’s right… they’re having a fundraiser just like the fuckin’ girl scouts. This is a parable, man, so roll with me, okay?

  So anyway, as I was saying. You know you’ve got enough bread that you could single-handedly scarf up every box they have to offer. Your billions could rid the world of one of the worst blights ever known to man, but there’s a catch, man… there’s always a catch. See, you happen to know—through your various business contacts—that the tasty treats these geeks are hawking are produced in some third-world sweatshop. I’m talkin’ the type of place where they’ll lop off a finger if they even suspect you might be carting some of that product home via armpit express to feed your starvin’ family.

  So what do you do? Do you condone child labor and so many human rights violations that even Amnesty International would say whoa, man, now that’s fucked up? Or do you condemn millions of people to a drawn out, agonizing death?

  Now that’s a morally ambiguous brownie, man, but that’s the weight of the decisions I’ve carried around on my fuckin’ shoulders, see? That’s the shit I’ve gotta deal with and yet you have the audacity to sit there and judge me? To write me off as some damn lunatic who can’t tell the difference between the fantasies in his mind and what’s real.

  Well fuck you, man… fuck you. I know which way the wind blows and I know it’s blowin’ with the fires of Hell and it’s gonna consume us all. Burn us down, man, to cinders and ashes. And we’ll be the lucky ones, oh, you better believe that. The people who come after us? They’ll only wish they’d had such an easy death.

  So what did I decide, then? I decided to buy those fuckin’ brownies. You choose your battles and I picked the devil I knew, man. I mean, I’ve been in Ocean’s head, dig? I’ve heard her innermost thoughts, all those little secrets we’d never dream of telling another soul, and I’ve seen her for who she really is.

  And if there’s any way that I can spare that poor girl even a fraction of the bullshit and pain she’s been through… if there’s even the slightest chance I can save her ass, you better believe I’m gonna take it. I mean, I love her, man.

  Don’t look at me like that, you sick bastard. Jesus, she’s can’t be older than fourteen, man. I don’t mean I love her in a hey, I’ve got some free candy and puppies in the back of my van kinda way. It ain’t like that at all. I wanna protect her, see? I wanna make sure she never knows heartache or loss, to shelter her from all the suffering and sorrow and regret. I want her to laugh and play and run. I want her to be a fuckin’ kid. Is that so wrong? To safeguard the ones you love? If it is, then lock me up and throw away the key, dude ‘cause I’m guilty as friggin’ charged.

  Being dimensionally unstable gave me a way that I could help her, see? When you’re not restricted to past, present, and future you get the big picture. You see things develop like a time-lapse film. You witness how everything falls into place. And that’s how I learned about the seven signs, ya know? Because I’ve been all over that timeline.

  Clarice fuckin’ Hudson. She was just one of the brownies in those boxes, man. She was a threat to Ocean, ya know? To humanity, for that matter.

  See, I was in the Dollar Bonanza… you know, that place in the mall where you can get just about anything for a buck? Yeah, the one right between the shoe store and that shop with all the goth kids milling about. That’s the one, man.

  Anyways, I was in Dollar Bonanza trolling for victims, right? Shit, dude… I’m just fuckin’ with ya. You shoulda seen the look on your faces. Priceless.

  I was there looking for shaving cream, man. Razors and shampoo. Normal stuff. I was wonderin’ if there would be some way I could take one of those little glass penguins or a kid’s book with me through the Eye of Aeons, ya know? Inside, I knew it was a losing battle since even my own body couldn’t cross over. But it was a nice thought, dig? One of those things you’d like to do, but know you never will.

  So I’ve got my basket hangin’ off my arm and it’s practically overflowing with junk. Most of it I didn’t really need. But you know how those stores are. You go in for the bare essentials and come out with a miniature zen garden, three shot glasses with snotty little bunnies on ‘em, and a DVD or two of old Kung Fu flicks. I take my place in line and at first, I’m just looking around at the candy and the sunglasses and shit. Taking a few steps forward every couple seconds and then finding something else to divert my attention.

  Something about the clerk caught my eye, man. Not in a sexual way, either. Don’t get me wrong. She was cute and all. Had these stawberry blond ringlets wisping over this round face with high cheekbones. Eyes like sapphires. And even beneath that lime green smock you could tell the bitch had a nice rack. So okay, maybe at first I was a little aroused. I mean, I’m a man, ya know? I respond. Even against my better judgment. So I’m checkin’ out her tits and I can’t help but notice the name tag pinned to her apron: Hi, my name is CLARICE ask how I can help.

  But then I noticed how she had these little beads of sweat on her brow, right? I look a little more closely and I notice there’s these wet stains spreading across the armpits of her white blouse. Wasn’t long before I realize
her entire body was practically shimmering in a sheen of sweat. The strands of hair hangin’ down the back of her neck? Drenched, man. I mean, they’ve got the air conditioner pumped up so much I’m practically fartin’ ice crystals. I got my sleeves rolled down and the woman in front of me is trying to warm herself by rubbin’ her hands up and down her arms while she talks to her husband or boyfriend or whatever. We’re all fuckin’ freezing. But this chick? She’s sweating like a whore on payday, man.

  Let me tell ya, I lost that chubby real damn quick.

  See, that’s the first sign, man. The infected… their bodies are undergoing changes at a molecular level, see? You know how much energy it takes to alter just a single sequence of DNA? You could power a small town for a week. Energy excites molecules, right? Hopped up molecules create friction and friction builds heat. On top of all that, you’ve got your own body tryin’ to fight this shit off. The infected are like these walking nuclear reactors… and they sweat. Good God, do they sweat.

  I get my ass outta that line real quick, believe you me. I just sit my basket on the empty counter to my right and hightail it out the door. I don’t want her touching my shit, man. I don’t want her fingers all over my can of shaving cream. I mean, I’m gonna be sprayin’ that foam out and spreading it all over my face, ya know, and then scraping a razor across it? One little nick and next thing I know I’m buying stock in Degree antiperspirant, if ya get my drift.

  But at the same time, I keep thinking about Ocean. I see her driving that tire iron into her mother’s skull, feel her confusion and pain and emptiness. All the conflict raging inside her, justification versus guilt and all that shit. And it pisses me off, man. No kid should ever have to experience that.