by TW Brown
“I’m not saying that,” a voice responded defensively. It took me a second to place it: Nickie Bailey. Of all the residents, she was the only one with that peculiar Southern accent. I say peculiar because this is the Pacific Northwest. While some folks may adopt a lazy form of speech, hers was definitely a real, honest-to-goodness Southern drawl. I keep meaning to ask her about it, but I’ll be damned if things don’t keep cropping up.
“I think it is best if Sunshine makes her concoction and then we administer it when the child is on the verge. Ease her into it if we can.”
That made me sit up. They were discussing Emily. I already had my mind made up. I would be the one to take care of her in the end.
“And that is fine,” Nickie countered. “However, Jesus has said that he would step in and take care of her after. Steve has enough to deal with…why should he have to be the one to put that little girl down for good?”
“Because she is my responsibility,” I said, causing both of them to jump.
“Steve, I am sorry if we woke you,” Nickie sputtered. “We were actually outside when this conversation began. I guess we just lost track of where we were and how much volume we were using.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said with a wave of my hand. “But as for Emily…I will be the one to deal with her in the end.”
“Steve—” Dr. Zahn started, but I didn’t want to hear it.
“That’s not open for discussion.”
“Oh good…you’re up.” Melissa pushed into the open room past the two women who were still giving each other the evil eye. “The newcomers are starting to come around and we have a problem.”
“Never a shortage,” I huffed. “Now if you all don’t mind, I would like to change into some clean clothes before I go out there.”
For some strange reason, all three of them looked at each other, and then at me like I’d sprouted an extra appendage somewhere in the middle of my forehead. Fine, I thought. I dropped my pants and hooked my thumbs in the band of my underwear. When I looked back up, Nickie was gone. Well, so much for that.
“Doc…do you mind?”
“Oh, sorry,” she said with a slight shake of her head. Obviously she had gone on to other things in her mind and could care less if I were about to drop trow.
“I guess now is as good of a time as any to ask,” Melissa began with just a trace of hesitation in her voice.
“Sure,” I shrugged, “why not.”
I pulled on a clean set of boxer-briefs and sighed as they almost slipped back off. Who needed fancy pills or expensive gym memberships? I hadn’t been exactly fat before all of this, but on those rare occasions when I would work out with a few buddies and we got around to doing sit ups or whatever the latest thing one of them had read about in some fitness magazine, the rally cry would go up. “Time to do abs!”
“You mean ab,” I always corrected them. I had a very well-defined one pack. It sorta looked like the hood of a VW Bug.
Now, I could actually see three of the mythological—to me at least—six-pack. Why is it that I could see the top two and the second one down on the left side? Weird.
Anyways, I would need a smaller size next time we sought out those sorts of supplies. I pulled on some pants and fastened my belt, realizing for the first time that I was now three notches past the original ones.
“…ever you did has not only got that child all stirred up, but also that other guy, Potter or Palmer or whatever his name is,” Melissa was saying.
Oops, I guess I was distracted. Still, I think I was catching the gist of what she was saying.
“I was the one who put down her mother and a few others,” I explained. “I guess they have been shielding the kids from what is going on. She thinks I was actually killing people.”
“That’s terrible,” Melissa sighed.
“I know,” I agreed. “I mean, how long did they think they could keep that up?”
“No,” Melissa scolded, “I mean how could you kill the zombies, especially her mother, right in front of her, Steve?”
What?
“That had to be very traumatic. No wonder the little girl is terrified of you.”
“It wasn’t like I was the only one,” I snapped. Why in the heck did I have to defend myself? She should know damn good and well what it is like out there. We never shielded Thalia or Emily. In fact, she was one of the big proponents for getting the girls exposed to more of what went on. “Jon was in the barn taking them out, too.”
“I bet he was inside and out of sight of that poor little girl.”
Honestly, the way everything was starting to blur together, I couldn’t really remember. What I did remember, and it came to me in a bolt that made the hair on my arms and on the back of my neck stand up, was the reaction of that one child-zombie that had seemed to observe us from a distance.
“Well, Misty seems to only remember what you did,” Melissa insisted. “And that man keeps breaking into hysterics, saying that you went crazy and just started chopping people up and bashing their heads in.”
“Is that right?” Now I was a little annoyed. Not with the child. Actually, her being the way she was had everything to do with how the adults around her had acted. What I wasn’t going to do is let some stranger come in here and start painting me as a blood-thirsty lunatic.
I headed out to the lobby area. Luck was with me as everybody—except those on watch—was sitting down to eat. The newbies, or at least the ones that were mobile enough to come out and sit or slump at the table, were present. I did a scan of the faces and realized that, other than Mr. Patton and little Misty, only two others from the group we’d rescued were present. I would worry about names later.
“So…I guess we need to have a group meeting,” I announced. Most of my “old” group simply glanced up from their plates. However, it was the reaction from the newcomers that got my irritation meter slamming into the stops. You would have thought, based solely on their faces, that a herd of zombies just walked through the door…led by Satan.
“W-w-we don’t want any trouble,” the man, Mr. Patton, stammered.
“Well that’s really the issue, isn’t it?” I snapped. “We plucked your people—the ones still alive—from a bad situation that was only going to get worse.”
“You killed—” Patton started, but I cut him off.
“You were eating each other,” I snapped. “You had almost nothing left as far as supplies go. We found you and made not one, but two trips to gather you up and bring the ones here that we could try to save. Now obviously many of you were too far gone. And I am really sorry that so many of you died even after we brought you here, but I am not a monster. I put down those of you already dead who had come back as zombies.”
“Excuse me,” Mr. Patton said meekly. “But am I to believe that you are saying the members of our group that became ill were…coming back as...zombies? I believe that is the word that you used isn’t it? Zombies?”
What rock had these people been hiding under?
“Do you have a better term?” Billy leaned forward at his place in the table so he could look down and see Mr. Patton.
“I imagine there are probably several if we were to have the opinion of an actual doctor,” Mr. Patton said with what actually sounded to me like disdain.
“I am a real doctor.”
Now you’ve done it, I thought as Dr. Zahn slipped into her normal seat at the table which happened to be right next to Mr. Dean Patton. Perhaps I wouldn’t need to say much at all.
“Well then surely you can not expect us to believe that the dead are getting up like some sort of very bad movie and eating people. This has to be some sort of virus or biological weapon,” Mr. Patton almost laughed.
“Where exactly have you been all this time?” Dr. Zahn asked as she folded her hands before her and turned her gaze fully on the seemingly ignorant Mr. Patton.
“We have been living in our commune,” he said simply.
“What sort of commune?” M
elissa spoke up.
“We are simply a group of people who left the material ways behind and sought a more simplistic and basic life,” Mr. Patton explained.
“Like a religious cult?” Billy squinted and seemed to be on the verge of laughing. I shot him a stern look and he quickly straightened his expression.
“Some of our members choose to follow certain faiths,” Mr. Patton explained. “We had all kinds. Some were atheists, and some kept it to themselves. Religion had nothing to do with our choice.”
“So like a hippy commune,” Jake Beebe offered.
The look on Mr. Patton’s face told me that he was starting to get really annoyed. I guess I could see why. Still, I was not really clear about him or his people, and if he wasn’t going to just offer it up, then I guess he would have to keep being asked questions that he didn’t like.
“Some of our members are former bankers, corporate CEOs, we were made up of all kinds and classes.”
“So then you don’t have television or radio in your…” I considered my next word and just decided to say ‘The hell with being delicate!’ “Compound?”
“We chose to remove ourselves from society after our government had repeatedly failed us and practically wiped out our retirements, our jobs, caused many of us to lose our homes.”
Okay, that I could get behind. I understood their logic…at least sort of anyways.
“So you really don’t know what has happened?” I pressed.
“Our deliveries of oil for our heating and cooking systems and our gardening supplies did not show up as scheduled. After several days, a few of our people went into La Grande to find out what was wrong.
“When they returned, only two made it back and both were almost beyond understanding as they were delirious with fever. When one of them went into a catatonic state, we were preparing to send for a nearby doctor that comes out and does annual check-ups of our people—we aren’t crazy or solely reliant on nature or God to tend our needs,” he threw that last line in and glared around the table at all of us. I imagine we’d given him enough reason to feel defensive, so I wouldn’t hold it against him.
“Only, just as we were about to do so, Trent came out of his coma. It was his crying that brought us all running. It was the most peculiar cry if you knew Trent. He’d been a welder in the shipyards before and that cry almost sounded like it came from—”
“A baby?” Nickie blurted.
“Yes,” Mr. Patton said. He got a far away look for a second, shuddered, and then continued his story.
“When folks went in to check on him, he was up and out of bed…but he was obviously still very sick. His eyes were…wrong. And his tone was certainly off. He attacked people who tried to help him. Even managed to bite a few. When we finally got him restrained, that was when the other fella who had just slipped into his coma an hour earlier woke up. We got him tied down, but a few more ended up being bitten or scratched.”
“You didn’t start to realize that there was a problem?” I asked. “I’m not doctor, but I have a pretty good handle on what dead is. Nobody noticed the lack of a pulse…breathing…some of the basics?”
“We just thought we were missing something,” Mr. Patton insisted. “Nobody wants to be the one to say that a dead person is getting up.”
Denial. There it was as plain as day.
“But you started figuring out…some of you must have,” Jon spoke up. “The first time we came out, you had everybody that was infected either tied down or locked in a shed. So how come you folks didn’t start trying to find help?”
“Honestly?” Mr. Patton looked up with red-rimmed eyes.
“That would help,” Jon said with a nod.
“By the time a majority of us were willing to accept the possibility…a few of our group had snuck away in the night. They took our only working vehicles and most of our canned food. We always had a pantry with dozens of shelves lined with jars. Our gardens were well-tended and everybody took part to ensure that we were always set just in case of any prolonged stretches of inclement weather.”
“It sounds like there is more to this than you are sharing,” Jon pressed.
“There was a fight. Only, none of us had guns. Well…none of us were supposed to,” Mr. Patton admitted. “The ones leaving had us outmatched. Even worse, they took a few against their will. That was when it got really ugly and a few of us tried to stop them.”
“So why not just hike out of that place?” I asked.
“We had everything we needed except for food. We had a little…just not enough to last very long. Plus…” His voice trailed off. After a few deep breaths, he continued. “We were afraid. And we’d already lost so many of our community. Plus, the snow started. Then we were truly trapped. Honestly, we believed that we could hunt. Only, it just seemed like the game had left. Sometimes we would go days without even hearing birds. That was when it started to sink in that there might be problems. And then we realized something that, looking back, is kind of embarrassing.”
“What’s that?” Jon prompted after another of Mr. Patton’s long pauses.
“The sky,” he said with a shrug. “Not one single contrail. And none of us could recall when it was that we’d last seen one. And then there was that night when a few of the…” Once again Mr. Patton grew silent. Finally, he spoke, and that first word came out like he was trying to spit a foul taste from his mouth. “Zombies came…they attacked a few of us. That was when we decided to build a fence around part of the commune.”
“So who decided that it was time to start eating each other?” Jake blurted. He looked around the room at us and seemed embarrassed for a second. “You know that you were thinking it,” he finally said to me and Jon.
Mr. Patton sighed again. This one was different, though. He closed his eyes and you could see him wince and flinch. It was almost like he’d developed some sort of facial tick. Tears started to roll down his cheeks, and I honestly did not think that he was going to answer Jake’s question.
“We got so hungry.” His voice was barely above a whisper and he kept this eyes squeezed shut. “We’d actually buried some of our dead. But then some of the others began to fall. Not from being bitten—we’d secured all of them. The ground became too hard to be able to dig graves. Since it was so cold, we just decided to put them in one of the unused yurts. We would take care of them come the spring.
“But eventually our food was gone. Twice we sent a few volunteers out to try and find something…anything. None of them ever came back.”
I tried to imagine what that little bit of Hell must have felt like for those poor people. After all, it was hard enough those first days…weeks. What must it have been like for them to walk out into the world several months into it and discover everything was gone? Couple it with their obvious denial, and they were like zombie room service.
“…when Gail mentioned something about that soccer team that had crashed in the mountains back in the Seventies or something,” Mr. Patton said.
I snapped my attention back to him. I was actually curious about how that whole thing had come about. I guess you can’t judge somebody unless you have walked a mile in their shoes, but I could not even remotely imagine where things would have to go where I would be able to rationalize eating Melissa…or Thalia. My mind immediately flashed the image of that little girl we’d found frozen to the fence outside their compound. Great.
“She tried to laugh it off, but nobody else was laughing. We were all so hungry. And we didn’t have anything left for the few children that were still alive. That night, after the little ones were asleep, we went into the yurt and pulled out the first body. After some discussion, we agreed to wrap the heads in burlap so that we didn’t have to look at the faces. We removed the clothing and wrapped all of them that night. Then we moved them all around. We went so far as to have each of us go in after the others and move the bodies so that we would hopefully not know who we were choosing…it didn’t work.”
I looked arou
nd the room and saw a lot of expressions. Some were horrified, others simply fascinated. But everybody was paying attention.
“Once we started…it is hard to explain,” Mr. Patton finally opened his eyes. “That first day that nobody was hungry…the children weren’t crying…”
I’d heard enough. I looked at Mr. Patton and felt something even more profound than pity. It wasn’t embarrassment. Whatever it was, I couldn’t put a word to it, but this man had seen the bottom.
“I think we’ve heard enough,” I announced. Heads turned my way, some with very visible expressions of relief. “Look, you’re welcome to stay. However, you need to understand that things work a little bit differently here than what you might be used to. We have watches, patrols. If you are going to stay, then you will be expected to pull your weight. We have a school program for the children…and also train them how to deal with this new world. That means going outside and learning how to deal with the zombies.”
I noticed a few eyebrows raise at that last statement. It was a reality that I could not ignore. Yes, Thalia was better equipped to deal with what was happening than say, Misty. But there was more that she needed to know if she was going to have a chance at a future.
I looked around the room and gave a nod that this was over. It was time to eat and then tend to the daily tasks. One of those tasks would undoubtedly be Emily.
After breakfast, I went in and checked on her. She was drenched in sweat and the smell had actually gotten worse. Sunshine had her heavily sedated. Billy was sitting in a chair a few feet away. Thalia had already taken her spot beside the bed. I was a little surprised to discover the other two children that we’d “inherited” from that group of Muslims that had been here just a short time ago before deciding to just walk out into the woods with several members of their group infected and on the verge of turning.
“Can we sit here, Mister Steve?” Levent asked.
“Of course,” I said with a nod. I noticed that Rabia had remained silent and kept her gaze at the floor while waiting for my answer. De-programming wasn’t the word, but I hoped that, eventually, she would shed some of that “second-class citizen” mentality that seemed to be imprinted in her head.