The October Light of August

by Robert John Jenson

  Jesse stood on the lawn of a house two doors down, staring warily as the dead boy rambled towards him. I don’t know if the kid had spotted him yet, and the big guy tried to bark out an authoritative, “Hey!” But it only issued as a low croak, so he cleared his throat and yelled it again. The kid, in boxers and a The Black Keys t-shirt, stopped his slow progression and wavered on his feet. The door to the house whose lawn Jesse stood on cracked open, and Mrs. Clarke peeped out. Jesse darted a look at her, and waved at her to shut the door. That was when I noticed the gun in his hand.

  “Just stay inside Mrs. Clarke,” he told her.

  The kid’s attention was now drawn to Jesse, and he began to move in towards the big man. Jesse took a few steps back, and shouted at the kid to stop. The dead teenager stumbled as he stepped off the curb into the street, but maintained his balance and the added momentum caused him to move towards Jesse faster than he had been. Jesse retreated further, and by now was in the lawn next door. The kid continued his palsied march towards the armed man, and I could tell that Jesse was done backing up.

  “I swear to God kid I will drop you right there,” he said as he raised his gun. “Seriously, if you are fucking with me you are dead.” Jesse must have thought about how that sounded, and he gave a nervous giggle. The kid acted as if Jesse had been speaking in tongues for all the effect it had on him, and continued his advance. I don’t recall if there were any merry pranksters out there who had been scaring people by pretending to be one of the dead, but it sounds like such a monumentally stupid idea I’m guessing it had to have happened somewhere. Apparently Jesse was willing to entertain that possibility, because he fired a warning shot in the air. The kid didn’t even flinch. Jesse’s gun arm wavered for a moment, then leveled. The pistol fired, and the kid dropped like a marionette whose strings had been cut.

  Jesse stood with the gun pointed at the kid for several moments. Then his shoulders sagged, and he turned to walk back up the street. I stood as still as the porch post, yet he turned to look at me, his eyes wide and empty. I nodded at him, (how do you impart your understanding and sympathy in a single jerk of your chin?) but he turned his head away and resolutely walked back home, wet blades of grass sticking to his bare feet. I looked back down to the dead kid as the street lights winked out. No one else peeked out of their homes, so I decided it was best to go back inside.

  My mom died from fright, I think. More than likely a heart attack, but scared to death all the same. She wasn’t obese – hell, I wasn’t obese before I started working out. But fat and out of shape can’t help any when the end of the world comes scratching and rattling at your door.

  I think she had been scared most of her life. Not so much fearful of unknown monsters, but the fear of disappointment – and of disappointing others. The fear of abandonment and the fear of having no friends. As kind and loyal as she was, her eagerness to please and socialize would turn people away. I could see this when I was a little kid – the wary looks of people after Mass. The grim politeness when they were trapped into talking to her during coffee and donuts. How do you find a way to tell your mother to lighten up, when you know for certain that she knows she should too?

  But I think her biggest fear was her son ending up unloved with no friends. As sparse and empty as her social life was, she was always after me to try and make friends and to blaze trails. To her credit she never tried to keep me as a companion. She was insistent that I find an apartment and have an independent life away from her. She would have been overjoyed if I was married and happy, even if I were a continent away from her.

  My dad died when I was 6 years old, and I can’t be sure if I have real memories of him or ones manufactured from photographs. Do I really remember sitting on his lap watching The Seventh Voyage of Sinbad, or is it from the photo of him lounging in a sagging easy chair? Mom didn’t talk a lot about him – if she did it was usually something positive. The only real negative thing she mentioned was that he was a bit “light-fingered” (which came in handy for me later, I have to admit). I suspected there was jail time involved. My mom had boxed up some of his stuff for me, convinced I would like it.

  For the most part, I did. A lot of VHS tapes recorded from television broadcasts – monster movies, Star Trek episodes, World War II documentaries. My favorite items were the vintage paperback books that had covers painted by likes of Frank Frazetta, James Bama and Boris Vallejo. I devoured those books as a kid, and would re-read them periodically into adulthood.

  I don't remember meeting any of my grandparents – my mom would talk to her mother on the phone once a month, but they were pretty brief conversations. She had a sister who visited once or twice, and I received such open and pitying looks from the woman I ended up going into the backyard to practice with my sling-shot (thanks dad). A plastic Ninja Turtle or Greedo would feel the impact of a marble and fly away, cartwheeling into the back fence. Take that, Aunt whoever you are…

  And yet my mom would try calling her family desperately to see how they were doing before the mobile and landlines went dead. She never got an answer, and no one called her. Sure, everyone had their own problems, but what sort of insanely self-centered fuck were you to not bother returning a call to your own daughter or sister?

  When the power went out, and people panicked and hit the road, I asked her if she wanted to leave. To head to Iowa and see her family. But I think she felt as I did – no place else was any safer. And there was probably the fear of being turned away or ignored. She had endured it all these many years from a distance, but I imagine it would be crushing to have it happen face to face. She may have put up with it stoically for years with rationalization, but she knew in truth that she and her son had been rejected. As far as I was concerned the family didn't deserve her, and I was happy to stay put.

  So I’m thankful my mother didn’t wind up being eaten by the living dead, or have to endure the last year and a half. Life didn’t treat her particularly fair, but death didn’t botch it at least. I hate to think the cause of her heart attack was fear for me, but that would have been typical.

  I don’t recall how long the power had been out by the time we saw the first mob of dead roaming the neighborhood – and I think the word 'mob' can be used in the loosest way possible. I don’t doubt that one dead person may follow another with an instinctual sense of “Maybe that guy knows where the yum-yums are so I’ll follow him.” I think it more likely that dead person A spots dead person B and automatically moves off in that direction until dead person A realizes dead person B is dead, but what the heck – dead person A is now moving in that direction so keep on keeping on, right? I bet you can get a sizable group moving along like that.

  But the tales of hundreds of the dead storming the castle that we heard about? I dunno, man. That makes it sound organized, and the only evidence I’ve seen is that they are completely uninterested in each other. The amount of dead grouped down by the river, though... Well, maybe I’ll get back to that. See how much time I have.

  Anyhow, the first mob I saw was a group of eight, clustered around Jesse’s house. I don’t recall hearing anything that may have attracted them. I think our street – those of us that were left – had boarded up the lower floors of our houses by then. But restlessness would make you tinker and adjust your defenses, and maybe Jesse had been hammering away reinforcing a window. Or maybe he just had a particularly fetching looking locked door. Regardless, they were clustered around his house and I can see where that would be unnerving. I was under the impression Jesse was not the type of guy that liked to be indoors for a long time. Personally, as long as I had the resources I could have held out forever - until the living would come through, looting and destroying.

  We could hear the random banging and some low moans next door, and my mom could never resist going upstairs to look out. No matter how much I encouraged her to stay away from the windows she would venture forth for a “quick peek”. She would usually pronounce that it was a false alarm – speculating Jesse must
have been doing something. Or she would carefully watch the dead and then triumphantly announce that they were going on their way, as if they had a specific destination in mind. It kept her occupied and satisfied her curiosity, I suppose.

  So her quiet, “Oh my...” in this case alarmed me.

  I ran as quickly and quietly up the stairs as I could to stand next to her and peer through the sheer drapes to the house next door. There were four that I could see up on Jesse’s porch, shuffling and jostling for position at his front door. I could see one more on the side lawn between our houses. Like us, he had a high fenced-in back yard, and I could not see anything back there from our vantage point. I moved to the back bedroom to see if any gates had been opened and if there were any dead wandering around in the backyard. As I strained to look in both of our yards, I heard my mother hiss sharply.

  I trotted back to her in time to see Jesse slide up his window and lean out to stare at the dead guy wandering along the side of his house. I’m not sure if any of the dead on his porch heard the window open, but a dead woman in a nightshirt covered with prancing kittens and a gaping wound in her throat wandered around to the side from the front yard. The dead guy below paused and tipped its head up to stare stupidly at Jesse. Framed by the window, Jesse appeared to be wavering a bit, and I realized the guy was drunk.

  My mom and I looked at each other, our mouths round and eyes wide. The sound of the shot snapped our attention back to Jesse, and my mother gave a little whimper of dismay. Jesse had his pistol pointing down at the dead guy, and his arm was wobbling in little arcs until he made a visible effort to steady his aim, and this time his shot blew into the top of the dead guy’s head.

  The dead at his front door turned in unison and began to navigate around each other to reach the steps and exit the porch. The dead woman stumbled up against Jesse’s house and began to claw at the siding, as if she could scale the building, and Jesse leaned a little farther out the window to aim down at her. My mom moaned, and I wanted to throw open our window and yell at him to watch what the hell he was doing, but a morbid fascination kept me from doing anything other than staring dumbly through the drapes.

  This may have been the moment when I thought that things were not going to be okay, and that the world as we knew it was over. Before, the fear seemed more like an abstraction – the terror of it all was happening to everyone else. You could try and calculate the odds of a percentage of the population who would succumb to the pandemic, but you didn’t include yourself in the equation. Hunker down. Stay safe, it will blow over. Back to normal.

  But you didn’t allow for the great game-changer: the stupidity factor. Your drunk next-door neighbor shooting zombies outside his window. The drunk taking a header out of the window, and you running for the back bedroom – the bedroom you grew up in, where you could climb out your window to the roof over the back porch and then into the limbs of the maple tree beyond. Drop down, and grab your implement of destruction – the spear of destiny - a wicked tool you used to cut sod once, and was now a plowshare turned into sword. You had put some thought into home defense, after all.

  And leaving your mother behind.

  I slid the bolt on the back gate, and swung it open a crack. The dead were spilling off the porch and lurching around the side of the house. The dead woman lay in the grass and I could see her arms and legs twisting feebly. I don't know if Jesse had been able to get a shot off, or had just nailed her when he fell. His feet were digging into the turf, and he scooted along with his rear in the air, towards me. Absurdly I rooted for him – keep moving those feet! He was a running back trying to break a tackle. But he would never make it, as the dead that had gathered on his porch were closing in, and a fifth one wandered into view from the street. I darted out, my weapon thrust out in front of me like a hero in a Harryhausen movie. The odds had to be better than taking on a giant crab or a cyclops, right?

  I took the lead dead guy straight in the chest, propelling him back into the other three. They all went down, limbs jerking spasmodically as I back-pedaled to Jesse, who had pushed himself up to his knees, blinking owlishly, grass stains smearing his face and shirt.

  “Come on!” I snapped at him, reaching out to grab an arm.

  He jerked violently away, and fell over onto his side. I looked around desperately for his pistol, found it lodged against the foundation of our house. I grabbed it, turned to see the woman in the kitty nightshirt roll over and promptly sink her teeth into Jesse’s left bicep. That finally motivated him. He screeched, and pummeled the dead woman’s head until her teeth ripped loose. He then kicked out and away from her, and scooted along the grass towards me.

  The pile of dead were disentangling themselves and the one from the street moved in and another one came limping around the corner of my mom’s house. I leveled the gun and aimed at a head, twitched my index finger on the trigger but nothing happened. What the hell? I had no clue what was wrong – was there a safety that had engaged? I had no time to figure it out, and I backed towards our gate and the security of the backyard.

  “God damn it, Jesse - come on!” I smacked him in the shoulder with his gun.

  He tried to stand, and ended up stumbling through the gate to fall down again behind the safety of the fence. I slammed the gate and shoved the bolt home.

  Jesse rolled over onto his back, his arm weeping blood through his shirt. He didn’t grab his arm, grimacing stoically through the pain. He just lay there, staring up into the overcast summer sky.

  “Fucker bit me,” he mumbled.

  The gate rattled and shook.

  “Yeah, Jesse...she sure did,” I said quietly. His eyes rolled towards me.

  I waved the gun absently at him. “I…I don’t know how to use this, man. Can you…?” I didn’t know what to say. He knew he was dead as much as I did. Honestly though, I meant it for him to defend himself from the dead, who were now shaking the gate and fence violently.

  His hand reached out and motioned impatiently, and I handed over the pistol.

  “Check on my wife?” he asked, and as my eyes darted over to his house, he tucked the gun under his jaw and pulled the trigger.

  I jumped at the shot, and the rattling at the gate ceased for a moment, and then began again. I decided I had had enough of this nonsense, tossed the spear up onto the porch roof, and swung back up into the maple tree with substantially less grace than Lord Greystoke. In through the window, spear in hand – it was the beginning of a beautiful relationship - to discover my mother’s lifeless body crumpled on the floor of my bedroom. I thought I heard a window slam shut next door, but maybe it was just the sod cutter dropping to the floor. That too sounded like it was far away.

  I didn’t know what to do. I don’t think I’d ever felt more paralyzed by indecision. What the hell do I do? Of course I tried to revive her – I wish I could say I was crying and screaming for her to live, but I only felt a quiet desperation as I compressed her chest with the knowledge that I was very unlikely to re-start her heart. With no paramedics to come to her rescue, she was gone. Yet I kept pumping away until my arms gave out. When my arms gave out, so did any resolve and hope. And with no hope I had no idea of what to do with her.

  I moved her to her bed and covered her with the comforter, then sat on the floor and stared at the shape under the fabric that refused to move. I must have sat there for half an hour, wondering what in the world to do with her. Bury her, for sure. But would I be able to do that – be allowed to do that? I stood and peered out of her window into the side yard, and there were still four of the dead I could see wandering about down there.

  I moved back down the hall to my bedroom and looked into the backyard, but saw no movement. From the angle I could not tell if the gate had been forced or not. And it dawned on me I had two bodies to deal with – assuming Jesse’s wife was not going to want to help out. I had no plans on trying to contact her right then other than hoping to see her through her window and waving a howdy-do.

  I couldn’t
see Jesse’s body down there either – the back porch blocked where he lay. For all I knew dead were back there feasting on him at that moment. Or, since he was dead, did they ignore him? Was he not fresh enough for them? Did that matter? They seemed to have some sort of standard to what they ate, and professional courtesy was an unlikely answer. Did rigor mortis factor into – and then it dawned on me that my mother would start to stiffen soon. That was a thought I could not begin to bear, and it became increasingly important to me to take care of her right then and there.

  I moved back to her bedroom and pulled back the comforter, hoping she would be staring at me, confused and maybe a little annoyed. But the slight frown and compressed lips had softened, slackened, gone with the life that had left her and refused to come back. You have hope that you can die with a satisfied smile on your face, but I suppose most of us don’t. In these times, not being eaten alive was enough of a small miracle.

  I wondered if she would have wanted to be buried in something other than the mom-jeans and blouse she wore. Of course she would, but I had never seen my mother in any state of undress and that wasn’t going to happen now. I pulled the comforter all the way off her body, pulled loose the blanket and top sheet and folded them over her. I then maneuvered her to the side where I manipulated the comforter around her, retrieved some bungee cords from the hall closet downstairs and secured the bedding around her body. As I noted, she was a heavy woman, but thankfully not a tall one. Her feet thumped hard on the floor as I pulled her off the bed, and then dragged her down the hall to the stairs. I hesitated, wondering how safe it was for me to walk backwards down the stairs with her over my shoulder.