The road was clear, and ahead of me was the park. Almost immediately, my plan of sticking to the alleyways had hit its first obstacle. I hoped that wasn't a sign of things to come. I could see no one – dead or alive – out in the park proper. I could only guess at what might be hiding in the gloom of the trees, or behind the brick building that was the restrooms. The grass was coarse and faded, and it looked like weeds had begun to sprout in the baseball diamond. I also got my first clean look at Division – no one seemed to be on it, and it didn't appear to be clogged with stalled or dead cars either. Several of the dead staggered along it, but they seemed uninterested in the park for now.
I had decided to move west, past the park and back in to the alleys when I heard a faint rhythmic squeaking. Twilight was fading into dusk, and at first I couldn't tell what was going on. Amongst the see-saws and teeter-totters and merry go-rounds of the children's play area was a tire swing that hung from three chains which allowed it to spin flat as well as swing. I could tell that someone was lying on the swing, but it took me a moment to recognize what I was seeing. A woman was on her back, hands and hair trailing into the sand of the play area. Her torso twitched as the swing jerked and shook. I could see a dark mass at her abdomen, and below the squeaks I could hear a low grunting.
You'll understand that while the idea of the hungry dead was something that I now took for granted, my perceptions were still anchored in a world where that wasn't the case. So of course the first thing I thought was, that in these lawless days, I was witnessing some guy going down on his girlfriend in the park. In front of God and everyone. What would Mrs. Clarke have said about that? And then, naturally, it dawned on me what was really going on, and the back of my neck felt cold and my gut tensed.
I moved from the fence and began to cross the street to the park. As I got closer, I could see that the woman's strawberry-blond hair had once been dyed in a rainbow of colors, but was now fading and her natural roots showed. A t-shirt was pushed up under her breasts, which shook and trembled in the warm air along with her arms. Her eyes were open, and she wore what could only be a look of disappointment on her face. Closer still, I could see a head buried in her stomach, twisting and rooting. As I stepped up onto the sidewalk of the park and into the sand I jumped back, startled – another of the dead had moved from behind and began to gnaw on the woman's arm.
Well, crap. What to do? Neither of the dead seemed to know I was there, or they didn't care. I stood with the familiar feeling of indecision smothering me until I noticed a couple of the dead from Division Street wandering in towards me. I lifted my spear above my head and brought it down hard on the arm-gnawing ghoul. With a grunt, it fell into the sand and then tried to push itself up. It was a woman, probably in her mid-fifties. I let her get up, then pushed her down again onto her back and drove the sharp wedge of metal deep into an eye socket with a satisfying crunch, and it was done. The dead man gorging on the woman's guts was still oblivious to me. I poked him with the blade, then slammed it across his back.
Nothing. God damn it.
I grabbed him by the ankles, and dragged him backwards several feet. That finally got his attention as his hands clawed in the sand. He tried to rise, and I pushed him over onto his back with the sod-cutter. He seemed to have better reflexes than the woman had, and he was harder to keep down. Finally I drove my spear through his waist and deep into the sand. He was a skinny guy, no shirt and blue jeans. Blood and sand clung to the wispy mustache and beard smeared across his face. Not yet having a hammer, I got my Wrist-Rocket out and shot a heavy bearing into his skull, then after twisting and shaking the spear loose from his abdomen, I drove it into his eye for good measure. The dead moving in on me still had fifty or so yards to reach me, so I wasn't concerned with them yet.
The woman in the swing was now still. I was going to grab her by the legs and haul her off it, but noticed that was where the older dead woman had been feasting, and there was no way in hell I was touching her there. I tried to drive the blade of the spear into her eye socket, but I had no leverage and only made the poor girl spin around as the blade mauled her face. Finally, I grabbed her wrists and yanked her off the swing, very nervous that she would turn - and then try to bite me. She didn't, though, and I was able to punch the spear into her brain.
With more of the dead closing in I decided that was a good enough start as a fearless zombie-hunter, and picked up my backpack and headed west into the neighborhood. It dawned on me I hadn't felt sick to my stomach at all during that encounter. I didn't know if I should feel pleased with myself or disgusted.
I spent weeks just roaming around. If I heard a car engine I would try and hide immediately – often by simply dropping into brush and out of sight. Mostly I tried to roam by night. Not a lot of vehicles were out after dark. The dead roamed all the time, so I figured I was cutting the danger in half that way. I tried to use the night vision goggles sparingly – you might be surprised what you can see by moonlight or starlight (man, the stars are amazing these days, aren't they?). Often it was easier to spot which house was occupied by night – I could see slivers of candlelight around windows sometimes, and I would leave those houses be. More telling would be the dead clustered around these houses of course, and it was during this time I finally saw evidence of them actually trying to turn doorknobs.
I had assumed before that they were just pawing at them or rattling them by bumping up against them, but I could see the dead grasp the knob and twist. That startled me – we had been assured that the dead were empty of mind, that nothing of who the person had been in life was left in the wandering corpse it now was. I suppose a lot of things were told to us to make us feel better, and to not give us false hope a loved one might be cured. And really, that makes sense. I think most people's inclination was to be creeped out, and to want to make sure the infected stayed dead - be it grandpa, mommy or a seven year-old daughter in pigtails. But there would always be someone not wanting to face reality, or be able to finish off someone he or she cherished. And I guess I'm not one to judge, seeing I let Pink roam at will.
As my notions of what the dead actually are were being challenged, my faith in humanity as a whole was being tested. Where were the people that would flock to disaster areas to help out? The people that would donate to some child's cancer fund, or some third-world groups that were always in need? Where was the good in people? Was it something we were only able to muster up a day out of the year when we served the homeless dinner on Thanksgiving? Was it only capable of being generated when we knew the worst was over in a disaster, and couldn't be maintained for the long haul – or maybe only while others were watching? Without the world stage of the media, did we not care, then? Or was it that we were instructed to isolate ourselves from each other? Was too much time given to us to think only of ourselves first? If not given the chance to react and defend each other as a community, did that breed an “us and them” mentality?
Or were we all, in truth, just the thoughtless jerk behind the wheel of a car, the selfish clod who trampled others on Black Friday? Did we all laugh at other people's misfortune? Was humanity now collectively laughing at its own demise? Treating the end of the world as if it was a preteen skateboarder smashing his teeth in during a stupid stunt on YouTube? Was that really us? Or did the good ones just leave town?
I have no doubt there were individual acts of heroism. I also feel somewhere people banded together to try and maintain order and protect each other. The odds would have to give us that, wouldn't they? The poor bastards had to be doomed, though. I certainly felt doomed, and I had no desire to try and hook up with anyone else. I worked with the assumption that I was on borrowed time. I wasn't the only loner out there. While I would hole up during the day, sometimes I was able to witness someone with his guard down get bit, or get shot in the back of the head – or in the knees, then hands and stomach and finally in the face. I saw a guy tied up and repeatedly shot with arrows for target practice.
Sorry - I promised no
t to list atrocities, didn't I?
During the daytime, there seemed to be an almost ceaseless background noise of bullets, screams and engines. That makes it sound like a never-ending battle and of course it was far from that. But I swear, the pop, pop, pop of gunfire got to the point where it was as comforting as the sound of driftwood crackling in a campfire. It was the sudden burst of engines that I dreaded, with the inevitable mindless screaming and yelling. I guess I should be thankful someone was making so much noise that it attracted the dead – who were so intent on heading in the direction of the noisemakers that they would pass right by without a glance sometimes, abandoning their quests to find the treasures behind locked doors.
The nights could be eerily quiet. For so much mayhem in the day, when it grew dark I think the old superstitions and fears of the night returned to even the chaos-generators among us. I imagine they wore themselves out and huddled together somewhere – I had the notion that they stayed along Division Street in defensible locations. I avoided it as much as possible, of course. But I had a strange itch to walk it all the way down to the river. Curiosity, I suppose. It was largely a straight shot of several miles, and it was an irresistible notion to grab a bike and ride it all the way in to downtown. Skid to a stop with a little flourish. Ta-da!
While the living settled down at night, the dead kept roaming. On the whole they were pretty quiet. Involuntary grunts or groans, sure - and some would do it constantly. Those that did also seemed to have other weird twitches and quirks. I saw an elderly man who held his fists close to his chest with his thumbs pushing back and forth as if trying to polish his forefingers, all the while humming tunelessly. Some clacked their teeth occasionally - anticipating a meal for all I knew. But for the most part they were quiet. Arms and heads hanging loose, and always moving. An obstacle would make them pause for a moment – especially ones that seemed freshly dead – but they didn't stay motionless for long, or hide waiting for meals to come to them. They would hang out on a porch or around a house, but as far as I could tell you could outlast them. They may have been more patient than someone wanting to introduce you to Jesus or a kid selling magazines so he could go to DC, but they would eventually move on. So you could hear them shuffling along in the dark. Animals had a stealthy, purposeful sound to their footfalls. The dead just...moved.
That didn't mean you didn't have to be cautious when exploring homes or garages, of course – they could come out of nowhere sometimes. I'm not sure how good their depth perception is, but they seem capable of avoiding tumbles from high places unless they were eager to get a meal.
I was scouting a huge metal garage near Post Street one evening – the thing was big enough for an RV. It's automatic door had been pried up and off its track, so I guessed it had been looted already. Still, you never knew what might be left behind. I peeked in with my night vision goggles and looked around. There was crap scattered all over – busted open boxes, mostly clothes, some books and kids toys. A work bench ran along the back, and I found a ball-peen hammer that would wind up being one of my weapons of choice. As I tucked the hammer into the webbing of my backpack, a dead guy dropped from above and landed with a crunch at my feet.
I jumped about a foot in the air and came down on one of his hands, which then twisted and grabbed at my ankle. I gave an involuntary yell and fell down, all the while kicking at the dead guy's hand, propelling myself backwards. My back pushed up against a support post of the work bench giving me no further room to retreat. The dead guy seemed to have trouble getting up – something wasn't working right. In the glowing-green world of night vision it was hard to tell what was wrong with him. His head twisted oddly, and it looked like his jaw hung loose and dislocated. The fall had broken him. But he was giving it a go anyways, and began to pull himself towards me. I had left my spear...somewhere. That was a life lesson in itself: never not know where your weapons are.
I scrambled to get at my backpack, snatched the hammer I had just tucked in there and rolled to my feet. I immediately jumped wildly over the dead guy, his sluggish nervous system not realizing I was behind him. As he crawled towards the work bench, I brought the hammer down hard on the back of his head, and that was that. Still, I gave him several more whacks for good measure. As I stood there, shaking and panting and waiting for my heart to crawl back out of my throat, I began to wonder if it was going to become commonplace for the dead to drop out of the sky at me. I tipped my head up and spied a rectangle of plywood in the rafters above. I took off the goggles and grabbed a flashlight from the backpack and shone the beam upward. Fifteen feet up was a kind of loft space suspended from the rafters, about ten feet wide, and running from one side of the garage to the other.
Huh. I swept the light around and could see no staircase or ladder reaching up to it. How in the hell...?
After mulling it over, the obvious answer was the guy died up there after getting infected. When it seemed likely no more of the dead would come hurtling down at me, I began to try and figure out a way to get up there. Looking around the garage I could see no ladders lying about, or any rope. A metal storage rack had been tipped over near a standard door on the east side of the building. It looked to be about eight feet tall. I didn't relish the idea of dragging the pile of metal across the concrete slab of the garage, but there seemed to be no alternative. I stood it up with a minimum of a crash, waited for several minutes to see if any dead came poking around and was about to start hauling the structure across the floor when I spotted some of the clothes strewn about. I grabbed some pants and shirts and wrapped them the best I could on each leg of the rack. I discovered some plastic line for a weed-whacker and used it to tie the clothes into place. It would have to do.
While I was convinced the noise I made hauling the storage rack was loud enough to call all the dead within fifty miles and wake those already in the grave, the clothing did a decent enough job of muffling the screech of metal on concrete. I fine tuned its position under the loft and then started to climb the rack, stopped, found my spear by the big garage door. I put it on the top shelf with my backpack, then climbed up to join it. Stretching up, I could easily push the head of the spear over the edge of the loft and then gave it a shove and heard it skitter away across the plywood. I was satisfied to hear it stop and not slip over the other side and clatter back down to the floor.
Now then. I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, cursed myself for being a fucking moron and jumped. My hands slapped on the edge of the platform and held. I made a desperate grab for a support beam, locked my wrist around it and pulled myself up with all my strength. I was able hook a leg up and on to the loft, wrapped my other arm around the beam, and at last pulled myself onto the platform.
Holy crap. I had made it. With the hindrance of night vision goggles, no less. I lay there curled up on my side, letting strength ease back into my muscles and giggled quietly into the dust of the loft. Perhaps fortune did favor the foolish...
I eventually sat up, pulled the flashlight from a pocket, and lit up my surroundings. Several rolls of pink insulation were stacked on each other, forming a U-shaped kind of structure. I had to crouch over and crab-walked around a line of insulation rolls to the inside of the barrier. I couldn't help thinking of a fort made from sofa cushions. Inside the U were cans of soda and bottled water, various canned goods and power bars – man after my own heart, it seemed. A combination flashlight and radio, the hand crank kind, rested on a pile of magazines. There were packages of toilet paper and a first aid kit and some clothing - male and female, some feminine hygiene products, and that about wrapped it up. Huh. So was there a couple up here originally? Or was the guy a weirdo? No weapons that I could find.
I moved to the far side of the insulation rolls, and still found no ladder. Had the guy climbed up here, died, and then someone came in and stole it? I couldn't fathom that – they would have climbed up and taken his supplies, I wagered. Unless he had turned already and they didn't want to confront him. But I would think
if that were so he would have tried dive-bombing any hypothetical ladder thieves like he had me. Unless – and then I spotted it: a length of knotted rope looped around a support beam. Ah-hah.
He had nailed a two-by-four between the inverted V-shaped support beams turning it into an A, and had tied the end of the rope around it. That made it easier to climb up and over onto the loft. I unwound the rope and let it drop over the edge, then sat and waited in the dark for some time. I could hear no tell-tale sounds of the dead, just a persistent cricket in the alley. I slipped on the goggles, decided there was no time like the present (despite bad memories of failed attempts in gym class) to master the art of rope climbing, and lowered myself down to the floor fairly quickly. I guess that gym membership paid off. Still, we would see about getting back up.
I thought it best to move the storage rack back to where it had been. My backpack was still on it, and I thought about climbing the rack and tossing it up. Then I got the bright idea of tying the end of the rope to it and hauling it up after me. So back went the rack, tipped over near the side door, and up the rope I went – the things you can do when you have to do them, I suppose. And then I hauled up my pack. I lay in the dark, drinking from a bottle of water and feeling pleased with myself.
For the most part I felt safe about leaving the rope to the loft dangling free while I was out at night. I hadn't seen another living soul in my nocturnal exploring, and I found it highly unlikely any of the dead could climb the rope much less give a shit about it. As I crept back to the garage in the mornings I would listen carefully for any sounds inside, then tap on the metal sides to see if anything would come out. A few cats would shoot out here and there, but no dead. They seemed to like to stick to the streets. Alleyways were beginning to fill with weeds, although the one behind the garage was paved and not so heavily choked with plant life. When the dead did enter the garage, it was during the day.
The October Light of August Page 10