The October Light of August

by Robert John Jenson

  I decided his mantra was better than mine, and giggled nervously. I watched as a dead kid – he couldn't have been older than 11 or 12 – staggered into mix. As Tim kicked out at the boy, I heard a thrashing noise behind me, turned, and saw one of the dead tumble down the embankment to my right. I grabbed my spear tighter and twisted back in time to see another one step off the sidewalk above and into the brush. Her feet tripped up in the weeds and down she went, but she didn't fall beyond the brush line and into the loose dirt where I was. I began to move laterally across the hill, heading east. Another dead man appeared at the top of the hill, spotted me, and began to stumble in my direction.

  Tim continued his litany of bullshit declarations, but his screams grew weaker and less adamant. You won't get an argument out of me, buddy, I thought bleakly.

  My feet slipped and skidded in the hillside, and I used the spear as a walking stick as I hustled across the slope. I spared a glance at the dead guy heading my way - down he went, but then made an unlikely somersault, wound up on his feet, and grabbed some air as the momentum launched him right to me. I blindly struck out with the spear and felt it punch into the guy's chest. The force shoved the handle end into the hillside, but the dead man's inertia carried him forward to sail over my head, ripping the spear from my hands. He landed on his back in an explosion of dust and dirt, sliding to a stop about twenty feet below me and began to flail weakly in the dirt, trying to push himself up.

  The spear protruded from his chest at a jaunty angle. I could not afford to lose that, of course, and I began to side-step it down the hill towards him. I risked a quick look above, and the top of the hill seemed to be filled with the dead (although in retrospect there was probably only ten or twelve). Not knowing if they would all decide to step off the beaten path and join the festivities, I hastened my trip down to retrieve my weapon. The dead man was more interested in getting to me than the wedge of steel jammed into him, but he didn't seem to be able to understand the spear was preventing him from rolling uphill to reach me.

  Naturally, it wouldn't be any fun if some of the dead didn't come creeping out of the apartment complex below, so several did exactly that. Even though a retaining wall and fence would more than likely keep them from getting to me, I whimpered in frustration, grabbed the handle of the spear, gave a mighty tug to pull it free but it was stuck and only pulled the dead guy closer. I twisted the handle furiously, gave another stroke-inducing yank, and fell back as the spear popped free. I jumped up and began to run up and along the hill again. I rounded the ridge line that formed from the corner above and darted past a group of trees. Up at its top, Post Street looked fairly clear at the moment – only a few of the dead were on it - but as I ran down the embankment towards it a small block retaining wall gave me a two-foot drop I wasn't prepared for and I stumbled face down into the street, the spear clattering away as I received serious road-rash on my face, knees and arms. Yards away from me, Tim had all three of the dead feasting on him now and he was no longer making any noise.

  I scrambled to my feet, grabbed my spear and began to run up Post, dodging several dead as they shuffled down the street. As I cleared the top of the hill, a dead guy lurched along with a port-wine stain from hell covering his whole face. It was a purple bruise that gave me the creeps, and then it dawned on me he had probably died face-down, and that's where his blood had pooled. That bit of knowledge didn't exactly make him look any less disturbing to me, and I started to avoid him but he spotted me, his teeth clacking in anticipation as he adjusted his course to intercept me. I was tired, hurt, pissed off and in no mood to dance. I rushed at him, spear thrust forward and knocked him down into the front yard of a corner lot. As he struggled to rise, I jabbed furiously at his neck and head until I finally hooked an eye socket and drove his head into the grass. I lifted the spear up and jammed it down over and over until he lay still. I gave him several vicious kicks that I could not afford wasting the time on, dodged a dead woman closing in on me and continued my sprint up Post.

  Garland seemed flooded with the dead, but I shot past it and then took a side street and then an alley. I kept heading ever north, zigzagging on side streets and alleys until I was almost to Wellesley, then double backed to my alley off Post and into my garage. I slipped to my knees briefly on the cold and smooth surface of the concrete, wincing at the sting of the scrapes on my legs. I looked up at the loop of rope hanging in the gloom of the rafters and realized if I lost momentum now I would not be able to climb it for quite some time, so I rose and hooked the rope with my spear and pulled it down. I quickly tied the rope to the spear and I began the painful climb upwards, my hands raw against the rough fibers.

  After hauling the spear up behind me and shucking the pack, I collapsed on my back and sucked in air, feeling my heart pound in my ears. I was restless from adrenaline, my feet working feebly against the plywood of the loft, my right arm thrown across my forehead, then back to smack against the loft, then back across my face. I knew I should get the first aid kit and start cleaning my scrapes, but I couldn't rise. I just lay there, and tried to review if there had been any possibility I had been bit and did not know it yet. I decided I didn't care too much about it at that point.

  So much for a quiet stroll in the daytime, I thought. And began to laugh.

  Summer retreated into autumn, and good riddance. My hair had grown longer, my beard thicker, and I wanted to hack at both of them. I'd never had a beard before, and for good reason. It was sparse and patchy and would do nothing to make me look manly – only point out the fact that I could only grow a miserable beard. Still, with the air cooling, perhaps it would help keep me warm in the coming months – if I lived that long.

  Cooler air made for sluggish dead. Well, more so than they had been – but you have no idea how excited I was when I noticed how cold nights slowed them down. Actually, you probably do understand, but I hadn't even considered that freezing temperatures would work against the dead. Suddenly winter wasn't that big of a worry to me. Could I actually live in a house with a fireplace? I was still leery of attracting any attention of the living, but it was something to think about.

  The first night the temperature dropped below freezing and stayed that way for most of the morning I realized the loft would not work for wintering in. Even with the rolls of insulation piled around and the sleeping bag I had impulsively bought months ago, I was uncomfortable as hell. And, frankly, I was damned tired of climbing that fucking rope. So in mid-October, I began to scout for a new location. I had been venturing out towards Division much more lately, and one morning I had went so far as to stand at the top of the hill, right where it dropped, to look out over the city.

  In the predawn light, the street looked less formidable than I thought it might – hardly any cars blocked passage along it, and again I fantasized riding a bike down it. The wandering dead sobered me on the idea, though. While I still had my fair share up here with me, the events of early September had drawn a lot of them down there, and they didn't seem to have the inclination to hike back up here. Or maybe the hunting was better down there? I had no clue if any of the living were camped out beyond my sight. I saw no sign of fires, and I couldn't help but feel I would scout down there someday. But I was still rattled from my adventure the month before, and that day would not be soon.

  I left Division to trudge north through alleys, my breath blooming cartoon vapor puffs in the air and frosting my mustache. I was wondering if the cold would actually kill off the dead for good. Surely, with a deep enough freeze, the brain cells would burst and that would be that? Could the pandemic be over as easily as that? Not worldwide, of course, but enough for the living to gain control and a little sanity in our region? The idea made my mood darken, and that in turn startled me. Had I written the living off as so irredeemable I'd rather see the dead take over? Why couldn't there have been a virus that just made asshole's heads explode? I would have been willing to deal with the mess.

  As I emerged from the alley I was fa
ced with the south end of the park, and mentally kicked myself for not heading a couple blocks west to bypass it. I looked both ways along Garland, and didn't see anything other than a listless dead boy leaning over the short wrought iron fence that bordered the park. He looked to be about ten years old, and the color of muddy ice. He wasn't a problem, and it was hard for me to take out the dead when they were not even teenagers. Not that I hadn't before. But today... I liked to think of him as playing in the park.

  I was about to head west when the sun seemed to blink on, rising high enough to light up the vivid colors of the trees in the park. I stopped, taken aback by the beauty that had popped out of nowhere. My mother had loved the fall – most women I had known did. For some reason I associated it with going back to school when I was a kid and have never cared for it. But the sight of the trees lit up golden and bright, frost glittering in the grass, made me catch my breath and stare open-mouthed. Beauty seemed a rare presence these days. Over the tops of the trees to the north, I could see a sliver of white blazing against the sky, and it took me a moment to realize it was the office building that housed the bank my mother used. And the wheels, as they say, began to turn.

  It somehow felt important to ignore alleyways and head up the sidewalk along Division. I can't tell you why, other than it felt wrong to sneak up on a potential home. Striding right up the street as bold as you please? Why, it made a man feel respectable! The fact that I hadn't seen any cars zipping around in weeks and the cooler weather made me bolder, I suppose. So I marched up Division feeling almost like a normal citizen without being harassed by the dead or the living. If the habit of maintaining silence wasn't so ingrained, I would have whistled.

  As I reached the edge of the empty parking lot that stretched out before the ten stories of concrete and broken windows, my mood faltered. I almost turned down a side street to the alley that ran behind the building. I wanted to observe it for quite awhile, but the idea of having my back exposed to wide-open Division for so long, the sun lighting me up for easy target practice, made me nervous. So much open space, and I wasn't comfortable with it. Still, I had no idea if the building was occupied, and I needed to watch it from all angles before I would set foot in it, and the front was as good a place to start as any.

  I maneuvered myself through some bushes under two shade trees and a street lamp in an island in the parking lot. I got a nice view of the front, east side of the structure and also the north side. The sun felt good on my back and I quietly ate some breakfast. I could see no movement at any of the window openings. The seventh floor looked like it had most of its windows intact for some odd reason, and it bothered me. After half an hour I moved quietly north – as far as the gas station, then double-backed down the alley and sat under the trees by the dumpsters and observed the west and south sides of the building. I could see no indications of occupation, but I was hesitant to go in. I felt I should come back at night and do the same thing, only utilizing the night vision goggles.

  All told, it was another two days before I took my first tentative step through the back door of the office building and into my new home, and even then it took me another two days of painstaking reconnaissance until I was satisfied no one but me was there - and to convince myself no one would be returning. The idea of setting up my private space in the dropped ceiling on the sixth floor didn't occur to me right away – the natural choice would be the seventh with its better ratio of intact windows to all the other floors, but since it caught my eye I assumed it would anyone else too, attracting future looters. I briefly considered smashing more windows out for a more balanced effect, but didn't. Who the hell knows? Lucky number seven – I might want those windows someday, and wanton destruction was not something I enjoyed.

  I spent almost a week on the seventh floor in an insurance company's office, but I felt restless and vulnerable. I did not like sleeping on the floor. I had set up some half-assed alarms consisting of aluminum cans, but they seemed like they would be pretty obvious to any looters. I was laying on my back one afternoon staring up at the acoustical tiles in the ceiling when I wondered if I could hide stuff up there. Standing on a desk, I discovered the tiles themselves were suspended in a thin framework and couldn't hold up much. But there appeared to be a lot of space. Exploring the sixth floor, the dental office had an even lower dropped ceiling at the front desk and office area. Lighting, computer cables and other crap snaked away up into the darkness. Well those would have to go...

  And so it was that I decided to make my new hidey-hole a dental office. The weather was cooling rapidly, so I decided I would utilize the rolls of insulation stacked in the loft to help make the space cozy. I was pleasantly surprised to find two cans of gasoline tucked in the middle of two of the rolls. The garage had a typical garage-type smell to it so I hadn't noticed the cans – or at least realized that they were there next to me. The bulk of my stash was still at my mom's house, hidden in the attic space behind the dresser. I was afraid of moving the gas cans anywhere else where their odor might give their presence away, so for the time being I would leave them where they were.

  I cut up swaths of the insulation and stuffed them in lawn and leaf bags to contain stray fibers. I didn't think fiberglass would be all that great to inhale or generally get all over the place. Once I was satisfied I had enough to stack in the space in the dropped ceiling, I set upon a way to suspend my sleeping bag from the floor joists. I took an office door to use as sort of a platform. The wall behind the filing cabinets met in a T-shape as it merged with another wall. Not perfectly stable, but if I was careful I could use it as kind of a base to help get into the bag and keep heavier objects within reach. I also hung a rope from the joists above to help pull myself up. I guess I wasn't done with ropes yet. The price you have to pay to hide above everyone, I guess.

  To say I was kept busy redefined the word understatement – but I discovered that I liked to keep busy and to solve little survival problems. I felt safe enough on the roof of the building to heat canned food on the camp stove, and to boil water. Oatmeal and instant coffee had never tasted so good.

  I became much more efficient collecting rainwater in large rubber containers, creating shallow but broader funnels that would direct much more water into old water cooler bottles, which I could seal up fairly well with plastic wrap and rubber bands. Life was beginning to mellow some, but I was still anxious and on edge – always expecting a mob of raiders to flood over the landscape and turn things to shit. When I had nightmares, it was only the living that plagued me. The dead chastised me – Jackie had not totally left me, you see.

  But I had few encounters with the living – usually at a distance. I could see smoke rising from chimneys here and there when looking out from the roof's vantage point, and I know I had visits occasionally during the day. I would let them scrounge and look through the office building to their heart's content, but I don't believe anyone knew I was there. The dead – they didn't like stairs. When they did climb, it was easy enough to shove them out broken windows – if the fall didn't smash their heads in, they were easy to finish off later. Plus, the cold slowed them considerably.

  The first big freeze in November came with a mild snowstorm. I was afraid of snow and rain blowing into my sanctuary, but the intact windows on the floor above kept drifts from accumulating up there to drip down below, and any that blew in on my floor didn't pile up very far inside (for now – I didn't know what to expect when a good storm rolled in). For now, I felt fairly snug.

  I observed the dead with a clinical fascination as they froze in their tracks one evening. I had begun to take them out, knocking them down to smash their heads in until the thought occurred to me to wait and see what would happen when they thawed out. I felt certain that the reanimating virus, fungus, whatever would be killed, or couldn't utilize the brain anymore. So I waited. As the storm left and the weather warmed bringing a new storm with rain, the dead jerked and creaked back into motion. Well, maybe we just need a really long deep-freeze
, I thought, and didn't worry about it.

  The fall ended up being fairly mild and uneventful. Light snow and rain, for the most part. I didn't know if I would ever be able to predict – or anticipate might be a better word - the weather. I suppose I could try to find reading materials on it. Really have to go to the library, I told myself. If it could be done in the olden days, then I could do it too, right? But I didn't even know if I could find a barometer anywhere – or if it would be any use to me. I guess it takes an apocalypse to show you how stupid you truly were.

  Thanksgiving and Christmas were celebrated with chili. I had gathered up the nerve to go into Mrs. Clarke's house late in the year. It had been ransacked, with no sign of Mr. Clarke at all. I did discover a khaki utility vest that looked like it had been used for fly fishing. I liked the idea of multi pockets, and I suppose the twelve year-old in me thought I was Doc Savage. Merry Christmas to me! I found little glass jars that I discovered belonged to an airbrush (apparently Mrs. Clarke had been quite the artist). I collected all sorts of shit like that at the time. You never knew what could be used when.

  The new year brought some new weather. A decent storm blew in to drop several inches of snow, and the wind rattled and shook the ceiling tiles. I stayed pretty warm in my sleeping bag, my cave of insulation helping to keep my body heat in. During the storm, I knocked the dead over to let the snow cover them – one I went so far as to immerse its head in a puddle that had formed in a planter, then used a snow shovel to pile snow atop its body to ensure the damned thing would get nice and frozen. Gotta give those brain cells a good chance to burst...

  The skies cleared, and dropped the temperature down to single digits at night, never climbing out of the twenties during the day. Water turned into ice that grew as bitter and mean as concrete. The dead, for the moment, were motionless.