The October Light of August

by Robert John Jenson

  Well that didn't take long, I thought gloomily. So much for not getting treed.

  I sat against an air-conditioning unit, the sun at my back, and let my nerves settle. I saw the telephone pole shake slightly and heard the quiet moan of the dead. A distinct thud sounded from below, and I assumed one of the dead had fallen between the rock outcropping and the back of the building. I raised a water bottle in salute, then took a swig. Not even something as agile as the sprinter could get me, I was certain. Only the living. And if they were hunting me, I was a goner anyways – I was certain of that too. Self confidence was never my thing. All it did was get me in trouble. March down Division. Right to the river. You can do it!

  My nerves were calming, but I was fuming – muttering to myself what an idiot I was. I took off my vest and jacket, the sun warming the rooftop. I didn't want to get up and survey my situation. I just wanted to sit on my butt and feel sorry for myself. I hadn't really acclimatized myself for this trip I realized. I was used to my nighttime rambling, and was feeling some jet-lag.

  So it wasn't long before I dozed off.

  A sharp whistle sounded in my ear, and I woke with a start. A girl sat against the wall that ran along the roof, facing me directly. She appeared to be fairly young – maybe twelve or thirteen judging by her size. But I couldn't really tell – sunglasses covered her eyes. Her deeply tanned legs were crossed at the ankles, one foot twitching lazily with an internal rhythm. Her hiking boots looked like they had seen some miles. Raggedly cut sun-streaked hair poked out from under the ball cap perched on her small head, and the sun glinted off the gun she pointed at me.

  I gaped at her, and then sighed. She looked so damned adorable – it had to be that my hallucinations were back. Only she smiled, and flashed me a peace sign. My head jerked in surprise, and her grin grew wider.

  “Cute, isn't she?” a voice whispered behind me. “Yeah... Say, I do believe you are on our roof.”

  “You're quite the sound-sleeper,” said the older one. She was going through my backpack as the younger one held the gun on me, still smiling.

  Well this is a new development, I thought. They're acknowledging me now. My hallucinations were believing in me, it seemed. I was kind of flattered.

  As the older girl (or woman - it was hard to tell since she had sunglasses on too, but she was taller than the younger girl and her voice sounded mature) methodically emptied my pack, she would occasionally glance at me as if expecting me to talk back to her. I was afraid that would spoil it all, and anyways my voice seemed to be having trouble finding its way out. So I stayed silent and just watched them, fascinated. The sun was high now, around noon by the look of it. The light was still bright and full and wonderfully summer. The false light of autumn wouldn't show up for some time yet.

  “Don't have anything to say?” she asked me, examining the night-vision goggles. “No habla ingles?”

  She was as tan as the younger girl - hat, shorts and hiking boots as well. Gun in a shoulder holster. A faded sugar skull adorned her t-shirt. I looked around and spotted their gear piled next to the north wall of the roof. Two backpacks, usual crap – if I had been able to spend more time with Jackie, I might have been able to tell you what they were armed with. I noticed my spear tucked behind their packs. Hmmm...

  “Maybe he's mute?” offered the girl with the gun, and the older one turned her head speculatively towards me.

  “You mute?” she asked.

  “I'm just...” My voice croaked, and I cleared it. I rose the water bottle that had been sitting next to me, and the girl sat straighter and extended her gun arm. The older one rested on her knees and stared at me, deadly still. I shook the bottle and pantomimed a drink. The older one jerked her chin up once, and I took a deep swallow. That was better.

  “I'm just trying to decide if you two are real,” I stated. The older girl's forehead wrinkled, pulling an eyebrow over the top of her sunglasses. The younger one frowned.

  “What do you mean by 'real'?” they both asked, then spared themselves a quick grin. Maybe not too long ago it would have been followed by a “Jinx!” and an argument over who owed who a soda, but their discipline was pretty tight.

  “Well,” I said, “I've been prone to hallucinate lately, so I'm just trying to decide if you're real or...” I gestured with the water bottle in their direction.

  “A hallucination,” finished the older girl. I nodded.

  “Hmm,” she added, and looked around the clutter from my pack spread next to her, then gave a satisfied grunt and picked up my bag of ball bearings. She loaded one into the pocket of the Wrist-Rocket and pulled it back, stuck her tongue between her teeth as she sighted and shot the bearing. It nailed me in the shin, and I yelped, drawing my legs up. It hurt like hell, but only broke the skin. She gave a wicked grin.

  “How did that feel?” she asked.

  “Jesus! How do you think?” I asked, massaging my shin.

  “Think it was real, or did you hallucinate it?”

  “Well since I'm pretty fucking new to the hallucination game I can't tell you, now can I?”

  She waved the slingshot at me dismissively. “Just cut the crap, okay? I'm not interested in any mind games you're trying to play.”

  I opened my mouth, then shut it. I decided to treat these two as real. If they were hallucinations, they were pretty touchy about it. And the pain felt as real as the ball bearing.

  The older girl stared at me for a moment, then her shoulders slumped as she scanned my belongings. “Jesus. Dude, really?” she asked. “This is all you got?”

  “With me,” I said quietly. She turned her head to me, deadly silent again.

  “If you're expecting firearms or whatever, then no, you're shit out of luck. I'm not what you would call a gun person.”

  She continued to stare at me, then gave a short bark of laughter as she shook her head. “It would figure,” she said. She looked over to the other girl, who shrugged her shoulders.

  “You're telling me,” the older one asked skeptically, “that you're down in zombie central without any sort of fire-power at all? What the hell's wrong with you?”

  “Well I didn't know it was 'zombie central' until I came down here,” I retorted.

  “Well where were you that was so zombie free then, and why the hell didn't you stay there?”

  “Just up the hill, Northtown area. And what the hell are you two doing out and about if this is 'zombie central'?”

  The younger one sat straighter again and asked, “Northtown doesn't have any zombies up there?” The older one turned to stare at her for a moment, then back at me. Both eyebrows arched up over her sunglasses this time and her lips pursed in anticipation.

  “Well, sure there are,” I said – probably less sarcastically than if the older girl had asked. “But not nearly as many down here – I mean,” I jerked my head towards the southwest, “I haven't ever seen a group like that before.”

  “Don't get out much, huh?”

  “Well...”

  “You have some sort of protected zone up there?” interrupted the younger one.

  “No,” I answered shortly. I was beginning to feel pretty scorched in the sun. I must have been sleeping for some time before these two found me. The back of my neck and forearms felt burned. I wished I had brought a hat – too much time roaming in the dark makes you forget things like that. I hurt, and getting a little irritated at the one-sided questioning.

  “Then tell me how -” started the older girl, but I cut her off.

  “So, where you two from then?”

  “Oregon,” said the younger girl, and her companion shot her head around to stare at her.

  “Where in Oregon?”

  The younger girl opened her mouth, but the older one cut her off.

  “Nunya,” she said. “You've probably never heard of it.” She smiled sweetly, and the young one chuckled quietly.

  “You traveled up here from Oregon?” I asked skeptically. “What, on foot?”

  �
�Yep,” answered the younger girl.

  “Sure,” I snorted derisively. “Sure you did.”

  They both stiffened, and I could tell they felt offended.

  “Two little darlings like you came all the way up from Oregon?” I snorted again. I knew I was pushing my luck, but they hadn't killed me outright so what the hell. The younger one stood up and pointed the gun down at me. I did my best to ignore her.

  “She's not...fond of that word,” said the older girl, and stood as well. “Darling.”

  “And I'm not fond of having guns pointed at me - and my stuff picked through,” I said, amazed at the anger that was simmering in me.

  “If you only knew -”

  “Oh, I know very well. Very fucking well.”

  They glanced at each other, and the younger one shifted uncomfortably.

  “You think the two of you are unique little snowflakes?” I asked. “I imagine you've seen some shit that would have made you faint not long ago – and that's only from the dead. God knows what you've seen the living do. If there's any justice, those people will pay for it in the end. I only know I've had nothing to do with you, yet you're the ones pointing a gun at me and stealing my stuff. Take any moral outrage you might have and shove it up your asses. I've endured my fair share of horror too.”

  Silence stretched between us, and I resisted the urge to fidget. Funny what you can say with ease when it used to be so hard. I was worried I had stepped over the line. They had no more need to feel sorry for me than I did for them. Except, what else could we do - other than kill each other?

  “You said you came from Northtown,” the younger one said quietly. “What's... Is it... Are there any other people up there? Like, a lot of them?”

  “You know what?” I asked. “Could we start with some names? My name is Arthur – Arthur Jeffries. My friends call...used to call me Artie.”

  “Puddin' Tame,” muttered the older one, and the younger girl let out an exasperated sigh.

  “I'm Ashley,” said the smaller girl, and the older one whirled on her. “Oh, for fuck's sake,” Ashley added before she could be interrupted. “What's he going to do? Stalk us on Facebook or something? It's just our names.”

  The older one visibly suppressed herself, her lips moving as she swore under her breath. “Lori,” she finally said. “We're sisters. I'm 22 years old, and believe it or not she's 20. We like long walks across state lines and laughing in the rain. Want to know our turn ons and turn offs?”

  “I want to know where you heard of Puddin' Tame,” I asked.

  “Just...one of the weird things my dad would say,” said Ashley. She squatted down, the gun still pointed in my general direction, but not so aggressively. “Look, Artie, we're just trying to find our parents. And we did come all the way up from Oregon to do it.”

  “You guys really walk across the state line, then? All the way up here?”

  “Well,” said Lori slowly, “we actually made it to Umatilla by car. On foot the rest of the way. So technically, yes, we did walk across the state line.” She still stood over me, and it was hard to judge if her tone had softened.

  “Sounds far enough to me,” I offered, and I got a wry smile in return.

  “Tell you what,” I suggested. “I am in desperate need of shade – I'm not as used to the sun as you two appear to be. Unless you can think of a better place to go, can we rig something up to take the sun off me? I'll answer any questions, and you can tell me...whatever. I'm not all that nosy.”

  The street light and power lines from the fallen telephone pole came in handy to drape my sleeping bag over to help make some shade. The sisters had a tent, but I was nervous about setting it up. The dead were milling around below – apparently we had been noticed. Of course I was more worried about the living seeing us.

  “We came in on the railroad tracks,” Lori revealed. “We figured that way was the least zombie-infested. Less people too.”

  I thought about that for a moment, and decided it was probably a great idea. Less chance of running into the dead or people. It must have been a lonely trek across the Palouse – winter may have been tough if snowdrifts were a problem.

  “So, what does downtown look like?” I asked. “Not quite a year ago there seemed to be some sort of battle going on down here.” I gestured towards the arena. “Looks like we may have had some sort of base over there – I'm wondering if we had a true north-south battle royale going on?”

  “We didn't make it into the downtown, really,” Ashley said.

  “Yeah,” added Lori. “We got close to about 5th Avenue before we chickened out and double-backed.”

  “It was just too weird!” blurted Ashley. “It was early evening, and it was so freakin' quiet, you know?”

  I nodded my head.

  “We could see dead people wandering down below – more than we had seen since the Tri-Cities,” Lori said, her sister nodding in firm agreement. “I can tell you that area was infested enough.”

  I don't know why, but my heart sank a little. I guess I was hoping for some sort of sanctuary of humanity after all. If the dead roamed at will across the river on the lower South Hill, then what were the odds there were any communities that were healthy? I would have to think that if there was an active and thriving group over there, they would have made concerted efforts to wipe the dead out during the winter at least.

  The sisters must have read the disappointment in my face, because they were quick to add that they just didn't get a chance to check things out. They didn't want to explore downtown in the dark.

  “We just wanted to get up here to the north side,” Ashley said. “So we turned back, took the tracks that run north-west and we left them on Sunset Boulevard. There were a lot of barricades around, but no one at them - well, except dead-heads. Looked like some had been smashed through, though. We were able to run down into High Bridge Park – had a few zombies tail us but we lost 'em in there – and we crossed over the creek and then into People's Park and crossed the river there.”

  “Someone tried to block it off,” said Lori. “Cars were crammed on to it, and it looked like they had been set on fire at one point. We just crawled over them. We took the path up the hill and camped out in some old foundations – high ground, you know? We spent the night there, then took off this morning and zigzagged our way up here. Discovered a group of admirers,” She tilted her head towards the arena, “and spotted a path to high ground again. And here we are.”

  I nodded, and probably turned redder. It occurred to me that I much preferred waking up to them pointing a gun at me than having them burst in on me while I was doing my business. Close call, when you think about it...

  “Well, I traveled farther today,” I said, pushing the embarrassing thought away.“But I think I had less dead to contend with then you guys did.”

  Both of them nodded their heads.

  “It's awful by the river,” Lori said. “Not one frickin' street was free of dead-heads stumbling along. We felt like the fucking Pied-Piper after awhile. Then, as we ran along Boone and saw them all...” She threw her hands up in a helpless gesture.

  “We thought we were goners,” Ashley said simply.

  We sat in silence for a moment, contemplating the statement. The probability that the same scenario would happen again seemed certain. Would we be shocked and surprised if escape became impossible in the end? Or just disappointed, like the rainbow-haired girl in the tire swing?

  “Well, they seem to lose interest after awhile,” said Lori abruptly. “I don't think we'll be stuck up here forever.”

  “Even so,” I offered, “it may be possible to leave at night with the goggles. Slip right past them.”

  Ashley frowned. “Maybe one person,” she said.

  I thought about that. The logistics of two people making a coordinated escape at night wouldn't be easy, to be sure. But I thought it might be doable.

  “I think they'll leave the lot behind the store here first,” I said. “They don't like rocky and
unstable ground, and won't be prone to be back there. You're heading north anyways, and like I said, they're thinned out that way.”

  “You still thinking of heading across the river?” asked Lori skeptically.

  I sighed, and answered honestly. “I have no idea what I want to do at this point, actually.”

  “Dude,” said Lori earnestly, “I would not waste my time trying to get over there.”

  “It's....not so important that I get over there,” I said slowly. “I just kind of want to know what's over there. I don't know if I hold some idea in my mind as to what it might be. My guess is it's not much different than anywhere else. But if there are people over there living an easier life, I can at least stand on the river and and flip them the bird.”

  Everyone needs someone, a childish voice in me chided. Even if it's someone to ignore. But what good is it if they don't know you're ignoring them?

  “What the hell's the point?” she asked.

  “None at all,” I said quietly. “Look, I have issues with the living. I bet you do too. I think this whole pandemic could have been controlled if people hadn't lost their shit. Before the power went out and you could still get news, there was talk of closing access into town – not just the city and county, but basically downtown and the South Hill – so not just to the mythical 'outsiders' – we're talking inside our own city. Now, you heard that geographical elitist bullshit all the time, right? Just talk. If you ask me, it would have been impossible to do. But people get scared, need to be able to blame someone, and then feel like they're doing something.”

  They both stared at me silently, unreadable behind their sunglasses. I supposed I sounded like I had an ax to grind, and of course I did. But living your life in a town that is easily divided by a river could color perceptions - on both sides of it.

  “Look,” I said, “from what I saw go on up here, I don't blame them for wanting to block access from us. Truly. But...you have to understand talk like that started very early on – can't you see where that might get some people worked up? You tell people in this town they can't do something and they lose their God damned minds over it. So people get scared, and throw up roadblocks. Other people just want to fight. True human nature finally rises to the top, and things go downhill from there.”