When the Dead

by Michelle Kilmer

  “Let’s go then.” Ben suggested.

  “Hold on. I want to look at his movie collection.”

  By movie collection Vaughn meant porn. The owner of the house was single and an avid collector like Vaughn. He dug through a pile in a box near the television, selected a few titles, and led the way out the front door. The driveway was clear of any undead. Molly could see the lifeless body of the zombie they had run from lying on the cement near the FedEx truck, his skull broken in.

  Gnome City

  The world was full of all kinds of people.

  “Be careful in this house.” That was all Vaughn had to say about Gnome City, named so due to what Molly counted to be no less than fifty garden gnomes hiding in the overgrown front yard. He could have said a lot more but he knew that they would have to see to believe.

  Molly didn’t want to vomit for a third time but the inside of the house could easily qualify as an inducer. A hoarder lived there; a woman from what Molly could tell based on the collections. Dust covered dolls and photographs lined shelves on the walls and peeked out of stacked boxes. The air was thick with the stench of old cigarettes and cat urine and the small bits of wall that were visible, once white, were a dingy yellow color.

  “How many cats are in here?” Ben asked with amazement and disgust in his voice. He’d stepped over or around five just inside the crowded entryway.

  “I think the question is ‘how many fleas are in here?’” Vaughn said.

  Ben bent down and tucked his pants into his socks. Molly wasn’t going to do the same until she actually saw a cat covered in hopping fleas. Her body started to itch, she tucked in her pants. The cats meowed incessantly at their feet and as they jumped from pile to pile.

  “They must be hungry,” Molly said sadly.

  “I don’t think there‘s any cat food in here. We could let them outside,” Ben suggested.

  “They’ll die. The zombies can catch them and it is starting to get cold out there,” Molly said.

  “They will have a better chance of finding food if they are free and the heat doesn’t work in here anyway.”

  “How about we give them the option and let them decide for their little cat selves?” Vaughn interjected. “After we do what we came in here to do. Follow me into the kitchen.”

  They slowly made their way in but both Ben and Molly looked confused as to why the kitchen was any more promising than the rest of the house. Mold grew on plates of abandoned food stacked on the dining table. Old magazines and junk mail dated three years ago littered the floor. Cat feces covered everything. Even though they’d already been breathing the vile air, the state of the kitchen encouraged the donning of their dust masks.

  “Why’d we come in here? This place is disgusting.” Molly tried her best to enunciate through the thick mask. “You should have put an X on this house.”

  “Look in the pantry,” Vaughn explained, pointing to a wooden door set in one of the walls, “this lady collected food too.”

  Ben walked to the door but from the outside it looked like a closet not a pantry. He opened it after much negotiating with the piles of garbage on the floor that blocked its outward swing.

  “Wow! The plastic bins are going to be full!” he yelled through his own mask. A room ten feet deep and eight feet high and full of shelves was revealed to him. The shelves were chock full of canned and dried food. He set to grabbing all he set his eyes upon but Vaughn grabbed his shoulder.

  “We can’t take most of it. You’ve got to take the time to read the expiration dates. Some of the cans date back to the nineties. If you can’t find a date or if the can is damaged leave it, or it might kill you or someone else.”

  “Was she hoarding for Y2K?” Molly joked as she found a can with an expiration date of just after the non-event.

  “Or a zombie apocalypse?” Ben added.

  “I’m guessing something religious. You should see her bedroom.” Vaughn said.

  “Where is she?” Molly asked.

  Vaughn led them to the woman’s bedroom. The walls were tinged with the same dirty yellow from tobacco smoke but they were covered with pictures of Jesus. Molly even spotted a black Jesus and a female version of the savior. In the middle of the room was a bed with a cat-covered corpse on it.

  “Oh my god, if she had all that food why didn’t she survive?” Molly asked.

  “She starved to death in her bedroom, clutching some meaningless piece of newspaper and sitting in her own filth. I found her sitting there and she didn’t even get up to try and bite me. The most pitiful thing I’ve ever seen. She wasn’t even good at being a zombie. I shot her just in case she might decide to get up.” Vaughn explained.

  “It seems like such a waste that she kept all that food only to starve a room away.” Molly reflected on the woman’s obsessive life.

  “No waste. We’re going to eat it. She helped us!” Ben side brightly.

  “Thank you hoarding cat lady,” Vaughn said as he bowed to the dead woman.

  They returned to the kitchen and went to the task of carefully sorting the food into an edible and un-edible pile. They packed the plastic bins full and stacked them neatly on the hand truck. As they left Gnome City they left the front door open for the cats. Some followed them as they walked to the center of the cul-de-sac; others stayed behind, pulling deeper into the hoarded house, preferring the chaos of home to that of the outside world.

  “We’ll have to come back,” Vaughn said as he looked at the sky. “We don’t have enough daylight or any more room to carry back food from the other two houses. But we did well.”

  No Blood on Our Hands

  “Pack it all up. She doesn’t need to be here when this happens and it has to happen,” Isobel said as she stood in the living room of Molly and Jill’s place with Edward and Moira. She was trying to sound strong and say all she needed to before she started to cry. “Pick up anything that belonged to the Coopers.”

  “We can take it back upstairs to their apartment,” Edward said. “No point in throwing it out when there is already a place for storing it.”

  “It’s such a sad thing. They were on the verge of being a family and now they are just boxes of stuff. I hope that isn’t our fate,” Moira said solemnly. She was taking the time to fold the baby clothes individually as though another child might use them someday.

  “A mother’s love knows no bounds. That baby only lived days! Has it even been a week since she was born?” Edward’s mind worked at processing the loss as his body worked at breaking down the crib.

  “I don’t think we should talk about it. We just need to clean up what is left and think about how we are going to tell Molly.”

  An hour later, the scavenging party returned. Rob hastily hoisted their loot up to Isobel’s apartment on the second floor with a rope as the group climbed the fire ladder. Molly ascended first.

  “Isobel you don’t know how happy I am to see you!” Molly exclaimed as she embraced Isobel in a tight hug. Isobel started to cry from the loving contact of another. Molly pulled away to look at Isobel’s face.

  “What’s wrong? Hey, don’t cry. We made it back safe and we got a lot of food. Everything’s going to be ok. I even found some baby stuff for Annabella.” Molly dug around in her backpack and produced a doll from an interior pocket. Isobel took the doll from her. Edward cleared his throat. They had wanted to wait to tell Molly. They wanted to give her a little bit of time to relax from the trip she’d just had.

  “Why is everyone so quiet? Where are they? Where are Jill and the baby?” Molly’s voice escalated to a panicked yell. She ran out of Isobel’s apartment and down the hall to 204. Isobel followed her out and found her standing in the doorway taking in the emptiness of the apartment.

  “She did it, didn’t she?” Molly asked quietly, though she didn’t need an answer to know that it was true.

  Isobel nodded anyway and they stood silently next to one another for a while. Molly didn’t want to know the details, didn’t need to know the
m. She could envision without aid the terrible event.

  “Thank you for cleaning up her stuff. I don’t think I could have done that.”

  “Sure,” Isobel said. She gave Molly a quick hug, returned the doll to her, and went back to her own apartment to sort food with Ben.

  “Edward told me what happened. Do you think Molly will be ok?” Ben said as he wiped off cans and sorted them by fruit, vegetable or protein.

  “Who knows? We’ll all miss them but we can’t burden ourselves with this. The blame lies with them. They wanted out and that got Austin killed,” Isobel said.

  “And Jill couldn’t live without him and that got her and the baby killed,” Ben finished the summary of the Coopers’ final days. “You’re right. They weren’t our responsibility. People will do what they want when it comes down to it.”

  “Plus, that’s two less mouths to feed,” Vaughn said as he and Rob came in from the balcony, finally finished with hauling up the bins.

  Best Before . . .

  They were well stocked once more. Molly, Ben and Vaughn had procured more cans and boxes of non-perishables than they thought. Isobel stared at the food, neatly sorted and stacked. They brought back albacore tuna, soups, granola bars, sardines, corn, beans, and peas, rice and beans, fruit cups, nuts, powdered milk, and oatmeal, chili, smoked salmon, crackers and more. She dreamed of meals to come.

  “Ben, I want your help to devise a rationing system,” Isobel said quietly. “I don’t think we should involve the others in the decision making process. Let’s just figure it out and make sure everyone abides by it.”

  “Don’t you think we’re going to piss a few people off?”

  “The only person I care about pissing off, other than you, is Vaughn and he has his own food,” She replied.

  Isobel thought about how much each can held and how many people that meant it could feed.

  “Large cans of vegetables and fruit will be divided between 2-3 people. When we have the right ingredients we can make a large pot of a stew or soup and share it with the whole group.”

  “And no second serving until everyone has eaten,” Ben suggested.

  “Right. Also, we should make a sign out sheet for when people don’t eat with the group. They can mark off what they took and what meal they took it for.”

  “I don’t think anyone will like doing that. It’s one step short of having meal tickets,” Ben said, thinking deeply. “We could just give food out in two day increments and have one or two meals a week that are group meals.”

  “Maybe a few more group meals would be better to conserve the propane for the camp stoves.”

  “Oh shit!” Ben said, a light going off in his head.

  “What?” Isobel asked.

  “We spent all this time stacking the food and we didn’t organize the new stuff by expiration date.”

  “It’s late. We can do it tomorrow,” she sighed.

  Sanitation

  Markus and Jeff, both normally clean and well-groomed, had started to notice that the other was looking particularly bear like. It wasn’t the hair that was the problem for two men living together in abnormal conditions, it was the body odor.

  “You smell like death,” Markus told Jeff as they drank reconstituted powdered milk mixed with chocolate breakfast shake powder.

  Jeff lifted his arm and sniffed. “It’s the scent of the wild; the essence of man. I’m returning to my roots.”

  “Well it’s making me sick. Can you evolve a little and go take a shower on the roof?” Markus asked over his glass.

  “Hey now, I just have to take this moment to mention that you also smell like death, and look a little like it too. Care to join me?” Jeff shot back.

  “I’ll heat up some water,” Markus said through an overly pouted lip. He knew he smelled disgusting. He could feel the thick layer of muck on his skin.

  Fifteen minutes later, a bucket of warm water in tow, the two men climbed the stairs to the roof.

  “This is going to feel great!” Jeff said as he tossed a bar of soap into the air and caught it as it fell. He saw a flick of movement near the camp shower and he tensed. “You don’t think one of those things could get up here, do you?”

  “Don’t be silly. We barely made it up the last flight of stairs.”

  “I just saw . . . ” Jeff stopped as his eyes rested on the source of the movement.

  “Hey!” Molly yelled. She was completely naked and soapy and barely hidden behind the curtain they’d poorly rigged for privacy.

  “Sorry about that! We didn’t know anyone was up here!” Markus yelled back as he covered Jeff’s eyes playfully.

  “We’ll wait over here,” Jeff pointed back towards the door to the stairs. “Take your time.”

  Markus and Jeff sat down on the cool rooftop and watched as their bucket of warm water lost heat to the fall air. Not five minutes passed before the door squeaked open.

  “Oh hi guys!” Rob said happily. He and Gabe had emerged from the roof access door with towels, shampoo, and their own bucket of steaming water.

  “Doesn’t anyone use baby wipes for a bath anymore?” Jeff asked concerned about the line that was forming for the camp shower.

  “I’m not a baby!” Gabe yelled and then quickly went to hide behind his father.

  “We know that Gabe,” Rob consoled his son. “Hey, I think Thursday might be the official shower day.”

  “Is it Thursday?” Jeff asked as he looked at his watch. The battery had died a week ago and he’d been meaning to ask Vaughn to find him a replacement.

  “I don’t know. It just feels like a Thursday. So, who prompted the shower excursion?” Rob asked the two of them.

  “Markus reeks,” Jeff said, laughing.

  Markus sneered at him. “He who smelt it dealt it. What about you guys? You look clean enough.”

  “I found Gabe in our bathroom covered head to toe in hand sanitizer. He had the right idea but that gel didn’t do much. He was so dirty I think all it did was move the dirt around.”

  “He does look a shade or two darker, now that you mention it,” Jeff said.

  “It’s my Indian tan,” Gabe said proudly.

  “Love it while it lasts. You are going to be pale as a ghost after you are clean,” Rob teased.

  “Jeff, Markus, you guys are up,” Molly said as she walked quickly past the group of men, a towel wrapped tightly around her head and one around her body. She hadn’t shaved her legs in a long time and she didn’t want them to make jokes about it. She was able to make it back into the stairwell without a sideways glance at her unsightly lower limbs.

  “Gabe, let’s go wait inside. It’s cold out here,” Rob said shivering.

  “I’ll carry the bucket!” Gabe yelled.

  “It’s heavier than you. I’ve got it.” Rob opened the door for his son, lifted the bucket and followed him into the building.

  “I love hot water,” Jeff said. As he showered he was reminded of his wife. “You know, Sheila would always cut my showers short. I got seven minutes exactly. She had a schedule for everything.”

  “You can spend as much time as you want in there,” Markus said. He meant that, especially because he could see Jeff’s nakedness through a rip in the plastic curtain. What would happen if I jumped in there right now? He wondered. The urge was strong but he didn’t want to force himself on Jeff.

  “Can you believe this?” Jeff asked as he stepped out of the shower, flashing his flaccid penis at Markus.

  “What? Mine’s that small too when it’s soft,” Markus commented.

  “Not my cock! Look at all this hair!” Jeff pointed to his pubic hair which, unmanaged, had blossomed into a jungle.

  “Oh. Yeah. That is kind of crazy,” Markus laughed.

  “It looks like your beard,” Jeff played.

  “Did you just compare my finely coifed facial fuzz to your deathtrap Amazon pubic poof? Are there monkeys living in there?”

  Jeff rushed at him and embraced him. He pressed his body
against him; his lips into Markus’s in a passionate kiss. He had wanted this to happen. He had lain awake at night hoping for this closeness.

  “I want this too,” Markus said as though reading Jeff’s thoughts. “But let me shower first.”

  Finders Keepers

  Vaughn was happy to be outside without anyone else to look out for. He had no particular reason to be out there so he was just puttering from house to house, finding more of the same thing. He had a good memory for how he’d left a house, when he’d left it. Whether the door was locked, the blinds open or closed, cupboards full or empty. Today he noticed that someone had drawn the curtains of a house just two blocks from Willow Brook.

  “Exciting!” he said to himself as he slowly opened the front door to find out who it was.

  The first floor was empty but there were muddy shoe prints in the entry and leading up the light carpet of the stairwell to the second floor. He walked carefully, unsure of where any creaking floorboards might lie. The last thing he wanted to do was alert the person to his presence. He came to a closed door; the only closed one in the hallway. He wasn’t expecting to see what he saw after opening the door. A young girl, a teen, was asleep on the bed; her belongings in a pile next to it.

  He watched her for a while. No one was around and that instantly aroused him. She was here for the taking but, he had a better plan. He had to fight hard to keep himself from touching her as he found a piece of paper to write a note that would change both of their lives.

  Hayden

  She woke up just after noon. The room she was staying in was unfamiliar but even more so now for there was a smell to it that hadn’t been there when she’d fallen asleep; cigarettes and leather. It smelled like a man.

  She jumped out of the bed and backed into the far corner from the door, tripping over her bag as she moved. A piece of paper slid gently to the floor. Someone had been here but, judging by the note, had already left. She relaxed a little as she read: