When the Dead

by Michelle Kilmer

  After being hit she didn’t feel like she had the choice to say no. She followed him to his cold apartment and let his rough hands undo the soft work of Ben’s.

  Curiosity

  Isobel finally woke around noon that day. Ben sat on the couch across from her, reading a book. Two new cups of steaming tea sat on the coffee table next to something else.

  “What is that?” Isobel pointed at but didn’t touch the bunch of hair. “Or, whose is that?”

  “Vaughn left it here. Ask him,” Ben said quickly before he returned to reading his book. “Don’t waste this tea too. Take it with you.”

  Isobel gulped the hot tea, burning her tongue and throat a little. She stood up to the pain of her ankle and hobbled slowly to her bedroom to change clothes. She dug in a kitchen drawer for a Ziploc bag to put the hair in.

  “I’ll be back,” she said to Ben, who didn’t respond. On her way to the stairs she passed Rob and Gabe in the hallway. They were playing with toys and talking in whispers. Hayden was in the common area writing in a notebook and staying out of view of the windows. Isobel nodded to her when she looked up.

  “Do you need help up the stairs?” Hayden asked.

  “No, that’s alright. I think I can do it. Thank you though.” Isobel smiled at the teen. She took each stair one at a time and she could feel Hayden watching her the entire five minutes it took her to make it up the first flight of them.

  Play Time

  As soon as Isobel was making her way up the second flight of stairs, Hayden jumped up from the chair she was on and ran down the hall to Isobel’s apartment.

  “Isobel just left,” Rob called out to her. “Didn’t you see her?”

  “Um, yeah. I wanted to ask Ben if I could borrow a book.” Hayden lied as she let herself into the unlocked apartment and closed and locked the door behind her.

  “I see,” Rob said.

  “Ben doesn’t like Vampire books,” Gabe said.

  “That is exactly what I was thinking,” Rob said to his son. “Let’s go have some lunch, what do you say?”

  “Yum!” Gabe jumped to his feet from the hall floor.

  “Bring your toys.”

  Gabe harrumphed and picked them up. “You should help ‘cause you played with them too.”

  “Which ones did I play with?” Rob joked.

  “You touched this one and this one,” Gabe said as he pointed to toys he was leaving for his dad to clean up. “Oh and this one too!” He dropped one of the toys he’d already picked up.

  “Gabe! How about we each pick up half?”

  Hayden watched them through the peephole of Isobel’s apartment door. Behind her Ben had closed his book and started towards her.

  “Isobel will kill us if she knows you were in here. Vaughn probably will too. Do you want to die?”

  “Shh! Rob and Gabe are leaving now.” She watched them finish picking up their mess and disappear from view. Once she was satisfied that they had left, she turned to Ben in the dark entry and kissed him. Ben pulled her from him.

  “Why are you here?” he asked her.

  She replied by unclasping his belt and unzipping his pants. “I want more.”

  “Ok, well, it’s not that I don’t want more, it’s just, we are going to get caught. It’s the middle of the day.” Ben was trying to pry the girl off of him but she was making it difficult. “This is Isobel’s apartment! Not mine, not an empty one, definitely not yours! We can’t do this!” Ben succeeded in pushing her away.

  “Fine!” she yelled. “Maybe someone else wants to play!”

  “You’re not a toy, Hayden,” Ben said quietly as he kissed her forehead. “And there are other ways to show love.” He caressed her cheek lovingly. She turned away to unlock and open the door.

  “Not in my world,” she said before running down the hall.

  Ben stood for a moment in the doorway thinking about the choices he had made and the ones he had yet to make. Life was becoming difficult when right and wrong were becoming similar shades of grey.

  Killing as Kindness

  “What did you do, Vaughn?” Isobel asked, holding up the bag containing his ‘gift’ of Rachel’s hair and wincing from the pain in her ankle.

  “Do you really want to know?” He tried to read her face.

  “I know you didn’t go out at three in the morning to give free haircuts,” Isobel said as she lowered herself onto Vaughn’s couch.

  “I killed the anarchists.” He smiled like a proud child.

  “All of them?” She looked amazed.

  “Every. Last. One.”

  “That was fifteen people.” She counted on her fingers everyone she could remember on the truck yesterday.

  “Twelve,” he corrected her. “But I could have handled fifteen easily.”

  Isobel threw the bag at him. “Keep it. It’s your trophy.”

  “Why’d you put it in a bag?” he laughed as he looked through the plastic at her.

  “I don’t know. It’s gross,” Isobel said as she looked at it again.

  “It’s just dirty hair. We all have it.” Vaughn ran his fingers through his own greasy locks.

  “It belongs to a dead woman!” she screeched.

  “She wasn’t dead when I cut it off.”

  “Ok, stop there. I don’t want to know the details. As long as we are safe and they won’t be coming back here, I’m good.”

  “They won’t be coming back; not here anyway.” Vaughn smiled.

  “Thank you,” Isobel said, standing up and forcing herself to hug Vaughn. “Even though you may have just done it for your own safety, we did benefit from your murderous rampage.”

  “The ‘thank you’ would have been enough.”

  “A note without a pile of a dead woman’s hair would have been enough too,” Isobel said and then made her way slowly back down to her apartment.

  Ben awaited her nervously. He had his book in his hands but he wasn’t reading it, only staring at the blank paper between the lines. Isobel entered the apartment and Ben stood up.

  “I’m not the pope,” Isobel said.

  “What?” Ben asked, confused.

  “You don’t need to stand when I come into the room. You can sit,” she assured him.

  “Oh,” he said as he sat back down, not really realizing that he had stood to begin with.

  “Your fly is down,” Isobel pointed out.

  Ben’s face flashed red as he zipped it up. He’d remembered to redo his belt but not his pants.

  “We shouldn’t have taken in Hayden,” Ben blurted out.

  “She just offered to help me up the stairs. What could you have against her?” Isobel asked, thinking it strange that Ben suddenly cared either way about Hayden.

  Ben chose his words carefully. “She . . . came onto me.”

  “She’s confused. She has all those teenage hormones racing around in her and Vaughn treats her like shit so, you are the obvious next choice.”

  “What do I do?”

  “You do the right thing, the adult thing. You deny her. She’s underage,” Isobel said.

  Ben’s chest hurt a little. He hadn’t done the right thing. He’d followed her upstairs and entered her and he had liked it.

  “But Vaughn didn’t,” he said, looking for some sort of redemption.

  “If we based our moral standards off of Vaughn’s, well, we’d be truly fucked.”

  “Didn’t you go upstairs to thank him profusely for being our savior?” Ben teased.

  “I’ve never been a fan of him but you have to admit that it was a pretty nice thing he did for all of us.”

  “He’s a wolf in sheep’s clothing. I just hope that last night he got his fill of shooting the living.”

  Friendships Forged . . .

  Three days had passed since the anarchists tried to take over the neighborhood. The group had warmed only slightly towards Vaughn when they’d all heard of what he’d done. But life was brighter and louder again inside of Willow Brook, now that everyone coul
d make noise again without fear of alerting an enemy.

  Gabe was running sprints down the second floor hallway for exercise and when he was done he grabbed some toys and camped out on the floor in a bit of sunshine to play.

  While he was there he thought he heard a voice, not unlike his own; a child’s voice calling for his help. It was coming through the chairs, lamps, and bedside tables tossed into the stairwell to keep the dead people away. For a moment Gabe was terrified. He thought it might be a zombie trying to eat him. But then his brain caught up with his imagination, reminding him that zombies didn’t use words like regular people did.

  “Hello?” Gabe whispered. He turned away from the apartments down the hallway so the adults wouldn’t butt in. He pretended to keep playing with his toys but he waited anxiously for the child to respond. “Are you there?”

  “Can you help me? I need help. And food and I’m stuck,” a weak voice responded.

  “How did you get in there? They hammered everything downstairs.”

  “They did a bad job ‘cause the dead people opened it up again. There is a lot of ‘em so I had to squish into here and hide. But I’m hungry now and I can’t climb up anymore.”

  “Where are you in there?” Gabe asked. The child grunted and pushed a hand through the debris. Gabe reached out and grabbed it. “I’m Gabe, nice to meet you.”

  “I’m Charlie. I’m hungry! Can you give me some food?”

  Gabe ran to his room and grabbed some peanut butter stuffed cheese crackers that were still unopened; he’d been saving them for later but Charlie needed them more. The plastic crinkled in Charlie’s hand as he pulled apart the wrapping and consumed the crackers in no more than a minute.

  “Do you have anything to drink?” Charlie’s voice was thicker sounding from the peanut butter. Gabe had thought ahead and brought a juice box too and he handed it to the outstretched and crumb-covered arm. The box disappeared into the furniture and he heard slurping shortly thereafter.

  “Ahhhhhhh. That was good. Got anymore?”

  “Not right now. I can try to sneak some stuff from dinner for you. How old are you Charlie?”

  “Six.”

  “Stick your hand back out.”

  Charlie poked his arm through the opening one more time and Gabe stuck a matchbox car into his hand.

  “You can keep that. I’ll bring you some more food in a little bit.” Charlie didn’t respond but Gabe could hear car noises and he knew that, because of him, Charlie was happier; if only temporarily.

  “Who were you talking to Gabe?” Rob asked as they walked to dinner. He’d seen Gabe in the hall but didn’t want to disturb him.

  “Um . . . nobody.” Gabe didn’t want to share Charlie with anyone else and he was scared that his dad would make Charlie go back to his own house.

  “Do you have a friend that you can’t see?” Rob knew imaginary friends were a common occurrence and not an unhealthy development. It was probably just another way that Gabe had found to cope with the craziness and his lack of playmates his own age.

  “How did you know?” Gabe was amazed at his dad. He knew everything. “His name is Charlie and all I can see is his arm.”

  Rob laughed. He was expecting purple hair or silly clothes but an imaginary arm? “That’s strange.”

  “And he likes peanut butter and juice.”

  “How does he eat and drink with just an arm?”

  “He takes the food and puts it in his mouth. Duh.”

  At dinner, which was in Molly’s apartment that night, Gabe couldn’t stop talking about Charlie.

  “ . . . and he likes matchbox cars and he wants me to bring him some food and he’s my friend.”

  “Jeez, Charlie sounds real,” Molly leaned over to Rob and whispered. She’d gotten to know Gabe and she didn’t see him as the imaginary friend type.

  Moira didn’t think the boy was imaginary either. “How could a child survive out there for this long?” Moira asked.

  “Hayden did it,” Ben said.

  “She is almost an adult. Charlie is supposedly six. He isn’t real,” Markus tried to reason.

  Isobel laughed. “Real or not, at least I don’t have to play with Legos anymore.”

  “You never did! It was either me or Molly,” Moira frowned at her. “My hands still hurt from trying to pry those blocks apart.”

  “Gabe,” Edward said to the boy, “does your friend like to draw or read?”

  “I don’t know yet. I just met him.”

  “That’s strange,” Rob whispered to Molly. “Usually when children have imaginary friends, they know all about them. There is no ‘getting to know you’ stage.”

  “He isn’t imaginary! He’s real!” Gabe yelled.

  “Calm down, Gabe. Let’s focus on eating dinner right now. No more talk about Charlie.”

  Dinner was uneventful after Gabe’s small explosion of emotion and when everyone was finished, Gabe jumped back to the topic of Charlie.

  “Can I bring him some food . . . please?” Gabe was begging as Molly and the others cleaned their plates from the table.

  “You have to promise to eat it if ‘he’ doesn’t, ok?” Rob said.

  “Oh he’ll eat it!” Gabe’s eyes lit up.

  “Gabe?” Rob wanted to hear two words from his son.

  “I promise.”

  Rob made a small plate of leftovers and handed it to Gabe.

  “Bring the plate back to Molly when you’re done,” he told the boy as he ran off.

  . . . and Lost

  Gabe carried the plate to the top step and called out to his friend.

  “Are you there Charlie? I brought you dinner.” Gabe leaned forward, straining to see any movement in the barricade. He could hear muffled crying but no response. “Are you ok?”

  “They got me. My leg,” Charlie sobbed louder.

  “What do you mean? How could they get you?”

  “They climbed up in the hole I made. They bit my leg and now it hurts and it’s wet.”

  Gabe knew that a bite was a bad thing. His dad had kept a lot of things from him to “protect” him, he was told, but Rob had taught his son that bites were bad.

  “I’ll get help then. I’ll get my dad.”

  “I don’t wanna be a monster.” Charlie cried much louder.

  “Here, reach out your hand and take this food.” Charlie’s tiny hand accepted the leftovers and Gabe ran down the hall to his father.

  “Dad! Charlie needs help! They got him!”

  “That’s not funny Gabe. You shouldn’t joke about it. Charlie will be fine. He can’t get the infection.”

  “Why not? He’s just a boy like me.”

  “He’s not real so he can’t get sick, that’s why.”

  “He is too real and he’s stuck in the stairs and he needs help!” Gabe started to cry and Rob knew then that his son did not have an imaginary friend. Charlie was actually real. He followed his son to the end of the hall and sat next to him on the top step.

  “Charlie, are you there? Can you show me your hand?”

  Again a tiny hand, this time slightly green from smashed dinner peas, emerged from a gap in the debris. Rob gasped.

  “I told you he was real.”

  “We’re going to get you out of there, ok?” Rob reassured the little boy. It took thirty minutes to remove enough furniture to see the child’s face and thin upper body. He was barely alive, even before any injury he may have acquired, weighing just above nothing. “Gabe, go get more help. Find Ben and Isobel and tell them to come here. Then I want you to go to Molly and stay with her.”

  Gabe made no move to leave. “I want to stay with Charlie.”

  “He’s in bad shape kiddo. I don’t think you want to see him like that.”

  “I don’t. But, he needs a friend.”

  Rob couldn’t think of anymore to say to spare his son the tragedy of the situation. “Ok. Get Ben and Isobel and bring them back.” Gabe smiled, nodded, and sprinted away. He was still brimming with youthfu
l hope that his dad and the others could save his new friend.

  Ben and Isobel were as stunned as Rob.

  “How’d he get that far up the stairwell?” Ben was warily eyeing the mess of chair and table legs, books, clothing, and other items there.

  “He is so tiny and it was his only choice.” Isobel was teary-eyed and holding Charlie’s hand. She could see and feel the life fading from the child.

  “It didn’t do him much good. Gabe says he was bitten,” Rob added.

  “We have to get him out of there whether that is true or not. If he was bitten, before he turns. If he wasn’t, before he dies from something we could save him from.” Ben was starting to formulate a plan of object removal as he spoke.

  A thought occurred to Isobel that she shared with the men. “He’ll spread disease if he dies and we leave him there. We’d be forced to abandon Willow Brook.”

  “Let’s stop talking and get to it then. Step back Gabe.”

  Gabe stood across the hall in the common area as the adults slowly moved one household object after another from the pile that was tightly packed around Charlie. Every so often he would see Charlie’s hands flinch and his face grimace in pain as items shifted and settled over his body. It was when Ben moved a large framed mirror from atop the child that they saw the bites and the blood.

  “Gabe, go to Molly,” Rob said without looking at his son. “Now!” he yelled more forcefully when he sensed that Gabe hadn’t moved. Isobel went to him, placed her hands on his shoulders and guided him away.

  “Goodbye Charlie!” Gabe whispered as they walked down the hall. He knew if he spoke any louder that he would start to cry. His dad had been right. He really didn’t want to see his friend like that, all messy and ripped up. He could feel his chest get heavy with sobs and his eyes filled with tears as he reached blindly in front of him for the doorknob of Molly’s apartment. He couldn’t find it so Isobel took over, finally getting the door open. Gabe ran to Molly, who was seated on the couch reading, and took shelter close beside her.

  Movers

  “I don’t want to get dirty,” Markus was unenthusiastic about being recruited to get Charlie out.