This Dark Earth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Throwing open the door, Lucy dropped to the ground and sprinted along the highway. She heard Knock-Out clamber down from the cab and yell, “Wait! Lucy!”

  Ahead, she spied a culvert and drainage pipe passing underneath the highway. She ran down the length of the shoulder and jumped into the concrete culvert. Knock-Out huffed behind her.

  She turned back to see his progress and she heard a small boom in the distance, like someone slamming a door in a large house. She stopped. It was such a small sound, she allowed herself to hope. Her perception stilled into a series of snapshots, like a camera shutter sticking. The sky streaked with color, turning brilliantly white, like a new sun coalescing from stardust. Black upon white. Knock-Out’s silhouette in midstride, the hulking shape of the big rig behind him, a wall of fire growing beyond the tree line, rising toward heaven. The once blue sky now striated with wispy thin clouds. Her hair swinging toward the light. Wind at her back.

  White light.

  She threw herself to the bottom of the culvert and Knock-Out landed next to her. The sound became massive: not a roar, not an explosion, but a sound that went lower than the human ear could perceive and stretched away into infinitely higher pitches. Her stomach and intestines felt liquefied. Only pure desperation and self-preservation kept her moving. She scrambled toward the drainage pipe’s mouth, Knock-Out close behind.

  She’d passed over the pipe’s mouth and was pulling at Knock-Out’s shirt when the shock wave ripped past them like the mother of all tornadoes, carrying rocks, trees, debris. It passed over the lip of the concrete gully, tearing away their breath and making their clothes ripple as though they were in free fall.

  Lucy screamed, the sound lost in the din, clawing herself backward, further into the pipe. Knock-Out pulled himself over the mouth and flopped onto his side.

  The world became a furnace, and it was Knock-Out’s turn to scream. Again Lucy witnessed him silhouetted by light. Outside, beyond the pipe, air turned to fire.

  Their hair, their clothes, ignited.

  Knock-Out threw himself on top of her. He gripped her like an overamorous date and rolled up one side of the pipe and then down again, dousing their backs in the half inch of water standing stagnant at the bottom. Lucy’s head bashed into the pipe wall and the world spun.

  She felt something akin to relief as the darkness at the edges of her vision crowded in and everything became black.

  When she awoke, Knock-Out sat on the lip of the pipe, looking up at the sky. Half his hair was gone and horrendous blisters covered the back of his neck and ears, the exposed backs of his arms.

  He smoked, looking at the ruins of the sky. He smoked, just like everything around them. The whole earth was aflame.

  She pushed herself up and out, making him move to the side.

  He shook a cigarette out of his pack, lit it with the Zippo, and handed it to her. The bright snick of the lighter came through even above the crackle of fire. The woods beyond the interstate’s shoulder tilted crazily to the left and burned.

  Lucy raised the cigarette, drew the smoke deep inside her. She felt hollow, like an empty husk, dry from too long in the sun. She stood and looked up.

  A billow of black smoke, streaked with orange and red, rose away from the earth, so massive it covered half the sky. The head of a mushroom cloud.

  She took Knock-Out’s hand, pulled him up, and walked up the shoulder to the interstate to survey the remains of the old world they once knew.

  2

  EVERYTHING THAT RISES MUST CONVERGE

  Everything is everything.

  Meemaw used to say that, and I never understood what she meant.

  I came to her house with a fractured jaw, a splint on my arm, and a broken heart. Pa went to jail and I never saw him again. At night, I cried in my bed and Meemaw cradled me, smoothed my hair.

  “Why’d he do it?”

  “Shhh.”

  “Why was he so mean?”

  She stayed silent, thinking. “He must’ve been born that way.”

  “Maybe his parents were mean.”

  “Maybe. Never met them.” She said this as if she really didn’t care. “It don’t matter, Jimbo. He is. You can’t fight against what is.”

  “But Momma’s gone. Everything’s gone—”

  “Shhh, baby. Everything is everything. It can’t be gone.”

  My heart was broken, and the world ended when my mother died.

  The doctor is beautiful, and I’m glad she’s with me. She’s beautiful despite the soot, despite the bloody gouge crossing her skull and the fact that half her hair has burned away. I’ve known her for just moments, but she’s beautiful and I can’t imagine how I’d deal without her.

  Maybe because I’m scared.

  It all happens so fast. Everything. I pull over. She hops in. I thought she was a lunatic at first, claiming to be a doctor, but . . . really you just can’t fake it. Only doctors act like doctors. And like all doctors, she came before the bad news. Cancer. Tumors. Zombies. Nuclear explosions.

  She talks to me and then everything catches fire in a hot wind. Without the wind, we’d choke in smoke, but the smoke is whisked away behind us, making my eyes tear and itch.

  We walk the interstate for what seems like hours, baked by the heat of the infernos to either side of us. The pine forests crackle and howl and stink of creosote.

  Behind us, the cloud rises.

  Amazing how long a cloud like that can hang in the air. It’s like some gigantic, radioactive pastry rising in an oven.

  It’s so big, looking at it gives me the same feeling I had when we drove to the Grand Canyon. Seventy-nine, I think it was. I was just a boy. We drove across America, my grandfather, my grandmother, and me. Meemaw reading magazines and smoking. Peepaw humming with the radio. I always loved the road because of them, the way they were content in the cocoon of car and sound. I miss them.

  We came to dry country and drove for days. The sky became brittle and cracked at the horizon. It took hours to park, the lot full of cars releasing a horde of tourists with bulky cameras and picnic baskets, and when we did, the chasm was only yards away. I stood on the edge in Buster Browns, nervous at the brink, and tried to grasp the vastness of the abyss.

  The cloud we walk underneath is the same. It’s hideous and beautiful by turns. The mushroom rises behind us in the east. Before us, the setting sun smears the sky with color. The interstate is a long thread through burning piney-woods. We’re higher up than the rest of the land, a little. A delta. Without the world being set afire, it’d be muggy and we’d be swarmed with mosquitoes. Chalk up one point in favor of nuclear annihilation. No more skeeters.

  She looks at it too. The cloud. I can see her cringe.

  “We’ve got to get inside,” she tells me, face intense. She’s the most focused person I’ve ever met. When she looks at me, I feel flayed, bare.

  “Why?”

  “Fallout. Radiation. Every minute we stay outside, the more we risk sickness. Cancer.”

  Walking is hard. My body’s become used to the soft seat of the semi. My feet are like rotten pieces of wood. The flesh of my neck bubbles and bursts. I feel my own fluids leaking down the back of my neck.

  Ahead is an off-ramp. A charred figure stumbles toward us. One of them.

  “Still hard to get my head around it,” I say. “Zombies.”

  I have the pistol tucked into my belt. I guess I should get it out. I’ve never shot it, but I’m ashamed to admit that to Lucy. She is probably the better shot—she looks as if anything she tries is easy for her. Though growing hair might be troublesome from here out.

  “Here. Take it.”

  “What? The gun?”

  “I’m not much of a shot,” I say.

  She takes it, pops it open, checks the rounds. Little brass circles in a larger gray circle.

  The charred figure has come close enough for me to smell it. Burned hair. Melted plastic. Underneath all the char, it has the smell of pork, fatty with drippings. My
stomach rumbles. I wish I was nauseated.

  “Holy Christ, forgive me. I’m drooling like a goddamned dog.”

  She gives me a sharp glance. Beautiful. And razor-sharp.

  “It’s normal to start salivating in autopsies. Okay. Not normal in everyone. But in a percentage of people. It’s old, animal memories. Don’t worry about it. You’re fine.”

  I nod. Hope she’s right.

  She cocks the hammer of the pistol. The zombie is only ten or fifteen feet away. Lucy walks calmly forward, closing the distance. The thing—it is impossible to tell its sex, and anyway I don’t think you can even think of them as male or female anymore—raises its arms and totters at Lucy, trying to meet her.

  She shoves the pistol into its face and pulls the trigger. There’s no blood. No fancy explosion of brain or skull. No screaming. It drops. That’s all. The lack of drama or fanfare makes me pause, scared. It feels so much like murder. It’s too easy.

  Lucy looks at me and I can tell she’s thinking the same thing.

  “Knock-Out, we’ve got to get inside.”

  She’s said this before. But I nod. We walk up the rise, up the off-ramp. This area didn’t get hit as hard by the blast. There’s another overpass crossing the interstate. We’re not very far from Little Rock, maybe five or six miles out, and I recall, because this is my route now, that there’s a Shell Git-N-Go filling station off to the right. They’ve got a fry-station serving gizzards and livers. Cold beer. Pretty young thing behind the counter, a little thick around the middle but with bright eyes and the nice smile. Not anymore, I imagine. We go that way.

  There’s quite a few of the shamblers milling about. Some of them are burned, but others seem whole, if you can call walking around after you’re dead whole. The smell of charred meat is overpowering.

  The station is burning. The air stinks of burning tires and plastic and an oily smoke pours off the husk of the building and is whisked up and away into the already smoke-filled sky. My eyes tear, and there’s a cough building in my chest. Thank God for the wind at our backs.

  The gas tanks have exploded and the vehicles around the building are black husks, much like the zombies. They turn in a group, like fish or birds. Creatures of the same instinct. To eat. To destroy, maybe. I should ask Lucy. She could make it understandable.

  Ash begins to fall like snow.

  She pops the chamber on the revolver and counts the remaining rounds.

  “Too many. Can you run?”

  “As opposed to what? Getting eaten?” I laugh. “Hell, yeah, I can run.”

  This doctor, she takes off, her long legs devouring the pavement. I run too, behind her. She’s slender, swift, and deadly, pumping her arms with a pistol in her hand. With each stride, my feet sting and pain shoots up my legs. Boots aren’t suited for the mile sprint. They’re made for walking, as the old song goes.

  The dead bank to follow, coming around the twisted columns of the gas pumps like a school of particularly vicious fish swimming around black coral.

  We leave them behind, but they keep following.

  It’s the moaning that gets me. It sounds like an angry mob of deaf-mutes. Unintelligible and urgent.

  Lucy slows, looking to the left and right. To the left, trailers. To the right, a little pillbox house with frill around the eaves and reflective globes in the front yard. Nestled in pine trees. A gravel drive. The fires haven’t touched it.

  She peels off the highway, her shoes crunching on the gravel. She dashes across the lawn, dodging the potted plants in whitewashed tires, up the porch steps, and stops.

  My chest feels like the inside of a charcoal grill, crusty and black. My wind comes in great sooty heaves. After a moment, I climb the steps and stand beside her.

  She looks at the porch. A smear of blood marks a trail inside the house. The door is open and the lights are out.

  Lucy looks at me and raises the gun, pointing inside the dark of the house.

  “First thing you do, Knock-Out, is lock the door. Bar it with furniture. Someone’s in here. Dead. Or dying. We stay together.”

  I nod.

  “After that, find tools so we can barricade the windows, the doors. Then we’ll figure out what to do next. I have to get to—” She looks distracted for a moment, and I know what she’s thinking. Her child. His name is Gus; she told me in the cab.

  “We’ll find him.” I want her to concentrate. It scares me when she loses her focus.

  She blinks and gives me a sharp look. I toss my head at the open door.

  “Right,” she says, squaring her shoulders. “Let’s go.”

  Inside, I’m blind, nearly. I can see the bright shapes of windows but no details of the interior. But something moans. I hear a thump.

  “Close the door!” Lucy whispers as loud as a scream. “I’ll take care—”

  I turn and shut the door. There’s a dead bolt and a clasp. I fasten both then turn back to the house.

  My eyes are adjusting to the dark. We’re in a narrow hall. Lucy’s moved down it a bit, gun out.

  My legs are watery and weak, but I force myself forward, behind her. A spill of light from a window shows us a kitchen. In it, a shape moves. One of the shamblers. It turns and steps into the light.

  It used to be a woman, older, blue haired. Frumpy and heavy breasted. Still wearing slippers. She looks up with milk-white eyes. Her skin is bluish green, but her mouth drips with red. She’s holding an arm in her hands. The arm is small and showing bone. I’m scared that the arm is so small.

  The shambler drops the piece of flesh and its face becomes enraged. It seems the zombies still have one emotion left to them: anger. A garbled sound comes from its throat, half like a scream of rage, half like the bleat of a goat. It comes forward in a brisk limp.

  Granny is spry.

  Lucy’s arm pops up, gun out, and she fires, lighting up the dark hall with the muzzle-flash. The boom of the gun makes it hard to think. I’m blind again, but I feel Lucy falling back against me.

  I crab walk backward, toward the door we just entered through. I’m ashamed of my terror. I force myself to my feet.

  “Can you get this bitch off me?”

  I lurch forward, grab a cold, flabby arm, and hoist. It’s like lifting a wet, carnivorous sack of flour.

  Dead weight.

  Puns are the lowest form of wit, my Meemaw used to say. She was right.

  Once I pull the shambler off Lucy, she stands.

  “Knock-Out,” she says, a little hitch in her voice. “This has got to be the longest workday I’ve had in . . . well, forever.”

  She looks around. My eyes have become used to the dim light. Night is coming.

  A thump sounds from the front door. The shamblers from the Git-N-Go have arrived.

  Lucy, eyes wide, holds a finger to her mouth, indicating I should be silent. She steps over the Granny-shambler on the floor and goes through the door, into the kitchen. I follow.

  I hear her breath catch, and suddenly she turns and throws her arms around me and buries her face in my chest. She smells like baby powder and burned hair, but I don’t want to let her go. When I look over her shoulder, I see.

  It’s fresh and bloody. A child. Age? Your best guess. A boy, judging by the shoes. Chuck Taylors. Shreds of a T-shirt and jeans.

  There’s crimson handprints, small things, on the back door, on the handle and at the dead bolt. The whole incident plays out like a bloody diorama. He comes home, or down the stairs right off the kitchen, finds Granny, maybe spasming, maybe already blue gray. Asks her what’s wrong. Granny moans. Grabs the child. Bites him, maybe on the neck, or arm, or hands, as he tries to fight her off, already bleeding. The instinct to survive is so strong.

  There’s a smear of blood on a drawer. Another small handprint. He died trying to get something to fight her off. To fight it off.

  I disengage from Lucy. “Go check the windows. The shamblers are at the front door.”

  “We’ve got to be quiet.” Lucy averts her eyes f
rom the mess on the floor. “They can’t see, their eyes are too cloudy. If they can see, it’s only a little, like swimming in murky water.”

  “But they hear and smell like the dickens, don’t they?” Whispering is hard. My throat is already raw from the smoke and dry heat coming off the nuclear forest fires.

  “We have to build a safe room. Against the radiation. If we can seal a room with plastic, it’ll protect us from fallout and keep them from smelling us. If we don’t take shelter from the fallout, we’ll be dead from cancer by the end of the year. If they don’t kill us.”

  I nod, try to show her I understand. I’ve been x-rayed before. The techs wore big bulky protective vests. Like booze, or smoke, crank or blow, too much of it will kill you. Why should radiation be any different?

  “More than likely, they’ll go away if they hear another noise or smell something else.”

  “Okay,” I say. My voice sounds steadier than I feel. “I’ll take the kitchen. Find trash bags to seal windows. Something to eat. Whatever looks useful. I’ll take care of the—” I don’t know how to finish that statement.

  But she nods, squeezes my bicep, and smiles at me gratefully. I feel warm. It’s been a long time since someone has touched me.

  “Water. Whatever else happens, we’ll need water.”

  She turns and pads up the stairs. I turn back to the kitchen. To the boy.

  I can hear thumps from the front of the house. It’s hard to know how smart the shamblers are. Can they work out locks? They’re dead, right? Can they figure out how to break windows? Climb over a sill?

  I go straight to the sink and open the cabinet doors. It’s where I put the garbage bags at home, so it makes sense Granny-shambler would put hers there. She’s got sense. A large pack of Glad trash bags. Apple cider vinegar. Pine-Sol.

  A yellow flashlight.

  I take out a bag, open the mouth, and scoop air, popping the bag open. It makes a sound like a sail catching wind, more volume than you’d imagine.

  The noises from the front door get louder—thick wet sounds that hit my ears like the sound of someone gargling with meat by-products or trying to talk around a mouthful of Vienna sausages, angry and confused and vocal—I can hear the thumps and even the scratches too. It’s weird how the mind conjures images. I imagine horribly maimed hands, black and textured like pork cracklins.