This Dark Earth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  The boy looks to his father on the floor. I stand and glance around. In the corner is a stack of wool blankets. Military grade, they feel rough and wiry, like Brillo pads. I take one and drape it over Fred Ingersol. May he rest in peace.

  “The sirens, we could hear them coming . . . We went back inside and turned on the TV. The newsman was talking about a virus that caused seizures and . . . cannibalism.”

  “What else did the news say, baby? Did they say how far it had spread?”

  “They said it was in New York and Chicago. Atlanta. Miami. Mexico.”

  “Mexico?”

  “Shit,” I say, and both Lucy and Gus look at me. “I thought you said it was just around White Hall.”

  She’s giving us the thousand-yard stare, trying to figure things out.

  “Maybe it takes longer to show symptoms than we thought. If that’s the case, it could be around the world.” She rubs her mouth with the back of her hand. “Or maybe it is airborne and we have a natural resistance to it. I just don’t know.”

  “If it’s all those places, then it’s worldwide.”

  “It wasn’t when the electricity worked,” Gus says. He’s like a little man, serious, well spoken. An equal.

  “After the explosion, the news showed mushroom clouds all over. New York. Los Angeles. Canada. Europe.”

  “Oh no.”

  Goddamn. A fucking virus started World War III.

  “But last night, right before the electricity went out, the newsmen said that the president and the . . . Chinese guy . . . that they were gonna talk. We heard honking and screaming. Mr. Milton came driving down the street, swerving. There was something wrong with him. He screamed at us and shook all over.”

  Lucy hugs Gus tight to her chest and looks at me. I open the MRE. Spaghetti with meat sauce. An army of smaller bags fall from the larger one. I don’t need the Sterno; this has its own heating packet. Bread. Cheese spread. Salt. Pepper. Cocoa. And coffee. Sugar. Creamer. A wet wipe. Amazing how ingenious the American government was at one time. Now they’ve ingenioused the human race nearly out of existence.

  I feel like Lucy wants some support with her son despite me just meeting him. So I become my grandfather.

  “You want some cocoa?” I’ve never met a kid who doesn’t want cocoa. Even in the height of summer. It could be the Sahara, an inferno, and kids will want more marshmallows in their cocoa. What is a marshmallow, anyway?

  Fuck it, I’m gonna use the Sterno. Even the little extra light helps. I light the can and put the saucepan on the little fold-up rack that comes with it. I fill it with water and wait for the steam.

  I don’t have anything else to do with myself for the moment. But I’m starting to worry about the security of the house. The shamblers are beating at the front door and the back gate. I don’t want to get caught down here, especially after the door has been kicked in once. I stand, go to the hall, and get my shotgun where I’ve dropped it. I feed it with shells until I can’t put any more in it.

  Lucy gives me a puzzled look. Gus too. They’re looking at me like I’m crazy, but I’m feeling cooped up and claustrophobic. I take a deep breath, and, mirroring something I’ve seen both Lucy and Gus do, I square my shoulders and exhale.

  I sit.

  “Sorry about that. I got to roll. Just a touch of the nerves. I’m a trucker. But Luce . . . and Gus . . . we’ve got to secure the house soon.”

  Lucy and Gus exchange glances. He shrugs her off and stands up.

  I hold out my hands. “I’m glad y’all are listening to me, but I didn’t mean right now. Let’s have some water. Let’s eat some food. Gus, finish your story, and then we’ll check out the house. Okay? It can wait that long. We’d hear something, I think. Lucy, did you close the door at the top of the stairs?”

  She shakes her head.

  “Oh shoot. Okay, stay here. I’ll take care of that first.”

  Taking the Maglite, I walk into the hall, raise the shotgun, and tread softly on the carpet. On the stairwell, it’s real easy to spot the shambler making his way downstairs. There’s another behind him. There’s a breach somewhere in the house.

  I raise the shotgun, aim at the silhouette of the lead shambler’s head, and pull the trigger. It tilts backward and then tumbles toward me, hitting the stairs face-first, then sliding further down the incline. It stops moving. I wish Lucy was here to see that shot.

  I take a bead on the other shambler coming down the stairs and fire.

  I’m not quite sure how, but I’ve missed completely. I didn’t think that was possible with a shotgun, but you learn something new every day.

  And this one shows me another thing new: it isn’t beyond the undead to jump.

  It launches itself in the air, and suddenly I can’t breathe. I’m knocked backward into the wall, the Maglite spins crazily off down the hall, and only the shotgun is between me and the shambler. I can’t see its face, but I can smell its breath, like dog food marinating in chicken grease in the summer sun. I don’t need to see the foul thing to know he’s there. And he wants to eat me.

  I shove as hard as I can—I want to live more than he wants to eat me—and the shambler tumbles backward against the stairs. I stand as quickly as I can, put the bore of the shotgun in its face, and pull the trigger. It’s only a boom. I’ve heard bigger ones in the last few days. The head before me disappears in a fine mist of blood. I can feel it on my hands.

  What happens if its blood gets in my mouth? My eyes? Do I get the virus too? Was there blood on Lucy’s face? Is there blood on mine? She said we all might have it already. I have to go with that. And there’s no time to worry about it now, anyway.

  I don’t think I could do to her what she did to Fred. How could I? I’ve never, ever felt this way before. I can’t kill this feeling. I’d rather die. And rise again.

  I have the overwhelming urge to scream in the close darkness at the base of the stairwell. But I force myself to stand and walk up the stairs into the light.

  I catch another shambler in the hallway leading to the kitchen. There’s a guest bedroom that Fred and Gus didn’t board up. The zombies have beaten in the glass, and I can see twenty or thirty of them milling around just beyond the one caught on the sill, glass digging into his belly and holding him in place. One dead man claws at the back of his gut-caught brother and pulls himself up and over to flop on the floor like a fish able to move from pond to pond. I bash his skull with the shotgun’s stock before he can rise.

  There’s no use trying to shoot into this crowd. But the guy stuck on the windowsill is doing a pretty good job of keeping them out for the moment. One fish at a time.

  I shut the door. There’s no lock. I hope I can get downstairs and back with hammer and nails before they can get in.

  I run through the house, my breath wheezing in my chest. I feel a bit dizzy, but I keep going, shotgun in hand.

  I nearly run over Gus coming up the stairs.

  “We heard the shots!” he yells, but he’s strangely calm. Maybe he thinks I’m a little deaf. With all the gunfire, inside and at close quarters, I could be getting a little deaf at that.

  “They were on the stairs.” I see he’s picked up the Maglite I’ve dropped. “Listen, Gus, I need you to get your mother—”

  Lucy comes out of the stairwell.

  “Gus, do not just run off like that—”

  She draws up short when she sees the expression on my face.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “We can’t stay here. They’re starting to swarm the house. So, listen. Gus. Lucy. Go get as much water and food as you can carry from the workroom. Bring them to the kitchen. But first get a hammer and nails. Gus. You go now. Run. As quick as you can.”

  He looks at Lucy, silently asking permission to leave, and she nods. I can see she doesn’t want to let him out of her sight, but she knows she has to eventually. It might as well be now and make it quick.

  He’s down the stairs before the sound of my voice fades away.


  “Why do we have to leave? We can bar ourselves in the workroom, we’ve got food, water—”

  This is weird for Lucy. She’s not thinking straight. It should be her saying this to me. Families are our great strength. Families are our great blind spot.

  “Fred and Gus missed a room when they were boarding up. There’s shitloads of shamblers flopping in, one by one. The guest room window.”

  Lucy starts off, down the hall.

  “Wait. Lucy, wait.”

  She stops and turns back to me.

  “I’m going to nail the door shut and that should hold them, but we’ve got to get out of here, Lucy. We can’t just lock ourselves in the basement. That’s a sure death. They can smell us, remember? What happens when we’re the last folks alive in the city and there are thousands of them? Eventually they’ll make their way here. We’d just be sitting in a pitch-dark hole waiting to die.”

  She nods. I watch the thoughts passing though her delicate features. God, she’s beautiful, despite the blood, the grime, the burned hair.

  “We’ve got to be able to run. Always.”

  “Right,” I say. “We’ve got to get to the country. Arkansas hasn’t got a lot of people—”

  “But Little Rock—any city, really—is the last place you want to be. We’ve got to go somewhere with the lightest population density we can find.”

  I’m nodding now, because she’s back.

  Gus appears at the door to the stairwell. His face is ashen. He hands me my hammer. It has blood all over it. His father’s blood. But he looks me in the eye, solidly, and puts a snarl of ten-penny-weight nails in my hand.

  “Go get guns, get water, get food. Go to your rooms and get whatever—” I stop, not knowing how to say it. So I just say it. “Get your memories. Only what you can carry. Pictures of your father, Gus. Pictures of your husband, Lucy. You’ll never be able to replace them. There ain’t any coming back home once we leave. But do it quickly! Only what you can carry. We’re gonna leave on the ATV. We’ll be exposed, but we can go off-road, bypass cars, cut through yards. It’ll be easier to travel than being trapped in a car.”

  “But—”

  “Go!”

  I turn and run to the guest room. One of the zombies is banging on the door already. The good thing is, it opens inward, so he can bang on the door all he wants, it’s not going to bust open. Yet. Eventually, he might split it, if his friends join him. And one of the shamblers might remember how to turn a doorknob. Maybe. They remember anger. Sometimes it sounds like they almost remember a word or two.

  I put nails every ten inches around the frame. In the hall is a bookcase. I knock it over, use my foot to break off a board, and nail it across the doorway. I hammer boards until I run out of nails.

  I put the hammer back in my belt and go back to the kitchen.

  Gus is there with his backpack stuffed full. He’s got a pistol in a holster hanging from his belt. It looks heavy, blunt nosed.

  “Your dad’s?”

  He knows exactly what I’m talking about. But he looks at me and says, “No. It’s mine now.”

  I’m not going to get in some pissing match with a ten-year-old. I just boarded up a door to keep out zombies, for chrissake. The boy can keep his gun.

  “Hey, do me a favor, will you?”

  He stares at me and then nods once, slowly.

  “Don’t shoot me. All right?”

  Lucy comes in the kitchen carrying a big box of water and MREs. She has consolidated. I remember I had some water boiling downstairs. Before the shamblers on the stairs. The ones in the hall and guest room.

  “Did you . . . snuff the Sterno?”

  She gives me a quick smile and then sets the box on the kitchen table. She moves over to Gus, puts her arm around him. Not in a lovey-dovey way . . . no. She touches him in the same way that the heartbroken are reunited with their true loves.

  “We need glasses for the boy. Set him up with armor, bandana. Everything he might need.”

  “We should take a car,” she says firmly.

  “No. ATV.”

  “A car will protect us from—” She glances at Gus.

  “Luce. The boy knows about the zombies. The world we know is over. And we always need to be able to run. You can’t do that with a car. With the ATV we don’t even need roads.”

  She cocks her head and looks at me as if she’s seeing me for the first time all over again. I want to say that I can be stubborn, and sometimes I can be right. And in this case, I’m both.

  I dig in my shirt pocket, pull out my last cigarette. It’s bent but whole. I light it with a match. I miss my skull-and-crossbones Zippo.

  The smoke tastes good. Gus watches me, curious. I’m big and hairy and ugly. I’m not a jogger or tennis player like his father. I’m a trucker. But his father is dead and I’m standing here in front of him.

  I take another drag, ash on the floor, and then hold the cigarette out to Lucy. She glances at Gus. Then reaches out and takes it. She leans against the counter and inhales deep.

  “I knew you smoked, Mom.”

  She looks surprised for a second.

  “At night . . . before . . . sometimes I could smell it on you. You smelled like Granny. Smoky.”

  “It’s a bad habit, honey. It can kill you if you do it too much. But you already know that, don’t you?”

  He nods.

  I snap my fingers. I’m being a little hokey, but it’s been a long time since Emily was a little girl and she always thought my hokiness was funny.

  I say, “I just had an idea. I need a piece of wood. Yea big.” I hold my arms out and make an imaginary square, four feet by four feet. “And some black paint and a paintbrush. You think you can find that for me?”

  He’s quiet. I can see his brain is working. The boy is a little scary. He hasn’t cried; he hasn’t shown fear. Just acceptance and understanding of everything that’s come along. Zombies. Nuclear explosions. The change and brutal death of his father.

  “And some more nails. And rope. Can you get all that?”

  He nods again. He’s chubby but has a nice, long neck and big hands. Smart features. He’ll grow. Soon.

  He turns and runs to the stairwell. Watching him move, I’m reminded he’s only ten.

  “So, what happened? Did you get the rest of his story?”

  “Yeah. Bob Milton, our next-door neighbor, wrecked his car. Spasms. Lesch-Nyhan. Fred—”

  She stops. I reach out and take my cigarette back from her.

  “Fred went to the wreck to help him. Milton bit him. Gus pulled Fred . . . pulled his father back inside. They locked the door and watched the TV until the electricity went out. By midnight, the street was crowded with revenants. They started trying to get in. Fred boarded the windows, and Gus helped. But Fred started to have spasm problems. Cursing. Gus pulled him downstairs to the workroom. I guess it was there that Fred went into opisthotonus . . . a constriction of all the back and leg muscles. Horrible shit.”

  Lucy looks at the cigarette again. It’s almost down to the filter. I take one last puff and hand it over.

  “Gus is no dummy. He knew what was about to happen. And Fred did too. Gus convinced his father—who was already starting to spasm—to lock him in the safe. At least for a while, until they knew if Fred was going to—” She stopped there. Took a hard drag on the last of the smoke, looking out the window into the backyard. The rattling gate. Maybe it was the smoke that irritated her eyes. “So he dumped the Krugerrands on the floor and got inside the safe with a bottle of water.”

  “Shit. Smart kid.”

  She nods. “I can’t imagine how hard it must’ve been for him. Or for Fred to turn the combination.”

  “Do you have everything you need?” She needs the change of subject and I’m happy to provide it. “I think you need to get all the medical supplies you can get. All the drugs, whatever you won’t be able to find on the road.”

  “I lost my needle gun when we were running from the army. And it’s usel
ess without a lab anyway.”

  “Get what you can.”

  “I’ll get Gus armored up too. I think there’s some work gloves in the laundry room.”

  Gus comes into the kitchen carrying a two-foot-square board, a can of paint, and a brush.

  “Here. Best I can do, Knock-Out.” He leaves the board on the table.

  “Your neck, arms. Protect them.”

  Gus follows Lucy out.

  I hammer two nails at the top of the board, and once they’re in good, I bend them over, creating loops. I feed the rope through the nails and tie it off, making a larger loop.

  Opening the paint, I dip the brush in and, using my best handwriting, begin to write on the sign.

  When Gus and Lucy come back, Gus has ski goggles strapped to his forehead and a black bandana tied around his neck. He’s wearing a black motorcycle jacket, gloves tucked into his belt. A snub-nosed pistol in a holster. A hunting knife next to it, and a small Maglite. I have to remind myself he’s just ten.

  “What school did you get your medical degree from, Lucy?”

  She looks surprised. “Dartmouth Medical School. I was a resident at Johns Hopkins.”

  I turn back and finish the sign. They watch me work.

  It says, “Don’t SHOOT! I’m a DOCTOR. Dartmouth Medical School. Residency: Johns Hopkins. WE CAN HELP!”

  Lucy opens her mouth, shuts it. Gus smiles.

  “Where will we go?”

  “I don’t know. Somewhere with very few people.”

  “This is the first time I’m glad I chose to practice in Arkansas.”

  Gus says, “We have to make for the Ozarks. There’s nobody up there. And there’s woods.”

  “We’ll need to stay close enough to people that we can get food. Find other survivors. There’s not going to be a harvest this year, I don’t think.”

  The shamblers are in the guest room now, banging on the door. It’s time to go back out into the world. We grab our bags, our boxes, and go back out to the back deck, down the steps to the fenced patio. The dead moan and rattle at the cypress gate. They can smell us. They can hear us. Everything we have is on our backs and in our hands. The rest is . . . abandoned.