This Dying World: The End Begins

by Dean James

  “It’s about time,” I heard Adam under his breath.

  “I’m sorry, did you say something?” I asked.

  Adam lifted his head, glaring at me from across the table. He was gritting his teeth, his jaw muscles locked tight as his narrowed eyes locked on mine. What I had mistook as indifference towards me was in fact pure anger.

  “I said,” he spat. “It’s about fucking time you got off your fucking lazy ass and stopped wasting our shit!”

  “Adam, watch your mouth. There are kids right there, my daughter among them. They don’t need to hear your language. If you got something to say to me, fine. But you wait until my daughter is not in the room,” I said, forcing myself to be calm.

  “Fuck your daughter!” he clenched his jaw, setting his eyes to mine.

  Everyone in the kitchen stopped, holding their collective breaths. The silent tension in the room was palpable. The only thing that dared make a sound was the steady drum of a leaky faucet. The calm and happy breakfast time we were enjoying had evaporated in the seconds it took for the words to fall from Adam’s tongue.

  “Anna,” I said through my own clenched teeth. “Can you please bring the kids upstairs for awhile? Adam and I have a few things to discuss.”

  Chris moved closer to the table as Anna shuffled the kids upstairs. Lexi froze in her seat, her face looking as if she was trying to decide if she should stay where she was at or run away. Matt rose, looking like he was ready to pound Adam into the ground. Chris put his hand on Matt’s shoulder, guiding him away before he intervened. Rosa stayed where she was, watching the scene from the other side of the kitchen.

  “Now,” I said when I was sure the kids couldn’t hear. “You ever talk like that around any of those kids again, and I’ll tie sausages around your neck and march you into a horde of those Zeds! You have something to say to me, say it!”

  “Fine!” he shouted. “Your punk ass shows up and brings a posse’ of those fucks right down on us! We hide in the basement like fucking rats while those things ate everything we needed! Then you stay in bed using up all our medicine, and eating all our food while we’re working our asses off trying to fix your mess!”

  “It’s not like I brought them here on purpose! What exactly would you expect me to do!?” I shot back.

  “Stay lost! Take them somewhere else!” Adam’s pale face reddened. Spittle shot from gritting teeth as he exhaled heavily.

  “Maybe I should have, but I didn’t. I was being shot at, and the car was on its last leg. I almost died myself! How could I have led them anywhere else?!” I demanded.

  “You should have died! We should have left your stupid ass in that car!” He stood and put his fists in the center of the table, leaning in close as his voice lowered to a near growl. “If you pull that shit again, I’ll let you die. And I’ll feed your ole lady and bitch kid to those zombies too.”

  My fist connected with his elbow as I came off my chair after him. He tumbled forward towards the table. I helped him on his trip, slamming the side of his head down onto my plate hard enough to shatter it. My gun was in my hand and on his temple before I realized it. My finger was already squeezing the trigger.

  “The only thing I have left in this life is my family! I killed the last man who hurt them! I’ll kill anyone who even thinks about hurting them!”

  I was in a fog. Every cell in my body wanted to kill him. He begged for his life, pleading for mercy that I didn’t feel like doling out. My conscience was abnormally silent. I heard Rosa screaming for me to stop. Matt and Chris tried to talk me down, but their voices were miles away. The only thing that was crystal clear to me was the cold black pistol in my hand that was about to put a hole in Adam’s head.

  “Dan. No.”

  Abby’s soft words punched through my clouded mind. I heard them through the shouting and pleading that filled the kitchen. As soft as she spoke, her voice was louder than the murderous hate burning through me.

  I looked over at her as she slowly stepped into the kitchen. She still wore the nightgown she had slept in. Her hair was a mess, as it always was when she woke up in the morning. There was sadness in her eyes, but she still smiled. She slowly walked towards me, her slippers sliding gently across the floor.

  “He threatened to hurt you! He threatened to hurt Katie! I won’t let him! I’ll never let that happen again!” I raged.

  I felt her fingers caress my cheek, turning my face towards hers.

  “Dan. No.”

  Her hand touched my own, and my rage melted away. I felt all my strength ebb as she slid the gun from my hand. Chris reached over and took the weapon. I felt every drop of energy suddenly vanish from my body, and I wanted to fall to the floor. She took my hand and led me towards the front door.

  “Let’s get some air, okay?” she said softly as she lead me towards the door.

  We stepped out into the crisp overcast morning, closing the door on the shouting and crying that had overtaken the kitchen. We sat on the porch steps, sitting in the still silence of the snow covered farm. I stared off into space, until Abby finally broke the silence.

  “Dan. Talk to me.”

  I could find no words. I looked into her worried eyes, and I collapsed into her, crying like a child.

  **********

  “I warned you!” Chris growled at Adam. “When you got here, I fucking warned you. You’re done here!”

  “I didn’t do shit to him!” Adam screamed, kicking a chair across the room.”

  “You threatened his family! You threatened my family! If it wouldn’t have destroyed him for the rest of his life, I would have let him shoot you!”

  “Chris!” Rosa gasped. “You wouldn’t!”

  “Yes he would,” Adam answered. “His ass never wanted me here. He wouldn’t even give me a weapon. He needed slave labor, and I was it.”

  “I never gave you a weapon because I didn’t trust you!” Chris shouted. “You just proved me right!”

  “I don’t need to take this shit from either of you,” Adam mumbled, shaking his head.

  “You won’t have to anymore. Get whatever you came here with, and get out of my house.” Chris turned, walking towards the front door.

  Adam suddenly grabbed a fork from the table and charged at Chris. Adam held his weapon high, bringing the utensil downward towards Chris’ head. Matt suddenly stepped forward, bringing a side handed chop across Adam’s windpipe. Adam fell flat on his back, holding his throat and gasping for air.

  “Not happening,” Matt said.

  “That’s why you don’t have a weapon,” Chris said over his shoulder. He picked up two hammers from a shelf and continued towards the door.

  “Where are you going?” Rosa gasped. “Don’t you think we have to deal with this?”

  “I’m going to give Dan his gun back.”

  Chapter Thirty-Seven

  “You can’t lose yourself,” Abby said after several minutes. “What’s happening, all this death around us, we’ve lost almost everything. If we lose ourselves, we really won’t have anything left.”

  “I don’t know what happened,” I said, shaking my head. “I just…reacted. He threatened my family, he threatened you. I just wanted to knock his teeth in, but it was suddenly like I wasn’t in control. I wanted him dead.”

  “You’re not a murderer Dan. That’s what you would have become if you pulled that trigger. That wasn’t self-defense. That wasn’t justice. That would have been murder. Could you live with that? I love you, but I don’t know if I could.”

  “I’ve already turned that corner,” I replied.

  “No, Dan. You just opened the trunk. What that man did to those poor girls just came back to him. He killed himself, you just opened a door.”

  “That’s not much of a distinction,” I said.

  “It’s enough for me. But what you did to Adam was too far. You can’t shoot someone for making threats,” she said, squeezing my hand. “You can make him eat his own teeth, but you can’t shoot him.”

>   “I don’t know,” I said. “Before, I would agree with you. But now, I just don’t know.”

  “Dan, promise me. You won’t lose yourself. You won’t become something that I know you’re not. This world has changed us enough. Don’t let it take everything from you.”

  “I’ll promise to try. I can’t do better right now.”

  “I guess that will have to do,” she said, laying her head on my shoulder. “For now anyway.”

  We sat together on the porch steps without saying another word. A breeze blew across the fields, swirling snow up into the air into icy cyclones before settling it back down onto the ground. The leafless branches of the surrounding woods cracked and groaned under the weight of the ice and snow they supported. It would have been easy to enjoy a perfect wintery country day.

  That small comfort was not to be unfortunately. I don’t know if it was our scent on the wind that riled them up, or maybe they were just pissed that they were caught up in razor wire. All at once the undead captives began to growl and snarl like wild animals. The wire popped and scraped against the trees as the creatures pushed against their bonds.

  “We should probably do something about that,” Chris said as he walked out the door behind us. He carried a claw hammer in one hand, and my old trusty orange dead blow hammer in the other. “Mind if I borrow your husband for a while?”

  “Yeah, I need to get dressed in something a bit warmer anyway. Dan, please don’t forget your promise,” she whispered.

  After sharing a kiss that made Chris fidget a little, Abby stepped back into the house. I heard the heavy wooden plank drop into the brackets as she barred the door.

  “Come on,” he said. “Let’s go blow off some steam.”

  “Sounds like a good idea,” I said as I stood from the steps.

  “Keep to the driveway, then keep close and be careful when we get to the trees. The field has some nasty surprises in it,” he said as we walked.

  It had been the first time I had ventured outside since I had come to the farm. The combination of darkness and snow had hidden most of the defenses from me the previous night. A small backhoe had been parked lengthwise at the driveway entrance, its bright yellow paint catching the small rays of sun that had begun to peak through the clouds.

  Gone was the log fence that had once encircled the front yard. Only the support posts remained, sticking up from the ground like wooden sentries. The lawn furniture and the kid’s toys that were usually strewn about were missing. Instead, rebar rods littered the front of the house, the ends of which were sharpened like spear tips. Some were welded together in the middle, looking like a giant game of jacks. Others were anchored into the ground, propped at an angle towards the open field. Basically, the front of the house looked like the world’s most lethal pin cushion.

  “Where the hell did you find all this?” I asked.

  “Road construction site, about a twenty minute drive from here. I used the rebar mesh for the windows. We bolted it right through the frame of the house. The rest, well you can see we’ve been busy making toys with it.”

  “What about the backhoe?” I questioned. “You can’t tell me you drove that thing all the way here from a construction site.”

  “That was already here. I rented that to work on my septic tank a couple days before the whole world went to shit. If they want it back, they can come and get it,” he smiled.

  “You might lose your deposit,” I joked half-heartedly.

  “My credit sucks anyway.”

  We turned and made our way through the ankle deep snow toward the tree line, and the creatures ensnared within. Only three remained of the group I had seen the night before. Chunks of flesh and tattered clothing torn from their bodies hung from the sharpened barbs of the razor wire that had been woven between the trees. Unmoving bloated corpses with crushed skulls were scattered along the wire. Thick greenish black sludge oozed from where their brains should have been.

  The closer I got to the abominations the more the smell threatened to make me lose my breakfast. Had it not been bacon, I might have relieved my stomach of its contents, but I don’t give up my bacon that easily.

  I did mention that I like bacon, right?

  Despite the near vomit inducing odor, I moved towards the nearest of the undead. Until that point, I had not yet gotten very close to one of them without killing it or fleeing from it. I was transfixed on it, watching it’s movements as it tried in vain to reach me. Its blood stained teeth snapped the air as I got closer. Its mottled skin was littered with scrapes and gashes, whether from the wire or some other trauma I couldn’t say.

  “Careful!” Chris snapped as he grabbed me by the shoulder. “You see that big rectangle shaped indent in the snow that you almost stepped in? That’s about a foot deep. Those aren’t weeds sticking out of the hole either.”

  My attention had been so completely drawn to the monster in front of me that I had not noticed the trap. Small tips of what looked like shoots of dead plants poked out through the powdery snow. Each shoot had their tips sharpened, the silvery points almost invisible in the semi gloomy morning.

  “Tiger traps?” I asked, crouching down to get a better look.

  “Not quite as deep as a tiger trap, but the same basic idea,” he said as he scanned across the fields.

  “More rebar?”

  “Yeah, it’s amazingly abundant if you know where to look,” he replied. “Come on, I don’t like being out in the open this close to the road if we don’t have to be.”

  “How many of these are there?” I asked, brushing off snow from my jeans as I stood.

  “There’s more trap than field in front of the house. We found out about the noise when we were working on the side of the house. The damned things came out of the woodwork every time we fired up the backhoe.”

  “Is that why you’re using it as a driveway gate?” I asked as we carefully skirted around the edges of the trap. We crept along slowly, wary of the deadly traps that littered the yard.

  “Yes and no,” he answered. “They follow the road mainly. It’s almost like they don’t want to come through the woods unless there’s something that attracts them to it. So we put it there to add an obstacle.”

  “Path of least resistance,” I thought out loud.

  “Pretty much. Don’t get me wrong, they’ll chew through a brick wall if they know there’s someone behind it. But if they aren’t drawn to anything, they usually keep to the road or flat fields,” he said. “But we found out that’s not always the case with the mob you ran into.”

  Before I knew it we were standing in front of the dead thing that held my attention earlier. The thing had once been a man named Bent, according to the name tag stitched to his weather beaten shirt. I assumed it was his last name, because who would name their kid Bent? It groaned as fleshless fingertips swiped at me like sharpened talons. Its swollen tongue wagged outside of its mouth, dripping frothy slime to the ground.

  I realized something as I watched it react to our presence. There was no anger or malice in its face. They were not angry, sad, happy, or anything, nor would they be anything again. They were dead, and their emotions died with their bodies.

  What I saw was need.

  It was more than a desire to eat. They were not happy to eat, or angry when they couldn’t. It was a drive to feed. They needed to eat, but for what reason I couldn’t begin to imagine. The thing pulled at the razors, willing to tear the slowly decaying flesh from its body simply to get at its food. It made this once human thing something to be pitied.

  It also made them dangerous.

  “I never thought this could be real. I mean, how could this even happen? How can you exist, Gus?” I asked. It simply snapped its teeth again.

  “Gus?” Chris asked.

  “Well I’m not calling him Bent,” I replied. “Besides, he looks like a Gus.”

  “I hope you’re not expecting an answer from it,” Chris said. “They don’t talk much. You take care of Mr. Bent here, I
’ll get the other two. I want to check around a bit and see if the ones that got free are still around somewhere.”

  I didn’t watch him leave. I heard two heavy whacks followed by footsteps as he walked away. With the other two creatures gone, the only sound filling my ears was the lone growls of Gus’ struggle. The air suddenly felt heavy and still. Even the wind seemed colder.

  I was alone with Gus. Gus the mechanic. Gus, the family man if the ring on his finger was to be believed. Gus, the guy who just a few weeks prior was living his life. Gus, the zombie that wanted to eat me and my family. Gus, the thing that had to die.

  I looked into its dead eyes and again saw nothing staring back at me. It didn’t register what was about to happen to it, or why it should fear the bright orange clubby thing in my hand. The spark that had made this creature a living, breathing, and feeling person had been extinguished long before we met.

  “I’m sorry Gus.”

  I took a deep breath, and brought the hammer down across its temple. Like a light switch was flipped off, the thing stopped moving. It slumped over the wire, its hands still reaching towards me as they came to rest on the fresh snow. I sat down hard, not taking my eyes off the thing. I knew it was dead, but something inside me was bothered by what I had just done.

  “People say the first one is the hardest,” Chris said from behind me. “But it’s not. It’s the easiest. It’s the second one that really eats at you. That second one will haunt you.”

  “This isn’t the first or the second one I’ve killed,” I said, still watching Gus. I hoped that ending his existence would bring something peaceful to his features, maybe make him look more like the human being that he was before.

  But it still wore the same desperate look on its gaunt face. It still had the same grimy hair matted to its scalp. Its lips were still shriveling back with its stained teeth exposed. It still looked every bit the monster I had killed.

  “I wasn’t talking about that thing,” he continued. “Abby told me about the garage. She told me what happened. I understand what she is thinking, but let’s face facts. You killed that man.”