“I’m not sure if she’s dead or not…I’m just fearing the worst.” I said with the most concerned tone I could muster up.
Before we could even take our first step, we could hear a rumble off in the distance. We froze as all of our ears tried to analyze the sound.
“Thunder?” Sara asked.
“I don’t think so,” I said, my tone becoming more serious. “It’s getting closer.”
From around the corner we could see a black pick up truck and several motorcycles heading towards us.
“Quick, get down!” Jack called out, diving into the ditch of the dead. His vomiting started up again instantly. Sara and I didn’t dive in with the same gusto of Jack. We gently nestled down at the slope of the culvert making sure we were out of sight and also out of the gore. Rex burrowed under my belly and popped his head out by my neck. What we saw was a confirmation of my fears. As the motorcade passed by, I could make out very clearly the poor white trash driver that was Axel.
“Shit,” I whispered. “I wish I’d been a better shot.”
“Where are they going?” Sara asked.
“I’ll give you one guess what they are looking for.”
“Then leave the guns here for them to find!”
“He doesn’t care about the guns anymore,” Jack whispered from his pile of nasty. “We killed his brother, and he wants his pound of flesh.” The irony of his words while he was lying in a literal soup of human flesh was not lost on me.
We watched as the the truck and motorcycles followed the road around the bend towards the front of Home Depot. Once they were out of sight, we continued on at a much faster pace. We didn’t stop until we made it to Rondeu Drive.
“Well, this is her street,” I said as we looked at the half dozen or so zombies milling about the neighborhood. “Why can’t anything be easy?” I sighed.
“Which house is hers?” Jack asked while stretching like he was about to go for a jog. I pointed out the house right in the middle of the neighborhood.
Sara looked at the bevy of other homes on the street that would require less zombie interaction to reach. “Why don’t we just break into one of these other houses?”
“If someone is still alive and armed, I don’t think they would appreciate us kicking in their door,” Jack answered, still stretching.
“Yeah, and if we break in, then we have to repair however we got in to keep zombies from getting in the same way.”
“Come on! There’s only six of them between us and where we need to go,” Jack went to the nearest house and started checking car doors until he found one that was unlocked. He opened the door and popped the trunk like he knew what he was looking for.
“Perfect!” he exclaimed, pulling out a stainless steel tire iron. “Let’s do this!” he said, pumping himself up, as he ran headlong down the road.
“Jack!” I called out. “You’re the one with all the weapons!”
Within a minute, it didn’t matter. Jack stood in front of Joy’s house, heaving from exertion. A path of six smashed in heads lead the way for us. “Nice work,” I said, slapping him on his back before I remembered he was still sticky with fluid from his dive into the dead filled ditch. He smiled and dropped the tire iron that was now covered with congealed blood, grey matter, and gore. I went to the house and immediately found the fake rock with the key to the front door.
“How do you know where that is?” Sara asked.
“Joy, my ex, had a cat. She asked me to take care of it while she and her new guy went on a cruise together.”
“Well, that was nice of you,” she said. In truth, I went to the house once in the five days that they were gone and dumped a giant scoop of food for the cat so I wouldn’t have to go back again. I really only went to see what kind of house Carl had.
To answer your question, it was tacky.
As I approached the door, it flung open to reveal Joy alive and pale. Damn. I thought. Then out loud I said, “You’re alive!” with an inflection that I thought was actually quite believable.
“What are you doing here?” She asked in a tone that made me remember why I hated living with anyone in the first place.
“We came to make sure you were okay.”
She opened the door fully and motioned for us to come inside. The house was just as tacky as I remembered it. Fake deer heads on the wall from hunting fake deer, I suppose. Faux leather couches and fake fur throw pillows gave the home a fake southwest flare. I found it strange that she was married to someone who faked every single emotion of our relationship, and then when she leaves, it’s for a man who was so blatantly fake that it made me nauseous.
“What’s that?” she asked, referring to Rex.
“My dog, Rex.”
“Will he be okay around Pumpkin?”
Ohhh, that damn cat…
“Oh, yeah. He’s great with cats.” I guessed.
At just that moment, the slender black and white cat appeared at the top of the stairs and hissed. Whether it was at me, or the dog, it didn’t matter because Rex immediately took off after it. “See?” I said. “He already wants to play.”
After formal introductions, we all sat on the couch, and I told Joy about meeting Jack and Sara and the crazy rednecks that were looking for us.
“SO YOU CAME HERE?!” she screeched.
“Well, Joy…Not sure where else I could have gone.”
“What happens when those people find you?”
“Well, now it should be, what happens when they find us?” I corrected. She crossed her arms and tried to burn a hole in me with her stare.
“You can’t stay here!”
“Why the holy fuck not?”
“I don’t want you here Jeffrey!”
“So you would rather send me outside with fucking zombies?!”
At this point, Sara stepped in to try and act as the voice of reason. “Look, Joy…” she said as calmly as possible. “Obviously, you two have a strong history of complex feelings…”
“Ha!” my loving ex said while throwing her head back.
“What I mean,” Sara continued. “At one point, you loved him. Whatever happened in the end that led you to your current feelings happened. You’ve both moved on.”
“With you?” Joy asked with the tiniest bit of hurt creeping through the cracks of her rage.
I will say this, Sara’s face never showed any signs of cracking. Her poker face was one of the best I’ve ever seen. She paused only to let Joy hear her own question, and then she continued as if it was never said.
“You’ve both moved on, but there still has to be that memory of when you loved each other. That tiny kernel inside you that doesn’t want to send him outside to the many many things that want to kill him and us.”
Joy didn’t say anything. She just looked at the three of us for a long second before turning and walking up the stairs. When she got to the top, she turned back to us and said. “You can stay till the morning. Get some rest, and take what you need, but I can’t let you stay here.” She walked down the hall and out of sight before I heard her scream. “And your dog just SHIT on my bed!”
“I’ll get it!” I called out. Then inside I thought. That fucking dog can read my mind! I have to remember to give him some Hot Tamales when I see him again. “Thanks, Sara…I’ll talk to her,” I said as I grabbed some paper towels from the kitchen and ran upstairs.
Chapter 21
Once upstairs, I saw Rex sitting proudly next to his turd, and rightfully so. It was almost twice the size of him. I collected his leavings and tossed them out of her bedroom window. I left the window open in hopes that the massive stench would vacate as well. When I turned around, Joy was sitting on the edge of her bed with tears welling up in her eyes.
“Look, we’ll be out of here first thing in the morning…” I started.
“Did you ever love me?” she asked with tears silently streaming down her cheeks.
“You know I did…” I said, easily falling back into my disguise of some
one who cares.
“I know that’s not true…” she said. “I know you’re not capable…”
I gently approached her and did my best to look relaxed. “Joy, you’re just upset…”
“No, I’m not.” She lifted her shirt to expose a fresh bandage with blood just starting to soak through.
“Are you okay?”
“It’s a bite.”
I said nothing, knowing that silence was the appropriate reaction to a dramatic reveal.
“Are you sure it…”
“It’s burning me up inside. My temperature is a hundred and two right now. In a few hours, it’ll be a hundred an four.”
“How could you possibly know that?” I asked already knowing the answer.
“Because it happened to Carl,” she said matter-of-factly.
“Is he the one…?”
She shook her head. “He ran off outside before he turned. I don’t even know how far he made it.
I do.
“Pumpkin ran outside yesterday, and I chased after her. I only made it about ten feet before I got bit. I tried cleaning it right away with alcohol and iodine, but I can feel it inside me…It comes in waves, and it hurts. I know that in a few hours, my temperature will shoot up, and I’ll start to hallucinate. Then, I might have a day or two depending on how long it takes for the fever to kill me.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I was actually about to kill myself when I heard you outside.”
There was a long pause that was quickly interrupted by Rex jumping unceremoniously onto my testicles. Sure, to the casual eye, it was just a dog jumping onto a man’s lap, but his paws found purchase on the most delicate of delicates. My face reddened, and I took a deep breath in. But before I could grab the dog by his tiny ears and scream my pain into his face, Joy reached out and patted the small dog on his head.
“When did you get a dog?” she asked.
“It was a pretty recent thing.”
“Remember when I used to beg you for a dog?”
“Yeah…I guess I just wasn’t ready.”
“I didn’t want a dog. I wanted a baby.”
“I know,” I said truthfully. A puppy is a wonderful surrogate for those in need to nurture something adorable and helpless. But when she asked me before about wanting a pet, I dismissed it immediately. I gave her several excuses why it just wasn’t practical to have a dog then, but the truth was I simply didn’t want one. To be even more honest, I didn’t want her to have one. I treated the marriage as an experiment in human endurance. I know what I did, and why I did it, and nothing I could do would ever change the way things ended. Apparently, she knew more than I gave her credit for.
“He’ll be good for you,” she said.
“Picking up shit builds character.”
“No. Allowing something to love you does.”
Rex closed his eyes as she found that magical spot behind his left ear that sent him to doggy heaven.
“Jeffrey…” she said in a tone almost angelic. “I need you to kill me.”
Chapter 22
We all sat around the dining room table eating hot MREs in silence. Joy didn’t touch any of the questionable food. Her fever was starting to get worse, and her symptoms were starting to show. Sweat started to collect on her forehead, and her skin began taking on a much lighter tone. Her hands trembled slightly as she picked pieces of warm meatloaf out of her tin and fed it to her cat, Pumpkin.
I’ll say this for that cat, she ate the disgusting warm meat like it was fancy feast. Rex sat at my feet, and when I offered him some of what the package called “meat,” he sniffed it and then gave me a look like I was trying to poison him. The dog learned early on that he didn’t want any of the food that came from the small brown pouches we carried around. That was fine by me. Anytime Rex ate anything from an MRE pouch, his flatulence would turn any room into a lethal trap… one spark away from an explosion and certain death.
There was an unspoken tension around the table that was as thick as the “gravy” that came with our meal. I hadn’t yet answered Joy’s earlier request to kill her, and she would occasionally look over at me with pleading in her eyes. I was thankful when Rex pulled my attention away from the tense stares of my ex.
He stood up on his hind legs and pawed at my pocket until I pulled out an orange Jujyfruit from the box he wanted so desperately. I gave it to him, and he happily gobbled it up.
“He eats candy?” Joy asked while rubbing her temples.
“He loves it,” I said as I shoved a handful of the sugary goodness into my own mouth.
Then the room returned to silence. Everyone ate their food and nobody made eye contact. Jack and Sara weren’t aware of what Joy had asked me to do, but they were aware of the awkward tension. Jack was the first to finish his food, and he leaned back in his chair and slapped his belly.
“That really hit the spot!” he said. “Warm food does a lot to make you feel a little bit better about everything.”
“Sure,” I said. “If I can survive this meatloaf, I can survive anything.”
Sara didn’t say much. She rarely did. My mind drifted from my ex’s request to kill her, to Sara crawling into my bed the night before we had to flee my home. I wanted to talk to her about that night. Was that literally just a ‘thank you’ fuck?
If so, I’m cool with that, but there was something about our intimate moment together that I really enjoyed. Something about it felt so right. Before I could pontificate about this new relationship, my ex stood up with tears in her eyes and slammed her metal spoon down hard on to the table.
“Damn it, Jeffrey! I need you to kill me!”
All eyes moved slowly towards the woman who just demanded to be killed. She ran from the table and upstairs to her room where she slammed the door so hard the foundation shook.
After uncomfortably explaining Joy’s request to Jack and Sara, Jack asked me flat out.
“Are you really going to do it?”
“He has to.” Sara said. “If their relationship ever meant anything, he will do it because he doesn’t want to see someone he cared so much about suffer and become one of those…things.”
“There has to be another way!” Jack protested. “You can’t just murder her.”
“Is it murder?” she asked him honestly. “She died the minute she got bitten. Sure, she’s able to walk around for a little bit longer, but ultimately, she’ll turn, and that has to be worse than death.”
“It’s murder.”
“It’s euthanasia…She has a cancer that’s eating away everything that makes her human. She wants to die while still having a hold of her humanity. While still being able to know she is a person…I would want the same thing.” She added. “And I would would want someone who cares about me to do it.”
“Sara’s right,” I said gently putting a hand on Jack the giant. “I can’t let her suffer.”
I laced my voice with sorrow and pain to give Jack the impression that this was something that had to be done. It’s not something I was looking forward to doing. It wasn’t even something I wanted to do. But Joy seems to know more about me than I had given her credit for, and she knows that I can do this.
I made my way up the stairs and knocked gently on her bedroom door. She opened it, and I saw her standing there with tears streaming down her face. That was something I saw on a regular basis when we were married. Seeing her crying in the doorway sent me back to the night she told me she was leaving. It really affected her more than it should have for someone who had already moved on. She cried and threw her arms around me like she wasn’t going to let go. I knew she loved me. I knew she always would. But love just isn’t something I had to give. So now, maybe in some small way, killing her would be the way of letting her know that I don’t want her to suffer.
“Will you do it?” she asked me. I nodded, and she threw her arms around me. Her sobs got softer and softer until her tears seemed to dry up. She pulled away and looked into my eyes.
> “Can you do something for me?” She asked. Again, I nodded, but what she said next nearly took me off my feet. “Can you pretend like it’s old times? Can you pretend like we are still together?”
“Joy…”
“I know, Jeffrey. I know you were never capable of loving me, but you made me feel like you did once…can you do it again? Please?” It took me a lot longer to process what she was asking me than it should have. “Please…”
“Joy…” I said caressing her cheek like I used to. “You know I will always love you…” Tears began to silently stream down her cheeks again. “I wish things had ended differently for us. I wish we were able to work things out.” She reached her trembling hand up and squeezed mine with strength I didn’t think she possessed.
The Inhuman Chronicles (Book 1): Inhuman Page 18