by Jason Offutt
Maryanne ran for City Hall, clicks of the pigs’ cloven hooves on the pavement louder and louder with her every footfall. Her breath came hard. Kenny. Kenny. Gonna die like Kenny. Screams of the man she thought of when she explored her young body at night pounded at her ears, mixing with the grunts and squeals of the deadly hogs.
“Fuck you, pigs,” she wheezed at first, then yelled. “Fuck you.” Maryanne reached the steps of City Hall, the drove not ten feet behind her. She threw open the door and dove inside, the smell of death and human feces nearly made her vomit.
She scrambled to her feet and grabbed the doorknob as the first pig slammed into it, nearly throwing her to the ground. Grunts and snorts filled the room as she held onto the handle, some pigs threw their weight onto the door, others stuck their wet, pink, undulating snouts into the crack.
“Go away,” Maryanne screamed. The figure below her was a cop; she could see a corner of his badge through the gray fuzz that covered his flesh and clothes. The stalk stood tall and rigid, not like Carlyle’s; the bulb swollen and full. This boy was fresh. Given the size of the town, she was sure he used to drive the police cruiser parked outside, probably the only one unless the mayor liked to borrow it for joyrides that ended with blowjobs from teenagers. People who ran for any public office were fucked up. Dried blood lay in a two-foot radius around the cop’s head; Humanity: three (so far), the Outbreak: seven billion. Another hog threw its weight into the door, nearly sending Maryanne flying.
“Fuck off,” she yelled, pulling on the door handle. Another snout nosed its way into the crack; Maryanne raised a foot and kicked it hard. The pig backed away squealing in pain. “Take that shit.” She kicked the cop’s leg, eased off pressure on the door, and pulled, the leg light from decomposition and stiff as a branch, craned awkwardly up through the crack and Maryanne slammed the door shut and fell to the floor crying because in her head Kenny was crying, too.
Then, from somewhere inside the building, someone said “hello?”
July 11: Barton, Missouri
Chapter 23
The Mechanic and the Librarian came at a slight jog, the Redneck close behind, protecting his beer from spilling. Something in Nikki’s head couldn’t blame him; nobody was making more beer these days. Gold wouldn’t buy you anything, but a case of beer might be worth a week’s worth of macaroni and cheese to the right person. The Robot walked slowly, mechanically behind them. A knot grew in Nikki’s stomach for the second time tonight. They were here. People. And they were going to find her. There was nowhere to go this time; they were closer to her bike than she was, and she didn’t have a gun to even the odds. Her spying from beneath the window on the Marstens’ living room floor didn’t give her a reason to think these people dangerous, but the Preacherman hadn’t seemed a threat until he drugged her, and the Greasyman probably smiled like a gentleman at Girl Scouts who sold cookies to him, not knowing he crawled back into his house with Thin Mints, poured the cookies onto his kitchen table and stared at those prepubescent stick legs and sashaying green skirts walking through his neighborhood as he masturbated into the empty box.
“Hey, it’s solar powered,” the Redneck shouted. “Hot damn. A refrigerator. A shower. A fucking TV.” He looked at the Robot and slapped him on the shoulder, making the mannequin man wince. “Terminator, T2, T3, Salvation, Genisys. Hell yes.”
“I now know why you cry,” the Robot said.
The Mechanic hit the stoop first; the Librarian grabbed his arm as he reached toward the handle of the front door. “If the power is still on here, someone might be home,” she said.
“Knock?” the Mechanic asked.
“Yes, knock,” she said. “The rest of the world may be dead, but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t have manners.”
Nikki stood still, leaning her back against the door to prop up her shaking knees. The Mechanic’s knock popped three times directly behind her head. Breath poured into her lungs like syrup.
“Hello?” the Mechanic called from less than a foot behind her head. “Anybody there?” He paused, Nikki seeing him in her mind turning toward the Librarian, the Redneck and Robot walking up slowly behind them. “See,” he said softer. “Lights are on, but nobody’s home.”
Nikki took a deep breath, faced the door, grabbed the handle in her left hand, keeping her right hand hidden, and yanked the door open. The strangers stood still, their faces aghast.
“What do you want?” Nikki asked slowly, trying to keep the shaking from her voice. She nodded toward her right hand hidden behind the door jam. “I have a gun.” Each stranger took at least one step back, except the Robot who stood behind the others like a prop in a movie.
“Hey, man,” the Redneck said. “We’re cool.”
“Shut up, Terry,” the Librarian spat. “We scared her. Don’t come off looking like a redneck from Kansas.”
“I am a redneck from Kansas,” he said softly, stopped, then took a drink of beer.
Doug raised his hands, palms up. “Hello, ma’am,” he said, smiling as honestly as he could muster. “I don’t think you know how happy we are to see you. We’ve been traveling for a while, just a few miles at a time. Almost everybody’s dead.” He paused and the smile dissolved. “I know you’ve seen that, too, and I’m sorry for your loss.”
Jenna elbowed Doug in the shoulder and he stopped talking. “Hi,” she said. “My name’s Jenna. Men, as you know, are tactless and dumb.” She stopped and motioned toward Doug and Terry. “These guys picked me up after I wrecked my car. Total gentlemen. That guy,” she motioned to Arnold. “We found him in Platte City. I don’t know what his story is. Asshole won’t talk like a normal person.” Jenna stopped and looked at Nikki, her eyes starting to grow moist for a reason that only pissed her off. “If you want, we’ll walk back over to that house for the night and we won’t bother you again. We’re just glad someone else is alive.”
Nikki frowned. Yeah, she was, too. “Where are you headed?” she asked. The Mechanic rested his right leg on the first step and leaned on his knee.
“Omaha,” he said. “There was a survivor’s shelter in Kansas City, but it had signs saying everyone went to Omaha.”
The strangers stood outside the Marstens’ house, Jenna looking at Nikki, while the men stared at their shoes. A cow lowed somewhere in the distance. Nikki knew these people weren’t the Preacherman, they weren’t the Greasyman, and they weren’t the Banker blocking the convenience store doorway, wheezing through blood-choked lungs, begging her to kill him. Nope, not even close.
“Hi,” she said, moving her hidden right hand toward Jenna and tried to shake it, but Jenna grabbed her and hugged her tight.
Jenna suddenly released her and stepped back. “Sorry,” she said. “I’m just excited.”
Nikki smiled a happy smile for the first time in more than a month. “My name’s Nikki. Please come in. It’s hot out there.”
It took less than an hour for Terry to fill the refrigerator with the beer from the truck and hook up the Xbox. He and Arnold sat on the floor of the Marstens’ house, using digital shotguns to explode the heads of zombies that walked through a fully furnished world with few humans – much like their own world, without the zombies. There were real monsters out there; they all knew it. Monsters that looked just like them, monsters that walked and talked, and did horrible things.
“This is amazing,” Doug said through a mouthful of leftovers, his fork full of stuffed bell pepper. “We’ve been eating old bratwurst and boxes of hamburger helper without the hamburger.”
Nikki waved him off. “If that’s all you’ve eaten, that could be dirt for all you know.”
Doug looked up from his plate, his face stone. “No ma’am,” he said. “I’m serious. This is delicious.”
Ma’am. Nikki grinned and thanked him. He’d called her “ma’am.” The Mechanic, Doug, had only about ten years on her, but whatever little town he came from they sure taught manners.
“Are you from here?” Jenna asked. “Barton?”
Nikki shook her head. “I’m from St. Joe. When my dad died …” She hadn’t thought about Gene Holleran for days. Tears flooded her eyes. Jenna reached across the dining room table and patted her forearm. This stranger’s warm, soft hand brought comfort. Maybe, Nikki thought, she needed these people. “…I left St. Joe. The town is mostly dead. There’s nothing there for me now. I just got lucky and stumbled on this place.”
“You know what happened to the people who owned it?” Terry asked. Nikki didn’t know how this redneck from Kansas did it, but he didn’t slur a word through all the beer she’d watched him down.
“Yeah.” Nikki pointed toward the back yard, the moon painting the night gray. “They’re out there in lawn chairs. Dead. I’ve only been here for two days. I haven’t had time to bury them yet.”
“We’ll help with that,” Doug said.
Nikki nodded. “Thank you.” A deer, a buck this time, walked across the backyard setting off the security lights. The Marstens sat in their black and gold canvass chairs as they had for at least a month, watching a garden they’d never tend again. The deer froze for a moment, then wandered into the garden, nosing around for anything Nikki hadn’t picked. “What about you guys?”
Paola, the Peckinpa house (Jenna leaving out any mention of Karl), Johnnyball, Worlds of Fun, Platte City, the St. Joe shopping mall, and the people each had lost.
“I guess we still don’t know anything about each other,” Jenna said, pausing and looking at each person around the table. Then she frowned at Arnold. “Especially this guy. What’s your deal?”
Arnold sat stiffly in the wooden dining room chair and looked Jenna in the eye. He turned his head slowly toward Nikki. “Where’s your bathroom?”
Nikki pointed toward the hallway. “Second door on the right.” Arnold stood and took a step toward the hall.
“Dude,” Terry shouted, grinning like a kid. “That is NOT from a movie.”
Arnold turned and looked at Terry, his face blank. “I’ll be back,” he said, and walked into the hallway.
“You sure he’s not dangerous?” Nikki asked.
Jenna nodded. “I’m pretty sure. The whole Arnold Schwarzenegger thing is probably just a psychological defense mechanism. He’s trying to cope with whatever personal losses he’s had to deal with. That, coupled with the fact that the world he knew is gone has driven him to temporarily adopt a different persona. Classic psych stuff. Just don’t make a big deal out of it; it’ll fix itself.”
The table was silent for a moment. “Where’d that come from?” Doug asked.
Jenna shrugged. “I was a psychology major at a liberal arts college. Things like that will come up from time to time. Get used to it.”
Plates clanked in the kitchen as Doug and Terry washed the dishes. The Marstens had a dishwasher, but nobody suggested using it. People needed time to get used to one another. Nikki and Jenna sat on the floral print couch, each held a glass of chilled Chardonnay, watching “16 and Pregnant,” featuring people they knew were no longer sixteen, or pregnant, or alive.
“It’s nice here,” Jenna said, the girl on the screen yelling at her baby daddy for not having a job.
Nikki nodded. “Yeah. I got lucky.”
“How long are you going to stay?”
She shrugged. “Haven’t thought about it. There’s enough food for a few months, more if I scrounge the other houses. Even more if I go back to Savannah or St. Joe. I could probably make it through to next spring.”
“Then?”
Nikki frowned and took a drink of wine. “I don’t know.” She paused. “How about you?”
Jenna drained her glass and poured another. “I’m sticking with the boys. We talked about finding a place like this, a place to just ride out the apocalypse, but I don’t know if we could handle it for long. I think we should go to Omaha.”
A shatter of china and a “shit” rang out from the kitchen. Nikki and Jenna laughed toward each other like it was a personal joke. Then Nikki’s face grew hard. “I don’t want to be alone,” she whispered.
“Hey,” Terry yelled from the kitchen, walking into the living room, drying his hands on a red dishtowel. “Dishes are done.”
For the next hour, the five sat in the living room and talked; Arnold on the floor, Nikki and Jenna on the couch, Terry and Doug in chairs.
Doug yawned. “It’s getting late,” he said, draining the glass of wine Jenna had handed him. Doug was never a wine guy, except for the cheap stuff with a screw-on lid he drank in high school. He only drank wine when he took communion at St. Mary’s Catholic Church, and that had grown seldom. Beer was it for him. “What are the sleeping arrangements?”
Nikki froze, Jenna felt it. “Hey,” Jenna said. “We can go to the other house, if you want?”
Nikki shook her head. “No, that’s okay. There are three bedrooms. I get the master bedroom. The rest of you can figure it out on your own.”
“Dibs on the couch,” Terry said, then smiled, facing Arnold. “If they’re taking the bedrooms, and I’m taking the couch, I guess you’ll have to sleep outside in the wind, buddy.”
“Crom laughs at your four winds.”
Nikki stood and waved them off. “Nobody has to sleep outside. I think this is a pull-out couch.”
Terry, still grinning like a clown, walked into the kitchen. “If I’m sleeping in the same bed as Arnold, I’m going to look for some sleeping bags out in the garage. No offense, buddy.” The kitchen still smelled like supper as Terry walked past the table where they’d eaten. He grabbed the handle of the door next to the refrigerator, he unlocked it and pushed it open. The blackness of the room was complete, like he’d stepped into a box. Terry reached across the wall next to him, his hand slid over drywall until he found a switch, and flipped it, light flooded the room. Loaded gun racks lined the walls.
“Uh. Hey, guys,” Terry said slowly. “You should really see this.”
July 11: Kingsville, Missouri
Chapter 24
The voice caught Maryanne somewhat by surprise, but not entirely. She’d felt she wasn’t alone in Kingsville, she just assumed it was the pigs, those 400-pound, man-eating porkers still snorting from the porch, one occasionally slamming its huge body against the door. Maryanne knew this crazy fucking world hadn’t turned into “Animal Farm,” or one of those porkers would have opened the door, killed her, and eaten her with onions and a nice béarnaise. She smiled at the insanity of that picture, of the whole fucking world. Then there was the voice. It came from inside the building, but it sounded muffled and far away. The voice could wait; she wasn’t kneeling over the voice, she was kneeling over a dead cop, and the cop had been dead for a while.
He’d been young, maybe 21 if he lied well. A dusting of moustache (the molestache, what all the cool pervs are wearing) graced his upper lip and was covered in a fine gray mold. Goddamnit. Did that thing move? Maryanne stared at the stalk, one of those creepy fungus stalks that grew out of everybody when they died. She swore it moved, like it was looking at her. Maryanne scooted away from the alien-looking tree sticking out of the kid-cop’s chest to the floor. His black leather belt lay next to him, the gray mold not yet making it across the floor; he must have been carrying it when he fell. Lucky her; cops had more shit on their belt than Batman. Not bad, she thought, standing and buckling the belt around her waist. She had to hitch it in the first hole, and it still hung loose, resting at an angle off her hips like she was Lara Croft: Tomb Raider. The belt held pepper spray, handcuffs (might come in handy, Hubba hubba), utility knife, .9mm pistol, ammo, and, most importantly, a big set of janitor keys, one of which would fit nicely into the ignition of the cruiser that would hopefully start.
“Hello?” the voice called again, more urgently. “Is someone here? Please help me.”
Maryanne stepped away from Barney Fife, Jr., and scanned the first floor of City Hall. Bo-ring. A computer with a dead black screen sat in the city clerk’s office, surrounded by pictures of grandkids, and greeti
ng cards with that crabby old lady that made Hallmark a shitload of money just bitching about being a crabby old lady. Fuck you, Hallmark. Unless you have a Welcome to the End of the World line of cards, your products have probably worn out their usefulness. Maryanne tugged on a door handle across the hall from the clerk’s office, expecting a closet with brooms and mops, but instead of cleaning supplies, a rack of black handled weapons greeted her. “Fucking A,” she whispered. “Christmas just came early.” She grabbed a shotgun off the rack, and went off to find the voice.
“Where are you?” she called, holding the shotgun stock pressed to her hip as she walked slowly through the rest of City Hall. “Can’t hear you, baby. Speak up.”
“In the basement,” the voice yelled, excited, eager, desperate, or probably all of the above. “God, I’m so happy to hear you.”
You might not think that for long, Maryanne thought, a grin tugged her lips. She ran her free hand up the barrel of the shotgun. No, not long at all.
“Happy to hear yours too, baby,” she shouted and walked toward a door opposite the clerk’s office, next on her grand tour of Kingsville City Hall. Stairs lead into a dark, foul-smelling pit. She put her right foot on the first creaky step. “You down here, hun?”
A rustle. Maryanne pointed the shotgun at chest level and kept walking down.
“Yes, yes, yes,” the voice shouted. “Please help me.”
Maryanne reached for the light switch at the bottom of the stairs in the dim basement, a concrete floor greeted her shoes when she left the last step. Her hand found the nipple of a switch and she flipped it; nothing happened but a click. Electricity was gone, probably was everywhere on the planet.
“You look like a fucking angel,” the voice called through the gray light.