Among the Roaring Dead

by Christopher Sword

  “Where are they?”

  “Who?”

  “Your sons.”

  “They’re about 50-feet behind the house. Can we come in?”

  She didn’t speak for a moment. Jess realized that neither of them had changed their position. He let the pitchfork dangle in one hand.

  “I found this in your shed. Might come in handy.”

  “You should be warned: we have weapons too.”

  Something glittered in her hand – Jess realized it was a handgun.

  “I’m not here to start a fight, or to forcibly take anything that you have. We’re sensible, caring people who just want to get out of the woods for a night.”

  “Well, you’re not welcome here.”

  Jess wondered what he would do in the girl’s shoes for a moment, and then brushed the thought aside.

  “Is that what this world has come to? We’re all turning into monsters? Your sick neighbours knock on your door and you leave them to the wolves? We’re not your enemies here. I have children – I’m just looking for a little sympathy.”

  “I can’t help you.”

  “What about giving us some cots and we’ll stay in your shed?”

  The girl just stood there. She looked down at her feet and then back up again.

  “How long do you need to stay for?”

  “One night should be enough. We just need a safe place to sleep and then we’ll be on our way again.”

  “Well, as long as you’re telling me the truth, I might be able to do something. If you’re lying about having kids with you or anything else, I will shoot you.”

  “Thank you for being so understanding.”

  “I guess you’re lucky. My mother says I always used to like bringing home stray cats. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch you like a hawk. If you try anything, I will use this. But go get your kids. I’ll consider letting you stay the night – one night.”

  Jess went back to the spot where he told the boys to stay. He circled the trees, twice. They weren’t there.

  There was a noise behind him and he nearly jumped before readying the pitchfork in his hands once more.

  Dustin was standing before the door of the barn, holding it still with one hand and peering in with the other. He walked towards him, restraining himself from full-on shouting like he wanted to. He knew that those things were still out there somewhere and they responded to noise.

  He turned just as Michael was coming out. He grabbed Dustin by the shoulders.

  “What were you doing?”

  Michael was beside them now, holding a hammer and a wooden beam in his hand.

  “We wanted to help you,” he said. “We saw you come out of the barn and thought there might be more weapons inside.”

  “You two need to listen to me next time! When I say don’t move, I mean it! I came back and you were both gone. Do you know what I was thinking?”

  “Sorry dad, we just got a little worried.”

  “Okay listen, there’s people in the house. They're going to help us out. We might be able to stay the night. Let’s do our best to convince them that we’re good people, okay?”

  The boys nodded, understanding.

  “Now go, get your butts in gear.”

  A light breeze was pushing the leaves past them on the ground. The evening sky had turned purple as if in warning to get inside.

  Jess put his arms at his son’s backs and pushed them forward, urging them to break into a light run. He opened the door first and stepped inside, motioning for the boys to follow his lead.

  “Hello? I found them. We’re back.”

  The girl again stepped out into the hallway from some unseen entrance. The remnants of the sun shone through a window behind her, making her hair look like it was on fire. She had a gun – a pistol – in her hand, and although it wasn’t pointed anywhere but the ground below her, it was still menacing enough to cause Jess to take a step backwards.

  “You can leave those weapons by the door,” the girl said. “If you really are just looking for a place to stay for the night, then you won’t need them.”

  Jess turned and put his pitchfork down and motioned for his sons to do the same with the items they were carrying.

  The girl asked them to follow her and she led the way through two hallways. They passed what was clearly a kitchen at some point but all the windows were boarded up with black paint or charcoaled wood. From the outside it made the house appear dark within, just like at Roscoe’s barn.

  They reached a room that had several candles burning. There was a fireplace here, framed in a fake brick arch. Family photographs were sitting on the upper ledge of the fireplace. Smiling faces on a boat and other celebratory gatherings squared between smooth black borders.

  The girl’s orange hair was not much different in shade or in clear sun. She held one hand out to signify the chairs that Jess and his sons could sit in while she held the gun still in the other.

  The boys sat on a cream-coloured sofa while Jess took up a leather chair that was about as comfortable as anything he had ever sat in before. The girl stood before the unlit fireplace, pacing.

  “These are my sons,” Jess said. “Dustin and Michael.”

  The girl made eye contact with Michael for a little longer than Jess felt comfortable with.

  Are the people upstairs going to come down?"

  “I’m Gwen. I live here with my mother. Nobody else is upstairs, but I'm sure you understand why I had to lie. She has advanced MS so she doesn’t get around very well.”

  “MS?” Dustin said. “Microsoft?”

  “Multiple Sclerosis,” Jess said.

  “You can look it up if civilization survives. It’s just me and her right now. My father went out about two days ago to get help. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”

  “Do you have enough to eat?” Jess said.

  The girl just stared at him for a moment. She hadn’t let go of the gun yet.

  “We’re not looking to take your food,” Jess clarified. “Just wondering how you’re managing.”

  “We don’t eat a lot,” Gwen said. “We’ve been rationing since power first went out so we’re in decent shape. I can probably make us all a small meal. It won’t be Christmas dinner or anything, but it’ll be something in our bellies at least.”

  Gwen was true to her word. The gun never left her side but she did at least put it down to make the meal. They had a naturally-cooled freezer in the basement of the house where they stored items like meat and vegetables, to make them last. She made fried chicken, mashed potatoes and dilled carrots. Jess doubted that the boys had ever had a better meal in their lives. They certainly ate like it was McDonalds after a two-hour football practice.

  Things seemed to settle down after the dinner. Gwen pulled out dry cookies from a package that seemed like some bizarre artefact from their previous lives. She was able to boil water over what looked like a camping stove and made coffee and hot chocolate, which went over well with all of them. Jess forgot how good freshly brewed coffee could be.

  “So how have you managed to last so long here?” Jess said. “It’s not like you’re well hidden or anything. You have endless fields on all sides but one. You must have had other survivors or other things banging on your door before we showed up.”

  Gwen hesitated for only the briefest of moments but Jess noticed it. The girl dipped her cookie in her hot chocolate and took a nibble, speaking with her mouth open.

  “We were raided once in the beginning. A bunch of people in a van looking to stock up on their supplies I guess. They took a lot of our food and most of the knives. They were in and out so fast that they missed a lot, including mother and me. We were hiding in a closet when they came.”

  “So you closed up the house by yourself?” Michael said.

  Another hesitation.

  “My father helped me. People do it all the time during epidemics. You see people boarding up their houses in Florida during hurricane season every single yea
r. They don’t do it because they’re afraid of the hurricane. They do it because they’re afraid of human intruders.”

  “It was a good idea,” Michael said. “It looks like it’s worked pretty well so far.”

  “Except that you forgot to lock the door.”

  “I had recently returned from the shed myself. I had my hands full, so I guess I did forget to lock it.”

  “We all need to start being more careful,” Jess said. “How is your mother, can I talk to her?”

  It was a blank stare aimed back.

  “My mother is very sick. She needs privacy and she needs quiet. That’s why I have to ask the three of you to sleep on the ground floor tonight. I have cots for all of you, so it shouldn’t be overly uncomfortable. It’s just that mother frequently wakes up in the middle of the night in pain. I’ve had to ration her medication as well, so she’s not coping as well as she would, if things were normal.”

  Gwen was right on one account. The cots were as good as any bed after their long day. They had metal-tubed legs that served as suspension legs for the canopy-style beds. Jess and the boys set up their beds in one of the front rooms that had few windows requiring wooden covering and there were several escape outlets available too, should they need it.

  Michael continued to fidget with his smartcard, and seemed to be rotating between radio stations, trying intently to get a signal with anything worth listening to. There was a station that playing music.

  Must be pre-recorded digital tapes, Michael said.

  When a second U2 song came on, Michael went back to scrolling through the dial. The sound of radio static was actually a pretty horrible sound, reminding him of metal being scratched together, something that Jess said he used to hear in his sleep. The tear of subway wheels grinding against steel tracks in dark tunnels was something that made some of the transit staff wear ear plugs. Many years ago Jess said he couldn’t do it because he’d be blocking out all the other sounds too – like alarms activated by passengers with emergencies. So he continued to round the arches of the subway route at full speed, as metal tore against metal in a sound that seemed to penetrate one’s spine.

  Jess was about to ask Michael to turn it down when the signal stabilized and a voice came through, rather clear.

  “If anyone’s listening to this communication, we’re transmitting... ... on the radio. These things are unstoppable. heading north. Our only chance might be isolating ourselves.”

  The signal disintegrated again to the screeching static and hard as Michael tried to get it back again, it just didn’t happen.

  As usual, Jess had difficulty getting to sleep. He must have spent at least an hour or two staring at the ceiling and forcing his eyes closed. Focusing his mind to create a tunnel of shapes and colours in his mind’s eye blocked everything else out so that he could finally dose off.

  Dustin woke in the middle of the night, calling for his father like he had done when he was a toddler. With the candles blown out hours earlier, the darkness of the room had blinded them.

  “I have to go to the bathroom.”

  Jess couldn’t recall seeing a bathroom on the main floor. He did a quick walk-through but couldn’t find one. Dustin was moving quickly from foot-to-foot, indicating that the issue needed to be resolved quickly.

  He took the boy by his wrist and led him up the staircase to the second floor. It was just as dark up here as it was in the rest of the house. They turned down the left hallway and tried the first door.

  It was the wrong door. The windows weren’t boarded at this level and it was clear that someone was stretched out on a bed and writhing in pain.

  Jess pointed his flashlight at the bed. An old woman in a pink nightgown was chained to the posts. The skin of her face seemed to be rotting away from the bone. Her eyes were nearly fully white, as if stacked with layer after layer of cataracts.

  The old woman seemed able to focus on their sounds and sat up as far as she could with her mouth open. A horrible moan escaped her dry and parched lips.

  Dustin wet his pants.

  “What’s going on here?” Gwen asked.

  She had the gun in her hands again.

  “Take it easy,” Jess said. “We were just looking for a bathroom.”

  “Well you found the wrong fucking room, didn’t you? I told you. I warned you that my mother was sick!”

  Jess looked again at the woman in the bed. It was clear that there was nothing human about her. Nothing but the shape of a woman with the countenance of an animal in its place.

  “Why is she tied up?” Michael had joined them.

  “Because,” Gwen hesitated, “she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She might hurt somebody, or herself.”

  “She’s a zombie,” Dustin said.

  “A what?” Gwen said.

  “You must have come across them by now,” Jess said. “All this time up here and you haven’t seen any?”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  Gwen carefully pulled a sheet up above her mother’s waist and ignored the snapping movements that the woman’s jaw was making.

  “A man was here a few days ago. He tried to break into the house. Mother tried to keep him away and they struggled. The guy was so desperate that he was trying to claw through a broken window. He cut up his arms really good and bit my mom’s arm when she tried to push him back out. He ended up cutting his neck open in the struggle. I guess he bled to death.”

  “He just died?”

  “His neck was cut in half. I dragged his body into a wheelbarrow and took it down to the river. Mother’s never been the same since. She got really sick; I thought she was in a coma. Then suddenly she snapped out of it, but she’s been angry and doesn’t make any sense. I think it must be trauma.”

  Jess tried to convince her to put the gun down with comforting words and gestures. It took some time but Gwen consented to letting them go to use the bathroom. They met downstairs several minutes later and Gwen put the gun down on the ledge of the fireplace but did not venture far from it.

  “Listen, we’ve been out there since this whole nightmare started. We’ve seen everything. This country’s biggest city is a ghost town littered with dead bodies and monsters seeking blood, or something like that. There are people out there who should be dead, but they’re not. They’re something else. They’re dead but they’re walking. I don’t know what they want, but it’s nothing good.”

  “What are you saying, my mother’s a monster?”

  “You can decide that for yourself. Thank you for letting us stay the night but we can’t remain with her in the house. We’re leaving as soon as the sun comes up. You might want to think about coming with us.”

  “And leave her here?”

  “She can’t come with us.”

  Jess moved quickly down the stairs, with everyone in tow, and started to pack up his bags.

  Gwen seemed angry but confused too.

  Chapter 29

  At daybreak, they were moving out across the field. Michael alone turned to look at the house behind them. Gwen decided not to join them. She had gone upstairs, presumably to look after the thing she still thought of as her mother.

  The sky had become purple again; bruised. There was a strong wind that instantly chilled their ears. Dustin was the first to notice that he could see his breath.

  “Where do we go now? We can’t just leave them there.”

  “And why not Michael?” his father said. “What are we supposed to do, force her to come with us? There is an old saying that you probably don’t know but you can’t force someone to make a change that they’re not ready to make on their own.”

  Jess walked on, straight-shouldered and broad-backed. Neither of the boys had previously noticed just how strong he could be. Michael and Dustin followed – more out of instinct than anything else. Michael wanted to turn around and go back but he knew that his arguments wouldn’t achieve anything. His father still treated him like a kid
– his opinions didn’t matter. It didn’t matter that they had no idea where they were going or that they had no food and were likely to freeze before long. Dad was in charge.

  They were traveling across hard dirt fields that presumably once had vegetables growing out of them. Their mother used to make them promise not to buy junk with their allowance. They used to get money to buy their lunches at school – 20 dollars loaded onto their smart cards a week. Don’t eat crap every single day. She didn’t want them eating fries and potato chips and they had both agreed and yet still largely continued to eat junk.

  Each student would deface the code on the product they were buying so that they would have to be recorded manually and generically. Michael’s box of fries would only come up “General-food” if he took this step.

  The hunger in Michael’s stomach was surreal. It made him salivate even at the thought of an apple or a bag of carrot sticks. Things that he normally never would have craved were suddenly delectable.

  Daylight was now almost like a perpetual twilight. Everything seemed muted in shades of greys and blues that seemed to disorient all of them. Jess was having trouble determining if they were still moving in a straight line before long. Their batteries were all depleted and the sky was not letting enough sun in. They had managed to make it to a small town at the point when Jess wondered if they were going in the wrong direction. Dustin was starting to talk about how he was hungry. They had been moving for hours through fields and woods, one after the other. Jess at least found that the hunger took the focus off his sore feet.

  There was a large structure up ahead that looked like an airport hangar.

  “It’s a hockey rink,” Michael said.

  He suggested they try to see if they could get in.

  Jess looked at him quizzically.

  “It’s the last place anyone will go,” he said. ”So there might actually be something intact inside. Something useful. Even if all we find is a working zamboni with gas, that’s still something. And, they usually have snack bars inside.

  They tried the front doors and found them open. There was indeed a snack bar inside. Rotting hot dogs sat on some kind of a conveyor belt cooking system that had ground to a halt. Soda machines dispensed flat pop that was surprisingly drinkable. There was some kind of emergency lighting in place that cast everything in a strange glow. An entire wall and display cabinet featured vacuum-packed snacks like baked carrot sticks and nuts and chocolate. Hardly a nutritious meal, but perhaps good enough to get them through the next few days, Jess thought.