Contagion On The World

by J. B. Beatty

  “Wow, you’re good at this planning stuff! I feel so comforted.”

  “Do you have anything better?” I laugh. Not cruelly, but kind of.

  “Sexist much?”

  “Oh my god. Really, I just want to get home alive. We can fight later. I am open for suggestions now.”

  Her eyes flare in anger. She breathes. I mean, I’m sure she was breathing the whole time, but this one breath I notice. Her voice is a tiny bit softer. “I don’t know. It’s not like anything in my life experience has given me a great set of battle plans to fall back on. I didn’t watch war movies. I didn’t play video games. I read books. Pride and Prejudice.”

  That robs me of a comeback because I never read that book. Instead I go for the easy hit: “And you were only a Daisy.”

  “You probably need to shut the fuck up about that.”

  “What is it with the whole Daisy thing? Why didn’t you become whatever the next thing was?”

  “Brownie.”

  “Yeah, why didn’t you become a Brownie? And then a Girl Scout or whatever was next? You might have picked up some skills. Like hotwiring a car.” I sit up and look out the window. The zombie in the bed of the pickup is still there, looking back at me.

  “I was at the ceremony,” she says, then she licks the barrel of her rifle and uses her sleeve to polish it. “The ceremony where the Daisies become Brownies and so on. It was at my elementary school one evening. I was there with my mom because my dad was stuck at work. Usually I went with my dad because the way my parents operated, at least until I was sick, they thought that if Dad did the girlie things with me and Mom did the manly things with me, it would leave me with a more enlightened sense of gender roles in our society…”

  “Okay…”

  “I’m there with Mom. And they call us down and line us up in our Daisy uniforms with our flowers. And then they had this giant cardboard thing made out of refrigerator boxes or something. It had a front door and a back door. And they told me we just had to walk through it and we would become Brownies. And I was so excited. I felt like I was on the brink of one of the special moments in my life. I felt like, really, I felt like this would be as important as getting married or having kids or getting my wisdom teeth out.

  “And then they started the presentation and they turned down the lights and they turned up a spotlight. And they focused it on the first girl in line. We were in alphabetical order and it was Miriam Adelmeier. And the woman on the microphone explained that Miriam would enter the oven and be cooked into a Brownie.”

  “Oh… ” I say. “I did not see this coming.”

  “Neither did I. I wasn’t even Jewish, but I knew about the freaking Holocaust. I mean I was only 7, but it wasn’t like I was 4. I mean, who doesn’t know about the Holocaust?!”

  I shrug, and look out the window at the zombies.

  “Miriam didn’t, that’s who. She started marching straight for the oven. And she was smiling! Fucking smiling! I screamed at her to stop. And then I ran and grabbed her. And Mrs. McGill snagged my arm and told me to shut up and get back in line.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I kicked her in the shin and called her a Nazi. And then it got fuzzy. There was a lot of yelling and Mom got into it. I think she also kicked her. There was a lot of kicking. And Nazi epithet hurling.”

  “And so ended your dreams of being a Girl Scout…”

  “I think they blackballed me for ruining their ceremony. Fucking Nazi cunts… I’m sorry. I don’t swear usually,”

  “You’ve got potential there.”

  “Can you believe that? Having the Jewish girl march into an oven? What planet are those women living on?”

  “I think they’re all dead now,” I say to comfort her.

  “They deserve worse.”

  She sits against the wall with the rifle barrel resting against her forehead.

  I look at her, and carefully stand. “That explains a lot, though.”

  “Yeah,” she says.

  “Anyway, I’ve got an idea now.”

  “Huh?”

  “To get out of here alive.”

  “Oh! What?”

  And that’s why we find the keys to the minivan that is parked in the garage (on the kitchen key rack, of course). And I douse the back seats of the minivan with a cannister of gasoline that I leave half-empty on the backseat and I start the engine and throw a match in and step out, then reach through the open window to throw it into reverse moments after hitting the button to open the garage door.

  I race back into the house and slam the door behind me. I join Carrie in the living room and after the van squeezes out of the garage, groaning and scraping against the garage door that doesn’t open fast enough, we see it lurch down the driveway and into the street.

  That’s about the time that the zombies decide we pulled a fast one on them and they charge en masse after the flaming minivan as it hits the curb and climbs onto the neighbor’s lawn, eventually running through a Japanese sort of landscapey area and hitting their front porch before exploding. Not really a movie explosion—those are actually terribly exaggerated. More like a pop and a poof with 65% increased flames.

  Carrie and I step out the front door and walk carefully to the doors of the truck. Zombies are running from behind the house toward the conflagration. We are seemingly invisible to them. Quietly, we open our doors and get into our seats. I even put on my seatbelt. Carrie aims her rifle out the window and says, “Ready?”

  I say, “Yeah.”

  And she pulls the trigger and fires a stream of bullets into the mass of zombies as I hit the gas.

  “Wait!” she shouts and I brake. She pops in a new clip. “Back up.”

  “Why? Let’s get out of here!” I am anxious to speed away from the scene.

  “If we’re going to come back to this neighborhood to do more scavenging, it would make sense to kill as many of these guys as possible now.” She fires a burst. “So back up.”

  I do so, but I still complain. “The noise could attract more.”

  “We’ve already made a bit of noise with that explosion. Might as well do a little more damage while we’re at it.” She sprays bullets before slowing down to single shots, aiming at the stragglers.

  Eventually, she doesn’t see anything else to shoot. She catches her breath, pushes her hair off her face, and says, “Okay, I’m good.”

  I put the truck into drive and pull out of the neighborhood and onto the highway. It feels good to put distance between us and all of the death back there.

  Even though it’s cold outside, I roll the window down. The air in my face feels liberating. We don’t get much wind down in the bunker. She says, “That felt really good.”

  I look over at her. She has her goggles off, her eyes closed. A smile plays upon her closed lips.

  “Killing zombies usually does.”

  “It’s not just that,” she says. I slow down the truck, thinking that speeding with no lights on, just night-vision goggles, might not be the safest thing. We are headed back toward the bunker, and we still have to check out the shed we’re planning to hide the truck in. And we still have to move all of the food we scavenged into the bunker. Morning is a long way off.

  I look over at her.

  “It’s thinking about the Brownies. I’m not the type of girl that holds a grudge. And I honestly don’t think I do. But seriously, that got me in the mood to pull the trigger. And that felt liberating.”

  6→BLAME’ FOOLISHNESS

  We find what we called the shed—it turns out to be some guy’s on-the-side auto repair business. Off the road a way, and his signage leaves a lot to be desired, but the garage is more than ample in size.

  We find the owner there, or someone anyway. He’s inside the house. The back door is completely ripped off and he is laying on the kitchen floor. Still alive. When he sees us he gets a burst of energy and starts to crawl toward us.

  “Are you okay?” I say.

  “He’s not
,” says Carrie. “He’s a walker. Or a crawler.”

  I’m not sure, so I say, “Talk to me, buddy.”

  He growls and throws himself at my legs in a desperate last attempt at a meal. I leap back away from him, but am up against the stove. I carefully aim my pistol.

  “No!” shouts Carrie. “Don’t shoot. We can’t have that kind of noise so close to the bunker.” Our fortress is just about ¾ of a mile through the woods, all uphill from this place.

  She pulls her knife out of the scabbard on her hip and carefully maneuvers to the side of the crawler, who is panting heavily and appearing to gather his strength for another attack on my legs. Just then he lunges—right as she is doing so. She had her knife aimed at his upper back but when he moves she ends up planting it in his side, farther down.

  “Crap. Help me!”

  I kick him in the face and grab my knife, which immediately slips out of my hand and clatters on the floor near his face. In the adrenalin of the moment, I react about as well as I usually do, and grab the toaster and start bashing him on the head with it. I bash him as if my life depends on it, but it really doesn’t so much, seeing he’s basically an ankle biter who’s running on empty. Still, I keep bashing him long after he stops moving, until Carrie finally says, “Arvy? Arvy? Arvy! You can stop now.”

  “Oh,” I say. Blood is on my hands and I am shaking.

  “He’s been dead for a while,” she says. “I stabbed him about 10 times. That usually does it, you know, once you get into double digits.”

  “Okay,” I say. I need a moment to collect myself.

  “A toaster? Seriously?”

  “It was right there.”

  “Yeah but, of all the possible weapons. I mean, you could have simply picked your knife off the floor. You could have grabbed the butcher knife off the counter. Heck, there’s a hammer right over there.” She points to the countertop near the refrigerator. “But a toaster?”

  I shrug. She shakes her head in disappointment and stands. “Let’s sweep the house,” she says.

  By the time we are ready to start taking food up to the bunker, it’s already 3 in the morning. We load our backpacks with all we can carry and start up the hill, rifles at the ready. We take care to follow a somewhat different route each time, so that we don’t leave too much of a noticeable trail. Still, I’m sure that if anyone good at tracking took a look, our path couldn’t be any clearer if we painted arrows on the trees.

  When we get to the hatch, we pop it open and unload as quickly as we can, not bothering to take the stuff all the way down. Inside the hatch is enough. A round trip takes 30 minutes. Then it takes 35, and then 40 as we slowly run out of steam. Finally we unload the rest of the food in the garage, putting as much of it as we can in the trunks of the two cars that are stowed in there. The rest we cover up with a dirty tarp in the corner and begin our last trudge of the night up the hill.

  As the sky starts lightening with the morning, we shut the hatch behind us and start ferrying the food deeper inside the bunker. This is going to take forever to stock up for the winter.

  And still we need to get some sleep. Tonight, we have to visit a pharmacy.

  7→DOWN TOWN, AND EVERYTHING WAS GOING WRONG

  “F

  reeze!”

  Everything at the Walgreens had been going so well up to that point. We found the store in good condition, relatively unlooted. No zombies. We were just entering the pharmacy to get Carrie’s drugs. Then we hear the voice.

  “Freeze! And drop your weapons.” We freeze, but go slow on dropping our weapons. Instead, we slowly grip them and move our fingers closer to the triggers.

  A shot rings out and pierces a carton of Sunny Delight on the shelf directly behind me. “Next time I aim at you. Now drop the guns, I’m serious!”

  As the synthetically orange stream of Sunny Delight splashes on my pantlegs, I look at Carrie and I slowly set my rifle down on the floor, away from the growing puddle. She does the same, her face betraying the confusion we are sharing. We can’t see where the shooter is.

  “Now the pistols.” And we take them out of their holsters and set them on the ground next to the rifles. In addition to not being able to see the shooter, I am starting to wonder about the voice itself, which sounds like a young girl’s.

  “Now the knives.” Ditto.

  Then a small girl steps out from behind a wall of toilet paper. She is carrying a rifle with the confidence of many hours of service. She motions for us to move against the counter. “Sit down there,” she says.

  “Hey, we don’t mean any trouble,” says Carrie. “We just need medicine.”

  “No talking,” she says.

  “I’m sick. I just need my medicine.”

  “NO TALKING!” she screams.

  “Okay,” says Carrie, looking at me out of the side of her eyes.

  The girl is maybe 10 or so. Red-haired and looks well-cared-for—as in, not starving and clean clothes. She glares at us like we are escapees from the legions of Hell. With one arm struggling to hold the rifle steady, she uses the other to grab a walkie-talkie from her belt.

  “Gemini, this is Artemis. Come in, Gemini.”

  No response.

  “I repeat, Gemini, this is Artemis. Intruder alert.”

  No response. Carrie tilts her head toward me to make eye contact.

  “Jessica, are you awake?!” Nothing.

  “WAKE UP!”

  Carrie raises her eyebrows at me. I shrug.

  “We’re having technical problems,” says the girl to us.

  “Can I just get my medicine?” Carrie asks softly. “Then we’ll leave right away, I promise.”

  “You’re not going to do anything like that because you are my prisoner and you can’t do anything unless I let you.”

  I say, “Are you part of a group?”

  “I don’t have to talk to you. I’m not supposed to talk to you. So no talking.” She sits down on the floor about 15 feet from us, cross-legged, keeping the barrel of her rifle pointed at us.

  She tries again. “Gemini, this is Artemis.” Nothing. Then she looks at us: “It’s a gang, not a group. A ‘group’ sounds like an after-school activity.”

  “Artemis is a nice name,” says Carrie. “Did you pick it yourself?”

  “You’re not supposed to talk.”

  “Okay.”

  “We all picked our own names. Artemis was the Greek goddess of the hunt. And she was the protector of young girls.”

  “What’s the name of your gang?” I ask.

  “Be quiet!” she says to me angrily.

  I lean back against the counter, sufficiently chided.

  “Is your gang all girls?” asks Carrie softly.

  “Yeah, we’re the Girl Gang. We’re in charge of everything on this side of Maple Street. The boys have the other side.”

  “Oh wow. Do you get along with the boys?”

  “We have a peace treaty now so we’re not supposed to shoot at them anymore. And they’re not supposed to raid any of our stores but we still have to put guards in them around the clock. That’s why I’m here. I’m the guard for Walgreens. Tonight. Usually I’m one of the guards at the Meier but Kristin is sick so we had to move people around.” She yawns.

  “Meier’s is ours and Aldi’s is theirs, but we have to share the Walmart. That’s the deal. Because otherwise it’s not really even. But still it’s not really fair because the boys make a mess of things and they ruined a lot of stuff so that we can’t use it. But we still have to share it because that’s what Granny June says.”

  “Who’s Granny June?” I ask.

  “SHUT UP! NO TALKING!” She points the rifle at me threateningly. I put my hands up and hold my lips tightly together.

  Carrie clears her throat gently. “So, is Granny June in charge?”

  Artemis looks at her and relaxes. “Kind of but not really. Big Jim was in charge of everything. He was her husband. He was an old guy but he had lots of guns. And all the boys and girls, h
e was in charge of them. But he’s gone.”

  “Did someone kill him?”

  Artemis shakes her head slowly. “We don’t know what happened to him. He was yelling at us one day—he would yell a lot. All the time. Usually at the boys because they’re not as smart as we are and also they can be very disrespectful. And he was yelling and then he just fell down and he was dead. Sarah said he had a heart attack. We thought we should give him CPR but I don’t know how to do CPR and the boys said not to and then we got into a big fight. And one of the boys killed a friend of mine. Teresa. She wasn’t one of my best friends, but she was nice. And he killed her. After that, we went and told Granny June. She’s not my granny. I don’t think she’s anybody’s granny for real.

  “She was real upset that Big Jim fell over dead since that was her husband. But she was more upset that the boys and girls were fighting. So she divided the town up and told us that we could shoot the boys if they came onto our side. I think she was extra mad at the boys because they didn’t want Big Jim to get CPR.”

  “Have you shot any?”

  “Not yet. I almost shot one but it was my brother Joseph so I let him go. I shot 12 zombies, though. That was kinda neat.”

  “Your brother’s on the other side?”

  “Yeah. He’s a boy.”

  “That must be hard to not have him around,” I say.

  “He’s around. Just on the boy’s side.”

  “I know, I just meant, it must be hard to be separated. You must love him, I imagine.”

  “Not really. He’s mostly gross.”

  “Okay,” says Carrie. She rubs the palms of her hands on her pants. “You know what’s hard for me?”

  Artemis looks up at her.

  “I have this disease and sometimes everything hurts. My bones, my knees, my skin. It hurts so much that sometimes I just cry all day long.”

  “Is it cancer?”

  “No, it’s…”

  “My aunt had cancer. It was breast cancer. They had to cut off her boob. But they got her a new one.”

  “Yeah… no, mine’s not cancer. They haven’t had to cut off anything…”