by Morgana Wray
The furious mother stormed out of the front door. And I scurried quickly behind her. The kid wasn’t blood but she had become rather important to me. I was keen on doing whatever I could to get her back in one piece. She was in no shape to be traipsing about in the woods.
There were all sorts of crazies out there and not forgetting to mention, scores of undead that roam freely in the wild hunting their next kill.
The wall kept hordes of Risers from overrunning the town completely. But Rosewood wasn’t short of undead things. There were hundreds upon hundreds of them within the walls. There just weren’t that many of us humans left to take care of the Riser problem.
We have more weapons than ammo. Gunsmiths are a rarity. So carving out ammo that would match a bullet chamber isn’t such an easy job. You don’t want to end up blowing your own brains out if the gun malfunctions because the bullet didn’t match.
“Hey! Wait up! I can’t run that fast!” I yelled out to Diane’s mom who was already several feet ahead of me.
“I don’t have time to hold your hands. My daughter is out there. Keep up, or go back to the estate.” Diane’s mom snapped impatiently at me.
She wasn’t keen on loosing the trail. She was an expert at tracking things. Much better than I was. I was shit at running. I never won any medals for that at high school. My heart and legs just weren’t built for high speed.
I stopped to draw breath every ten minutes but somehow I managed to stay on the muscly woman’s tail.
“Any suggestions as to why she is doing this?” I panted loudly, pressing my sweaty palms against my thighs.
“She must have seen us together in a way that she did not like. Her dad meant a lot to her. She must think that I don’t care that he is gone. This must be her way of punishing me for being a bit human and not turning myself into a haggard shell of an eternally mourning widow in black.” Diane’s mom winced, wiping sweat off her brow and forehead.
“That does sound like what she would do, to be honest! Let’s try to keep it less hands on from now, shall we?” I waved my hand in the air, suggestively.
Diane’s mom nodded her head and stared into the distance, turning her back to me. She was a bit more rattled by the recent turn of events than she was letting on. Behind the cool and calm exterior was a desperate mother. A mother frightened half to death about the safety of her offspring.
Her whole macho persona was designed to be a smokescreen to protect her from getting hurt. I could only guess that she was the type that locked her emotions away in some dark dungeon that she could mostly not bear to look at. Emotions to this stern-faced woman, were like a smelly toga that was repulsive to put on.
There were noises coming from a distance, further into the woods. We ran as fast as our feet could carry us. The noise was loud music coming from the blearing speakers of a loud boom box.
Surprise! Surprise! Diane was at the heart of that ear-wrenching malarkey.
The kid had carved up a stick and modified it to have spikes made from nails on it. She was battering the hell out of the infected that had been drawn to the sound of Blue October doing their rendition of hate me.
Her face was all scrunched up and her teeth were bared. Her eyes stared blankly into the distance. She did not look at the faces of the infected men and women that she had clobbered. They fell in a pile behind her. The blood dripping down the nails of the stick in her hand did not put her off the torrid task she had imposed upon herself.
She was indulgent in what she was doing. She had been seared with burning hate on the face of her fragile heart. Hate for the plague, and hate for the ones brought back by the plague.
“Come on you bastards! Is that it? Is this the worst you can do?” Diane roared defiantly without a care for life or limb.
She seemed ready to damn whatever the consequence was. The kid was really messed up inside and wasn’t coping well. She had taken the loss of her dad very badly indeed. She had chosen to let out that hurt in a very unhealthy way.
In her mind, she must have been getting some sort of rush from taking out the infected who she seemed to have blamed for taking her dad from her.
“Diane! What the hell are you doing? What is the meaning of all this?” Diane’s mom grabbed her from behind, shaking her like a child’s rattle toy.
“You don’t get to do that! You don’t get to ask the questions!” Diane grimaced, shooting a killer stare at her mom and myself. “You can’t tell me what to do after carrying on with that. It hasn’t even been five minutes after dad has passed. The grass has barely grown over whatever bog hole you dumped him in and you couldn’t even have the decency to show him some fucking respect.”
“There is no need to speak to your mom that way, kid,” I croaked rather uncomfortably.
“What are you, her fucking white night in geriatric pants? But out meat for brains! This doesn’t concern you!” Diane rolled her eyes at me.
That was a blow way below the belt! That stung like a bee dancing around in your underwear!
She had the temerity to refer to me as geriatric. The nerve of that kid. The things that I take just to keep the peace with her. She definitely was a melodramatic drama queen. Her lips definitely did not disconnect from her brain. Even for a second.
She was as brazen as polished brass and never let anything go without giving her take on things. She was definitely convinced that I had done wrong and was using her tongue to lash out, and land punches where it really hurt.
If there was a teenager purgatory, I was definitely knee deep in it. Boy, was my ears burning from all Diane’s tongue wagging.
“You have every right to be upset. But don’t drag the poor, hapless man into it. He has been nothing but good to you. Besides, he would make an excellent stepfather.” Diane’s mom slapped her across the shoulder.
“Grose! Now, I can’t get the image of him in knackered underwear out of my head! That shit could scar me mentally for life!” Diane muttered disapprovingly.
“You know when I said that the plague took your dad from us?” Diane’s mom put her hand on the back of her head, and wore a slightly constipated look on her face. “that bit might have been slightly exaggerated.”
“But you said! What the hell are you trying to say?” Diane gawked expectantly at her mother.
Diane’s mom put on a straight, solemn face and began to recount events as best as her memory could serve her, lips quivering as she spoke, “Your dad wasn’t killed by the infected. He was shot in the stomach by looters. He gave them all he had but it wasn’t enough. They wanted him to watch them do things to me. Things that no one should ever have to see happen to someone they care about. Sure, the Risers killed plenty, but the real monsters, they just killed because they could.
He struggled with them and he did pack a punch. He knocked them to the ground. But one of them blindsided him and shot him point-blank in the stomach. His insides hung out from the gaping hole in his stomach. There was no saving him from bleeding out.
His eyes went as still as glass pretty quick. I didn’t even get the chance to hear him draw his last breath. We had been attacked in our hotel room for no fucking reason. Your Dad was laying in a pool of his own blood for no fucking reason. I didn’t get that. I didn’t understand the madness that had separated us so cruelly.
All I knew was that someone had some penance to do that did not involve hail Marys or holy water. The men that attacked us were filth and they deserved to burn for what they did.
I had never killed before. But I saw red in that instant. I grabbed the kitchen knife and I cut and I kept cutting. One of them got me in the face with a meat cleaver. It didn’t go in very deep. I yanked it out and buried it in his crotch. I had never seen a man scream so loud in my life. I cut him in half with his own clever.
There was so much blood at the end of it all. So much blood on my hands.
Everyone in that room was on the floor, bleeding out. Everyone but me.”
Chapter 9
By the tim
e the scarred woman was done telling her tale, the tension between Diane and her had somehow melted away, and there was this cordial mother and daughter rapport that had replaced the bickering and acrimony which I had witnessed a couple of minutes ago.
I was shocked to see Diane smiling and sharing jokes with her mother. The kid was usually as grumpy as a wet weekend. This was a new side to her that I did not know that she even had. In the end, I was just happy that they did not result to tearing each other’s hair out. Satisfying as that might have been to watch, they could have drawn more of the undead to us with all the chaotic noises that a fight would have brought.
The keen hearing abilities of the risers would certainly have given away our location and made us easy targets.
We got home to find Cyril feeding a slender-framed woman in the shed that had been previously locked up with pretty hefty chains and padlocks. Her eyes were dark. They were empty like the eye of a bottomless pit. When her mouth opened and crunched on the morsels of raw meat, she exposed horrendously discoloured teeth that were shaped like crooked spades.
The blood from the fresh kill splattered against Cyril’s apron. He clearly knew what he was doing. He had done the same old routine several times. Who could blame the old fool. He still thought of the decomposing, flesh-eating terror as his other half, and seemed devoted to keeping her alive.
Alive, being the operative word.
Someone had to bring him up to speed with reality. He was letting unreasonable emotions blind his perceptions of what was real and what was just pure delusion.
“Cyril! What the hell are you doing?” I barked at him from behind.
“Making sure my wife is fed! What the fuck does it look like to you?” Cyril frowned, with his eyes glaring crossly at the three of us. “Not that it is any of your business what I do in my own goddamn house.”
Cyril had a cleaver in his hand, and he was pointing the damn thing at my nose. I wasn’t keen on getting my face caved in by a mentally unstable old geezer. I would have chucked his irrational behaviour down to some sort of dementia but her sure seemed to have a sharp memory.
I could only see the emotional trauma behind his desperate eyes. Everything he did seemed to reek of utter desperation to keep that undead abomination breathing.
He had her foot shackled to the ground. The depraved old dude even put her in a wedding dress. I wondered how he had managed to do that without getting bit. She didn’t seem to have a muzzle on.
Maybe he muzzled her before he put her in that dress? Or maybe she turned on their anniversary?
Either way, this wasn’t healthy behaviour. This was just giving bizarre a different meaning. Surely, he did not think that he could keep this dangerous game going for much longer. He would slip up one day, and his undead wife would dig her crooked teeth into his flesh.
I didn’t think that he cared much. He must have wanted death. He must have wanted to join her. Him out here, so near to the wall. That was him preparing himself for oblivion. He had the pale, unresponsive face of a man that had given up on everything.
“I get you! I get what you are going through, but you have got to let go with these ghosts or they will put you in the ground!” I looked Cyril in the eyes, and tried to appeal to his better judgement.
“You think I am mad, don’t you? You think I have somehow lost the plot, don’t you?” Cyril walked away from the bucket of freshly cut meat that his wife had dunked her face in. “I cook, I clean up after her. I do what every good husband does to help out when their wife gets a little sick. So, she is a little different than before. That doesn’t mean there isn’t a shred of her left in there. That doesn’t mean the she isn’t my Wendy anymore.”
The old man’s eyes were flashing brightly as if he had had way too much legal highs pumped into his system. We could see where this was starting to go. We could see that his mad devotion had overtaken common sense.
He was actually believing the drivel that was coming out of his mouth. Someone needed to knock some sense into the poor old fool before he ended up hurting someone, or himself.
“Nobody thinks any less of you. Everyone in this room would go to the end of the world and back if it would give them a single second with the one they have lost. We can see you are hurting. We can see you are hurting really badly, but you know Wendy would not want this for you.” Diane’s Mom chucked herself right in the old man’s face, giving him the sternest look that she could muster.
Had he been some naughty schoolboy, he might have melted away, and sank into his little stool in some dinky corner of the room where the sight of him would not have caused anyone offense.
But without question, Cyril was not a boy. He was a grown man with thirty two teeth in his mouth. Granted, some of those were forged from silver. There were five false teeth in his upper jaw. He must have got into really bad fights when he was younger.
I guess if you did stupid shit like this all the time, you wouldn’t blame people for wanting to kick the shit out of you.
Cyril had the right to cling unto his hurt. He could even have drowned it in a bottle. But he didn’t. He just had to keep the baggage with him, in the flesh, literally. Shit doesn’t get any more complicated than keeping the living remains of what used to be your wife in shackles.
She was alive but she wasn’t. Sure, there was a pulse but her skin was all pale and unnatural. Her eyes were wild and lacked any signs of true sentience. Those eyes weren’t looking at anyone in the way that a normal person should. They were looking at each and every one of us as if the dinner lady had just rang the damn dinner bell, and we were on the top of the all-you-can-eat menu.
“Cyril, we should drag that thing out and set her on fire. I hate to say this, but there is nothing human left in there. She’s nothing but a hollow shell that craves nothing but to feed the bottomless void in her guts,” Diane’s Mom spoke as slowly, and as earnestly as she could, spitting on the ground, and shifting her gaze to the infected woman in chains.
“You can’t know that. None of you can. We have always had each other. I can’t just end her life like that.” Cyril cried, grimacing painfully through tearful eyes. “I made vows to that woman. Don’t make me unmake them. We spent the best part of forty years together. She never said a word in anger to me. She always made me feel much more than I was worth. She was.. She is everything to me.”
“Cyril! You need to wind this shit up, or I swear to God I will put a bullet in her myself. The plaster has to come off, even though it will hurt like a bitch.” Diane’s Mom put firm hands on the sobbing old man’s shoulders.
I could see that she meant every word. She was not wearing her I-wanna-screw-around face. Her brows were bent into a bow and her nose was hoovering air up more quickly into her racing chest.
“Two things made me happy-Wendy and hunting down things that would have your guts for wasabi in a heartbeat. So don’t you stand there and lay down the law to me in my own goddamn backyard. I am not ready to say goodbye yet. If you all don’t like it, you know where the damn door is. Feel free to use it, and don’t let it smack you in the face on the way out,” Cyril shouted angrily, waving his meat cleaver in our faces.
“I have been burning cigarettes out in my own skin since I was five! What could you possibly do to make me move an inch, old man?” Diane’s Mom shot Cyril and indignant look.
The woman certainly looked like she had no intention of backing down. She seemed intent on kicking the hornets nest all the way down the street.
Cyril wasn’t about to shrivel up and melt into those tall plastic boots on his feet anytime soon. Even though that would have been some neat magic trick. Something definitely worth paying a buck or two to see.
I wondered if those two were going to descend into trading punches over a woman who was technically mostly dead. The whole emotionally attached thing was just incomprehensible to me. The woman Cyril was protecting was just a walking sack of rotting meat and bones. A freak cooked up in a sadistic scientist’s Petri dish.
“So what are you going to do Cyril? Are you going to kill us over some Riser that you should have put a bullet in, and buried a long time a ago?” Diane’s Mom spoke calmly without flinching, shifting her head sideways, very slowly.
“Don’t tempt me woman! Don’t tempt me!” Cyril grunted, dropping the hand that held the meat cleaver like a stone.
“Good to see you haven’t completely lost the plot then, old man. You can’t keep her like that forever. Sooner or later, you’ll have to release her or she will be the end of you. You have to save yourself,” Diane’s Mom spoke in a less reproachful tone to Cyril.
He bent his head low and listened. He seemed as if his ears were soaking up what the woman with the shaven head had just said to him.
“I don’t have the strength to do this. I can’t kill her. Not when she looks the way she does.” Cyril spat out what sounded like a hesitant apology.
“Then you can go inside. Pour yourself a drink. Pour yourself several drinks. When you are done, she will be taken care of and buried. Properly.” Diane’s Mom patted the old man on the back.
He dropped his apron and sighed deeply. He knew what needed to be done. He must have felt the huge chip on his shoulder that had been grinding him into the ground get a bit lighter, as he walked away from the shed. He was walking away from what he had considered to be the best days of his life.
Those were really hard steps to take. The sluggishness of his feet as they lifted off the ground beneath him said that much.
When he was out of sight, Diane’s Mom turned to me, and shook her head. At first, I didn’t get why she was doing that, or what she was suggesting until I saw Diane’s enthusiastic face grinning broadly.
“Oh! Yeah! You want me to make the young one disappear!” I raised my voice in a not so subtle attempt to let Diane’s Mom know that I got the message.
I dragged Diane off. She wasn’t keen, but I did it anyway. She did not need to see any more violence than she had already seen. We heard a shot rip through the air. The groans that were coming from the undead woman had ceased and only haunting silence greeted our keen ears.