Cattle (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  They should have been more careful.

  Traveling in the winter was dangerous and taxing, but in some ways it was safer than traveling in warm weather. Zombies were not as active in the winter. The smart ones hated the cold and tended to stay in their homes where it was warm. And the chompers froze. Zombies were cold-blooded creatures. They turned into zombiecicles if the temperature dropped below freezing long enough. You could walk right up to them and knock their frozen blocks off. Harold called it Zombie T-Ball.

  “I’m just so tired,” Brent said. “I want to stay here a little while. Get some rest.”

  “You can’t give up now,” Ghost-Harold said. “You’re almost Home.”

  “I know,” Brent sighed, staring out the window.

  Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he could see the snow swirling through the air outside. It looked like the picture on an old TV set that was tuned to a channel with no signal. It was coming down pretty thick. Visibility could only be a few meters. The ground outside was already white, the collapsed barn nearly obscured but for the section of the roof that kept flapping up and down, creaking and banging.

  Out there past the storm, or maybe staring out their windows at the snow like he was doing, were the citizens of Home. The city of living men was only 300 miles away now. Harold had traced out a rough route on an old road map when they decided to make a run for it. That was a year ago, but they had managed to travel over six hundred miles before his partner died. Two-thirds of the way.

  In the old days, a 300 mile trip would have taken about five hours. Less if you put the pedal to the metal. Now, traveling on foot, it would take at least a month for Brent to finish the journey, and that’s if he didn’t run into any trouble, that’s if he could walk ten miles a day, every day, until he got there. More realistically, he was looking at three to six months.

  And then…

  But it was too much for him to imagine. Too much, almost, to hope for. He tried to imagine it, being someplace safe, someplace with thousands of other living human beings, with food and electricity and safe drinking water, and it made his heart ache.

  “You don’t realize how much you need other people until they’re gone,” Brent said. “How much you need… to just be around somebody. To have some company, even if you don’t talk much. To just feel their presence.”

  He sniffed and wiped his nose, watching the snow twist and flap at the glass.

  “You crying?” Ghost-Harold asked.

  Brent nodded. “Yeah… a little.”

  “Over me?”

  “A little.”

  His imaginary friend was quiet for a moment, then said in a gentle voice, “It’s all right, kiddo. You go ahead and cry. Sometimes you just have to let it all out.”

  Sometime later, Brent slept.

  7. Day

  As often happened now that the world was dead, Brent woke disoriented.

  Without the distractions of modern technology, Brent’s interior life had become much more vivid. It was a thing he had noticed shortly after the world ended, when the initial chaos and violence had passed and the world became very empty and still. It was like his brain was a muscle that the technological world had caused to atrophy, and now, in the new silence of the post-modern world, that muscle had begun to develop, to grow stronger, to bulk up.

  In the absence of constant electronic diversion, that dormant, almost vestigialized part of his mind had reawakened, had flowered, and he reverted, it seemed to him, to a nearly childlike state of awareness. His imagination was suddenly so overpowering that he constantly slipped into a dream-like state during his waking hours, talking to people who weren’t there, weaving fantasies in his mind, making up songs in his head, or poetry, or jokes. His dreams became so intense, so potent, that they seemed real to him, even after he awoke, as real at least as the waking world. Sometimes, when he awoke, he was not sure which world was the real one, the world he had just departed, or the one he had just opened his eyes to, or even if such a distinction was important anymore.

  It was like that when he woke the next morning.

  He had dreamed that he was a child again and that it had snowed the night before and school had been cancelled. In his dream, his mother made hot chocolate for him, and then she had helped him into his outside clothes so he could go and play with his friends. He had played all day with his chums—Evan and Bobby Toothaker, twins who lived down the street from him—bobsledding down the big hill behind the old elementary school, building a snowman, making snow angels and having snowball fights. He played until his nose was red and running, until the sun had rolled all the way across the sky and twilight dyed the white hillsides the pastel blue of Easter eggs.

  “Bre-eeent!” his mother called, and he turned in the direction of her voice, a snowball in each hand. “Uh oh! That’s my mom, guys! I gotta go!” he said, and then he had awakened, and he looked up at the brightly glowing window, laced with the snow that had fallen overnight, and for a moment he thought he was a child again, and he hoped that school had been cancelled so he could go outside and play with his chums like he had in his dream.

  The truth came quickly, but it did not hurt as much as he might have expected. He had long since mourned for the world that used to be. There were times now that he no longer even missed it. Sometimes he didn’t even remember it.

  “Rise and shine, kiddo!” Ghost-Harold cried.

  “I’m up,” Brent responded, shielding his eyes from the glaring light that slanted through the window. The storm had passed. The sun was bright and warm and cheery, the sky clear and deep and cloudless.

  “I would have made you some coffee, but I don’t have any hands,” Harold said. “Or coffee, for that matter.”

  “Thanks anyway,” Brent said with a chuckle. He sat up and surveyed the room, letting his memories, like the pieces of a puzzle, slot back into place. He leaned up to the window and peered outside, making sure there were no tracks in the snow.

  The snow in the backyard was pristine but for a solitary trail of rabbit tracks. That was good. Maybe he would rig up a trap for that rabbit. It had been a while since he’d eaten fresh meat.

  The thought of rabbit stew made his mouth gush with saliva. It was powerful motivation to abandon his warm nest.

  Brent threw aside his covers, wrinkling his nose at the smell of himself. Maybe he would take a bath today, too. Look for some new clothes in all these boxes and bins. Mr. Johnson was a big guy, but the Johnsons might have had kids who were Brent’s size, clothes that Mrs. Johnson had boxed up and stored after her kids outgrew them.

  It couldn’t hurt to look.

  He got up, put his boots back on, and pushed aside the boxes he’d barricaded the door with. He listened at the door a moment, then unlocked it and peeked out into the hallway.

  “All clear,” he said.

  He crept down the stairs just as carefully, then surveyed the house and its surroundings. There were no signs of intrusion and no tracks in the snow outside, in either the side lawns or the front. He allowed himself to relax a little.

  Brent grabbed a large pan from the kitchen cabinet and used it to transfer some water from the water barrel outside to the tank of the Johnsons’ commode. It was cold outside, but not uncomfortably so. Once he had filled the commode, he dropped his pants and took a leisurely crap, availing himself of the magazines Mr. Johnson kept under the bathroom sink: Cheri, Playboy, Penthouse.

  “Why, Mr. Johnson, you old dog you,” he said when he found the magazines.

  The glossy pages of the magazines were brittle and faded, but the images and text were perfectly legible.

  It seemed to him a great luxury to crap in an actual toilet while flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine. Drinking a cup of coffee while he did it was the only thing that could have made it any more luxurious, he thought, and then he wondered at how spoiled he had been in his old life, how petty his problems had been back then.

  “You had it good, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold sa
id. “You lived like a king and didn’t even know it.”

  “Do you mind?” Brent said. “I’m trying to take a crap.”

  “Oh, yeah. Sorry.”

  Brent sighed, shaking his head, and returned his attention to his magazine. He rotated the magazine sideways to view the centerfold, ignoring the moist trumpet sounds reverberating in the toilet boil.

  He whistled. “Hello, nurse!”

  Miss August, AKA Katrina Twain, stood with her back turned two-thirds of the way to the camera, dressed in just a pair of bright red stiletto heels and a few bits of glittering jewelry. Her hair was a honey-gold swirl around her face, her eyes like sapphires rimmed in charcoal. Her candy red lips were pouty and partially parted, as if she were about to whisper something breathy and vulgar to the cameraman. The puffy mounds of her pudenda were just visible between the smooth globes of her flawless derriere. In the bottom right-hand corner of the pinup was written, Come on baby light my fire, XOXO Katrina, in a swirly cursive script.

  He wondered if she was still alive somewhere, or if she had died during the pandemic. Odds were she was dead. Almost everyone had died during the outbreak. If the Phage didn’t get you, the zombies did, and if the zombies didn’t get you, your fellows survivors did, and if you somehow managed to survive all that, the radiation from the nukes got you, or you caught some other illness and died from lack of medical care, or had an accident, or got depressed and killed yourself. Humanity had gone up in a blaze of glory. People like Brent and Harold were just the last warm cinders cooling on a mountain of ash.

  “So you gonna beat off or what?” Ghost-Harold asked.

  Brent winced. Whatever passions Miss August had begun to stir in him had been doused by his morbid ruminations. He looked around for something to wipe on.

  “No toilet paper, kiddo,” Harold said apologetically.

  Brent sighed.

  “Sorry, Miss August…”

  He flushed and watched the water swirl down the pipe with the same fascination a Neanderthal might have watched a DC-10 take to the air. It had taken humanity 200 million years to go from flinging their feces at each other in the treetops to indoor plumbing, and like a careless gambler they’d lost it right back to the house, and in spectacular fashion.

  Brent returned to the kitchen. He grabbed a pan and stepped out onto the back porch. The sky was clear now, the sun flashing brilliantly off the snow. It reminded him of the dream he’d had during the night. Playing in the snow with his buddies, school cancelled, and nothing to worry about but the quality of the fun they might have until sundown.

  He stepped down off the porch and sank to mid-shin. Last night’s snow storm had dumped at least a foot of snow on the region, maybe more. He filled the pan up with snow, returned inside and set it on the counter to melt. He would have fresh drinking water when it melted, no need to boil, though it might be a little radioactive. Several major cities had been nuked during the worst of the pandemic. A lot of people had died from radiation sickness in the years that followed, but not Brent. Nothing ever seemed to make him sick. Even when he was a boy he had been unusually healthy. He could remember his mother remarking on it once or twice when he was a kid.

  He pushed the table against the back door again and went upstairs. For the next hour or so, he went through the Johnsons’ storage boxes. Most of the clothes in the bins were women’s clothes, but he did find a couple outfits that looked like they might fit him. The Johnsons must have had a son, or sons, and while most of the boy’s clothes were too small, there were a few that fit well enough.

  Happy, he carried the clothes downstairs and laid them on the table. He raided the linen closet for towels and washrags and then walked into the bathroom to look for soap and shampoo. There was a single bar of dried up soap in the medicine cabinet, shrunken and fissured, but the shampoo had turned into some kind of weird blue plastic inside the bottles. Looked like something out of a sci-fi movie.

  “Oh, well. This is good enough,” he said, carrying the soap into the kitchen.

  “You ought to take a bath,” Ghost-Harold said. “Might be your only chance for a while.”

  Brent shook his head. “Too much trouble. It would take me all day to heat up enough water.”

  “Take it cold,” Harold said. “Are you a man or a mouse?”

  “Mouse,” Brent said. “Definitely a mouse.”

  He fetched several more pans of snow, lit his tea candles and began to warm the water up over their flames. He poured the contents of each pan into one of the kitchen sinks as soon as it was room temperature, then warmed the next. When both sides of the sink were full of water, he stripped down to his ragged skivvies and began to wash himself.

  He scrubbed and scrubbed, making multiple passes over his skin, until the left basin was soapy and gray with filth, then he switched to the right side sink and began to rinse off.

  “Good grief, you’re getting skinny,” Harold said. “You look like one of those concentration camp survivors.”

  Brent had noticed. Scrubbing the washrag up and down his ribs was like running his hands up and down an old fashioned washboard. He didn’t reply to his imaginary friend, just dipped his soapy hair in the clean water basin and rinsed it out.

  “Wash your beard, too. Get the bugs out,” Harold said.

  Brent grinned and shook his head. Harold was just as annoyingly helpful in death as he had been in life. He was one of those people who always tried to nudge you aside and take over what you were doing, whether it was cooking, making a fire, or skinning a dead possum. If he had been a standup comic, his catchphrase would have been, “Let me do it!”

  Brent was just getting ready to put on his clean new clothes when something banged against the front door. He jumped and wheeled around.

  A moment later, he heard a low moan.

  8. Chompers

  There were only two of them, thank God. There was a big fresh one, didn’t look like he’d been dead more than a few weeks, a couple months tops. He was dressed in a parka stained black with blood and tan Carharts pants. Judging by the vacant expression on his face and the soulless gray marbles of his eyes, he was a chomper. The other was an old zombie, smaller, dressed in rags, its limbs like sticks wrapped in dead vines, its face a leathery death’s head. Brent peeked at them from one of the living room windows, peering through the narrow gap between the window frame and the bookshelf he had barricaded it with.

  The old shriveled one was tottering around in the front yard like an Alzheimer’s patient, the wind tossing its rags and the thin dark hair of its head. The big fresh one had clambered onto the porch and stood just outside the front door. Every so often he would step forward and smack his body against the door or bat it with one of his hands.

  After a few minutes, Brent realized the zombie’s lurching movements followed the creak and bang of the barn roof in the back yard. Each time the loose section of tin crashed in the back yard, the big zombie would jerk and step forward.

  Zombies were drawn to loud noises, and that hunk of roofing had been flapping and banging all night.

  “Damn,” Ghost-Harold said behind him. “Whatcha gonna do, kiddo?”

  If it were warmer out, he’d just abandon the farmhouse, slip out the back and put some distance between him and his uninvited guests. But it was below freezing outside and windy. He would very likely freeze to death if he had to travel very far. He didn’t know how far the next house was—and he was just as likely to run into more chompers there.

  There was only one thing he could do.

  “You’re gonna take ‘em out, ain’tcha?”

  Brent nodded.

  Brent left the window and crept into the kitchen as quietly as possible. He snatched up the shovel he had propped against the counter and headed toward the back door. He peeked through the curtain, made sure there were no deadheads stumbling around in the back yard, then eased the table aside.

  “Be careful, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said, his voice tight with anxiety.

 
; Brent nodded, his lips pressed together.

  The wind gusted in on him, blowing his hair back from his brow. He slipped out onto the back porch. His heart was thumping rabbit-like in his chest.

  He wasn’t worried about the old one so much. The old ones were slow and easy to take out. It was the fresh one that scared him. They were stronger, faster, more violent. They could be tricky if they retained a little of their human cunning, even if they hadn’t fully reawakened. He had seen them use fake outs and ambush tactics, and it was hard to put them down. They just kept coming at you and coming at you until you brained them.

  He crept across the porch, keeping close to the side of the house. Started down the steps without looking. There were just three steps, but they were icy. His right foot skidded on the second one, and he barely caught himself on the railing. He dropped the shovel but trapped it between his knee and the railing.

  “Careful!” Ghost-Harold gasped.

  Brent cursed silently at his clumsiness. He waited to see if either of the deadheads had heard him stumble. They were very sensitive to sounds.

  He listened to them groaning around front for a moment. They sounded like two depressed guys getting blowjobs-- zombie idle. If either had heard his fumble on the porch steps, they would have immediately started howling, come running to investigate. Perhaps the creaking and banging of the barn roof had obscured the sounds of his near fall.