by C. Dulaney
I kept my back to the bigass scorch mark in the yard over by the far wall. It was hard enough trying to accept Nancy’s death without being reminded of it by evidence of her cremation. Same with Daisy. Gus ran in a large circle between me and the men by the wall. He didn’t seem to be interested in exploring like he usually did. Every time he stuck his nose to the ground, he’d whip his head up and tuck his tail, then begin his nervous running again. Even though the mess was cleaned up, there was apparently enough residue of death to freak the little guy out.
My eyes shifted slowly from the soldiers working on the fence to the second story windows of the club. Abby was watching me from her room and it startled me a bit. I hadn’t noticed her there, and had no idea just how long she’d been staring down at me. And she was staring, not casually observing the activity in the yard as you would expect. I frowned but pulled my hand from my coat pocket and threw her a small wave. My frown deepened when she didn’t wave back; Abby simply turned her back on me and disappeared into the darkness of her room.
It was strange. The longer I stood there the more I realized she’d been acting…off, since the night before. Ever since the troops showed up. I made up my mind to talk to her later, and called Gus in the middle of his twentieth lap. The wind had picked up and it was getting colder. Time to go back inside.
* * *
I followed Gus to the kitchen, my mind still preoccupied with Abby and her weird behavior, and didn’t notice Michael striding through the living room with John on his heels. My fuzzy buddy sat at the swinging door, tail wagging and tongue licking his chops, waiting for me to open it just enough for him to bolt through. It was close to lunchtime and apparently the little guy was hungry. I nudged the door open with the toe of my boot as I unzipped my coat, the smell of deer roast and potatoes smacking me in the face. My mouth filled with saliva automatically; it was the best thing I think I’d ever smelled.
Of course, my nose had been assaulted by the reek of rotting flesh and guts for the past thirteen months, so that roast could have smelled like dog shit and I would’ve slobbered all over myself.
“What the hell’s going on in here?” I asked as I stepped inside.
Apparently they finished the inventory.
The swinging door slammed shut on Michael, who had the presence of mind to throw his hand up at the last minute to stop it from hitting him in the face. I was too engrossed with the two people hovering around the stove, and the contents of the large pot on top of it, to notice Michael and John enter behind me. Gus skittered to the corner and glued himself to his food bowl.
“Smells good, huh?” Jonah stirred with a long handled wooden spoon. Mia pretended to help.
Man, that girl’s got it bad. I bet the chickenshit still hasn’t told him how she feels.
Jake and Todd were sitting at the table. Michael and John edged over to them and started talking in low voices. I followed my nose to the stove.
“Damn right it smells good. Since when can you cook?” I leaned over the pot, closed my eyes, and took a deep breath.
“Well now…that’s a story for another day, isn’t it?” He smirked, then winked at Mia.
I thought it was nice, everyone trying to get back to normal as quickly as possible. Pointless, but nice. I shrugged and turned my attention to the four huddled around the table, taking note that Abby was not present.
Still in her room.
I grabbed a chair, pulled it out, and sat down. Jake was biting a nail, something I had never seen him do.
Well, that isn’t foreboding at all.
Michael, who was leaning down with his palms flat on the tabletop, sighed and looked over at me. I’m sure we all had that same look. You know the one. Weary eyes, puffy and black underneath. Wrinkled forehead, semi-permanent frown. Pale complexion. But on Michael, it was downright ominous.
“No contact with the other camps. Except Reedtown.” He shifted his weight to his other arm. “Waters made contact with his counterparts. Evidently, this isn’t an isolated thing.”
The new chefs had become interested and were standing behind me, listening as Michael went into detail concerning what Waters had found out. Jake was biting his nails like a man possessed, so I kicked him under the table. He grunted, looked at me, crossed his eyes as he looked at the finger in his mouth, then slid it onto his lap with his other hand. Todd…well, Todd was his usual dumbass self.
“What thing?” he said.
Now, I hadn’t known Mike, the idiot Ben and Jake had traveled with back when this thing first started. From what Jake had told me about him, I figured Todd had to be Mike’s long lost twin. Being forced to tolerate the resident asshole for as long as I had, I completely understood the lack of mourning that had taken place when Mike had finally bit it. Or was bitten, as the case turned out.
The look on Jake’s face at that moment was not only priceless, but it told me that his nails had been forgotten. “Todd?”
“Yeah, man?”
Everyone else fell silent, mostly because we didn’t have the energy or motivation to tell him to shut up…again.
“I want you to do me a favor.”
Jake wasn’t even looking at Todd; his head was tilted and his eyes were closed. Todd, of course, was suddenly enthusiastic. Someone was paying attention to him, talking to him, and for the first time in a long time, he wasn’t being yelled at.
“Sure thing, Jake.”
“I want you to go outside. Now, when you get outside, I want you to get up on the wall. Then I want you to jump off. If you don’t break your legs, I want you to head down the driveway.”
At this point, Todd’s enthusiasm was wilting.
“If you don’t run onto any deadheads, keep walkin’. When you get to the end of the driveway, head on down towards the main road. If you don’t run onto any deadheads by then, keep walkin’ towards Blueville. You keep goin’ ‘til you find one of those zombie sonsabitches, and when you do, Todd…” Jake turned and gave Todd one of the meanest, scariest looks I’d ever seen on Jake’s face. “I want you to jump up its ass. All the way up in there. Now, do you understand? Or do I need to explain it again, a little plainer?” With that, Jake twisted in his seat, one balled-up fist on his hip, the other on the table, clenched so tightly his knuckles cracked.
Todd got the point.
We waited until he left the room, stumbling and tripping over his own feet, before giving our attention back to Michael.
“Yeah…I don’t even know what the hell I was saying,” he said after several long seconds of silence.
That turned out to be the straw that broke the camel’s back.
The kitchen filled with laughter, so loud and long that the soldiers outside stopped what they were doing to listen for a few minutes, unsure what the commotion was all about, convinced the Winchester group was all very much insane.
* * *
Abby sat on the edge of her bed, listening to muffled laughter coming from downstairs with a faint smile on her lips.
Good. They deserve a moment of happiness.
She had drawn the curtains and turned out the lights. Anything brighter than twilight hurt her eyes now. She’d changed into a fresh pair of jeans and a clean t-shirt after straightening up her room and packing her belongings. Her suitcase and rifle were by the bedroom door, patiently awaiting her departure. She didn’t want to say goodbye to the others, never being one to show emotion very easily.
It’s better this way, she thought. I hate long goodbyes.
She had been bitten by what Kasey lovingly referred to as a “snapper” during their run from the wall to the house. Of all things, her ticket had been punched by a goddamned snapping head. Abby hadn’t thought it too much to ask to go down in a blaze of glory. At least that’s how she had always imagined her death, in Z-World. Running toward a pack of deadheads like her ass was on fire, guns blazing, laughing maniacally. No, her death sentence came at the hands of (or in this case, the jaws of), a runner who’d had the legs broken right out f
rom underneath him.
The bite was sickening to look at. Just above her ankle, the skin surrounding it mottled black, the wound itself oozing a green and brown pus. Tendrils of faded purple trailed up and down her leg, radiating out from the bite. She’d given up on cleaning it; disinfecting now was a senseless waste of supplies. She was beginning to show other signs of infection as well, and had been keeping a log of it in the notebook on her desk. Even though she knew she was dying, she wanted to leave a detailed account of how it happened. Maybe it would help the others understand this virus better. Maybe not. Either way, she knew her time was almost up.
Abby took a ragged breath and looked at the pistol in her lap. Her right hand was already curled around the grip. The shakes had started an hour before, the muscles in her arms and legs almost useless because of the tremors. She felt she could do this one last thing…had to do this one last thing. To save her friends, to save herself. She didn’t have much time left; her vision was already becoming blurred by streaks of red across her sight.
As the laughter began to fade downstairs, Abby raised her right hand and put the barrel into her mouth. She used her left hand to steady her shaking right, tears flowing freely down her cheeks. She inhaled deeply through her nose, before finally closing her eyes.
Abby squeezed the trigger.
* * *
“Perform an aerial sweep of the area, a hundred mile radius. Radio back if you locate any large swarms. I want direction, location, numbers.” Waters was standing in the center of the communications building, the old prison administration offices, giving orders to Collins and a handful of his men. He turned to the private behind the desk. “If the CC makes contact, ignore it. Understood?”
“Sir?”
Waters stepped up to the desk and leaned closer to the confused face behind it. “Unless a civilian leader or a district commander calls, I want you to ignore it. Pretend you didn’t hear it. Claim you had to piss and missed the transmission, I don’t care.”
The private’s eyes widened. “Y-Yes, sir.”
Waters turned back to his chopper crew. “Let’s get to work.”
* * *
“Waters to Winchester, over.” The big black radio in the Head Room barked over and over. “Winchester, this is Waters. Respond.”
“Someone answer that goddamn radio!” John shouted.
A few of us were in the next room, gathering up as many medical supplies from Nancy’s stash as we could hold. John, myself, and Jonah scrambled about, dropping rolls of gauze in our haste to get back upstairs.
“On it!” Jonah said, unloading his armful into my bag. He bolted out of the room, leaving me and the big man to grab what we could.
“Should be enough. Let’s go,” John said, his voice ripped with panic.
A gunshot only a few minutes earlier had brought us all running upstairs to Abby’s room, where we found her sprawled out on her bed. Blood gushed from her face, which had been completely destroyed by her botched suicide attempt. Mia, Jake, and Michael stayed with her as her body convulsed and seized, while we ran down to Nancy’s makeshift infirmary to find whatever we could that might be of use. I’m sure I wasn’t the only one thinking: the only thing that will help her now is another bullet, yet I couldn’t bring myself to say it out loud.
While John and I were running back up the stairs, Jonah was practically falling over himself to get to the radio.
* * *
“Uh…this is the Winchester. Over.” The cowboy was panting and shaking, leaning against the desk for support, the mic quivering in front of his mouth.
“Who am I speaking with?” Waters answered. Jonah swallowed hard and wiped the sweat from his brow.
“This is Jonah. What do you need?”
“I need to speak with Michael.”
“He’s busy, talk to me.” Jonah’s legs were threatening to give out on him, so he clumsily yanked the chair out and fell into it.
“What’s your status?” Waters asked.
Something in his voice changed. He was less demanding now and more suspicious. Jonah being Jonah, he caught that change immediately.
“We’ve got a situation here and I don’t have time to explain. Tell me what you want and make it quick.”
The radio was silent for a moment.
“An undead situation?” Waters finally asked. Jonah laughed, frightened hysteria nearly taking control of him. He almost said “You could say that,” but decided against it.
“No. Nothing like that. We’ve just got…we’ve got a problem with one of our people. She’s been…injured. Now if you don’t mind telling me what the hell you want? I need to help the others.”
“Aerial recon shows another large swarm moving north along the river, sweeping through each town along the way. So far our intelligence shows there are no living in said towns, but the Zacks are still aggressively proceeding.”
Jonah took a deep breath and let it out slowly, then told Waters he’d let Michael know.
“Copy that. Waters out.”
“About time you bastard.”
Jonah let the mic fall to the desk and ran from the room. He took the steps two at a time, closing in on Abby’s room and the shouts coming from within. What he found was pretty much the same as when they had all first discovered her. Except now there were four people holding her down while one person tried desperately to slow the blood flowing from her nonexistent face.
* * *
“Jonah, help me.”
I was trying to hold Abby’s right arm down and stabilize her head at the same time, while Michael attended to her face, packing wads of gauze into and around the open cavity. John and Jake each had a leg, while Mia was on her left arm. All of us were in shock, reacting on instinct and not taking the time to think the situation through. Why had she done it? What could have possibly caused someone like Abby to shoot herself? If we had stopped for even one second to consider this, we’d have known what was about to happen.
“Waters was just on the radio.” Jonah squeezed in beside me to hold Abby’s head still as she convulsed. Michael was frantically stuffing gauze, trying to staunch the bleeding, and only glanced up at Jonah.
“And?”
Jonah’s voice hitched with each jerk of Abby’s head. “He said there’s another swarm headed north along the river.”
“Shit. Okay,” Michael said. “Someone take over for me. I’ll run out and tell the men.”
The soldiers outside had come running earlier after hearing the gunshot. Instead of letting them investigate, Michael had ushered them back outside. I supposed they had went back to work on the fence. Or they could have been standing around with their thumbs up their asses. That’s what Todd was doing, standing in the corner of Abby’s room, arms crossed with one hand covering his mouth, staring at us with huge bloodshot eyes.
What an asshole.
“You got it?” Mia asked Jonah after he slid in to take Michael’s place.
Jonah nodded, seeing there was no more room for gauze. His eyes and hands froze for a moment on what used to be Abby’s pretty face, then he finally just pressed his hands down, putting pressure on all the material packed into her sinus cavities and eye sockets. His weight helped to hold her head still, though you could tell he was fighting the urge to puke all over us. If it hadn’t been for all the blood, Abby would have looked like a deadhead, stripped of all flesh, exposing teeth and the bones of her face. The blood helped hide all the grotesquery, but at the same time it added a whole new level of revulsion to the scene.
“What did you do, Abby?” Jake whined. “What the fuck did you do?”
“Keep it together man,” John panted next to him, locking eyes with Jake as Abby’s legs yanked and jerked them around.
For a dying girl, she sure was strong. I was having a hell of a time just holding her arm. Sweat dripping off my face, I looked across to Mia, who had already been staring at me. She mirrored my apprehension, a hundred questions flying through both our minds.
�
��Did she say anything to any of you before?” I asked, keeping my eyes on Mia’s. A long silence from everyone told me she hadn’t.
“Maybe she just couldn’t take it anymore?” Todd spoke up from his corner. For once, no one told him to zip it.
Jonah shook his head, the motion exaggerated by his upper body being yanked around by Abby’s head. “No, she wouldn’t have done this. Not Abby. She had to have had a better reason than that.”
Mia’s eyes widened only slightly enough that I would notice. I began yanking up on Abby’s shirtsleeve.
“What’re you doin’?!” Jake asked, his voice picking up that shrill edge.
“Check her!” I shouted back, a fresh wave of panic spreading through my chest.
On one hand, I knew we should just put a bullet in her brain. That would take care of two birds with one stone. But on the other? This was Abby, not some stranger. Could we put her down if she wasn’t infected? Should we? Or should we let her die on her own, assuming she hadn’t been infected?
Mia pulled the left sleeve up, saw nothing, and then moved on to the lower hem of Abby’s shirt. She used her knee to pin the seizing girl’s arm, checking the skin on her abdomen and sides, then further up. Abby’s torso was clear, no bites. The arm I was holding was fine as well. John and Jake were having a harder time, trying to hold Abby’s legs as they kicked while jerking on her pant legs.
“Todd!” I craned my head around to find the idiot still huddled in the corner. “Get over here!”