Mara rose to her feet, intent on returning to her workshop to consider this new idea further. She turned and stopped cold, confronted by a nightmare she never thought possible.
A zombie had shambled to within arm’s length. It stood there, glowering up at her through milky eyes. Half of its face had been torn away. Dried gore had congealed around the zombie’s gaping maw. A once-pink t-shirt was now torn, grimy, and encrusted in dried blood. The zombie’s fingernails had all sheared off, leaving bony stubs protruding from filthy, desiccated fingers.
Still, Mara thought she recognized those fingers, the nails chewed away by a scared little girl huddled on a sofa and asking about her daddy and about Jesus. Mara glanced down and confirmed her fear.
The diminutive zombie still wore one tattered shoe.
Tears blurring her vision, Mara knelt and held her arms open as Skylar stepped closer.
***
Time crawled, a snail laboring through molasses. Seconds passed like minutes, minutes felt like hours, and days masqueraded as weeks. Mara lived her life in a haze, hunting zombies on autopilot, and dispensing doses of ecstasy—or insanity—with curt brevity.
Embracing her daughter, only to betray her with the twist of a blade had been the hardest thing she had ever done. Nevertheless, the decision she had made next had pushed her resolve further than she had ever thought possible. She needed to see, needed to know, and the only way to know was to experience the memories herself.
Mara had brought Skylar home in the wheelbarrow and eased her into the recliner in the workshop. Skylar had looked tiny nestled in the recliner. Mara had stroked her daughter’s cheeks, no longer fearful of being bit and infected. Violent sobs shook her until her tear ducts gave up, unable to keep pace with her guilt and sorrow. At last, Mara had plugged the cranial saw into the generator and sat down to her task.
Bone dust and the odor of burned hair had permeated the room by the time she’d finished. Mara had removed her daughter’s brain, extracted the limbic lobe and had left it hanging in the drying room apart from the others.
That had been a month prior.
Now Mara sat alone in the same bloodstained recliner; a dealer about to sample her product for the first and last time. She fingered the dried brain matter, so mushroom-like in texture. It looked and felt enough like hallucinogenic fungi that she understood how so many of her clients could have missed the truth. Or perhaps, deep down, some of them had known but had not wanted to acknowledge the inconvenient reality.
“They’re encephaloshrooms,” Mara muttered. “That’s marketing gold.” She laughed without mirth.
In carrying out the details of the sentence she had handed down upon herself, Mara had intentionally left her door unlocked; if someone living came to rob her, so be it. If one of the undead intruded upon her while the drug swept her away, so be that as well. She had made her peace with both possibilities.
Right now only one thing mattered. Mara needed to see herself through her daughter’s eyes. She would witness what kind of life Skylar had lived. Had she been happy or miserable? Had she felt loved or ignored? Mara would experience it firsthand in one concentrated dose. But would the revelation bring her jubilation or retribution?
Mara pressed the dried shred of brain onto her tongue like a communion wafer and closed her eyes. She chewed, swallowed, and attempted to prepare herself for whatever came next.
15 Blood in the Water by Emmet O’Cuana
Tom kept one eye on his son in the back of the car as he drove. Stanley slept through most of the journey. Occasionally he would stir to the sound of Tom’s wife crying. Charlotte made a soft and wet keening sound that made broke Tom’s heart.
Tom’s son slept and dreamed faraway dreams, his wife sobbed, and outside the family vehicle the living hid in their homes, motionless, terrified—and the dead walked.
When morning came, he watched as Stanley awoke and rubbed his eyes, squinting out the window in the morning light. The car was now crossing a bridge across a grey, choppy sea. A thick mist obscured the road ahead.
Tom was exhausted. He had driven all night without a break, fear chasing him to this remote island off the west coast of Ireland that he had a dim memory of from a childhood holiday. It was a mad hope that had brought them here, but then the world had become mad.
He realized he was gripping the wheel so hard he was fixed into his seat, tensed, vibrating in concert with the engine.
Charlotte looked hollowed out by shock. She had said little else over the night except to mention the thought of eating made her nauseous.
But Stanley had slept through the worst of it. He had not seen the bodies by the roadside, the burning homes near the motorway, or the train swarmed by a horde of those things. He had slept and dreamed, while Tom and Charlotte had not been able to close their eyes all night. The car engine had muffled the screams. The memories would remain for them.
“Where are we?” Stanley asked. The voice of his son almost made Tom drive through the guard-rail into the sea. The spell was broken.
“You remember I showed you the map of Mayo?” Tom replied before prompting, “It’s a safe place for us.”
“We’re on a holiday, Stanley,” said Charlotte, giving her husband a meaningful look.
Ahead was the island. There was a man standing at the end of the bridge. The car slowed to a stop.
***
Minutes passed. It felt like hours to Tom. Was this one of the creatures? He sat frozen in his seat, his foot resting on the clutch. If the island was not safe after all, he had no idea where else to go. If the things were here, too, there was nowhere left. Had he dragged his family across the countryside for nothing at all, survived against all odds only to meet a lonely end here? The stranger raised his right arm and waved. Time relaxed.
***
Stanley watched Charlotte give his father a reassuring squeeze on the arm. It was a private moment between them that was strange to him, a child, used to having their undivided attention. He did not like it.
Tom unbuckled his seatbelt and exited the car. The fog was so thick he seemed to vanish for a moment. Then a gust of wind cleared the way. His father and the stranger were only a few feet apart, speaking to one another.
“Mummy, who is that?”
“Shhh!”
Stanley knew enough to be quiet, but leaned forward, squeezing between the driver and passenger seats to watch. His mother reached back and gripped his right shoulder, hard. Her fear was being broadcast within the confines of their car with her every ragged breath, each shivering twitch of her arm, but to Stanley it was all just noise. He had always been a poor observer of the world outside of his own immediate concerns.
The man waved to the car and then walked back the way he had come. Stanley watched Tom turn and smile grimly at him and his mother.
“Oh,” Charlotte said simply. “Oh.” She rubbed her belly tenderly.
“You’ve gotten fat, mummy,” said Stanley.
***
Charlotte promised herself she would tell Stanley that she was pregnant when she knew they were safe. He was a jealous child. A brother or sister would not be made welcome by Stanley. The world had ended, the dead were killing the living, and nothing much made sense anymore. If her son’s frequent emotional outbursts were added to all of this, any hope of keeping her calm would be destroyed. She felt so tired.
Only a boy so self-absorbed could have slept so soundly in their car that night. Charlotte loved her son. He was her flesh and blood. She had made peace some time ago that he was a little shit.
***
Mick had lived on the island his whole life. Before the Trouble started—he had reclaimed that particular expression for the mass slaughter of the living by the rotting dead, now that they had done for Catholics, Protestants and everyone else in the country—he had rarely visited the mainland.
“Not likely to ever again now, eh?” he said cheerfully, as he threw another lump of peat on the fire.
His guests h
uddled together on the thin carpet by the fire to warm themselves. Mick’s home was a small stone building with a thatch roof. The man himself looked every inch the Man of Aran, postcard-friendly stereotype Charlotte remembered from regional news programs on national broadcaster RTE. She and Tom had that softness in appearance of a comfortable city life in Dublin. Standing by the fire, dressed in a woollen geansaí, raincoat and worn jeans, clean-shaven and with kind eyes—Mick could have been the romantic hero of a Maeve Binchy novel Charlotte had read as a teenager.
“Yes, haven’t seen anybody here for a while now. Your car was the first across that bridge since this whole business started. I understand, I suppose. Some felt they could defend their homes when it started. They thought it would all be over soon. But I knew it wouldn’t be. Not Trouble like this. The dead and all,” he chuckled, “that’s too much trouble for anyone.”
Mick was all alone on the island. There had been others, old families like his, descendants of fishermen that had lived here for centuries. But the homes of his one-time neighbours were empty now. The dark inflection in his voice brooked no further questions on the matter. They were not likely to come back. Charlotte made a note of that. The strangeness of this situation right now was less of a priority than the dead rising.
“But you are safe here,” he said, with those kindly brown eyes lit by the fire. “Safe as a marquess in his castle.”
Charlotte smiled tightly, her husband hugging her to him. Mick gave the boy a brief glance, and for the briefest moment his expression changed from a welcoming smile to a frown. Charlotte had no idea what that meant. Why did Mick feel sorry for Stanley? Hadn’t he just said they were safe?
After the family had warmed themselves sufficiently Mick served them dinner. Fish stew. “Get used to it,” their host laughed.
***
The island quickly became a home and, until the day by the rock pool, Stanley continued to be oblivious to the disaster that had overtaken their lives and was not afraid.
He found the island to be an ideal playground. Stanley was not lonely and did not miss the company of other children. He had always been a solitary child. When his schoolmates had chased each other around the yard, or kicked a ball around, teachers used to find him tucked into a corner of the classroom reading a large book he’d lugged about in his bag. He was oddly proud of his bookishness, saw it as an achievement of sorts. He chose to ignore that the other children did not want to play with him. The books he read did not have pictures or large type. He read stories that he assumed grown-ups would read. He did not meet many book-readers.
On the island, in the absence of any other children and with a paucity of reading material, Stanley discovered the joys of running, of hiding, and exploring the rocky grassland of his new home. This island was his schoolyard now and, without the distraction of the printed page, he began to invent games for his own amusement.
Sometimes his mother Charlotte would come and find him before dinner. That in itself was a game for Stanley, hiding and giggling as his mother shouted herself hoarse. Every now and then, Mick would be the one to track him down. Mick was always smiling, friendly, happy to see a child at play once more on the island. He didn’t mind looking for him. But he gave Stanley a stern warning.
“Stay away from the beaches and caves down by the water, son. It gets rough out there and the sea could take you away in a jiffy!”
There was a cluster of empty homes on the raised hillock of the island, perfect for looking down on the wide blue ocean and affording a good view of the bridge to the mainland. In the mornings Mick would sit on a stool outside, smoke some of his quickly diminishing store of tobacco in a favorite pipe, and gaze out across the sea.
Stanley’s family moved into a small house near Mick’s. They received food and clothing salvaged from the other homes. Stanley did not think about the missing people, or ask his parents where they had gone.
He would see Tom staring at the bridge as though trying to see something, sometimes standing on his tippy-toes. Eventually his father stopped after Mick began laughing at him so hard he had a coughing fit. “Sure we’re protected here,” Stanley heard Mick say to Tom, and then “the neamh-mairbh have never set foot on this island.” Only then did Tom unpack the car. Stanley did not ask what that word in his native language meant. He was not interested.
Stanley did notice that Mick would vanish sometimes. He would vanish, usually just before the sun went down, then reappear, all smiles, often with the evening meal of fresh cod. The light of a fire would be seen from inside his home, a few repeated bars of an old sea shanty echoing out into the warm night, the smell of peat smoke, and shortly afterwards they would hear his call to dinner.
One evening, when the smiles and laughter came more easily to Stanley’s parents, Tom asked Mick if he could join him fishing someday.
“Oh now, don’t worry about that,” said Mick, knocking his pipe against the table to dislodge ash and embers. “Let me take care of that. You get comfortable and take your ease for a while longer yet. We’ll have plenty of chores before winter, I assure you!”
“But we’ll be home by then,” said Stanley, laughing.
The adults all stopped and looked at the boy. Their faces were fixed in expressions of sadness. He only then in that moment knew the truth.
“We’re not going home, are we?”
“Darling, it is just not safe,” Charlotte said. She reached out to him and he jumped out of his chair, staring at her like a hunted animal.
“Don’t be mad…something very bad is happening back home,” his mother said. “Some very bad people were hurting our neighbors, Stanley. It was too dangerous for us there, so we ran away.”
“You’re safe now, son,” said Mick. “You are all welcome to stay here for as long as you want. The bad people won’t find you here.”
Stanley started to shout at them at the top of his lungs. His head was hot with rage and he felt sick in his stomach like he was about to vomit. They did what they could to calm him. He hated Tom then—Tom who was weak, who would flutter his hands like a shirt on a clothesline in the wind and only make Stanley angrier; Charlotte the woman who could barely raise her voice even when she tried. He had been trapped with these two weaklings and now they were stuck on an island in the middle of nowhere. No more books, no more movies. It was all so unfair! When he stopped, Stanley just fixed Tom and Charlotte with a stare full of hate.
Awkward goodnights followed, the adults trying to extricate themselves as politely as possible following his outburst. Mick was mortified. Stanley didn’t care. He wanted to go to the home they had left behind, to his own bed with its warm blankets, instead of the small cold room waiting for him in a cramped island cottage. That night he lay still for hours and listened to the waves.
***
Tomorrow he would tell them, Mick told himself. Tomorrow. For the boy’s sake. He looked at the worn sack he used to bring the gift of fish back up the hill. The time would be coming round again soon. He decided to give them another day. He knew Tom and Charlotte would make the right decision, break the cycle the island had been trapped in for so long. The dead were walking on the mainland, but an older evil had claimed this place as its home long before. There was a price to be paid for safe refuge.
***
Stanley left the house in the early morning. His parents were still in their room. Mick was nowhere to be seen. He made for the sound of the waves, walking down the hill. The path led down to the rock pools.
It was cold and crisp. The dew on the grass made him slip and lose his footing once or twice before he began to step more carefully. Sharp rocks jutted out from the boggy ground. Stanley had a vision of sliding down and smacking his head against one, cracking his skull open. His parents wouldn’t find him for hours. He imagined them seeing the blond hair of a cold corpse matted with blood and the island winds snatching away their miserable sobs. The thought of their grief made him smile.
He made slower, more careful progress
, grasping the long grass and emerging rocks to balance himself. The smell of sea air filled his nostrils and he felt excited to be exploring by himself. Mick’s warning about the sea rang in his ears, but he didn’t care. This small rebellion felt good. Life on the island was remaking him and he walked with a more confident step. Sucking cold air down into his lungs gave him a sense of exhilaration that movies watched from his bed had never matched.
He followed the little dirt path at a quickening pace, glad to be free of the treacherous soft and slippery earth of the slope. Round the bend it went and then he saw it—a small inlet, with sheer rock faces on both sides, a stretch of white sand and rocks in between. It was low tide and an outcrop of rocks ringed the beach containing a small pool of stagnant water.
And there was something in the rock pool. Stanley thought of a scarecrow cut down from its post, but he knew what this was. A body. The body of a man washed up on the pale sand.
Stanley started running towards it—gulls shrieking in the sky, the wind threatening to knock him off the path and down to the crash of waves below—he ran until his chest hurt and his nostrils were stinging from the abrasive salt air.
Stanley the bookish nerd would have run and called for an adult. Stanley the boy reborn on the island saw the opportunity for a real-life adventure
He jumped from the path down to the beach and there it was. But the body had been moved. It was on the dry sand, further away from the receding tide. At first Stanley thought a wave had caught it, thrown it forward on to the beach.
But the water was calm, a placid wet surface. The sand was darkly stained, tracking from the body to the water’s edge. And the body had no legs. It was a torso with arms, and no legs.
Apoc Series (Vol. 1): Whispers of the Apoc [Tales From The Zombie Apocalypse] Page 29