'Til Death (The Fearlanders)

by Joseph Duncan

  She saw the blood then, a big chocolate-colored stain in the middle of the foyer, and she thought her heart was going to jump out of her chest. She squeezed her eyes shut and concentrated on her breathing, and the little surge of panic abated.

  “Should we try the phone?” she said, and she was surprised at how even her voice sounded. Surprised and proud of herself.

  Charlie turned around. There was a phone on a small table by the stairs. It was one of those cordless phones everybody owned before cell phones took over the market. His mom and dad had one just like it in their kitchen. The receiver was sitting in the charging base, a green led glowing faintly on the machine. That meant it was fully charged.

  “Yeah, try the phone,” Charlie said. “I’ll check out the rest of the house.”

  “Who should I call?” Rachel asked as she rose.

  “911, I guess,” Charlie said. He stood up with her, locked the front door. He wavered, looked like he was going to pass out for a moment, leaned against the door, holding the knob.

  “Charlie!”

  “I’m okay,” he said, eyes fluttering. He took a deep breath and squared his shoulders. “I’m fine,” he said with more certainty. “Try the phone.”

  She smiled at him, amazed by his strength and courage. Whatever her mother thought of him, whatever her family thought of them marrying so young, she was glad that they had found one another. If the world was coming to an end, she couldn’t think of anyone she’d rather ride it into the abyss with.

  As Charlie walked into the living room, Rachel went to the phone and lifted it from its cradle. It took her a moment to figure out how to use a landline phone, she was so used to her cell. She got a dial tone and tapped out 911, but received the same automated message she’d been getting all day. I’m sorry. Due to the unusual volume of calls, blah blah blah…

  She hung up as Charlie crossed back through the foyer, going into the kitchen. “Same thing,” she said. “Robot operator.” She fell into step behind him.

  They froze in the kitchen, staring out the window.

  “Oh, God,” Rachel moaned.

  A woman in a cream-colored nightgown with curlers in her hair the size of soup cans was wandering around in the back yard. Her gown was black with blood and the lower half on her face was missing. It was just gristle and teeth from her nose down.

  Like her (presumed) husband, she was stumbling around like a sleepwalker, blinking up at the sky as she worked her jaw restlessly, gnashing her teeth.

  “Get down,” Charlie hissed, and he pulled Raye to her knees.

  “Why?” Rachel asked. “They’re just wandering around outside.”

  “If they see us, they might attack,” he said. “You saw how those infected people acted back in town. It wouldn’t take anything to bust through one of these windows. We need to make sure no one sees us in here.”

  “Okay.”

  “Don’t walk in front of the windows,” he went on. “Stay down out of sight. And no lights. And try not to make any noise.”

  “Okay.”

  He crawled to the window and peeked up over the sill. “Whatever they’re infected with, it seems to make them… sort of dumb. It’s almost like they’re drugged or something.” He lowered back down and rubbed his chin thoughtfully. After a moment he smiled at her—a very tired smile—and said, “I guess we need to check out the upstairs.”

  That sounded like the beginning of a very unpleasant scene in a horror movie.

  Charlie crawled over by the kitchen cabinets, stood, and started opening and closing drawers. He said, “Aha!” and took out a large carving knife. He dropped back to his hands and knees and crossed by the window again. “You should stay down here,” he said.

  “Uh-uh. No way,” Rachel said. “When one of the group says ‘let’s split up’ in the movies, you know someone’s going to die.”

  Charlie laughed and nodded. “All right. Come on then.”

  They returned to the foyer. Before they went upstairs, Charlie peeked out the window in the front door. “Old Man Frobisher’s still out in the yard,” he said. “He’s looking up at one of the trees.” Charlie glanced at her, the corner of his mouth quirked up. “It would be sort of funny if it wasn’t so fucking awful. Am I going to be like that? Blank, like someone emptied the brains out of my skull.” He choked a little on that last part, his Adam’s apple jerking. He pushed aside his fear, said, “Come on, sexy butt.”

  As they climbed the stairs, Rachel examined the Frobisher’s pictures. Framed photos angled up the stairwell, moving forward through time as they ascended. It was like a slideshow. First, childhood photos of Mr. and Mrs. Frobisher, young, dressed in old-fashioned clothes. There was a teenaged Mr. Frobisher, looking slim and handsome with pomaded dark hair and his pants hiked all the way to his ribcage. Here was Mrs. Frobisher in a sexy beehive hairdo and hornrim glasses, rocking a classy flower print polyester dress. Wedding photos next, the bride and groom standing beside one another, his arm curled around her narrow waist. Next, their first child, a dark-headed boy, and then another boy, and a girl. The children aged in leaps and bounds as Rachel’s eyes moved from photo to photo: childhood, teen years, high school graduation pictures. The photo at the top of the stairwell depicted the Frobishers as they looked now, heavyset, late middle age, surrounded by three handsome young adult children.

  “They had three kids,” Rachel whispered. “Where are they now?”

  Maybe in the house with them, upstairs, standing in one of the rooms, staring blankly at the door. Maybe just around the corner...

  She was spooking herself, commanded herself to stop.

  The upstairs was silent, dimly lit. The only sound was the creak of the floor as they traversed the corridor. There were four bedrooms, all uninhabited. None of the children were up there. Rachel went to the window of the daughter’s bedroom and looked out on the back yard.

  “Oh, there they are,” she sighed, the relief in her voice palpable.

  Charlie peered over her shoulder. She tried to ignore the odd smell coming from his skin. He smelled like spoiled meat.

  You don’t smell like fresh peaches either, she said to herself.

  “Just like their mom and dad,” Charlie murmured.

  The Frobisher children were out in the field beyond the barn, all three of them. Like their mom and dad, they were just wandering around in dreamy circles, arms extended out like they were blind. There were two dark-headed boys and one redheaded girl. They were too far away to make out any other details.

  “So we have five of them outside,” Charlie said, moving away. He walked carefully to the door, choosing his steps like an old man who feared he might fall. He paused and turned back to her. “I suppose we should go check out the basement, too. Just to be thorough.”

  8. In the Dark

  Of course, the basement flabbergasted them. There were cots, water, food, a bathroom, a radio, a small television, a small kitchen area. Basically anything a person would need to survive Armageddon. “It’s perfect!” Charlie exclaimed, exploring the bomb shelter.

  Rachel was just as stunned as Charlie, but she balked when he suggested they sleep down there tonight. “I don’t think I can,” she objected. “You know how claustrophobic I am! Why can’t we stay in one of the upstairs bedrooms?”

  “Because one of those things might bust into the house,” he answered, looking through the shelves of canned food. “You don’t want to wake up with Old Man Frobisher climbing in the window.”

  “They can’t get in the upstairs windows,” Rachel said.

  “No, but if they got in the house with us upstairs, we’d be trapped with no food or water. We’d have to, I don’t know, tie our sheets together and climb out the window, I guess.”

  Rachel held her elbows in her hands, looking anxiously toward the basement steps. She could feel the weight of the house above her, the cold earth surrounding her on all sides. She knew she was just imagining it, but she wanted out of there, even if the zombies could g
et at them more easily upstairs.

  “Raye,” Charlie said, trying to keep the annoyance out of his voice, “this is the safest place for us to sleep. We won’t even have to go upstairs if we don’t want to. The door is thick, and it’s got a strong lock on it. Nothing will be able to get at us down here.”

  She felt like weeping, but only because she was so tired. “Okay,” she said reluctantly. “Okay, we’ll stay down here.”

  He moved as if to embrace her, then thought better of it. He didn’t want to infect her.

  And he was right, as usual. After a couple hours, after she got used to being down there, she felt safe for the first time since the attack at the Pack ‘N’ Tuck in Buncombe. Charlie laid down on one of the cots, giving in to his exhaustion at last, and was sleeping uneasily within moments of his head hitting the pillow. Hungry, Rachel heated a couple bowls of soup and fried some canned meat, then woke him up.

  “You need to eat something before you sleep,” she said. “You haven’t eaten since last night.”

  “I’m not hungry,” he said groggily. His eyes were red and glassy.

  “I’m not leaving you alone until you eat,” she insisted, so he sat up and ate.

  After eating, she insisted on changing his bandages. The Frobishers had medical supplies in their underground fortress as well.

  She unwound her makeshift bandages after Charlie removed his shirt and jerked back in horror. The wound where the wild woman had bitten him was puffy and oozing some kind of black pus-like substance. His entire shoulder was red and hot to the touch. “Is it bad?” Charlie asked, trying to see the injury. Rachel turned his head by the chin and said, “It’s not that bad.” She poured some peroxide on it, which instantly turned to foam, then applied tincture of iodine and rewrapped it in clean gauze from the Frobishers’ first aid kit.

  “There,” she said. “That better?”

  “No, it burns like hell. But thanks. You’ve got the makings of a fine nurse.”

  He slept again after that, but Rachel was too nervous to sleep. Instead, she tried the TV, and was surprised to find that most of the TV stations were still broadcasting.

  A few of them, like AMC and Showtime, were broadcasting their regularly schedules programs, but most were covering the pandemic. All the anchors and correspondents were reporting the news in feverish, disbelieving voice. After a few minutes of TV, Rachel was feeling a little feverish and disbelieving herself.

  People were running wild in the streets. There was wholesale slaughter, looting and destruction. India and Pakistan had nuked one another. The President of the United States had declared martial law. Rachel sat on the bunk next to Charlie and wept. Finally, she could take no more of it, and she turned the TV off.

  She looked at her husband wheezing in the cot beside her. He hadn’t put his shirt back on, and she let her eyes trail over his body. He had a pale but muscular torso, nice arms, flat belly. He was a very handsome man. She had called him beautiful once, which he had taken offense at for some reason, but he was beautiful. Men could be beautiful.

  She rose and lay down beside him. Infected or not, she needed a cuddle. He made room for her without waking, scooting over on the cot for her. She lay on his good arm, putting her chin against his chest, feeding on his closeness as a flower feeds on the sun.

  He was hot—so dreadfully hot!—but it felt good to lie beside him. She loved him. She loved him. He was her husband, and she loved him. She was suddenly, and he would say quite irrationally, overcome with a desire to make love to him, to have him inside her, disease or no disease, to take him into her body, pleasure him, love him until he filled her with his seed. She put her hand upon his crotch and squeezed it lightly. He continued to snore softly, so she held him and stroked him gently through his jeans.

  His eyelids cracked open. “What are you doing?” he asked.

  “What do you think I’m doing, silly?” she whispered, smiling at him.

  He took her wrist and moved her hand away. “We can’t.”

  She couldn’t say “why not” because she knew why not. So instead she said, “I know. I don’t care.”

  “Well, I do,” Charlie said, pulling his arm from beneath her and sitting up. “I don’t want to die knowing I got you sick. In fact, you really shouldn’t even be lying here beside me. We don’t know how the virus is transmitted.”

  If she said anything else, she knew it would just sound petulant and childish. Instead she nodded. She got up and went to the adjacent cot and lay down.

  “I’m sorry,” Charlie said.

  “No, you’re right,” she sighed, staring at the ceiling. “You’re always right.”

  He laughed. “No, I’m not.”

  Later, after they turned down the lights to sleep, Charlie murmured, “I can feel it inside me.”

  Rachel turned over. “What?”

  “The virus. Disease. Whatever it is. I can feel it worming its way through my body. It hurts. The nerve endings in my hands and feet are buzzing, like they went to sleep and they’re starting to get the feeling back. It’s all I can do to think straight.”

  “Is there anything I can do?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  He was quiet a while, so long she thought he’d dozed off again, then he spoke again.

  “I’m really scared, Raye,” he said. “I don’t want to die.”

  “I know, baby.”

  “I don’t want to turn into one of those things, either. It’s so awful. All we have are our minds, really, and that’s what it takes away from people. Our minds. The one thing that makes us us. You know what I’m saying?”

  “I think so.”

  “I don’t want to forget who I am. I don’t want to forget you. The memories I have of you are my most precious possessions.”

  “Charlie, please, you’re going to make me cry.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “No,” she said, wiping her cheeks in the dark. “You just say what you feel like saying. Say whatever you need to say. I like listening to you talk, even if its terrible things.”

  The next day the power went out. Charlie was prepared for it, however. He had found some Coleman lanterns and had them ready for just that eventuality. A little later, he handed her a bundle of clothesline and told her she better tie him to the bed.

  “Why?” she asked.

  His lips peeled back from his teeth. His eyes gleamed at her from the dark hollows of their sockets, moist and red and filmy. “Because right now all I want to do is rip your fucking throat out,” he said hoarsely.

  9 . Head, Meet Axe

  “This is probably going to sting a little,” Rachel said, raising the axe above her head. She was trying to make a joke of it, in honor of the man she had fallen in love with, but it came out sounding cruel and mad to her own ears, and she started to cry. She dropped the axe to the bare concrete floor of the Frobisher family’s bomb shelter and sank on her ass beside it, sobbing.

  The Phage had revived her husband shortly after he died. Now he was like all the rest of the monsters they had encountered thus far: dead and yet not dead. He tugged mindlessly at the ropes that bound his wrists to the bedframe, snarling and hissing at her, his handsome features twisted in rage, his eyes rheumy and soulless gray marbles. It was Charlie, but it was not Charlie. It was a hideous caricature of the man she had married.

  You have to do this, Rachel said to herself. You can’t just let him… BE like that!

  He wouldn’t want to be like that. If he still possessed the sense to speak, he would insist she do it. “It would be a mercy,” he would have said. “Put me out of my misery like a rabid dog.”

  But it was hard. Maybe too hard.

  She remembered the gentle, practical man he had been, the one who rubbed her feet whenever they were sore, who had been so proud when he won a stuffed animal for her out of a coin-operated crane machine—just like a kid!— who had, just days ago, promised to love, honor and cherish her forever, and it seemed like a blasphemy to harm ev
en a single hair on his beautiful head.

  And yet she had to chop that beautiful head off…

  The only way to kill them for sure, the anchorman on MSNBC had said before the power went out, was decapitation. The only way to kill them was to destroy the brain, whether it be gunshot, blunt trauma or chainsaw.

  Guns were out of the question. Rachel was scared of guns. She didn’t even know how to use one. A chainsaw would be too messy, and she didn’t think she had the strength to bash his head in with a can of Ravioli or something, so she had decided on the axe she’d found at the far end of the basement, over near the stove.

  She had to do it.

  Eventually, he was going to get loose, whether he tore the bedframe apart or he sawed through his own wrists with the ropes binding him to the bed, so she might as well do it and get it over with.

  In a way, she would be setting him free, she reasoned. Giving him peace. Besides, it wasn’t even really him. Not anymore. His soul had taken flight the moment he died-- had gone straight to heaven, she was sure-- and left behind this horrid thing. Not even a “him” anymore. A violent, slavering “it”.

  She had tried to talk to it, but it was mindless… just a crazed animal that jerked and twisted at the ropes that bound its wrists, sawing relentlessly through the meat of its own arms.

  Maybe… maybe if she covered its head with something…

  Wiping her eyes, Rachel used the handle of the axe to push herself up. She looked around, spotted a burlap sack of potatoes. She pulled the cord that held the end of it shut and shook the bag out, watching the spuds go rolling across the floor. Then, holding the empty sack in her hands, she cautiously approached her dead husband.

  Charlie snarled and jerked even more vigorously on the bed, trying to get at her. Tarry black blood oozed down his forearms. He had sawed his wrists almost to the bone, she saw.

  “Charles?” she murmured as she eased closer.

  He lunged and snapped at her.

  “Baby?”