The Haunted Country

by Jason White

  The voice is familiar, but I can’t place it. I hesitate only a few seconds more before reason overrides paranoia and I unlock the door.

  A bearded man bursts through. It takes me a moment or two and I’m reminded of Dahmer’s lungs bursting through his back. The man who had pulled the trigger, killing the sick bastard, is standing in front of me.

  “Grant?”

  The man closes the door behind him and locks it. He leans against it, breathing hard. The sweat on his forehead and cheeks forms beads upon his pale skin. He opens his eyes and nods at me.

  “Yeah, it’s me.” He smiles. “I knew that you’d need my help sooner or later.”

  chapter six

  Grant goes to work quickly, bashing in the skulls of the undead that are breaking through the windows with the butt of his rifle. He doesn’t have to go outside to get them all. They’re dead, clumsy and, some would argue, blind. They know what they want and where to go.

  A breathless snarl comes from his lips, his eyes wild and fierce. At one point I see him smile. It all takes about twenty minutes, but he manages to take out the zombies with minimal sound. I wonder if he enjoys this work.

  When done, Grant steps up to Cindy. She’d been crying the whole time but stops long enough to step back and cover her chest with one hand. Her other hand is up at her head, the fingers dancing by her ear.

  “Shut your mouth,” Grant says. “You’re attracting the damn things.”

  His voice directed at her is violence enough to thrust her into deeper, louder burst of crying. Not for the first time, I wonder if her throat hurts twenty-four-seven.

  Grant looks at me, his jaw clenched, the grip on his rifle tightening and I think I know what’s going through his head.

  I’m not wrong.

  He brings the butt of the rifle up and smacks it dead center on Cindy’s forehead. The crying stops immediately, and Cindy crumples on the steps.

  “What the fuck?” I say, moving quickly to her side.

  “She needs to shut up or she’ll get us killed,” he says, his voice a snake’s hiss. “And don’t you yell at me. You fired your pistol. You’re not that dumb, kid. You know noise like that draws them! Were you trying to get yourself killed?”

  I enfold Cindy within my arms and notice that she’s not truly unconscious. Her eyelids remain half-lidded, her breathing rapid.

  “You didn’t have to hit her,” I say, though I know it’s a load of bullshit.

  Grant moves to the window and peers out.

  “We gotta get outta here,” he says. “Thanks to you and your retarded sister, there’s more on the way. If we can be quiet, we can make it back to a place I was staying at. But we gotta take care of some of them first or they might follow us. We gotta do it quietly. That means no gun shots, no crying sisters, got it?”

  I answer with a glare. I want to watch one of my bullets crash through his skull and paint the door and walls behind him with his brains. Yet, I can’t help but think that he’s right. Were you trying to get yourself killed? The question spins around inside my skull. What bothers me the most is that I don’t know the answer.

  “Why are you here? You said you didn’t want to take care of us.”

  This makes him pause. He looks through the front door window and then looks back at me. His expression is blank, or perhaps it’s a silent, controlled rage roiling behind his eyes. Whatever the case, he doesn’t answer me. Instead he motions to Cindy and says, “You’d better pick her up if you don’t want to leave her behind.”

  He grips his rifle and then is through the door and out in the morning amongst the dead. He holds the .30 .06 rifle like it’s a club, a baseball bat, using its massive stock to smash in skulls as he travels through the front yard and then into the forest. I follow with Cindy over my shoulder, surprised at how light she is. There was a time when carrying her would have been next to impossible. Back when the world was normal she loved to eat. Dale and Merrick used to spoil her with home baked pies, cookies, meals that were saturated with grease and carbohydrates. I remember the horrid way she used to chew her food, mouth open with her eyes looking up at the ceiling. If she particularly enjoyed the food, she’d laugh while chewing.

  Mom and Dad never let her eat this way. Hung over and/or wasted, they would grow impatient with her, slap her in the back of the head and tell her to chew like a normal person.

  This was not the way with Dale and Merrick. If she laughed while chewing her food, her fingers dancing with pleasure at her chest or by her ear and they would laugh with her. Merrick, who often took on the ordeal of feeding her, would sit by her side, holding the fork or spoon caked with greasy smears or sugary bliss by her mouth, would smile and stroke her hair until she took the offering.

  Cindy was fat then. A big girl. Now she’s like a sack of bony feathers. It’s not like I had grown any stronger. I was overweight, too, when all this began. Now my ribs protrude over my stomach. I’m often so hungry that I get dizzy when overexerted. Not today. Not now. Not with Cindy on my shoulder, dangling limp like a corpse and with Grant smashing in the skull of every undead thing he comes across.

  We move fast, bypassing trees and undead alike until the undead thin out and Grant no longer has to hit them down. Soon they’re gone, behind us, aside from the odd straggler. We slow down to a slow jog. My lungs are burning and I think I’m going to vomit. Grant, however, has a lot more energy. He’s rippled with muscle. How he has been able to stay in shape this long I have no idea, but his strength works exactly like fear does. It’s contagious. I can keep going so long as Grant’s by my side.

  By the time we reach the farmhouse he’d been staying in, only a few miles away from where Cindy and I almost met our fate, the stock of his .30 .06 is painted crimson-black. Chunks of rotting flesh cover his hands and wooden stock both, but Grant barely seems to notice. I can imagine that he’s used to this, fighting the dead like a professional, as if such things exist. Perhaps they do, or did, but I doubt it. Grant seems like he was either an athlete or a soldier in his previous life.

  The dead had no chance.

  Someone had boarded up the windows in the old farmhouse, yet each window has a small hole from where someone could keep an eye on the perimeter. Grant does this immediately, going from one window to the next. Again he leaves the house, ordering me to take Cindy upstairs, pick a bedroom and stay there until he comes back.

  He heads towards the undead that had managed to follow us. I watch as he takes them down and a shiver trails down my spine. There’s something very angry in the man who rescued me and my sister. There truly is joy in his eyes and his smile while he takes down the undead. A few of them are fresher, more vibrant, and he dances around them, tripping them with his own feet and hands and then pounding their skulls into mush with seeming ease. After the last one he stands in the spot, eyes examining the immediate surroundings. He’s looking for more, his chest heaving, muscles ripped, face flush with blood. What scares me the most is the expression on his face.

  He’s mad. Insane.

  I have no one else. Somehow I don’t really mind. I can’t help but to admire the man. My only problem now is convincing Cindy to see him the way I do.

  “Have you ever thought of putting your sister down?”

  Cindy is asleep and these were the first words Grant speaks after returning from killing the undead around the house. He had washed his gore-streaked hands and arms in a tub of cold water. My admiration and joy at having this psycho in our lives died right then. Now, my throat burns with stomach acid. The anger is sudden, automatic.

  “What do you mean? Put her down like some dog?”

  “It’d be easier for her and for you,” he says, in a casual matter-of-fact way while wiping his hands on a dry white towel. “She would no longer suffer. Or come to a bad end. The world isn’t fit for a girl like her. It’s just a cold fact, and I don’t like it much more than you, but she’ll get you killed, no matter how much you love her.”

  I’m speechless, word
s caught in my throat like chunks of ice. When the words do finally come, they come without thought or preamble.

  “This might be hard for you to understand,” I say, “But Cindy is twelve years old. All she’s really had in her life is me. You get that? That means that since I was three years old I’ve been taking care of her to the best of my ability. Our parents couldn’t have given a shit. You’re right, it’s a miracle that she’s still alive, but I have never given up on her and I’m not about to, no matter what an ugly fuck like you says.”

  I raise my eyebrows, spikes of white-hot adrenaline nearly blinding my vision.

  “Is that why you tried to get yourself killed back there at that farm? You didn’t do anything to secure yourself or to keep your sister quiet! And when they came you fired your weapon. There will be a horde of the things there this time tomorrow. That don’t matter, cause if I hadn’t’ve, you guys’d be zombie food right now.”

  “You’re a real asshole, you know that?”

  My cheeks burn. I want to say something intelligent, something to put the fucker in his place, but my mind is blank and the only things that do come are more childish insults. I suppose that I am a child to this idiot, but then any fifteen-year-old kid would be a child to him. This doesn’t change the fact that my eyes burn with angry tears, though, and I don’t realize that I had turned around until Grant’s hand lands on my shoulder.

  “Listen, kid,” he says. “I don’t want to hurt your sister, and I won’t. But if you’re sticking with me, then it’s your responsibility to keep her quiet. If you don’t, I’ll have no choice but to knock her out again. I’m not getting killed because she can’t keep her yap shut. You should feel the same, because there’s not that many people out there kind enough to take you in with someone like that. In fact, there’s plenty out there who would try and take advantage of the fact that she can’t fight back. You understand what I’m trying to tell you?”

  I did understand as I thought again of the bastard who tried to rape Cindy not that long ago. I thought of the moment when I killed him, but I’m not going to tell Grant about that.

  I shrug his hand off my shoulder keep on topic.

  “A few days ago,” I say, “you just took off on us after I asked you to help. Why care now?”

  He breaks the eye contact, takes a step back, and looks to the floor.

  “I couldn’t,” he says. “I couldn’t just leave you. I wanted to, but I couldn’t.”

  I want to say more, but the words just won’t come. How could he even think about killing my sister? Who the hell does he think he is?

  It’s hard to believe that it was hot and humid just a few days ago. Tonight giant flakes fall from the sky. They quickly melt on the dying grass and gravel of the farmhouse driveway. It will collect if it keeps coming down this hard. I remember three winters ago it snowed just a week or two after Halloween. We got close to two feet of the shit, and it kept coming all season until March. That was one long winter. I swear that it snowed every night that year. Cloud dandruff as my father used to drunkenly slur, his rheumy eyes studying the orange glow of the low winter night clouds. The constant shoveling made me think of Russian prisoners in the work camps of Siberia. The wind slapped my face with the frozen hands of wraiths, turning my cheeks a deep crimson red. There seemed no end to the snow. A lot of the banks I shoveled for my parents’ often grew to be taller than I was.

  And it kept snowing.

  It is autumn, but I doubt we’ve reached Halloween yet. The snow falling the way it is now is a bad sign. I don’t know what we’d do if a winter that hard hit here and now. I can’t say how far from home we are. It cannot be that far. Although it didn’t always snow that hard in winter, the risk of a storm never went away. A good two feet can fall during any night or day. A storm could come from absolutely nowhere and could last for days.

  If that happened now, we’d be stuck here. We’d starve. Grant would no doubt want to kill and eat Cindy. I’m almost certain that if we do get stranded here, I’d have to keep my eye on him. Or kill him before he hurt us.

  Grant is a strange man. Despite the fact that he wanted to kill Cindy less than a week ago, within the last few days he’s been treating her with much more compassion. He talks to her all the time. At first she shied away from him, her hand either crumpled and pounding against her chest as her head and eyes lolled, or her fingers danced over her ears. Grant remained by her side until she didn’t look quite so panicked by his presence.

  He’d talk to her in a soothing voice, telling her that she can’t scream like she does when things get scary, because her screaming will only make it worse. He talks to her as though she’s an infant, and I suppose that intellectually she is only an infant, but she seems to enjoy his trying to communicate with her. I keep my eye on him every time he speaks with her, though. I’m afraid that if I turn my back or leave the room, the sweet talk will disappear and his hands will grasp her neck quickly, like a striking snake, and he’ll choke the life from her. Or break her neck with one swift twist of the wrist.

  Then, just like that, I wonder why I fight so hard to keep Cindy alive. Death is everywhere, it seems.

  It’s gotta be hope. Or something close to it.

  I know that the snow falling outside fills me with hope. Before the apocalypse, friends of mine like Ben and Franklin often said that they’d move north if the zombies were to ever come. Their reasoning was simple: with snow comes the cold. If it’s a fact that water freezes, then so too will flesh, rotted and dead and living alike. Although we haven’t seen any undead in days, I feel that my old friends, long dead by now I’m sure, both of them probably zombies themselves, are wrong.

  I used to argue the same point, though. It makes sense. It’s logical. But they’re still out there, moving around despite the sub-zero temperatures. You can hear them crying out to each other late at night. They sound like dying wildlife calling out for comfort. In reality, I know that they call to one another to gather and grow their numbers.

  As the snow falls thick and heavy they sound like the howling wind. Like wraiths soaring around the trees.

  .

  “Come on, now,” the voice says. It sounds old and rattled. Tired, waking me out of a deep sleep so that I can identify with it. “You might as well come on out of there. Not your place for squattin’ in.”

  A loud crack and I’m suddenly sitting up, my eyes blurred with sleep, my heart pounding. The dread hangs heavily. Why can’t Cindy and I ever find peace?

  “Not no more,” Grant shouts back. “This place been free of people a long time.”

  “Not that long.”

  “Longer than a few months, you can bet on that! Judging by the dust of the place, I’d say a lot longer than that!”

  “Don’t matter. Place don’t belong to you!”

  “Far as I can tell, the place don’t belong to nobody anymore.”

  I get up and look out the window. Four men, all carrying pump action shotguns and .30 .03 rifles. With their flannel plaid jackets, cowboy boots and beards, they look like ranch hands. They’re probably farmers, so this house could very well belong to them.

  “Why don’t we let them in?” I say to Grant. “The house obviously belongs to them. This doesn’t need to get violent.”

  He’s sitting by the window he’s cranked open, a rifle in both hands, the barrel pointed up at the ceiling.

  “Because they’re full of shit,” he answers. “This ain’t their house. Could be they know the family who lived here, but they want nothing other than the supplies, both ours and the family that lived here before.”

  “How do you know that?”

  “God, kid! Use your senses,” he hisses, his eyes wrinkled with anger and frustration. He then motions around the living room. “Look at the pictures around here. None of them out there look like any them.”

  Over the fireplace hangs a large picture. It’s a family portrait, a woman with long blond hair stands beside a muscular man with a mustache. The woman�
�s red blouse matches her lipstick, and her smile is full of the cleanest teeth I have ever seen. The man wears a white sweater. Both husband’s and wife’s hands are placed on the shoulders of two boys, one around the age of ten, the other at least seven. Everyone, not just the mother, is smiling. The thing that breaks my heart is that the smiles seem genuine, natural. A good family that was probably, for the most part, happy. Pictures of each family member at various events and gatherings fill the rest of the living room. There are school pictures of the boys along the walls, a picture of the father pitching a baseball to the oldest son, a picture of dad holding a trout the size of his massive forearm by the mouth and gill. All are coated with dust.

  I look outside. None of the men out there lived here. Or, if they did they never had their picture taken and hung on the wall like a trophy. If they are indeed farmers I doubt that they’re from this area. I’m reluctant to agree with Grant. But he’s probably right. They came looking to fight, if they had to, for our food and water. Our guns and ammo. They may even have watched us for a couple of days to see just how dangerous we might be. I suppose I should feel some honor that they didn’t just kick down the door, kill us, and take what they want. Grant’s war-mongering idiocy is responsible for that.

  “I don’t think you get it,” the man at the forefront says. He’s wearing a leather winter jacket, jeans, hiking boots, and one of the bushiest mustaches I’ve ever seen. He stands by the driver’s side of an old red Ford pickup that wasn’t there the last time I looked out the window. The butt of his twelve-gage on his hip so that the barrel points up at the sky. His posse hide behind the Ford, their guns aimed at the house windows, at Grant and me. While he talks, Mr. Moustache holds up a hand as though telling his men to hold their fire.

  “We’re coming in there and getting what’s ours,” he says. “It doesn’t matter what you say. You can either lay that weapon of yours down or we can fill the house and everyone inside it full of holes. It’s your choice.”