The Haunted Country

by Jason White

  The man’s smile sends shivers down my spine.

  “Looks like we’re in for some action,” Grant says, and I’d be damned if he wasn’t wearing the same smile. “You’d better get your sister situated. It’s going to get loud.”

  “Look, the place obviously belongs to him, let’s just give it up. We can find another.”

  “It’s not their place,” Grant says as he moves away from the window, taking shelter behind the couch. “If it was, he wouldn’t be willing to fill it full of holes.”

  “He hasn’t filled it full of holes, yet,” I say, but it sounds ridiculous and empty when two seconds later their guns pop and crack and the windows shatter with flying shards of glass and splinters of wood. Taking fist-sized chunks out of the house and its innards.

  I’m unsure as to when Cindy started screaming as I can only hear her shrill cry between gun blasts, which seem to go on and on forever.

  If this was their place, they wouldn’t be so willing to shoot it to hell and back like they’re doing right now, as Grant said. Judging by their hoots and hollers coming from them as they shoot, they’re also having one hell of a good time doing it.

  Debris flies everywhere, glass and plaster and wood raining down on me with the ferocity of subzero winter squalls as I try to find my way to the staircase. Hot liquid on my forehead and I know that I’m bleeding. So I cover my head with my hands and curl up near the staircase, the source of the flying splinters as holes burst through the carpet and cause the wood beneath to disintegrate.

  The shooting ends. Whether they stopped to reload or to check to see if we’re still alive I can’t tell. I notice the gaping holes that were once the glass panels of the windows at the front of the house, the mutilated shards of their framing. The staircase is full of holes and wood and carpet debris.

  I take my chance and scoot up the broken steps, which surprisingly still hold, and run towards Cindy’s screaming. I pause in surprise when I turn around to see that Grant is behind me. I must have given him a look, because he says, “What? We’ll get a better advantage from up here on the bastards once they start shooting again.”

  We both run in the same direction, toward the bedroom at the front of the house that Cindy and I had been sleeping in. She was having an afternoon nap when the shooting began, but now she’s standing in the corner. Her hands curled at her chest, her entire body curling into the wall as though she thought it was made of flesh, as though it had arms to wrap protectively around her. Her screams have stopped, but her sobs are loud.

  Immediately I go to her.

  Grant heads to the window, which look a lot like the windows downstairs. “Oh no you don’t!” he yells, and his rifle blasts three rounds into the ground below. Someone, a man from what I can tell, begins to scream.

  “They were attempting to get in the house, but I got one of them,” Grant says. He leans along the window pane while taking short and quick peeks outside.

  Cindy’s cries return to the ear-tearing screams. I hold her tighter; say soothing words that do nothing to stop her.

  “Show her some fucking restraint!” Grant says, still peeking out the window. “She along with all this goddamn gunfire is giving me a headache!”

  “Suck it up,” I say. I doubt he hears me. The thunder of gunfire erupts again, and the second story becomes saturated in flying debris, dust, and the growing stench of cordite. I pull Cindy with me to the floor and try crawling with her to the end of the bed. She’s frozen stiff with fear and the only thing working is her mouth and throat.

  Grant’s there again, crab walking on kneeling knees and gorilla arms. He grabs Cindy, and as though he read my mind, he drags her to the end of the bed propping her up so that her back leans against the footboard. He grabs her by the chin, positioning her face so that she’s looking at him.

  I go to intervene, but using his free hand, Grant pulls a pistol from his pants and aims it at me. I’m pretty sure that it’s a Glock. The .30 .06 is right on the other side of him, leaning against the bed, I know that if I lunge for it, Grant’s sidearm could punch holes through me. I wouldn’t put it past him.

  “You need to stop screaming,” he says to Cindy, but she’s not listening. Tears roll down her cheeks in fat rivers, her lips covered in saliva and snot.

  He gives her head a shake and I’m surprised how gentle it is. Somehow the shake is enough to help her focus and make eye contact, which is rare enough on its own, but she also stops crying.

  When Grant speaks again, his voice is soft and slow, his eyebrows raised as if to emphasize the importance of his words. “You can’t scream like that. It only brings the bad guys.”

  It’s something I’ve never seen before and I’m not even certain that I’m seeing it, but Cindy holds the eye contact for a long time. So long that I feel a pang of jealousy. I’ve been taking care of her all my life, tried for a long time to get through to her, and this guy can communicate with her?

  The guy who knocked her out?

  I realize that the gunfire has stopped, had been stopped for a while and that the bastards shooting at us are now yelling. Grant flips the Glock over so that the barrel is no longer aimed at me.

  “Take this and make sure they’re not trying to get in here,” he says to me, but he keeps staring into Cindy’s eyes, even though she’s no longer looking at him.

  “I got my own, thanks,” I say.

  “Your six shooter?” Grant says, and laughs. “Use this, it holds more bullets.”

  I grab the pistol’s handle, hard with its metal roughened surface like sandpaper against my hand. Grant let’s go and the weight of the gun in my hand is tangible, suddenly all too real.

  I’ve held and shot guns in the past year since the dead began walking, but I’ve only fired against zombies. I’ve never fired against another human being. I didn’t even shoot the bastard who tried to rape Cindy. Just made sure that the undead got their fill.

  I head over to the window and copy the way Grant did by creeping around its edge, then brave a look down below. Relief fills me. The bastards are huddled behind their truck, a red Ford. I can see a pair of legs sticking out the back end. There’s a thick blood trail from the side of the truck closest to the house which leads to where the legs are. He must be the one that Grant shot.

  It looks like someone might be working on him, too. His legs jiggle in a rhythm that suggests that someone is pumping on his chest. A muffled voice, “Come on, Come on!” comes with each jerk of the legs. Ice flows through my veins. Why did it have to come to this?

  On the other side of the Ford, a man wearing a cowboy hat has what looks like some kind of automatic rifle pointed at the window, right at me every time I take a peek. Short burst explosions echo and drown out the frantic demands of the strained medic. Glass and woodchips shatter from what’s left of the window, stabbing into my face and upper arms.

  Cindy screams and Grant immediately repeats, “No, that’ll only attract the bad guys.”

  As if by answer, more shots rip through the house and I duck and wait for Cindy’s screams, but they don’t come.

  Is Grant really breaking through to her?

  “Use that gun, Son!” Grant yells at me. “Or they’re going to think that they can just waltz in here an’ take care of us.”

  I raise the gun up to my chest, then lower it. I peek outside and raise the gun again. There’s nobody moving down there. The legs of the fallen man have stopped moving.

  “You don’t need to hit anyone,” Grant says. “Just shoot at them to keep them where they are.”

  The gun I hold is then outside the window, aimed at the truck. I fire once, twice, a third time, surprised at Glock’s power. The bullets hit the truck’s driver’s side window, shattering it. The other two punch holes in the empty truck bed.

  Grant is once again at my side, looking out the window, his head weaving back and forth as though he could dodge bullets if the bandits below fired back.

  “Not bad, kid,” he says, taking the gun
from my hand. “But I was thinking something more like this.” His arms straighten and he holds the trigger down until the clip empties. Bullets punch holes through the Ford’s side, the truck bed, and the ground just beyond where the bandits hide. Once the pistol is empty, he releases the magazine, and then, like magic, has another in his hand and slams it home.

  “That’ll keep them quiet for a while.”

  “I think you killed one of them,” I say, pointing to the motionless legs.

  He looks at the blood, at the stillness of the body itself and quietly swears to himself. “They’re gonna want something in return,” he says. “Ah, but there’s some good news.”

  I shake my head, shrug my shoulders, wondering what the hell he could be talking about. Is he thinking of running out the back door? That would be good news, but then if the men saw or heard us, they’d hop in their truck, flattened tires or not, and run us down.

  “Your sister,” Grant says. “She was quiet during that last bit of gunfire.”

  I look over to the end of the bed, then crawl over so that I can see her. She remains as I left her. Curled up to the footboard of the bed. I know that if she could disappear into that wood, she would not hesitate. She holds her knees to her chest with fingers clenched so tight that her finger tips have turned white. Her eyes are wide and wet with terror, but she’s not crying. Instead, she rocks back and forth. Back and forth. Perhaps some innate memory of being rocked to sleep as a baby. Her only comfort. I can’t remember my mother ever being that sympathetic or loving, so I doubt it.

  Grant fires more shots out the window. Although Cindy flinches at each one, she doesn’t scream.

  “Jesus Christ,” I say once Grant is finished firing. “Did you work with people like Cindy before all this?”

  “No,” he says. “You weren’t telling her why it was bad for her to scream that way. You just told her not to do it. She understands a lot more than you think.”

  The words sting, but as Cindy’s frightened gaze comes up to meet mine, I realize that maybe it’s true. I’ve always known that Cindy could think, no matter how limited. But I was never sure just how much language she understood, if any at all. She rarely responded before the apocalypse. Even her special educational teachers said that she would not respond to us very much when we talked to her. It was drilled into our heads. Was it possible that self-preservation had somehow made her smarter in order to raise her chances at surviving this new world?

  The thought makes me shiver. It also fills me with pride. Cindy is getting stronger while I crumble away inside, the seams of my sanity tearing in a whirlwind of violence and decay. I’m coming real close to giving up, and here’s my sister, who can’t even read a clock, getting stronger.

  From outside come more gunshots. Judging from the type of terrified screams and the fact that no bullets turned any part of our hideout to woodchips, their bandit comrade had just reanimated and had to be put back down. Often I think of having to do that to Cindy if she were to die and come back. I’ve never had to do anything like that, and doubt that I have the strength or the balls.

  I reach out and touch Cindy’s face, wipe the wetness from her eyes.

  “I’m sorry,” I say to her, and her eyes roll around, finally landing on my own blurring gaze. What could be a small smile appears on her lips, but then it’s gone and she looking at the ceiling again.

  The standoff continues, flowing at a dreadfully slow place. I remember watching hostage situations in movies where bank robbers held a group of men and woman at gunpoint for hours on end. I thought that the whole experience would be one of continuous terror and tight, jittering muscles. Especially after a firefight and a casualty. We’ve experienced no more gunshots since the bandit’s resurrection, no more attempted house raids. Instead, they use words, threats of what they plan to do to us once they get in. They would get in, they promise, no matter what.

  They’re stupid in more than just making noise. Now that the sun’s set, they’ve also lit a fire. Grant’s muttered more than once how surprised he is that they’ve survived this long.

  What I didn’t expect was the boredom as the hours passed by. With the windows shot out the boredom is made worse by the early onset of winter. I shiver in the cold darkness and wonder how to get my blood flowing again.

  A moaning from outside that doesn’t come from the bandits. The cold is forgotten. I’m surprised that we hadn’t heard the sounds before now. The zombies must be thinning out in this area, or the cold has indeed slowed them down. Their moans creep through the inky black woods, and once again they remind me of ghosts, specters of both nightmare and the waking world.

  Cindy’s own moans soon overwhelm the undead. She trembles in my arms, and although she trembled earlier from the cold, the sounds coming from her throat are beginning to become serious.

  “Shhh,” I coo in her ear, but it doesn’t do anything. I rub her arms and stroke the hair from her face. I make sure that the thick comforters cocooning us are up around her neck, but this only agitates her. She squirms and wriggles, fighting the temporary restraints of my arms.

  “You can’t scream,” I tell her. “It’ll only bring the bad guys.”

  She screams anyway. It’s loud and hurts my ears. A sound I ought to be used to by now.

  Grant curses and lights a lantern. He crawls over in the dim light, making sure not to get within the range of the shooters outside who are waiting for us to make a mistake outside. He looks like some configuration of crab and human. A claw reaches out, grabs Cindy by the cheeks of her face, and the crustacean’s giant head is within inches of hers, silencing her.

  “What did we talk about, Cindy?” He snarls, steam coming out his mouth with his words, and although she remains quiet, her body continues to tremble in my arms. “No loud noises from any of us,” he says. “Or the bad guys will get us. Is that what you want?”

  Only silence answers his question, but it’s enough. He lets go of Cindy, glares at her for a second or two longer, says, “I didn’t think so. Now, I’m trusting you. Both of you,” and then he’s back at the window, where I presume he’s been perched since it got dark.

  “Looks like this’s gonna end one way or another,” a bandit yells from outside, meaning the approaching zombies. “You fuckers gonna die, now!”

  Grant chuckles to himself, mutters, “What stupid fucks,” and then out the window, “How do you suppose they’re gonna get us before they get you. I’m betting that we’re all fucked. But you more so than us as it stands right now!”

  Silence as his words sink in. In the silence I can hear the undead getting closer now that words have been exchanged. They know exactly where we are. It won’t be long now.

  “We got a truck, asshole!”

  Again Grant chuckles, quickly pops up into the window, takes aim and fires three rounds below. Cursing follows, and then, “You fucking asshole!”

  The window frame, or what’s left of it explodes with the firecracker pop of gunfire. I roll off the bed with Cindy, and together we resume our place behind the footrest. Grant crouches to the right of the gaping hole, hands gripping his rifle, squinting the opposite way to protect his eyes from splinters.

  “You already killed one of us, you fucking psychopath!” The words come in a sudden moment of quiet before holes punch through the walls again. In the cacophony, I think that I can hear Grant’s laughter. He’s laughing as though someone had said something funny, or perhaps the laughter is an indication of the state of his sanity. The sound of it makes my intestines squirm even more than the gunfire, but not as much as the cries of the approaching undead. Madness is commonplace in this world. I’ve felt the pin pricks of its spiders crawl by the thousands beneath my skull in the last year. More than I’d ever care to ever admit. I want to laugh with him. To laugh at the absurdity of it all, the thought that we could survive this. The absurdity of the idiots outside who’ve been shooting at us half the day thinking that we’re the ones doing wrong.

  It just sudde
nly seems so comical, so ridiculous, that all one could hope to do is laugh. Laugh and laugh until you cough. Then cough and cough until bits of your lungs come out.

  I don’t laugh, despite the desire. If I start, I don’t think it would end. Grant has obviously passed that point. He’s rolling on the floor even when the firing from outside stops. When he finally sits up, he wipes the tears from his eyes and again, perhaps with suicidal intent, leans out the window.

  “Who came here today looking for loot and fuck knows what else?” he asks. “Who the fuck shot their weapons first?”

  “This is our goddamn property!” is the reply.

  “If that were so, you wouldn’t have been so goddamn willing to shoot it to shit like you have!”

  Apparently they have nothing else to say about this. Outside the orange glow of the bandit’s fire snap and crackle. The sound would have been normal, almost calming, if not for the undeads’ constant growls. It doesn’t matter. All sounds are suddenly overwhelmed by the jerks that lit the fire punching more holes into the walls. This time, instead of laughing, Grant crab crawls to our side. Over the gunfire he yells, “Come on, it’s time we got out of here.”

  Before the words sink in, he’s got hold of my bicep in a painful vice grip and pulls both Cindy and me to our feet. We leave the lantern burning—surprising that it’s still going at all amongst the chaos—and head into the hallway, then down the stairs. The men outside continue firing their weapons. From here we can see the pop flash from their barrels, the spark of the bullets as they dart up at the second floor. My ears ring and Cindy, still wrapped in my arms, squirms. She has yet to scream since Grant yelled at her last. For that I am glad.

  Cindy and I are shuffled behind the couch while Grant heads to the window by the front door. He kneels and takes aim at the shadowy silhouettes of the bandits. One shot and the firing from outside ends and turns to cries of rage and pain.