The Haunted Country

by Jason White

  “Get your ass moving!” Eve says to me from the back of the house. As though I need her screaming at me with the front room nothing but flying chunks of wood and brick.

  I swing Cindy around onto my shoulder. She is still unresponsive, but I don’t have the time or luxury to worry about it right now. I follow the light of Eve’s lantern. I’m surprised that she waits for me. She stands at the opened back door, the lantern held high. Once she sees me, she turns the lantern off and tosses it.

  “Come on,” she says. “We’re dead meat already.”

  We run through the open doorway and into the cold. Eve slams the door behind us. It won’t distract the oncoming men, but it might give us a few minutes head start.

  It doesn’t take long for our eyes to adjust. It’s dark out here, but the houses look like blocks of darker matter. Between them we see faint candle lit windows. Outside, men run with lanterns and flashlights in hand. They shout orders amongst each other, trying to judge our whereabouts. This means they know we’re outside and we’re a hell of a long way from safety.

  There’s no time for Bill’s daughter. I doubt there’s even time enough for us.

  We run.

  Run until the muscles in my legs ache and my lungs burn. Cindy feels like she weighs a thousand pounds, when in reality I doubt she weighs more than a pound over a hundred. My breath comes in harsh gasps. My stomach churns. Still I run. Eve is before me, her figure dancing in the silver moonlight, dodging tree stumps, swing sets, while occasionally tripping over the dead or the odd toy truck.

  The gunshots echo over the voices when we reach a plaza. We run through the parking lot only to find more plazas. We finally come to a McDonald’s and a Sobey’s grocery, a liquor store, and then woods.

  The bullets find us, kicking up snow and dirt at our heels, but we’re almost away. We’re almost where we need to be in order to get away, to confuse and elude our adversaries. A sharp pain pierces my side and I fall.

  Warmth spreads from the stinging at my side. I am looking up into the night sky. It is clear and full of stars, the moon a half disk and right there, just out of hands reach. Cindy moans nearby and I realize that I had accidently flung her from me in my fall. I pray that she’s okay, but where is Eve?

  The voices come closer, closer, closer.

  Then they are here, above me to join the moon and the stars and the terrible beauty of the night.

  I just want to close my eyes and forget any of this has happened. I want to be back in my alcoholic parents’ house, with Dale watching old black and white horror movies with me, Cindy sleeping safely upstairs.

  “Lookie at what we found here,” a voice says. It’s gruff and deep. Familiar, even though it too is gasping for breath. I’ve heard that gasp before. Too close. Too much pain.

  His face blocks the beauty of the night. At first, it’s only a shadow of cheeks and sunken black holes for eyes. It’s his true face. The face of evil. My eyes adjust, and the evil morphs into Max’s. He is smiling down at me with his white teeth, his heavy breathe a mixture of coffee and whiskey.

  The smile turns into a pout. “I thought we had something going together,” he says. “I thought you liked me.”

  “That’s why you had to handcuff me to a cot?”

  “I was going to let you go,” he says. “I was even going to take care of your retarded sister for you. I was growing attached to you two. Now you’ve gone and fucked it up.”

  His finger trails down my cheek as he talks; a loving gesture that’s filled with malice and cruelty.

  The smile returns.

  “So, we’re going to have even more fun with you now,” he chuckles. “We’re going to create art out of you and your sister. That fucking bitch Eve.”

  I don’t say anything. There’s nothing to say. The man is insane, even though he has control over himself and his men. I could imagine him before the rising. If the redhead was correct in her assumed accusation, I could see him driving down the road, wearing a suit and tie, perhaps fifty pounds heavier and bathed in his own sweat. Hating his life, but not the life he lived inside his head, the very life he lived now. The life of a king, an emperor. A tyrant with no qualms over his deeds.

  Maybe the redhead was right. Maybe while driving down that highway, he’d come across a hitchhiker. A young man wearing denim shorts, a plaid shirt, a scraggly beard. He pulls over and is all smiles.

  “Come on in, partner! Where you heading?”

  His cock shifts in his pants as he thinks of the “tool kit” he has in the back seat and all the terribly wonderful things he’s going to introduce to this young man. They are in the middle of nowhere, after all. He could just drive off the road right now; drive into the field until they were too far away for traffic to see them.

  “Yeah, you understand,” Max says to me. He’s whispering now and the smile has crept back into his lips. Then his voice turns into a snarl. “You want it, don’t you?”

  No, I don’t, I think, but my tongue is too dry, my throat too much like a cylindrical wall of sandpaper for me to speak.

  “Now, tell me where is that bitch Eve?” he says.

  I remain silent, trying to swallow and work my tongue unsuccessfully.

  “His sister’s right here,” another voice says, motioning to my unmoving sister.

  The smile on Max’s face grows bigger. “That she is,” he says. “I think it’s time we show our friend here what fun’s all about.”

  Hand snake beneath my shoulders and grasp roughly beneath my armpits, pulling me up. They wrap my arms behind my back, the man’s own arms entwined with my own so that I can’t move. My ankle, which betrayed me in our attempted escape, screams at the movement. I try to focus on that pain rather than what the men want to show me. Max paces before us, then stops. He caresses my hair, then grabs it tightly as his expression changes and his fist plows into my jaw.

  I see stars and a warped vision of Max laughing. He then goes over to Cindy and turns her over. She moans at his touch as though she knows evil is near. She cries out, even if just a little, when her dazed eyes meet his.

  “Hello, Cindy,” Max says. “You ready to have some real fun?”

  chapter twenty-one

  The sound of Cindy’s screams will always haunt me, no matter what happens after this or how long I last. She comes alive when they touch her, their fists coming down on her face, her chest and stomach. They begin taking off her pants, despite the cold. She comes alive!

  She screams, kicks and thrusts the palm of her hands up into their faces.

  I want to go and help her, but Max holds me with my arms behind my back. I can hear him chuckle when I try to squirm free. “This is the best part,” he says, his breath hot and reeking of rotting things. “You get to see your sister die first! And in the worst way!”

  Again he chuckles, but it’s cut short by a loud crack that’s nearly deafening. The man standing above Cindy’s prone form, held down by two more of Max’s men, had his cock in his hands and was stroking hard it until that crack. His head juts upright, and in the dim light of the lanterns something spills from his skull just before he collapsed to land with his cock still in his hand, his mouth hanging open, his skull a ruin.

  Another crack and one of the men holding Cindy down jolts and screams. He lands on his back, wheezing, blood oozing from a wound in his chest, coloring his cheeks when he coughs.

  “Where’s Stephen?” Max shouts. “Where the fuck is Stephen?”

  The hold loosens on me, and I remember that there had been another man standing beside Max, shouting rude requests at what was to be a rape. He had held a rifle over his shoulder. It had made the man look insectile in the dim light.

  The other man at Cindy’s shoulders freezes as though he doesn’t know what to do. He looks at Max and shakes his head.

  “I don’t kno—”

  Crack!

  His eye explodes into a mass of jelly, blood, and skull. He falls over onto Cindy, who has gone back into herself, withdrawn an
d motionless.

  “Jesus!” Max yells. His grip tightens on me as he pulls me back out of the light of the lanterns. We head out of the clearing and back into the forest. Gunfire erupts from our left, from somewhere back in town. An explosion shakes the earth below our feet, and suddenly the forest is alive with motion.

  It’s the undead. Not the ones from Angus as Max’s men had cleared them out. No, these are from neighboring towns and farmer’s fields. The wandering army of undead. It has to be them. I’m almost relieved, but Cindy’s still in the snow, Eve’s still missing, and Max moves a thickly muscles arm around my throat, hugs me close to his body, using his free arm to aim a pistol at my sister’s body that slowly fades away.

  Screams echo through the night between the cracks of semi-automatic fire. “What the fuck is going on?” Max says.

  “What do you think?” I say, my voice strangled. “You stayed here too long. They’ve heard you and now they’ve come.”

  Bursting pain in my right kidney. Who knew getting hit in the kidney by a handgun could hurt so much? My ankle is suddenly forgotten. “I don’t fucking remember asking you, shithead,” Max snarls into my ear. I grimace, clench my teeth.

  The shadows in the forest continue to move, then, to our right, something comes at us. It shambles, walking stiffly as though the thing can no longer bend its knees. The gun moves from where it had planted itself in my back and Max shoots the zombie in the head. It drops immediately, a sack of dead flesh doing what it was supposed to do in the first place. Who knows? Maybe that’s all it wanted all along? I wouldn’t blame it.

  More gunfire, and a tree nearby splinters.

  “Fuck!”

  The arm tightens around my throat.

  “You let him go!” A voice comes from the dark woods. I can still see Cindy, way down there in the clearing, surrounded by dim golden light, a dead body on top of her like a blanket. I kick at the bastard holding me, but he’s like rock, impenetrable. I get the air cut off in my throat as a reward.

  “You wanna fight me, fucker?” Max whispers in my ear. “I’ll fucking kill ya, right here, right now.”

  Then I can breathe again. It comes in choked gasps.

  “Hey, asshole!” The voice comes again. This time I recognize it. Female. Eve’s voice.

  Another shot zips by. It thunks into a tree somewhere behind us.

  “I hope your aim is better than your tactics,” Max says. His laughter is a harsh bark. “I’ve killed younger than this.”

  “You probably fucked them, too, you sick piece of shit!” Eve’s voice seems to come from everywhere as it bounces off the trees. I can tell that she’s not that far away. Max knows it, too. I can tell by the way he’s inching to our left, back towards town, away from Eve and, hopefully, her shot.

  “I didn’t hear any complaints when it was you!”

  “I know when to keep my mouth shut!”

  Another shot. Snow and thin pieces of broken branches and pine needles rain down on us.

  “Don’t you move another step. You’re pal had a real good rifle on him. I make every shot I aim at!”

  Max’s movements stop. For seconds we just stand there, in the dark, the dim light of the half-moon up in the sky paints everything silver, but it’s still too dark to see anything. We stand there, a standoff with Eve out there in the forest, no doubt with us in her crossbeams, and Max’s arm resting on my shoulder, aiming into the darkness beyond.

  We take a step back.

  Crack!

  Max screams out in pain, the muscular arm loosening from around my neck. I take the chance before it disappears and raise my leg, the heel of my foot finding its target between Max’s legs.

  He lets me go with another cry, a release of breath.

  I turn and smash his nose with my fist. Hot blood glistens on my knuckles, he has me in his grasp again. He falls, his grip on my arm too tight for me to fight off. Pain explodes in my ankle from where I twisted it and so I go with him. Somehow, I end up on top. Blood is everywhere. It comes from his arm. I can’t see how bad it is, but Max is grunting and gritting his teeth at me.

  His eye are insane with agony and frustration and rage.

  “I’ll fucking kill you!” he says. “I’ll fucking kill all of you!”

  His teeth snap near my face. He’s trying to bite me! I use my free arm, the one not being held by his clamp-like fingers between our bodies. My forearm is at his throat. This is just like fending off a zombie, I think. Like a zombie, his teeth snap at me, fight at the weight I’ve put against his throat.

  How can he breathe?

  I doubt he is. I’ve crushed his throat as surely as he had mine not that long ago.

  Still his teeth snap. The only things letting me know that he’s actually alive were the words he spoke before I put my choke hold on him, and the fact that he’s slowly losing energy. His eyes begin rolling, and then, finally, his head relaxes, his teeth still showing but remain unmoving.

  “Well done,” Eve says from behind me. I get up off Max’s body and he lets in a giant gasp. “But I don’t think he’s dead yet.”

  I look at Eve. Her red short hair, her shapely hips almost highlighted in the soft moonlight. I look past her, down deep into the forest. Cindy is still there, still unmoving within the golden glow of the lamplight.

  “Thanks,” I say to Eve, meaning her saving my life, and I take off running in Cindy’s direction which, with the pain in my ankle, is more like a drunken limp. From behind I hear a gunshot and then Eve’s feet pounding and kicking up snow behind me. Or, at least I hope it’s Eve. If it was anyone else, I imagine they would have shot me by now.

  When I arrive at Cindy I’m winded, my legs tired. My ankle swollen and stretching my boot. My head spins with nausea. I pull the dead man off Cindy’s body and she doesn’t react. Her eyes stare at the sky above, but don’t stare at anything at all. Soft puffs of steam come from her open mouth, her chest rises and falls, but she feels dead to me when I grab her into my arms.

  “You need to make a decision.” Eve’s voice comes from behind like a dagger to my heart, startling me with things I don’t want to hear. “You’ll be doing her a favor.”

  I cradle her in my lap. Off in the woods there are screams of agony, screams of joy, and screams of men ordering other men around. These latter voices are closer and I can see beams of flashlights shifting through the woods, coming this way. They had probably seen the lantern’s glow and wondered what had happened to their master. Max the fascist, the rapist, the murderer tyrant. A man anyone would want to follow.

  “Listen, I know it’s ugly,” Eve says. Her voice breaks. She holds a handgun to me, the 30 .06 she claimed to have earlier, the one that had taken out Max’s arm, is strapped over her shoulder. Standing straight she looks like a soldier. Her eyes are full of pain and torment. Full of honesty and grim truth.

  The tears are hot when they spread down my cheeks. Funny how fast they become cold and freeze before they hit my chin. I look down at Cindy, at her deathlike gaze to the stars. I remember way back when Grant had suggested I put a bullet in her head after he had rescued us for a second time. I know now that he was probably right, that a young girl in Cindy’s condition had no real place in a world like this. Not with the dead wandering the forests and towns and roads. Not in a world populated with living people who’d rather hurt each other than find a way to survive what has become humanity’s lowest point in its entire history.

  Grant, why can’t you be here!

  Cindy’s eyes crawl towards me, pass me by. They focus. She’s staring at the gun in Eve’s hand, the one held out for me to take. I’m not sure if I’m actually seeing what I think I am.

  “Arlie,” she says, looking into my eyes now. Her eyes turn red with tears, and she nods her head.

  She’s broken inside. I was wrong to think that I should have shot her when Grant had first suggested it. I had never seen her so alive in the time that we spent with Grant. I don’t know if she had a small crush on Grant or i
f that were even possible, but he had pulled the best out of her I’d ever seen, and it hurt more than ever to see it gone now. Her body now more a lifeless husk then it ever was before the dead rose.

  “Arlie, lease!”

  Again, she’s looking at the gun. When I take the pistol from Eve’s hand, Cindy nods her head again, her eyes locked on mine.

  “I can’t,” I say. I weep and it sounds weak and pathetic. Cindy is all I’ve ever really known throughout all this. It was my mission to take care of her. I doubt that I can go on without her.

  Eve sniffles behind me. She puts a hand on my shoulder and then walks away. The men in the flashlights are getting closer. They stop every so often to fire off a round or two. I imagine it’s the undead they are shooting at, as sometimes they stop when one of them starts screaming like a little girl with a bee sting.

  The dead are all around us now. I can hear Eve smashing the butt of her rifle against something’s skull. It squashes and cracks like a watermelon.

  I stroke Cindy’s hair away from her forehead.

  I’d rather put the gun up to my own head.

  But I don’t.

  “Arlie,” Cindy whispers, then looks up to the sky. Lifeless. Dead.

  I put the gun under her chin.

  I look around but see nothing. My body sways with agony, both physical and emotional. Cindy’s been destroyed from these men, these bastards, and putting her out of her misery will kill me too.

  But I’ve grown up enough to know when enough is enough.

  I look down at her face one last time. She’s so beautiful. The smile, the look of pure joy that sometimes possessed her face.

  I bite my lower lip until I taste blood.

  I pull the trigger.

  chapter twenty-three

  It is then, in my most desperate moment, when everything explodes. Shots are fired nearby, but knowing Eve’s position behind me, I can tell that it wasn’t she who fired them. I look around, confused, and through my blurred vision, I see Eve stagger a step or two towards me. Blood pours from her chest and she’s dropped her rifle. When she tries to talk, only blood comes out from her mouth. She falls, and the sound of her trying to breathe through the blood rushing into her lungs is terrible.