by Jason White
“She already has one, I just don’t know it.”
“I tried getting that out of her earlier. She either doesn’t know it or doesn’t care.”
Again I nod and look down. The girl is sleeping.
“She likes you,” Maggie says, smiling. “This is one of the first times she’s been quiet since coming here.”
My own eyes grow heavy. All I want to do is lie back and close them. In the distance comes the rumble of a truck. Somehow I know that it’s Palmer with our new ride. With its rumble comes the occasional pop of a gun, the moan of a zombie. A thump from outside, then another. They’re out there, pounding on the walls, no doubt having seen Maggie’s candlelight.
Seems like it’ll never end.
I know that it never will.
epilogue
We continue on. Travelling the countryside, staying in old farmhouses and avoiding big cities like Toronto along with all its neighbors. Most importantly, we avoid other people. Even when it appears that they are defenseless. Armies, such as Max’s, no longer exist as far as we know or have seen I can say that in the following months since our encounter with Max and his men, we have watched others lower themselves to the level of the undead, only with more intelligence.
Winter turned to spring and spring to summer, and within these months the need to find shelter and a hot fire were no longer necessary. We live on rabbits and squirrels and the vegetation we know that is okay to eat. We travel with a tent, a portable stove, an axe, gun and ammunition. Palmer and I have both become pretty good with handmade spears and a crossbow we found on a bullet-riddled corpse on the middle of a road soon after leaving Angus.
One night in our tent, sometime after a dinner of squirrel, we heard the echo of a child crying.
“I’m going to investigate,” Palmer said, grabbing a 30 .06 along with a semi-automatic. I handed Bianca, Bill’s daughter, to Maggie and took the rifle from him. There wasn’t much argument. We both knew that Maggie was very well capable of taking care of herself. We headed into the woods toward the source of the crying. The woods thinned, then became a valley. A field that had once been part of a farm stretched out before us. The farmhouse is where the child’s cries came from, but Palmer insisted that we do nothing but watch for a while.
The kid was wandering the space between the farmhouse and barn, looked to be a boy of about eight years old, according to my scope and Palmer’s binoculars.
The sun was slowly dying in the sky, sending the trees, the house and barn to cast long shadows. We sat and watched the kid screaming his head off for long minutes when there finally appeared further motion. A man with a rifle that looked a lot like my Remington, and a women with what looked like a Glock.
They didn’t even make it to the kid before shots rang out. Both the man and woman were taken down.
Following this was the hoots and hollers from the victors, a couple of men who were perched in nearby trees, camouflaged with hunting gear. A woman came from the house and gathered up the child while the men got a fire going. What they did with the bodies of the man and woman was exactly like what I saw when first meeting Eve, with the bodies being strung upside down, bled dry and skinned. We left before having to see the bodies prepared even further. The last thing I needed was to see a kid, who had become as effective a hunter as his guardians, eat human flesh.
“They must have smelled our smoke,” Palmer said soon after we returned to camp. “Either ours or theirs. Whatever the case, they set the trap and someone fell for it.”
“Why don’t they hunt squirrels and rabbits like we do?” Maggie asked.
“I don’t know,” Palmer answered. “I bet we’re more easy to hunt.”
We didn’t speak of it again. That night we took shifts keeping watch. I wondered how long would it take before our merry band started setting human traps or if we would even last that long.
Death, after all, is after every single one of us. Although death can stumble around like a drunk or a stiff walking corpse, it’s hungry and can come running at you full speed. Whatever the case, it will one day catch up. It will get all of us. I can’t say how many of the undead I’ve seen with no physical wounds. Most of these are old men and women, and I imagine them having died alone of a heart attack or stroke. There are others we’ve found who’ve died from their own stupidity, like the man we found impaled upon his fence. It looked as though he’d been doing some work on his roof, judging by the tools that were still on the roof above him, rusted and weather worn. His skin was the color of dried mud, the same texture and moisture of an Egyptian mummy. The zombie was almost comical, the iron having pierced into his back and through his chest, he lay there suspended, his head upside down as he reached for us, moaning, his jaw clacking.
Soon after that we returned to Angus. We didn’t stay long. Only long enough to notice that most of the houses on Mill Street had burned down.
We built a pyre of chopped wood and placed Cindy’s body on its top. We stayed long enough to watch her flesh wither and dry, burn and smolder. I’ve tried like hell to keep that image from my mind ever since. A ghost, a specter that refuses exorcism. It’s always there.
Today we’re staying in a cottage house somewhere north of Wasaga Beach. I’ve no longer kept track of the towns we bypass or if we’re even in Ontario. Though I doubt that we’ve left the province. We just keep heading north and west, opposite of southerly direction Grant had me and Cindy going.
Perhaps south would be better. I keep bringing this up to Palmer, but he only nods his head and says, “Yeah, yeah, yeah.”
I think he wants to get us out west somewhere. He tells us that he plans on heading northwest until we reach the mountains. He has a map only he consults, saying that we’ll eventually find the Trans Canada Highway. Finding a working vehicle would be extremely helpful, he says, because he plans on going as far west as the Rockies Mountains, then head south.
The key, he says, is avoiding populated areas.
We will then head as far south as we can, avoiding towns and cities, where we can finally take or build a cottage for ourselves. If we’re south enough and not too high on a mountain, we can avoid the worst of winter while hunting and growing our food year round.
It’s a good dream, something to strive for. But, I’m not sure we’ll make it. I’m certain that I’m not alone in thinking this either. There is doubt in Palmer’s eyes when he talks of his plans or consults the road map. Maggie always acts as though she isn’t paying attention to him when he starts talking of the dream, of finding our own little paradise. She looks exhausted and indifferent to bullshit. I think that she’s on my side on the false ideals of hope. I see, in Palmer, a man who has yet to be broken.
Perhaps that’s what I admire the most about him. He’s like a machine, burning the poison hope as his fuel. His drive could become dangerous, I’m not sure it matters.
As I said. Death will find us one day. It’s only a question of when. Let’s not think about the how.
Bianca coos and laughs at something only she can see. She waves her arms in the air, rolls over and gets up onto her feet, then promptly falls back down onto her rear end. Frustrated now, the laughter turns to a scowl, her big eyes growing wet and angry. But she doesn’t cry.
I go over to her and grip her doll-sized hands into my own. Seeing the size difference between our hands, I realize that I’m no longer fifteen. It’s been over a year since the dead rose and everyone began to die. The hair on my face is nothing like the wiry fuzz on Palmer’s face, but it is thicker and longer than any sixteen year old deserves. When I inspect it, I even see grey hairs in there. It seems I’m aging faster than the average man, in more ways than one, too. I remember back to before the apocalypse when I’d spend my nights alone, for the most part, in my room reading books, doing homework, watching movies, and I wonder if I could ever return to that.
In my heart that’s all I want. I want Cindy back in her wheelchair, annoying me with her temperament while at the same time gifti
ng me with her endless love. I want mother and dad wasted and laughing softly to each other in the kitchen before heading off to bed like two children themselves. I even miss their arguments, which were just as often.
I miss Merrick. I miss Dale and his horror movies.
I even miss Grant.
I can’t go back to any of that. None of us can. It is as impossible to go back physically as it is mentally.
Her hand in mine, Bianca scrunches her mouth. She looks doubtful. Perhaps I am a hypocrite, because I know that soon she’ll take her first steps. We decided to call her Bianca not long after the incident at Angus. There was nothing else to call her. If she knew her name back then, she’s forgotten it and has accepted her new name. She responds to it.
“You can do it, Bianca,” I say, and her little hands flex in mine. I, the hypocrite of hope, pull her to her feet. She wobbles, the weak muscles there trying to find balance. When she finally stands strong, I slowly let go of her hands.
“Hey guys!” I say. “I think she’s going to do it this time.”
“You always say that,” Maggie says, but comes into the living room anyway. She looks curious.
Palmer is close behind, his teeth shining white, a bony rictus within his scraggly beard.
I take a couple steps back.
“Come on, Bianca,” I say. “Come to me.”
Since Angus, Bianca has been my responsibility. For the most part. I carry her around, feed her, change her diapers. Maggie and Palmer don’t seem to mind, but they do the hunting for formula, clothes and accessories.
“Daddy,” she says. I want to tell her no, that Bill was her daddy, but I can’t do that. Maggie and Palmer taught her to call me that. Even though it feels wrong for her to call me that, it also makes my heart swell. Yes, there is the poisonous hope there.
I’ve got to stay alive, if only to keep this little girl alive, to give her a chance at living in Palmer’s paradise. Why I feel this way I’ve no idea. The rational part of me says that she’ll only know suffering and death. It is the poisonous hope that says otherwise.
Whatever the case. whenever I look into her big blue eyes I want to try.
“Daddy,” she says again, and her legs begin to wobble. I remain where I am while Maggie and Palmer cheer her on from behind me.
Her progress in walking is late, I’m sure. We’ve been running for too long. It looks like she’s finally caught up.
Her right foot moves.
“Come on,” I say.
Her body nearly folds into itself and she almost falls, but she stands up straight again.
“You can do it,” I say.
She takes a step, her first, toward me. She holds her arms out straight as though awaiting my embrace, even though I know it’s helping keep her balance. She takes a second step. Maggie and Palmer cheer behind me. She takes a third and her smile is as wide as the horizon, as bright as the sunlight.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jason White has been writing for 13 years with over 15 short stories published with various small press venues. He lives in Ontario, Canada, with his wife and six-month-old son. He is attending college for the second time in his life studying interactive web design and development. During his free time, which is slowly dwindling to nothing, he enjoys reading, watching movies, and tasting various ales and wines.
With a background of ‘The Incredible Hulk’ terrified him as a young child. At the age of nine, he decided to attack the fear head on. His mother rented Friday the 13th IV: The Final Chapter, and it was love at first sight.
He has written numerous short stories which can be found in collection or as stand alones on Amazon which include ‘Isolation’, ‘Divorce and the Black Cat’, ‘Surviving the Fittest’, ‘Room 118’, ‘The Serpent’s Son’ and ‘Chemical Burn’. His work can also be found in the number one bestseller ‘The Dichotomy of Christmas – A Holiday Anthology’ which raised money for the International Animal Rescue.
He also hosts the very popular podcast ‘Darkness Dwells’ which can be found through Microsoft, I-tunes and other podcasting stations.
He feels horror is the best medium to poke criticisms at society and the human condition and believes that people are generally good. When you put them in extreme situations, you find out who they really are. ‘It’s a good thing we’re all flawed, as flawed characters resemble real people, and horror with flawed characters is a near perfect platform for story telling.’