by Lee Thomas
I tell him I’m sorry and that he’s safe, and he tells me he was with his grandfather and lost the old man in town, and he saw my light, and he’d hoped to find the man here, and the grandfather was wearing blue sweatpants and red sneakers, and had I seen the man.
I had seen the man, but the truth of what I’d witnessed wouldn’t comfort the boy. I asked him his name, and he hesitates to share it with me but finally says, David.
A number of lies, meant to quell the boy’s unease and keep him quiet so we would not follow too closely in his grandfather’s steps, rolls through my mind, and I know David will fight all of them. So I tell him that I spoke to his grandfather, and his brown eyes light up hopefully. Then I tell him that I had promised the old man I would take David to a house where the man waited with others.
The boy wants to believe me, but he is reticent and shuffles back a step. He looks about uncertainly and when he gazes into the aisle on his right, his face goes slack.
I step forward and swing the light in that direction, and it falls on four trudging figures. Not long ago, the man leading these wanderers was an executive, with a stout confident face and a wave of white hair. He wears a blue suit that would have been expensive, reminding me of the arrogant partygoer who’d considered fucking an appropriate preface to suicide. This executive’s hand is missing three fingers and his suit sleeve is torn at the shoulder. Flanking him, two women of diametrically opposed attractiveness teeter from side to side as if each step is their last before collapse. The person behind is unidentifiable save for a swatch of jutting red hair.
Then more of these broken wanderers appear at the front of the aisle, and more still until it is clear this boy, David, has led an ample contingent into the shop. I dash to the far aisle and see that it too fills like a chute guiding cattle to the trough. As quickly as possible, I race back to the boy and scoop him up in an arm, causing him to squeal a sharp protest. Pain flares along my shin from ankle to knee as I support his added weight, but I carry him to the burned portal above the pharmacy counter. With a clumsy motion I throw him at the hole, and he drops heavily across the lower frame, but manages to scramble inside without further sound. Then I follow, and my backpack catches on the upper edge of the hole. I twist and fight, terribly conscious of the vulnerability of my body’s lower extremities. Finally I manage to work my way through the hole and drop onto the linoleum, coming down hard on my elbow. Adrenaline deadens the pain. Again on my feet, I turn to the compromised shield and the breath slips out of my chest. From where I stand it seems that these dreadful wanderers occupy every inch of floor space. To the left I see the former executive, pushing against the back of a man in an open bathrobe. The man’s torso is shredded, decimated by teeth and nails, leaving only a great sheet of scab running from his throat to the chasm in his belly, and from this hollow to his devoured crotch.
David pulls on the sleeve of my jacket to get my attention, except I can’t turn away from the spectacle before me. The people beyond the barrier—those in shadow and those in my light’s cast—move forward and back in unison as if swaying to music pumped over a frequency only they can hear, and for a heartbeat’s time, I envy their unity and wish to feel it, regardless of the perverse rite of passage joining them requires. It is an odd notion, one that surely has roots in my life before this town.
Then David is pleading with me and I turn away, uncertain of what he thinks I can accomplish. We are meat in a butcher’s window. The boy insists we have to leave, and a chuckle of disbelief rises in my throat, but I kill it on my tongue. Telling him our situation is hopeless will solve nothing. We might wait, hidden behind the shelves, hoping the wanderers lose interest or forget of our existence, but that is foolish. Already an overweight, black-haired girl with blood-stained braces, wearing a T-shirt that reads “Unclean,” attempts to climb onto the counter, her eyes focused on the gap as hotly as the acetylene torch that created it.
David again pulls my sleeve and I follow him, wondering what this boy intends. He leads me to the last row of shelves and points into a gloomy alcove beyond. I lift the light and it falls on a door, and I feel a bolt of embarrassment that I should have thought the store possessed a single entrance and exit.
Before approaching it, I check the partition and see the plump girl with the grisly braces wriggling through the hole, one arm extended in full as if reaching for an invisible handle to grasp for leverage. Her jaws snap at the light’s beam, which glints off her dental work creating tiny blades of reflection. Then I swing the flashlight back to the door and find that David has already opened it, and the sound of rain crackles in the pharmacy. I follow him outside, into the cold and angry sleet, and a sharp wing of wind beats over my neck. The back alley of the store is empty, only dumpsters holding month-old trash, slowly decomposing in the metal bins.
The narrow corridor amplifies the angry sounds of storm as downpour claps on concrete, steel, brick, and filth. I ask the boy to stand behind me and lead him to the end of the alley, and he asks why I’m limping, and I tell him I hurt myself.
Are you bit?
He delivers the question with such disgust and fear, I think to ask him what he intends to do about it if I am, but I clamp down on the ire, pinning it to my tongue, and tell him the truth. The limp is the result of a poorly fashioned booby trap set in one of the neighborhood houses I’d been scavenging soon after trading the city for this place. Upon arriving in town, I met a group of men and women and stayed with them briefly. On one of the daily gathering excursions, my foot went through a sabotaged stair step, and though sprains and breaks had been avoided, a jutting nail had torn a considerable gash in my pant leg and the shin beneath.
David insists I show him the wound, and I lift my damp pant leg and show him the bandage. When he insists I peel this back, I release the gathered fabric, allowing the cuff to return to its place at my ankle and tell him we have more important things to worry about and I’m not about to risk infection—another infection—to assuage his curiosity.
The exit from the town, along a different street, one not littered by the boy’s grandfather, is uneventful. Night closes fast, and the ice and water continue to pelt, dropping furiously from the tumor-hued cumulus. The cold is inside of me now, affixing to muscle, vein, and bone. The threats we see are distant, on side streets, wandering aimlessly in circles, and if they notice us, it is without interest. I lead the boy to my house but do not take him inside. Instead, I continue along the street to the house on the corner where the others live, and he asks if his grandfather is inside and I lie and assure him that the old man is safely wrapped in a blanket, chatting happily with a fine group of people.
After I knock, a sour-faced man who not long ago had been a promising corporate attorney opens the door and points a sleek, silver pistol at my face. His name is Cameron and he wears a blue cotton dress shirt over black slacks. His blond hair droops shapelessly over his brow. He asks what I want and I introduce him to David and ask if he will get Erica for me. Cameron frowns more deeply, the expression comical in its extremity. He waves us in and checks over our shoulders to make sure I have brought no threat upon the house in the way that David invited it to the drug store.
Inside a battery-powered lantern glows weakly from the staircase. The windows of this house have been covered with plywood sheets and reinforced with studs so that little natural light enters. Pockets of shadow float at the top of the stairs and in the room to my left where I feel people are gathered, though I cannot see them.
Where’s Granddad?
David’s question takes me off guard. I don’t want to have to explain the old man’s fate to him and wish Erica would appear so she can relieve me of this repugnant obligation. Cameron presents me with bitter eyes and pinched lips, and I repeat my request to see Erica. He looks from me to the boy and back again and then nods. I hold David by the shoulder and tell him that his grandfather is probably napping in one of the bedrooms, and we will wait for Erica to take him. Faces begin to appear in th
e wells of shadow at David’s back. The men and women come forward slowly, holstering their weapons as they approach and all greet us with smiles and ask me how I am feeling, and I tell them I am fine, and I assure them I will be leaving soon, and this casual statement, delivered without a hint of acidity causes them to frown.
I introduce David to the eight men and women, and he tells them he wants to see his grandfather, and questions alight and then vanish from their brows as they understand why I’ve brought the boy to them.
Mindy offers to get David a blanket.
Chet hurries off to find the boy a cup of tea.
The others comment on the necessity of these tokens of warmth and how much they will soothe the boy, who has yet to understand the extent of his misery.
Erica walks into the foyer of the house. Not long ago she was a caring, full-figured woman with red hair and compassionate eyes. She still is.
I ask Burt to show David into the living room and then lead Erica to the back of the house.
In the kitchen, I explain what has happened to David’s grandfather, and that I withheld the information from the boy because I didn’t want him to panic, and she tells me I’ve done the right thing, and she will speak to him immediately. I thank her and open the back door, making to leave.
Erica tells me I can stay. She tells me I should stay. I tell her I can’t stay and return to the storm.
Crossing the backyards, through hedges and over low fences, my leg aching with each step, I am barely aware of my surroundings, but no threat approaches and I reach the back door to my house without incident. Inside, I light the lantern. This house has been similarly shielded with boards and studs—a final kindness from the survivors down the street, the men and women who cast me out.
I peel off my wet clothes and retrieve a towel from a stack I keep in the hall closet. Once dry I pull on fresh clothes and wrap myself in a duvet. I take a can of ravioli and a bottle of water to the sofa and sit down for my supper, but the tepid meal slips down my throat like a mudslide landing hard and gritty in my stomach. I retrieve the pill bottles from my backpack and swallow one Truvada and one Viramune, and then I return to the sofa and hike my pant leg to examine the cut on my shin.
It still hasn’t healed. The red gash appears wet and fresh in the flat glow of the lantern. Blood has long since stopped seeping from the wound, but it does not scab and it does not close. The skin at the wounds lips carries the same cranberry stain it showed the afternoon of its infliction. It appears neither aggravated nor infected, but it has been two weeks since the nail gouged my leg and it continues to resist amelioration, and though I don’t know what this means, I know it must mean something.
I curl up on the sofa, wrapped tightly in the duvet. I think about what I told the boy about my injury. Though not a lie, it wasn’t the whole of the truth either.
I entered a home with others, intent on looting supplies, and I did crash through a step that had been worn away with a saw or file. All true. But after freeing myself from the rigged staircase, leg searing with the fresh cut, I returned to the front of the house and found Cameron in a corner of the living room. He had lost his gun or had set it down at some point, leaving himself unarmed. He held his empty hands in front of him as three rotting wanderers closed in. Their focus on him made their deaths easy. I crushed one’s head with the iron and the other two didn’t even turn my direction. The second was similarly subdued, and all should have been well, except Cameron found his courage and retrieved a bronze obelisk from a tabletop and swung at the third. Its head exploded into a fetid spray of bone and tissue and fluid, covering me from face to foot.
I had not been bitten, but that didn’t exempt me from infection.
Upon our return, Erica insisted on treating my wounds and noted the debris covering the wound on my leg. After cleaning and binding the gash, she offered me a distracted smile and excused herself.
They held their arraignment while I dozed on a bed upstairs, and when I woke Erica, Cameron and Burt stood in the room, the two men aiming pistols at my head. I was told that I’d remain under guard to see if my system had been compromised, and I did not argue their logic. That night, while I slept, they held their trial and I woke to find I’d been found guilty. A bite could kill and turn a man in less than twelve hours, and though I had already exceeded this window period the uncommon nature of my wound—its failure to clot—was suspect, and with great sadness and apology they asked that I leave for the safety of the others in the house. It never occurred to me to argue.
In honesty, I had been considering my future with this band of men and women for days before the accident. Already they spoke of repopulation and of building a society devoted to the Bible’s word—for certainly this was a Rapture—and who could say which words from this book would soothe them and guide them in the months to come? I would be useless to them in regard to fatherhood, having carried an established infection into this fresh pandemic—to say nothing of my repugnance for the act—and as to their philosophies regarding a future of god-fearing, black-and-white morality…it comforted me little. I also feared that a gathering of their size provided more opportunity for exposure—the safety of numbers outweighed by the necessity for those numbers to eat and move about. Cameron and the other men relied on their guns, each report a siren, calling the rotted vessels to port, and there were the arguments, the affiliations, the jostlings for power, this group already eager to rekindle politics and government—a new society like a fungus growing from the decay of the old.
So I left the house and they helped me secure this place, and they apologized for their decision, which was unnecessary, and I thanked them, and they returned to the house on the corner. I was left alone and found it acceptable.
Chilled now, I pull the duvet closer to my neck and curl into a tighter ball, staring at the plywood sheets intended to keep the world out.
The loneliness is manageable, if only because it was well rehearsed before the outbreak, not that I practiced misanthropy or reveled in the anti-social. If anything I felt unmoved by the cultural touchstones that so greatly occupied the interests of other people. I didn’t follow the television programs dissected and analyzed at office gatherings, preferring documentaries and British crime dramas; nor did I read the latest literary phenomenon, because the voices of Monette and White rang truer to my ears; nor did I take joy or offense at anything a pop musician, movie star, or inexplicable celebrity did or said. This disinterest in glittering culture evolved without calculation, never occurring to me that others should include or exclude me based on such fragile and transient bits of interest. I found politics ridiculous, as logic wasn’t allowed to bridge the gaps formed by the Right and the Left. Useful discussion was mutilated as it attempted to cross the laser fences separating the two camps. Religions offered similar obstacles and similar intolerance. I found so many things incomprehensible, so many just plain foolish, and it left me outside—out in the cold, as they say—because I could not with any sincerity claim to belong to this group or that.
Similar estrangement marked my intimate life, not only because of the virus that required awkward disclosure but also for my inability to weave another man into my heart and head. It seemed that my partners always required more than I could give them—more attention, more time, more understanding. They would play games to spark a reaction in me, and I never understood the rules of their games, so I always lost, and they always left. I felt like a cog, filed and sanded, with no teeth left to grip the other gears in the machine.
I drift into dreamless sleep, and come morning the pain in my leg bleats me awake as efficiently as an alarm clock. Through a narrow gap in the plywood, I see the empty street outside, still gray though the storm has passed. The pavement and the grass are wet and the bleak scene sends me back to the sofa, where I doze as the morning hours pass. At noon I take my medications and as an afterthought pop four ibuprofen caplets in the hope that the ache below my knee will subside.
Overnight the p
ain had escalated, and though still tolerable it concerns me. I check the wound and find it has not changed. No swelling, no discharge, no further discoloration. It remains as it was two weeks ago, and certainly this indicates my system has been compromised, but I am alive long after other infected men would have turned to threat, and I consider the pills I take for the first infection and wonder if they have some affect on this new one. The doctor told me it was a control not a cure.
Fatigued, I lie down and rest my eyes, and I think of the boy, David, and hope that he has come to terms with his grandfather’s absence. I know that Erica will do all that she can for him, as she did all that she could for me. Meager light—all the plywood allows to enter—comes and goes, and it is again night. Hunger pulls me from the sofa and I eat a can of deviled ham and a packet of crackers and drink a bottle of water. I take my evening dose of pills and more ibuprofen, and then I put the battery-powered lantern on the table behind me and read a poorly translated German mystery found in the home office down the hall. Soon enough, I am sleep. I’m startled awake in the middle of the night by a tremor in my leg. Fingers of electricity turn to lightning in my veins, shooting from the cut below my knee to the base of my skull, but then I realize my mistake. The wound is the destination—one of many—not the source of this electrical disturbance. Shocks erupt in my head and fan out, coursing across my system in tingles that at first terrify me and then soothe. The pain in my leg vanishes, leaving only a tickle on the skin, and I lay there in the soft glow of the lantern, gazing at the lake of shadow pooling across the ceiling, and I feel certain that something has passed, though I am unable to identify it. Come morning, a voice in the street summons me to the window, and I press my face to the plywood and gaze through the narrow opening. In the center of the road, Erica calls my name. My hands form claws against the planks, scratching.