by Nick Cole
Find me.
Survivor and Zombie.
Something like that.
“All that’s over now,” she whispered and moved the curtain aside once again to watch him. There he was. His mouth began to open. As though he were silently moaning. But she couldn’t hear what he was saying, or groaning, not this far away.
He was gone now. That wasn’t him out there, she told herself. Isn’t him. He’s gone now. Forever.
She knew that. She knew it right there. Forever. Could see it with her own eyes even though no one had explained the specifics of the plague to her. They didn’t need to, now. She just knew that whoever was driving that thing on the lawn across the street wasn’t her dad.
She got up and went to the gilded little bar cart in the family room. She selected a bottle at random and poured it into a gold rimmed tumbler with etched starbursts. She looked at it for a long moment and then drank.
“Ewww!” Then she choked out a, “Horrible.” Then drank again. She went to the fridge, found a soda and poured some of it into the tumbler and added more liquor. She stood in the day-bright yellow kitchen. Standing there drinking. Listening to the absolute nothing life now promised.
“We’re next,” she said with a sigh. She could hear Cory moaning to himself softly in the other room. She selected a kitchen knife from the block and walked into the family room and stood in front of a painting of a lithe, willowy woman with a big floppy sunhat standing in some sort of indoor garden. With a slow, determined motion she slashed the painting from top left to bottom right.
“This is not art,” she mumbled and drank a bit more, only barely making a face this time as though she were some old pro who merely winced at the slow poison every time it went down. “Not at all.”
Next she cut the other painting. Same vein. Same fate.
Then she drove the knife harder than she’d meant to into the couch. Still, it felt good. So she did it again and again until the other pieces of furniture cried out for fresh cuts.
She drank and cut things. Smashed a few plates but knew that noise was somehow not good in light of current events. She thought about going upstairs to see what there was to destroy. She passed Cory still sitting cross-legged and rocking.
“You okay?” she asked not expecting an answer.
None was given and Cory did not make eye contact.
She checked the window. Her dad was still out there. The sun was starting to drop into the west. Everything was fading to smoky orange. Somewhere fires still burned.
“Doesn’t really matter if you are, kid,” she said to Cory as she continued to watch the street. “Because none of us are ever going to be okay, ever again.”
She turned back to Cory and watched for the impact her bile missile should’ve made. When the crater didn’t appear, she moved on.
What’s death, she thought. What’s there to be afraid of about death?
She remembered her grandpa dying. Grandpa Jack. One day he was there and the next he was gone. She’d asked her Dad where he’d gone and her dad had taken off the wire rimmed glasses she loved to try on and told her Grandpa Jack was “asleep forever now, honey”. Later, when she’d delved further into the nature of death, sleep was a nice way, she’d found out, of saying death is really just nothingness. “When you die, you’re nothing,” her dad had finally told her.
She thought of him out there on the curb now. Gray and drooling. Covered in someone else’s blood.
Whose?
Drinking and thinking about her Dad’s cheap explanation of death made her suddenly angry. Why couldn’t there be something after death? Why did it just have to be nothing?
She filled the tumbler once again and felt the room spin. She burped and felt better.
I don’t want to end up like them, she thought and noticed she was crying.
Why couldn’t there have been a Heaven?
She remembered feeling angry and resentful at her Dad when he’d explained to her that he had no power over death. That death just was. “Don’t you love me enough to try and beat death?” she’d thought then. To come and get me no matter where I’m at? She thought now. That’s what she’d wanted to say to him.
“Don’t you love me enough for there to be no such thing as death?”
She started to cry and then said, “C’mon, we’re leaving!” and threw the tumbler into a tinted mirrored wall with gold flecks. It exploded and she dragged Cory to his feet, grunting. But what she really meant was, “C’mon, let’s go outside and die now.”
She picked up the knife from the last piece of furniture she’d done to death and opened the front door, Cory trotting after her as she crossed the lawn screaming at her Daddy on the other side of the street.
“Don’t you love me enough!?”
She charged the zombie who was once “Daddy” with the knife held out in front of her.
He stumbled to meet her for a final hug.
Other heads, mouths drooling and agape, turned at the rage. There were maybe ten or twenty undead on the street that burning orange late afternoon.
All along, Cory had been thinking.
He was still clutching the bag of medicine in one hand. He knew he needed to go home. But where home was seemed unclear to him. He was hoping the girl would take him there. So, like a good boy, he waited patiently for his turn to come. Daddy had taught him that sometimes he must wait patiently. Cory had needed to learn this skill because of all the babysitters he’d ever had. Not all of them had been as kind as Mrs. Sheinman. And because of the money, Cory’s dad couldn’t always be as choosy as he would’ve liked to be.
Daddy? Tonight he would need to look at the moon and see if Daddy had used the Bat Signal. If Commissioner Gordon needed Cory, Batman, to come and help Daddy.
This was always the case when Colin needed to work the night shift. If Cory ever got worried, all he needed to do was check the moon, and if Daddy was in any kind of trouble, Cory would see the Bat Signal and then Cory could come and help Daddy. As Batman of course. Because Batman can help people. That was the deal Sergeant Colin Morris had made with his son.
So on some nights when Cory awoke, scared and confused, at Mrs. Scheinman’s house or some other new sitter, if he was worried about Daddy and the Joker or Mr. Freeze or even the Scarecrow who was the worst of all, then all he needed to do was check the moon. No Bat Signal meant everything was “good to go” as Daddy always liked to say. Then Cory could go back to sleep and of course the next morning there would be pancakes because Daddy always made pancakes after a night shift.
Cory followed Heather out into the fading afternoon.
There were strangers everywhere and they frightened Cory as they lurched toward him.
“I’m Batman,” he said to himself. “I am the night...”
Heather charged her father, screaming unintelligible bloody murder, the knife raised high over her shoulder now. The stranger, arms out, stumbled toward her. His teeth were grinding back and forth. There was a loud rumble coming from somewhere nearby.
She swiped and sank the knife into the stranger’s chest. The force of her blow made him stumble, dropping him to his knees. Then, as Cory watched, the girl stood over the stranger screaming at him, and crying.
Then the stranger reached out and grabbed onto her legs.
Heather recoiled in horror, screaming louder. Backing away, falling down.
Cory knew Batman was supposed to save people from strangers. Especially strangers who wanted to “play”.
“I’m Batman,” he reminded himself.
A snarling woman, eyes gray and milky, track suit blood-stained and dirty, lunged from a nearby curb at Heather. Heather, screaming, drove her foot into her once-father’s face.
The snarling track-suited woman reached for Heather’s exposed neck and Cory drove his massive industrial gloved fist down into the woman’s, the stranger’s, heart-shaped gray face. He heard the woman’s neck snap as she crumpled to the ground.
The woman lay on the ground gu
rgling, not moving, her eyes rolling wildly and even maliciously at Cory. He had broken her neck, and even though she was undead, she would never move again.
Another stranger, arms flopping wildly at his sides came loping at them and Cory connected with his left hook the way Daddy had taught him to “play” when the big kids wanted to play too rough. The zombie didn’t even try to dodge or duck or even roll with the devastating left hook. It merely rag-dolled away from the blow, its bell permanently rung, even on some undead level.
The sound of a distant engine, revving at high speed, squealing tires echoing off the low canyon walls of the housing tract of the future circa 1974, came at them from some indeterminate and everywhere at once direction.
Cory grabbed Heather and flung her away from the stranger with the broken nose who was writhing and clutching at her as specks of gray spittle and bloody foam flew from his snarling mouth. Cory dragged Heather back onto the lawn and away from the strangers closing in all about them.
A teenage boy in a leather jacket, long greasy hair, dirty jeans and no shoes came stumbling onto the sidewalk. His lower jaw was missing. Cory socked him in the stomach, bending the wasteoid loner zombie in two, doubling him over as he emitted a papery, “Ummphhh”. Cory backed away as a screaming Heather cowered behind him, feeling the azaleas that grew alongside the house at her back.
A brand new Dodge Charger, dealer plates and everything, slammed into the eight zombies still crossing the middle of the street heading toward Heather and Cory. It even power-braked into a slide to catch as many as possible. Bodies thumped against the windshield and went flying everywhere, landing on lawns and out in the middle of the street.
Oblivious to the interruption, a zombie closed in on Cory, and Cory let him have it right in the face. A place his Daddy had told Cory never to punch. But he did and he caved in the zombie’s nose, driving it right back into its brain. The zombie flopped to the ground, suddenly dead again, forever.
Cory felt tired.
Teenage boys, tall, rangy, cigarettes erupting from their thin, hard mouths, sprung from the bloody, gore-spattered, brand new high-performance muscle car. Shotguns and pistols began to go off at sudden concussive intervals as blue gun smoke mixed with the bloody red light of the last of that day. Zombies crossing the street to meet them in hand to hand combat went down in hails of gunfire. Zombies stumbling from perfect tract homes as though just coming out to water the lawns in the early evening heat were blown back into the stucco walls and garages with accompanying blood spatter. One hulking teen produced an aluminum baseball bat and began driving it down onto the pulpy skulls of prone zombies in the street, grunting with each effort-filled strike. Whooping in triumph as he raised it again and again into the bloody sunset above his potato-shaped head.
Cory pressed his hands to his ears. The loud explosions of the gunshots drove him to his knees. He closed his eyes, reeling with each blast.
Within a minute, the shooting had stopped and the street was quiet until the boys started laughing. The one wielding the heavy baseball bat was breathing heavily, coughing.
“Heather MacLean,” said a tall boy who’d jumped from the driver’s seat. He was holding a snub-nosed revolver.
Heather stared at the boy. Lane Hardy. The leader of the loadies from High School. A year ahead of her. They’d never known each other, really. Back in elementary school they might have played kickball together back when they were all playing kickball that year. When kickball was life. But she didn’t think he actually knew her. Knew her name other than to call it out if she did something stupid in the quad.
But he looked older. He had a goatee. His face was drawn and tight. There were crow’s feet around his eyes. He walked forward, crossing the lawn toward her. Cory was still squeezing his eyes shut and on his knees. Hands over his ears. Lane Hardy pushed him over as he walked by. Cory tumbled onto the grass. Then opened his eyes and looked around.
“Batman, huh?” said Lane, standing over Cory.
Cory just looked up at the strange man with a gun like Daddy’s. Guns were a “no no”.
“How’d you...” began Heather.
“We wuz just out cruising the old town,” said another boy. Randy Flagg. She’d known him too. He and Lane were friends. People said Randy Flagg was strange. “Heard someone screaming and thought we’d come see what was what.”
“Good thing we did, huh guys?” Everyone agreed with Lane. They all seemed older to Heather than they should have. Like they’d been living hard for longer than just the few days since she’d last seen them in school. Taller. Leaner. More muscular. Some of them even had cruddy new tattoos. She couldn’t remember them having tattoos the last time she’d seen them somewhere on campus.
Lane Hardy came close to her and offered his hand. She could see a crude tattoo of a simple Black Hand between the thumb and index finger. He stuck the shiny gun in his waistband. She took his hand and stood up.
“You look real great, babycakes!”
She involuntarily smiled, feeling herself blush. Then she saw her Dad face down in the street. He’d been flung into a mailbox. She couldn’t see his face. Just his pants and shirt and loafers. That was him. His style. Community College Professor of English lit.
Not anymore, she thought.
“You alright?” asked Lane Hardy as she stared for a moment longer at the dead corpse that used to be “Daddy”. “Look like you seen a ghost.”
She turned and shook her head. Shaking away everything that once was. Everything she thought life should be. Yeah, he was right, she thought about her Dad. “Death is just nothing.”
“We’re going to the mall, Heather,” said Lane. “Wanna come? It’s pretty cool. We can do... well, hell, we can do whatever we want now.”
She looked up at him. He was missing a tooth. Crow’s feet. Definitely crow’s feet.
“You wanna gun? We got lotsa guns. Booze too.”
Someone whooped at the mention of booze. The big chunk of male testosterone carrying the aluminum baseball bat. The whooper. He had a round, potato-shaped head.
“Yeah,” said Lane. “Gasher loves him some booze.”
“I don’t know,” mumbled Heather as her ears began to buzz. “I just don’t know anymore.”
“Well, gotta decide right now, chick. ‘Cause them things are thick as flies a couple of streets over and no doubt they’re headed this way after all our target practice.”
Cory was sitting on the grass cross-legged. Cory as Batman. Rocking back and forth.
“Okay,” she whispered and looked at the body of her Dad one last time.
Lane snapped his fingers and tapped the open palm of one hand against the closed fist of the other. “Alrighty-then! Let us make haste.” He walked toward the Charger and Randy Flagg cried, “Mount up!” as he finished spray painting something in the middle of the street. Numbly, Heather followed Lane to the car. She looked back at Cory, only once. He was staring off at something. But she couldn’t tell what.
“Don’t even think about it,” said Lane, holding the door open for her to climb into the back seat. “He’s a liability. And there’s no room for liabilities in this future.”
Okay, she thought she’d said out loud, but didn’t. She climbed into the car, distantly feeling Lane pat her on the butt as her head began to feel dull, that distant buzz rising between her ears not unpleasantly. She slithered in between two other boys, men really, in the backseat. She didn’t feel threatened. She didn’t feel safe. She didn’t feel anything.
Through the windshield, she could see her Dad’s legs and the rest of his body behind a hedge that bordered the lawn of the 1974 house.
Death is nothing, she told herself again.
Right?
Chapter Sixteen
Cory stood up.
Time to go home now. Getting dark. Daddy will be home soon.
The roar of the Dodge Charger faded into the distant end of the day. Cory could hear tires squeal as it made some sharp turn and then the engine
wound up as the mean boy named Lane Hardy mashed the accelerator and sped away from the dead-filled neighborhood and the aftermath of a slaughter in progress. A slaughter that might never find its end.
“Errrr...” sung Cory softly, mimicking the fading tire squeal.
All around, he could hear them even though they were unseen. The strangers. Their distant moans. Banging into fences in unseen backyards. Stumbling through houses and shattered sliding glass doors to come out. To come out and get him. Drawn to the gunfire that still seemed to echo off the walls of the white and beige stucco houses and even Cory’s ears.
Cory went back inside the house he and the girl had waited in all afternoon. He closed the front door behind him and made his way to the back of the house. He opened the sliding glass door and smelled the lawn and early evening rising. The grass felt wet and heavy and fresh in his nostrils. There was water on the concrete.
Cory looked at the refrigerator, walked to it and devoured a handful of the lunchmeat. He drank some water from the sink faucet because he was thirsty, wiping his mouth with his sleeve when he was finished. In the backyard, he climbed the fence after making the “Bhuwuuush!” sound before he did, and then let himself down into the silent wooded area beyond the housing tract. He knew the pharmacy was just down the hill through the woods.