The Living Dead 2

by John Joseph Adams

  Before everything changed, Grandpa Joe used to ask Mom and Dad if he could teach Kendrick how to hunt during summer vacation, and they’d said no. Dad didn’t like Grandpa much, maybe because Grandpa Joe always said what he thought, and he was Mom’s father, not Dad’s. And Mom didn’t go much easier on him, always telling Grandpa Joe no, no matter what he asked. No, you can’t keep him longer than a couple weeks in the summer. No, you can’t teach him shooting. No, you can’t take him hunting.

  Now there was no one to say no. No one except Grandpa Joe, unless Mom and Dad came back. Grandpa Joe had said they might, and they knew where to find him. They might.

  Kendrick put on the red down jacket he’d been wearing the day Grandpa Joe found him. He’d sat in this for never-ending hours in the safe room at home, the storage space under the stairs with a reinforced door, a chemical toilet, and enough food and water for a month. Mom had sobbed, “Bolt the door tight. Stay here, Kendrick, and don’t open the door until you hear Grandpa’s danger word—NO MATTER WHAT.”

  She made him swear to Jesus, and she’d never made him swear to Jesus before. He’d been afraid to move or breathe. He’d heard other footsteps in the house, the awful sound of crashing and breaking. A single terrible scream. It could have been his mother, or father, or neither—he just didn’t know.

  Followed by silence, for one hour, two, three. Then the hardest part. The worst part.

  “Show me your math homework, Kendrick.”

  The danger word was the special word he and Grandpa Joe had picked because Grandpa Joe had insisted on it. Grandpa Joe had made a special trip in his truck to tell them something bad could happen to them, and he had a list of reasons how and why. Dad didn’t like Grandpa Joe’s yelling much, but he’d listened. So Kendrick and Grandpa Joe had made up a danger word nobody else in the world knew, not even Mom and Dad.

  And he had to wait to hear the danger word, Mom said.

  No matter what.

  By the time Kendrick dressed, Grandpa was already outside loading the truck, a beat-up navy blue Chevy. Kendrick heard a thud as he dropped a large sack of wrapped jerky in the bed.

  Grandpa Joe had taught him how to mix up the secret jerky recipe he hadn’t even given Mom: soy sauce and Worcestershire sauce, fresh garlic cloves, dried pepper, onion powder. He’d made sure Kendrick was paying attention while strips of deer meat soaked in that tangy mess for two days and then spent twelve hours in the slow-cook oven. Grandpa Joe had also made him watch as he cut the deer open and its guts flopped to the ground, all gray and glistening. “Watch, boy. Don’t turn away. Don’t be scared to look at something for what it is.”

  Grandpa Joe’s deer jerky was almost as good as the lumberjack breakfast, and Kendrick’s mouth used to water for it. Not anymore.

  His jerky loaded, Grandpa Joe leaned against the truck, lighting a brown cigarette. Kendrick thought he shouldn’t be smoking.

  “Ready?”

  Kendrick nodded. His hands shook a little every time he got in the truck, so he hid his hands in his jacket pockets. Some wadded-up toilet paper from the safe room in Longview was still in there, a souvenir. Kendrick clung to the wad, squeezing his hand into a fist.

  “We do this right, we’ll be back in less than an hour,” Grandpa Joe said. He spit, as if the cigarette had come apart in his mouth. “Forty-five minutes.”

  Forty-five minutes. That wasn’t bad. Forty-five minutes, then they’d be back.

  Kendrick stared at the cabin in the rearview mirror until the trees hid it from his sight.

  The road was empty, as usual. Grandpa Joe’s rutted dirt road spilled onto the highway after a half-mile, and they jounced past darkened, abandoned houses. Kendrick saw three stray dogs trot out of the open door of a pink two-story house on the corner. He’d never seen that door open before, and he wondered whose dogs they were. He wondered what they’d been eating.

  Suddenly, Kendrick wished he’d stayed back at Dog-Girl’s. She was from England and he couldn’t always understand her, but he liked being behind her fence. He liked Popeye and Ranger and Lady Di, her dogs. He tried not to think about the ones that were gone now. Maybe she’d given them away.

  They passed tree farms, with all the trees growing the same size, identical, and Kendrick enjoyed watching their trunks pass in a blur. He was glad to be away from the empty houses.

  “Get me a station,” Grandpa Joe said.

  The radio was Kendrick’s job. Unlike Dad, Grandpa Joe never kept the radio a secret.

  The radio hissed and squealed up and down the FM dial, so Kendrick tried AM next. Grandpa Joe’s truck radio wasn’t good for anything. The shortwave at the cabin was better.

  A man’s voice came right away, a shout so loud it was like screaming.

  “…and in those days shall men seek death and shall not find it…and shall desire to die and death shall flee from them…”

  “Turn that bullshit off,” Grandpa Joe snapped. Kendrick hurried to turn the knob, and the voice was gone. “Don’t you believe a word of that, you hear me? That’s B-U-double-L bullshit. Things are bad now, but they’ll get better once we get a fix on this thing. Anything can be beat, believe you me. I ain’t givin’ up, and neither should you. That’s givin’-up talk.”

  The next voices were a man and a woman who sounded so peaceful that Kendrick wondered where they were. What calm places were left? “…mobilization at the Vancouver Armory. That’s from the commander of the Washington National Guard. So you see,” the man said, “there are orchestrated efforts. There has been progress in the effort to reclaim Portland, and even more in points north. The Armory is secure, and running survivors to the islands twice a week. Look at Rainier. Look at Devil’s Wake. As long as you stay away from the large urban centers, there are dozens of pockets where people are safe and life is going on.”

  “Oh, yes,” the woman said. “Of course there are.”

  “There’s a learning curve. That’s what people don’t understand.”

  “Absolutely.” The woman sounded absurdly cheerful.

  “Everybody keeps harping on Longview…” The man said “Longview” as if it were a normal, everyday place. Kendrick’s stomach tightened when he heard it. “…but that’s become another encouraging story. Contrary to rumors, there is a National Guard presence. There are limited food supplies. There’s a gated community in the hills housing over four hundred. Remember, safety in numbers. Any man, woman, or teenager who’s willing to enlist is guaranteed safe lodging. Fences are going up, roads barricaded. We’re getting this under control. That’s a far cry from what we were hearing even five, six weeks ago.”

  “Night and day,” the cheerful woman said. Her voice trembled with happiness.

  Grandpa Joe reached over to rub Kendrick’s head. “See there?” he said.

  Kendrick nodded, but he wasn’t happy to imagine that a stranger might be in his bed. Maybe it was another family with a little boy. Or twins.

  But probably not. Dog-Girl said the National Guard was long gone and nobody knew where to find them. “Bunch of useless bloody shit-heads,” she’d said—the first time he’d heard the little round woman cuss. Her accent made cussing sound exotic. If she was right, dogs might be roaming through his house, too, looking for something to eat.

  “…There’s talk that a Bay Area power plant is up again. It’s still an unconfirmed rumor, and I’m not trying to wave some magic wand here, but I’m just making the point—and I’ve tried to make it before—that life probably felt a lot like this in Hiroshima.”

  “Yes,” the woman said. From her voice, Hiroshima was somewhere very important.

  “Call it apples and oranges, but put yourself in the place of a villager in Rwanda. Or an Auschwitz survivor. There had to be some days that felt exactly the way we feel when we hear these stories from Seattle and Portland, and when we’ve talked to the survivors…”

  Just ahead, along the middle of the road, a man was walking.

  Kendrick sat straight up when he saw
him, balling up the tissue wad in his pocket so tightly that he felt his fingernails bite into his skin. The walking man was tall and broad-shouldered, wearing a brick-red backpack. He lurched along unsteadily. From the way he bent forward, as if bracing into a gale, Kendrick guessed the backpack was heavy.

  He hadn’t ever seen anyone walking on this road.

  “Don’t you worry,” Grandpa Joe said. Kendrick’s neck snapped back as Grandpa Joe speeded up his truck. “We ain’t stoppin’.”

  The man let out a mournful cry as they passed, waving a cardboard sign. He had a long, bushy beard, and as they passed, his eyes looked wide and wild. Kendrick craned his head to read the sign, which the man held high in the air: STILL HERE, the sign read.

  “He’ll be all right,” Grandpa Joe said, but Kendrick didn’t think so. No one was supposed to go on the roads alone, especially without a car. Maybe the man had a gun, and maybe they would need another man with a gun. Maybe the man had been trying to warn them something bad was waiting for them ahead.

  But the way he walked…

  “No matter what,” Mom had said.

  Kendrick kept watching while the man retreated behind them. He had to stop watching when he felt nausea pitch in his stomach. He’d been holding his breath without knowing it. His face was cold and sweating, both at once.

  “Was that one?” Kendrick whispered.

  He hadn’t known he was going to say that either, just like when he’d asked for a Coke. Instead, he’d been thinking about the man’s sign. STILL HERE.

  “Don’t know,” Grandpa Joe said. “It’s hard to tell. That’s why you never stop.”

  They listened to the radio, neither of them speaking again for the rest of the ride.

  Time was, Joseph Earl Davis III never would have driven past anyone on the road without giving them a chance to hop into the bed and ride out a few miles closer to wherever they were going. Hell, he’d picked up a group of six college-age kids and driven them to the Centralia compound back in April.

  But Joe hadn’t liked the look of that hitcher. Something about his walk. Or, maybe times were just different. If Kendrick hadn’t been in the car, Jesus as his witness, Joe might have run that poor wanderer down where he walked. An ounce of prevention. That was what it had come to in Joe Davis’s mind. Drastic measures. You just never knew; that was the thing.

  EREH LLITS, the man’s sign said in the mirror, receding into a tiny, unreadable blur.

  Yeah, I’m still here, too, Joe thought. And not picking up hitchhikers was one way he intended to stay here, thanks a bunch for asking.

  Freaks clustered in the cities, but there were plenty of them wandering through the countryside nowadays, actual packs. Thousands, maybe. Joe had seen his first six months ago, coming into Longview to rescue his grandson. His first, his fifth, and his tenth. He’d done what he had to do to save the boy, then shut the memories away where they couldn’t sneak into his dreams. Then drank enough to make the dreams blurry.

  A week later, he’d seen one closer to home, not three miles beyond the gated road, not five miles from the cabin. Its face was bloated blue-gray, and flies buzzed around the open sores clotted with that dark red scabby shit that grew under their skin. The thing could barely walk, but it had smelled him, swiveling in his direction like a scarecrow on a pivot.

  Joe still dreamed about that one every night. That one had chosen him.

  Joe left the freaks alone unless one came at him—that was safest if you were by yourself. He’d seen a poor guy shoot one down in a field, and then a swarm came from over a hill. Some of those fuckers could walk pretty fast, could run, and they weren’t stupid, by God.

  But Joe had killed that one, the pivoting one that had chosen him. He’d kill it a dozen times again if he had the chance; it was a favor to both of them. That shambling mess had been somebody’s son, somebody’s husband, somebody’s father. People said freaks weren’t really dead—they didn’t climb out of graves like movie monsters—but they were as close to walking dead as Joe ever wanted to see. Something was eating them from the inside out, and if they bit you, the freak shit would start eating you, too. You fell asleep, and you woke up different.

  The movies had that part right, anyway.

  As for the rest, nobody knew much. People who met freaks up close and personal didn’t live long enough to write reports about them. Whatever they were, freaks weren’t just a city problem anymore. They were everybody’s problem.

  “Can you hold on, Dad? My neighbor’s knocking on the window.”

  That’s what Cass had said the last time they’d spoken, then he hadn’t heard any more from his daughter for ten agonizing minutes. The next time he’d heard her voice, he’d barely recognized it, so calm it could be nothing but a mask over mortal terror. “DADDY? Don’t talk—just listen. I’m so sorry. For everything. No time to say it all. They’re here. You need to come and get Kendrick. Use the danger word. Do you hear me, Daddy? And…bring guns. Shoot anyone suspicious. I mean anyone, Daddy.”

  “Daddy,” she’d called him. She hadn’t called him that in years.

  That day he’d woken up with alarm twisting his gut for no particular reason. That was why he’d raised Cassidy on the shortwave two hours earlier than he usually did, and she’d sounded irritated that he’d called before she was up. “My neighbor’s knocking on the window.”

  Joe had prayed he wouldn’t find what he knew would be waiting in Longview. He’d known what might happen to Cass, Devon, and Kendrick the moment he’d found them letting neighbors use the shortwave and drink their water like they’d been elected the Rescue Committee. They couldn’t even name one of the women in their house. That was Cass and Devon for you. Acting like naive fools, and he’d told them as much.

  Still, even though he’d tried to make himself expect the worst, he couldn’t, really. If he ever dwelled on that day, he might lose his mind…and then what would happen to Kendrick?

  Anytime Joe brought up that day, the kid’s eyes whiffed out like a dead pilot light. It had taken Kendrick hours to finally open that reinforced door and let him in, even though Joe had used the danger word again and again. And Kendrick had spoken hardly a word since.

  Little Soldier was doing all right today. Good. He’d need to be tougher, fast. The kid had regressed from nine to five or six, just when Joe needed him to be as old as he could get.

  As Joe drove beyond the old tree farms, the countryside opened up on either side; fields on his left, a range of hills on his right. There’d been a cattle farm out here once, but the cattle were gone. Wasn’t much else out here, and there never had been.

  Except for Mike’s. Nowadays, Mike’s was the only thing left anyone recognized.

  Mike’s was a gas station off exit 46 with porta-potties out back and a few shelves inside crammed with things people wanted: flour, canned foods, cereal, powdered milk, lanterns, flashlights, batteries, first aid supplies, and bottled water. And gas, of course. How he kept getting this shit, Joe had no idea. “If I told you that, I’d be out of business, bro,” Mike had told him when Joe asked, barking a laugh at him.

  Last time he’d driven out here, Joe had asked Mike why he’d stayed behind when so many others were gone. Why not move somewhere less isolated? Even then, almost a full month ago, folks had been clumping up in Longview, barricading the school, jail, and hospital. Had to be safer, if you could buy your way in. Being white helped, too. They said it didn’t, but Joe Davis knew it did. Always had, always would. Things like that just went underground for a time, that’s all. Times like these the ugly stuff festered and exploded back topside.

  Mike wasn’t quite as old as Joe—sixty-three to Joe’s more cumbersome seventy-one—but Joe thought he was foolhardy to keep the place open. Sure, all the stockpiling and bartering had made Mike a rich man, but was gasoline and Rice-A-Roni worth the risk? “I don’t run, Joe. Guess I’m hardheaded.” That was all he’d said.

  Joe had known Mike since he first built his cedar cabin in 1989, a
fter retiring from his berth as supply sergeant at Fort McArthur. Mike had just moved down from Alberta, and they’d talked movies, then jazz. They’d discovered a mutual love of Duke Ellington and old sitcoms. Mike had always been one of his few friends around here. Now he was the only one.

  Joe didn’t know whether to hope his friend would still be there or to pray he was gone. Better for him to be gone, Joe thought. One day he and the kid would have to move on, too, plain and simple. That day was coming soon. That day had probably come and gone twice over.

  Joe saw a glint of the aluminum fencing posted around Mike’s as he came around the bend, the end of the S in the road. Although it looked more like a prison camp, Mike’s was an oasis, a tiny squat store and a row of gas pumps surrounded by a wire fence a man and a half tall. The fence was electrified at night: Joe had seen at least one barbecued body to prove it, and everyone had walked around the corpse as if it weren’t there. With gas getting scarcer, Mike tended to trust the razor wire more, using the generator less these days.

  Mike’s three boys, who’d never proved to be much good at anything else, had come in handy for keeping order. They’d had two or three gunfights there, Mike had said, because strangers with guns thought they could go anywhere they pleased and take anything they wanted.

  Today, the gate was hanging open. He’d never come to Mike’s when there wasn’t someone standing at the gate. All three of Mike’s boys were usually there, with their greasy hair and their pale fleshy bellies bulging through their too-tight T-shirts. No one today.

  Something was wrong.

  “Shit,” Joe said aloud before he remembered he didn’t want to scare the kid. He pinched Kendrick’s chin between his forefinger and thumb, and his grandson peered up at him, resigned, the expression he always wore these days. “Let’s just sit here a minute, okay?”

  Little Soldier nodded. He was a good kid.

  Joe coasted the truck to a stop outside the gate. While it idled, he tried to see what he could. The pumps stood silent and still on their concrete islands, like two men with their hands in their pockets. There was a light on inside, a super-white fluorescent glow through the picture windows painted with the words GAS, FOOD in red. He could make out a few shelves from where he was parked, but he didn’t see anyone inside. The air pulsed with the steady burr of Mike’s generator, still working.