I lift the hatch and slide in, taking some of the forest dirt with me. I feel a looming sense of safety. Once my head is in, I feel for the inner lever and pull it down. I can feel the weight and security of the hatch as it lowers into place. When it rests, I pull the level to the left and I hear the bolts slide into place.
I breathe again, leaning against the ladder. Yet now that I am safe I notice I am shaking. Even though I can let my guard down, the adrenaline overload leaves me nauseous. I feel sick as hell. I flick the safety on my pistol. I reach around my back to do the same to my rifle. I turn on my flashlight.
Time slows instantly as I turn and my eyes focus on him. I am frozen, completely incapacitated by shock and fear. He is crouched in the tunnel, against the second hatch, just a few feet away from me. His hair is matted, his beard and face wet with something. He makes no sound though my heart beats so loudly I can hear nothing else.
We stare at each other. My brain is overwhelmed by my heartbeat and finally I can hear a voice telling me to escape, to open the hatch again and run. But I know with complete clarity that he will be faster, that if I climb the ladder and try to reach for the hatch his teeth will be upon me before I touch it.
My pistol rests at the foot of the ladder where I set it down. I think that I need to slowly ease my hand toward it. As if it heard my thoughts, at that moment he leaps at me. In an instant he is on top of me and I hear my gun clatter away. My rifle lay beneath me and his hands tear at my head to bring my face, my neck, closer to his gnashing teeth. I push away at him but cannot move him. His arms feel like steel pistons. In my grip I can feel only hardened muscle and savage fury.
His face draws closer and closer. His breath is a rotting spray of death. One of his hands grips my ear and tears at it, pulling me closer. He lunges, and his teeth reach my skin and bite, ripping at my neck. I am dead, I know, I am dead. And I am overcome with an urge to close my eyes, to let it all be over, to let him have me. To be like the antelopes you see in wildlife videos, giving themselves over to the lions. It is the final decision, to be at peace.
As I reach out to embrace that peace I see Maggie, healthy Maggie. I see her scowling at me and telling me to fight the fuck back. It’s as if I come to life again. I push harder and I shove him away from me. I feel his teeth pull back, taking some of my skin with them.
I roll, to force his weight off of me, and my hand lunges to my leg where it finds my knife. I grasp it and start stabbing and hacking at any part of him that I can find. I feel new pain and I know that one of my stabs must have gotten my own leg. I push harder with my left hand and I can pull my right far enough up so that I can plunge the knife into his abdomen. He shows no pain; his ravenous hunger still drives him to bite, bite, bite.
He shifts and bites down on my left arm. I twist the knife into him and push deeper and deeper with it, feeling his warm organs around my hand, feeling the hot gush of his blood rhythmically pumping out on to me. Finally, his snapping teeth slow and I can push him off me and see that his eyes have lost their animal gleam and now look glazed and still. I pull out my arm and the knife. He is motionless.
An anger much larger than me takes over. No longer do I feel exhausted or scared. I only feel the searing red anger of revenge. And I throw myself upon his corpse, slashing his throat till his head nearly comes off, plunging the knife repeatedly into his heart and lungs until his chest is a stew of minced parts.
Finally, I stop. I breathe. I look at my hands and my own chest, completely drenched in blood. I touch my neck and feel where he took a bite. I hold my hand there, expecting to feel the life blood rushing out of me. Instead I bleed, not like in the movies. Maybe he missed the artery. Leaving his body where it lay, I make my way down the tunnel and open the next hatch. When I slide through and shut it, I know that I have left something of myself back there and I will never be the same again.
45→THE NEXT MOMENT
Ihave to pound on the final hatch and identify myself before Justin throws the lock and lets me come down. He stares at me in shock for a moment before he locks the hatch again and starts stripping my clothes. He frantically cleans blood off me, looking for all of my wounds and interrogating me on them. No questions about how it happened, only about where it happened on me.
He cleans, he disinfects, he bandages, and when he’s got all the bleeding under control, he starts stitching my neck. “Once the local anesthetic wears off, this is going to feel pretty weird for a while. You’re missing a whole chunk of skin and you’re basically going to have to stretch what you already have. Technically it’s going to look like you got a fucked-up necklift.”
“That is going to be a kickass scar,” says Maggie from the doorway. She’s leaning on Carrie and doesn’t look so tired.
I go to reach for a towel because I am naked as Justin stitches me. But she says, “God, don’t worry about covering yourself. Sex is not really what any of us are thinking about right now.”
I try to respond but my face hurts. I try to pull away but Justin says, “Stay still. Almost done. And every time you move, the scar’s going to look worse.”
But I still have to tell them. I put my hand on Justin’s arm and pull away a little and struggle to begin: “RIP…”
“We can guess,” says Maggie. “We figured that the second you came back without him.” She pauses. “That’s just how you are now. I don’t suppose you…”
“No Homer. Sorry.”
46→AROUND THE VAULT OF HEAVEN
We’ve all seen too much death since the flu went out of control not even eight weeks ago. Our loved ones are all gone and we have found ourselves in this bizarre fight for survival that has seen us depend on strangers for everything. They didn’t stay strangers for long. They became family. And RIP is the first family member we’ve lost.
“He was sweet,” says Maggie. “He just always wanted to help out with whatever. And if he didn’t know the answer to something, he’d make it up. I kind of have a soft spot for bullshitters.”
“The dude backed it up, though,” says Justin. “He could fix whatever needed fixing, and in a fight, you’d want him on your side. He was always more worried about us than he was about taking cover.”
“That’s what probably killed him,” I add.
Carrie, who barely knew RIP, just nods.
“Should we have a little service?” asks Justin.
“Just did,” sighs Maggie. “I need to lay down before I collapse.” Justin jumps up to help her back to her bed. She hasn’t mentioned Homer lately. I’m really not sure which loss she’s feeling worse
I look to Carrie and we shrug at each other. “If you want to say something, I’m still here,” she says.
I suck at on-the-spot wisdom, so after racking my brain for anything to share about RIP, I’m left with one crumb of his that has stayed with me. “Once after I thanked him for saving my butt, he said he had a lot of making up to do with karma. He wanted to have a good balance sheet before he took the Big Nap.”
47→CONSIDER ALL THIS
Iam changed, I guess. The end of the world will do that to you. Nearly dying will do that to you. Losing someone you love will do that to you. If this we’re a movie, we would have won. The bad guys would all be gone. We could all have ponies. And we would see rainbows every evening and we could watch them while talking about what lies at the end as we eat ice cream cones.
But it’s not a movie. I live in an underground bunker with the only three people on earth that I love. Above the surface, heavily armed people want us to die and diseased savages want to eat us. We don’t have enough food to last the winter. These are all considerable challenges to our continued survival.
Carrie—it seems I’ve known her for years and I am surprised to tell myself it’s not even two days—says words to me that truly convey meaning. She says we need to heal, we need to plan, we need to take care of Maggie.
“And I don’t know who they are,” she says gently, dabbing my stitches with a disinfectant, “but
there are people out there that we need to kill.”
I stare into her shining eyes. And I slowly nod.
The Author
J.B. Beatty disappeared without a trace in the early 1890s, leaving behind one child. That family line led to the author of this book, who toils in anonymity.
The Artist
Erik Reichenbach is a comic artist, illustrator, and former CBS Survivor Fan Favorite. Since the mid 2000's he has been creating colorful illustrations for books, comics, and advertising; his art has been featured in Entertainment Weekly, People.com, and various podcasts and blogs. Currently he is working on Starving for Attention 2: The Hungering, and a mobile app strategy game, Islands of Chaos.
The World Itself (Book 1): The World Itself Departed Page 21