by Bryn Roar
“SILENCE, SOW!”
Dirty hands found her panties and yanked them down her thrashing legs. The Rabid pressed down on her back, pushing the last of the air from Josie’s lungs. Splotchy patterns began to coalesce before her eyes, changing shape and form, like random Rorschach inkblots. She prayed that oblivion would precede the coming violation. Resigned to her violent Fate, Josie felt little fear for herself. It was Buddy boy her mind turned to now. This would be more than he could bear. One feckin’ blow too many. Fate had always been so pitiless when it came to that poor boy. He’d lost his mother, his father, and now he was about to lose Josie to the same sickness responsible for all his misery. A punishment too cruel to contemplate.
Far worse than what was about to happen to her.
Besides, Josie didn’t intend on becoming what RS13 had in mind for her. If Bill left her alive (and she prayed that he wouldn’t) she hoped he would at least leave her able enough to crawl over to the handgun.
Then she would go out on her own terms.
Like Garfield before her, Josie had no desire to wait for a vaccine—even if Bud managed to find one. Some memories, you just can’t live with.
Bill lay heaving on top of her back, his head resting beside the right side of her face, their flesh pressed hotly together. She could smell his fetid breath. Could feel him tremble excitedly atop her. His heavy penis pressed into her upper thigh, searing her skin with its strange heat. It was harder than anything that flesh and blood had any right to be. Like the heat, it just wasn’t natural. The coming rape didn’t frighten Josie in any sexual sense. The thing burning her thigh seemed less a body-part than an instrument of violence. Of monstrous hate.
She wasn’t losing her soul to this rabid monster. Just her life. She only wanted the ordeal over.
As the Rabid’s hands moved slowly down her back, the creature savoring the sadism, a sense of calm began to flow through Josie O’Hara. Her trembling ceased and the fear left her at once. Her heart began to sing…
Oh, Buddy boy, oh, Buddy boy, I love you soooo.
A peaceful smile stole across Josie’s lips. She thought back to a time when she was a little girl, her daddy sitting on the side of her bed, singing that corny old Irish song in his beautiful baritone voice. A bedtime ritual performed every night when he was home.
Oh, Danny boy, the pipes, the pipes are calling. From glen to glen and down the mountainside. The summer’s gone, and all the roses falling. Tis you, tis you must go and I must bide…
Her favorite song. Then the bedtime prayer, as she knelt beside her beloved daddy, her tiny pink feet in funny contrast to his great big puddle stompers.
“Now I lay me down to sleep. I pray the Lord me soul to keep. If I should die before I wake…”
Above her, the Rabid whined piteously.
“I pray the Lord me Soul to take…”
Josie felt the Rabid’s penis soften on her leg. His trembling intensified. “Stop that…please,” said a voice familiar to Josie. “That praying…please…stop it.”
She tried to get up, but Bill shoved her back down.
Josie closed her eyes and clasped her hands tightly together, her voice louder than before.
“God Bless Rusty and Ralph and…”
“N-no. D-don’t d-do t-that…”
“…And Bud William Brown, who’s already lost more than any one man ever ought to, Lord!”
“Bu-Bud…Buddy…Boy. My Buddy boy.”
Josie felt something hot and wet hit her bare back. She flinched, and then realized it was just Bill’s tears. Somehow the man was regaining control of his senses!
“And God Bless Bilbo Brown, who’s always been like a father to me…”
The next thing Josie knew, Bill was climbing off her body, the air again filling her lungs. Her naked back, cold from the sudden loss of all that unnatural heat. She turned her head, worried it might be a trick; still expecting, though, to see that Bill Brown had somehow fought off the disease; that all was well. What she saw instead made her heart thunder in her chest…
Bilbo had scurried over to a corner of the shelter, the one lit by the flashlight. He sat crouched there in the half-light, cradling something dark in his hands. His eyes burned just as bright as before. Maybe even more so. As if something inside him was stoking the fires in an attempt to quash this astonishing breakthrough of willpower.
He stared back at Josie with the same lust filled gaze. The man behind those avid eyes was the only thing keeping that ravenous demon at bay.
“Let me help you,” she said, getting up from the table. Josie stumbled towards him.
Bill drank in her naked body. His face contorting as he struggled to maintain control. His skin rippled in fleshy waves, seeking out a shore to come to rest. Something from within him was pulling Bill Brown apart.
Josie saw what he was holding in his lap, where his penis was once again growing rigid. The .45 he’d retrieved from underneath the coffee table. She heard the click of the safety disengaging. He leveled it at her chest.
“Look away, Josie.”
“No! Wait, Bill! Please don’t—”
“Look awwwaaaayyy,” he growled, tears flowing from his awful, awful eyes. Then, almost a gentle whisper, meant for another: “I love you…”
In the Bunker, the gunshot was oh so loud.
*******
Halfway to the Bunker, Bud tripped over a rock in the grass, his forward momentum driving him hard to the earth. In an instant, the air was gone from his lungs. It seemed likely that he was about to die. Still gasping for air, he struggled to his feet, but that was as far as his body would allow without more oxygen. It took seeing Josie naked—save for her white sneakers—for him to regain his senses.
She was scrabbling madly out of the rabbit hole, her back covered in blood…and what looked like brain matter.
“Josie,” he rasped.
She was far too upset or hurt to hear him.
“JOSIE!” he managed to shout.
He didn’t realize it but he too was crying; certain he’d just lost the last important link in his life. His only reason for living now. Josie still didn’t acknowledge his presence. She made a beeline for the lake, sobbing wildly. Bud left his backpack on the ground and took off after her.
Josie ran straight into the lake. Without slowing, he ran to the edge and dove in right behind her.
Emerging, he found her slapping away at the bloody gray matter on her hair and shoulders. The question being: Did any of it belong to Josie?
He swam to her side and placed a hand on her cold shoulder. Cold, like a corpse…“Joe—”
“AAAHHHHHHHH!” she screamed, batting away at him. “NO! You’re dead! YOU’RE DEADDDD!!!”
“JOSIE! IT’S ME!” Bud shouted, grabbing at her flailing hands. “IT’S ME!”
Josie blinked in confusion. Her green eyes opened wide, and again she burst into sobs. She threw herself into Bud’s arms, crying out his name: “Bud! Oh, Buddy boy!”
“Shhh, Joe. It’s okay now! You’re all right,” he said, not knowing if that was the case at all. He turned her around, looking for any injuries, but couldn’t find anything evident. Then again, they were standing in water up to Josie’s chest, so he couldn’t be sure. “Are you hurt?” he asked her, shaking her ever so gently.
“ Is it o-off m-me?” she asked, still hysterical. “Are t-the b-b-brains off m-m-me!”
“Let me see,” he told her. He turned her around again, and using mud from the bank, he scrubbed her back, neck, and hair. Then tenderly, like Minister Milo performing an Easter Baptism, he dunked her under, rinsing it all off. Clean now, he led Josie up on the bank, where a plush bed of grass awaited.
He laid her down on the grassy knoll, Josie clinging to his arm. Once more, Bud looked her over, from her head to her tennis shoes. When he didn’t find anything besides emerging bruises, he nearly collapsed from relief.
The question remained, however: Had one of the Rabids raped her? And if so, will she tell m
e?
He allowed her to pull him next to her. Already she was regaining her composure. She stared at him in disbelief (and a little sadness, Bud thought), as she brought herself under control. Her force of will astounded him.
“Buddy boy…you’re really here, aren’t you?”
“A little late, but I’m here. Sorry it took so long.”
“All right?”
Bud managed to smile. “Yeah. I’m all right. Tired, is all. What about you? What happened down there?” Bud had a dozen questions for her but realized Joe needed time to come out of her shock. Only time was in short supply.
“Did you find the vaccine?” she asked him, ignoring his question.
Bud could only shake his head. He just didn’t have it in him to tell her the whole sorry story. “There is no vaccine,” he finally replied.
Josie put her face in her hands. So it hadn’t even mattered! Bill would have gotten the virus, regardless. It should have been a comfort, but of course it wasn’t.
“Bud…your dad…”
“He’s dead, isn’t he.” It wasn’t a question.
She looked into his eyes. “How could you know?”
He shrugged, unable to tell her about the voice in his head. “Earlier today I heard y’all calling out to him. Besides, in my nightmares, Pops was never around in the end. None of our parents were. I guess I knew it all along; that he wasn’t going to make it after Tansy bit him. But we had to try, didn’t we, Josie?”
Josie nodded, wondering what else Bud was keeping from her about the so-called “End.”
“Was that his…blood you had on your back?”
“Yes,” she said, fresh tears filling her eyes. She replayed the events of their day, lost in the Pines. Of Bill wandering off, his reappearance later on, confirming their most dire fears; how Tubby broke his leg falling in the sinkhole; Rusty, finding the courage to stay by his side—all leading up to the horrible incident in the Bunker, where, in the end, Bilbo had given his life that Josie might live.
Bud was so distraught over the loss of his father and Josie’s possible infection that what she said about the boys didn’t register just yet. “Did my dad…”
He couldn’t bring himself to ask the whole question, but Josie’s state of undress, and the hand-shaped bruises forming on her neck, arms, and legs begged an honest answer. She grabbed his face until their eyes locked.
“No, Buddy boy,” she said, her lips trembling. “What Bill did for me down there was the most courageous thing I’ve ever seen. Now I know where you get it from.”
“I’m so sorry,” Bud said, crying.
“Don’t be sorry, love. Bilbo saved my life! That’s how I’ll always remember him, too.” She popped up like a Jill-in-the-box. “Oh, dear Lord!”
“What is it, Joe?”
“The boys! We’ve got to go get them!” She tried getting up but Bud held her fast. “What’re you doing? Didn’t you hear what I just said? They’re out there all alone! We’ve got to find them before it’s too late!”
“You stay put,” he ordered her. “I’ll gather up your things. It’s getting cloudy, and no telling what those Rabids will do if they get a little shade. Not to mention if they see you like that! You’re safer here by the water.”
Josie conceded the point, allowing him to leave her side. She hugged her arms across her chest and watched the greedy clouds above once more steal the precious sun.
*******
Crawling without caution into the rabbit hole, Bud glanced at his watch: 5:13. They had at most fifty minutes of good daylight left. Less, if the clouds kept building up like they were. Barring some miracle they would be coming back through the Pines after sunset. Anxious to get going, he’d left his backpack where he’d dropped it, so he had no flashlight to show the way. His Zippo was lost to him, too, lying somewhere in the alcove below. He would have to stumble his way through the—Maybe not…
Bud could see a faint glow in the Bunker below. He remembered Josie saying how Bill had knocked the flashlight from her hand. It must still be on.
He landed in the alcove and began looking for his father’s body. The air was thick and oppressive. Death and grief pressing down on all sides. Bud’s heart was thumping so hard he thought it might tear right through his ribs. The lump in his throat so large, it made him gasp for air. It brought back memories of that first time by his mother’s grave, alone at his insistence. He’d missed her funeral; his doctors and father didn’t think he was ready to face the truth. They were right, of course. Two months later, and he still hadn’t been ready to face the truth. That his mother was really gone. He’d cried for over three hours that day, the full enormity hitting him right there in the lonely cemetery. Mom was really dead. Now his pops was gone, too. Déjà’ vu, baby. Déjà fuck you, too.
Bud circled the other two bodies; his eyes never straying from the sad figure, sprawled naked just inside the shelter. He slowly approached his father, afraid he might somehow disturb the old man’s rest. A rest William Beauregard Brown deserved so very much.
He couldn’t help but wonder if his dad and mom weren’t somehow, somewhere, together again.
As if in reply to his heart’s lonely query, he felt a sudden change in the Bunker. The air now somehow lighter, cleaner. The oppressive weight lifted from the room. Even the flies had at last taken their leave.
His father’s sacrifice had made this place, once more, a sanctuary from Evil.
Bud knelt by the old man, averting his eyes from the messy hole in Bill Brown’s head. He took the man’s still warm hand in his own. “Pop…I want you to know that Josie’s okay. She told me what you did for her. How you saved her. I’m just sorry I couldn’t do the same for you.”
He stood up and began walking away, stopping halfway to the storage room. Without turning around, he returned his father’s last earthly thought. Saying it out loud.
“I love you too, Dad. I love you, too.”
*******
Rusty watched the waning sun, his heart sinking with it. Where’s Josie? She should’ve been back here by now!
He checked his watch. 5:43. The clouds above were burning orange, the temperature dropping steadily.
Has something happened to her—
The sound of crashing underbrush broke his train of thought. What the hell was that!? Josie?
No. The noise was too abrupt, harsh. Like a bobcat pouncing on an unsuspecting fawn in the palmettos. With dark coming on, Josie would’ve been more circumspect. He looked down at Tubby. The boy had been in-and-out of consciousness. Right now he was somewhere in-between the two planes, moaning in pain. “Shhh, Opie. I need you to be quiet,” Rusty said, bending over his friend.
Tubby squinted up at Rusty. He nodded his head and licked his dry lips. Rusty got his water bottle and held it up with a questioning look. Tubby’s smile came across as a grimace. Rusty put his hand under Tubby’s head and lifted it slightly so his friend could swallow without choking. After Tubby was finished, Rusty took some of the water and bathed his friend’s fevered brow.
He bent down until his lips were beside Tubby’s left ear. “Something’s up there. Moving around.”
Tubby mouthed the question: Joe?