by Russ Watts
“No way. This is ridiculous.” Charlie looked at the six figures by the fence, horrified and terrified at being so close to them. It was one thing watching them from the safety of her bedroom and quite another being out here only feet away. “I’m not doing it,” she said, refusing to take the crowbar.
“Like you said, Charlie, at some point we’re going to have to leave. We may as well start thinning them out now. Not to go to Attwood’s, but somewhere brand new, somewhere away from Peterborough and New Hampshire, somewhere far, far away where they aren’t.” Kyler looked at the zombies lined up against the fence and then at Charlie. He wasn’t sure if she was more afraid of them or him. He had to make her understand. “Don’t you see, Charlie? America is teeming with them now. They’re like rats. They infiltrated our cities and spread like a plague. Once there was one. Imagine that. The first one had to have come from somewhere. Then there were two, three, and a hundred; then a thousand until there were millions of them. And you know what? We can’t get rid of them now. The government saw to that. Screwed us over big time. There’s no rescue coming, Charlie, not ever. No, we have to leave. I don’t know where yet. North or South. But I know we have to leave Peterborough.”
“We can’t kill them all, Dad. So you kill these six, some more will come along. We should leave them alone, Dad. This is pointless.”
“That’s what you think, is it? Leave them alone? Leave them alone, and perhaps they’ll leave us alone? Maybe we should just let them take over, ‘cause if we don’t do something about them, they will take over. The streets aren’t safe, Charlie. Doing nothing is not an option. If I had the ability, the power, I’d build a wall. I’d build the biggest fucking wall this planet has ever seen. Forget seeing it from the Moon, you’d see that fucking bitch all the way from Jupiter. I’d kill every last one of them, and then I’d erect a wall around the whole country. Nobody comes in, nobody gets out. It’s the only way.”
There was so much hate and vitriol when he spoke that Charlie feared he wasn’t even joking. “You’d build a wall?” she asked, incredulous. “I think we’re getting off topic here. We don’t need to think about them, we need to think about us. It’s what we do that matters.”
“True, it does matter what we do. It matters what you do. You have to start thinking bigger, Charlie. If I could, I’d build that wall today. I’d start with our house. Then I’d protect our town, and finally the whole country. There’s too much at stake to let it all fall now.”
“So what happens when all the zombies are dead? What happens when other people need our help? You can’t just block yourself in and close your eyes to what’s happening out there.”
“You’re wrong, Charlie, that’s exactly what I’ll do. We need to separate them from us. We clearly can’t live together. All we do is fight and kill each other. You want to try and live alongside them, then be my guest. You’ll be dead in sixty seconds.”
“Well, I guess it’s a moot point anyway.” Charlie wondered if he was truly serious. They barely had enough energy to get through the day as it was, and here he was talking about building walls. “You don’t have the ability to build a wall.”
“Not yet. Maybe I won’t be able to. Maybe I’ll be dead before we can get close to achieving anything for this sorry ass nation of ours. But I need to get it into that head of yours that you need to protect your own. You can’t rely on other people; you have to do it yourself. So you put up a wall around yourself, got it? You find the biggest wall you can, and get yourself behind it.” Kyler lifted the crowbar and looked the zombies. There were eight now. “Just let everyone on the other side kill themselves.”
“I don’t really think it’s that simple. And besides, you seem to picture a world where the zombies are all gone. You think that’s ever going to happen? There are way more of them than there are us.”
“I’ll agree with you on that. That’s just what makes them so dangerous. You can’t reason with them. You can’t sit them down and talk it over. The only thing they understand is a damn bullet to the head.”
“Dad, you know it’s not that simple. They deserve a bit more respect than that. They are us. They were just unlucky enough to get this thing, but they’re our family. They’re human beings. Mom’s out there. You want to put a bullet in her head?”
“You don’t get it, Charlie.” Kyler marched to his daughter, and twisted her around. He forced her to look at the zombies gathering by the metal fence.
“Kill them, Charlie. Take this crowbar, and kill them all. Put it through their brains. You have to fight, or die, Charlie. Do it.”
Charlie struggled, but as usual her father was too strong for her. She wanted to turn around and slap him, to show him that he was being a fool, but he had hold of her too tightly for any chance of escape. “No, there’s no point. They’re already dead.”
“No point?” Incensed, Kyler grabbed the back of Charlie’s long, blonde hair and yanked her head back. She screamed at him to stop, but he began pushing her forward. Her slim frame offered little resistance to her father’s bulk, and he easily made her walk over the last few feet to the fence.
“No, Dad, stop.” Charlie screwed up her eyes. The arms and hands reaching through the iron railings strained to get to her.
Kyler stopped only when she was inches away. She squirmed in his grasp, but she wasn’t going to get away that easily. “Fight or die. Which is it going to be?”
“Dad, you’re hurting me. Let go.” Charlie tried to twist away, but her father’s grip on her neck only got stronger.
“No, Charlie, you have to decide. I’m not going to stop and neither are they. So decide: fight or die.” Kyler prodded his daughter’s head forward, only inches away from the gnarled and yellowing fingernails of a zombie, its thin skeletal arms waving and dancing in front of her face. “Well?”
Charlie gave up. There was no reasoning with him anymore. She couldn’t fight him. If he wanted her to die, then she would. She closed her eyes and waited for the final push, for him to feed her to the zombies. After a moment the pressure on her neck eased, and she was suddenly free. She stumbled back and found Kyler behind her staring at the fence.
Charlie was about to leave him, to disappear into the recesses of the house, anywhere that he wasn’t, when she realized he hadn’t stopped because he had wanted to, but because he was distracted. She turned to the fence to see what he saw and found herself staring at her mother. The torn red dress was instantly recognizable although the battered face of her mother wasn’t. She barely looked human anymore. They had eaten away so much of her before she had reanimated that she no longer resembled the beautiful woman she once was.
“Do it, Dad,” said Charlie, turning back to her father. She rubbed her sore neck and glared at the man she once loved. “If it’s that easy, then do it. Kill her.”
Kyler gulped down his fear and lowered the crowbar. “This changes nothing. You should—”
“I should what?” Charlie stepped away from the fence. It was unnerving being so close to them, to the dead, to her. She was angry with her father and couldn’t believe he had treated her like that, as if she was nothing but dinner for the corpses. “I should what? Fuck off and die? Is that what you want? You think I like living like this?” Charlie felt the sting of tears coming, but was unable to express how much she resented her father in that moment. She was tempted to grab the crowbar from him and smash it across his face. She hated how much he got to her, but there was no other way to live. One of them had to change soon, or it would end badly for one of them. “Peterborough is a good town to live in,” she said. “We just can’t stay here anymore in this house. It’s too…painful.”
“Correction, it was a good town. Now it’s just a cemetery like everywhere else.”
Kyler sighed. He looked defeated, but it was nothing to do with Charlie. It was the unexpected arrival of her mother that had changed him. He was calmer now, withdrawn almost, but he was standing his ground. He always had to have the last word.
“Your mother always tried to bring out the best in you, and God knows I pushed you too. Your grades were good, better than average, and you were a bright kid. Are bright. So what went wrong?”
It was a rhetorical question. Charlie knew Kyler was in the groove now, getting into the natural rhythm of his criticism of her. It happened occasionally, yet with more frequency since her mother passed. She knew there was little point in answering since it only seemed to spur him on. Any case for the defense was met with more criticism. Another minute, and he should get there. ‘You’re such a disappointment.’ She almost wanted him to say the words, those four little words that he longed to express yet lacked the courage to say out loud.
Kyler looked down at the crowbar in his hand like it was an alien object. “I’ll tell you where it went wrong: your last year you got involved with that Jackson boy. He let you think you would be happy here. He let you settle, let you think this was it, that you had achieved what you needed to; I think you fell in love with your first fuck and let him convince you that the outside world was your enemy. Stay in Peterborough, right? Settle down and have lots of babies? That about right?”
“Jesus, Dad, just quit talking like that. Jackson wasn’t the problem.” Charlie was still crying, and all the while her father kept talking she was aware that her mother was behind her. As usual she was stuck between them, unable to break free of the shackles they had thrown around her since she was a child. Why did it have to be this way? Why did everything have to be so hard?
“No, of course not,” said Kyler. “You never could see anything wrong with him, could you? But he got into your head. Somehow he took away all that ambition, all that energy and drive you had, and turned you into this wet lettuce, devoid of any drive or character.”
Charlie sighed and wiped her tears with the back of her hand. It was hard listening to him when he got like this. As much as she put it down to the drink, sometimes the truth came out, she knew that. And he hadn’t started drinking today—yet—so she couldn’t blame what he said on the liquor. She looked at him unable to recognize the loving father he had been when she was growing up. He was older and slower, but he was also bitter and angry. Why did he have to take it out on her? If she hadn’t stuck around, he would probably have drunk himself into an early grave. She helped out around the house and looked after him, so why did he despise her so much? She had no response to his diatribe and vitriol. He could spout it all day long, it made no difference. It didn’t change the fact that her mother was dead. Charlie had tried reasoning with him before, yet anything she said only seemed to make him angrier.
“Look at you. Even now when I’m insulting you you’ve got nothing to say. It’s pathetic, Charlie.” Kyler glanced at the fence, at his dead wife, and then back to Charlie with a startling clarity. He straightened his back as he looked at her. “Do you know what? Do you know what I think?”
Here it comes. Those four magic words every daughter wants to hear from her father. Charlie stared at him, her hands curled up into tight balls as if she was about to enter a boxing ring, her hands gripping the pockets of her jeans as if she was clinging onto the edge of the world.
“Do you want to know?” he asked.
Charlie knew she was going to hear it whether she wanted to or not.
“You’re not the girl who I brought up. Where’s the fighter I raised? Do you want to die, is that it? Where’s all your fight gone? You’re not your mother’s daughter anymore. I don’t know where our Charlie went. Maybe she’s buried deep inside of you. Maybe you can find the key to the chains you put her in and get her out again one day, I don’t know. But I can tell you this, Charlie. If your mother was with us now, she would say the same as me. You’re a disappointment. Truly, you’ve not just let me down, but her too. That’s what gets me. You would be such a disappointment to her.”
So there it was. Finally, he managed to get it out. Charlie knew it was coming, yet when he finally said it out loud it felt like her heart was going to burst. All the time he had been talking she had been ignoring what he’d been saying. She had heard most of it before. At least once a week he would open a bottle of whiskey and get into something with her. It was a form of entertainment she supposed. Without TV or sports anymore, without anyone else to talk to, then what else was there to do but talk to each other? The problem was that her father didn’t know how to talk anymore. All he knew how to do these days was bitch and moan, usually about her. That didn’t mean she had to sit back and take it. As she looked at him in the sunlight, she looked into his eyes. They were red from the alcohol, yes, but there was life in them yet. He wasn’t tired. Did he want to fight? Was that the only sport he could think of now, goading her into an argument that she knew she had no chance of winning.
“Feel better now? Feel better now that you’ve got it off your chest? What a relief, huh? Feel good about yourself telling your only child that she’s such a disappointment to you?” Charlie considered for a brief moment of going to her mother, of letting her rip open her neck, and ending it all. She had no death wish, but there would be something satisfying about letting her father realize that he had failed her. He couldn’t protect her all the time. There would be an irony in it if it ended up being her own mother who both gave her life and took it away.
Kyler scratched his nose and looked at Charlie. He folded his arms and sighed. The driveway fell into silence as they looked at each other, both waiting for the other to speak. There was no sound, and even the zombies seemed to hush.
“So that’s it? We go to bed, I make you breakfast in the morning, and we carry on as before?” asked Charlie. She couldn’t understand what he was trying to do. Another argument would get them nowhere.
“That’s really up to you, Charlie. You tell me. You gonna fight now?” Smiling, he extended the crowbar to her. “Why don’t you decide, right now? Fight or die? I’ve tried with you. I’ve done what I can. It’s up to you now.”
Charlie glared at Kyler. It was too much. She wanted to cry, to run away, to hit him and slap him and kick him until he saw sense, but as she pictured herself doing all of those things, she knew it was all pointless. He wouldn’t change.
“I thought I was just a disappointment. What kind of fighter would I make, huh? And what about you? The great Kyler Gretzinger. The man. The one and only. What do you think you are to me?” Charlie ignored the offer of the crowbar and stared through her tears at her father. “What happened to us, Dad? What happened to my kind father? He disappeared when Mom died. Now I’m living with a drunken slob who hates me. You wonder why I’m so quiet, yet all you do is criticize me. Why would I bother trying to hold a conversation with you when I already know the answers? Charlie, you’re so stupid. Charlie, why don’t you listen to me? Charlie, your Mother didn’t do it like that. Fight or die, Charlie. What the fuck is your problem? I’m sick of it. Guess what, Dad? You’re the disappointment. You really think you’re the man? You think this is the life I wanted? Living with you in this stinking house with no way out? Thank God she’s dead, ‘cause she would hate to see what we’ve become. Christ, if Mom could see you now she would hate you as much as I do.”
Kyler threw the crowbar at Charlie and she ducked. It flew past her head and clattered into the fence, sending the zombies into a frenzy as the clanging noise reverberated around the still, warm air.
“Don’t talk about your mother like that,” said Kyler. “Don’t you dare. You really believe it’s a good thing she’s dead? You happy with that situation?”
Charlie regretted her words as soon as she’d said them, but he kept pushing her. There was nothing more in the world she wanted than to have her mother back. She would never talk like this. She would never have let things get this bad between them. Her mother had been the glue holding them together, and now that she was gone the bond between fa
ther and daughter was gone too. It hadn’t vanished overnight, it had taken a few weeks, but slowly it had gone. Her father had refused to talk about anything for a while, and by the time he came around to it, it was too late. There was a distance now that he and Charlie could never recover from. By the time Kyler had started talking again she could hear the bitterness in every word he spoke to her. Why did she have to be stuck here with him, with no future, with zero chance of making a future for herself? Was this all that life had left to offer: endless arguments with her father, never venturing beyond the walls of the house, and never seeing anyone else in the whole world but herself and the hatred in her father’s eyes?
As the tears continued pouring down her cheeks she hated herself for it. No doubt he was pleased with his morning’s work. He was right, she was pathetic. She was twenty-one. She knew she should be stronger than that, able to rise above the insults, yet she found that as every day passed she was getting weaker. She was giving up. She couldn’t argue with him anymore. She couldn’t see a way out of this mess. She wiped away her tears and summoned up what little energy she had.
“I wish it was you. I wish it was you out there instead of her.” Charlie sniffed and rubbed her eyes. God, she was tired. It was barely noon, yet all she wanted to do was curl up in bed. “I wish Mom was here and you were dead.”
Kyler strode up to his daughter, walking right up to her so that she could smell the faint residue of last night’s whiskey on his breath. “And?”
Charlie looked at him, confused. And what? She had just told him she wished he was dead, and all he could do was look at her. Why wasn’t he shouting at her? Why wasn’t he berating her, telling her how ridiculous she was being or slapping her? Was this just a game?
“And what?”
“Well, I wish your Mother was here too. Every time I look at you, I see her. Every single minute that I’m conscious I wish she were here. Jemma was the best thing to happen to me until you were born. But she’s gone, so wishing I was out there instead is pretty pointless, don’t you think? Isn’t it more realistic to think about what you can do about it, about your present situation, instead of dwelling on the past?”