Dead Earth

by Demers, Matt

  “Which one is the Tweak?” Gaffer said, pointing the 12-gauge.

  “Forget it. You’ll spray everyone from this distance.”

  The wind and rain were pricking needles against James’ nerve-damaged skin. He should have grabbed the parka.

  A door burst open two campers down. Dr. Marcus stood in the rectangle of light. Her white coat was mottled with streaks of color. She cast a lanky shadow across the gravel. A Tweak had already done its worst and now she was one of them too. The doctor’s back hunched and fingers spread into a claw. She swiped at the air. The Tweak had torn large sections of neck and arm away, leaving what James thought looked like deep potholes.

  Either a horde of them had gotten past the barricades somehow, or a single Tweak had bitten and changed many of them already. But that fast? Was it possible? And where had it come from?

  Silhouettes cut across the figure of the doc-Tweak, making a shot too risky. While James hesitated, the doc shrieked and dashed into the dark.

  James turned to Paul and Delores and lifted the Desert Eagle. Paul had managed to wrestle the rifle away from Delores. The big-boned woman rolled onto her back and Paul mounted her. Delores flailed, clawing at Paul’s face, grabbing and tearing at his shirt. Paul raised the rifle, butt pointed down, both hands clenched around the barrel grip. He stalled for a moment. Then—

  The butt descended. It struck Delores on the temple. Her arms thrashed wildly before the butt battered her again. Her limbs tensed then went limp. The butt rammed and battered until gore dangled from the rifle in stringy pendulums.

  “Paul’s the Tweak.” Gaffer stated the obvious without emotion.

  “Paul!” James shouted at the Tweak, hoping to stall him. “Paul, you God-fearing Tweaky fucker, you!” Spittle flew from James’ mouth. Paul, the three-time LaSalle Bowling champ, and one of only three residents to have a lower handicap than James. In other words, Paul had this coming.

  Paul turned his head and eyed James. James cocked the .44’s hammer one-handed. “Come get saved.”

  Paul dropped the rifle and staggered to his feet. He snarled and tore straight for James, escaping from the window light into the shadows. James aimed into the black and listened. Shrieks echoed from every direction, but he honed in on the sound of crunching stone. It grew louder as Paul’s heavy steps approached. The faint outline of Paul’s large frame appeared in the light a few feet away.

  The boom of the Desert Eagle rattled the campers. Muzzle flash illuminated the lot, giving a snapshot of the magnum’s entry wound and something else — another Tweak in James’ peripheral vision.

  A shoulder plowed into his chest and he fell back. His weapon soared out of his hand. He couldn’t breathe. His skull smacked stone and white light flashed. Warmth trickled down the back of his neck. The world retreated until it stared back at James through the end of a dark tunnel. James felt stone against his back, but when he looked it wasn’t gravel, but smooth pebble. The warmth on his neck engulfed him now. The tide had rolled in.

  Green River?

  Indeed — Greenville’s one-and-only meaningful landmark. James gasped and clawed up the sloping shoreline. He didn’t want the tide touching him. No Tweaks in sight. How hard did he crack his skull?

  Maybe the cancer finally got me, James reasoned. Now I’m…Where?...Heaven? Hell? A lukewarm place between?

  Everything glowed orange beneath the dusk sky.

  James heard the clanking of carabineers. Further down the shoreline, Bondy and Thrasher sprinted down a long dock toward a fishing boat, their feet pounded on the dock planks, sounding just like they had that day on Riverside Drive.

  If only you were a moment sooner, a voice called from far off.

  James turned, expecting to see the girlfriend of Phil Rettig. She’d be accusing him of having stalled by the bedroom window that day. But no. There was only a long green that separated him from Riverside Drive, which also stood dark and empty.

  That noise…

  The scream of a 40-horsepower engine.

  The squeal of tires and smell of burnt rubber.

  The mustard-yellow Mustang, with the doomed boy and his loopy father in the front, drove full tilt down Riverside, dodging cars that weren’t there. And just as it had done that day, it veered off the road and crunched against a telephone pole.

  James shouted, but his voice didn’t carry. He ran, but his legs didn’t either. The highway shrank further away, the car now a crumpled dot in the distance. James fell. He cupped his ears to block out the sound of the father’s pleas.

  My son! My son! My son!

  James felt the warmth of the tide around his ankles. He looked down. The Green River had risen above the breakers and now flooded the field. The water rose and sucked James back toward the river. He let it do its thing.

  Now the shoreline was a distant horizon, and it wasn’t a river anymore, but an ocean. Dark waters stretched in every direction, its current strong; its surface rough and foamy. James floated face-up, listening for the roar of what came for him. He heard it howling, an embodiment of ten hurricanes, racing along the water’s surface at twice the speed of a 747.

  Don’t look.

  James fixed his gaze on the dawn sky, at the strange square light that shone from the shore.

  Don’t look.

  But the urge to look swelled with the waves. He clamped his jaw, and balled his fist until his nails dug deep enough to draw blood. The water turned colder as it approached, and James craned his neck to watch. Its dark shape formed in the distance, and James knew, whatever it was, was coming just for him, and it almost did, just before the square light pulled him in.

  ***

  Saved.

  James squinted, blinded by the square of brightness. It was — he felt the grimace on his face relax. It was the camper’s dome light, James thought. That’s what he’d seen in his dream. Now he lay face-up in the camper. Gaffer leered over him clutching blue tarp. Not dead yet.

  “James?! I was just about to pull a sheet over you!” The grin on Gaffer’s face was shaky, but genuine. His eyes were wet and bloodshot. “You were gone, man. I mean dead, dude. For at least five minutes.”

  “I almost saw it, Gaffer.”

  “Saw what? Dead celebrities?”

  “No... It. I almost saw what they see.”

  Gaffer tilted his head. “You mean the Tweaks? Gaffer’s eyes bulged and his smile faded. James thought Gaffer never looked so old then. Every one of his forty-two years — plus one hundred. Gaffer grabbed something out of view and turned. A hand tool?

  “Don’t you bury that crap on me, James. Whatever you almost saw — you keep that shit to yourself.”

  “But I couldn’t make it out,” James winced. Pain began to split his head. “I woke up just before.”

  Gaffer held the tool out.

  James squinted. It looked black and smudgy. “Gaffer? What’s that?”

  Gaffer pushed on it and something tiny and shining ejected from the bottom. It dropped to the floor and chimed like a pin drop.

  What did it say? White lettering adorned it. It read Swing…something.

  Swing-shine? Swing-mine? James blinked and his vision sharpened. He read it loud and clear. Swingline.

  “No, Gaffer! You come near me with that — I’ll kill you!”

  Gaffer chucked and waved the stapler.

  “Tell you what, James. If you can grab it, I won’t touch you.”

  James reached up and immediately a wave of nausea crashed over him. The dome light retracted and a voice mumbled deep and hollow. Something warm pressed James’ forehead — a hand perhaps. James looked up and now the phrase on Gaffer’s festive shirt mocked him — “No Problem, mon! Kingston, Jamaica 2001,” it read in tropical colors.

  “I’m sorry, James,” the voice rang. “You got a bad split in the noggin. At first it just bled, but then came some clear stuff. You know what that is? Brain fluid. It’s flowing like a Culligan faucet. Seeing as Dr. Marcus came down with a case of 12-gauge
buckshot, I’ll be filling in as this evening’s surgeon.”

  James, half gone again, forgot what black anomaly hovered over him, but he knew to fear it. He felt its cold surface against his skull and it made the pain on his head sear even hotter. “Bite down on this,” the voice ordered and James felt a smooth rod against his teeth. It tasted like carbon, James would have observed , if he knew what carbon was at that moment.

  He shut his eyes. A heavy clank. Fireworks of hot pain. White tracers flared outward.

  “One down,” the voice said.

  Something had impaled the top of his skull. He spit the carbon thing out and gagged from a pain that stung and felt utterly wrong. The kind of wrong that came with dislocated joints or chipped teeth or torn-off fingernails.

  ***

  The taste of carbon became chalk. The pain ran hot, but less wild, more throbbing. The interior dome light now off. He glanced at his body. A prescription bottle of Tylenol 3’s sat sideways on his chest. Three capsules remained. James lifted his head and the bottle rolled off and fell to the camper floor.

  Gaffer sat at the fold-away table toying with a pile of gun parts.

  “There’s no salvaging it.” Gaffer frowned.

  “My head?” James cried.

  “Worse,” James muttered. “The Desert Eagle.”

  James gasped and dropped his head back into the pillow. The tracers flared again.

  “You threw it right over the camper when Marcus came at you. Dented it on something. Wouldn’t trust it to not to blow up in your face. Shame.”

  James grabbed the edge of the bed, and sat up. “Didn’t,” James managed before pain flared and froze him in place. “Throw. It.” He felt his scalp gingerly. A three- inch patch of hair had been shaved. Six staples lined like Braille in its place. James patted along it then inspected his hand. No blood.

  “You did good work,” James decided and tried to grin. Even that hurt. He sat up in his bed. “Urgh.”

  “Easy, killer.”

  James waited for the world to stop tilting. “Before Will Heller almost got me,” James told Gaffer, “I called his name. It stopped him for a second. It became Will again.

  Do it, James. It hurts.

  James continued. “When I tried that on Paul Woodhouse, he just pounced, as if his own name enraged him.”

  Gaffer began to assemble the Desert Eagle parts. “Maybe it’s like Doc Marcus said, every case is different. Some speak, some reason, some are just mindless killers running on instinct. But Marcus never explained why exactly—”

  “Depends how they were while they were… normal,” James cut in.

  “Exactly. That’s what I think. What’s different about every case is how fast they decline and how bad they get. And it becomes that much worse if they were bat-shit crazy already. That might be why no two are exactly the same.” Gaffer stood from the table and opened the camper.

  The whole Woodhouse family was indeed nuts. The fact they wanted no part of the RV lot alone said a lot.

  “It shows, James. You should see Paul Woodhouse’s body now. He looks bad, even for a corpse. Take a look,” Gaffer suggested.

  James poked his head outside the camper. Lumps of blue tarp, sleeping bags, and bed sheets scattered across the lot. James pulled his collar up to mask the smell. The rain hadn’t helped any.

  Gaffer stepped from the door and crouched beside a tarp-covered lump by the camper’s flip-down steps. Gaffer’s cigarette butts decorated the space around it as if tobacco was the real culprit. Gaffer pinched the tarp and peeled it back.

  Paul Woodhouse’s eyes gazed upward. His mouth hung agape with the sides curled into a smile. You got me, but not my friends, he seemed to say.

  Woodhouse’s skin had changed from its original ginger-pink to grey-blue. Cobwebs of popped blood vessels spread over his blotchy nose and cheeks. Worse, in the natural creases of his skin — the lines along his mouth and the wrinkles ringing his neck — the skin had separated. A roadmap of deep ravines split his skin James saw fatty tissue and bone beneath.

  Gaffer sucked the last inch of cigarette then flicked it. It twirled in an arc then dropped into the Desert Eagle wound in Paul’s chest. It fizzled in the ooze that leaked from the hole. “Score. To think Skee-Ball never agreed with me,” Gaffer joked dryly.

  “That black sludge –– oozing out of him?” James said. “Smells like the overpass. Like swamp. I bet he was living off swamp water.” James hiccupped and turned away, placing a fist over his mouth to stop from gagging. He saw Gaffer’s belly shake in his peripheral vision.

  James dry-heaved and Gaffer’s shakes became rumbles. Gaffer bent down hands-over-knees and laughed himself mute. His face reddened as he sucked wind. Finally, he erupted in small wheezes that echoed through the lot as if the dead laughed along with him.

  “We’re surrounded by the decaying bodies of our dead friends,” James began. “And you laugh because it sickens me?” But James felt his own giggle-fit building. This wasn’t the type of carefree laughter traded among friends, but the type drawn from the wellspring of insanity.

  “Not my fault it’s funny!” Gaffer roared. “You always try to stop puking fist-over-mouth. Don’t know whether to get a bucket or request a Karaoke song!” Gaffer let out and roared again.

  James looked down at his fist, which had made its way to his mouth again to stop another spout of gagging. It did kind of look like an imaginary microphone. For the first time in a long while, and despite the head pain and the cancer pain and the dead around him, James laughed. Insanity or not — it felt good.

  Gaffer leaned back and let himself plop onto the camper steps. His body shook and tears trailed down his cheeks. James’ smiled down at his friend, but that quickly turned into a frown.

  “Gaffer? You alright, man?”

  Gaffer placed his palms over his eyes and cried. Not cries of laughter, but real weeping. James had never seen him cry. The man trembled and the tears flowed.

  You’re no good at these things, a voice reminded James. It sounded like his college girlfriend, the day she bawled in his dorm room, both of them dressed in funeral attire.

  I’m sorry about your brother, James had told her and the words felt forced.

  You’re no good at this, she had said.

  I sure ain’t, James agreed. But he put a hand on Gaffer’s shoulder anyway.

  “They’re all gone, James,” Gaffer said, looking up, weary-eyed. He ran a forearm across his nose and sniffed. His body tremored.

  “Huh?”

  Gaffer said. “We’re the only ones left in Greenville.”

  That was obvious, but it seemed to finally hit home for Gaffer. James heaved again and spilled his stomach’s feeble contents. Gaffer didn’t laugh, only stood and gazed across the lot at the forty or so lumps strewn about. Some of them sagged against campers; others piled in twos and threes.

  Gaffer’s face took on that old look again. Every crease of his face deepened. “I’ve gathered the essential,” he said softly. “Meet you by The Wire in half. It’s time to go.”

  He was right. Hell, they should have been gone months ago. The way the Tweaks looked at them from across the barricades, the residents had known for a while that a pile of metal and spool wouldn’t do. Not anymore.

  James retreated to the camper and grabbed his rucksack from beneath the table. He went through the cabinets and packed only the essentials — compass, map of Monroe City, two pens, toothbrush, soap, small piece of cloth, canned mushrooms, three packets of beef jerky, one bottle of Perrier, matches, one crank flashlight, shades, parka, socks, undershirt, briefs.

  He stuffed a thermos of water in his canteen pouch. He rolled and strapped in his sleeping bag, snatched the three arrows from his quiver — all that remained — and stuck them arrowhead down in the rucksack’s side-mesh. That’s what Gaffer had lodged into his mouth during the “surgery” — a carbon arrow.

  James swapped his blood-splattered shirt for a clean, plain black one — blood didn’t stain
dark clothes as easy. He slipped his body harness on and holstered the Bearcat, and opened the chamber he knew was empty but hoped otherwise. James sighed while re-holstering the revolver.

  Shooting the rafters at Al’s was fucking stupid.

  He glanced through the window at Gaffer shuffling through the lot. Man, did Gaffer ever look wrecked. Gaffer the indestructible hillbilly. Gaffer the shotgun wielding good ole’ boy, with his folksy knowledge, and his straight-up outlook on things.

  “There are three things guaranteed in this town — STDs, the unemployment rate, and Frank Gaffer,” James said to himself.

  Gaffer looked like one of those worn-out Tweaks hobbling beyond The Wire, just asking for a good ole’ crotch shot. Gaffer crouched by a mound draped with bedding, pulled the sheet away, and patted the pockets of a corpse. Dead bodies or not, something was up. Something James didn’t know about, yet. Not even a year ago, when every other survivor walked with their heads in the dirt, Gaffer was the only one keeping his chin up.

  James mulled over other items in the camper for another ten minutes and realized Gaffer had packed little, if any of their shared supplies. He slung the rucksack, shouldered his bow, gave the Coleman a farewell salute and stepped onto the lot for the last time. He headed toward The Wire, head stooped. That nice yeasty scent from Hiram’s hadn’t hung over Greenville for some weeks, but it went without saying that’s where they’d head next.

  James watched the barricade grow until it stood above him. He followed the dirt slope to the foot of the bridge, where Gaffer perched on a rock by the edge of Turkey Creek with his Remington shotgun across his lap.

  “You’re packin’ pretty light,” James noted.

  Gaffer grabbed James’ hand and placed something in it.

  James opened his fist to see five rounds of .22 shells. “What’s this happy horse shit?”

  Gaffer smiled, failing to hide the sadness behind it. “Fucker bit me, James. Just barely. Hardly drew blood and I thought at first it didn’t get in. But now I feel it.”