“Communion wafers have no nutritional value,” Ian said and then continued walking.
“Sometimes churches have kitchens in the basement,” Grant explained.
“How do you know anything about church?” Ian eyed him. Grant had Satanist tendencies. He was definitely closer to an earth-worshipping Pagan than he was to a Christian.
“Know thy enemy.” Grant waved Ian to follow him.
The church was quiet and empty, but it was the one place they’d entered that felt okay to be empty. It looked like a weekday, instead of a Sunday, when the church would be brimming with life. They took a long hall to the back of the building and entered a room labeled Supplies.
Ian opened cabinet after cabinet. “Communion wafers; boxes of them. I told you.”
“The body of Christ.” Grant opened a box and slid a single wafer onto his tongue where it stuck and quickly absorbed all of his saliva. “Water,” he said, pointing to the paste it had become.
In another cabinet, Ian found a few bottles of Dasani. “It’s labeled as ‘Holy’”, he said. “Won’t this burn your flesh?”
“Ha ha. Only one way to know.” Grant held out a hand and chugged the liquid. “I’m melting!”
Ian tried a wafer and found himself downing water with his friend.
“Now, time to find the blood of Christ.” Grant rubbed his hands together in expectation and his eyes were bright with excitement. That light quickly faded when he discovered that the wine cabinet was locked.
“We should leave.” Ian had seen Grant drunk twice before. Both times he wanted to forget. The first ended with a near suicide attempt on a freeway overpass and the second, a girl threatening to report Grant for inappropriately touching her. Ian hoped the key was on someone’s key ring, very far away.
“Come on, I really want a drink. We can hang out here; maybe sleep on pews for the night. I promise I won’t cause any trouble.”
“Fine,” Ian said with a sigh. “The key’s probably in the office.”
The office—or Secretarial Office, as its closed door was labeled—was quiet. They knew better than to trust still air and so they each stood to one side of the door while Grant lightly tapped on the wood. Nothing. No sounds. No sudden, desperate, death-driven movements.
Ian shifted on his feet. “We’ve spent too much time here. Are we doing this or what?”
Grant nodded, grabbed the doorknob, and threw the door inward.
A woman rushed forward from the darkness. Her right hand was wrapped up from an old injury; the blood on the fabric had turned brown long ago. For no apparent reason, she turned toward Ian and knocked him to the ground.
An undead adversary bent on eating your flesh has even more of a want to kill you than any other thing you might come into a fight against. This statement includes sharks, grizzly bears, crocodiles, serial killers, and any fatal disease known to the CDC. A hungry zombie trumps them all. And this zombie was very, very hungry.
Ian was scared, but he wanted to prove to Grant that he could hold his own. He pushed and strained against the rotting terror. Its stomach leaked all manner of bile and rot onto his shirt. He vomited and watched in horror as the beast’s biting mouth moved ever closer to his own face. He hadn’t considered the ick factor, the absolute grossness of touching decay. His fingers were sinking into the woman’s body, unable to push away, only able to sink in. She bent closer and her teeth dragged across the skin of Ian’s neck.
“Grant! Help me!”
• • •
He was right there for you, wasn’t he?
“He wrapped a banner of some kind around her face and pulled her off. Then he…he…he jumped on her head to stop her.”
And he found the key and moved on like it was nothing.
“Nothing at all.”
• • •
“This church is cheap,” Grant observed as he inspected the label of the only wine bottle in the cabinet. “Think folks would donate more if they knew they were drinking this crap?”
They became comfortably drunk and spent the afternoon exploring the rest of the church. The sanctuary, a room of low carpet, row after row of stiff wooden benches, and a blood stain the size of a person at the end of the center row, was empty. At the beginning of the plague, a pastor overcome by infection was re-killed by a member of his congregation. The weapon of choice had been a large cross, ripped from the wall above the altar. It now lay next to the crusted puddle of gore. A bloody trail led from the sanctuary and out the front doors.
• • •
I see you’ve already decided the person of whom it spilled out.
“It had to be the pastor. He’d still be here if he was alive.” Ian says, unaware that not all people of God spend every waking moment at church, but also unaware that he was right.
Hardly the first blood spilled in a religious place, anyway.
• • •
The cupboards of the kitchen beneath the sanctuary were empty. On each cabinet door was posted a sign declaring “Label your food!” to any who might make use of the shelves.
As the sun went down outside, they barricaded themselves into the sanctuary.
“Pull up a pew,” Grant said with a still-drunken laugh.
“Don’t mind if I dewww,” Ian replied, equally giddy and inebriated.
• • •
How many times has he saved your life?
“I never counted.”
I bet he remembers the one time you didn’t save his.
“I wasn’t thinking straight.”
You weren’t thinking at all.
Ian jumps to his feet, anger pulsing through his frail body. He re-bundles Grant’s sleeping bag, places it back near the memorial of his dead friend, and returns to his tiny closet prison.
You cannot escape me.
“I can certainly try!” Ian fumes.
This was your idea, all this story telling. Don’t back out now!
“What’s that noise?” Ian asks.
Don’t change the subject!
“Shhh!” Ian quiets his mind. “I really do hear something.”
Where earlier a cat had braved the rotting minefield of the first floor, another critter has followed. Ian hears it sniff the floor and scratch the bare wood with its small claws. His stomach growls after his mind wanders to thoughts of cooked squirrel. Grant had used early-learned hunting skills to secure a few wild meals before his death. They never really needed squirrel, but Grant liked to show off and kill things sometimes.
Ian slowly pushes the wool coat from his lap and lies down on the closet floor. He can see the bottom of a thick-furred body sitting on long feet.
A rabbit, he guesses silently.
A stench rises up in his nose and for a moment he blames the new guest on the other side of the door. But when the rabbit hops away the smell remains, digging deeper into his nostrils.
It’s you.
“I gathered that, thank you,” he says. He is embarrassed even though he is alone.
You smell like piss.
Catching the rabbit wouldn’t help his situation much. Grant always was better with blades. Ian, on the other hand, would probably cut himself due to nervousness. He suffered paper cuts from cereal boxes and couldn’t be trusted to safely open envelopes from the mail. Besides, he isn’t ready to see more gore or cause the death of another living being, not yet anyway. Not quite starving enough. Ian does find some hope that the bunny has taken a handful of greedy fleas with it.
Sleep is calling him once more. He tries to fight it, to postpone the nightmares, but his lids are too heavy to resist.
In the middle of the cold night, Ian awakes to the tinny sound of raindrops hitting the windowpanes. For a terrifying moment his mind imagines the grotesquely long fingernails of the dead tapping on the glass. Even in their walking death as other parts rotted and fell away, their hair and nails continued to grow. Each body seems worse than the last, with curled claws extending from their fingertips.
The rain r
eminds you of something else.
“The day we found Thomas. It doesn’t matter, he’s just as alone and doomed as I am.”
Everything matters, Ian. Tell them about Thomas.
“He deserved to survive, if anyone did, and he deserved our company. But…”
…I DIDN’T GIVE T.W. A CHANCE
Grant and Ian hadn’t been popular in school. They weren’t “in” with the sports guys or any other after school activities group. But they weren’t the most unpopular either. They floated between the cliques and were generally accepted wherever they showed up. Thomas Winston existed on the outskirts of every group.
He was in a league of his own.
T.W., as he was often called, was a schoolmate of Ian’s and his neighbor. He was also a young genius. A mad scientist of sorts with an interest in sketching, Thomas wore a large winter jacket year round with a breast pocket stuffed full of number two pencils and pens of every color. In the school lunchroom he drew pictures more than he ate food and most of his homework assignments were turned in with accompanying doodles in the paper margins. As memorable as he sounds, when the world ended, Ian and Grant forgot all about him until they returned to Ian’s street one day to find Ian’s house had been burned to the ground.
A light from an upper window of one of the houses across the street cut through the dreary, wet evening. As Ian watched it, the window opened and a figure stood backlit at the sill.
“Hey, guys! Up here!” the person called. It took the boys a second to put the voice to a name, a face.
He waved them over and pointed to a tree that grew to the right of the single-story garage. They climbed it to the first floor roof where the teen greeted them happily.
“Thomas Winston,” he said with his hand in front of him, ready to shake.
“We know who you are,” Grant grumbled. He had little patience for T.W.’s overly friendly personality and even less now that the world had ended. Ian, fearing immediate denial of entrance and wanting desperately to find shelter from the rain and the dead, shook Thomas’ hand firmly.
“Ian, your neighbor” he introduced himself. “He’s Grant.”
With proper introductions made, Thomas stepped aside to let them in.
Grant climbed in first. “Holy shit!” he exclaimed. Before Ian entered, dark thoughts ran through his brain. The ‘holy shit’ could mean anything. Thomas could have killed his family and their bodies were rotting just inside the window. It could mean that Thomas’ room was disgustingly dirty, covered in feces and moldy food. ‘Holy shit’ could mean that Thomas was holding a gun to Grant’s head at that very moment.
“Come on, Ian,” Grant coaxed. “You have to see this!”
Inside, Thomas stood to one side of his bedroom, which was clean enough for a lone teenager in the apocalypse. A bunk bed, meant for sleepovers with friends but never used as such, filled one corner and a desk sat opposite. Thomas’ jacket hung on the back of the desk chair.
It was a normal room, but for the hundreds of sheets of paper covering the walls.
Every available inch of wall space had a drawing pinned or taped to it. Ian examined one closer. In it a boy with red all over him ran after a truck. A scrawled TW marked the bottom right corner. Another showed a large black vehicle, disabled in the middle of the street.
“He saw us take out Keller’s Hummer,” Grant said.
“New stuff,” Thomas said. He pointed to a piece of paper that was covered in orange flames and black blobs that must have been smoke. “Retaliation.” Thomas had seen Keller’s destruction.
“Yeah,” was all Ian could say. He was heartbroken over it, but he couldn’t dwell on it.
• • •
Do you want to talk about it now? Everything you lost?
“I shouldn’t. Some things aren’t meant for revisiting.”
You never checked the rubble. There could be something left.
“Keller probably lit that stuff on fire too.”
Let’s get back to T.W. for now then, but you’ll have to talk about it next.
• • •
“A man of few words, many pictures.” Grant was taking in as much as he could from the sketches. They told the story of what had befallen Tom and Ian’s neighborhood.
“He’s like a historian,” Ian said.
“It’s an illustrated guide to the apocalypse. Whoa, you saw aliens?” Grant asked as he pointed to a section of drawings full of green people.
Thomas shook his head and went to his desk. He dug around in a bin and pulled out the tiniest nub of a colored pencil. “I ran out of red.”
“A lot of mess out there,” Ian said with a sigh, thinking of the rain, the burned remains of his family’s house, the bits of people all over the ground.
Thomas paced in front of his desk, deep in thought. “My parents told me to stay put until someone came for me.”
“I don’t know if they’re coming back,” Ian said as gently as he could. He knew what it was like to lose a parent and how fragile it had made him.
Thomas shrugged. “I know. But someone from the church will come for me. I’m on a list. It’s part of the plan, for them to look after me. Did you see any of them coming down the road? They should be here anytime now.”
Grant and Ian had seen a pair of missionaries a few blocks away, but they were no longer serving God. “No, no church people,” Grant lied.
“What will you do when you run out of food?” Ian asked.
Thomas didn’t answer. Instead, he led them downstairs and through a long hallway, the walls of which were covered in framed family photos. In them, Thomas sat grinning between two conservative-looking parents, both much older than Ian or Grant’s.
In the kitchen, Thomas opened every cupboard door. The shelves held row after row of canned foods, from soup to vegetables to fruit medleys. Grant and Ian weren’t starving in the apocalypse yet, but the food was still a sight to see. Ian’s overstocked pantry, before it was burned to the ground, was slim pickings in comparison.
Ian couldn’t believe his eyes. “Wow, man. You are set.”
“There’s more,” Thomas said as he opened a door on the far end of the kitchen. It led to a garage that was just as stuffed full of food. Metal shelves held all manner of nonperishables. It was a mini mart in the middle of the neighborhood.
“Fuck.” Grant shook his head as he stepped into the garage.
Ian eyed the thin, metal garage door, its face marred by several dents. There wasn’t much separating them from the dead. “They don’t bother you?” he asked Thomas.
“I’m quiet. They don’t know I’m here. Those dents are from my dad’s Buick.”
“Do you think maybe we could grab a couple things?” Grant asked, but he was already reading labels and setting cans he wanted to one side of the garage.
Thomas shrugged. “Yeah, take whatever you want. Or,” his voice quieted, “you could stay.”
Staying with Thomas wasn’t an option for either of the boys. Ian wanted to be nowhere near the remains of his home and Grant could handle no more than twenty minutes of Thomas at any given time.
“Thanks,” Ian said. “Really, thanks a lot, but we need to keep moving.”
Grant gave a half-assed salute. “See you around, Thomas.”
Loaded down with as much food as they could carry, Grant and Ian struck out again. As they made their way down the street, Ian glanced back several times. He could see Thomas in his bedroom window, busy sketching a new piece.
“I can’t imagine what would be interesting about us walking away,” Ian said.
• • •
He had so much food. Someone has to say it.
“Say what?”
Don’t make me say it.
“Grant’s dead now, it doesn’t matter. It can’t be undone”
We are looking to the past. If you had stayed with T.W…
“Grant would still be alive.”
Yes. And T.W. is still alive.
“We don’t know t
hat!”
You’re the one who likes to write others stories how you see fit. I say he’s still alive.
“No! He’s dead too! Everyone is dead!” Ian bursts from the closet, but he cannot escape himself and he is forced to return when he smells the rotting bodies of Grant and Lena. He longs for the safety and security of his own home, but he cannot go back.
Because it is no more.
“And it is no more because…”
…I DIDN’T GUARD MY SANCTUARY
After countless days on the road and after Keller drove them from a house in which they were sleeping, Ian’s shoes, like his patience, had worn thin. They had successfully rid their systems of the need to explore and experience the plague. The novelty had worn off and the true struggle was beginning to show through the shiny veneer they had originally seen.
Ian stared at Grant, who appeared to have aged from the stress of everything they’d been through so far. Dark bags hung beneath his eyes. “Maybe we should go home, to my house, and stay there for awhile,” he suggested lightly, unsure if Grant was really feeling as tired as he looked.
“Yeah, let’s,” Grant replied. He turned around and headed north toward Ian’s.
It wasn’t out of the ordinary for them to see smoke drifting above the buildings and treetops. It was, after all, the apocalypse. Cars burned, buildings burned, people burned. Grant and Ian smelled like a campfire just from walking around in it.
But this cloud of smoke was different.
• • •
“It was thick, dark black.”
Go on, Ian. I know it’s hard.
“And it was coming from my street.”
How did it make you feel?
“Warm. Too warm. Angry. Lost.”
• • •
Grant and Ian could feel the heat three houses down. Flames burst from every window; no room was left untouched. As the roof collapsed, so too did Ian. He sat on the sidewalk across the street and watched his old life disappear completely. He became only a boy with a backpack and the dirty clothes that clung to his body. Interestingly, no dead were around.
Mistakes I Made During the Zombie Apocalypse Page 8