"That's it?" I asked.
"That's it," Sam said.
"What about the government?" I asked. "Aren't they, you know, working on something? A cure. Something to get rid of all the zombies."
"I'm sure that's all they're doing these days," Sam said, "but c'mon-nobody expected this. They might know more than we do, but that doesn't mean they know much."
I turned away and put my head back, as though going to sleep, and looked out the window.
"Chin up, Pete," Sam said. "I didn't mean to sound hopeless. We've got the smartest people all around the world dropping whatever they were doing and working on this now. It'll be like Kennedy wanting to go to the moon. It seems far off, but in a few years, they're bound to have something."
I nodded noncommittally, and watched the snow outside.
My girlfriend lived in the woods on the far side of Dennisburg, in a house with a high-peaked roof at the end of a long gravel drive. The drive was decorated with flowerpots and planters on wooden stands. In front of the house, a large bower encrusted with grapevines and dead, frozen spiders shielded the front door from the road. The windows of the home were dark and shuttered, but a light at the doorstep had been left on.
"Does it look like she's home?" Sam asked. I smiled. He was saying that the house looked uninhabited, and not really asking me anything.
"Maybe she likes it dark," I told him. "I don't remember."
Sam pulled up close to the house and killed the engine. We looked around carefully before opening the doors. And we brought our guns. I remember thinking: This doesn't feel like a guy going to his girlfriend's house. This feels like we're marines on a drop, or maybe cops responding to a distress call.
"Watch over there," Sam said, gesturing to the woods. "We can't see much over there."
I kept my eyes on the impenetrable, dark row of trees that Sam had indicated, and took a superfluous breath to taste the cold, frosty air. We crept past the creaking grape bower and up the steps to the house. I went to knock, but Sam stopped my arm and pointed to a legal pad under a rock that had been left beside the welcome mat.
"Gotta be for you," he said.
I stooped and picked up the pad. The message-in a woman's handwriting that was usually flowery, but had had its fancy curtailed by haste-read:
Pete,
What the fuck? We waited and waited.
Going up to Kate's place.
V
I handed it to Sam and watched him study it.
"You have any idea where she means?" I asked.
To my great relief, something like recognition crossed Sam's face.
"Yeah, actually," he said, "I think I do. Vanessa has a sister named Kate. Lives on an eco-friendly farm or something, a few miles north of here. You took me there once for a cookout on Labor Day when I didn't have anything else to do. I think I could find it again if I had to."
"Good," I said. "Because you have to. I've got no memory of it at all."
"Yeah," Sam continued. "I mean, it was a few years ago, and it wasn't dark and snowing, but I think I remember the way."
We walked back toward the car.
"Good thing I was so nice to you all these years, eh?" I said. "Sure paying off for me now, isn't-"
I stopped. Dead.
A shadowy figure was lurking underneath the grape bower. It walked like a man with his legs in locks, and slumped forward as if nearly bereft of energy. But it did walk-and moan. Neither Sam nor I moved. We let it get a little closer and saw an ugly, flabby face, black with rot. Its eyes rolled, then focused, aware of us. The thing stank, even from a distance. (I didn't have to breathe to get a hint of the stench.) It moaned again and took another step forward. Its arms slowly stretched in our direction. I instinctively took the blue revolver from my pants and raised it at the lumbering hulk.
"Wait," said Sam.
"But it's a zombie," I told him.
"Look how slowly it moves, though," he whispered. "I don't think we need to shoot this one. Plus, we might hit the car."
He was right. It was a clear shot through the zombie into the hood of the shiny, new Scion.
"What, then?" I said. (I was also whispering, although I wondered why. Clearly, the thing was already moving toward us. Or, now that I looked more closely, was it only moving toward Sam?)
"Let's just go around it," Sam said. "We'll run in a wide arc out past the bower and around to the car. No way it'll catch us."
The figure took another step. It was still hard to see, but parts of it looked heavy and fat. I started to think they were breasts, and that this had been a woman. Massive rolls of flesh swayed as it walked. I began to reckon that I liked our chances, zombie or not. This person had been no great sprinter in life, and zombification would not have improved that trait.
"Okay," I said. "You go first."
My pudgy companion hitched up his pants a little, and began creeping forward like an animal stalking prey. When we drew closer to the bower, he quickly accelerated into a run, arcing wide around it. I stayed on his tail.
As soon as we started running, I saw that Sam had been right. This single, slow zombie would be easy to circumvent. No problem at all. If anything, we had over-thought it. It turned as we ran past, but did little else. I found running more difficult than I could remember. Some new primal sense told me that acceleration was dangerous-that moving quickly would put my body into some sort of "red zone" where I threatened to shake apart.
I slowed down and hazarded a glance back at the zombie. It was still lumbering forward slowly, a sad, awkward corpse of what had probably been a very obese woman. Then a mad curiosity overtook me, and I stopped, letting it close the gap between us a bit. Then a bit more. Then further still. I heard Sam starting the car, but paid it no mind. I turned and walked back toward the bower. Soon, the zombie was close enough to reach out and touch me. But it did no such thing.
The zombie regarded me for a moment with unblinking, idiot eyes. It saw me, but did not see food. I was just an obstacle, blocking its path. A moving piece of turf. The zombie looked past me, and lumbered on toward Sam.
More than my lack of breath or heartbeat or hunger, this seemed to confirm that I was, without a doubt, a member of the walking dead.
"Pete, you okay?" Sam called from the car. "Where'd you go?"
"I'm coming," I said, and loped through the bower after him.
Back in the car, speeding toward the house of my girlfriend's sister, I began to feel a new hesitation and anxiety.
When we met these people (whom, presumably, I would "know"), I'd have to continue the charade that I was alive in the same way that they were. I would have to pretend to eat and breathe and shit just like they did. And I would have to explain away my raspy voice and my cold, pale skin. As the black Ohio farms and hillsides rolled past, I wondered how long I would be able to keep the truth quite literally under my hat.
"I know that lake there," Sam said, gesturing to a round body of water at the base of a steep hill. Next to it was a crude roadside billboard that seemed to advertise homemade jams. "We're on the right track."
I looked where Sam had pointed, and suddenly a memory came to me. A woman. Mid-thirties. Half-Chinese, half-European. Short black hair and glasses. A substantial bust and nice hips, topped off by a devilish smile. (I would have said this Inemory- woman was attractive if I'd had any sexual feeling at all.)
Sam slowed and turned the boxy car down a drive that wound past the circular lake and into some very dark hills.
"Hey, does Vanessa wear glasses by any chance?" I asked. "Short hair? Maybe part-Asian?"
"Bingo!" Sam said, genuinely enthused. "Welcome back, buddy."
"Yeah, I ... wouldn't get too excited yet," I told him. "This isn't a full recovery. Something in that lake just made me picture her. I can't remember the situation, but we're outside and I'm standing very close to her and the sun is bright behind her. Almost blinding. I think it's reflected light coming off of that water."
"Could be," Sam
said.
"And you're there, too," I said. "And there are other people with us."
"Sounds like you remember Labor Day," Sam said. "See, this is good. Memories build on memories. We'll have your brain up and running in no time."
"Uh, yeah," I said, a little uneasily.
The country road-poorly paved to begin with-soon exhausted itself, and gave way to side roads of gravel and dust. There was little light, but even less to see (apart from the odd silo or telephone pole). Dark, tree-shrouded drives led off to what I presumed were people's homes. There were no signs of life. No people. No loose pets. Certainly, no movement.
Then, when I thought the old gravel road could not possibly go on any longer, I spied the light of a single kerosene lantern hanging from an ancient oak that framed the entrance to a darkened drive.
"That's gotta be for us," Sam said. "It's been a while since I've been here-and it's hard as hell to see in this dark-but that lantern's got to be a signal for us. I mean, for you."
Sam turned down the narrow drive into an even darker forest, the gravel crunching noisily under the Scion's tires. As he did, he laid on the horn twice in quick succession.
I looked at him. "What'd you do that for?"
"So they know it's us," he responded. "People coming, and not ... anything else."
"Do they drive cars?" I asked.
"Hey, anything's possible," Sam answered.
We crept slowly and crunchily along the drive. The trees folded in close to the car, creating a tunnel of dark wood, with the odd birdhouse or no hunting sign thrown in for variety.
After a couple of minutes, I began to make out electric lights ahead of us, and the tree tunnel opened to reveal a clearing. In it stood an empty garden, an ancient barn, and a modern-looking home with daring architecture and what appeared to be solar panels dripping off of every surface, like reflective moss.
"They have power-at least a generator," I pointed out.
"They've got more than that," Sam said. He gestured to the edge of the yard where three wind turbines captured the winter gusts and routed the resulting energy to the house.
"Well, damn," I said. "So they do."
"Do you remember Kate, Vanessa's sister?" Sam asked, pulling up to the house.
"Not a thing," I said. "Can't even picture her."
"She's like a smaller Vanessa; not as pretty, frankly," Sam said. "She married an older man who owned a factory that made matches. Seriously. Matches made him rich. Anyway, the guy died about a year ago, but she had a couple of kids with him."
"Oh," I said. "That's sad. I guess."
There was movement on the porch. Before Sam could kill the engine, a heavy, matronly woman stepped out of the house and was illuminated starkly and unflatteringly by automatic porch lights. She must have been three hundred pounds without her heavy winter coat. She held a shotgun, and looked not completely unlike the stout zombie we had circumvented at Vanessa's house.
Sam and I looked at one another.
"You sure this is the place, man?" I asked.
Sani shrugged.
We exited the car slowly, leaving our guns behind.
"Hello there," Sam called, waving both of his hands to show he was not armed. "Are Kate and Vanessa home? We're friends."
The woman frowned disapprovingly, as if we were children requiring to be scolded. Then she stuck her head back inside the house.
"Vanessa!" the woman called from the side of her mouth. "You said it was only going to be the one!"
Looking just as I had remembered her, Vanessa emerged from the house like a figure stepping out of a dream. She wore a tightfitting black sweater and jeans, but no coat. She crossed her arms against the cold and looked at Sam's car, appearing momentarily confused.
"Oh ... hi, Sam," she said, addressing my friend first. Then she looked to me and flashed a cautious smile. I flashed one back.
"You said one person," the grumpy woman reiterated. "We had an agreement. If you all start changing things, I'll take my food out of your freezer and go back to my house. I mean that. Don't think I won't!"
I quickly guessed what the problem might be.
"Sane just drove me here," I called in my raspy voice. "He's not staying."
The matronly lady cocked an eyebrow (but not, at least, her shotgun). We gingerly approached the deck where the two women stood.
"Sam's not staying," I said to the woman. "He's just my chauffeur."
"Peter was in a car accident and got a little bump on the head," Sam said. "I didn't think he should drive. Besides, his car is totaled."
"Seriously?" Vanessa asked, suddenly alarmed and concerned. "Are you all right?"
"I've been better," I said with a smile. "But basically, yeah, I'm okay. Still walking and talking. You know."
"We had the college doctor look him over," Sam added. "He seemed to think Peter was okay just a little concussed. From what we gather, Pete was on his way to see you, and he ran his car into a tree."
"You `gather'?" Vanessa asked.
"I'm having some trouble remembering things," I confessed.
"Yeah, he's got a little memory loss," Sam said. "Doc made it sound like it wasn't a big deal. We expect it's temporary."
"Do you remember me?" Vanessa asked, half seriously.
"Yeah," I said, truthfully. "Of course I do."
"Well, that's a relief," she said, her mood genuinely brightening. "Then let's just be thankful you made it here safe and sound."
Her tone was gentle enough on the outside, but it was wrapped around something deeper and guarded. Something tender, that hurt. It said this was not the first time I'd fucked things up, and that surprises and shortcomings on my part were not entirely unexpected. (Maybe it was a lot to infer from someone's tone of voice, but somehow I knew it instantly.)
We joined the women up on the deck, and Vanessa hugged me.
"You look really terrible," she said matter-of-factly. "And you're cold."
"Thanks," I told her. "Sam says I need a nap."
"Pete, this is our neighbor, Matilda Kay," Vanessa said, indicating the stalwart and bewarted woman brandishing the shotgun. "Matilda is joining us for the ... duration of things."
"Our food supply is finite-limited, you know?" Matilda said, managing a tone that was apologetic and stern at the same time. "I didn't mean any offense to your friend. It's just that we've got to think ahead."
"Matilda's a hunter," Vanessa said, her arm draping itself naturally around my shoulder. "She brought over a freezer's worth of venison.
"You don't need to be concerned," Sam said. "I'm not staying here. A group of us are holding out just fine on the hill at Kenton."
"What about the graveyard?" Vanessa asked.
"That's the most exciting part," Sam said. "Seriously, though, we keep a watch on it. Things crop up, and we put them back down."
"But there are gangs and criminals loose now," Vanessa said. "They announced on the news that the prison in Mansfield had a huge escape-over half the inmates."
Sam shrugged.
"We're up on a hill," Sam said. "We see things coming. We've got guns."
Vanessa nodded, but still looked concerned for him.
"That's what we're hoping for here," she said, indicating the long wooded road leading up to the house. I couldn't help thinking that this only meant you could see cars coming. Anyone, or anything, that really wanted to could pick its way through the forest and up to the house from any direction.
"I'd have been fine to stay at my own place," Matilda offered, almost defensively. "Excepting it's right by the side of the road. It's too ... visible ... for what's likely to come."
"On TV, the president is saying it's going to get worse before it gets better," Vanessa said.
"Well that's his motto, isn't it?" I responded hoarsely. Vanessa smiled.
"Sam, do you want to come in and have a cup of tea or something before you head back?" Vanessa asked.
Matilda wrinkled her nose.
"We're not
rationing tea, Matilda," Vanessa said sternly. "Besides, none of it is yours."
Matilda rolled her eyes.
"No, but thanks anyway," Sam said. "I should really head back before it gets any later. Starks and the others will be expecting me."
"How was the drive over?" Vanessa asked.
"Not bad," Sam said. "Snow was light. No accumulation. Not much ice on the roads."
Remarkably, Vanessa shot him an expression which handily telegraphed the entirety of That's not what I fucking meant, and you knoll' it.
"Oh, right," Sam said, looking over to me. "I wouldn't say we saw ... too much activity. What would you say, Pete?"
"Just a couple-behind that old bar by the highway intersection," I said, deciding to leave out the fact that we had also met a zombie on the very doorstep of her house. "And they could've just been drunks, for all I know. Drunks behind the bar. It was hard to tell."
"Yeah, good point," Sam said unconvincingly. "I bet they were just drunks, stumbling around. You know how it is."
Sam and I nodded in unison, as if to say that the matter was settled. Vanessa (and Matilda) appeared less than sold.
"Whatever they were, you be safe getting back, Sam," Vanessa replied. "Say, we've got some gas stored out in the garage. You want to top off, just to be safe?"
Yet another look of alarmed disapproval sprang from Matilda. Vanessa threw her back a cast-iron glare of her own. Matilda grunted and went back inside the house.
"I've still got half a tank," Sam said. "Take care, you two. You know where I'll be if you need anything. I'll try to call if the phones go back up."
"So will we," said Vanessa.
"Thanks again for the ride," I called as Sam turned to go. We waved as he walked back to the car.
Vanessa and I stood on the porch and watched Sam's taillights disappear down the thickly wooded country road. Vanessa held me around my waist. Hard. It was a tight feeling. Good. Secure. She could squeeze as hard as she wanted now. I wouldn't feel any discomfort.
Gentle snow fell just inches from our faces. I took a deep, superfluous breath. Vanessa smelled good-like perfume and warm laundry and food fresh from a kitchen. Even after Sam's car was well out of earshot, we stayed there, holding on.
The sensations were enough to make me forget my predicament (or perhaps it was our predicament) for the moment. I let my head swim, the snowflakes swirling like points of light in a disco.
Zombie, Ohio Page 5