Dredging Up Memories

by A. J. Brown

  I braced myself, glanced toward my truck. I could run, grab a gun long before he could reach me. Instead, I held my ground, shovel in hands, eyes fixed on my buddy’s kid.

  “He’s not Thomas,” I whispered over and over, trying to calm my nerves. It didn’t help.

  The shovel shook in my hands as he approached. Ten or fifteen feet from me, he lifted his arms, his face changed from a once loving little kid’s to a horrible semblance of what he used to be, lips turned down in a sneer, brows furrowed. He bared his teeth as I backed away.

  “I’m sorry, Thomas,” I said and swung the shovel with every ounce of strength I had. The hollow, metal-on-skull sound echoed in the silent neighborhood. My hands stung from the blow. Thomas staggered sideways and fell, but he wasn’t done. Blood seeped from the nasty gash on the left side of his head. On his belly with his legs pushing and arms pulling, he crawled toward me, unfazed by the blow he had taken.

  I raised the shovel above my head and brought it down. His skull cracked, and mercifully—for both of us—it was over.

  I dropped the shovel, backed up until my butt hit my truck. I climbed in, locked the door. For the first time since the world went to hell, I cried. Straight up and down bawled. Images of my family scampered across the front of my mind, Jeanette and Bobby, my brothers, Pop. It was all too much to swallow.

  “Get a grip, Walker,” I said and wiped my eyes. Several deep breaths followed.

  Most of the rest of that day, I dug holes. Three of them: one fairly large and two smaller. The dead are heavier than folks might think they are, especially Mr. Mitchell with his trailing insides. It’s dead weight—no pun intended—and it’s like carrying tree logs or boulders. I laid them in the big hole, like human matchsticks all in a pile. Mr. Martin and the dead body beneath his wheel and whatever remains of folks littered the street went into the second hole. The bones and body parts that had been scattered about went in there as well. Tommy and Thomas Banks went together in the last one. I couldn’t bring myself to separate them. But I didn’t bury them right away; was Karen still alive? Was she dead? Was she somewhere around the neighborhood, in her house?

  Though we were raised in the church, I had never been much on praying. But I prayed this time—I had come to praying a lot by then. I said some words out into the air, hoping the wind would carry them to the right ears, the right heart.

  Night was well on its way. There was no time to sweep the houses like I had hoped to. The day’s events had drained me, both heart and soul. I went back to my truck, locked the doors, and loaded my pistol and rifle. Behind the seat sat Pop’s old shotgun. I still have never fired it, not having the luxury of a broken collarbone like my brother. Maybe one day, I would. But not that day, the day I took down an undead child and his father. The children, they’re always the hardest to kill.

  I closed my eyes, pistol in hand. Exhaustion claimed me as night settled in…

  Five Weeks and a Day After It All Started…

  The rap on the window snapped me from dreams of Jeanette and Bobby sitting in the warm sun at Brayland Park. Bobby squashed tiny ants as they scurried onto the blanket Jeanette had laid out. She wore a sundress, yellow and white striped that came to just above her knees. He was in a baseball uniform, Junior Jaycees on the front of his garnet shirt, his number 9 on the back along with his last name, WALKER, in white lettering. I was there, watching everything through a video camera lens. I wasn’t very good at holding the camera steady, but thankfully, in the dream, I held it just right.

  Jeanette looked up at me, waved. She got Bobby’s attention, and he glanced up, taking his mind from the destruction of the ant family long enough to flash me a toothy smile and yell, “Cheese.”

  I woke. Not to a cop knocking on the window wondering why I was parked in the middle of the road and why there were a number of guns in the cab but to a woman, her dead fingernails scraping glass, brown stains on the front of her once blue shirt. Her skin sagged along her face. I could see gray tissue beneath her drooping bottom eyelids. She had no eyes, just a sense that something living sat beyond her reach.

  I cranked the truck up, let it idle for a moment as I watched the vaguely familiar woman. She mashed her face against the window, her nose bending to the left, her lips squashing on the glass. Her moan was muffled, but it was enough to kick start my instincts. I backed up. Her lips left a smudge of brown behind. She fell forward, gravity pulling her off balance and to the ground. I shifted the truck into DRIVE. Her skull popped beneath the tire. My skin crawled. My stomach flipped. I closed my eyes and listened to the rumble of the truck’s engine.

  I drove the length of the street. It ended in a cul-de-sac. I circled around, glancing at the houses. In the distance, I could see the graves I had dug the day before. No undead shambled from open doors or fell over damaged fences. The woman lay dead for good in the middle of the road, her head nothing more than a pulpy mass of tissue and bone.

  Before getting out of the truck, I grabbed my guns. In the rearview window, I saw Ox hanging on its hooks. Maybe one day, I would use Pop’s shotgun. Until then, I have my rifles and pistols and all of Leland’s ammo. Pop’s as well.

  “Don’t think about them,” I said and stood from the truck.

  A hundred feet away lay the woman. I went to her and nudged her with the toe of one boot. I had to be certain.

  The houses loomed before me, the U-shaped cul-de-sac appearing more and more like a death trap than the homes of loving families and good country folk. The houses felt larger than they were. In my mind, they were like abstract paintings, distorting the reality of the world, making things stretch out higher to the sky. I wasn’t looking forward to going inside any of them. These sweeps made my stomach knot in anticipation. Or dread. Probably a little bit of both.

  I inched into the first house, a yellow, two-story ranch style. The door remained open. Inside, the place was in shambles. Furniture was tipped over, windows broken. Blood had been spilled on the floor and spattered on the walls. There’s always a lot of blood. Pictures of happier times hung on walls. A woman, a man, a little girl all smiling wide. The girl clutched a tan teddy bear wearing a bunny suit. I wanted to smile at the innocence, but I knew that purity was gone, and if that little girl were still in the house, there was a good chance she was dead—either really dead or risen up.

  Before heading up the stairs, I closed the front door, made sure the back one was shut as well. I didn’t need any rotters coming in while I was upstairs. They could be sneaky like that. I learned that lesson the hard way during one of the first sweeps I had done a few weeks earlier. It was in one of those Victorian houses on the edge of town. Not many folks lived on Route 11, so I thought nothing of leaving the door open. The problem? The owners had probably been old or disabled—there was a ramp that led to the porch. I should have known better, but at the time, I don’t think anyone still alive knew much about these things.

  I made the sweep, found no one in the house. On the way down the steps, three rotters greeted me. One of them—an older man with a bald head—was missing an arm and looked like the rot was catching up with him a lot faster than the other two. He was slow and bumbled about, running into the walls and the banister before he fell down. His head ruptured when it struck the hard wood of the floors, ending things for him before I could.

  The other two…

  The other two weren’t quick like a living person, but they still moved with something akin to grace, making a straight line toward the steps. I leveled my pistol at the first one and waited. He managed to get a foot on the first step before teetering back and bumping into the other one, another male, this one younger, maybe a teenager or in his early twenties. I watched, wanting to see if they could actually climb the steps, if their stiff muscles and bones would allow them to lift those legs higher than an inch or two off the ground.

  Again, the one male tried to go up the stairs but couldn’t seem to get his leg high enough. I took a couple of steps down, aimed, and pulled the
trigger. The blast was deafening. My ears rang. Only the teenager remained, his brown hair somehow still neatly combed.

  “Sorry, kid,” I said, squeezed the trigger again. He toppled over, landing on the old guy with the ruptured skull. My hands trembled for hours after that.

  I shook my head, pushing aside the memories, and went up the stairs. There were three rooms: a bathroom and two bedrooms. Only one door was closed. I checked the two open rooms first, finding the mother in a bedroom, her head smashed in, her mouth bloodied, a chunk of someone’s flesh still clenched tight in her teeth. I lifted her lifeless body over my shoulder, carried her outside, and set her down next to the woman who had woken me. Back inside I went, up the stairs to finish the sweep. The bathroom was empty. The other bedroom had to belong to the child. This I knew before pushing the door open.

  Unlike in the horror movies, the hinges didn’t scream. I was stunned when I stepped into the pink room. Nothing looked out of place. It was as I thought a little girl’s room should be: dolls and a play house in one corner, a mirror on the wall, stuffed animals on a blanket that held pictures of cartoon characters. The only thing that might have been odd was the stuffed bear lying on the floor, the one in the bunny outfit from the picture on the first floor. I picked the bear up. It was soft, plush.

  I’ve never been an overly emotional man, but the events of the weeks leading up to that point in my life had changed things considerably. Tears tugged at the corners of my eyes as I thought about the stuffed animal, about the little girl, and what probably happened to her along the way. I hugged the teddy bear close, smelling little girl soap or shampoo or maybe just her natural scent. I smelled the innocence I saw in the picture.

  It took me back to Bobby, back to a little blanket he received when he was born. It was black and white. One end laid flat over his infant body; the other end had the head of a puppy and two front legs that looked more like arms for hugging. I remembered how he held it tight to his chest when he got older and “Doggy” no longer covered him. He took Doggy with him when…

  Turning on my heel, I hurried out of the room, teddy bear in hand. I closed the door behind me and made my way down the stairs. Outside, I set my pack on the porch. I opened it up and pulled out a red spray can, put a big X on the door, and placed the can back in the pack. I tucked the bear inside as well, zipping the pack on both sides so only its head poked out.

  “So, what’s your name?” I asked, knowing the silence I would receive.

  As if on cue, a thought popped in my head.

  Humphrey.

  The thought didn’t feel right. It didn’t feel like it was mine but someone else’s, as if I had stolen it from the mind of the little girl in the picture.

  “Humphrey?” I nodded, pushing away an uneasy feeling. “Humphrey it is.”

  The other houses were similar: a couple dead folks, a rotter or two that had been taken down by someone else before they moved on. Or at least I hoped they were able to move on. The bodies were taken outside and laid together.

  The afternoon sun was directly overhead by the time I had finished all but one house. That house I would leave for later. Another three hours and another mass grave—this time for seven people—had been dug and filled in. I was tired but not finished.

  I didn’t want to go into the Banks household. I guess I didn’t really have to, but I knew if I didn’t, I would always wonder if Karen were in there, if she were dead or alive or shambling about, not quite resurrected but something that was a perverse form of it.

  At the porch, my mind replayed Thomas’ tumble from the day before. I closed my eyes, shook my head, and then reopened them. A deep breath, and I went toward the house. My body moved on autopilot. Legs went up the steps, one hand pushing the door further open, the other hand clutching to my pistol. Again, legs moved throughout the house, room by room, eyes scanning, taking in the ruins of the inside of the house, hands pushing doors open until I had gone through the entire house, and Karen was nowhere to be found. I exhaled, thankful she wasn’t there.

  That was a short-lived feeling. Passing the back door, I peeked out the window. In the center of the yard was a grave, a cross jutting out from the freshly turned dirt. I knew it was Karen even before I walked into the yard to see Tommy had painted her name on the cross: Karen Banks, Loved Forever.

  I didn’t think about it so much as I just did it: I dug another hole, this time next to the grave of Karen Banks. Back at the front of the house, I dug again, this time digging up the bodies of my friend and his son. Tommy and Thomas went into the other grave, right next to their wife and mother. I found the small paint can in Tommy’s shop. On the cross Tommy had placed on Karen’s grave, I painted Tommy and Thomas’ name and then put the can away.

  Back at my truck, I looked back to the small neighborhood. I needed to leave for a while. No, I wasn’t done with my hometown, but the memories were so strong they hurt.

  “Time to go, Humphrey,” I said and pulled the little guy from the pack. His brown eyes sparkled; his pink, stitched lips were in the shape of a smile. His paws held pink pads on them, and his nose was a slightly lighter pink. I strapped the bear in the passenger’s seat with the seat belt and cranked the truck up. I pulled away from the U-shaped cul-de-sac and glanced down at Humphrey. “She took good care of you, didn’t she?”

  He said nothing though I imagined he spoke one simple word. Yes, and the voice was that of a young child, a female…

  Seven Weeks and Two Days After It All Started…

  “Sometimes, life kicks you in the teeth.” It was one of Pop’s sayings. It was how he referred to dealing with everything, good or bad. Either it kicked you in the teeth or it picked roses for you, and even then, those roses held thorns. “It’s how you respond that makes you who you are.” It was also one of the last things Pop said before…

  I can only shake my head and close my eyes and pray there was a better place on the other side of this mess.

  It had been a little under two months since folks started dying and rising, but Pop’s words still rang loud in my ears. By then, the sweeps had led me through most of Sipping Creek. I don’t know how many hundreds of people I killed.

  Killed? That’s laughable. If things were normal, I would have probably never been able to take aim at another human being. But things were far from normal—still are. The only place left to sweep was the street I had lived on. I reckon you could say my world ended on that street—at least the world I knew, the one I had lived in, had a family in.

  I drove the short distance to where home had once been, having not seen a living person since…since too long. More and more, Jeanette and Bobby were on my mind, and more and more, I wondered if they made it to the cabin or if they were now walking among the dead.

  Why was I still there? Why was I still sweeping our little town? Why did it matter anymore? If anything, Pop is why. Leland is why. Davey Blaylock is why. Every single person I ever knew was why I was still there. The dead were dangerous. They may have been our friends and neighbors and family at one time, but once they changed, once death had hold of them and turned that key in their brain that made them rise again, they were no longer people. They were monsters. But deep down inside, I still thought of them as people with souls and feelings and probably just as scared of me with a gun as I was of them.

  Kill or be killed. Isn’t that the famous saying? Kill or be killed? Yeah, that’s the way it is now. But the living are losing the war. There are only a few of us left. Maybe even just me. I don’t know. What I did know—do know—is there are so many more rotters, and wiping them out seems to get harder and harder each day.

  I think of Jeanette and Bobby and hope they are still among the living. Why did I send them away? Why didn’t I go with them? Why didn’t all of us just stick together? In my nightmares, I see them shambling along a street, their faces slack, eyes staring off into nowhere, mouth open. Blood is on their clothes and skin. I pushed the thoughts away, refusing to think of them as decaying co
rpses.

  At the corner of Elaine Street, I stopped the truck and stared at the carnage left behind. Somewhere along that street, I was going to run into neighbors, folks closer than most of the dead I had encountered, and I would have to put a bullet in their brain to end their misery. It was on that day as I sat in my truck, the motor idling, that I wondered if the dead knew they were dead; if they could feel and think. If I was careful, I could find out, but one mistake, no matter how small, and I would know the answers a little more intimately than I wanted.

  I slid out of my seat, shouldered my pack, and looked down at Humphrey. “Hey, buddy, you keep an eye on the truck, okay?” He didn’t answer, only stared straight ahead at the dashboard he was too small to see over. I would have to remedy that if he was going to continue to tag along. I checked my guns, slid the machete into its sheath, and strapped it to my back.

  It was as if the Heavens knew I wouldn’t be able to handle putting the folks in my own neighborhood down. The eight houses along the right side held none of the undead—none of the living as well. There were no bodies anywhere. Sure, there was some blood, and most of the houses had been ransacked, windows smashed and doors kicked in. Like most of Sipping Creek—most of the world I guessed—people had left in a panic, taking only what they could carry and leaving memories behind. I crossed the street and made it four houses in the direction of my truck.

  I stopped there.

  The gray trim looked the same, accenting the red brick structure. The grass had turned gray in some places, brown in others. The garden that lined the brick fence on the left side of the yard had wilted, the stems of elephant ears lying on the ground, withered and black. The front door was closed. Around the back of the house was much as I remembered. A swing set, a playhouse, an old Fairlane under a dark blue tarp, its engine in various states of repair in the garage off to the right.