by A. J. Brown
Bobby’s toys lay strewn about the yard, left where he had last played with them, forever forgotten. I went back to the front, looked down the street, then in the other direction. Nothing. No one. Just a soft wind whistling on a dead street to keep me company. I walked to the next house—the Baxters’—bypassing going inside mine. I remembered telling Max what was happening, asking them to go with Jake and my family up to Table Rock, that the mountains might be safer than the small towns or the big cities. Inside told me all I needed to know. There were bodies—four of them—but it didn’t look like the dead had gotten hold of them. The boys—both in their early teens—lay in their beds, sheets pulled over their heads. The brown stain where their heads were relayed the story. I found Sarah in Max’s bedroom; she, like her sons, still lay in bed, the sheet pulled over her head.
On the couch in the den sat the body of Max Baxter, one of my longtime friends from high school. The pistol lay on the floor at his feet. The bullet had entered under his chin and left a crater in the top of his head. The ceiling above and the wall behind him were spattered with dried masses of brain matter, hair, and blood. One hand clutched tight to a piece of paper. It took a minute, but I managed to pull it free. Two words were scrawled in black marker; two words that showed the desperation of the situation: I'm sorry…
“Yeah, me too,” I said and dropped the paper to the floor. Pop would have said Max’s response was that of a coward’s. Me, I’m not so sure I agree. Maybe it was the only way he could protect them. Maybe he saw them in his head as the rotting dead, the same as I saw my family in my nightmares, and hated the very thought and did what he thought was best. I don’t know.
Wrapped in sheets, I pulled their bodies into the front yard. Before all was said and done, I would need to bury them.
There was nothing in the final three houses, their owners having fled like many others. That left my house—the only one of sixteen in the neighborhood without a bright red X on its door. I won’t lie and say it was a piece of cake. I won’t say I walked right in and checked the place out and got out of there, X in place, the past behind me without a struggle at all. No, I stood in my front yard for the longest time, terrified to go inside. Not because I thought I would find someone—I knew I wouldn’t—but because of the memories stepping inside would bring back. Just standing in the yard was bad enough, but going inside…going inside meant facing the almost certainty that I would never see my family again and that I was truly alone in this world gone insane.
My legs shook as I took the steps and stood in front of the door. Funny to think about it now—I even laughed a little then—the door was locked. From my wallet, I produced a key, slid it in the knob, and turned it until I heard that familiar click. The door opened, and I fought back the urge to run. Though we had left in a rush, the house was not a mess like so many others. Sure, there were a few things out of place, but all in all, the house looked as if someone still lived there.
I stumbled through the living room and down the hall, my legs not wanting to work, my mind screaming for me to just go away, to never come back unless I want my heart broken all over again. The kitchen held a couple of beer cans—the ones Leland and I had emptied the night the dead came to town. The bedrooms were mostly neat, the only thing really not right being the beds were not made. Bobby’s room was the typical boy’s room: not really a mess but not really clean either, kind of an organized chaos. I could hear his laughter, see him playing with cars and trucks and Legos and marbles…but he wasn’t there. It was all a trick of the mind, memories surfacing, waving hello, and dipping back under the blackening waters of life. I closed his door, went back up the hall, and stopped short of the front door. The attic door was in the ceiling in the center of the hallway. I pulled the drop chord and lowered the stairs.
It was dark and dusty, but the lights from the ventilation on each side of the house made it easy to spot the blue and gray car seat sitting next to a bag of old winter clothes. I reached for it and then stopped. A sound came from the corner of the attic. It wasn’t much. Just a little rustling, like a squirrel had gotten in there somehow. I waited, holding my breath, focusing on the corner. If it wasn’t a squirrel, then maybe someone had managed to get into the house and hidden up there. In more certain times, that would have been an irrational thought. But the times weren’t so certain, and sometimes, rationale goes right out the window.
I slipped the pistol from my waistband and held it out in front of me.
“Who’s there?”
The rustling came again. It sounded like it was by several bags of Bobby’s old stuffed animals. Maybe the big, white rabbit with the bowtie that I won for him at the state fair in Columbia when he was only two.
“Come on out now.”
My mind told me it was just a small animal. A squirrel, Walker. That’s all, old boy.
I was in full squat mode, duck walking across the dusty attic floor. I was only a few feet from the white trash bags. I could make out the lumps of stuffed animals all crammed together, a head here, the length of a leg there. Was that a snout trying to push through the plastic? I moved the bag. A rat darted from behind it and across the room.
I screamed and fell back. It wasn’t my most graceful moment. I took aim and fired the pistol. A piece of wood splintered in the floor, but I missed the rodent. I saw its tail slither behind some boxes.
A few months earlier, Jeanette would have been on me about getting some traps or some D-con or call an exterminator for crying out loud, and I would have told her I could handle it, Babe. And I would have tried to catch that rat. That was then.
Instead of pursuing the vermin, I duck walked backwards to the dropdown door. I grabbed the car seat, looked it over. No rat goodies left behind.
I took the seat and made my way down the steps, closing the attic door behind me and hoping I had trapped the rat inside. I doubted it. It had gotten up there somehow; it would find its way out as well. Outside, I locked the door and placed an X on it. Sipping Creek was done. All the undead that I could find were dead again, and all except for the Baxters had been given the proper burial they deserved.
At the truck, I moved Humphrey, strapped the car seat in, and then stuck him in his new chair—one high enough to see out the windows just in case he got bored of the trip. “Hang tight, buddy,” I said.
My imagination spoke for him.
Sure thing, Mr. Walker, it said.
Before leaving, I buried the Baxters and placed a marker over the grave. It wasn’t much—a cinderblock with their last name spray painted on it. The sun would be setting soon, and I hoped to find higher ground before it did, somewhere I could park the truck and get some sleep.
I drove along, Humphrey quiet, the world rolling beneath the wheels. The sun was beginning to sink in the horizon. Another hour or so, and it would be dark again.
Then I saw the woman crossing Grover’s Field just outside of town. By the way she lurched, I knew she was one of the dead.
Sleep would have to wait.
I pulled the truck to a stop, staying in the road. I got out, leveled my rifle at her, and then lowered it. She was an older lady, her hair gray, the sags along her chin and arms normal for a living woman, not for a body rotting away like the dead were supposed to. Her face and arms held scratches on them. The front of her shirt and pants were red, and she wore only one shoe—a light blue slip-on.
“Stay here, Humphrey,” I said, stepped to the front of the truck, and set the rifle on the hood. I pulled out one of the pistols—a do-nothing .22 caliber thing—and took aim at her.
She shambled into the road, almost fell along the shoulder. She stopped, not more than thirty yards from where I stood. Her head rose as if she were smelling the air. The dead can’t smell, I thought. Then she turned toward me, her milky eyes catching mine. The expression on her face changed from one of slack-jawed boredom to maniacally hungry. A moan escaped her, and she lifted one arm toward me as if she were pointing. Her bumbling gait became more of a panick
ed hurry as she approached me.
I leveled my pistol toward one shoulder and squeezed the trigger. Her arm jerked backward, and the groan that came from her…it sounded as if she were hurt, but it didn’t stop her from advancing on me. I squeezed off a second shot. One of her outstretched fingers snapped off. She moaned louder. I set the pistol on the truck’s hood, picked up my rifle, and aimed it at one knee. She was less than ten yards away when I pulled the trigger. Her knee disappeared, sending her to the ground. The moan, the groan…the scream…it filled my ears. I still hear it to this day.
“I’m sorry,” I said, my heart aching for the pain I had inflicted on her. Somehow, she managed to get onto her back. Black blood oozed from where her knee had once been. My stomach rolled over, and my body tingled with sadness. I drew a little closer to her as she struggled to stand, reminding me of a turtle on its shell, doomed to die in that position. Through her insatiable hunger and those milky eyes, I saw her pleading with me to…to do what? Feed her? No. I didn’t think so. I saw in those pained eyes the desire to be dead—completely dead—and free of existence as a walking corpse. It reminded me of the way Jeanette’s brows would teepee over her eyes and her bottom lip would poke out slightly when she wanted something she thought I would say “no” to. This was different though. This woman didn’t want a fancy meal or flowers or a trip to wherever. She wanted a release. I couldn’t begin to imagine the feeling of being trapped in a decaying body, completely unable to control what I was doing, unable to tell someone I was in there and I was still alive, that I could still feel and smell, and the hunger…
I thought I had been slowly losing my mind over the previous few weeks, but the insanity that must creep in on the dead, the helplessness…I have no words to explain how it made me feel just to think about it.
Again, I apologized to the woman. When I took aim the next time, it wasn’t to wound her; it was to test a theory I thought was true. Her struggles ended with the sound of my rifle going off. I went back to the truck, grabbed the pistol off the hood, and shoved it in my waistband. I had another grave to dig, another person to bury. My thoughts centered around the many rotters I had put down. Up to that point, I had refused to see them as rotters, but that was really what they were: slaves to the hunger, trapped in dead bodies, longing to be freed. The undead knew they were going to die again every time I pointed one of my weapons at them. Maybe they welcomed it like I thought that woman did. Maybe the reason they hurried toward me when I raised the gun wasn’t so they could feed but so that I would hurry and put a bullet in their brain…hurry, for crying out loud.
I buried the woman, spoke a prayer over her, asking for mercy for her soul…and for mine as well. If murder is a sin, then I’m Hell-bound. I asked for forgiveness I wasn’t so sure I deserved.
The sun was almost gone as I got back in the truck. I closed the door, put the window all the way up, and looked over at my riding partner. I started to speak then only shook my head, preferring to let the silence ride along with us. I put the truck in gear, flipped the lights on, and drove off, my thoughts lingering with the woman a while longer before turning back to Pop. Up to that point, life had kicked me in the teeth, but unlike Max, I didn’t choose to exit the story stage left. I stuck around for whatever the world would bring me.
Eight Weeks and Three Days After It All Started…
Humphrey sat in his seat, his head slightly higher than the edge of the door. He could see over the dashboard and the road ahead of us. My little stuffed traveling buddy. We sat atop a hill overlooking a small town—Harkers, South Carolina. It wasn’t much of a hill, but it gave me a clear line of sight in all directions. The town wasn’t much of a town either—a couple of buildings that looked as if they belonged in the fifties, some cars lining unmetered parking spots. There was a red vehicle stopped at a streetlight. The light itself had long since expired. A few houses off in the distance ran along a cracked blacktop that was in serious need of repaving.
There wasn’t much to see.
I lined the perimeter of my truck with cans and wire—enough to raise a loud clatter if someone or something were to try and cross it. I had made the makeshift alarm system after that lady tapped on my window a few weeks earlier. If anyone approached, I would know.
Night settled down. A slight breeze blew in, ruffling the leaves of trees a hundred feet to our right. I needed gas for the truck but had no desire to pilfer the tanks of the cars below in the dark. I could wait until morning. It’s not like the world was passing me by.
I leaned across the seat, made sure Humphrey’s door was locked. His glass eyes reflected in the moonlight, a shimmering image that made him look alive.
“Do you remember what it was like, Humphrey?” I asked. “You know, before…all of this?”
I waved an arm like a game show host revealing prizes to be won. All of this can be yours if the price is right… Humphrey said nothing.
“Do you even know what happened?” I looked down at my lap, the pistol sitting between my legs. A bottle of water sat beside me, half full. I took a long swig, swallowed. “Of course you don’t. You can’t be all that old, can you? Maybe six, if that?”
Four.
I glanced down at him, startled by his voice. I nodded. “Okay. Four it is.”
I thought of my boy when he was four. Star Wars and Legos and Hot Wheels cars—he loved them all.
“Daddy, I’m going to be R2D2 for Halloween.” The beeps and boops and whirrs that came from his mouth made me smile as he pretended to glide across the kitchen floor. By Halloween, he had changed his mind. Instead of being R2D2, Luke Skywalker’s trusty companion, he went for R5D4, the rusty bucket of bolts that barely worked well enough to roll five feet. Bobby popped and clunked as he pretended to move like a robot. Then he would wheeze as he broke down. He was a great little R5D4. And he let people know when they called him the other robot. I shook my head, tried to push Bobby from my thoughts for a while.
Humphrey stared ahead, unmoving, his stitched-on smile never wavering. Always the optimist.
“You know, it started with a slight fever,” I said as I stared down into the darkness of Harkers, a small town as dead as any other in America. Humphrey said nothing, not even a whisper in my brain. He just sat…and listened to this lonely man talk. “A kid in North Carolina got sick, his fever not rising much above ninety-nine degrees. His name eludes me at the moment. It’s something normal, like Robert or James. The fever was just enough to make him uncomfortable. His body began to ache as if the fever were much higher. The doctors said he had the flu, maybe even some new-fangled viral flu. They actually said that—new-fangled, like it was doctor speak.” I shook my head. The night sat still beyond the cab of the truck.
“Let it run its course, they said. Give him Tylenol and Ibuprofen, alternating doses every four to six hours, they said. If he’s not better by the end of the week, bring him back, they said.
“The kid…was his name William? I can’t remember. Something like that. Anyway, he got sicker. His temperature never went up though. Gray sacks formed under his eyes. His hair became matted, as if caked with mud. Breathing became irregular gasps. The doctors sent him to the hospital, said something about pneumonia. His skin began to gray. The doctors then cried his kidneys were failing.
“Internal bleeding, they said when he began to vomit blood. They didn’t have a clue.
…
“He cried a lot.”
Didn’t they all? I thought. All those sick children, crying, wanting their mommies and daddies.
“What was his name? Jessie? Larry?”
I shrugged. “His momma sat in the hospital bed with him, cradling her little boy in her arms—the same arms that held him when he was born, comforted him when he was hurt, hugged him just to hug him. She wept as he slept, held onto her strength in those few moments he was awake before…”
I hated myself for not remembering his name. I should’ve never forgotten. How could I have?
Carl with a C
? Or Karl with a K? I couldn’t remember. I should have.
I continued my story. Humphrey remained silent, his ears as perked up as they would ever be. “His name was in the local papers as doctors from MUSC and other places within the region went to see him. Duke Medical Center could do nothing for him.
“The kid lost weight, and by the time he breathed his last, he had become nothing more than an emaciated stick figure, skin on bones, if you will.” Skin on bones? That’s the best I could do for the kid? Describe him as skin on bones? The thought haunts me. What if that kid had been my Bobby? What if any one of those millions of kids had been my Bobby? What if, since I last saw my wife and boy, Bobby had suffered the same fate? My breath hitched as I thought of the boy—a boy whose name I couldn’t remember, whose name I should have never forgotten.
“By then his momma—her name was Nancy, this much I’m sure of—had gotten sick. Like her boy, it started with a slight fever that never reached a hundred and progressed to the vomiting blood, graying skin, and loss of weight. She began to itch and scratch at her skin, tearing it in some places. Her death came quicker than her son’s, accelerated by lack of sleep and food. Her body just couldn’t hold up under the grief and illness.
“The kid’s pediatrician and a couple of nurses got sick as well. Who knows how many kids and parents were in the office the day the kid—was his name Jeffery—was there? I guess most of us know how it goes from there. Fever. Stiffness. Throwing up blood and graying skin. Loss of weight. Itching and scratching and…death.
“A not so funny thing happened a few hours after Wilson—Wilson! That was his name.” Tears stung my eyes as I thought about the dark-haired kid with green eyes, his pale complexion a trait inherited from his momma, from Nancy, whose husband was Richard Walker, my second youngest brother. How could I have forgotten Wilson’s name? How many times have I said I’m sorry into the air, begging my brother, his wife, and Wilson to forgive me for such a horrible thing?