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Dredging Up Memories

Page 7

by A. J. Brown


  I don’t know how many times I went head over heels. I do know the truck came to a stop at the bottom of the hill, upside down. I struck my head on the ceiling, and my left shoulder felt like someone had stabbed me with a hot poker. My left ankle hurt, as did both legs.

  The world sat upside down, and the blood flowed to my head. Pressure filled my face, and there was a rush of water coming from somewhere in my skull, the flood echoing in my ears. I tried to move my left arm, felt a bolt of pain, and forced my hand across my lap. With the other hand, I pushed up on the ceiling, taking as much weight off the seatbelt as I could. I pressed the button, and the belt released. My head bumped the ceiling again, but I was free of the restraint. I rolled onto my right shoulder, grimaced as another pain tore through my left arm.

  The pain was intense for a few minutes, but the danger I was in…that danger was far more real than the way my body felt. Laying on my side, the rushing waters in my ears subsided. A little relief but not much.

  I pulled my feet free and got on my knees. My ankle barked once but nothing like my arm. I looked at my shoulder. I could see the swelling, the way it had pulled free from the socket.

  The windshield was cracked. There were a few trees around us, and the grass was grown up considerably.

  “You okay, Humphrey?”

  She didn’t respond. She just hung upside down in her car seat. I reached over, worked the clasp with one hand until it came free. Humphrey tumbled onto the ceiling, gave a sharp, Ow.

  “Sorry, kiddo.”

  It’s okay.

  She sounded little again. I was okay with that.

  “We need to get out of here, Humphrey.”

  Where are we going to go?

  “I don’t know. Maybe find somewhere to hole up for a day or two—my shoulder’s killing me.”

  Outside, I could see only the grass and trees and the edge of the off ramp the truck had tumbled down. The engine hissed as fluid leaked from a busted hose. The door handle lifted easily enough, and I pushed the door open. It groaned as metal on metal tend to do. I grabbed the pistol and carefully poked my head out. I didn’t know if any rotters heard the tumble, but I saw none of them either on the road just beyond us or on the hill at the top of the overpass.

  A few minutes later, I had my pack over my good shoulder, Humphrey tucked in the top part, the zipper tight to keep him from falling out. The food and weapons were scattered about the ground. I grabbed as much ammo as I could fit in the pack and in my pockets and slung old Ox over my left shoulder and around my neck. The strap tugged on the wounded shoulder, and I grimaced as fresh pain raced down into my elbow and up into my neck. I made my way up to the off ramp, each step I took sending hot bolts up into my left knee.

  At the top of the hill, my worst fear had become a reality. Several of the dead had heard the truck crash and made their way toward me. One of them—a thin man with a chunk of hair missing on the side of his head—saw me. His upper lip twitched, and he groaned.

  I reached for my machete. A panic came over me so suddenly it felt like electricity along my skin. The machete lay in the road a mile away where I had mutilated the Paul Marcum lookalike. I didn’t want to fire the weapon. Not then. Not with only a handful of them nearby. The truck crash was one thing, but the gun would echo and carry further.

  Limping along, I hurried away from the overpass and down a stretch of road that led away from the stores and restaurants the other direction promised. The center of the road provided distance between the buildings, and I moved as fast as I could, keeping eyes on the corners of the structures and the dead trailing behind me.

  I don’t know how far I walked. My ankle hurt, my shoulder pulsed, the skin felt tight, but stopping to check wasn’t an option. Eventually, what seemed like a small shopping district gave way to an open road with a few cars along its side. Off in the distance and across what looked like a world of tall grass stood a house. No rotters came from that direction.

  Behind me shambled a dozen or more of the soulful dead.

  I started to cross the grass then thought better of it. What if there was a wayward rotter in there? Instead, I went to the end of the road that led to the house. It was more like a long, dirt driveway with gravel and rock lining both sides.

  The house easily sat a hundred yards or so off the road, and though the dead were still a good distance behind me, walking didn’t feel safe. I ran the best I could. At first, the pain in my ankle was like slivers of glass tearing at the muscle and bone, but after a dozen or so steps, it loosened up, and I ran with a slight limp. The pain in my knee did not ease up so easily. In my younger, less beat up days, I could have run that hundred yards in twelve or thirteen seconds. Not then.

  At the house, I had my gun at the ready, arm extended, finger on the trigger. It was a two-story wooden structure with ornately carved rails trailing up the steps and frilly designs along the windows. The white paint flaked a little on the edges, and what probably was once red trim had faded to pink. A dozen or so steps led up to the landing where the door stood closed. The windows were boarded from the outside. Maybe someone still lived there. I could only hope.

  I knocked, waited, looked out toward the road. The dead still lingered about. Some of them had shuffled back toward town. I knocked again. When no one answered, I tried the knob. It turned—it actually turned. I couldn’t believe it. For a moment longer, I stared at the door then pushed it open.

  Once inside, I closed the door, let it click shut. I set Ox on the floor and lowered the pack.

  “Stay here, Humphrey.”

  Like he—she—was going anywhere. The kitchen was empty. The hall that led away from it had two rooms to the right, a bathroom to the left. No one occupied these rooms. Stairs led up to the bedrooms. I braced myself as I went up one step at a time. A few creaks sounded louder than they probably were. I cringed with each one and prayed the sounds didn’t alarm anyone, living or otherwise, to my presence.

  Four bedrooms and a full bath and not a soul to be found. Each of the bedrooms held their own particulars, their own characteristics, telling what type of people had lived there. The one at the end of the hall closest to the bathroom held my attention for a few minutes longer than I wanted it to. Posters of baseball players were tacked to the walls. Baseball bats sat in a rack bolted to the wall closest to the bed. A banner that said RED SOX 2004 WORLD SERIES CHAMPIONS—THE CURSE IS DEAD had been put up along the edge of the ceiling like a border. A ball sat in a glove on top of the dresser. It was definitely a boy’s room. By the size of the bed, I would say a little boy.

  Bobby played baseball. Second base. His old man played third, though I was a lousy hitter. Bobby swung a bat much better than I ever did. I closed my eyes and I saw him in uniform, taking cuts while standing in the on deck circle. At the plate was Charlie Rose’s little boy, Chuck—yeah, he was a junior, but instead of calling him that, we all just called him Chuck. The pitcher was a kid I didn’t know, his hair sandy blond and long with thick strands hanging out the back and sides of his cap. A large A in Old English font was plastered across the front of the opposing team’s uniforms and hats. He threw the pitch, and Chuck singled into left field. The outfielder bobbled the ball, and Chuck, even at ten years old, knew to run to second base as quickly as he could.

  Bobby came up to the plate, swung his bat a few times, then stepped into the batter’s box. A first pitch strike was followed by a ball then another strike. The pitcher wound up and…

  I don’t know what brought me away from my thoughts. I was startled to see the sun was setting. How long had I been standing there?

  I hurried out of the room and back down the stairs. With no one there, I thought it safe to lock the door. But with all the windows boarded up with plywood, I couldn’t see outside. I opened the front door, looked out with the gun ready if needed. At the bottom of the steps, I saw what snapped me from my memories: one of the dead had made it from the road to the house. I reckon it tried to climb the steps but only managed to
fall backward. It struggled to stand, but its legs were too rigid to bend.

  I went back inside, very aware of the pain coursing through my shoulder. The arm had grown stiff. I grabbed Ox from the floor and went back outside. I made my way down the steps. White film covered the man’s eyes, and his mouth snapped open and shut, open and shut. “End of the line,” I said and brought the butt of the gun down on his head. It cracked, but he still squirmed. Again, I brought the butt of the gun down, this time much harder. His head split from forehead back.

  A shiver traced up my spine, and I hurried back up the steps. That’s something I never got used to: physically striking one of the dead. The thought of it made me nauseated. With the living, you could pull a punch and still do plenty of damage. With the dead, a pulled punch could be the end of your life. Still, my skin crawled, and I wanted nothing more than a shower that I wouldn’t get.

  With the door closed and locked, I went over to the couch in the front room. I was thankful there was no carpet on the floor. If there had been, I would never have been able to move that couch to stand in front of the door.

  I walked the downstairs a second time. All the windows had been nailed shut from the inside; boards covered them from the outside. The backdoor window had also been covered with wood, but a hole had been drilled in it at about eye level. I wondered why the person who had taken all the precautions to board the house up didn’t bother with drilling a hole in the wood in the front door as well.

  Like a lot of houses, there were pictures on the walls, and these pictures showed a happy family. Two adults, a teenaged daughter, and a young boy, blond hair and shining blue eyes. He looked like a baseball player. Add a couple years to him, and he could have been that pitcher…

  I grabbed my pack and Ox and headed up the stairs to the second floor. I was exhausted and wanted sleep, but there was the matter of my shoulder. In the bathroom mirror—one that was as tall as the door it hung on—I pulled my shirt off. The skin was tight and purple and red. The swelling covered the clavicle completely.

  Dislocated.

  I tried to lift my shoulder. Bright bolts of pain shot through my arm, and I let it drop. I spun in a slight circle, tears in my eyes.

  ”Come on,” I said, looked at myself in the mirror. When did that beard grow in? When did those dark gray bags form under my eyes? When did I grow so old?

  The pain was bad but would be worse if I didn’t get the shoulder back in place.

  I put my hand under the elbow and lifted my arm. The growl from my throat scared me. The pain of locked up muscles being forced to move brought fresh tears to my eyes. I pulled it as straight as I could and began applying pressure to it. With a quick shove upward, my shoulder moved with several pops.

  I screamed. My vision filled with dots, and my stomach grew sour as the immensity of the pain threatened to swallow me. I yelled, long and loud, as I jammed the shoulder up a second time. My head swooned, and my vision wavered and grayed along the edges. I thought I would pass out from the pain, but then, just as suddenly as the lightheadedness had come on, it was gone. On the third try, there was an instant of relief as the shoulder went back into place. It was like an extracted tooth: It may be gone, but you still felt the phantom pain of it. My head grew light, and those spots in my vision became larger. I stumbled from the bathroom and into the room that belonged to the boy. I was breathing hard, and sweat poured over me. With the door closed, I slid the dresser in front of it.

  To tell the truth, I don’t remember crawling into the bed or setting my pistol on the nightstand beside it. I don’t remember pulling Humphrey from the bag and setting him—her—on the pillow next to me.

  What I remember is waking up with the sun shining through the slats in the blinds, my body aching and a tickle in my throat. I sniffled a snot runner and wiped my nose. A moment later, I sneezed. Then again. And again. And several more times after that just because my body wanted to.

  My breathing came in phlegm-filled rasps. I sat up, fully alarmed at what appeared to be a cold setting in. My shoulder hurt but not like it had when it was out of socket. It was more of a dull throb that let me know it was still there and still hurt. At any other time, a cold would be just that: a cold. But in these times, where a cold started this whole mess, my mind seized on the only truth it could: I was dying, and sooner or later, I would become one of them.

  I sat up in the bed, holding my arm tight to my chest and hoping not to jostle the shoulder too much. I swung my feet to the floor. My boots scuffed against the hardwood floor, and I stood too quickly. The swooning in my head forced me to sit back down. I waited, eyes closed, head down, for the world to stop spinning. When it did, I stood slowly. My heart hammered my chest and the thoughts…the thoughts that traipsed across my mind…

  What if I am dying? What if this is the Rotter Flu that took so many others? What do I do? There’s no cure. Do I…

  I shook my head to that thought. If push came to shove, I guess, then I would. That reminded me of what someone said when the rotters became a reality: Always keep a bullet for yourself just in case the worst happened. I checked my weapon. Plenty of bullets there. Which one had my name on it?

  A tickle formed in the left nostril, provoking a sneeze that was followed by four more. I coughed, told myself that the scratch in my throat was nothing.

  I limped my way to the door and eased the dresser from in front of it. From there, I made my way to the bathroom, opened the medicine cabinet. I don’t know who owned the house before the end came, but they had medicine for both colds and pain. I took two of the cold pills dry and wished I had grabbed a couple bottles of water before I took off. But I hadn’t.

  Another cough.

  Another sneeze.

  Another snot runner sniffled back up into my nose.

  “I can’t be sick. There’s been few people…barely enough to…”

  The Paul Marcum lookalike came to mind. I bludgeoned him badly, and this was Karma biting me on the butt. Humphrey said something when I got back in the truck. He said I had blood on my face. I wiped it away—black gunk, thick like sludge. I had looked at it and then wiped it on my jeans without much thought.

  I couldn’t help but laugh. Like my brother, I had been done in by Paul Marcum—Lee by the real deal and me by the phony. How do you like those apples?

  Down the hall in one of the other bedrooms, I found some clothes. They were a little big for me, but they were clean, and clean was good. I changed then dumped my old clothes into a trash bag that would probably never be moved outside that house. With my old boots on, I grabbed the pistol. The end of me may have come, but I wasn’t going to go without a fight. And if I was going to fight, I needed my guns…

  “Stay here,” I told Humphrey after shoving the couch away from the door. She sat in the center of it, a loaded pistol on her lap. “I’ll be back.”

  Are you sure?

  I gave a nod. No, I wasn’t sure. To be honest, I had no intentions of going back. Humphrey had been with me for a short while and he—she—had probably kept me sane through much of the Hell, and I didn’t want to turn into a rotter with her there to see me. I wanted to leave and die somewhere else without Humphrey having to know. In a way, I guess I was sparing her the pain of watching me die. “You bet, buddy,” I said.

  The door closed with a click, and I lowered my head. She was just a stuffed toy. She wasn’t real. All of the conversations we had were in my head. Right? Still, the guilt of lying swelled in my chest. I bit my bottom lip and shook my head. A deep breath and I headed down the steps, passed the dead person at the base of the stairs, and kept going.

  I limped but barely. My ankle and knee were tight, but my shoulder hurt more. I sneezed and grimaced as something tore free in my chest. I spat a string of yellowish phlegm out.

  Life is funny sometimes. Not that haha funny but more like a curve ball you just can’t hit. There were no rotters walking around when I reached the road. I walked that same stretch back toward the shopping dis
trict, saw the overpass in the distance. The closer I got, the tighter my chest became. The anxiety of meeting death head on scared me as much as dying itself.

  The first of the dead that appeared made my skin prickle. I moved between two cars, ducked down, and hurried around it. At the overpass, I looked down at my truck. Bottled water lay on the ground, and the dryness of my mouth begged me to run down and get some, but I didn’t. Instead, I eyed a drug store about a block or so away. I hurried around the burned bodies and the car with the man’s head splattered against the windshield.

  After crossing the overpass, I realized that I had made a mistake. They were there, so many of them wandering aimlessly about. I didn’t have near enough bullets to take them all out. I detoured into a parking lot where several cars sat and then hurried along the edge of a building, checking the corners when I had to step away and out into the open. At the drug store, I stepped over a body in the doorway. Flies hummed about it, no doubt getting their daily fill of rotting flesh and laying their billions of eggs.

  I eased into the door, my heart hammering. A little girl leaned against the counter, her hair dirty and matted. I eased down a side aisle, almost frantic with panic. If I shot her, the others were sure to hear.

  The pharmacy sat at the back of the store. Several corpses lay back there. I went through the half door, made sure it closed behind me. It would take a little work for the girl to get it open, and with the upper half clear, I could see her if she heard me and managed to make it back there.

  In the pharmacy, I nudged the bodies. Someone had given them each a bullet to the head. I rummaged around in the semi-dark area. Though a lot of the drugs had been looted, there were still several bottles of good painkillers and cold medicines. Even better was the large bottle of 500 mg Amoxicillin in pill form. I set my pack on the floor, unzipped the front pouch. The Amoxicillin and painkillers went in along with the prescription cold syrups.

 

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