Dredging Up Memories

by A. J. Brown

  I gotta go, Brother, but one more thing before I do. I buried Leland’s family and Jeanette around the back of the Cabin. Jeanette wanted me to leave you something on her marker. I hope you get it.

  I pray we meet again.

  Jake.

  Emotions are a horrible thing. A wide range of them struggled for dominance in my head and heart. Sadness. Anger. Pity. Fury. Rage. Urgency. But no fear.

  I set the letter on the dash and got out of the van. The sun was still high at that moment, but it wouldn’t be for much longer. If I was going to get out of there while it was still daylight, I needed to do so soon. But I needed to do something first.

  My body shook as I walked back to the cabin. My eyes were blurred by tears. At that moment, a rotter could have come out of the woods, and I probably would have been a dead man. I gathered myself when the thought hit me, wiped my eyes, and pulled the gun from my waistband.

  “No need getting killed now.”

  My voice startled me.

  I looked around, saw no one, and then rounded the side of the house. Trees were only about twenty feet away—how could that have been safe? How could an area where the dead can’t be seen long before they arrive be safe? I wanted to punch myself. I wanted to scream. I sent them there.

  It’ll be safer there, I had said.

  I was wrong—there’s no place safe in this world. What I had done was isolated my family from the rest of the world and sent them to their graves. The weight of that decision—a split-second thought that seemed rational at the time—bore down on my shoulders, threatening to crush me.

  At the backside of the cabin were eight graves, dug by my baby brother. Each one held a handmade cross of tree branches held together by twine and nails. Jake had carved the names of each person onto their respective cross. I had done something similar for Leland and Pop. But this was Jake, this was the little kid I had been charged with to protect when we were kids.

  And I had let him down.

  I had let them all down.

  I didn’t need to see her name to know which grave belonged to Jeanette. The gold necklace I had given her on our first wedding anniversary had been hung on it, her wedding band with it.

  My legs gave out, and I dropped to my knees. Everything I lived for was gone. My family. Jeanette. Probably Jake and Bobby as well. There’s no way they made it out of there without something happening. Maybe their vehicle was along the side of the road on the way out and I had missed it. I made a mental note to go slow and see if I came across Jake’s beat up pick-up.

  I wept.

  I don’t know how long I sat there, face to the ground, tears flowing, snot bursting from my nose, my heart broken in a million tiny pieces. There would be no putting it back together.

  Unless I made it to Saluda and Jake and Bobby were there and alive and…

  The sound off to my right caught my attention. I whipped around and stood in one motion. My gun was up and pointing toward where the dead man stood. It could have been anyone’s father or son…or brother. His salt and pepper hair was matted to his skull, and he looked like he had fallen down at some point, dirtying himself in the mud. One eye was missing, and the other one drooped. His mouth was slightly open. The few teeth in his mouth were gray and jagged. He shuffled from between the trees and out into the open before his foot caught on a root and sent him to the ground. I heard the sound of bone breaking, and he let out a noise that sounded like a muffled scream.

  That muffled scream…I don’t know what it was about it, but I felt my jaws clench, and everything I had ever felt came rushing back, just like with the Paul Marcum lookalike just outside Summerville. But, unlike then, I didn’t lose my mind or get angry. My emotions were already spent.

  I walked toward him. He struggled to move, to crawl toward me, but both of his arms were broken and bent at awkward angles. I pulled the pistol from my waistband and aimed then stopped. He was harmless at that point, but he could still move. I gave him a wide berth and came up behind him. With the heel of one boot, I brought my foot down on the back of one knee. There was another one of those loud cracks and that same muffled scream from the dead man. I did the same to the other leg, but it took three stomps before the leg snapped.

  He groaned.

  I just shook my head and left him there.

  Back at the crosses, I was careful not to walk over the graves. At Jeanette’s, I lifted up her necklace and ring. It was cold in my hand, and then it was cold against the back of my neck and on my chest after I put it on and slid it in my shirt. I touched the cross and let new tears come.

  I cried again.

  And I cried for a long while, my hand on her cross, my forehead on the hand. No rotters came around. No birds sang. The day started to wane, the sun fading and bringing with it night.

  There were clouds coming in, gray and black and dreary, much like the way I felt inside. I sniffled several times, wiped my eyes with the backs of my hands. By the trees lay the dead man, groaning as if in the worst pain of his undead life. Maybe he was. I didn’t care.

  I bent down, kissed the cross, and whispered, “I’m sorry, Baby. I’m sorry I wasn’t here to protect you. I’m sorry I let you down.” A sob tore free, and I cried again, but after only a minute, I composed myself. “I love you, Jeanette. I hope you knew that. I’ll always love you.”

  With that, I stood and walked by the dead man. He snapped his teeth at me, and I wheeled on him, bringing the toe of my boot across his jaw. It broke, the skin ripped, and the jaw hung off the side of his face. I kicked him again as if kicking a football. His jaw tore free and bounced along the ground. I knelt down, stared into its dead eyes.

  “You’re going to die here. You’re going to wilt away until there’s nothing left of you.” I stood, teeth clenched. “I hope you suffer.”

  I left him there, went back to the front of the house, and flipped on the flashlight. I didn’t think there would be supplies there, but I looked anyway. I was wrong. In the basement were plenty of supplies—things I thought Jake would take with him but had left behind. Water and canned goods and a lantern with oil. I hauled them up the steps and to the van, setting them on the ground and going back for more.

  Before I left, I went through to the back bedroom. The beds were singles. I pulled the mattress off of one and carried it out the cabin and to the van. I thought pulling the back seats out would be hard. I was wrong. The back seats didn’t even need to come out. They folded down and made a somewhat level back area. I slid the mattress in, shoved it as far to one side as it would go, leaving just a little room on the edge where the door was. I went back, grabbed a pillow and some sheets from the closet. The van wasn’t huge, but it was big enough for the little mattress to be in the center of the van and then a space in the very back where the hatch was for supplies.

  I loaded up, strapped the supplies in place, and got in the van.

  Before leaving, I looked back. The place my family spent many summers in my childhood was no longer ours. It now belonged to the dead. I doubted I would ever be back.

  I also doubted I would ever care if one of the dead hurt inside or not. They were the enemy, and as far as I was concerned, every one of them had killed my Jeanette.

  Are you okay? Humphrey asked as we pulled away.

  “No.”

  I don’t think I ever will be again.

  Eleven Weeks, Four Days, and Fourteen Hours After It All Started…

  Silence.

  The new world—or maybe it’s still the old world—is all about silence. The quieter you are, the less chance you have of attracting attention from the dead.

  “Let’s play the quiet game,” I said.

  What’s that? Humphrey asked.

  “It’s where we see how long we can go without talking. Whoever talks first loses. My brothers and I use to play it when we were kids. The loser got a punch in the arm from all of us.”

  Humphrey didn’t respond. I guess she went ahead and started.

  We drove alon
g in silence, me with my memories and Humphrey with, I reckon, her thoughts. Images danced through my head, each one crying out, “remember me,” or, “remember this,” or “remember when.”

  Most of them centered on Jeanette.

  I met her by accident. Literally. She bumped into my car in the parking lot when she was backing out of her spot. Instead of driving off like most people would have, she sat and waited for me to get back. When I arrived at my car, she got out of hers and approached me. She was a pretty girl with that blond hair, white skin, and blue eyes. My heart sped up. I didn’t know what she was up to, but I thought it might be my lucky day.

  “Hi,” she said nervously. “I kind of bumped your car earlier.” She pointed. I looked. “I’ll be more than happy to exchange insurance with you and—”

  “I don’t see anything,” I said.

  “Right there.” She touched a spot just over the top of my bumper. Maybe she had dinged it a little.

  “That’s nothing. Don't worry about it.”

  “Really, let me at least get it fixed. I’d feel better about it if—”

  Again, I cut her off—not to be mean but because I was suddenly afraid she would walk away when the conversation was over and I would never see her again.

  “I tell you what. I’m heading over to The Dairy Barn for a bite to eat. If you want, you can come with me, and we can talk about it.”

  “I’m really not hungry,” she said, still nervous.

  “I’m not either.”

  “Then why go eat lunch?”

  “I thought it would be a good way to spend some time with you.”

  We didn’t end up at The Dairy Barn but at a local ice cream shop. We had milkshakes and talked like we had known each other our entire lives. We were rarely apart after that. I was twenty-two; she was nineteen. The next time I saw my brothers, I told them I had found the woman I was going to marry. They thought I was nuts.

  Maybe I was.

  …

  …

  The only time we weren’t together was when the world went to Hell. I sent her off with other people. And she died.

  …

  I failed her.

  …

  …

  …

  It was dark by the time I realized I was lost again. This time, it was okay. I was in no hurry, and if the dead tried to get me, well, I thought I might let them. The chances of my baby brother and son making it to Saluda were as slim as they could get. The desire to live was all but gone.

  I pulled into a parking lot in some small town that I don’t recall the name of. There wasn’t much to see there, a bunch of brick buildings and run-down shacks, a few houses that looked like they could have been built before the Civil War, but other than that, there wasn’t much of anything there. I shut the van off and killed the lights but left the key in the ignition.

  The world was black. It was as if I never noticed it before. The clouds overhead blocked out the moon and stars, and whatever posed as streetlights in that town were long dead.

  My shoulder throbbed. A few swallows of bottled water washed down two pain pills. I sat there, staring out the windshield, my thoughts on hold. My head grew heavy, and I started to doze. I crawled to the back of the van, set my gun by the edge of the mattress. Somewhere between lying down and my head hitting the pillow, I was out. There were no dreams.

  A thump brought me from sleep. Another thump and my eyes opened. There was a haze in my head, a cloud that threatened a storm all its own. The third and fourth thumps brought me fully awake, the clouds dissipating and my head clearing. I reached for one of the guns, flipped the safety off, and crawled toward the front of the van.

  Humphrey sat completely still in her seat, but she looked terrified with her glass eyes wide and shimmering as if on the verge of tears. I reached forward, unsnapped her seatbelt, and pulled her free. I placed her on the mattress.

  The thump came again, and the van rocked slightly.

  “Are you okay?” I asked.

  Rotters, she said.

  “I see.”

  Rotters. The obvious answer. For all I knew, it could have been a living person trying to get in the van, but the doors were locked. That wouldn’t have stopped the living. No, they would have found a stone or a pipe, something to smash one of the windows in, and then they would have been able to unlock the door. Easy as pie.

  Don’t go, Humphrey said.

  A finger to my lips, I shushed her politely. I eased into the driver’s seat, pistol still in hand. There were a couple of guns on the floorboard on the passenger’s side. Another thump came right next to my door. I flipped the headlights on.

  A heavy fog hung low to the ground, thick and a smoky white. In that fog, I saw the legs of a dozen or more of the dead trundling about. Another thump came against my window, heavy and loud. The face of an old man was plastered against the glass, his jaw moving up and down, his teeth scraping against the window. He could have been anyone’s grandpa.

  They closed in on all sides, shuffling and stumbling. I couldn’t hear them with the windows up, but they had to be groaning and growling and hungry.

  “Looks like a party,” I said.

  Are we leaving? Humphrey asked.

  I didn’t answer right away. My thoughts went back to Jake and Bobby and Jeanette. I wondered if that was how it looked when the dead closed in on our little cabin. Did it start as one or two coming out of the trees or shambling down the dirt road? Did they try to hole themselves in, or was it a big horde to start with, and those filthy creatures forced their way in? How long did they fight? Who was the first of the living to die?

  Part of Jake’s letter came back to me. Bobby unloaded his gun into the zombie that bit Jeanette. What was he thinking when he did that? What was he thinking when the dead man got to his mother? Was he around when…

  Sometimes, thinking is a bad thing.

  Did he get to say goodbye to her before she passed away?

  The more I thought, the more my mind conjured up images of a horrific battle between the living and the dead. And the angrier I got. I had started losing sight of what Pop had told us at the beginning of this whole mess. They were once people. I had done a few experiments along the way, getting a few results here and there and proving to myself there were still souls inside those rotting bodies. But I didn’t care anymore. A bunch of those former people were responsible for my entire family being wiped out, and as far as I was concerned, they all had a hand in it.

  Back in “the Before”—when the world was still living and daily life consisted of wake up, grab a coffee, go to work, come home, eat several times a day, playing, a little fun with the wife after the kid was in bed, and then sleeping just to wake up and do it all over again—anger was something most people felt over stupid things. “He took my parking spot.” “She cut in line.” “She’s prettier than me.” “He gave me a dirty look.” People got mad about things like that. That anger was hot. It made your face flush, your blood boil, and in many cases, it caused arguments, fights, and sometimes death.

  As I sat in a van I stole from a dead family who opted out instead of facing the swarms of dead, my anger wasn’t hot. My face never grew flush, my blood never boiled. My jaws clenched, and my eyes might have narrowed a little. There was none of the spur of the moment “I’ll teach you a lesson” mentality. No, the anger I felt was calculated, like a woman in a bad relationship, one where the man just beats the crap out of her for nothing. Eventually, they break down, break out, or break free. If they break down, their spirits are broken. If they break out, they are like a convict that escaped from prison, always on the run and looking over their shoulders, afraid of being caught. But if they break free, the man paid a price—and deservedly so.

  I was that woman sitting in the corner of her bedroom, her nose broken and bleeding, her eye swollen, blood seeping from between her legs where her man was brutally rough with her. When he was done, he might have said, “When you get cleaned up, get my supper and a beer
for me.” I don’t know. Something like that.

  I was that woman who waited for him to fall asleep, who calculated every minute, trying to figure out the right time to strike. And when the time came, there was a gun or a knife or maybe someone conveniently broke into the house and did the job for me after his palm was greased with a few dollars, or maybe a little bit of rat poison went in his coffee each morning until he was too weak from the consumption that a baseball bat or a pillow over the face would do the trick nicely.

  That woman…that woman doesn’t act on anger. She acts on revenge, on hate. She might even go to jail when all is said and done, but she would be free. Free. And there would be relief—a big weight off the shoulders that led to tears of both sadness and joy and fear.

  I was that woman as the old man zombie thumped his rotting head against the window of the van, his teeth scraping glass, leaving streaks of brown muck behind. And in that moment, I felt nothing. No pain. No hurt. No anger. Nothing.

  I left my seat, went to the back of the van. It was dark back there, and I could have easily flipped on my flashlight, but no need to draw any more attention than I already had. Sure, taking out Grandpa would be easy, but that fog was like a cloak, and I had no clue how many others were out there waiting for a meal.

  What are you doing? Humphrey asked, her voice shaking.

  “Preparing.”

  For what?

  “Revenge.”

  I checked my guns, made sure they were fully loaded. I took the baseball bat and suddenly wished I had a helmet with a facemask on it and maybe some long sleeves. I also wished for the machete I threw away, but wishful thinking never got anyone anywhere. I placed several pistols in Humphrey’s seat, the baseball bat leaning against the passenger door. A box of Cheez-its and a bottle of water later, I was back in the driver’s seat, eating the breakfast of champions and watching Grandpa chew on the window.

  “Don’t you go anywhere,” I said and took a swallow of water. “You’ve had your last meal.”