by A. J. Brown
“I hear what you’re saying, but that really doesn’t change the uneasiness everyone is feeling right now.”
He nodded, pursed his lips, and then smiled. “Do you know what that is?”
“What?”
“That’s fear: False Evidence Appearing Real.”
I repeated the words back to him. “How do you figure?”
“Simple. You think you’re going to lose your job. Has anyone told you that was going to happen?”
“No.”
“Then why would you think it?”
“I don’t know—it’s just the way things feel right now.”
“So your perception is that you and your co-workers are going to lose your jobs. It’s not true. I’d be a fool to get rid of you guys—I don’t know anything about the system here. I’d be cutting my own throat if I got rid of any of you. Your perception is false evidence appearing real.”
I never forgot that conversation. I wonder what happened to him—if he made it out of the city or if they really did kill him.
I shook my head. Everyone I knew and loved were gone: family, friends, acquaintances. It was now only me and a stuffed female bear who bore a male’s name.
As I sat there, the van’s engine idling and the fresh memory of that old man’s eyes pleading with me, saying what his brain wanted but what his mouth couldn’t vocalize.
Kill me, please.
He knew what he would become if he died. He knew the dead were in and around the church and that it was only a matter of time before they caught up to him. He slumped against the church wall when I shot him, his bloodied hand dropping into his lap, his mouth popping open. His head hit brick and bounced forward before settling on one shoulder.
All of that could have been avoided. If I had stayed away from that church. If I had just made my way out of the town instead of playing “in search of,” then the dead wouldn’t have followed me to the dinner table. Maybe they would still be alive. Maybe not. The young man died while I was there, and those people seemed oblivious to the truth. Surely some of them would have died if not all of them, all while Reverend William White prayed his prayers and refused to believe that deliverance was in the shape of a door that led to the back of the church.
Still, my decision brought the dead to their front step. My decisions cost White and at least three of his congregation their lives. My decision ended old Hairy Ears’ days on this Earth.
Decisions. I thought of all of those as I sat in that van watching the smoke rise higher into the sky.
Then I thought of other choices I had made. One stood out among them all: telling Jeanette to take Bobby and go to the cabin, go to safety. The more I thought about it, the more I realized we would have been safer if we had just stayed put. We could have boarded up the house, fortified it enough to wait it out. There were windows on all four sides of the upstairs. It would have been easy enough for me to pick them off as they neared the house. We had a basement straight out of the eighteen hundreds with a door in the floor that I don’t think any walking corpse would have been able to lift even if they tried.
We would have been safe.
I knew that. In hindsight, I knew it when everything was going down, but the natural reaction was to flee, find higher ground, and wait it out as if we were caught in a flood. It was a decision born of panic. It was the wrong decision.
And my family died because of it.
I put the van in gear, pulled all the way onto the highway.
Where are we going? Humphrey asked.
“Home.”
Home?
“Yeah. We should have never left there.”
It was a long drive, one that was spent in reflection, like so many other times. Every once in a while, I would see some of the dead shambling along, mostly one or two at a time, but there was an occasion where there were four in an old wheat field off 385. I stopped each time. The single ones, I took out with a bat. The group of four was three bullets then the bat—no use wasting ammo on a one-on-one situation.
I could have kept on, not stopped, let the dead continue on, but I didn’t. I chose to stop, to end their existence. No need for them to catch sight or sound of the van and then turn to follow. I had made that mistake in that small town earlier. It wasn’t happening again. If I saw a rotter and I could safely take it down, I did so.
My world had suddenly become a game of “what if?” What if I didn’t stop? Could those rotters find another survivor and kill them? What if there were kids involved? Though I would have never known, in the back of my mind, I would have been wondering, “what if?” There was no time for “what if.” “What if” could get other people killed.
I saw the sign for Sipping Creek, South Carolina, POPULATION: 700+ AND GROWING.
My mind fixed on the sign, whispered in my ear, Time to change that number.
I passed through that great, invisible border that separates one town from another and continued on. The small neighborhoods took shape, most of them the way the living left them when they fled that proverbial flood. There was some change by way of my gun and shovel and the graves where the dead had been buried after being put down.
I slowed as I approached the street my family had lived on in better times. My stomach was all nerves and my palms sweaty. I wasn’t so sure I was ready to face the reality of living in that house without my family. A left turn followed, and I crept along the road. It was quiet, almost peaceful. The doors still held the red, spray-painted Xes on them. I backed into my yard, pulled the van right up to the porch steps, and turned it off.
Where are we? Humphrey asked.
“We’re home.”
My home?
It hadn’t occurred to me that Humphrey had once lived with another family. Sure, I remembered where I had gotten her, but the thought that she wasn’t home didn’t cross my mind. She had a girl who probably loved her at one time. That girl lived in a different house, a different home. For a moment, I thought to crank the van up and make my way back to that house. I remembered it well enough: a U-shaped cul-de-sac, the picture of the little girl and her parents, Humphrey held in her arms. There had been no fences around the yards in that area. I shook my head—a little harder to fortify, I thought.
“No, not your home, Humphrey. Mine—or at least what used to be mine.”
Humphrey didn’t move, didn’t make a small grunting sound when I picked her up and slipped her in the pack, zipping it up around her. She didn’t say anything when I put the pack on my shoulders. The pain in the one arm stretched down into my shoulder blade, making me aware it was still injured even though it was back in place. I reached into the console, grabbed a couple of pain pills, and popped them in my mouth, chewing them instead of swallowing them whole. They left behind a nasty, chalky residue in my teeth and tongue.
“Come on,” I said and grabbed a pistol.
The front door greeted me with thousands of memories. My knees grew weak, and I almost fell to the ground at the base of the porch.
Walker, are you okay?
“Yes,” I lied.
To lie is to make a decision not to tell the truth. It was often a bad decision, a habit I seemed to have gotten good at. Not lying but bad choices. I would make a few more of those in the coming weeks and months of trying to survive in the dead world, not the least of which was turning the knob to open the door and finding it locked.
Then I remembered. I had locked the door the last time I left just before placing the big, red X on it. I thought I would never go back, but there I stood on the same familiar porch in that same familiar town. A knot formed in my stomach. Reaching in my pocket, I pulled out a set of keys. They weren’t mine. No, they had never belonged to me, not even then—they belonged to a family who killed themselves about a hundred miles from Sipping Creek. My keys were still in the ignition of my overturned truck. I was in too much of a hurry to grab them when I wrecked and then again when I went back to retrieve my guns and some supplies with the dead closing in on me.
Then we should leave, Humphrey whispered.
I had a chance to turn around, to get out of there. I had a chance to make a decision to escape the demons that were inside that house. What did I do? Yeah, I went down the steps, rounded the side yard, and went into the back yard and right to my shop. I tried not to pay attention to the toys on the ground or the parts to the old car I had been working on or the playhouse I had built when Bobby was still barely crawling.
The door was closed but not locked. I pushed it open, not taking for granted the shop would be empty. The sun flushed part of the darkness inside away. Dust mites danced in its rays. There were cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, the worktables, and shelves. It looked like spiders had taken up residency. I pushed away some of the webs and stepped inside. Humphrey let out an unhappy squelch.
“You okay back there?”
I hate spiders.
“Yeah, me too.”
Really?
“Yeah.” Another lie. “They’re good at hiding, and you run into their webs and do that weird ‘oh crap, I just ran into a spider web’ dance.”
Humphrey giggled.
A coffee can sat on the third shelf of a tin unit near the door. I grabbed it. It wasn’t as dusty as I thought it would be, and the top came off easy enough. The key sat in the bottom of it. I looked at it for a long while, plucked it from the can, and turned it over in my fingers.
Then I was standing at the front door, the key in the hole, the tumbler clicking loudly, the front door open. Those same rays that shone in the shop now shone into my house, making it look older than it was. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me.
Back in the old world, that would have been a great feeling. Coming home after a hard day of work, kicking off the boots just inside the door, letting my feet air out. A cold beer and maybe a football game—yeah, being that it was early September, football season would have just started.
I slid the pack off, set it on the light blue recliner that I used to sit in every night. I used to read Bobby stories right there, his little body tucked under my arm. He loved The Monster at the End of This Book, and I did a great Grover impression and pretended to try to keep him from turning the pages. He would laugh until there were tears in his eyes and he could barely breathe.
Yeah, it was a bad idea returning home.
I stumbled over to the couch. I plopped down and sat back, my hands went between my knees. I don’t know if I cried or if I just sat there staring into the bleakness of nothing, but eventually, I snapped out of it, and the sun was coming up. Yes, coming up. But somewhere in between, I believe the sun had set and risen a time or two more.
“We need to leave,” I said and stood. My legs were tired. Maybe I had slept instead of just sitting there, letting time pass me by. I took the few steps to the recliner, grabbed the pack, and opened the front door.
Outside, the air was crisp. There was a slight breeze, and the sky was still somewhat gray as the sun continued its ascent. Before I reached the van, I saw her. She was one of Jeanette’s best friends. Her hair was brown and brittle. Once upon a time, she had beautiful hazel eyes the shapes of almonds. From the looks of the wounds on her arms, neck, and the gaping hole in her shirt, I gathered she had survived the sickness only to succumb to the dead and then become one herself. She stumbled along the road, looking like she was sleep walking. Maybe she was.
I set Humphrey in the van, checked my gun. A full clip.
Slowly, I walked toward her, keeping plenty of distance between us.
“Sherri,” I whispered.
She continued to trundle along.
I followed behind her. How did I miss her? Was she alive when I went inside her house but hiding somewhere I didn’t look? Did she think I was one of the dead that managed to get inside and was looking for a fresh meal? Was that why she didn’t come out when I was there?
“Sherri,” I said a little louder.
How many times had she and her family eaten dinner with us? How many times had Jeanette confided in her about life’s little problems? How many times had we laughed together? She was the maid of honor in our wedding, the godmother to Bobby. She was everything to Jeanette.
“Sherri,” I yelled.
She stopped. Her head lifted slightly as if she were listening for something.
“Sherri, it’s Hank.”
She groaned. I imagine she was trying to say my name.
“Sherri, turn around.”
And she did so. My stomach flipped, and the skin on my arms and neck bubbled with cold chills. I should have just put a bullet in her brain and not said anything, but I didn’t do that. When she turned to me, I saw the torn lip, the caked white eyes, the sallow skin. My breath hitched, and I stared hard at her.
“Sherri, are you in there?”
Another groan, then a step. She lifted a hand toward me. Her fingernails were long—they hadn’t stopped growing.
“Sherri, stop right there.”
Sherri took another step. Her other arm extended out. She was missing her thumb.
Jeanette had known her since third grade. They graduated from high school together. They both went to the university over in Columbia. They had been inseparable even after they both got married.
A growl tore from her throat, and she stumbled along a little faster, her arms outstretched, something akin to brown sludge coming from her mouth—the drool of the dead, I reckon.
“Sherri…” I shook my head, my breath held tight in my lungs. “I’m sorry.”
The pistol recoiled. The boom somehow silenced in my ears. Sherri fell backwards, landed on the ground with a soft thud. Her head hit the blacktop, and reddish/black blood made a crown beneath it.
I stood staring at the body of my wife’s oldest friend for several minutes before making my way back to the shop around back of the house. There was a shovel hanging on its peg on the wall. It had been a while since I had dug any graves, but I spent the next couple of hours doing just that. I couldn’t leave her on the street to rot. When I was done, I drove the shovel into the soft mound of dirt to mark her grave just in case…just in case I came back. I didn’t think I would, but I had thought that before, and look where I ended up.
“Time to go,” I said as I slid behind the wheel.
Where to now? There was a hint of frustration in her voice.
“Saluda maybe?”
Where’s that?
“Sixty miles along 378, just before you get to Newberry. It’s pretty country. Not so close to the city. Lake Murray is out that way. We could find one of the houses out there and make it our own if nobody is in it. And we can start over.”
What about your son?
It took a while for me to answer, but when I finally did, I realized why I had chosen Saluda. “The Batesburg armory is out there, about twenty minutes or so from the County Line Store. I figure we could check it out first. Maybe Bobby and Jake will be there.”
And if they aren’t?
I took a deep breath. “Then my search is over.”
Twelve Weeks After It All Started…
In the old world, there were crazies everywhere. Corrupt officials. Corrupt cops. Corrupt teachers. Corrupt sports figures. Kids killing kids. The world was on the verge of killing itself when the dead began to rise. The difference between then and now? The crazies aren’t arrested for the things they do now, and there is no media circus to follow them around, reporting on their every move.
It took longer than I thought it would to get from my home down I-20 toward Saluda. Roads had been blocked by accidents or stalled out cars or bodies, so many bodies. I moved what vehicles I could and detoured where I couldn’t. I ended up on Old Batesburg Road where the houses looked worn and the yards were mostly unkempt. Occasionally, I would stop and take out a couple of the dead, but for the most part, Old Batesburg Road was abandoned, much like I guessed most of the world was.
That two-lane blacktop would lead me close to
the Batesburg Armory. I hoped to find my baby brother and my son there. If not…
If not wasn’t something I wanted to think about.
I slowed down when I saw the vehicle up ahead—a truck that was bigger than mine—sitting in the middle of the road. I saw people, but I couldn’t make out if they were living or dead. One of them had to be alive. It looked like a struggle taking place, and someone needed help.
What’s wrong? Humphrey asked.
“I’m not sure, but there’s something going on up there.”
Are we going to check it out?
“That’s the plan.”
We drove forward until we were about thirty yards from the other truck. It was high off the ground, the wheels lifting it up taller than the top of the van. It was a rust bucket color, and it definitely belonged to a couple of country boys. I put my window down enough so I could hear the commotion at the front of the vehicle.
Someone was laughing—it was a taunt if I’ve ever heard one. Someone else was speaking, his voice deep.
“You want some of this?” he said. “I know you do.”
The alarms went off in my head. They had a woman, and they were going to rape her. That’s the only thing I could think. I couldn’t quite see them, but hearing was enough.
I grabbed my pistol, checked to make sure it was fully loaded, and then stood from the truck.
Hank?
“Stay here, Humphrey. This could be bad.”
She let out a low whine as I closed the door gently.
With their truck being high off the ground, I thought they would have seen me or at least the van. But they were too preoccupied with their taunting and teasing, and I could only imagine the poor woman they were terrorizing. I rounded the front end of the truck, pistol drawn. I aimed before I saw.
There were two men, one scrawny and dirty, his hair greasy and his clothes just as filthy. He held a rope in one hand and a knife in the other. The other end of his rope led to a woman’s neck. The second guy was bigger and taller. It looked like all the meals Scrawny missed, Fat Boy made up for. He held a rope as well, and like his buddy, the other end of it ran to the woman, this one at her waist. Her top was ripped, and she only had panties covering her privates.