by A. J. Brown
“So you’re not only nuts but you’re a drunk as well. Nice. Psycho drunk people are the best. Of all the people to get saved by, I get you.”
“Yeah, you got me. But you don’t have to stick around. You can take yourself right on out that door. Good luck though. They got us surrounded, and I doubt you’re going to get very far.”
“It doesn’t matter. I’m going to die anyway.” He lifted his shirt. There were teeth marks on his stomach—just enough to break the skin and leave a bloody imprint.
“One of them got my leg too.” He pulled at a hole in his pants, exposing a deeper wound—one that had already begun to turn gray.
He showed me his hand. A huge gash stretched across three knuckles. “I punched the one that bit my stomach.”
I stared at him.
“Where’d all the…what did you call them? Biters?” I asked.
“Yeah. Biters. That’s what they do. They bite and tear the flesh off your body.”
“Biters. That sounds about right. So where’d all of them come from?”
“I don’t know. I just kind of ran into them as I was trying to get out of the area.”
“So you ran this way?”
He laughed. “If that’s what you want to call it.”
“What would you call it?”
“Limping lamely, maybe?”
“Where were you coming from?”
“A house a couple of streets down. It’s not much of a place, but I holed up there for a couple of days until my buddy died. Then I left.”
“Did you put him down?”
“My buddy?”
“Yeah.”
“I think so.”
“You think so? You don’t know if you put him down? What did you do?”
“Dean had been bitten, and it was all I could do to make him comfortable. He wanted me to go ahead and put a bullet in his head before he died. He didn’t want to turn…and I didn’t want to kill him.”
“You didn’t finish the job?”
“I rigged the bedroom door.”
“Rigged the door?”
He nodded. “Yeah. With an axe and a rope. If he gets up and tries to open the door, the rope will pull a lever, and the axe will split his skull. It’s the only thing I could think to do other than be there when he died and do it then. But I couldn’t. I just couldn’t.”
I thought about that and understood where he came from. I put Lee down, and there is not a day that goes by that I don’t think about the way his head snapped back and the way blood and hair and brains splattered the wall behind him.
“I hope it did the trick. If not, your buddy’s going to suffer for a long time.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’ll show you,” I said then went to the door. “Come with me.”
“Out there?”
“Don’t worry. We’ll be fine.” I opened the door. Minutes earlier, I went out there and noticed the chill in the air, but I didn’t notice the brown and orange and yellow leaves on the trees mingled in with all of the greens. Fall had set in pretty good by then, I reckoned.
“What month is it?” I asked.
“Late October if my watch is right.”
“Late October?”
More time had passed than I thought. It was mid-September when I arrived here.
“I didn’t catch your name,” he said.
“I didn’t throw it.”
Silence fell over us like a cloud.
“It’s Hank. Hank Walker, but you can call me Walker.”
“I’m Hetch.”
“Come here, Hetch. You won’t believe this unless I show you.”
He looked apprehensive. I guess he had reason not to trust me. I did whack him pretty solid on the head, and there were bodies in the yard on crosses. I went down the steps. Most of the biters—yeah, I liked that term a lot better than rotters—had shambled away. Only a few stragglers hung behind. I don’t know if they were waiting for a meal or for the angel of death.
The closest one was a man, maybe in his mid-forties. His brown hair was missing in places, and his eyes drooped in their sockets. I drove the machete into his head then pulled it free. A second male moved toward me, a low groan in his throat that I ended with another over-the-top plunge of the blade into his skull.
The third guy was a big man—not fat, but in life, he had been muscular. The muscles he probably prided himself on were still fairly solid looking and only sagging around his chest and mid-section. If he got hold of you, there would be no breaking his grip. His hair had been cropped short, and his shirt was ripped and barely hanging on by one arm. He had been bitten on the shoulder. For all the weight lifting and being in shape the guy had probably done, he was still like the rest of us: raw meat, and one bite was all it took to spoil it.
“This guy, Hetch. Look at him. You see him?”
“Yeah.”
“He was someone’s son. Maybe someone’s brother or dad. Look at his hand—he was married. He liked to work out. He might have been a jock when he was in high school. His appearance was probably important to him. Are you getting all this?”
Hetch stood at the top of the stairs. He looked ready to run back inside if things got out of control.
“Why does any of that matter?” he asked.
“The body is dead, but the person inside isn’t.”
“You really are crazy, aren’t you?”
“Maybe we all are,” I said and then added, “Pay close attention.”
I picked up a hand-sized rock and moved toward Muscles. If this were the world that was, I would have probably never approached him. I certainly wouldn’t have tried to taunt him. A few feet away, I threw the rock. It hit Muscles in the chest. It sounded like someone punching a bag of sugar—a heavy TWHOCK.
Muscles growled.
“I think I made him mad.”
He staggered forward, his right hand reaching for me. I sliced it off with a quick, downward slash of the machete. Muscles leaned to the right and let out a loud moan.
“Did you hear that? That’s the sound of someone in pain. He may be dead on the outside, but on the inside, he feels everything.” My eyes never left Muscles, and then I spoke directly to him. “Ain’t that right, fellah?”
His jaws snapped shut and then opened. He shambled closer to me, this time extending his other arm. I took it off at the elbow. He howled like an angry wolf.
“Now, what are you going to do, Muscles?”
I hated what I was doing, but I had to prove a point. I had to make Hetch understand that there was so much more to the biters than just being reanimated corpses with an insatiable hunger.
I kicked Muscles in the kneecap. His leg buckled backward, and he fell to the ground face-first. His groans were agonized.
“Come here,” I said to Hetch.
“You’re crazy.”
“Come here. I have a headache the size of Montana, so don’t make me tell you again.”
I thought he was going to bolt. His eyes held that weary stare, that look that if he had somewhere to run or a car to get into, he would. He could have just run in the house. I wouldn’t have blamed him if he did.
He didn’t.
Hetch limped down the stairs, holding tight to the railing.
“Help me roll him over.”
“What?”
“Help me roll him over. I want to show you something.”
“Haven’t you shown me enough? Just put the machete in his head, and get it over with.”
“I will, but you have to see this first. You won’t believe me if you don’t.”
We stood in silence for several seconds before he finally nodded. He pushed from one side as I pulled on one of Muscles’ shoulders.
On his back, Muscles snapped his jaws at us several times.
Hetch jerked away and fell on his bottom. “Are you crazy? He almost got me.”
“It doesn’t matter—you’ve already been bitten. You’ll be one of them soon enough, right?”
I grabbed Muscles
by what little hair he had on his head. “Listen up in there. Do you hear me? I know you do. Answer a question for me. Can you do that?”
“He can’t understand you, Walker.”
I knocked on Muscles’ head a couple of times. He growled and gnashed his teeth.
“Hey now, that’s no way to act toward the man who’s going to end your suffering.”
“Walker, that’s enough. Just put him down.”
I spun on my knee and grabbed him in the leg where the hole was. He dropped to the ground, a scream escaping him. I had my gun out and pointed it at Hetch’s head.
What was I doing?
My grip on the world had slipped too far away. But I couldn’t reel it back in. Not right then, at least.
“You know what the problem with this world is? It’s not the dead. It’s the living. We’re all too busy being scared of those things, those biters. But you know, maybe they’re just as scared as we are. Did you ever think about that? Did you?!”
Hetch had a hand over his head and one forearm at my chest. “No. No, I never figured they would be afraid of us. They just march along, killing and killing and killing.”
“They can’t help it,” I said and pulled the gun away. I slipped it back in my waistband and turned to Muscles. Hetch was right about one thing—I should have just put him down and ended his misery right then. The other biters had begun to turn around, many of them making their way back to us. “Unlike the living, they can’t help their impulses.”
I stood and pulled Hetch to his feet. “Look at his eyes.”
“What about them?”
I chopped off one of Muscles’ feet. He wailed.
Hetch backed away. “What the hell?”
“You saw his eyes—they changed, didn’t they?”
“But he’s dead.”
“No. I’ve told you already. His body is dead. He’s still in there.” I looked to the biters migrating toward us. There were more than a dozen. “They’re all still in there. They can’t help themselves. But we, the living, we can. I don’t know how many living people you’ve come across, but most the ones I’ve met have been crazier than the nuts in a nut house.”
Hetch gave me raised eyebrows.
“Yeah, I know how I must look to you—like one of those crazies. But I’m not. I’m just trying to survive and not doing a very good job of it.”
I didn’t know if Hetch believed a word I said. I didn’t know if I believed it either. To be truthful, I don’t know how anyone in this world—the way it is now—could be completely sane. Every one of the living had to be a little off kilter from the things they’ve seen, the things they’ve done. Sanity’s just a pipe dream.
I turned back to Muscles and shook my head. He looked like he was in pain, like he was screaming on the inside. And me, well, I had caused that pain.
“Nothing personal, buddy,” I said to the poor guy. His head split open easy enough underneath the blade of the machete.
To Hetch, I said, “Stay here. I have to help these people.”
Help them? That’s somewhat laughable if you think about it. In any language, it was murder. Or maybe it was assisted suicide, like that Dr. Kavorkian guy. They called him Dr. Death. He supposedly assisted in the suicides of over 130 ailing patients. He went to jail for murder, though really all he did was help those people leave this world, end the pain they were going through.
At that moment, I was Death—not so much Dr.—to these people. I provided the machinery. No, it wasn’t the Thantron or the Mercitron, as Kavorkian called his machines. It was the Machetetron, and it was just as lethal.
“Come on, people,” I yelled and stepped away from the house and away from the hanging corpses, which I can only believe I used to keep the dead at bay—if they couldn’t smell me, they wouldn’t want me. Oh, but they caught my scent right good, and several of them picked up the pace.
I sliced through them with ease, the machete lopping off the tops of heads or splitting them all the way to their noses. My arms grew heavy and ached—but the blood rush and adrenaline kept me going. Finally, the last one went down—a young man with long, tangled hair and wearing only shorts.
Hetch stood at the bottom of the steps, one hand on the rail. Again, he looked like he would bolt.
I walked through the corpses—easily two dozen or more—and stopped a few feet from Hetch. I said nothing as I passed him and went up the steps. At the top, I looked down. The scene from there was worse than up close. I had cut off more than just the tops of heads. There were arms and legs lying here and there, and the blackish red blood painted the grass in splotches.
I was no Dr. Death, but on that day, I was Death all the same to twenty-seven trapped people.
I motioned for Hetch to come in then walked inside.
Seventeen Weeks and Two Days After It All Started…
“Are you just going to leave them there?”
I looked at Hetch. “Close the door, why don’t you?”
My arms and legs shook. My clothes were soaked in gore and dried vomit.
The door clicked shut, but Hetch didn’t move away from it. Instead, he watched me as if he thought he was next on my list. His eyes were wild, and he constantly licked at his lips, which, for the most part, were covered in a brown beard.
“What?” I asked.
“You’re just going to leave them out there to rot?”
I almost laughed at that but managed to hold back. “In case you haven’t noticed, they’ve been rotting since they died.”
“You know what I mean.”
“Do I?”
He went from scared to angry in a couple seconds. “You’re a jerk; you know that?”
“I’ve been told that a time or two.”
Living interaction. I wasn’t so sure I wanted it. It had been all too infrequent over the last few months, and what little there had been had ended badly for the most part. Someone always died. So maybe I was being a jerk. Maybe I always would be. At least until I die.
Thinking on that now reminds me death isn’t that far in the future. Not many people stand a chance of living into the golden years now. And what type of life would that be? Could the world rebuild itself? It first had to figure out how to get rid of the biters.
“I’m going to go shower,” I said. “Unless you have a problem with that as well.”
“You don’t get it, do you?”
“Get what?”
“You’re a drunk and you’re reckless and—”
That was it. I’d had enough. “Do me a favor,” I said.
“What’s that?”
“Open the door.”
“Why?”
“I said so.”
He hesitated but eventually listened.
“Now, step outside.”
He frowned, started to speak, but I guess he decided not to. He closed his lips tightly and buttoned them up as pretty as you could want. Then he stepped onto the landing.
“Now close the door.”
“Wha… What?”
“Close the door.”
“Look, man, it’s not safe out here, and I don’t have any weapons, and—”
I drew my pistol, pointed it at him, and took the five steps toward him. “If you’re still here when I get done cleaning up and changing, then we can talk. If not, goodbye.”
He said something else, but I paid him no attention. I slammed the door and locked it. He wouldn’t be able to get in—the windows were boarded up, and there were a series of four locks up and down the door, all of which I bolted.
It didn’t take him long to start beating on the door. I ignored him as I went down the hall to the bathroom and got undressed. One good thing about that house was it had a well, and it hadn’t dried up yet. There was a windmill out on the lake, which supplied the water to the house. I would never drink the water, but showering in it was a different matter. It was icy cold, and my muscles felt like they would turn to stone before getting used to the water. Then they relaxed. I took my time,
hoping Hetch would leave. In the short time I had known him, he struck me as high maintenance: someone who would question everything I did and every decision I made. I had been on my own for too long by then to let a stranger question what I did or why I did it.
I dried off, feeling refreshed. How long had it been since I took a shower? I got dressed and went back up the hall.
I listened for a short while. Hetch no longer beat on the door. I waited several seconds, holding my breath, my hands clutched into tight fists. Then something happened, something I didn’t expect.
Panic took hold.
I was alone, and being alone was not good for me. Humphrey had kept me sane after everyone else had died. But Humphrey chose to leave. She had been my anchor, and without her, I was nothing more than an abandoned ship with torn sails. I was adrift in an ocean of death, just waiting to sink.
Hetch’s screams had awakened me from a drunken stupor. Though he seemed difficult, he didn’t come off like most of the nutcases I had met in the dead world. If anything, I was probably the head job with all those biters nailed to stakes out in the yard. What was I thinking?
The door was so far away, and each step I took felt like I moved backward instead of forward. I was having a nightmare within a nightmare, and I knew I would never wake up from it, especially if I were alone again. I slung the door open. I started to yell his name and then stopped. Hetch sat on the top step, his elbows on his knees, hands dangling between his legs. He looked back at me.
“I’m gonna die,” he said.
He was right. He had been bitten and not just in one spot. He would die, and it would only be a matter of days. Maybe even just a day.
“I’m gonna die, just like everyone else, and then I’m going to come back and…and…and…I don’t want to be one of those things.” He pointed to the bodies on the ground. “I don’t want to go through what Dean went through. It was hard to watch, and he was delirious at the end…”
“You’re not going to die, Hetch.”
“Yes, I am.”
I waited a minute longer. His eyes were rimmed red. He was scared. So was I. I had a gallon of healing water—touched by God, so the Cherokee say—but didn’t I want to use it on some stranger I may not even like after a couple of days.