Fear Of The Dead
By
Mortimer Jackson
Copyright 2011 The Morning Dread
Kindle Edition
Dedicated to my readers
For picking my first novel
Table of Contents
Vanessa Lowen
Day One
Day Two
Day Three
Day Four
Grace Minien
Day Four
Day Five
Day Six
Day Seven
Linus Baxter
Day Six
Eli Desmond
Day Four
Day Five
Atton Stone
Day Five
Day Six
Closing
Day Seven
Vanessa Lowen
Chapter One
Day One
Sunday
April 20, 2003
5:23 PM
Two hours ago I killed my husband. Tom Everett Manning. He was 36 years old, a teacher at Mission High School. He had a masters in US history, and was under contract by a publisher to write a Civil War novel. Historical fiction was what it was. He was writing an account on the early life of General Chamberlain.
He never finished it. I never got the chance to read it. Truth be told though I doubt I would have even if he did have it done, published, book cover and all. I was never one for history. I guess you could say I’m one of those left-brain types of people.
Or was it right?
Everything’s been flying straight past me these days. Funny that. That right after getting out, right after seeing all that’s been left of the world, the only thing I can think of is my dead husband.
Funnier still, the thought that even after everything we went through, it still hurts to know that he’s gone.
Tom and I had a troubled marriage. Before that we had a troubled relationship. We never had much in common, but I suppose that for a loveless marriage we had enough.
It’s odd how people change the way they do. I remember a time, long ago by now, when I could look into his eyes and see everything that I ever wanted out of life. Now I can’t even explain to myself why I ever felt the way I did, or when or why it ever went away.
When the infection hit California, Tom had us sealed inside a bomb shelter underneath the house that belonged to his father. George Manning. George was a WWII veteran, the product of an era that pictured nuclear war as some unavoidable future. He turned the basement into an air sealed bunker when he got back from his tour in Japan. In case the commies attacked, he said, and meant it too.
He and his wife died of age six months ago. Tom inherited the house. Two days after the attack on Oregon slipped down to Sacramento, that’s where Tom and I went. To hide inside his father’s bunker.
We were in there for four months. Sealed, disconnected from the rest of the world. The phones didn’t work. Radio had no signal. The television sent nothing but static.
Tom said it had to do with the power in the city being disconnected. There was no one around to manage infrastructure.
“It’s what happens when civilians are evacuated.”
I remember him telling me that. Word for word. And I asked him why we couldn’t have gone with everyone else to the military safe houses.
He grumbled on about how the military would just hole us up in some crowded facility, as if he’d done this kind of thing before. In fact, every moment from the Sacramento infection onwards, Tom acted as though he knew exactly what we were supposed to do.
According to Tom, we were just as safe as everybody up there in those evac zones. Safer, in fact. Plus we had our own space.
It wasn’t hard to see the situation from his perspective. Not at the time anyhow. Tom had a point and I couldn’t argue with it. We had our own laundry, our own shower, a stove, a computer, and a working television with some DVDs to pass the time.
The bunker had its own generator, which he said would be good for about a year. The motor was new, and we had more than enough barrels of gasoline to keep it running within that time.
He told me that the disease would clear up long before we used a quarter of our power.
I’m not sure if he meant that when he said it. I didn’t know how he came up with the number, but at the time I didn’t want to ask. He seemed sincere enough, so I believed him. But as I reflect back on everything now, all the time he’d spent preparing that bunker for a day like this, and those occasions on conversation when he would casually reminisce about living in the woods, isolated from the rest of the world. Was it all just coincidence? Or was it a sign to something I should have seen coming?
I didn’t love Tom. That made living with him difficult. There were people out there that I actually cared about and wanted to be with; friends that I hoped were doing fine. But we moved from San Fran to Tom’s bunker up in Fremont, and there was no way to get a hold of anyone I knew. If they were still alive, I had no way of knowing it. All I could do was sit in the comfort of an underground bunker, and hope that the world would still be there by the time I got out.
We marked the days on an Iceland calendar. January had a picture of the Black Waterfall. A column of hexagonal rocks over a waterfall that was said to be igneous, which meant it had been shaped by lava.
We didn’t have windows, so we used the clock to remind us of when each day passed. We marked it on the calendar, then waited for the next day. Or at least, I did.
It surprised me at first how well Tom had adjusted to our new, temporary life. He spent most of his time in the study, either reading a book or writing. As for me, I couldn’t stand it. Living inside that bunker, all I had to look forward to was getting out. I told myself that I would, eventually. I made myself hope.
Days went by. Weeks. And slowly, what had started out as bare contentment turned into dying impatience. 500 plus hours trapped in an underground home with nothing to do. Where the only books belonged to Tom, and watching the same goddamn movies day in and day out only made me restless.
I wanted to go back outside, to see what was going on. I wanted to know what had changed in the world up top. Where everyone went. Tom told me to stop staring at the calendar, and to find something else to do. It made me mad. And for the first time I went from merely tolerating my husband, to fucking hating his guts.
To him the bunker was a goddamn haven. He didn’t care what happened beyond his walls. He had everything he wanted down there, and he was as happy as could be. It didn’t matter to him one bit that the world was turning itself inside out. For all he was concerned, everyone he knew could have burned in hell.
Tom never did have friends. At least, none that he spent any time outside of work with. He spent a lot of time on his own. Writing. Every day we spent locked inside that bunker together, I’d hear that fucking keyboard clack and clack and clack. He’d type for hours on end, stopping only to either disappear inside our bathroom, refuel the generator, or grab some food. Food that he enjoyed far too much for someone who was eating the same fucking thing for four months.
The storage room was stacked with canned food of little variety. Beans, soup, fish, and instant noodles. Stuff made me sick by the first week. I started to eat as less as I possibly could. Appetite became a foreign concept.
January passed, and in came February. The picture this time was a glacier. Jokulsarlon, if I remember right. I probably do. I have a habit of being able to memorize things pretty quickly.
It was at this point that depression reared its ugly head. Sometimes I would go to sleep crying. Sometimes I would think of simply killing myself. There were a few instances when I lashed out against Tom, took my frustrations out on the furniture. Vases, chairs, glasses, whatever I could get my hands
on.
From then onwards I started sleeping on the couch in the entertainment room. He thought it was because I was mad at him. I was. But it never occurred to him that I was anything more than that. That I was tired of being with him, and that I had no interest in ever sharing the same bed with him ever again.
Tom was always so oblivious.
No. It was more than that. He never cared. That’s what it was. He never cared enough about anyone else to try to understand what they felt. All the missed hints and cues, because he never paid any goddamn attention.
March. Now a picture of the Thjorsa River, and by this point I had to leave the bunker.
I asked Tom how much longer it would be. He said at least three more months. As if somehow, without any radio communication or any means of reaching the outside world, he would know exactly how much longer we would have to stay.
Weeks more of bullshit like that, and eventually I had enough. I decided I was going to unseal the door, consequences be damned.
Early morning. I went up past the stairs to the entrance tunnel. I tried to turn the metal lever that kept the door closed. But either the thing was jammed, or it was just too damn heavy.
Tom must have known what I was doing. I knew he could hear me running along the tunnels. My footsteps left imprints in the air. But I didn’t care. Not at the time anyway. I was getting out, and I didn’t care enough to make a secret of it.
When I saw him standing behind me however, scowling at me like a vicious animal, I thought that maybe I should have reconsidered.
He asked me what the hell I thought I was doing. And gone was the politeness in his eyes that I had once known him for. In its place, a grimace of unsaturated animosity that I had never seen in my entire life.
They say that people don’t change. They reveal. Maybe it’s true. If so, then I had to reconcile with the fact that the man I had once fallen in love with all those years ago never really existed. That he was just a mask to a demon I had never known was there.
The thought scared me. And it made me mad.
Six years of marriage for a man who never really existed.
I screamed to his face and told him that I was getting out.
He threw me away from the door. My head hit the wall.
He screamed that it was dangerous out there. A rising bruise on my forehead made me see the irony of his words.
He said I’d be putting both our lives in danger if I opened that door.
The anger weighed heavily on my gut, though it was subsided by the fear of what he would do if I argued, or hit him back.
He apologized right away. Tom inched himself closer.
I cried, and ran back down to the bunker.
I wanted a place to hide. A place where Tom wouldn’t find me. No such luck. All those months of living in the same house had a tendency to expose every nook and cranny.
Hating myself for my failures, I ran straight to the bedroom like a little girl, where I cried until I couldn’t. When I left and entered the kitchen, I saw him warming up a can of chicken soup.
He told me to have some breakfast. His voice was calm and normal, as if nothing between us had even happened. Like we just woke up, and it was the next morning.
My first thought then was how meaningless the word breakfast had become. Without the context of night and day, time was just an hour on a clock. Breakfast, lunch, and dinner, were just part of the same three square meals each day. One that in the end was no different than the other, considering the fact that we would always have the same damn food no matter the time. Gone were the days of eggs and bacon in the morning, sandwiches in the afternoon, and a glass of wine at night.
My second thought, one that lingered longer than it should have, was how indifferent I would have been if Tom had died. I could see him in the kitchen with his head over the stove, gleaming back at me with the same smile as the one he’d used when our marriage wasn’t a complete façade. All-the-while I imagined him lying lifeless on the floor, and feeling strangely comforted by the image.
The calendar on the wall was gone.
I asked him where it went, looking to the wall where it had once been.
He told me that I was getting obsessed with that calendar. That I should apply myself to something other than waiting to leave.
When I asked him what I should do, he gave me one of his empty notebooks. This one. The one I’m writing my entry on.
At first all I used it for was to jot down the remaining dates of March. One page for each day that passed. I wasn’t going to humor Tom. I wasn’t going to pacify myself while the rest of the world moved on. Unlike him, I wasn’t going to forget.
We’d been down there for three months. And by then, who could have known what was happening outside? For all either of us could be certain, the infection had already been dealt with. People could be returning back to their homes, rebuilding what had once been destroyed. What if my friends, Julia, Brett, Mike, or even Stephanie were back in San Fran, wondering where I’d gone?
Whatever was happening outside, I wanted more than anything to know. Instead I was trapped inside my own little hell, unable to escape no matter how much I wanted to. The dying marriage that I once had with Tom had now decayed into something else.
I was his prisoner.
April. I knew it was April, because I remembered from the calendar that March ended on the 31st. Problem now was that I didn’t know when April ended. Was it the 30th? Or 31st, like March? I wondered also what picture was on this month. What new sights of Iceland had I yet to see?
For the rest of April until the 20th, today, I set my sights on getting that bunker door unlocked. I was going to get out even if it killed me. Even if Tom killed me.
I went back to sharing the same bed with him. If I was going to try anything, I needed him disarmed. Having him think that I trusted him after all this time went a good way into doing precisely that. I even went ahead and had sex with him the first night, as much as the thought disgusted me.
To no surprise, he bought it. After he came, he told me how glad he was that I’d forgiven him. The warm feel of his body nearly made me think that I had.
It’d been three months since I last had sex. A moment of curiosity then, when I wondered if the man I’d done it with was still alive. If he went with the rest of the evacuees.
Tom kept a gun in the safe. I remember seeing him bring it in before we sealed the door. It was a pistol that belonged to his father. Said he got it during the war, when he swiped it off a dead SS general.
He kept the pistol inside a safe along with our passports, wallets, and cash, just in case. I didn’t know the combination, so I asked him if I could see my passport. When he asked me why, I said I wanted to know if they weren’t expired. So that maybe, if the day came when we could finally leave, we could just grab our passports and go on a vacation together. Preferably someplace sunny.
Tom seemed to like the idea. Either that or his smile was only meant to keep me entertained. To keep me dreaming.
He unlocked the safe while I watched his hand on the dial.
25; 4; 15. I repeated the combination in silence until I knew the numbers better than the date of my own birth.
Good for two years, the passports said.
I feigned happiness.
The following night, I made certain that Tom was asleep. I whispered in his ear. He didn’t hear me. It was two in the morning, and Tom was out cold. I grabbed the pistol, and tip-toed my way up the ladder into the tunnel. If Tom tried to stop me this time, I swore to myself that I would be ready to shoot him dead.
Once again I struggled with the door. Only now there was something else there that I hadn’t noticed before. A lock tied around a chain. Tom must have done it the first time I tried to leave.
I hesitated over what to do. But I guess I didn’t have much of a choice.
I shot the lock.
A shock of noise and vibrations reverberated around the bunker. I could feel it all, coupled with the warmth
of the pistol in my hand, and the burning smell of gunpowder. Tom heard it. I could feel his bare feet shuffling around downstairs. Calling my name as he ran.
I didn’t wait for him to show up. I set myself to unfurl the chains and open the latch.
Again, it was heavy. Sturdy as a rock.
With all the muscle I could put to it, I was able to weaken but not completely undo the latch.
And that was when he showed up.
The scream startled me. He blared for me to stop.
I aimed the pistol at Tom, my hands and fingers shaking as I did. Determined as I was to leave, a part of me was surprised at how much I was willing to do, and at how far I’d already gone.
I had a gun pointed at my husband’s chest. This was the point of no return. Live free or die, there was no going back to the past four months of safe living underground. I couldn’t surrender. Not anymore. Tom would kill me if I did.
He told me to put the gun down. To see if we could talk about what I was about to do.
He was afraid. I could see his face turn pale, just like mine. He didn’t know if I was going to shoot, and at the time neither did I.
I didn’t know what to do. I had to get that door open, but I couldn’t turn around and let him come any closer. Shooting him seemed a good idea even if it was on the leg to stop him from moving.
But I didn’t want to shoot Tom. Not for everything he’d done to me.
He stepped closer.
I yelled for him to stop moving, and the pistol flailed so hysterically in my hand that a part of me was afraid it would go off on its own.
He assured me he wouldn’t move. But Tom was lying. I could see it in his face. I knew that the moment he had his chance, he would take the gun from my hand and beat me over the head with it. Or shoot me. No. I knew that if I took my eyes away from him, he wouldn’t hesitate to stop me.
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