by McBain, Tim
She started almost every sentence this way, demanding Erin’s full attention before she’d actually start the conversation.
“What?”
“Do you think zombies poop?”
“What?”
“They have to, if you think about it,” Izzy continued. “Otherwise they’d keep eating brains, and it would keep building up and building up, until eventually they just exploded.”
Erin just shook her head. Crossing by the lumpy form under the blanket, she noticed one hand protruding from the edge, the bones looking more like a claw than anything human.
The thing that struck her over and over was how much they all looked the same. Sometimes the clothes tipped off the gender and maybe the age. Like in this case, she’d guess: male, 45 years old and up.
But for the most part, it didn’t matter if they had been skinny or fat, black or white, Catholic or Muslim, gay or straight: they all looked the same once they were dead and rotted. It made all the crap that happened in the world -- politics and war and bigotry of any kind -- seem extra stupid and pointless. Now that the world had ended, most stuff from Before seemed stupid and pointless.
Even the little things. Like how she used to spend half an hour on her hair every morning. Washing, blow-drying, flat-ironing. All to get her already-straight-hair a little extra straight. Now she barely looked in the mirror in the mornings.
Or how her mom had a conniption fit if she got a C on her report card. Because all that Trigonometry was really coming in handy in the post-apocalypse. She could have done with a little less tangent and cosecant and a little more How to Build a Fire.
How to Forage for Food.
How to Kill a Zombie.
She whipped through the cabinets in the kitchen, finding a few ketchup packets and a box of strawberry-banana sugar-free Jell-o. She turned to the sack of bones on the recliner.
“Congratulations, sir. You’ve just won the Worst Food Stash Ever award. The prize is a box of sugar-free Jell-o, which I will accept on your behalf.”
Plastic crinkled as she pulled a shopping bag from her pocket and shook it open. She plunked the so-called food into the bag, feeling like Charlie Brown with his trick-or-treat bag full of rocks.
She reminded herself that they didn’t actually need the food. They had a pretty good cache back at the house. But it was mostly beans. And she hated beans.
As she passed the lounger, she noticed a box next to the chair. It was red and yellow and proclaimed, “26 Sticks Inside!”
It looked like she and Izzy would soon be snapping into roughly 26 Slim Jims. Hurray.
At least it wasn’t more beans.
Her lips pressed together in a line as she read the description of the product: Mild Smoked Meat Snack. They weren’t even allowed to call it beef jerky.
“I spoke too soon, sir. Obviously you were a man of impeccable taste.”
She tucked the box into the shopping bag with the rest of the haul and made for the door. Now that would have been a useful class: How to Survive the Apocalypse with Nothing but a Box of Slim Jims.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
47 days after
The bike juddered between his legs, his knees absorbing the shock and jolt of every rock he rode over. And then the tires moved back onto asphalt, the ride went back to being smooth, and he sat once more on the bike seat. There were cars piled up here and there on the road, places where he had to ride into the rocks to get around them.
It was Sunday. No booze. No weed. No pills. It was his off day. He had a rotation.
It was unseasonably warm. Some last gasp of summer or something, Travis thought. The sun was a ball of fire in the sky, pushing its heat down onto the back of his neck. He felt like a paper tray of chicken nuggets resting under those infrared lamps in the high school cafeteria. He had sweat through his t-shirt, and the moist fabric clung to his back. If he’d known it would be this hot today, he wouldn’t have worn black.
Another group of cars cluttered the street, front ends bashed in and stuck together in some permanent four-way car-kiss. He veered off of the road again to get around them, droplets of sweat gliding down his back when the bumps shook them loose.
From what he and Sean could tell, the EMPs had knocked some of the newest models of cars out—the ones with the electronics and microchips and such—which, along with the general panic, led to a bunch of traffic jams and wrecks that day. He thought the burst of energy would render most every car useless like it did to computers, but apparently not. From what Sean had told him, and he’d apparently confirmed the validity, some of these could have the electronics reset merely by unplugging the battery for 30 seconds and plugging it back in. The ones from the late 90s and early 2000’s could be salvaged in many cases, along with anything older. Anything newer than that had fried chips and motherboards, though. They were all junk. Either way, nobody was going to come along and clear all of the streets for him, so Travis stuck to his trusty bicycle for now.
He rode on. No destination in mind. Just a ride. A task. A movement. A stretching of the legs. A rapid beating of the heart. Fresh air pumped into the lungs. Something to pass the time, to fill the time, to kill the time. Something to do to feel human in an empty world.
He pedaled harder and felt the warmth in his gut, the fire in his legs, the perspiration pouring from his chest and back. An idea popped into his mind, a fully formed thought that seemed to take shape in his head all at once as though broadcast from somewhere outside of himself. He thought maybe his life wasn’t so different in some weird way, some fundamental way. He pedaled hard with no place to go. Isn’t that what he did before? Isn’t that what he’d always done? He toiled without purpose. He spun in place, never went anywhere. He’d never found a passion, a sense of place, a guiding light. He just was.
He tried to remember his life, how it felt. He remembered the events, working at the factory assembling showerheads, the occasional trip to the bar, the occasional night out with a string of girls he never really got to know.
He remembered having his own apartment for a year when he was 19. It was a total dump, a studio with barely enough room to take a deep breath, but it was his, and that was pretty great. Total freedom. Total independence. When his dad had a stroke and couldn’t work, his parents asked him to move home to help out, though, so he did.
He remembered moving back in, toting boxes and boxes up the stairs to his old bedroom, hanging up the old posters to make it feel like his again. No more apartment, yeah, but no more bills. That much more money to throw around on narcotics and booze and gifts for those girls he never really got to know.
He remembered these things, yes, this sequence of events that comprised his life. He couldn’t really remember how it felt, though. He couldn’t remember what he thought about, what he desired, what he worked toward or dreamed of or hoped for. He could watch replays of scenes in his head like playing an old movie, but he couldn’t find his way back inside there, inside of his old self.
He breasted a hill and coasted down the other side. Steep as hell. He ran the back of his hand across his forehead as the bike picked up speed, felt the sogginess of his eyebrows. His hand dislodged some of the sweat so it drained down the sides of his face. He tasted the salt of it in the corners of his mouth.
He moved through a rich neighborhood and locked eyes on a house enclosed by a big iron gate that he’d always been curious about. The fence was comprised of thick iron bars and looked out of place, even in an upscale neighborhood like this. He’d always been especially intrigued that the gate in front of the driveway was controlled by a little number pad that could be used to unlock it. It was like something on TV. In high school, he’d witnessed the owner leaning out of the driver’s side window of his Lexus to punch in the code, watched the gate roll out of the way automatically, his mind blown.
He always thought the gate attracted attention more than anything else, though. He could easily climb the thing. And anybody looking at it
couldn’t help but wonder what the owner was trying to protect with this lavish setup. What was he hiding? What would possess him to spend thousands of dollars to have this thing installed? It was basically begging for burglary.
And there were no laws left now. Almost no people at all. His bike ride achieved a destination after all. He’d get a look inside the gate.
His bike overturned in the driveway, he put his hands on the iron bars. He let his eyes scan across the yard, skimming past the two-car garage and basketball hoop to gaze upon the yellow siding of the main building. In most respects, the house itself was nothing special. It looked the same as the other homes in this subdivision, none of which apparently necessed an elaborate gating system. It was a tri-level built in the 1970’s that he estimated to be about 1,800 square feet, assuming the basement was finished. It was possibly even modular, though he wasn’t certain about that. The one across the street looked like an awfully similar house in a different color, an eggplant or plum shade rather than the light yellow of this house.
He slid his hands off the vertical bars, hopped up to grab the horizontal bar and pulled himself up. His arms shook a little as they hefted his weight, but he didn’t find it too difficult. He rested his chest on the cross bar, adjusted his hands to inch his belly up onto the beam, then swung one leg up and over followed by the other, his body doing a 180 in the process. Faced the other way, his abdominals once again rested on the bar. He took a breath and eased himself to the ground.
He took a couple of deep breaths and brushed the dust off the front of his shirt. Yeah. That was too easy. So easy, in fact, that it was almost a disappointment. He felt a little twinge of doubt, some sense that maybe there was nothing interesting in the house after all, but it faded. There must be something here. There must be. Still, if they wanted to keep people out, Travis thought, they probably should have made the fence taller than six feet.
He walked to the house. The wind kicked up, and he realized how sweaty he was as the air swirled over the back of his t-shirt. All of the places where sweat adhered the fabric to his skin went cold, and the wet became bothersome. He shimmied his shoulder blades to try to get the soggy shirt to release from his back, but it didn’t work. He picked at it with his thumb and index finger, pinching and pulling the fabric away from his flesh. It snapped back right away, of course, but he thought maybe it felt a little better afterward, at least.
His feet trod over the asphalt, which gave off a considerable amount of heat. He didn’t realize how much until he stepped onto the grass and felt the cool there. It was a big relief, a sudden freedom from a smothering force he was only vaguely aware of in the first place. It was strange, though, to wade through this knee high grass. It suddenly didn’t feel like he was really outside of someone’s house. Looking upon the waving stalks gone to seed from a distance was one thing. He’d gotten used to that. Walking through the tall stuff, feeling the cool of it brush against his calves, was another. He’d push-mowed the lawn at home for something to do when he was drunk, but all of the other yards were well overgrown now. He guessed they would be from now on.
He padded over to the big front window, cupped his hands around his eyes to try to see inside. Dirt smudged the glass, though, and the glare from the sun was pretty bad. He couldn’t see much, just sun lit spots on white walls and the vague shape of a rounded doorway leading into the next room. He couldn’t even see these things exactly, just some hazy sense of them.
He took a step back and looked up and down the house again. The front door was a few feet to his right. He would try it, and he’d circle around back to try whatever doors were back there, too, but he figured there was a pretty good chance he’d need to break a window to actually get inside.
He moved to the front door, turned the knob. Locked. Shocking. He crossed a bed of gravel, turned the corner and trudged through the tall grass once more. It seemed itchy now. He couldn’t help but imagine ticks protruding from the tops of the plant life, disgusting little limbs extended, waiting for something with a beating heart to come along.
The back door popped open as soon as he turned the knob. He wasn’t expecting it and did a stutter step, almost falling into the damn place. He stood up straight, letting go of the knob. The screen door pressed against his back, though he wasn’t sure if it was consoling him after the near mishap or trying to help push him down.
He stepped into the house, removing his arm from the screen door to let it close. It took a second for his eyes to adjust to the shaded interior, so the first thing he noticed was that the air felt different, somehow drier on his skin and in his throat as he breathed. He stood in a little back porch area, a four-foot square section of linoleum flooring covered with shoes and boots in various sizes. The basement steps descended in front of him, and the doorway to his left led into the kitchen.
He took the step up and passed the fridge to round the corner. His skin crawled right away as he crossed the threshold into the actual house. He squinted. It looked like a normal kitchen, a nice one even, but some part of him was certain that something was wrong. He stopped, eyes gliding over shiny black countertops, the pile of mail and magazines on the snack bar, the open jar of dry roasted peanuts next to that, as though someone would walk back into the room any minute to continue snacking.
A whiff of something like death hit his nostrils soon as he moved past the snack bar into the living room, but a muted version of it, something much smaller than the odor of the dead boy in the grocery store, he thought. He couldn’t quite be sure what to make of it.
White leather furniture filled the living room. Travis might have found that amusing if he wasn’t so nervous. Diagonal bars of sunlight shined through the window pane, making meaningless patterns on the wood floor.
He pressed on, some determination welling in him to see what wonders and horrors this place must hold. He didn’t know why this felt necessary, but it did. All part of him wanted was to run right back the way he came and never look at this house again, but all he could do was put one foot in front of the other, advancing whether he liked it or not.
The living room contained nothing of interest, and the same held true for the den or whatever this family might have called the room with the books and the recliner. The bedroom downstairs was similarly empty of intrigue as was the bathroom. That left the upstairs.
Unlike the wood floors stained dark throughout the downstairs, cream carpet covered the steps. Plush. His foot sank down into it and the wood beneath squeaked as he took the first step. He mounted the steps slowly, listened to his heart bang away in his chest. He no longer was sure if he was looking for some rich person’s well-protected treasure or the rotten bodies of a dead family. Maybe it was both at once.
The third step from the top moaned as his weight settled on it, a throaty bark of a sound like a walrus begging for fish at Sea World. His hair pricked up again, and he paused, hand clutching the banister. For the first time he considered that someone living might still be here.
Or something.
He stood there for a long time, three steps from the top, his head swiveling back and forth, straining to listen for any tiny noise.
Nothing. Nothing but the sound of his beating heart.
He climbed the final stairs, feeling somehow vulnerable, almost naked, as he released his grip on the banister and moved into the open space of the hall at the top of the steps. His palms tingled. His chest spasmed breath in and out. His blood roared.
There were four doors up here, two to the left, one to the right, and one straight ahead. All of them were closed but the one at the end of the hall which was opened a crack. He figured the one to the right must be the master bedroom. He may as well start there.
His feet plodded in that direction, the carpet inching up to grip the soles of his shoes with each step before releasing them with some reluctance.
The smell hit as soon as the door squeaked out of the frame, a musty version of the roadkill smell at the grocery store. And then somethin
g charged at him, a dark blur, its movements familiar but not quite human.
He froze.
The dog hurled itself at him, tongue lolling out of its mouth. Its paws slapped at his knees as it pogoed straight up and down, its tail wagging with great gusto. It was part greyhound, he thought, based on the large rib cage to tiny waist ratio, a 20 pound blur of red fur that didn’t hold still long enough to really get a good look at, though from the glimpses of its face he got, it looked like it was smiling.
“Hey dog,” he said, brushing at its head.
It dropped its feet to the floor and pushed its head into his legs, smearing its eyes on his jeans. That’s when he realized how emaciated it was. Every rib was visible. It was starving. He patted the side of its barrel chest.
With the moment of crazy fear gone, his senses faded back in, and the smell hit again. Death.
He finally let his gaze dance across the rest of the room. Dead bodies sprawled in all directions. Two lay on the bed, adults, judging from the size of them, though they were badly decomposing and torn up pretty good. Their heads seemed to have congealed bloody smears instead of human faces. Two children folded over each other in a pile of rotting limbs on the floor. From his angle, he could see that the legs had been partially eaten.
He scowled as he thought this over. If they were stuck in a closed room, how did they...
He looked down at the dog, its front legs still hopping off of the ground over and over, sometimes going into alternating stomps like it was playing piano. He couldn’t see blood around its mouth, but he knew. He knew that it did what it had to do to live on for days after the people passed on. Claw marks gashed the door and the wood trim around it. It had tried to get out, too.
And then the smell was too much, and he was running away. Tears filled his eyes as he hurried outside. Not tears of sadness. Involuntary tears in response to the noxious fumes. He leaned over the tall grass, dry heaving a few times. He stayed in that hunched over position for a long time as the nausea faded. At some point he realized the dog was next to him, its tail wagging like mad.