by McBain, Tim
“Seems like such a waste, though.”
“I know,” Erin said, then stooped to pick up her lot of the bags. “Oh well.”
The bags swished and rustled with every step. The handles dug into the fleshy parts of Erin’s fingers and arms, threatening to cut off the circulation. She had a bag in each hand and another strung over each arm. She lowered her arms so that the bags slid down from the crook in her elbows and landed in the middle of her forearm. A deep purple line circled her arm where the bag had rested.
It was over a mile back to the house, and they’d made it about half way when Izzy stopped. Erin kept going a few paces, then turned back to see why she was dawdling. Erin flexed her fingers, trying to keep them from going numb.
Izzy’s chin was tucked to her chest, and Erin could see her eyes moving back and forth.
“What is it?”
Izzy lifted her head.
“Do you hear that?”
She told herself Izzy was probably just talking about something harmless. A bird or a grasshopper. But her heart knew the truth and started pounding a little faster. It was never something harmless.
“What?”
“Listen.”
Erin held her breath and waited.
And then she heard it, too. It was far off (the farther the better) but it was unmistakably the hum of an engine. Car, truck, or motorcycle, she couldn’t tell. Not that it mattered. Engines meant people, and people were to be avoided at all costs.
“Shit,” Erin said. “Run!”
To their left, the road shoulder dropped into a rocky creek. To their right, the wooded land rose steeply. There was really only one choice.
She veered into the tangle of grass, chicory, and Queen Anne’s lace at the side of the road, heading for the woods. Dust kicked into the air as she tore across the ditch.
It was an uphill climb through the overgrowth. Good for a hiding spot. Pain in the ass for climbing with four heavy grocery bags. But the panic lit a fire under her, and she almost forgot about the bags as she scrambled up the hill. She heard Izzy’s voice behind her, but there was no time to stop and chat. They had to move.
When she reached the top of the ridge, she dropped over the other side, just to be sure she was really out of sight. She sat, red-faced and huffing, assuming Izzy was right behind her. It was three breaths before she looked back. Izzy was still at the bottom of the hill, trying to rescue the cans and jars and boxes that had burst from one of her bags. The torn remnants of the bag hung from her wrist, flapping in the wind like a flag.
“Izzy, hurry!”
The engine sound was closer now. Erin disentangled herself from her own bags and scurried down the hill.
“Just leave them!”
She half-ran, half-slid down the incline, taking the one good bag from Izzy and pushing her toward the top. Back in her hiding spot, Erin let her head fall forward to rest on her knees.
She couldn’t believe she’d just left Izzy behind like that.
“I didn’t mean to drop the bag,” Izzy said. “It got caught on a branch and then the side ripped open.”
“I’m not mad at you…” Erin rubbed at the spot between her eyes, the way her mom used to do when she was stressed out. “But the next time I tell you to run, don’t stop for anything.”
Izzy started to say something, but Erin held up a hand. “I think it’s getting farther away.”
They waited another half a minute to confirm that the sound was fading away into the distance.
“It’s gone,” Izzy said.
They trudged back down the hill, sidestepping like mountain goats to avoid sliding down the incline.
Erin stooped to collect the cans and boxes that had exploded out of Izzy’s bag, distributing the goods between the remaining bags before continuing on their way.
Every few minutes, she paused to listen, to make sure there were no new sounds approaching. She couldn’t stop imagining what would have happened if they’d come this way. What if they’d seen the food spilled on the side of the road like that? Decided to search the woods. She and Izzy had no way to defend themselves.
And if they had to run, then what? She had zero survival skills. She’d never started a fire. Never hunted. The closest she’d come to gardening was watering a houseplant.
She was barely fit to take care of herself. How the hell could she hope to keep both of them alive in this awful, new world?
There was something else bothering her, too. Something her dad used to say.
He said that you often found out who someone really was by how they responded in a crisis. Maybe Erin was starting to find out who she really was.
At the first sign of danger, she had left the kid behind.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
42 days before
The car weaved its way across town. Mitch watched the boys in the rearview mirror, their faces blank, eyes watching the world flicker by through the windows in the back seat, one screen for each of them. He selected a path that would avoid all of the busy streets, figuring them the most likely to burst into violence. They passed mostly working class residential areas, houses all packed together, paint chipping, porches sagging, a couple of brick school buildings the color of sand.
“Dad, what’s ring around the collar?” Matt asked.
Mitch’s eyes flicked to the mirror, looked into his son’s. The kid’s forehead wrinkled as he tried to puzzle it out.
“Huh? What do you mean?” Mitch said.
“Jimmy Douglas told a joke today,” Matt said. “It said ‘ring around the collar’ in it.”
“Let’s hear it,” Mitch said.
“OK,” the boy said. He cleared his throat. “There are five things wrong with the penis. It has a hole in its head. It has a ring around the collar. It hangs out with a couple of nuts. It sleeps next to an asshole. And when it gets excited, it throws up in a plastic bag.”
Everything in the car went quiet.
“Yikes,” Kevin said, his gaze not breaking from the world outside the window.
“So I don’t get it,” Matt said. “What does ‘ring around the collar’ mean?”
Mitch scratched his chin.
“Well... I don’t know, man,” he said. “Look, let me try to call your grandparents again.”
He pressed the button and the phone dialed. He brought it to his ear. No one answered, but at least it got him out of that conversation. Kevin locked eyes with him in the mirror after he hung up the phone. Mitch shook his head, and his son went back to looking out the window.
Silence settled on the car, everyone staring at their screen, their faces blank. At a stoplight Mitch watched the heavyset girl in the lane next to him sing along with her stereo, closing her eyes and tipping her head back to belt out the high notes.
He wondered what Janice would say about this, what her sarcastic comment would be, and then he remembered that she would never comment on anything again. No more jokes. No more complaints. Ever. She was gone. It didn’t quite seem all the way real yet, but in that second, it was real enough to make his breath catch in his throat. He hunched ever so slightly as if reeling from a body blow. God, it was so weird. And he’d never even have time to get used to it, to heal even the slightest bit. He would just suffer for another 30 some hours, and then get pummeled down to his own death.
He swallowed, and his throat felt tight and dry and strange. Was that a sign of the sickness? Probably not. He thought about peeling back that sleeve, finally getting a look at the bite on his wrist, but he couldn’t do it. Not now. Not in front of the kids.
He gazed off to the right to peek through the clearings at the intersections. Smoke plumed in the sky in the distance, a dark cloud twirling over the big offices and apartment buildings downtown. If the city was still burning... He wasn’t the only one experiencing the death of a loved one today, though knowing this didn’t really make it any better.
He thought about how people react to death on TV. Their emoti
ons all came spilling out. Their faces twisted and contorted. They wore their grief in the set of the shoulders, the tilt of their chin, the water pouring from their eyes. And yet, in some sense, it was a safe version of grief, a shallow version that washed right off when you were ready to be done with it. The musical cue swelled. The somber melody soared above the grief montage, tugging at the heart strings for as long as the focus groups said it felt right, and when the montage ended, and the tears were all jerked off, the sad music faded out, and the audience could be done being sad and move onto the next adventure and watch more commercials and buy more fries and Coke.
It wasn’t like that, though. Not in real life. The weight of it settled on him in fits and starts, a crushing heaviness on his neck and shoulders and chest. And in real life, the feelings of it came and went in waves. Anger, grief, nostalgia, denial. They swirled around like the ice and booze and cola when he mixed up a whiskey and Coke with a butter knife in the kitchen. And perhaps that was a fitting metaphor as he was mostly drunk on denial for now, he thought. He didn’t have full access to his feelings, just periodic flashes of the torment down in there. Mostly his mind did some sleight of hand to keep him numb to it. When he looked in the mirror his face was blank.
He had no time for grief anyway, though, no time to feel sorry for himself.
They drove the last eight blocks in silence, pulling into the driveway at Janice’s parents’ house. The bungalow sat on a hill, so the driveway was steep as hell. He parked just shy of the garage door and put the emergency brake on.
With the car off, he craned his neck to look up at the house. It was small, but a nice place, cream siding with brick red shutters. They’d spent a small fortune on the matching red aluminum roof on top two years ago. Looking closer, he noted the lack of light in the windows. The grass looked a bit shaggy as well, and Janice’s dad was a lawn freak. One of those nuts that loved mowing and sometimes did it twice a week.
His eyes drifted to the glove box, and he rubbed his thumb against his fingers. He wanted to take one of the guns with them, but he didn’t want the boys to know he was scared. He’d have to tell them some of this at some point, but not yet.
Not yet.
He opened the door and stepped out, and the kids followed suit. The ache and stiffness he felt in his lower back and the arches of his feet reminded him that he hadn’t really slept last night, that aside from a nap of sorts, he’d busied himself shuffling around and buying guns and killing zombies instead.
Sweat greased his palms as they walked up the two sets of concrete steps to the front door. He could feel his pulse banging away in his neck. The bushes running around the porch smelled like pine, and he always felt like he could smell the humidity in the air here, some dank odor that lingered around this porch.
His arm rose, his hand balling into a fist that rapped at the door. He stepped back, eyes watching the peephole for signs of darkness, his shoulders squirming a little as though his jacket suddenly felt too tight. The boys looked disinterested, fidgeting, staring off. He thought about how he should pretend he left something in the car and go grab one of the guns, but he didn’t do it. He pounded at the door again. No flicker of darkness came to the peep hole. No sounds or signs of movement.
Nothing. Nothing. Nothing.
Fuck. What was he supposed to do? Their only living grandparents were nowhere to be found. Who the hell was he going to leave these kids with? Where were they going to go?
Fingertips dabbed at the place where his nose and forehead met, smearing at the sweat now pooling there. The skin of his face felt clammy and slicked with grease. The words “all greased up with no place to go” popped into his head.
He didn’t know what to do, so he knocked one more time and thought it over. Could he leave them with some of his and Janice’s friends? Faces flashed in his head. Most of them were divorced couples he hadn’t seen in a long while. At some point, he and Janice settled into their own routine without a lot of outside socializing, and that only became more pronounced after they moved. No one sprung to mind. No one within hundreds of miles.
He felt an itch like a tick crawling on his wrist and went to scratch it. And as his fingernails unsheathed a bit of his forearm, he saw the swirls of black lines crisscrossing out from the bite like some evil roadmap running beneath his flesh. He angled himself away from the kids to shield them from seeing and gazed upon it for a moment. It almost seemed to pulse, but he couldn’t tell if it was a trick of the eye since he stood in the shade under the awning.
The black tendrils were no trick. Of that he was certain. He traced one snaking black path with the tip of his index finger.
At least he knew for sure now.
“Dad,” Kevin said.
He looked up, pulled his sleeve back over his wrist. In some part of his mind he was aware that this wasn’t the first time his son had addressed him just now. He’d zoned out and not heard.
“No one is here,” Kevin said. “Let’s go.”
The boy’s shoulders already faced the car, ready to move on.
“Wait,” Mitch said.
He riffled his fingers through the back of his hair. They needed the key to the cabin. One way or the other, they weren’t leaving here without it.
Travis
Hillsboro, Michigan
54 days after
He’d pissed the bed the night after his parents were killed. He woke up wet and cold sometime before dawn, the smell of stale urine like a cloud hanging in the air in his room. It followed him when he walked out into the hall to get clean sheets. It followed him as he built a fire to heat water to clean himself. Even after the sponge bath, it clung to his skin. He could smell the acidity to it, a bright odor, an astringent citrus note that made it all the grosser somehow. It made him picture a glass of lemonade with those scummy piss bubbles floating on top.
He sat in it all afternoon, piss and shame wafting into his face, stinging his eyes, before he finally heated another pot of water and washed again. The smell seemed mostly gone after that, though he didn’t feel much better about it.
He smoked cigarettes and wondered if that was why cowards were called yellow. Because they pissed themselves of fright every night. Later, he drank enough to forget everything, and the rotation was born.
When he pissed the bed this time, some weeks later, he didn’t care. Maybe that was the good thing about staying fucked up through the night and into the next day. He was still drunk enough to be confused, to find the circular piss stain on the sheets and blanket vaguely amusing.
It’s a good feeling, he thought, to wet the bed and not care. I bet the great poets have never attempted to describe that one.
A smile curled his lip, and he rolled over and went back to sleep.
Some hours later, he crawled out of bed. The piss was dry now. He couldn’t smell it full on, though he got whiffs now and then. Was his urine less smelly this time for some reason, or was he that used to it from sleeping in it for so long?
The dog lifted its head to look at him from its blanket pile in the corner.
“Hey Hannibal,” he said and she wagged her tail. He named her while drunk, only later realizing the dog wasn’t a cannibal exactly. It ate its human family, though. Close enough.
He walked downstairs and out into the backyard to urinate. Apparently it’d been long enough for his bladder to reload. Steam coiled off of the ground where his urine slapped and wet the dirt. The cold had returned to vanquish that final gasp of summer a couple of days ago. Just standing out here long enough to pee made his shoulders quiver for a second with the chills. The dog galloped out to the back of the yard to pee along the wood fence.
When they went back inside, Travis caught his reflection in the mirror. It wasn’t his face anymore. It was some guy with a broken nose, crusted blood draining down from the nostrils to surround his mouth in red. He brought a finger to his flattened snout, and it was sore.
In the kitchen, he opened the cupboard and fished an off-brand c
ereal bar out of the box. He ate and tried to think back on the prior evening, but nothing came to him beyond mixing up rum and lime juice and sitting on the porch with Hannibal. After about three strong drinks, he didn’t remember anything. Could he have fallen on his face? That’s supposed to be hard to do, though it’s certainly not impossible, he supposed, when you drink enough to black out. That must be it. He’d probably find a little pool of blood somewhere in the house. The scene of the accident.
He finished the cereal bar and grabbed another. His mind continuing to wander as he ate.
Maybe he didn’t fall. Maybe Sean decided it was high time to reestablish the social order of jocks ruling stoners and punched him in the face. That notion made him laugh. The idea of popularity and social order seemed funny all on its own with the town empty, the whole world empty so far as he knew. He thought about the two of them running for Mayor, putting those dumb signs in their yards and chuckled again.
Today was supposed to be a mellowed out day of smoking weed, but he felt like changing things up. Pills. It would be a pill day. Rotation be damned.
With heaven inside of him, he walked around town. It felt more like he was floating, though. His vision held so tranquil and steady, like a shot in a movie that pans and zooms in slow motion, a shot from within the clouds, rolling puffs of white billowing across the frame, everything hazed in a soft focus.
He wasn’t in the clouds, though. He walked on the railroad tracks behind a row of convenience stores and gas stations. Brick buildings squatted to his right, and beiged-out husks of tall grass stood to his left, rasping against each other in the wind. The whole place smelled like soot somehow. It reminded him of how his hands smelled when he got home from the factory, all blackened from handling metal parts all day, some of the dust worming through his gloves to coat his palms and fingers.
This section of the railroad was where he used to collect bottles when he was a kid. With a refund value of ten cents each, he could often gather enough to get a candy bar or play games at the arcade. And the search for bottles itself was its own adventure, he thought, at least when you’re as poor as his family was. Maybe some kind of nostalgia brought him here now. He wasn’t sure.