by McBain, Tim
Dead on the inside. Maybe he wasn’t much of a human anymore, inside or out.
No lightning lit the sky here, but he felt like he did when he walked through the dead cities in that recurring black dream. When he wondered what fire burned inside of the animals still walking the Earth. When he wondered why we clashed against one another, clawing and maiming and killing each other for eternity. When he wondered why this violence aroused us, entertained us. When he wondered how anyone could look up into the stars and find a meaning to any of this.
Lorraine
South of Sulphur Springs, Texas
2 days before
The road opened up before them again, a path she could stare down. The trees grew sparser here, reduced to clusters among barren fields and the occasional trailer park. All of the grass looked half dead. Beige everywhere.
Maybe it was the lack of captivating scenery, maybe it was something else, but she found she preferred to stare down the empty road, to look on the place where the asphalt disappeared into a shimmer on the horizon. With the land so flat and the traffic so non-existent, it seemed like she could see a long, long way. She had no idea what the actual distance might be, but it felt like miles.
Her eyes flicked toward the driver’s seat. Ray rolled his neck from shoulder to shoulder, one hand gripping the bottom of the wheel. The tension seemed to have drained from his shoulders, and she was glad for that. Typically driving around in a stolen car would have kicked up new anxieties, but Ray assured her that the police were too busy with other matters. She believed him.
The man had surprised her. He’d done much to ensure their survival already, and he’d shown a level of vulnerability along the way that she hadn’t anticipated. He proved to be less of a lizard person than she thought. More like a good dog. She was happy to see him relieved.
And she could understand the feeling. It felt good to be hurtling forward again, to feel the momentum of the car carry them on at top speed, to hear the tires thrum against the asphalt. It felt like home. A new home.
She stared down at that twinkling spot in the distance and let her mind go blank aside from that image. It seemed a comfort for a while.
And then it occurred to her that this was as far as she could see into her future, this visible stretch of road they rocketed down. Houston would be gone. They couldn’t go backward. Just forward down an empty road. Anything could happen after they passed through that glimmer down there.
“Where do you think we’ll go?” she said.
The sound of her voice seemed to break some silent spell that had fallen over the car, shaking them from some half-dream state that had settled upon each of them.
Ray grunted.
“Don’t know,” he said. “Away from here is all.”
“Shouldn’t we make plans?”
“Maybe. I mean, we should get some sleep at some point. I was hoping to get farther on from Dallas before we did that.”
He scratched his stubbled chin against his knuckles, his voice trailing away as he finished his thought.
“Don’t know how far is far enough.”
He fished a hand into the paper bag between them, a crinkling noise erupting as he dug around, and then he pulled a Twinkie free, using his teeth to help rip the cellophane package open with one hand. He leaned forward and spit the plastic flap onto the floor, which was already cluttered with other people’s balled up fast food wrappers.
Twinkies. That’s what she got when she let him do the shopping at the gas station while she filled the tank. Two boxes of Twinkies, a variety of colas, a plastic jar of peanuts and all of the bottled water he could carry. Most of it got packed in ice in a stryofoam cooler, both of which he also bought. At least they had enough cold water for a couple of days.
He unsheathed the Twinkie, licking his lips as he slid the rounded tip out of the sleeve. After a beat he stuck the yellow tube in his mouth. Something about all of this looked equal parts gluttonous and homoerotic.
She looked away, gazing out the window at the endless fields of dead grass. It crisped in the sun like chow mein noodles. A picture formed in her head of setting foot on it, hearing the crunch of each distinct blade as her heel and toe descended. She remembered reading something about a drought up this way. Apparently, it hadn’t been as bad as you moved toward the coast.
Something about that image, the dead grass as they moved away from their homes, didn’t bode so well for their journey, she thought.
Teddy
Moundsville, West Virginia
76 days after
Smoke filled the room now, an opaque cloud that hung almost motionless above him, just faintly drifting in most of the room, only really roiling over the landing where the fire raged. The younger zombie lay still in the midst of the flames, her body and clothing now colorless, black, a crisped husk shriveling into the ash of the bottom steps. She no longer groaned, holding silent and still.
The older zombie wandered into his field of vision, wobbling to his right. Her face was blackened now like burnt chicken skin, her features erased into a matte black finish, but the flames on her had died down to almost nothing, glowing red patches of clothing, tiny little flickers around the edges. Her mouth still produced noises, but it sounded tattered and small. Raspy. Perhaps her vocal cords had gotten fried somewhere in there.
Teddy knew what to do now, but he didn’t know how.
He thought about taking off his shirt, using it to protect his hands as he grabbed the older zombie. Then he pictured the t-shirt melting, the dripping fiery fabric sinking into his skin, searing all the way to the bone and melding with the flesh there in his fingers, his palms. It made him shudder.
He’d have to bare hand it. It was going to hurt.
He juked around a fiery mud puddle and rushed the wobbling creature, hands latching on each of its upper arms, fingers sinking just a bit into that burned outer layer, and he flung the thing down like a nose tackle dispatching a running back in the backfield. She toppled over, landing in a heap on the landing atop the other zombie.
It wasn’t until the moment after he released her that he felt the scream of the sting in his hands. He didn’t look. He didn’t have time, but he pictured the heels of his hands and the tips of his fingers and that webbed spot between the thumb and palm all blistered up, bubbled sacs of skin full of yellow fluid.
He ran then, planting one foot and then the other into the back of the freshly fallen zombie, feet landing right between the shoulder blades and pushing off. From there he launched himself up the stairs, jumping clear of the fire and scrabbling up the steps on hands and knees.
He didn’t feel safe until he passed through the doorway and belly flopped on the linoleum in the kitchen. His forehead sank to the floor and rested there, the cool of it comforting him. That was close. Too close.
He knew he couldn’t relax long, that there was still a good chance the fire from the steps would get to the joists and floorboards above them and the whole place would go. With the way the lighter fluid cans continued to give off whooshing fireballs every few seconds, he thought it likely. This place would be a total loss. Still, he had the opportunity to rest for the moment, so he did.
After a time, he lifted his head and looked down the steps to see the older zombie still squirming there, arms scrabbling in flame and ash, unable to get a grip on anything. It slowed, and soon it would stop. Even still, he wished he could keep it.
Baghead
Rural Arkansas
9 years, 127 days after
Delfino squatted by the Delta 88, a handkerchief pressed to the wound in his deltoid. The shotgun lay across his lap. He stood when Baghead stepped out of the woods, gathering up the gun and pinning it under his good arm.
“Jesus,” he said. “Are you OK?”
Baghead nodded.
“You?”
“Well, I got shot, so that blows.”
Baghead puffed a laugh from his nostrils.
“Just a graze, Bags. That fuck didn’t
have the balls to do any real damage. I heard the sound of your gun. Three shots. You kill ‘im?”
Baghead nodded again.
“Damn, dude. I didn’t take you for the psycho type, just marching right out there to do something like that.”
They just stood for a moment. Not talking. Not making eye contact.
“Is she OK?”
“She’s fine. She ate all of the jerky. Kind of acted like she thought she’d be in trouble for it. Figured we’d eat if- when you got back.”
Baghead nodded again. He opened the door to the back seat.
“You hungry?” he said to the girl.
“Well, yeah,” she said.
Delfino wound around the back of the car to get to digging in the cooler on the opposite side.
“Shoot. Father’s going to have to send a legit assassin if he wants to take out the Baghead,” he said. “I guess he’s got four more cracks at it, eh?”
Teddy
Moundsville, West Virginia
77 days after
He lay in bed, his old bed, staring up into the darkness, knowing the bare light bulb was up there along with the joists and the wires snaking around them. He fumbled a hand into the black beside him, finding the curve of the top of the two liter and bringing it to his lips. Sweet nectar.
Warm Mountain Dew didn’t kill the pain that clawed inside of him, though. He felt small and weak like when the kids called him names in school. Humiliated. Defeated.
He’d watched the house go from across the street, the flicker of the fire raging in the windows, and the roof finally collapsing. It was fast once the fire made that transition from the basement steps to the floorboards above. Even still he could feel the heat on his face like a sunburn. He pictured what he might look like on the bed, his cheeks approaching the red shade of a lobster.
His plan had failed. He couldn’t keep them. He couldn’t even burn them in his own home, in his kingdom, his domain. What hope did that leave him going forward? A life without a plan quickly becomes meaningless. He’d heard that somewhere as a kid and always remembered it. Now he had none. No plan at all. Nothing to work toward, to look forward to.
His thoughts jerked back and forth, ideas that circled back on themselves, never resolving, like when one remembers song lyrics incorrectly and gets stuck in a loop without end.
First of all, why couldn’t he kill them and keep them at the same time? It’s all he wanted. Dumb that it didn’t work that way.
He drank again, the citric sweetness exploding on his palate, the acid tingling on his tongue and the inside of his cheeks.
Maybe it didn’t matter about the zombies, though. They just weren’t that fun. They weren’t what he really wanted. Even burning them every day, hearing those ghastly sounds they made, would bring him no satisfaction in the long run, wouldn’t soothe the restlessness inside of him.
When he was honest with himself, he wanted a girl. A real girl. To touch. But he knew that the way he wanted to touch girls was wrong. It was bad. It was worse, even, than throwing the cats and dogs in the back of the truck. You couldn’t watch videos of it on TV or on the computer. You couldn’t talk about it at school.
He guzzled more Mountain Dew, spilling a little on his chin.
Why did everything have to be so confusing? Just like the difference between cats and dogs and meat. It made no sense when you really thought about it. Made no sense at all.
His eyebrows wrinkled then. He sat up, hand resting on the curve of the two liter again, but he didn’t lift it. He walked himself through the thought once more and smiled.
Teddy thought he understood. When it was an animal, people cared about it. But after that, after it was dead, it was meat. Nobody cared about meat. And that made it OK to eat and everything.
It would be wrong to touch a girl the way he wanted when she was a girl. But it wouldn’t be wrong when she was meat. It’d be no different than hacking up those zombies.
That was all there was to it. He would find a girl. A real girl. He could make her meat, and after that, he could touch her however he wanted.
He lay back and closed his eyes. He tried to stop smiling, but he couldn’t.
Mitch
Bethel Park, Pennsylvania
41 days before
The sunlight made it so he could only keep his eyes open for a few seconds at a time. It wasn’t particularly bright out, he thought, the sky retaining a bit of an overcast from the rain, but after all the time closed up in the shed, his eyes couldn’t take it. He fought it, forced them open, held them as long as he could, the soft flesh all around them quivering, but after a fraction of a second, the eyeballs rolled back, and the lids wove his eyelashes back together.
A vision contrasting white vinyl siding against green grass snapped shut to blackness over and over, but he pressed forward. He knew the way well enough.
Half blind and stumbling, he kicked through the grass, wetness clinging to his shoes. The yard gave under his feet, squishing like a plush carpet, much softer than the concrete slab he’d grown used to, and the open air all around brushed its cool against his cheeks, the sky above full of it, stretching out forever.
A tingle came over him as he mounted the steps of the back porch. It started when his fingers wrapped around the metal rail, like a spark, an electrical current, passing from the wrought iron into his hand and traveling up his arm, up his neck, behind his face and through his head until every follicle on his scalp pricked up. Even with all that was going wrong, his life disintegrating all around him, he thought it felt goddamn amazing to be alive, to inhale, to feel the air rush into his lungs, pulling his chest taut, to feel the blood thrumming all through him, to feel this crazy tingle bristle across the top of his head for no good reason.
He stopped short of the back door, and the tension in his shoulders released just a little. God, he wanted to push through this door, grab a beer out of the fridge and plop down in his recliner to watch some TV. There was probably a baseball game on. He could heat up some Hot Pockets or something between innings.
But no. No more.
He opened the door and advanced into the kitchen. He stopped in the middle of the room, blinking a few times, letting the feeling of being home wash over him one last time, trying to savor it. He walked to the sink, let the water run over his fingers until it was nice and cold and then filled his jar, that ascending pitch ringing out as the water level rose. All of these tiny details, all of these experiences that filled his life, they’d all be gone so soon, and it was hard to fathom.
He drank, a single droplet of water spilling out of the corner of his mouth and running down his chin. The rest rolled through his mouth and down his throat, cooling him all the way down.
He heard video games in the next room, and he knew that the power had come back on. Damn. The desire to watch TV, to gaze upon that flicker of images, was like an itch behind his eyeballs. Un-scratchable.
He tipped his head back to down the last of the water, mopping the back of his wrist over his lips. When he returned his head to its normal upright position, a dizziness came over him, a weakness in his neck that wanted to let his chin sink all the way to his sternum.
He fought it, tried to keep his head up, tried to keep his eyes open, his vision steady. He felt like a captain fighting to right a listing boat at sea.
And then things went black. Full black. Flipped off like a switch.
His consciousness faded in, and he lay face down on the tile floor in the kitchen. His head hurt like hell and swirls swam along the edges of his vision. He lifted his head, which took considerable effort, and blinked his eyes hard a few times, tried to clear his vision, but everything still flickered and blurred around him.
This was it. This was the end.
Christ, he was lucky to have not already turned. He didn’t know how much time had passed while he was out, but he heard baseball on TV in the next room instead of video games now.
He pushed himself up on hands and knees, prying
the gun from his belt, and he crawled toward the basement door. Not fast, but the best he could muster. Things went gray again right away, and he stopped, and he took deep breaths. He just needed to make it to the basement steps. Not all the way down. Just to the other side of that door. That was all.
Color blushed back into things, and he crawled again, hands shuffling forward and legs dragging along behind. He put his head down and pressed forward, no longer even looking where he was going.
He heard a beer commercial on TV in the next room. A zany one about a guy who has built his entire house out of cans of Bud Light, much to his wife’s chagrin. It reminded him to drink responsibly, and then the top of his head hit wood.
The door. He’d made it.
He reached up for knob and pulled it open, falling over on his side to get out of its path. Now he slid forward on his belly, his crawl almost more of a slither as he eased himself down a couple of steps. A change came over him as he crossed that threshold, a relief that he could die apart from them, if only separated by this door, and he found new strength in his arms.
He pushed himself up and turned back, reaching out, fingers gripping the bottom of basement door and swinging it his way. More relief as the door closed and the latch clicked, leaving him in the dark. Breath heaved in and out of him, and he settled back, his head and the top half of his back now resting against the door.
The gun quivered in his hand, and his arm shook pretty bad as he lifted it.
No bullshit now. Just do it.
He brought the gun to his temple and pulled the trigger.