(Book 2)What Remains

by Barnes, Nathan

  As the years passed I cleared out portions of the jungle in order to make additional usable areas. There was an area dubbed ‘Mommy Cove’ which sported a hammock, bench, and a drink stand. Jutting out of the back of Mommy Cove was a play area complete with a clubhouse, rope swing, and a re-purposed slide. There were two small gaps in the fencing: one caused by a hurricane a few years ago and another in the corner of the yard where a transformer box was installed by the power company. These spots were small enough that I doubted even half of a man could have squeezed through them. A less scrutinizing patrol was possible in the jungle thanks to its isolation.

  The tension broke when Sarah flashed a smile back at Maddox. She sheathed her sword and followed a worn path back to the grass. With the morning patrol completed, Maddox gleefully ran back to the stepladder lowered down on the opposite side of a railing that had supported my weight during the grueling fifteen-minute check of the yard. He easily climbed atop the deck and set the machete on a folding table so cautiously you would think it was a Fabergé egg. Then he startled me by speaking aloud.

  “It’s alright, Daddy. The fence is good and so are we.” His volume wasn’t quite at a normal level but it was still above a whisper.

  His confidence did nothing to ease my worry. “Should we be talking out here, buddy?”

  A smirk developed on Maddox’s face before I even finished the question. “Relax, Daddy. I swear it’s all right. Calise has even played out here before. As long as we keep our voices really quiet and don’t talk near the edge of the fence then the zombies won’t hear us.” My scowl at the Z-word stopped his smirking. “What else should we call them?” He pointed at the boarded bay window where Calise was inside bouncing up and down at the sudden inclusion. “Calise can’t hear us so I should be able to tell the truth. I know what they are, Daddy. I’ve watched your scary movies before while you were napping so I know all about them. I’m eight years old and I can handle this!”

  “Monkey, I’m thirty and I can hardly handle it. You have no idea the things I had to see and do just to be having this conversation with you.” Not long before this I wouldn’t have had the strength to argue. It was a good sign that recovery was upon me. Sarah approached the deck so I decided to cut this off. “We’ll talk about this later. For now you are not to use that word… got it?”

  He nodded acceptance through a quelled tantrum. Sarah made it up the ladder and gave me a kiss. “Everything looks good.” Her low voice had the soothing undertones of a jazz singer. Utilizing her supernatural wife/mother powers, she automatically sensed the fresh tension between her two boys. “Are things okay up here?” Under these circumstances she’s had to trust Maddox with so much responsibility. He has every right to see himself as being older than his limited years; having the world end without your father immediately present would age anyone by a decade.

  “We’re good, babe. Maddox was just filling me in on the rules for being out of the house.” His postured relaxed slightly upon hearing my response. I pointed at the machete. “Should he have that?”

  Before Sarah could respond Maddox replied, “No guns inside the fence. We save those for emergencies only.”

  Perhaps I underestimated how adult my son sees himself to be if the possession of a machete is so normal that he thought I was referring to him being under-armed. Fortunately, Sarah knew what I meant. “You heard the rule, Daddy - we stay as quiet as possible. Don’t worry, because the only time a weapon has been used here was when we pulled you out of the cul-de-sac.”

  Things were different then; one would think that I shouldn’t need any more convincing of that after having to cut down over a dozen things that were living people when the month began. I let out a sigh and conceded, “Sounds like a pretty smart rule. Good call, Mommy.”

  “Thanks, but he’s the brains here,” she said while making her way back over the rail. Maddox stood there with brimming with the confidence of a soldier that had just had the Medal of Honor placed around his neck.

  I rubbed his head. “Grab your weapon and go help Mommy get into the house. When you’re done come back and help me off this deck. Also remember - before you even think about picking on me for acting so old, I did kill a lot of that-word-we-don’t-say-around-your-sister to feel this way.” His grin reached from ear to ear. Within seconds he was in the grass moving the ladder for Sarah to get back in the house then quickly returned to give me the same assistance.

  1200 hours:

  The kids had grown restless inside the attic. Their ability to control the average noise level gradually faded away. Given the circumstances, we couldn’t blame them one bit for it; an eight year old and a five year old had no business being essentially caged up. Their outside time had been brief due to the elevated reaper activity in the area that was only there courtesy of my arrival. Sarah and I knew that we couldn’t keep it up much longer before a tantrum erupted and subsequently rang the dinner bell for every ghoul in the neighborhood.

  Calise was excited to help her mother get Thanksgiving dinner ready. Regardless of how minimal our feast was to be, she could not wait to help for the first time. Her smiling enthusiasm was as infectious as the evil that put us in this position to begin with. Daddy’s little girl had reminded me about the sweet things in life since I first set eyes on her. I would have slaughtered the entire infected neighborhood if it meant maintaining my little girl’s innocence. The beauty about being so young was that everything was significant; she deserved to feel excited.

  Maddox was born wise beyond his years, always in a hurry to do everything: talking, walking, learning and comprehending. That morning reminded me how powerless I was to prevent him from seeing the world for what it had become. When not picking on his sister, he was lost in a book about the settlement of Jamestown. Last year he went on a field trip there and bought a book about colonial survival in the gift shop. He kept telling me that he wanted to dig a deep hole in the back yard to store our food in because it would act like a natural refrigerator for the more perishable items in our pantry. The boy’s initiative was ambitious and I was damn proud of him for it. I had no idea if his subterranean refrigerator would work, but it was worth a try since the preparation of the Thanksgiving meal would mark the end of many short term preserves.

  Before the walk of the fence line that morning I peeked through various peepholes in the front barricades to assess the situation in the cul-de-sac. Two infected were within earshot of the house. The closest one shuffled around at a snail’s pace in the driveway. It lumbered into our only remaining car, which was fully packed for the trek to my parents’ farm. My heart stopped, remembering the wretched creature that bumped into a car when I first reached Hull Street and alerted the horde. Thankfully it didn’t recreate the scenario because our tiny four-door hatchback would need its window smashed for an alarm to go off.

  The second zombie was hardly a threat. It lay face down on the ascending hill from the ditch Sarah had pulled me through when I barreled through the undead wall closing off our circle. Somewhere along the line this poor bastard had lost both arms. I tried to remember if I used my Kukri in the final flight but the whole experience was still a little foggy. At some point it fell face down and became the Halloween equivalent of an overturned turtle. At first I didn’t think it was anything more than one of the re-killed corpses that peppered the pavement; then it flopped around grinding its face against the ground with hungry frustration.

  I observed them as long as I could before Maddox started asking to take a look himself. He obeyed my order to stay away from the front windows but insisted that I join them outside for the check of the yard.

  After a few hours of uneventful meandering I decided to get a look out of the improvised window I’d used late the previous night. The image of a ghostly figure running its hand along my neighbor’s fence was still burned into my brain. I shuddered and reached for the box to close the window. Then a gunshot echoed from somewhere far out of view. Nothing was visible from the limited vantage p
oint so I listened intently to try and learn whatever I could from the sound that had become less common since I arrived home. A string of shots followed irregularly. The excited reaction from the cul-de-sac’s walking dead was louder than the gunfire. Their barks and moans then became drowned out but something even more unusual: the trebled rip of an engine. The ridiculous mental imagine of some poor sap trying to be an action star with a revolver and a motorcycle came to mind.

  Both kids stood behind me like deer in the headlights. Sarah rushed back up the stairs from preparing lunch. They all looked to me for answers that I didn’t have.

  “I didn’t see anything,” I told them. “Whatever it was can’t be a bad thing. It means that someone else is putting up a good fight against the monsters. Also it will probably draw some of them away from our circle.”

  It was a sad reality; we were benefiting from another person’s last stand. Sarah and the kids reluctantly returned to their fleeting distractions. Soon after we’d eat and they wouldn’t think about it, at least, the kids wouldn’t. Sarah and I would need to talk seriously soon about what we were going to do.

  Less than an hour later everyone was finishing up with an early lunch. I told Sarah to get the kids ready to play outside. The kids reacted like I’d just let a swear word slip out during Christmas blessing. Sarah looked confused until she saw me moving towards the peepholes to take another survey of the front.

  “Guys listen to me,” I said with as much confidence as I could muster then stood with a stern look until the impatient wiggling ceased. “I’m going to take a look at the front again. If none of the monsters are very close then you both can go play in the back. Stick to the quiet rule. I don’t care how much fun you are having or what one of you did to the other – you stay quiet. When you’re in the grass you don’t talk – got it?”

  “But, Daddy, it really is okay…” Maddox tried to counter but I snapped my fingers and cut him off.

  “I don’t care. I’m telling you right now that there is no talking while you’re in the grass. It’s too close to the fence and if one of them is close by it could hear you then get interested. When one gets interested it has a way of making more of them interested. Mommy, do you think the yards around us are empty?”

  Sarah nodded.

  “Good. So long as the yards on the other side of the fence don’t have anything in them, you both can talk quietly back in the jungle. Play on the slide, swing on the swing, do anything you want as long as it’s quiet. The distance from the front along with the cushioning from the trees and fence should keep the noise out of their range.” I took a breath and looked them both over to make sure I still had an audience. “I’m counting on you guys to be good. We’re going to be leaving for Grandma and Grandpa’s in a couple days.”

  Their eyes grew almost as wide as their smiles when they heard we’d be leaving there soon. Sarah looked at me with deep concern. I tried not to focus on her reaction because the kids needed to see every bit of the false confidence I tried to exude. In the time it took me to blink I felt a little hand grip mine. Following the pink sleeve to the darling face of my daughter she squeezed my pointer and middle fingers tightly. “You can count on us, Daddy. We’ll be quiet so the monsters don’t hear us, I promise.”

  Damn, she could pull my heart strings like the strings of a marionette puppet.

  “I know, Princess,” I said with a smile. “Go put your sneakers on. If you need any help see if Monkey can give you a hand.”

  Sarah helped both the kids prepare for their longest period of time outside since the world had collapsed. I eased my way down the creaky drop-down ladder to conduct my final check of the front yard before letting them out. That ladder had always been a source of irritation. The two-part folding design had awkwardly sized metal bits that loved to fall off after a few trips regardless of how many times I’d screwed the damn things back on. When I walked down I felt like an elephant descending the rickety ladder to a tree house constructed without parental supervision.

  As I returned to the ground floor of my ranch house this time I noticed that the typical pig-like squeals of warped wood were not insulting me for every extra pound. After surveying the front yard I discreetly went to the middle bathroom to weigh myself on our digital scale. I stood there for a moment dumbfounded by the simple equation presented in glowing blue numbers. It had been a long time since I’d lost enough weight to warrant the use of math. Assuming the scale was correct, I was at least forty pounds less of a man than I was when the dead stayed that way.

  Chapter 6 – False Security

  1315 hours:

  Our bed felt like heaven. Sleeping a night on padding in the attic made me appreciate our memory foam mattress like it was the first time. I was physically feeling a thousand times better than the last time I rested there. However, mentally I was wracked with a plague of worry. Aside from trying to convince myself that the improvement I felt in my body wasn’t just the result of medication, the worry about where my family would be a week from then overcame the constant flashes of what I’d gone through to get to that point.

  Maddox insisted on going out the hidden entrance in our window first so he could help Calise from the outside. I felt so proud of the little man he had become. With me being essentially out of the picture one way or another in the time since the collapse he had eagerly taken over the reins more than any eight year old should have to. Once both kids were clear, Sarah propped the plywood swing panel open so we could hear them then sat on a folding chair next to the bed so that she could see outside. The kids weren’t in sight because the jungle was on the far opposite corner of the yard but we were able to hear them in the event the noise rule was violated for any reason.

  There was an unusual moment of calm in the house without them inside it. I was about to speak but Sarah beat me to it.

  “Nathan…” this was the first time I’d heard any wavering in her confident facade. “What are we supposed to do?” Her shoulders sunk down in the chair like her guard had been let down for the first time in weeks.

  The handle of my Kukri, newly reinstated to its rightful place on my belt, poked my side as I shifted towards her. I gently took hold of the scabbard, feeling the battle scarred gouges that marred the leather. With a light tug the blade slid from its sheath and was placed on the nightstand with a thud. Sarah tensed for a moment upon seeing the flash of dirty steel then I think she understood I was simply uncomfortable relaxing with it jabbing me.

  I slipped down from the bed behind her and started massaging her shoulders. They were wrought with tension at first but quickly conceded to a tender touch. The sensation of her soft, curly hair dancing over my fingertips was like a riding a gust of fresh air through billows of smoke. “We’ll leave in two days. Today we enjoy ourselves as much as possible. Tomorrow we prepare to leave this place behind us.” As the words left my mouth we both realized that soon the home in which we’d started our family would be nothing more than a memory.

  Light beamed through the propped open window. Outside, a parting in the clouds allowed sunlight, something I’d nearly forgotten about, to bathe the ruined land for a brief moment. Daylight glimmered off of my wife’s cheek in tears that escaped her tired eyes.

  “You barely made it here from downtown… how are we supposed to make it across Hell with two kids? What if we somehow make it and your parents aren’t there? We could be headed to someplace even worse than here.”

  I hated how right she was - the odds were not in our favor. We had already defied the odds with our survival to this point; she and I both knew that, and there was no need to acknowledge it. Potential plans of action had run through my mind for weeks. I knew from the very beginning that somehow we would need to make it to my parents’ farm. Originally, that end goal seemed like it would be as simple as loading up the car and driving there. After the time I spent on out in the virally ravaged world I knew all too well that it wouldn’t be as easy as embarking on a family road trip.

  “B
ut I did make it,” I said. “I also learned a lot in the process.”

  She scoffed at me. “Only you could turn the apocalypse into a fucking learning experience.”

  “Joke about it if you want, baby. I’m not going to patronize you by saying any of that ‘everything happens for a reason’ bullshit. But I did learn; I learned a lot about what we’re fighting and what the world has become. We have a chance to get somewhere, anywhere that is safer than here.” I moved from behind her seat to crouch beside her. It had been a while since I’d bent in such a way so my joints fought the motion with grinding disapproval.

  “How can you be so sure?” Another tear attempted to flee her fatigued face only to be thwarted halfway by a light brush of my hand.

  “Because I also learned that I’d happily butcher anything that gets in the way of me and my family.”

  She immediately smiled. If there was ever evidence that this woman was my soul mate, smiling in response to my maniacal devotion definitely qualified. Her response came in the form of a gentle kiss. She started to speak when a shriek from outside broke the fragile silence. We both leaped to our feet. Sheer panic blanketed Sarah’s face as she immediately knew what I knew – the scream came from Calise.

  All sensation in my body instantly became numb; every action impetuously flowed from instinct, magnified tenfold by the shriek my precious daughter let out from beyond the safety of our walls. I went into an automated call to arms that hadn't existed in me before the world fell. If I'd heard such a sound before the pandemic my reaction would have been simple irritation at the assumption that the kids were fighting. Now, I've been so justified in paranoia that I didn’t even register the Kukri as it entered my grip. When I awkwardly landed after the jump through the trap door the ground felt no different than the cushioning mattress I had just left. My muscles obeyed all commands without their typical protest. The mere thought of something attacking my children quelled all of the crippling dread I should have felt from a headfast rush into danger. A second later my tunneled vision locked onto the pink of Calise’s puffy coat.