“Della and me, well, we felt terrible sleeping in the guest house,” Lance explained in his suppressed Texas twang. “It never felt right to stay there. Your folks were more welcoming than anyone else on the damn planet would be. But every day I knew they didn’t want us in that house. Truth was, it wasn’t our place - it was yours. We got to hear about you and the kids over every meal. I’ll admit, I started to doubt that you’d show. Almost two weeks is a helluva long time with the shit going on out there. To them, though, it didn’t matter one bit. They knew you’d get here no matter what.”
They had worked together to make the two properties safer as a whole. The trashcan wall was Lance’s idea.
“I tried to make it a hassle for anyone to get past. I filled the cans with gravel from the creeks. I wasn’t going to have a gust of wind knock them over. Or, if some random dead asshole bumped into it then he’d keep on movin’ instead of pushing past,” he boasted.
“Why the chain, though?” I complained. “Those things were heavy enough as it was. Did you have to chain them together too?”
“It wasn’t meant to hold them up, dummy. Each trashcan had a good sixty pounds of gravel and mud in it. The chain was supposed to make it noisy. If someone tries to get in here I’ll be damned if they do it without me knowing.” His boisterous confidence hadn’t changed one bit in the two weeks we’d been apart.
“Taking bolt cutters to the middle of the line was a dick move, man,” Lance said dryly.
“Shooting me in the fucking shoulder was a dick move!”
He roared with laughter. “You’re never going to let me live that down, are you?”
“How would you feel if I shot you?” I pointed accusingly, forgetting the ache in my arm that my mom had stitched with a sewing needle.
“Fine, you’ve made your point. Honestly, I didn’t recognize you,” Lance teased. “That scruff on your face popped up fast enough that you’ll be a Sasquatch by Christmas. You also lost a lot of weight in a short time. Where did the fat ass that I abandoned my post with disappear to?”
Our laughter shifted towards melancholy. For me, and I assumed for Lance, the last part of his joke unearthed memories of our first sin on a dreadfully long list of wrongs. I thought about what became of the people we abandoned at police headquarters often, always wondering if any of them had made it out alive or if the sealed building became the tomb we feared it would be. If not for the draw the location, and the people inside, had for the city’s newly infected populace, I highly doubt we could have made it out. So many of the undead were pulled towards the place that we saw a fraction of what otherwise would have roamed the campus grounds.
We sipped from our mugs in silence for several minutes.
Lance asked, “How are the kids doing with the adjustment?”
“They are stronger than I am, I think. The two of them act like they are blissfully engaged in a never-ending vacation.” I chuckled. “It’s good to see them happy. Spending all this time with Grandma and Grandpa is like a reward for making it through. Both of them were incredible through it all. Stuck in an attic, stuck in the back of the mail truck, always needing to be quiet… I don’t know that I would have been able to get through it when I was a kid.”
“Hell, I don’t know that I could have done it as an adult!” he joked. “How are they handling all of this? I mean, the stuff they had to see and all.”
I’d wondered the same thing as each day passed. Maddox and Calise were brilliant kids that had been exposed to genuine nightmares. I tried not to bring anything specific up with them while making it clear that Sarah and I were available if they wanted to talk about it. It was a treacherous line to walk when trying to figure out what was going through their little heads.
“Hard to say. Having room to run around and places to get away from each other has to help. Still, it’s hard to say. I tried to keep a lot of it from them. That’s easier said than done when everywhere you look has some evidence of what’s happened.”
Lance set his empty mug down then walked over to the desk to return the flask. He looked at me with a serious expression I’d seen him use in the past on people in handcuffs. “Go easy on yourself, okay?”
“I’m good. Really.”
“Cut the bullshit, Nathan. You’re not good and you have every right to not be. If you are good, then you’re more fucked up and twisted then the monsters out there. Anything that happened, anything we’ve done, anything we will do, does not matter because of who we did it for. All that matters is the simple fact that we’re still living and so are the people we care about. So I know that you’re beating yourself to death in that big head of yours, but it’s gotta stop at some point.”
A streak down my cheek chilled as a tear dropped. I nodded. After tipping back the remaining contents of my mug I hoisted myself back to my feet. “I should start hiking back to the farm. They’ll be getting lunch ready soon. You joining us?”
He shook his head. “I’ll see you at dinner. We need to start planning supply runs. The old man had a few area map books so I’m going to plot out some possible routes.”
I set my empty mug on the desk next to Lance’s. Beneath the remnants of a newspaper I saw the spine of two composition notebooks. I slid them from the pile to discover that each was entirely blank. “There was a pile of receipts too that I took for fire starters. I think he was starting a new bookkeeping system or something. His name was Jon. Saw it on the envelope of an unopened bill.”
When the pandemic hit, it essentially took a snapshot of life before the collapse. What wasn’t destroyed or ruined was frozen in time at the moment of abandonment. This desk, like many other places we’d inevitably encounter, remained a memorial to what we lost.
“Think Jon would mind if I take these notebooks?” I asked.
We both laughed from the sarcastic absurdity of the question.
“Grab that nice pen of his while you’re at it. I’m not planning on finishing his bookkeeping anytime soon.”
Lance saw me out the back door. We shook hands then I walked up the street in the direction of the farm. I zipped my coat and pulled a newly knitted hat that my mom crafted after our arrival from my pocket to combat the chilly air. The Kukri tapped against my side with every step. Looking at it there in the scabbard was like smiling at an old friend.
My smile faded, and weakness returned to my body. Regardless how much sleep I was getting I still felt exhausted. I neared one the ponds that connected the creeks on the property. This one was closer to Lance and Della’s house with the far edge reaching the outer farm fence. A scattering of big rocks gathered towards the shore. Knowing I still had time before I was due to check in with the family, I decided to sit on the largest rock to give myself a moment to regain my composure.
Patterns danced along the surface of the pond with the brisk wintry breeze. Again I found myself in awe of how quiet it was. I don’t know what triggered it but suddenly tears streamed from my eyes. The guard that held them back throughout the day vanished. I sat next to the edge of the pond weeping uncontrollably.
Crimes, sins, regret - whatever they’d become in this broken existence, bombarded my thoughts. I saw all the mistakes. I recalled every face of the people I couldn’t— or wouldn’t— help in the moments I might have made a difference. I looked into the eyes of the two men I murdered. Phil’s showed me betrayal; Ian’s showed me painful acceptance. Every tragically minute detail of devastation that I refused to process while witnessing them replayed in my mind.
The Reaper virus washed over our world like a festering tidal wave sparing nothing from its wake. What remained of humanity was a disseminated blend of our best and our very worst. All that I did during events that unfolded after the dead began to walk had certainly condemned me. I remained a broken man with barely a soul masquerading as a cornerstone for what remained of the reasons that my heart still beat. For the unknown time that I’d be counted as one of the survivors, I would hold myself accountable for what I’d done. If
I didn’t, then I feared I’d fully descend the darkness as one of the monsters.
I wiped the tears from my eyes.
I needed an outlet. Breakdowns like this were an impairment that had to be avoided.
Then I remembered the composition books. In the past I was told that it was important to account for your mistakes; examining past errors could allow you to make amends and move past them. Recalling what brought me there was like deciding to slowly remove a bandage instead of ripping it off. However, since suppressing the memories only allowed them to infect my sanity I had to do something different.
If anyone were to somehow read my story they would certainly judge me for what I’d done. Perhaps judgment was precisely what I needed, what I deserved. Regardless, my actions were dictated by who I am inside and what I fought for. With the three people I love most as the stakes, death itself could not stand in my way.
There, alone beside the pond in the chilly air, I touched the pen to the page and closed my eyes. I tried to imagine the disgruntled man I was. My thoughts took me back to a night that felt like several lifetimes ago. On that night I was a sleepy civil servant getting irritated from the emergency calls that kept interrupting my reading and researching about a virus making people sick on the other side of the planet.
The End.
About the Author
Nathan Barnes lives in Richmond, Virginia with his two kids and lovely wife. Whenever he can he is exploring creative hobbies of writing, photography and some graphic design. Nathan is a long time reptile enthusiast that enjoys dabbling in the many outlets of doomsday preparation. His first novel, THE REAPER VIRUS, uses many real life people and places set against an apocalyptic turn of events. He also wrote the darkly humorous novella, MY FRIEND ASMODEUS, and has stories featured in several horror anthologies.
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