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For W-Bot.
“Gotta copyright my heart so no one can steal it
And broadcast it out so everyone can feel it.”
Jason Molin, “Jesus Rode a Bike”
he box was old, lightweight pine. It reminded me of my stepfather’s coop, but without the locks. I’d scrunched my body quickly into it, and the rough wood was repaying me with splinters.
I actually like small spaces; they usually help me feel calmer. I crawl into closets or corners and feel safer, secure. This wasn’t that kind of time, though. I was hiding.
I wasn’t hiding from rotters. I could handle them. Trying to hide from rotters in a box would be idiotic, anyway. They’d just keep growing in number, waiting around, no matter how long it took, for a person to emerge. And then they’d start biting.
What I was hiding from was an ugly band of men I’d seen cutting their way through the forest. Dozens of them.
And they had hostages. Women, men, and children. Tied together, gagged. These people had been severely beaten. They were bruised and bleeding. Blood and yellow-white crust covered their bodies. The tears they’d cried had left streaks through the gory crud on their faces.
These men were far more dangerous to me than any rotter.
So I’d hidden away in the first available spot, knowing running from their path would attract attention and make me one of their captives.
They marched into the clearing of this old campsite, and some of them stopped to rest while the others moved on.
“Tog!” a man shouted. “Get your ass over here and bring me back my good lighter!”
He sat down on the box. I held still, slowing my breathing and trying not to notice how hot and stuffy the small crate had already become. I waited.
The man fumbled with a lighter for several seconds before getting it lit. He smoked a cigarette and spilled his drink. It dripped through the cracks onto my shoulder.
Finally he heaved himself up and continued down the trail with the others, mumbling and grumbling about Tog.
I waited some more. I could wait in here for days, if I had to. I’d done it before, since the dawn of the apocalypse. And Before.
As darkness settled, I crawled out. Then I began to jog in a direction away from those terrible men.
My very first memory is of my father. I’d wanted to hide then, too. He’d set a four-year-old me down to take a nap, pulling a small satin blanket over my tiny body. He was singing. It was a familiar song, one I’d already heard hundreds of times in my few years, and I’d mostly closed my eyes but could still see him. I was in shadows, and he couldn’t see I wasn’t sleeping. He stood in the doorway, finishing the song and preparing to sneak away.
My father heard a noise and looked down the hall.
The man who was to become my stepfather moved into the doorway. They talked briefly, quietly. I don’t know what they said. Then the man stabbed my father in the chest. Dad fell sideways into the room, and he landed next to my little racecar bed with a knife buried in his heart. I froze. The man took off a pair of leather gloves, bagged them, and put the bag in his coat pocket before striding away.
I looked into Dad’s deep brown eyes, and he stared back at me. His eyes were shining, shining. Then a different shining, and then the shine was gone.
After I’d traveled far enough away from the band of kidnappers that I figured there was no danger in taking a short break, I stopped at a clear, glassy pond. As I knelt down to wash my face, my reflection surprised me. My hair was clumped in random, filthy wads. Sweat had glued the box’s dust and dirt all over my face. Ringed by the dark purple clouds above, the person looking up at me from the water allowed a frightened expression to flit across her face for a split second. I plunged my hand square into her nose, breaking this ugly creature into dozens of fractured ripples. In an odd way, that was probably a truer reflection.
After detangling my hair and washing up, I rummaged through the front pocket of my backpack for a snack. I looked at my dead MP3 player resting beneath a bag of Gardetto’s garlic rye chips. I couldn’t bring myself to get rid of the device.
Music isn’t just entertainment for me. It’s an escape. It helps me drown out memories of the worst times. Before I went to the farmer’s, I’d only ever heard the music my stepfather listened to―shitty hard rock―and the occasional condescending Top 40 song someone at school might play for me. As a result, I’d never paid the entire medium any mind, considering it a background diversion at best. It was a provocation for unpleasant associations, usually. My first friend, Officer Bissett, had pushed me into singing for him a few times, but otherwise, my voice was only used for speaking in those days.
Officer Bissett. He was weird. He loved to listen to me sing. He’d been so kind to me, I was glad to be able to balance some of the debt I felt to him through the small favor of a song or two. He liked folk music best, and I’d learned a few songs specifically to please him, like “Birches” by Bill Morrissey and “Bridge over Troubled Water” by Simon and Garfunkel. They were nice enough, but I didn’t feel them the way he felt them, at the time. I didn’t allow myself to feel much of anything, and Officer Bissett tried to encourage me to learn how to. He thought music would help heal me, that it would expand my world. He was right. It just didn’t happen immediately.
I met a college-aged guy named Felix in town. He became my second friend. I’d been rummaging through fabric in a box at the thrift store, and I’d giggled at a hideous, colorful swatch of polyester I’d found. Its print made my eyes ache. The cloth was covered with pictures of a single jackalope, which were all identical except for their colors, Warhol-style.
“That’s so ugly it’s come back around to being cool,” said a guy who’d been pawing through used CDs nearby.
I looked up and smiled at him.
“I’m Felix,” he told me.
I put the bright, silly fabric into my shopping basket and shook his outstretched hand. The farmer’s wife (who I was shopping with) took forever, so I chatted with Felix while I waited for her. When it was time to leave, he asked if I wanted to hang out sometime. I didn’t. The farmer’s wife elbowed me, though, and I decided to appease her by exchanging numbers with him.
Felix showed me how to feel through good music. He was home for the summer, and had brought boxes and boxes of CDs back from college with him. (I can’t imagine how he lived with them all crammed into a teensy-tiny dorm room.) We’d been talking about something else over coffee, and I idly mentioned I simply didn’t care about music because my experience with it had been so lousy.
Felix gasped in a manner which was clearly supposed to be joking, but I think he meant it as well. The next time I saw him, he brought a CD for me to try out: The Sunset Tree by the Mountain Goats. The album consists of a series
of John Darnielle’s reminiscences of the physical and mental abuse he suffered at the hands of his awful stepfather. It touched a nerve in me for obvious reasons, and I was moved deeply by it. I felt like I was riding a roller coaster, able to finally see the vistas around me from a great height before my stomach plunged to my feet from the raw emotion on display. Music can do this? I thought, utterly stunned. I listened to it for days on end.
That album was my gateway drug, and my tastes expanded and became more musically gluttonous from there. Felix gave me total access to his vast record collection, and whenever I wasn’t doing chores or learning from the farmer, I took advantage of that. He had everything from country to metal, from jazz to rap to the flat-out bizarre, and I devoured all of it.
I was initially drawn to punk rock. Its aggression provided an excellent outlet for the anger and pain I felt. Over time, though, I gravitated more toward thoughtful, unhurried indie rock. The emotion of artists like Cat Power, Carissa’s Wierd, and Barbara Manning gave me strength, helping me to remember I wasn’t the only person who was hurting. Sometimes the melodies or the sounds themselves hit something deep inside me, but more often it was the lyrics which held me hostage.
I think Felix wanted more than a friendship with me, but I wasn’t ready for it and only allowed him to hug me once―at the end of his senior year. He moved away for a job almost immediately after he finished college, and before he left, he ripped all his albums onto a large hard drive and told me the vinyl and CDs were all mine. It was an enormously lovely present, and that’s when I let him put his arms around me. I didn’t like it.
He left, and we started sending each other letters once a week. Every correspondence from him was signed, “Love, Felix.” The best I could make myself respond with was, “Be well, Ally.” That was actually pretty good, all things considered.
I don’t know what happened to Felix. I never heard from him after After arrived. I still had my cell phone back then. It still worked, sporadically. He never called. I never tried to call him either. I chucked the phone when the battery died three days after leaving the farm.
The MP3 player held out slightly longer. Although I could no longer convince it to release any of the soul-cleansing songs trapped in its digital bowels, I still carefully guarded it. Over the years at the farmer’s, I’d loaded that device with a battalion of songs that spoke to me on a special, ineffable level. The thought that they were all imprisoned forever on that hard drive—the thought that we now lived in a world where the Delgados’ “The Drowning Years” or Nilsson’s “Think About Your Troubles” might never be heard again—was unacceptable to me. They would bloom again. I would find a way.
I was thinking of this when a rotter clamped onto my shoulder. I’d been so lost in my thoughts that I hadn’t even heard its approach. I whirled around and broke its grip, then backed away. It charged again. This time I was ready: I stabbed it through the eye. My knife had shattered the lens of the glasses the rotter still wore. Felix had worn similar hipster frames. I briefly had time to register this, and to think about whether rotters’ vision would continue to be improved if they wore glasses after being turned, before a huge cluster of them lunged from the woods around me.
I yanked my knife from the wannabe Felix rotter’s eye socket, and spun wildly, slicing at anything in my path. I had two objectives: not getting bitten, and getting away. The mass of rotters surrounded me. I kept slashing with my knife, unsure what to do next. I pulled out the farmer’s wife’s gun so I could stab with one hand and shoot with the other. Firing a gun was a last-last resort during a rotter attack, since the sound would just attract more of them, but I needed the short-term advantage it gave me. I blasted off some heads that were getting too close to my flesh for comfort. I kept turning around, keeping them from grabbing and latching on. Twice-dead bodies began to pile up in a mound around me, like sandbags around a foxhole. Soon this pile was too big—the rotters couldn’t, wouldn’t, climb over it. I stopped and took a breath. For the moment, I was safely out of the rotters’ reach. I took stock of the ones that were still animated. There had to be at least two hundred active rotters waiting to bite me, beyond the body-wall. I sat on the ground, surrounded. I ate a granola bar and drank some water, and rested briefly in my quiet little circle of death.
What I needed was a path. I could easily outrun the group, but I had to get past it first. I reloaded the gun and returned it to its holster. No need to waste my ammo. I did not look forward to the task I was about to undertake.
I scanned my mound of dead rotters, certain they’d yield valuable items if I could figure out how to use them. One of the rotters was wearing a heavy leather jacket. I removed the jacket from its body, feeling disgusted—and disgusting. It’s not so easy to undress a dead body, especially one in an advanced stage of putrescence. Feeling skeeved out, I pulled the jacket on right over my backpack. The jacket was way too big and too long. I looked around again and found a treasure: there was a machete sticking out from a rotter’s torso. Someone had stabbed the thing through its stomach? Guess they didn’t know any better. I hauled the machete out and wiped it on the dead undead’s shirt.
Make your own damn path, I told myself. I’d better get going soon, or more rotters would join the party. I zipped the jacket and fussed with its collar until it covered my neck. Time for action. With a knife in one hand and the machete in the other, I climbed onto the mound of decomposing bodies, then leapt from them. Rotters were on me before I even landed. I lashed out at those in my path and fought to keep my forward momentum. Rotters fell around me and I stepped through them. It felt like I’d never find the end of the path I was making… but at least it was keeping rotters from staggering up behind me. Ahead, they were all around, trying to bite. They chomped down on the leather jacket I wore, which made them spit in disgust. The leather held, and it saved me from dozens of bites. I finally made it to the edge of the cluster, feeling relieved. As soon as I reached clear ground, I shed the jacket and broke into a run. I didn’t stop running for at least an hour.
ears ago, the farmer and his wife had accepted me onto their property as if I’d simply been a transient farmhand. They taught me about growing crops. They taught me how to care for their animals. Most importantly, they gave me education in the form of vivid experiences and adventures. My life felt rich, being with them. Rich, comparatively. It’s all relative. My life was still missing something, but it was so much better than what had come before.
Money was scarce when I stayed with them, but they kept me clothed and fed, and occasionally provided me with a little spending cash. I usually spent the money on concerts, after Felix came along.
I’d been living with the farmer and his wife for a long time before the end came. Once they were gone from my world, I felt a little lost.
It seemed dumb after I’d become proficient at killing rotters, but I still abhorred killing bugs. One evening, a palmetto bug walked across my belly. I jumped up and it fell to the ground. I reflexively smashed it with a tree branch. Not hard enough. It lay on its back, slowly and repetitively moving one leg, looking like it was waving, and a wave of guilt crashed over me. I finished it off and started thinking about the farmer. The farmer was the first rotter I killed. I still have horrible dreams about it.
After killing the farmer-as-rotter, I went to check on his wife. She lay on their old bed. She’d chosen the short ending, believing her husband’s spirit was already waiting for her elsewhere. She’d been bitten, but hadn’t begun to change before she put a bullet through her brain. The body was already starting to stink.
Next to the farmer’s wife was a small scrap of paper. One word: “BELONG.” She wanted me to do something I’d never done, and something I didn’t think I could do. I tucked the note into my backpack, but it got lost somewhere along the way.
I picked up the gun and tucked it in its holster (the farmer’s wife had left it on the bed for me), pulling the leather strap low around my waist and securing its belt and leg str
aps as tight as they could go. I’d have to punch some extra holes in the leather later. A box of bullets sat next to the farmer’s wife’s body, too. I shoved them into my backpack. Her pain meds were on the nightstand. I added them to the bag without looking over the labels. I’d sort them later. I had to get out of the area before more of those things barged in from town.
The farmer and his wife were kind and generous, and I would miss them terribly, but I’d always felt beholden to them. Now I was truly free. I didn’t know what to do with my freedom and felt as though it would be wise to take my time deciding. I didn’t know what I would find. Hell, I didn’t know what I was looking for. I don’t know why I didn’t simply use the farmer’s wife’s gun on myself. Guess I wanted to see what might come next. I’m always curious about that.
I left the farmer’s house, and I watched the sun rise. First, a barely perceptible light glowed in the darkness. Then the light grew, and the sky became lavender-blue-pink. A huge, wobbly, rose-orange orb climbed up from the land, turning the clouds golden-pink before they settled back to white. The sky was beautiful. I wanted to wrap a golden cloud around me and melt into it. Spurred by the feeling that something was out there, waiting for me somewhere, I set my feet to moving again.
I generally stayed off the roads, opting for random forays through thickly-wooded areas. This made avoiding people easier. I didn’t want to deal with them, though I knew it was inevitable.
I considered playing with the pain pills the first night after leaving the farm, but didn’t bother to. Better save them in case I needed them later. I’d taken the time to check the medications and consolidate them into one bottle, though. They were mainly different formulations of the same narcotics.
I’d gotten drunk before experimenting with a few other things back in the safety of the farmer’s property. The farmer had been pretty liberal. He even grew cannabis for personal use. I liked that he allowed himself the pleasure. As long as a person’s not hurting anyone, I figure what he does is his own business.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 1