When I experimented, I tried to be responsible about it. I felt I should try to experience life fully, and this was part of it. I know lots of people would judge my actions and look unfavorably on me for them. Everyone’s got a right to his or her opinion. I’ve made some choices that would probably qualify as controversial. They didn’t feel that way when I made them, though. I stand by my decisions.
Some things I tried were far more appealing than others. Alcohol tasted terrible, but the buzz it gave was pleasant enough. I once drank way too much, though, and woke up with a headache and nausea that didn’t quit for days. Why would anyone allow that to happen to herself regularly? I’d rather just have a touch of something to mellow me out and make sleep more likely to be friendly when I tuck myself into bed.
I took a small chug of vodka from a flask to help encourage sleep to settle in with me for the evening.
I slept after consuming that bit of vodka, but my sleep didn’t last long. I got up, appreciating the light of the moon and a bat who became my sidekick. He feasted in the moth-filled beam of my headlamp (necessary for navigating the rough terrain) as I walked on. The bat was pale and furry. I named him “Festus.” Festus was a pretty great companion, but near to sunup, he flew away.
I love nighttime. I love the darkness. I have an extra touch of photosensitivity that makes daylight a vexation.
I’ve always liked the woods at night. In the moonlight, everything takes on a silvery hue. In the moonlight, deer prance about under trees. In the moonlight, raccoons waddle roundly over gnarled roots. In the moonlight, I feel a bit of peace.
In the morning, I ran out of woods. It happened abruptly; the trail bent around a corner and dumped itself out onto the edge of a small town. In the time it took me to consider turning around and seeking the shelter of the trees again, people emerged in the road ahead of me. My long walk of solitary subsistence was at an end. A temporary one.
“I’m Saul.” A man stepped forward from the group with his arm outstretched. “Join us!”
I couldn’t understand why people wanted so desperately to band together. I’d heard folks talk about safety in numbers, but under the circumstances, the opposite was true. A group was far more likely to attract rotters than a lone person. This was before I understood what it was like to rely on someone, though.
I usually avoided houses, but Saul’s group didn’t, which disturbed me. They weren’t cautious about it. They underestimated the danger. Houses can give a false sense of security. The stench inside many homes was overpowering, indicating they were crawling with disease. It festered and bubbled, breeding in the thick Southern air. Also, other groups set traps for unsuspecting travelers, either to stop them from looting supplies or for more sinister reasons. I’d been with Saul’s group for only a day when one of their scout teams disappeared. We tracked them into town and found nothing but blood.
Saul was the first man who ever tried to rape me. It happened late at night, after my second day with his group. I’d agreed to stay on with them for a bit—not because I found them engaging, but because I was too fatigued to come up with a good excuse to run off.
Saul was only strong in the way a normal man is stronger than a normal woman. He held me against a tree and smashed his mouth to mine as he felt me up. Saul had eaten clam chowder for supper, and I could taste and smell it on him. I knew I’d never be able to stand that smell again.
It wasn’t hard to get away from him. I dropped straight down, out of his grasp. Away from his rough hands and his stubby fingers.
“Come on, baby!” he cried out petulantly, rubbing his crotch as I dashed away. I grabbed my things from the edge of the camp and broke free from them all.
In my brief time with Saul’s group, I noted that there were still women who bothered with makeup. The more the better, apparently. Their clinquant distortions always seemed silly to me. I remember making pathetic attempts at trying some lipstick the farmer’s wife had gotten me for Christmas.
“Isn’t that color pretty on you!” she gushed.
I looked in the mirror. A clown smiled garishly back at me. But I thanked the farmer’s wife and complimented her ability to choose colors. She had meant well.
This was true of most people, I figured. Every day we danced around each other, disparate notes that were part of a large orchestra’s cacophonous symphony. Superficial interactions—artificial, even—but meaning well. How many times had I nodded and smiled at folks, essentially strangers? It had gotten old long before I arrived at the camp which became home. Still, it helped things go smoothly.
I wasn’t very good at relations with people. Especially normal people. People who were somehow different from normal appealed to me so much more.
Then again, it seems like everyone has something they struggle with that has skewed their lives from the anticipated paths. Most people seem normal at first glance, but have more intriguing substance under the surface. It took me a long time to understand, but maybe there is no “normal” after all. Perhaps we try too hard to boil down the terms of an average life into a simple syrup. In any case, people who end up extra-far to the side of normal have always been easier for me to relate to. I could fake my way through most conversations, but it almost always felt like I was an actress performing in a sketch.
I’d gone into the thrift store with the farmer’s wife a few times. A greeter offered flyers for the store’s sales. He was in an electric wheelchair, his body contorted by disease or congenital defect. His speech was slow and deliberate, but I still had trouble making the words out. He’d patiently repeat them until I understood. These were words he had certainly practiced for hours to make comprehensible. “Have… a… nice… day,” I heard him rehearsing once, an aisle away. I rounded the corner, and he repeated the phrase while looking me in the eyes.
“You too,” I said cheerfully, feeling an impulse to hug him.
But I didn’t hug him. I didn’t like being touched. It had always been unpleasant. It reminded me of life before I stayed with the farmer and his wife.
Some places seem to breed monsters. Pockets of the world are filled with terrible people who do horrific things. I understand not all of the world is this way, but it was what I was dragged into as a young child, and it’s all I knew for the longest time. Also, after After arrived, it seemed the people best equipped to survive were the cruel ones. So a lot of people I’ve met haven’t had much in the way of decency, though most people are probably mostly good. I’d like to believe they are.
By the time I was old enough to be cognizant of the world around me, my stepfather essentially ruled the rural county in which we lived like his own private fiefdom. He was educated as a chemist or geneticist or something—during his frequent self-aggrandizing monologues, he’d boast of his own expertise in almost every scientific subject you could name, but I was never certain which bits were true. Above all, he was a sociopath. He could be charming, he could be vicious. And he could turn those on at any time, like he had a toggle switch for it. (He usually defaulted to vicious around me.)
No, wait. “Toggle switch” isn’t right, because there were definitely times when he was concurrently charming and vicious. It’s part of why his Programs were so popular. He was a singularly compelling ringmaster. He gripped the audience with a tightly-calibrated, pandering wit and flair that made them feel as though they were sharing in the highly-evolved pleasures of a libertine bon vivant rather than being sold the ugliest manifestations of one man’s fucked-up id.
His control of the locals went beyond simple charisma, however. My stepfather knew what he was doing by moving to this particular backwoods area, because clean water was a much-valued consumer product here. Pretreated city water was not a luxury that had reached the homes in this county. Hard, sulfuric water ran through most people’s taps, showers, and toilets, and although it wasn’t exactly unsafe to drink, the potent rotten-egg smell was certainly off-putting. Nearly every household and business purchased pure water from groceries or ve
nding machines rather than using their own wells. (I laugh to think of it now—most of those customers would kill for reliable access to their old, stinky water at this point!)
So my stepfather went into the water supply business, working the “buy local” angle hard. He willingly lost a ton of money on this particular venture, as he would simply buy bulk shipments of whatever spring water he could find relatively cheap, repackage it (my siblings and I were often used as free labor, pouring water from one container to another), and sell it at a loss, undercutting his competition and ensuring it sold well in the area. “Short-term loss for long-term gain,” he’d mutter proudly to himself.
The water was far from pure, though, which was the main part of his scheme. He’d spiked it with an odorless, tasteless chemical of his own design, which was completely undetectable by standard water analyses. It made the users fairly suggestible, which allowed a silver-tongued ghoul like my stepfather to effortlessly exploit them. It also bound to the Y chromosome, enhancing men’s sexual drives and perverting these drives with desires for a show of blood—something my stepfather provided in abundance. It made the user get off on the suffering of people who were helpless. My stepfather sold his water, men developed tastes for exceedingly unsavory activities, and then my stepfather controlled them by hosting his Programs, fulfilling their desires. It made him popular, and it made him rich, and it gave him power. There was no fighting back, there was no running away. Everything revolved around him. No one in the region dared cross him. No one in the region wanted to.
Almost no one. Officer Bissett was the exception.
But it wasn’t all bad, life at my stepfather’s. There were stretches of days when he left us alone. When he was too busy with his “God-appointed” projects to bother with us. And there was school, when I could go.
I loved school, soaking up the knowledge which kept my mind occupied when terrible things were happening to my body. Sometimes, after one of my stepfather’s Programs, I’d be stuck at home for a few days. Long enough for things to scab over. I had to learn to be very still, or the scabs would break open. A few times, early on, I’d returned from school with my dark shirts pasted to my back, the dried blood acting as glue. If I sat very still and straight at my desk, though, the scabs would hold. My teachers complimented me on my beautiful posture.
Once, a teacher patted me on the back and felt the scabs there. He didn’t say anything. That summer, months later, I saw him in the audience at one of the Programs.
I decided to nap, hidden in the tall grasses of a field. I dreamed I died and turned. I remember the sensations vividly. I died quickly, violently, from rotter bites, and then my body got back up. I saw the world through a red haze. I saw people who looked somehow familiar, and I tried to go to them, but they cried and shouted and ran away. I didn’t understand why, but I wasn’t bothered by that. I was so hungry, just hungry. I couldn’t really think. All I knew was “eat” and “friend.” It seemed like everyone was my friend and I was supposed to bite them. Nothing hurt. Nothing. And everything was okay.
It was one of the best dreams I’d ever had.
The late-night (or early-early-morning) sky was vast and gorgeous when I awoke. I watched the stars. I did something I’d never done before. I wished on a star, not actually believing for a second that anything my heart desired would come to me, not believing my dreams would come true. I wished on a small star, one I’d never be able to pick out of the Milky Way again. I liked that. This anonymous little star would hear my wish, and even if it granted the wish, I’d never know which one it was. It felt as if all the stars would be granting my wish.
“Send me someone…” my wish began. I didn’t know what to add to it. Someone who understood? Why did I want someone, anyway?
I shivered in the chilly night air, and my wish formed itself.
“Send me someone who will teach me how to live.”
When I said “live,” I didn’t mean “survive.” I meant something more along the lines of loving life, experiencing it in a way that felt special and meaningful. I wanted a purpose.
I sent the wish up to my little star, like a helium-filled balloon floating off. I imagined it traveling into space and drifting up, up to that distant star. Then I let go of the string, and I let go of wishing, and I forgot.
aylight returned and I continued my journey. The world’s surviving advertisements caught my eye and I pondered them as I strolled on. A diversion. Nature hadn’t reclaimed anything yet.
I remembered an old favorite: “7Up. No caffeine. Never had it, never will.” A few years after using that slogan, they’d introduced caffeinated 7Up. Thinking about it always made me smile.
Old ads are like exasperating friends. You’ve had time to pick apart their flawed logic. They no longer entice you. They can instead be comforting in their familiarity.
“Won’t last long!” a realty sign declared.
“It’s CERTIFIED!” yelled a billboard displaying a used refrigerator.
Meaningless drivel to distract. It had lost its power to motivate. It never had any real power, of course; just the power gullible folks had assigned to it. I thought of all the people who had been driven to buy things they had no need of. Of our common self-consciousness preyed upon by merchandisers and marketers.
People bought useless products and tried the items once or twice. They were disappointed. They tucked the junk away, in a medicine cabinet or the back of a closet. Hidden, the items fell apart or separated over a period of years. Some people had cleaned out, sent it away before After. Others still had it in their moldering homes. Its lifespan exceeded their own.
By afternoon, the weather had become H-O-T. Hot and humid. This was a bad thing. In the heat, rotters stank worse. In the humidity, they became a bit rehydrated. They got heavier, more substantial. And they got sticky. I told myself I shouldn’t look forward to the cooler winter months either, and that I’d eventually regret it—rotters actually stay mobile longer in the cold because they don’t decompose as quickly—but it was hard not to eagerly await anything that might squelch their stink.
I’d read books and seen movies about zombie apocalypses. No one had ever expected such a thing to really happen, though. The fictions weren’t terribly different from the reality. Rotters do eat flesh, but they don’t eat brains. Brains are too hard to get to. Rotters do walk funny. They come in various states of decomposition. Usually, bone is exposed from multiple sites on their bodies. They can infect through a bite, or through blood contact in a wound or mucous membrane (mouth, nose, eye). Rotters usually move slowly, but they are surprisingly strong and resilient, considering the deterioration of their flesh. They can clamp down and lock on a grip with more force than it looks like they could wield. The thought of being eaten alive by a group of them made my arms prickle and the hairs on the back of my neck stand on end.
I never encountered a non-human rotter. Granted, I hadn’t seen much beyond forest creatures. Perhaps there were rotter monkeys swinging their ways out of zoos while I marched on.
Back in the earlier days, soon after the zombies became part of reality, I studied some. Not the farmer. What happened with him occurred so quickly. In my travels, though, I’d chosen to capture one instead of killing him.
Killing it.
Here’s another thing to ponder: how can you kill something that’s already dead? Then again, there are refried beans and twice-baked potatoes. I guess one could re-kill a body, if the body had been reanimated.
Or maybe they hadn’t actually died. Maybe they went through some sort of metamorphosis, like caterpillars becoming butterflies. Exceptionally fucked-up butterflies.
I caught a zombie and tied it to a tree. The zombie wasn’t perturbed by this. Just kept snap-snapping its jaws when my body got close. It didn’t seem to be suffering and it didn’t seem to feel pain. The stench was terrific. How could it not be, with its entire body rotting and its bowels loosed in its clothes and urine dried on its pants? That’s when I started ref
erring to them as rotters.
I considered the existence of a rotter. They seemed solely motivated by food, like they were always, always hungry. They’d try to eat even if their bellies were bulging full. They’d try to eat even if their stomachs were gone. Must be part of some malfunction in their brains.
Some other rotters entered my experimental setting. They weren’t at all interested in the rotter I had bound up. They weren’t interested in each other. They didn’t seem to be actively trying to make more rotters, either. That was incidental. Happenstance. When a regular person got bitten and escaped, they’d usually begin to change within a few minutes, though it could take hours. Generally, they’d break into fever, then their bodies would erupt with pus-filled blisters. Their skin would crack and peel, their eyes would change color.
Turning into a rotter looked like it should feel quite painful, but it apparently wasn’t, according to interviews with people who’d been bitten and were in the process of changing. Something in the virus (if that’s what it was) either deadened the nerve pain, severed the nerves’ pathways to the brain, or caused the brain to not register the nerves’ messages. Even without understanding the mechanism, I envied the result of it. I couldn’t remember a time without pain.
At night, rotters glowed a faint blue—something to do with the bacteria growing on them. Postmortem luminescence was something I appreciated about the rotters. It was good to be able to see them in the darkness.
I now had five rotters strapped to trees. As nothing seemed to hurt them, I didn’t feel too guilty. It felt important to penetrate the mystery of them. I needed to know more.
I took a moment to silently thank and mourn the people these used to be. Then I made some cuts. The rotters didn’t cry out, didn’t get agitated. They didn’t seem to notice, even.
Survial Kit Series (Book 1): Survival Kit's Apocalypse Page 2