It’s dark outside, but I don’t have much time to lose. I walk out to the truck and pop the hood, deciding that it’s as good of a time as any to have a look. The moon shines down through the dingy sky and I can’t see a damn thing by its feeble light. All I can make out are hoses, chunks of metal, and the engine block. I need more light to do this. I have no doubt that I can, but I can’t do it this late in the night. I walk around to the back of the truck, suddenly very happy that this thing is still here and hasn’t been looted. Rummaging through the crate of MREs, I grab one and decide that it’s probably important not to end up dead because of blood loss and starvation. I end up eating meatballs and marinara and I remember how fantastic it is to eat warm, delicious food. I miss the days of just going down the street to a bistro or a diner to get a big, juicy burger. Damn, I miss cheeseburgers. I miss a lot of things. Fucking bacon. What I wouldn’t give.
I sit in the cab of the truck, remembering all the wonderful things that I’ll never see again. Outside of finding a dumpling dish in one of the MREs, I doubt I’ll ever have bread again or cheesecake. I won’t eat ice cream again or watch a baseball game. I won’t be able to see Paris again and go to every Catholic church and leave a candle for Tiffany like I’d always wanted. I’ll never get to see Hamlet performed again. There was a lot of things I’m not going to be able to experience again. Instead, I’m given wonderful new opportunities like cauterizing bullet holes in my side and passing out. Man, I don’t think this new world is at all what it was cracked up to be.
Eventually I fall asleep again, but only for a few hours. I’m awake as the sun is coming up over the horizon, drowning the world in hues of blue before yellow light pierces the aquatic haze of the nocturnal world. I pull myself out of the cab and take another pair of painkillers from the medical kit. I’ve got a lot to get done. I pull up my shirt and look at the damage. The tissue is red and puffy, which means that it’s probably infected. God, I wish that Lindsay was here. She might not have been officially trained in how to treat people, but she knew a hell of a lot more than I do. There’s no help for it. I let go of the shirt and kick open the door, climbing down from the truck, wincing all the way.
I push up the hood again and have another look, trying to assess what exactly is the problem. My first job is going to be the radiator. That thing has taken two bullets in the battle with the lunatics on the road. I know the feeling of being shot to hell and I quickly inspect the upper hose, finding it shot in one side and out the other. I’m certain that there’s going to be a toolkit around here. Trailer parks usually have a shade tree mechanic or fifty. This place has to have something that will help me put this truck back together. Turning away from the truck, I set out to begin looking for a real toolbox and anything else I can find to patch it up.
My father was a mechanic. I had never really respected my dad, coming home from work with blackened, thick hands, and a face smudged with oil and grime. He was a man who worked hard but rarely received any of the benefits. When I was a child, I used to sit outside with my brother, watching our dad try and fix everything. He was a man who never replaced a thing. Why replace something and spend money when he could just put it back together? I found that so annoying as a child. Instead of going and buying a new lawnmower, we would sit outside for hours, watching my dad scavenge and figure out just how he was going to put the thing back together. I remember my brother and me talking incessantly about how annoying and frustrating that was while our parents were in the other room talking. Neither of us understood the significance of what our father was instilling in us. The idea that we can take the old and put it back together. I don’t mean the world, though, I mean life. Right now, I’m fairly certain that there’s no fixing the world, even with men like Jason out there. Life, though, that’s something we can put back together over and fucking over again.
My father was a man who gave to the world. He gave his entire life to the notion that doing well by other people was what made the world go around. I don’t know if I was as dedicated to the idea as he was, but it definitely rubbed off. My dad was the man who went to church every Sunday and every time someone needed an oil change or got a flat tire, they called him. Most normal, rational people would charge those who ask them to use their skills to help them out, but my father never did. He was the kind of man who gave people free oil changes if they called him up on the weekends. So when he would tinker with his own car or the lawnmower, it was usually because he couldn’t afford to pay someone to fix those things. These were the kinds of things that he did himself because he didn’t have the money to have others do it. What money he did have, my father saved. He did good work and he was highly regarded in the community, so he made a decent wage, we just never saw it. Poor by choice. It was an oddity in those times.
Then it was time for Scott and me to go off to college. When my brother got accepted into the University of Michigan, my father had enough money to pay for whatever was left over after the scholarships. My dad worked day and night during his life, hoping that he could provide a better world for my brother and me. I never understood the notion of suffering so much for your kids to have a better future when you could enjoy your life yourself. I mean, I got it back then, but my father could have given us experiences with that money. Why hoard it all away so my brother and I grew up the poor kids in our circles of friends, when we didn’t need to be? Sure, it had been nice when we got to college and actually got to spend time doing things we loved, rather than working our way through the courses, studying and then going to a part time job. I just never understood depriving us of the fun that we all could have had for the hope that we’d make it to college.
Then I had the girls and I completely understood. I understood everything. My father died two years after Val was born. He’d been on the side of the road one December night, changing a tire for an old woman he went to church with. He’d been on the side of the highway, but a driver hit a patch of black ice and before either of them could do anything, the driver plowed into Mrs. Eddleson’s car, killing my dad almost instantly. When I got the call, I didn’t know how to process it. Everything my father had taught me flashed before my eyes and I couldn’t find the words to tell my mother that I would be there shortly. Tiffany and I made it to the hospital before Scott, but not early enough. My mother had already received the news that my father was dead.
I remember going home and kissing the girls while they slept. I remember thinking over all the time that I had been fortunate enough to spend with my father. Many men aren’t lucky enough to have fathers, let alone great ones that spend time with them. He taught me the nobility in sacrificing for family, and I am here, in a trailer park, fixing a radiator the best I can because he took the time to impart more than just knowledge to me, but values as well. He was a good man, and as I hammer the screws into the side of the radiator, fixing the holes, I look at my handiwork and wonder what my father would say to me now, if he could see this whole hellish world that I’m trapped in. Would he say that I should give in and give up? No. He would tell me to keep moving. I know that he would do that. He was a man who believed that as long as you had two feet to stand on and a will to soldier on, you could keep fighting.
My mother died seven years ago. I can’t help thinking about her too as I reattach the radiator’s hose, now shortened but still operable, and turn my focus to tightening its clamps. She had died of cancer, but she never really was the same after my father died. She was sort of hollow and vacant, waiting for death to claim her as well. We lived in the same city, but I still rarely ever got around to seeing her. There just wasn’t any reason to. I would go to her house and sit there with her in silence while she stared at the TV, never actually seeing anything. I think the day that the doctors informed her that she had cancer was the best day of her life. It was her ticket home. I understand that, having lost Tiffany.
Scott and I had argued for hours about her decision to refuse treatment. The doctors had discussed other alternatives for her,
but Scott wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted his mother to survive as long as she could, which went to show how detached he was at the end of her life. He lived in Denver and never saw her. He never got to see the vacant, lost expression in her eyes as she waited for death to take her. I sided with her because I knew she had loved my dad, and that she wanted to go home to him. I knew better than anyone, and Scott accused me of projecting my own suicidal desires onto our mother. Maybe he was right, but I understood completely. At her funeral, Scott and his wife chewed me out one last time, calling me a terrible son and an even worse brother. They said that they never wanted to see me again and I understood. I completely understood.
I am the son of a woman who knew that surrender was sometimes the greatest reward, and a man who believed in fighting to the very end. I often wondered what the world would be like if their places had been switched. I’m sure that my father would have continued fighting the good fight and living life in a way that my mother would be proud of him. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s a price for everything and when the reward doesn’t fit the cost, it kills something inside of all of us. Maybe my father would have given up. Maybe he would have been like me and wanted a quick death. When Tiffany had died, my first instinct was that they had been wrong, that it wasn’t her time to go. But in the end, when I drove back home and walked into that empty house, my newer, deeper instinct was to go up to the closet, pull out my gun from the top shelf, and put one in my head.
Clearly, I am my father’s son. I am the one who fights on. I don’t know what happened to Scott or his waspy wife, but they’re probably still out there, fighting stubbornly and stupidly for survival because that’s what we do. That’s what we are. Even with the death of Lindsay, I move on, I keep pushing until I find my girls. I won’t stop until I find them. I will rip out a dozen bullets before I surrender to death. The reason I keep surviving is because I refuse any other option. I refuse death. No, I am death. What I refuse is failure.
With the hose reattached, I fill the radiator with water. I walk around to the driver side door, climbing in painfully, I sit down in the seat and look out the window at the propped up hood and close my eyes, saying a silent, wordless prayer to whatever deity is out there, mocking my every move. I hope that this works. As I turn the ignition, the truck’s starter whines but the engine remains silent, humming and trying to turn but doesn’t work. Pumping the gas I turn the key again, and with a loud shudder the truck roars to life and I let it idle for a moment, sweat running down my face and a wide grin across my lips. I’m alive still and I’m still mobile.
Climbing out of the truck, I walk around and look at the radiator, it’s only leaking slightly and it should do the trick. Reentering the trailer, I load up my supplies, leaving Lindsay’s pack behind and combining both of them into mine. I sling the pack over my shoulder and stuff the bullet that had almost killed me in my pocket. I might as well keep it as a souvenir for all the hard work it made me go through. Tossing the pack into the passenger seat, I put the truck in reverse and pull away from the trailer park. It’s time to find the girls.
Chapter Fourteen
Pulling the truck to the side of the road, I notice that the temperature gauge is rising again. I’m not happy with that. It’s not supposed to be rising that quickly. I’m halfway there, and if I need to fill the radiator again, so be it. I hope that’s all it is. My hand is shaking and as I push open the hood, I realize that I’m weaker than I originally thought. I need to eat something. I need to regain my strength, and a few pints of blood would probably do the trick also. I pull a gallon of water out of the back and set it next to the truck. I’m not opening the radiator until the engine cools down a bit. I’m not burning half of my face off before I get to the girls. I don’t need another few days of recovering from third degree burns.
Sitting down on the road, I look over at Lindsay and see that she’s doing way better than me. I let out a sigh and put my hand to the wound on my side and wonder if it really is infected. Maybe I should have cleaned the spoon a little better. She tosses a pebble out into the road as we both look at the dead grove of skeletal trees and the dead Ferrari parked on the opposite side of the road. It’s been covered in mud and dust, not nearly as pretty as it used to be, but I’d still take one.
“Well, this sucks ass.” I let out a long sigh.
“So near and yet so far away,” she says to me, brushing her hair out of her face. She turns and looks at me for a moment. “You didn’t take your sunglasses with you when you left that woman’s house.”
“I think it was the cannibal’s house,” I correct her.
“Who gives a fuck?” She shakes her head. “You need to take care of your eyes, Charlie. They’re going to boil out of your head if you’re not careful.”
“I have bigger concerns to deal with right now,” I say, frustrated by her nagging. “If you haven’t noticed, I think I’m dying.”
“We’ve all been dying,” she says very mystically to me. What the fuck is she, some sort of Zen master now? No, that’s not the Lindsay I know. “Stop being such a pussy,” she snaps at me. That’s more like it. That’s the girl that traveled halfway across the country with me.
“What’s it like being dead?” I ask her as she stands up and walk out into the road, giving me another look at her ass as she walks. She knows how she affects men. She’s probably known since middle school. Women like her are lucky to have that sort of secret weapon. Men like me, we’re not so lucky. She turns and looks at me with that celestial smile that could put a man in his grave if he stared too long.
“Not too bad,” she shrugs. “You’ve killed a lot of people, Charlie. Do you think that you’re going to just get away with all of that? All the lives that have been lost, just so you can hug your little girls again? Do you think the big guy upstairs is going to just let you walk away from that?”
“God and I aren’t on speaking terms,” I tell her. “Besides, not sure I hold the same beliefs as you do.”
“I’m an atheist, if you remember correctly,” she points out.
“Congratulations,” I tell her. I’m not so confident that I can be an atheist. Even in a philosophy based on doubting in the existence of any god, I have too much doubt to adhere to it. I want to be like her. I want to have the confidence to simply declare to the world that God isn’t dead. God never was. God was just a fairy tale that we’ve been whispering to one another for so long that we forgot to remember that it’s just a story. No. I live in a world of random chaos and madness. I live in that tunnel Alice fell down to get to Wonderland. “God isn’t real,” I confess to her.
“You don’t believe that, Charlie,” she shakes her head condescendingly at me. “At the end of the day, we all believe that there’s something up there. We just give our gods fancier, more scientific names. We like order. We like fate. We like things that give us hope, even in their disparaging, depressing truths. Because in the end, even an indifferent, absent god is better than no god. We can blame an absentee god figure for all our worries. But if we’re all right and God never existed, then we are all alone. So I’ll take a cold and merciless god over no god, because if God isn’t there, Charlie, then we’re seriously fucked. Well, you are at least.”
She’s right. I know that she’s right. I’ve been wandering the wasteland for what feels like a lifetime, struggling with God and his lack of presence. Since the day I spoke to the doctor next to my wife, holding her hand as he uttered the words “lymph nodes” and we both knew that the end was in sight, I have been at war with God. Why would God dare to exist in a world as cold and evil as this? How can he be justifying all of this? The world died for me a long time before the grass withered and the leaves fell for the final autumn. All those people that threw back their heads and jutted their arms into the air defiantly and cursed God for killing everything they loved, they were just playing catch up. I’ve been at this game for a long time and here at the end, I want an answer, but being one of God’s creations doesn’t
entitle us to answers. God never promised answers. The universe never told us that we’d get the explanations that we always wanted, because in the end, we are dust before the cosmic workings of an infinite, eternal presence.
“You’re not real,” I tell Lindsay the cold truth. As much as I want her to be real, she isn’t.
“I know,” she answers.
“You’re just my mind playing tricks on me,” I tell her. “You’re just the result of exhaustion and a serious medical condition. You’re just my mind taking advantage of me.”
“Maybe now I am, but I wasn’t, once upon a time,” she says to me, turning and dropping down to one knee in front of me. “Once upon a time, you kissed me, Charlie. You kissed me and you told me that you loved me, but it wasn’t the kind of love that I wanted. In the end, I suppose that it didn’t matter. It was what I needed to hear. You never talked about Tiffany. How was I supposed to understand how infatuated you are with your dead wife? You could have just explained it to me. You’re kind of a dick.”
“Kind of,” I smile.
“Okay, a fucking huge one,” she laughs at me. “You’re dying, Charlie.”
“I know,” I answer with a weak nod.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 47