Dead Judgment

by Flint Maxwell

To her, this is the worst part of the apocalypse, I think.

  To me, it’s not; it’s just necessary. Like breathing. If you want to survive and continue surviving, then you have to be careful. Simple as that.

  Back in the day, I wasn’t as careful as I should’ve been, but somehow, I survived. Now that I’m in my forties, I’ve learned my lesson. Mostly the hard way.

  What is the worst part of the apocalypse, you ask?

  Pretty much everything…from the lack of food, to the quiet, the crazy people who’ve gone gun-crazy, and the way the world stinks with death. But the worst worst, for me, is losing the ones you love.

  I’ve lost too many. I won’t lose any more.

  Someone answers my tap. I hear the zombie’s death-rattling loudly through the glass. It’s a woman. She’s wearing an open robe, and she’s naked beneath. There’s not much of anything left to see, though. Thank God. Her breastbone juts out, yellow-red, and her stomach looks like it’s been gutted open by a knife like mine.

  My guess: she got hungry, trapped in that house all by herself, and decided to see what she tasted like. Ate her stomach to fill her stomach. Talk about a Catch-22.

  Lilly raises her own blade, a disgusted look on her face. She pulls on the door, but I stop her again.

  “Wait a second,” I say. “Let’s see if anyone else wants to join the party.”

  I’m exercising caution, though I doubt it’s necessary. If there was anyone left in there with her, she would’ve devoured them before the virus ran its course.

  Sure enough, no one else comes, and the zombie woman presses her face up against the glass. She smears blood and bits of black gunk all over the door, streaks that Windex wouldn’t even be able to wipe clean.

  “Open it and spin out of the way. Let her come to me,” I say.

  Lilly nods, her hand seizing the handle.

  “Okay, now!” I say.

  The door slides on its track easily. No squeaking.

  The zombie woman stumbles out, but she’s forgotten about the raised lip at the bottom of the frame; her dragging foot catches on it. I see this almost in slow motion, and I step out of the way. She hits the patio concrete hard. Busts her face and convulses.

  It may have done the trick.

  I can’t say for sure, and I don’t want to get close enough to find out, so I put my blade in the back of her head for good measure. She convulses again then lies still.

  Dead. Again.

  I wipe the blade off in the long grass as Lilly steps into the place, then she immediately takes a step back, holding her nose. I’m not inside, but I don’t need to be for the smell to find me. It’s rank. The smell of death and rot. The smell of a graveyard in a suburban house.

  “You seriously want to stay here?” Lilly asks.

  I shrug. “We’ll get used to the smell.”

  She rolls her eyes at me, covers her mouth and nose with the collar of her shirt, and goes in. I follow.

  The house’s interior is pretty nice, once you look past all the blood and broken glass. I walk into the kitchen, and a few big bugs scuttle out of the way, hide under the refrigerator. Lilly takes the upstairs. She has her gun drawn.

  I’m in the hallway now. I enter what looks like a master bedroom. It’s clean. The sheets on the bed are faded and a little dingy, but there aren’t any impressions on them from sleeping bodies. The floor is covered in a thick layer of dust; no footsteps in the dust but mine.

  I keep going.

  Off the hallway, I find a family room. Big TV, pictures on the mantel, bigger fireplace. A couch with holes in it. Abandoned birds’ nests in the curtains. An old TV guide with Jimmy Fallon on the cover dated from 2016.

  No bodies. No blood.

  That’s when Lilly calls my name… Her voice quavers. She’s scared.

  I drop the TV guide, and rush up the steps, not caring that my boots are making thunderous noise. Lilly is standing in a short hall, looking into a bedroom. I see rocket ships on the walls. A race car bed.

  Lilly has her head in her hands, her gun lowered.

  “Don’t look, c’mon,” I’m telling her, trying to usher her out of the hallway and back downstairs where it’s at least semi-respectable. She’s not budging, though.

  “I already saw them,” she says. “I can’t unsee them.”

  “I wish you could.”

  She hugs me tight. This surprises me, and for a second I’m not really sure what to do. Human contact has been minimal since Darlene and Junior were taken from me.

  Gently, I hug her. Over her head, which is buried into my chest, I see what she saw.

  It’s not a pretty sight.

  Torn up clothes with superheroes and princesses on them. And small bones, gleaming white, as if slobbered on.

  9

  We go back downstairs. A couple of times, Lilly sways like she’s drunk, and I think she’s about to fall, so I reach out and grab her before she can.

  “We should’ve stayed in the parking deck,” she’s saying. “Should’ve slept there and drove on out of this town. Forgot we ever came through.”

  I’m beginning to think she has a point. I wasn’t prepared to see those small bones. To see what a mother, infected with the disease, could do to her children. It will stick with me for a long time, I think. I’ll have nightmares about it. I’ll wake up covered in sweat.

  I always tell myself I’ve seen it all.

  I’m always wrong.

  Lilly plops down at an old piano. There’s a glass sitting on top of it, the contents long evaporated. I go and open the front door.

  Abby’s standing outside on the porch. Her eyes are darting all over the neighborhood. She looks like a nervous cat.

  “About time,” she says. “I thought I was gonna have to break a window.”

  I nod to the Humvee. “Any luck?”

  She shakes her head. “The house cleared?”

  “It is now,” I answer.

  Abby wipes her feet off on the welcome mat. Certainly an odd gesture. I guess whoever said ‘old habits die hard’ wasn’t kidding. She looks into the side room and sees Lilly sitting on the piano bench with her head against the covered keys.

  “What’s her problem?”

  Raising my eyebrows, I say, “Don’t go upstairs.”

  “Puppies? Kittens?”

  “Children,” I say.

  “Oh, damn,” Abby says.

  “Yeah, the hungry mom is currently on the back patio.”

  “Dead?”

  I breathe on my grimy fingernails and wipe them off on my cloak.

  “Good,” Abby says. “But you can’t look cool in that thing.”

  We spend about an hour going through the house, looking for things of use. There’s not much. No weapons aside from rusty butcher knives and a pretty well preserved tool chest. The car in the garage doesn’t work, of course, but Abby tries it anyway. It’s a Nissan Versa. The inside still smells like old fast food, and there’s wrappers all over the floor and dashboard. Even after all these years.

  “Look,” Abby says. She’s sitting in the driver’s seat. The plastic casing under the wheel is torn off, and wires stick out everywhere. She had to try to hot wire it—the keys are long gone.

  I turn my head to see what she’s pointing at. In the sea of trash, there’s a boxed up Big Mac from McDonald’s. She picks it up. Opens it.

  You’d think it’d be covered in bugs, shrunken with age… It’s not. It looks just as it did fifteen years ago.

  “Dare you,” she says.

  “What’ll you give me?” I say.

  “A million dollars.”

  I snort. “A drop in the bucket now.”

  “You eat this, you’ll probably end up worse than the zombies. Geez, what did they put in this thing?”

  “Indestructible industrial ingredients, obviously,” I say. “That’s why they taste so good.” I sigh, look longingly at the burger. “Man, what I’d give for a fresh one.”

  Abby laughs and shakes her head, clos
es the box and throws it back on the floor.

  We leave the garage and the Nissan. Head back into the house.

  Lilly is asleep in the spare bedroom when we walk by.

  Abby chuckles. “Look at her now. Passed out. You think she’ll get mad if I say ‘I told you so’?”

  “Better not say that,” I whisper.

  Through the hall we go, toward the steps leading upstairs. Abby has moved the bones from the child’s room, and covered up the splotchy spot of old blood on the floor with a blanket. She means to sleep in the race car bed. She’s stripped the mattress of the old sheets. Doesn’t need a blanket or a pillow; when you spend most nights sleeping in a cramped truck, pillows and blankets become luxuries rather than necessities.

  The bedroom door is busted, hanging on half of its hinges. Though the bones aren’t there, the scene plays out in my head. The children running from their mom, screaming. One watching the other, as the zombie version of the woman who raised them tore them apart.

  My stomach lurches.

  “Maybe you should get some sleep, Jack. You don’t look too good,” Abby says.

  “I never look good,” I say.

  “Yeah, that’s true.” Abby smirks at me. “But now you really look shitty, my friend.”

  I shake my head, step backward out of the room, onto the spongy hall runner. “I won’t be able to sleep anyway. Maybe in a couple of hours. I’ll wake you up and you can take over.”

  “Wake Lilly up. I’m going for a full night’s sleep.”

  A full night’s sleep in the apocalypse is pretty much anything over four hours; if you get four hours of uninterrupted sleep, you’re doing pretty well for yourself. I don’t remember the last time that happened for me. Maybe back when I was in the town where I met Lilly for the first time. In that inn I stayed at. But that’s different, I wasn’t out on the road then. I was behind the safety of their walls.

  That isn’t a home, though, and neither is a life on the road.

  “We’ll see. Judging by how she looked, it won’t be easy to wake her up,” I say.

  “Throw some water on her. That always does the trick.” Abby winks, sits on the bed, and removes her hook. “Nothing like taking that off after a long day.”

  “I bet. Night, Ab.”

  “Night.”

  I head back downstairs for a few hours of sitting in silence with a gun across my lap.

  Welcome to the apocalypse.

  10

  The silence makes the night inch by. I am sitting in a wing-backed chair I dragged out of an office. It is pink with a diamond pattern. It smells old and musty, like everything smells these days. Once you get past the smell, though, it’s a pretty good chair. Probably got it at a local antique store or something—no, never mind. A house like this? They didn’t buy hand-me-downs.

  Makes me think of the dead mother on the back patio. She’s probably happy she didn’t make it this long. Everything is a hand-me-down now. I get up from the chair because I know if I stay in it much longer, I’ll drift off to sleep.

  Sleeping when you’re supposed to be on watch is never a good thing. It’s a thing that gets you into trouble. Though I know there’s a good chance we won’t get into trouble—even if I do doze off for a catnap—I’ve learned it’s not worth the risk. There’s hardly any room for mistakes nowadays. You mess up, you die. You mess up, you’re sporting a fresh bite wound that’ll kill you in short order, the disease spreading through your bloodstream, shutting down your central nervous system, seizing up your organs. Then, boom, you’re dead and getting up and walking around, even though you shouldn’t be. And you have a hankering for flesh. Mostly human flesh, but I’ve seen a zombie chow down on an animal from time to time. Nowadays, you don’t see too many animals where the bulk of the population used to be. Animals have this instinct about them, this second-nature, this way of sensing things.

  I go in the dining room. It’s a nice setup: big table, solid wood, carvings of leaves up the legs. Definitely not something you’d see in a hand-me-down store. There’s a layer of dust on the tabletop about as thick as building insulation, except for a couple of parts around the edges where the dust has been wiped clean by momma zombie walking aimlessly around the house for over a decade.

  Imagine that. Being trapped in your house, doomed to wander around the same six or so rooms for that long. If that’s not hell, I’m not sure I want to know what is.

  There’s handprints, too; I look closer to see them.

  I also notice that one of the chairs is tipped over. The wallpaper is peeling. Cobwebs hang from the corners of the ceiling, big ones. There are pictures on the walls, too.

  I deliberately avoid looking at these.

  At a distance, I can see they are family portraits; happy times, moments forever frozen by a flashbulb and some technology that will have died out in another fifty years. If I look at these pictures, I’ll end up getting sad, and getting angry, too. I don’t know who I’d be angry at, either. The government for fucking up this world, for trying to turn a disease into a weapon, or whatever the hell they were doing, when they should’ve made sure that it was completely eradicated? Or maybe the mom for turning? Or maybe for myself for still being here, still trapped in this hell? I don’t know.

  So I walk through the dining room. I’m in a little den. It’s about the size of my apartment in Chicago—an expensive apartment, at that. But relative to the rest of the house, this room is pretty small. Computer in one corner. Big bookshelves filled with stuff I’d never read on two walls.

  More pictures.

  Since the room is smaller, I can’t hide from these. I see the mom and the dad and the two kids. They’re at some theme park. Disney-something, maybe, I don’t know. Having a good time. Smiling. The little boy is missing a front tooth; so was one of the skulls I’d seen upstairs.

  And even after all these years of rotting, the mom looks vaguely familiar, too. Becoming a zombie hadn’t completely wiped her uniqueness away. She’s been stuck inside, that’s why. Didn’t have to brave the conditions or fight other zombies for meat.

  My stomach does one of its famous lurches, feels like I’ll either throw up or starve.

  I have to get out of this place.

  So I do. Don’t look at the walls. Try thinking of anything else besides what this family once was. But my imagination hasn’t died; I can hear their ghostly voices. Laughing at Dad’s joke in the dining room. The clacking of the computer keyboard in the den. Mom talking about her trip up to the mall, and the great deal she got on her designer handbag.

  I almost scream so I can drown these voices out. Because I know what’s happening. I know where my mind is going. And I can’t help it now. It’s too late.

  I’m thinking of Darlene. I’m thinking of her voice. Her sweet laughter. I’m thinking of her and Junior at our dinner table, us holding hands and saying grace for the food we were able to grow, for the canned beans some poor Havenite had scavenged in San Francisco. I’m seeing Darlene’s smile. Her perfect white teeth. I’m seeing Junior’s smile, and I’m seeing Darlene’s smile in his smile, the way the corners of their mouths curl up in the same mischievous way. The way he was missing one of his front teeth just like the dead boy who used to live in this house.

  Then the room darkens, and I feel like I’m spinning, like I’m trapped in some terrible time-loop, and I’m seeing the red smile across Darlene’s neck after the District bastards slit her throat right in front of me. I’m seeing the way her blood sprays, the way it coats the blade, the way the District men and women who’d attacked us are grinning. I’m seeing the one-eyed man sauntering over, putting his boot on my son’s back, and pulling the trigger of his gun. Hearing Darlene’s raspy, airy gasps drowned out by the roar of the gunshot. Seeing the one-eyed man flip Junior over with the same boot that had stamped his back. Junior’s lifeless eyes.

  I’m back in the foyer now. Back in my seat. The gun shakes in my hand, and there’s tears streaming down my face, getting lost in my
beard.

  I should’ve never left the damn chair.

  11

  My mind is going a million miles an hour. The house is quiet for the most part. Every so often, it’ll creak and groan; that’s the earth swallowing the structure up, millimeter by millimeter. In another fifty years, the place will probably be half-buried. That is if the walls stand that much longer.

  I’m still thinking of Darlene and Junior. Still thinking of the one-eyed man, which turns my thoughts toward Norm. My brainwashed brother.

  I’m going to save him. I know I am.

  I just have to find him.

  As I’m deep in thought, I hear something. My ears are attuned to the apocalypse. They’re sharp, pick up every little noise. Lilly snoring lightly in the room down the hall. Abby tossing and turning in the stripped bed upstairs. The direction the wind blows outside. I hear it all.

  And now I hear footsteps. Soles scraping on concrete.

  I stand up. Hold the gun tighter. The door in front of me has a small window at the top. I’m tall enough to get a clean look if I stand on my tiptoes, but I’m smart enough to not stand directly in front of the door—it’s a weak point. If someone is out there with a shotgun, they’d blow the door down, as well as put a hole in my stomach the size of my head.

  So I stand to the side, where I’m still protected by the house’s siding, and stand tall to get a look out on the street.

  Can’t see much. It’s dark as hell out there. Abby’s truck is in the driveway, probably twenty or so feet away from the front door, and I can’t even make out its shape.

  So I stand flatfooted again and listen.

  Hear nothing.

  My heart isn’t beating out of my chest like it would’ve been fifteen years ago. I’m pretty cool, calm, and collected. It took a while for me to get like this, but here I am.

  Still listening. Still hearing nothing.

  I begin to think I might’ve hallucinated it. I wasn’t exactly in my right mind after my stroll through the house.

  Then I hear it again.