by Tim Curran
Outside the Blake house, the very house that Mitch and Tommy were in no hurry to check, they saw destruction. The front door was pretty much torn off its hinges. Just hanging there. A lot of windows broken.
“Looks like the old bitch had trouble last night,” Tommy said.
Carefully, Mitch went up onto the porch with his Remington autoloader and stuck his head through the doorway. Instantly, he could smell the sickly-sweet tang of death. “Miriam?” he called out. “Miriam? You around?”
His voice echoed out and died.
Inside, there was wreckage: shattered furniture and pictures hanging askew on the walls, lots of mud in the carpet. Yeah, Miriam had had visitors last night and it sure as hell wasn’t the fucking Welcome Wagon. He knew if they searched that house room by room, they were going to find things. Maybe some of the dead ones. Maybe Miriam’s corpse and those of Russel and Margaret Boyne. Maybe even Lou Darin. But Mitch wasn’t up to it. He’d seen enough death, he didn’t need to go hunting for it.
Down the block they went, knocking on doors and looking for life and finding nothing. They didn’t even see anyone out walking or hear a dog barking. The world was just graveyard silent. Flooded and stinking and dead. If it hadn’t have been for the far-off drone of a plane, it would have been easy to imagine the entire world was like this. A colossal cemetery.
Then at the Procton house, life.
Lou Darin was on the porch, looking agitated like usual. “Is there anyone else left?”
“Not that we can find,” Mitch told him.
“Have you looked?”
“Yes, we looked, Lou. We’ve been knocking on doors for the past half-hour. Nobody’s around. Either they’re dead or they just got out of town.”
He grunted. “Well, that’s exactly what I’m going to do.”
“How’d you end up over here? Where’s Miriam and the others?”
“Miriam’s dead as far as I know. And good riddance. Russel and Margaret are inside. And I’m getting out. This is ridiculous. Absolutely ridiculous. Those things burst into Miriam’s house last night and we ran. We hid inside the Procton’s. I don’t know where they are.”
“You taking Russel and Margaret with you?”
He shook his head. “No way. They’re both crazy. I don’t care what they do. They think they’re living in a zombie movie. They’re preparing for the final battle of mankind. If you can believe that.”
He made to move past and Mitch grabbed him by the arm. “Miriam didn’t make it?”
“I don’t know. They attacked and we ran. The Boyne’s and I.”
“And you left that old woman there?” Tommy said.
“We didn’t have a choice.”
Lou gave them a more detailed version of events. Apparently, the dead got in the house and Miriam told the others to run. That’s all that Darin knew. Miriam was most likely dead.
Tommy laughed. “Well, you are one brave sonofabitch, ain’t you?”
“Oh, shut the hell up, you idiot.”
Darin stormed away, making for his own house and his SUV in the driveway if he was to be believed.
Inside, Russel and his mother were nailing boards over the windows, lording over an improvised collection of weapons: sharpened baseball bats and broomsticks with steak knives attached to the ends. Mitch had to wonder what good any of it was going to do.
“You both need to get out of here,” Mitch told them.
“There’s nowhere to run to, Mitch. This is the end battle. Just like in the Bible. Hell has delivered up the dead and this is the last stand of mankind. The whole world is like Witcham now.”
“You don’t know that.”
“Oh, yes I do. Hell on earth.”
“Russel, you can’t believe this.”
Russel drove a nail through a board. “It’s true. Just like in that picture where the dead take over the world. You can stay here with us, Mitch. Help us get ready. Because tonight they’ll be out in force.”
“I don’t think they have to wait for dark,” Tommy said.
“Sure they do,” Russel told him. “That’s how this works.”
Outside, both Mitch and Tommy just shrugged. There was no point in arguing with a dementia that was so well-developed. They wanted to stay and die, there wasn’t much you could do.
Mitch sighed, wiping a sheen of wet mist from his face. “Let’s go over to my house. I want to get some more shells for the Remington.”
They trudged through moist yards to his own, wet leaves blown up against the house, water dripping from the roof. It was impossible not to look at that house without getting assailed by a hundred memories. There were the raingutters he’d put up five, six years back. He could remember being up on the ladder and Chrissy was standing at the bottom, nine or ten years old and cute with pigtails and freckles on her cheeks. There were the Andersen windows that Lily and he had put in one sunny September day three years ago, the air brisk and sharp as apples, the sort of day you were glad to be alive. To either side of the porch there were Lily’s flower boxes filled with wilted brown stems. There were those pain-in-the-ass hedges that she made him round off every summer with the clippers. God, it was everywhere. All the damn memories. He could see Chrissy running up the walk from grade school, her dark hair bouncing and her Little Mermaid lunch box bumping against her leg. He could see Halloween pumpkins on the porch, Chrissy taping up cardboard skeletons and green-faced witches in the windows. He could see the trees that Lily hung with lights every Christmas, the evergreen boughs she decorated the porch railings with. He could see himself out there come Easter, scattering the carrots Chrissy had left for the Easter bunny in a trail, taking a bite out of each one first.
Oh, Jesus, Jesus Christ in heaven…it had been a life. A real life. It had been his life and he had been content with it all. In love with it. In love with his wife and his stepdaughter. All the holidays and special times, raking leaves in the fall and cutting grass in the summer and shoveling snow in the winter while Chrissy pegged snowballs at him. Chrissy’s slumber parties and Lily’s quilting guild. Tommy and he building the garage out back. Summer cookouts with steaks on the grill and cold beers in hand, Chrissy and her friends splashing in an inflatable pool and
“Mitch?” Tommy said. “You okay, man?”
Mitch swallowed it all down before it took him away. He wiped his eyes with the back of his fist. “I’m all right.”
“Maybe you shouldn’t go in there, you know? I can get the shells.”
“No, I’m going in.”
Mitch led the way up the porch, shutting it all down inside of him until he was numb and could not feel a thing. Just some wind-up machine out doing a job. The door was unlocked and he couldn’t remember if he’d locked it or not. No matter. He led the way in with Tommy behind him and he wondered vaguely in the back of his mind how many times they’d come in like this together, carrying groceries or six-packs or bowling trophies. Maybe even Christmas presents to be surreptitiously placed under the tree for Chrissy. A new sled and skates, Barbie’s Dream House and an Easy Bake Oven. God, those were the days. Tommy…crazy fucking Tommy…climbing up onto the icy, snowy roof on Christmas Eve night, stomping around up there like Santa Claus so Chrissy would go to bed already.
Stop it! he told himself. You don’t feel any of it! You don’t feel anything! Nothing at all! You’re empty!
Mitch got the box of shells from the locked metal box up in the hall closet. As he was taking them out, something gave him pause. At first he thought it was those damn memories again, sneaking up to torment him. Because he was smelling lilacs. Lilacs of all things. He stepped farther into the hall, over near the staircase leading to the second floor.
The odor was stronger.
Lilacs.
“You smelling it?” he said to Tommy.
Tommy nodded. “Yeah. Flowers or some shit.”
“Lilacs.”
That meant nothing to Tommy, of course. Not really. But to Mitch it meant everything. He knew that s
mell. Knew it very well and it made something in his belly pull down low. Lily’s body lotion. She put it on after she had a bath. Its smell was distinctive and he could feel her skin beneath his lips, that lilac odor sweet in his face.
Mitch stood there looking up the stairs.
“What’s the matter?” Tommy asked.
He told him.
“Shit,” Tommy said.
They went up the stairs side by side and when they got there, they went right to the master bedroom. Right away, that telltale scent of lilacs became almost overpowering. Beneath it, there was something else, a dankness Mitch was glad he could not smell. What he saw in therein his bedroomwas much like what they’d seen in that other bedroom yesterday at the Bell house. Someone had been here. Someone had been at Lily’s vanity. They had scattered cosmetics and perfumes and what have you everywhere. Drawers were yanked open, emptied. Silky underthings hanging out like guts. And there was the tube of lilac body lotion. Most of it had been squirted all over the vanity top and then tossed to the floor and stepped on, the remainder seeping into the carpet. Somebody had been using it, though. It had been on their hands when they pressed them against the vanity mirror, leaving creamy prints there.
Mitch felt like he was going to swoon. He steadied himself against the chest of drawers. “She was here. Last night or early this morning.”
Tommy swallowed. “Who?”
“Lily.”
“Mitch, you don’t know that.”
“Yes, I do.”
And he did.
They come back that quickly. They die and rise that quickly.
Tommy was looking at the bed. There was a gray stain on the quilt. Somebody had been laying there, somebody that was wet and dirty.
Sure, Mitch, he thought. She came back here looking for you. She went to her mirror and smashed things around looking for the lotion. When she found it, she smeared it all over her cold white flesh. Perhaps grinning like a skull the whole time. Then she laid in the bed and waited for you. As she had waited for you other nights…
“She was here,” Mitch said. “She might still be. You got that salt on you?”
Tommy pulled the waterproof bag out from under his raincoat.
“All right. If she’s here, let’s find her.”
Tommy didn’t argue.
They went from room to room, looked in closets and behind furniture and under beds. They could not find her. Finally, they opened the cellar door and looked down there into the black rising water. It was at least four feet deep and rising, coming right up to the seventh or eighth step. Cardboard boxes and plastic bottles of detergent bobbed on the surface.
“She’s down there,” Mitch said. “I know she is.”
“In the water?”
“Where else. She’s sleeping on the bottom, waiting for dark to come again.”
“You’re…you’re not going down there, Mitch.”
“No.”
He shut the door and locked it from the outside. If she planned on walking around tonight, he wasn’t going to make it easy on her. Is that what they were all doing, though? he wondered. Laying down beneath the water, sleeping, dormant? And when night came, they’d all rise back up. Five times as many as there were last night.
Christ.
Outside, in the falling rain, Mitch just stood there, making himself breathe in that moist, tainted air. Purging the smell of lilacs from his head. The worse smells coming from the cellar.
“I think we should take a drive out to the Army base like Wanda said,” Tommy suggested.
“All right. But first there’s something we have to do.”
“Which is?”
Mitch looked down the street to where Miriam’s house rose from the pale mist. “There’s someone in that house and I want to know who it is.”
“How do you know that?”
“Because when we left, I left the front door open. Now it’s closed.”
11
Mitch took hold of the door at the Blake house and gave it a pull and it nearly fell on top of him. Only one hinge stopped it from doing so. He set his rifle aside and leaned it up against the frame like it had been when they’d first looked for Miriam and the others. Once he did that, he gathered up his rifle and stood there, thinking. While Tommy and he had been checking out the other houses, somebody had set the door back in place.
“I wonder why,” he said out loud.
“Why what?” Tommy said.
“Why somebody put the door back up.”
Tommy pulled off his baseball cap and shook rain from it. “Why else? They put it up so the light wouldn’t get in. Maybe whoever’s in there, don’t care much for the light.”
Mitch had been thinking the same thing, more or less. When they’d came here before, he’d done little more than stick his head in the door and call out for Miriam. But he had smelled something in there. Death. Not an unusual smell in Witcham these days, but inside a house it was much stronger than out in the flooded streets. It was contained and heightened, purified.
“What you say we go get some pancakes?” Tommy said.
Mitch ignored him and walked through the doorway. It was just a mess in there. Not just the broken furniture he’d seen before and the askew pictures, but things much worse. The carpeting was covered with muddy prints and gray water squished out of it when you walked on it. Miriam’s guncases had been overturned, the doors torn off and weapons scattered about. A mirror was shattered. Everything had been swept off the mantel and crushed underfoot with the remains of the broken window.
“Looks like a really pissed off Avon lady called last night,” Tommy said.
Mitch saw muddy handprints on the walls leading to the kitchen. Most of them were badly smudged, as if especially grimy hands were slapped against the walls and dragged along. Some were very distinct, though. Adults, even children lower down. A few had bits of tissue stuck to them.
Mitch smelled the stink of death and looked at the wreckage, thinking, this would have been us last night. If Wanda hadn’t been burning that shit to keep the dead away, they would have stormed her house and killed us all.
They looked around in the rooms downstairs, saw nothing of much interest. The dead had rampaged through here, but apparently they’d come and gone quickly, left little evidence of their passing.
Mitch walked over to the stairs.
“More stairs,” Tommy said. “This is over, I never climb stairs again in my life.”
Mitch was feeling it the same way he was. Stairs. Stairs always led somewhere bad these days. Whatever was in the house was up there and he could smell it, something just beginning to decay with a sharp green smell. It was up there and he could feel it. It had a heavy, almost ominous physical presence that dried the spit up in his mouth. He tried to tell himself it was just the stairs, the memory of other things they had led to, but he knew better. Something was up there and whatever it was, it had raised the fine hairs at the back of his neck.
He cleared his throat. “Miriam? You up there?”
“She’s dead, Mitch. She ain’t about to answer you even if she’s here.”
Mitch waited a moment. Two, three. He felt a bead of perspiration slide down his spine to his beltline. He was holding onto the Remington so tightly, he thought his fingers would leave grooves in the stock.
“Miriam,” he called out, his voice echoing through the emptiness up there. “We’re here. We’re here to see you.”
Tommy looked at him like he was mad. Looked like he was about to say something smart and cutting. But he didn’t. Because a voice came from up there and the sound of it made them both want to run.
“Who’s down there?” it said, bubbling and mucky-sounding. “Who’s that? Who has come into my house uninvited?”
“Shit,” Tommy said.
It was Miriam’s voice, all right. The way she would have sounded if her lungs were full of gray water and sediment and rot.
“Is that you, Mitch Barron? You get out of my house or I’ll c
ome down and you won’t like that, Mr. Union Man, you won’t like that at all.”
“Come down,” Mitch told her, his voice full of steel.
There was a slurping sound that he knew was her drawing in a breath. “Here I come.”
There was a squishing sound of her walking down the hallway accompanied by that clotted breathing and then she was coming. They thought she would amble down the stairs like one of the dead, but she did not amble. She drifted. Wearing an old ratty dressing gown, she floated slowly down the stairs like some ghoulish hot air balloon. She was white and swollen and mottled, lots of bumps and humps on her face where none had been before. She floated on down with arms out to either side like she was crucified, her head slumped to one shoulder like her neck was broken. There was black goo all over her mouth. A great oily quantity of it was washed down the front of her gown, globby and sticky looking like she’d thrown it all up.
Tommy and Mitch had their rifles on her, but she didn’t seem to care. She floated near the top, just hovering there like some great predatory insect, making a low hissing sound in her throat.
“Don’t you move,” Tommy told her, ready to pull the trigger.
She grinned at him with yellow teeth, making a snarling noise. Her eyes were black and greasy, like fat skimmed over a pot of brine. They shone darkly. So very black and deep they were like windows looking into some fathomless, haunted dead-end of space.
“Come into my house, have you? Trespassing like hobos and bums and hippies crawling with disease! Come to visit old Miriam Blake, eh, Mitch Barron? Well, well, well. Are you happy with what you’ve found?” she said, her voice now high-pitched and wavering like it was coming from a great distance over a weak radio signal. You could almost hear the static crackling under her words. “You’ve brought your friend with you. Tommy Kastle. He would be the one that has deceived you, Mitch. All the while you thought he was your good friend, he was fucking your wife. What a fine state of affairs! Do what’s right, Mitch, turn that gun on him and kill him! Kill him for what he’s done to you! Do you hear me? Kill him!”
Tommy was taken off guard just as he was. He kept shaking his head side to side. “Mitch…Jesus Christ, no, I wouldn’t do that…I’d never do that…”