Kill Town, USA

by Joseph N. Love

“What happened to his hand?”

  “What?”

  “Daddy’s hand. He had a bandage on it.”

  “Carla bit him. Real bad.”

  She shook her head.

  “I think I know what was about to happen. To Watts, too. I’m sorry.”

  Her spit was thick, and as she tried to talk through it she grunted. “Don’t apologize. Don’t ever think you owe me an apology,” she held her face. Her breathing was frantic. “I know what that was,” she gasped. “You can’t hesitate to shoot.”

  I gripped the steering wheel as we approached the top of a hill. I stopped the truck and shifted to low gear. We rolled slowly downhill. The motor whined and squealed.

  “Why don’t you tell me exactly what’s going on?”

  But she was quiet. We made it to the bottom of the hill and started around a curve when she spoke again.

  “When was the last time you saw the news?”

  “A month.”

  “Jesus.”

  “I went hiking to get away for a while. I got laid off.”

  “You’ve gotten away. We have to get away.” She punched the dashboard. “Jesus.”

  I squeezed the wheel and released. “Just tell me what’s going on.”

  “I can’t explain it. No one can explain it. It has something to do with…” she picked up a Venni Vetti Beefy napkin off the floor and tore it in two. “…with this shit!”

  “The people who got sick?”

  “The people in comas. They didn’t die. They got up.”

  “That’s good.“

  “It’s not good. They got up, but they didn’t wake up. They just walk. And they feed.”

  “On other people.”

  “Yeah. You can’t stop it. If they get hold of you, or if it gets inside you.”

  “You’re already dead.”

  “Yeah.”

  “That’s what I thought. About Tom. And Watts.”

  She shook her head. “Watts was born a heathen. That’s what they’re calling them. At least around here.”

  “It fits.”

  Slowly, a group of deer came into view through the thick snow. They stood in the middle of the interstate. As the truck slowly scooted past, two bucks and a doe head-butted the truck.

  One buck was small but old—lots of points. Its eyes were empty. Black lifeless sockets.

  “Animals, too?” I mumbled.

  “God, the animals. They eat our trash, they eat all the thrown out toxic meat.”

  “That explains the bear.”

  “The bear?”

  “I was attacked last night. I fought it off with a knife.”

  “A knife?”

  “I pretty much cut off its head.”

  “Did it—are you bleeding?”

  “No. Just bruised.”

  “Where’s the knife?”

  I pulled up my shirt and took the knife out of its sheath. I handed it to her, but she didn’t touch it.

  “You cleaned it?”

  “Pretty well.”

  “You can’t—it can’t come with us. It’s contaminated.”

  I rolled down my window and dropped the knife in the snow.

  The grade increased and the truck groaned. The tires skipped and slowly the truck bogged down to a standstill. I kept the truck in gear and set the parking brake.

  “We have to walk,” I said.

  Audrey threw open her door and marched alone through the snow.

  I hoisted the pack and carried the Winchester in my arms. We quickly found it easier to walk in the ditch. Better footing.

  I adjusted the rifle, setting the safety and advancing the sight by a millimeter. I opened and closed the chamber, deliberately exaggerating every movement of the bolt.

  “Do that again.”

  “Do what?”

  “That noise you just made.”

  “This?” I slid the bolt back and forth.

  “Yeah. Do it again.”

  Click. Slide. Click.

  “I like that. You should do it every few minutes.”

  Click. Slide. Click.

  “I have some whiskey if you want. It’s good for your nerves, too.”

  “I’d like that.”

  I handed her the flask from my back pocket. She drank it like water.

  A loud crash came from the woods beside us. We stopped and glared into the darkness. Our breath swirled furiously around our heads. The moon circled the earth a million times. Our hearts pumped enough blood to fill Lake Michigan. I held up the rifle and aimed into the darkness.

  “It was a tree falling,” I lowered the rifle.

  I turned and walked. Audrey stayed behind.

  “It was just a tree,” I yelled. She caught up with me and held onto the shoulder strap under my right arm.

  Click. Slide. Click.

  WE FOUND THE MIDWAY MOTEL A LITTLE AFTER MIDNIGHT, an empty reception desk, no lights, and the parking lot a bare white sheet.

  “We should take a room and just let them charge us in the morning,” I said.

  “I don’t think anyone will be here in the morning.”

  “Of course.”

  “Let’s go to the office,” Audrey said. I followed her to the large glass window where we gazed into darkness.

  “We’ll just camp out in there.”

  “No, there should be a peg board with all the keys. I think. Shouldn’t there be a bunch of keys inside?”

  “I hope so.”

  I swung the muzzle against the tempered glass. The rifle bounced back. I swung harder and the glass exploded, creaking and sizzling as it fell at our feet.

  The lights did not work. The switch flapped up and down uselessly. The moonlight washed everything in white dust. We found the keys in a plastic bin on the counter. The key to room 205 sat beside the box on the counter.

  Room 205 smelled like wet paint and semen. All utilities were out. The only sound in Room 205 was the occasional pop of the ceiling straining under the weight of the snow. We peeled off our shoes and wet clothes and collapsed on the bed. I stuffed the sleeping bag under the blankets and crawled inside. Audrey followed. I placed the butt of the Winchester at my head. The smell of gun oil was pleasant. It put me to sleep.

  Audrey startled and jabbed me in the ribs. My arm was slightly numb.

  “I heard a car door,” she said.

  I opened my eyes.

  We listened. I heard nothing.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Shh. I hear crunching.”

  I heard the muffled squeak of snow outside. It was so faint I don’t know how she could have heard it over the blowing wind.

  I got out of bed, my collar cold from sweat. I pressed my hands to the window. There was a rusty GMC with a dozen lights parked in the middle of the lot. A fat man carrying a spotlight and gun inspected the rooms as he passed.

  I slowly turned the deadbolt and set the slide latch.

  “I don’t trust him,” Audrey whispered behind me.

  I released the latch.

  “Please get your gun.”

  Carefully, I stepped away from the window. I picked up the rifle and smoothed out the sheets on the bed.

  “He’s climbing the stairs.”

  I pressed myself against the door, and Audrey disappeared to the bathroom. In the stillness, I heard the soft, fuzzy conversation from the fat man’s radio.

  His light filled room 205. I felt like a fish in an aquarium. Dust floated between the window and the bed, bathed in the hot yellow light. The light lingered, every breath loud as a train. He spoke into his radio and passed to the next room.

  I lowered the gun. Slowly, I set the safety and shuffled to the bathroom. We fumbled awkwardly as I stepped over Audrey, our limbs unbending. I sat in the tub and pulled her to me. We sat with our legs hanging over the side, our feet resting on top of each other.

  “Do you think they found the truck on the interstate?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What do you think he’d do
if we went out there?”

  “We can’t go out there.”

  “So we have to hide?”

  “I don’t know. Yes.”

  “You’re still not telling me something.”

  She picked up her leg and crashed it against my shin. “It’s a quarantine. They’re doing it in several counties. They issued it today, but it’s not official. These guys just took over, you know?”

  “Vigilantes.”

  “Something like that. Watts didn’t want to bring Daddy to the shelter. I had to make him drive out there.”

  “The shelter?”

  “They made a whole compound. A place for families, a command station, a warehouse for rations.”

  I grabbed the Winchester. It was like ice.

  Click. Slide. Click.

  I closed my eyes and listened to the groaning roof. When the roof on our house collapsed one winter, Dad just wanted to leave it. But I climbed up there and patched it. I didn’t know a thing about roofs. I figured I just had to think like water. Water always goes downhill. Water replaces air. Water takes any shape it pleases. I fixed the roof. It didn’t look good, but it kept the water out.

  I thought I could do Dad that way. Think like him and be sad like him so I could understand how to keep his sadness away. But it doesn’t work like that. I wasn’t a depressed person. The way Dad was, his sadness built up until he couldn’t handle it. I realized Dad was gone shortly after the episode with the roof. There was just too much sadness and Dad collapsed under it.

  Audrey woke up early, just before sunrise. She yawned and squeezed my thigh. Her fingers dug under the muscle. Her breath curled out and away in a silver puff.

  “You want coffee?”

  She nodded.

  I set up the camping stove on the bathroom floor. By then, I only had half a liter of fuel left. The blue flame flicked and bent and I set the kettle over it. I poured Audrey’s coffee first. She cradled the tin mug in both hands and breathed in the steam.

  “We need to find food,” I said.

  “We should get going and find a path through the woods or something. Not on a road. They have plows and convoys.”

  We were slow that morning. I was sore from sleeping in the tub. The pack was heavy and dug into the sores on my shoulders and hips. I cringed, but I cinched up the straps and hefted the rifle.

  When your body burns and wants to stop, you tell it to shut up and you press on.

  The tracks left by the fat man’s truck were gone that morning. An extra foot of snow covered the parking lot, piled up on the concrete walkway in meter-high drifts. We crossed the interstate via the overpass. Halfway across, we stopped and stared at the roadway. A large white ribbon stretched for miles. Untouched, soft and pure. It was the Arctic.

  We hauled through the woods a good two hours before happening upon a mini-mart made of mortar and hand-hewn logs. Its metal roof bowed from the weight of the snow.

  We stopped near the edge of the parking lot and examined the empty fields around us. No barns or houses, no road signs, no intersections. It didn’t look to have been raided.

  Up the road, we heard the trembling of an engine. Then, a plow appeared. It was a yellow rig with spinning amber lights. Snow belched from its nose. Audrey and I took a detour around the mini-mart and headed for the dinky garage next to it. We went in through the bay door and weaved through bald tires, oil drums, and engine blocks. We crouched behind a Chrysler on jacks, two wheels removed and the brakes dismantled. The rumbling convoy shook the air. They were upon us. I took Audrey down the steps to the oil pit.

  The convoy stopped in front of the mini-mart. The air brakes barked. The rest of the vehicles were tankers, a dump truck, and two army trucks.

  We watched as men climbed out of the trucks and swarmed the gas station. Two men removed the fuel tank covers and dropped hoses in the wells. Another man took an axe to the lock on the propane bin, and a crew of five smashed the market window and disappeared inside. Two men stood guard with assault rifles tucked against their bellies. They just kicked around in the snow. Then, the whole roadside circus was packed up. The looters hopped back in the vehicles. The plow lurched forward. The men with assault rifles were the last to get in their trucks. Diesel exhaust dirtied the air. The trucks were gone. Fast as that.

  The currency of the apocalypse is coffee and cigarettes and lottery tickets. As long as there is hope for the future, men will kill for lottery tickets.

  The shelves of the mini-mart were torn apart and stripped clean. On the floor, a few items remained. Want-ads, cold Major Meat hot dogs from the rotisserie, and a dented can of Foster’s.

  Audrey sat on the floor with a handful of trampled snack cakes. I sat next to her and opened the dented beer. The foam slid down my hand. Next to candy bars, beer is the best thing for survival.

  I finished the beer quickly and tossed the can over a toppled display.

  “A tiny militia with plows and assault rifles,” I kicked a bent-up shelf. “What’s wrong with you people around here?”

  “Go home and you’ll be in the same situation.” She handed me a cupcake.

  She was probably right. I unwrapped the cupcake but didn’t feel like eating. I handed it back to her.

  Under the metal shelf I noticed something shiny, white and red. I leaned forward and flicked my fingers at it. Unfiltered Major Blends kicked under the shelf by a highway pirate. I held the cigarettes flat in my palm. Eagerly, we lifted shelves but found little else. Canned soup and sunflower seeds and a pouch of jerky.

  We left the mini-mart, splitting the jerky and following the plowed road. We came to Gochie Ford Farm Road. It was blocked by a wall of snow thrown aside by the plow. We climbed over the mound and took the road toward a column of gray smoke over the bony treetops.

  A quarter mile down Gochie Ford road, we heard a gunshot. Audrey and I ducked into a ditch and hid in the snow. I spread out flat and raised the Winchester. I scanned the sky, the woods, and the road in a Z-pattern. I felt Audrey shaking, but I’d forgotten what fear was like. I’d forgotten what cold was. I told it all to shut up. To carry on. To survive.

  Scanning the woods, I saw the hunter. He was leaned against a tree aiming near us, but I could tell he didn’t know where we were.

  I fired at the tree. Splinters exploded into the hunter’s face. He shot blindly and I ducked. Snow scattered over our heads. When the shooting stopped, I took aim again. I followed him as he moved cautiously over logs and took cover behind a large chestnut oak. I shot the oak twice to let him know I was tracking him.

  “I think I hear him yelling,” Audrey’s voice was louder than the rifle. I blinked. The tunnel disappeared. My ears rang.

  “Just leave us be,” he shouted. His voice was hoarse. “Take what you want, but leave us alone.”

  Bolstered by his fear, I stood up from the ditch and crossed the road into the woods. I stopped at the chestnut oak, grabbed the muzzle of his rifle, and aimed it at the top of the tree.

  “We don’t want anything,” I said. “What do you want?”

  He was a seventy year-old man with no teeth and a .247 deer rifle, a massive scope mounted to the top. He was silent.

  I took out the cigarettes and tore off the cellophane. “You want one?” I offered him the pack. He took a cigarette, propped it on his lip, and eyed me as he dug a silver Zippo from the breast pocket of his coveralls. He held out the lighter in his liver-spotted hand. I took it and lit my own. I put the lighter back in his pocket.

  He took a long drag. The ash plopped in the snow. He pointed behind me. “Who’s the lady?”

  I turned. Audrey stood in the middle of the road holding her arms tight across her chest.

  “That’s Audrey. I’m Jack.”

  He gave me his hand. “Sewell.” He squeezed hard.

  We followed Sewell into the woods. He gracefully stepped over fallen trees, stumps, tangles of roots, and dead shrubs. It felt safe to follow him. Safe to talk to him.

  We came to his small hou
se after a fifteen-minute jaunt. It was clad in unpainted board and batten siding. It had a porch, a raw patch of mud for a yard, and a stack of firewood around the perimeter. On the porch he had a wood rocker with several swatches of leather stapled to the seat.

  “I’ll bring you something to eat. Just wait here.”

  We sat. And waited. After several minutes, Sewell stomped onto the porch with two metal plates in hand.

  “Those are just lard biscuits. This coffee’s three-times reheated and cut with chicory. If you don’t like it, I don’t blame you.”

  We gorged ourselves on dry biscuits and weak coffee.

  He sat in the rocking chair listlessly turning his coffee cup between his legs.

  “It ain’t worth getting in them trucks. Wherever they take you, I don’t want to know. And I don’t want to go.”

  “Trucks?”

  “Sure, they just pile people in trucks and haul them away. They said I had a day to get my effects packed. To wait for the trucks at the gas station. I ain’t waiting at no gas station in the cold. Why don’t they let me be?”

  I shook my head. Audrey stuffed a biscuit in her mouth.

  “You know what all the fuss is about, I guess.”

  “Yeah,” Audrey said softly.

  “Why don’t you come inside?”

  Audrey and I followed Sewell into his house. Several crayon pictures were tacked to the wall. A stained and saggy couch was in the den. In the kitchen, a wood stove burned bright orange. He stopped at a door next to the kitchen and sighed. Then, he turned the handle and bumped the door with his shoulder.

  “It’s my wife,” he said.

  From the doorway, we stared at a heavy woman with her arms tied by leather reins to the bed, her face pale and stained with blood. In fact, the whole room looked to have been sprayed with blood—streaked on the floor, puddled near a washbasin, and spattered across the wall and window. The front of her nightgown clung to her skin. But she writhed. She was alive. She twisted and contorted her body in the restraints. There was no noise except the rustling of the sheets. Her eyes open and lifeless, she must have turned several days ago. I couldn’t imagine the struggle to get her tied to the bed.

  “She was ill a few days before she come out the room with a nosebleed. Worst I ever seen. When I tried to wipe it for her she bit me. Like I wasn’t—like she didn’t know me from anything.” Sewell unzipped his jumpsuit and revealed the wide bite mark on his shoulder. It had partially scabbed over and was deeply bruised. It was the color of eggplant. “That was two days ago. Seems by what I heard on the radio I ought to be like her now. But I’m still standing. Ain’t I standing?”