by Ann Christy
I can almost forget the deaders for a few minutes as we get back on the road and head toward the highway. The sun feels warm on my face, but the temperature is perfectly balanced so that the riding is a pleasure. My leg muscles are warmed up, even after the rest we took, and for those few moments, I can convince myself that this is no different than a bike ride to a friend’s house on a Saturday afternoon. Then I see a pile of moldering deaders, whatever is left of their mouths around the rusting remains of a washing machine on the sidewalk, and the feeling disappears.
I pedal on.
Seven Months Ago - Booze Run
As Emily unloads the big tricycle and her backpacks, her face doesn’t break into its usual relieved-to-be-back-in-one-piece smile, and her motions are stiff with tension. After the last bag is transferred from her hands to mine, I can’t stand it any longer. It can only be bad news. I’d rather know what it is. If it’s just that the pickings are getting too slim out there for her to risk these trips, that’s one thing. But my imagination is blowing up the message sent by the thin, stretched line of her lips into something worse. Maybe a horde of in-betweeners headed our way with their dinner forks handy.
“What, Emily? Just spit it out,” I say, trying to sound very mature and not at all scared.
Her hands drop to her sides and she seems to sag a bit, her shoulders rounding in that way they do when she’s got something to tell me she knows I won’t like. I get the feeling she thought she was hiding whatever it was successfully. That’s sweet, but totally not happening. Emily is too honest, and she wears her thoughts on her face.
“I think I need to go back into town. There’s a crowd of deaders around the liquor store, the one near college park,” she says, her voice surprisingly calm.
We both know what that means. Something is alive inside that store. It’s probably just an animal but it could be a human. Emily is constitutionally incapable of leaving something like that unchecked. But, I usually hear about those events after the fact. That she didn’t go means there’s more to the story.
“And?” I prompt.
“There’s a big crowd of deaders.”
“Ah,” I say, because there’s nothing more I can say to that. “What do you want to do?”
She glances behind me quickly. Jon is playing in the central area at the rear of the buildings. This used to be where trucks came up to the various buildings, so it’s wide, and has good visual shielding from anyone who might pass on the street, be they human or otherwise. I know she’s worrying about him, about what would happen if it was just him and I left. And she’s weighing that against the possibility that there is a person, or more than one person, inside the store.
More people here would be good, but what if they aren’t good people? I know she’s thinking of that as well, considering every possible angle and weighing it against the moral leanings of her heart. And that one look at Jon tells me something else, too. She’s wondering if there’s another little kid waiting to be torn apart like Piper, Penny, and Jeremy were inside the apartment where she found me.
“You know I’ll back you, whatever you decide,” I add, looking straight into her face so that she knows I’m telling the truth. I am telling the truth.
Something shifts in her. It’s subtle, but there. She doesn’t stiffen so much as get her spine back where it should be, straight and tall. She’s going.
“I’m going to need a lot of bolts for this,” she says, resting a hand on the stock of her crossbow. It’s still strapped to her back on the sling that lets her spin it around with remarkable speed.
“Alright,” I say, then hold up a dented can of ravioli from one of her bags. “Let’s eat first, though, shall we?”
*****
She prepared me for an extended absence, taking pains to say I shouldn’t worry if she doesn’t come back for a few days. While I know she’s a planner and not someone who acts on sudden impulse, I also know that she’ll likely change her plan to reflect the situation once she gets there. Deaders are somewhat predictable, but the humans—or animals, because that’s still the most likely scenario—inside the store won’t be. That much pressure might cause them to make a break for it, or the situation might be too much for them to handle.
It’s dark tonight, with little in the way of moonlight to help her in her tasks, but it doesn’t help us back here at the warehouse either. Usually, one of us keeps watch for a while or sleeps on the roof if the weather is nice. When she’s gone like this, that’s not possible. I can’t leave Jon alone for that long. Instead, we’re cooped up in the tiny, windowless office with an LED lantern sending its harsh white light around the room.
I’m tense and Jon is picking up on that. He’s being fussy, which is very unlike him. The blocks he’s playing with become missiles that he sends around the room when his uneasiness rises in response to mine. It doesn’t help that he’s got a molar coming in, so his mouth is sore.
I pull him into my lap and rock him, almost as much for me as for him. We should both be asleep by now, or at least lying down in the dark, but I can’t bear it yet and I know I’ll just have to get up again for Jon.
He resists at first, cranky and fidgeting, but then I start to sing one of his favorite bedtime songs. As always, I have to sing it very quietly, but it works. He settles, nestling into my arms in the way he likes best. When his thumb finds his mouth, he jerks it away as the soreness of his tooth makes sucking his thumb unsatisfying. After a few minutes, the lullaby over, I keep rocking him in hopes that he’ll drop off to sleep, but he doesn’t.
Instead, he looks up at me and asks, “Em?”
Despite the situation, I can’t help but smile at him. We’ve been concerned that he’s developmentally delayed. He walked at a normal—or at least I think normal—time, but he’s reluctant to make noise of any kind and that includes speech. He’d barely begun using Sam’s name when Sam went in-betweener. And even though I’d been acting as his mother since he was a few weeks old, he’d never said my name at all, only squeezing his little fists at me with a grunt when he wanted something.
But in the year and a half since we’ve been here, with safety and regular meals and a dose of sunshine every day—assuming it’s shining—he’s blossomed. His size, his skin tone, his level of alertness and yes, his communications, have all improved to such an extent that it surprises me to look at him sometimes.
“Emily is going on one of her trips. She’ll be back,” I whisper, trying to push back my nervousness on that score and sound confident.
His little brows, so dark they look like someone drew them on with magic marker, come together and there’s doubt in his eyes. He’s too young for that kind of uncertainty, so I smooth the space between his eyebrows with my thumb and keep smiling. Either he’s too tired to carry on asking or he’s satisfied, because he snuggles down more comfortably into my lap and closes his eyes. Within a few minutes, I see his lips part in sleep and his heavy baby breaths begin.
I lean back against the wall, careful not to jostle Jon, and settle in for a long night. There won’t be much sleep for me tonight.
*****
It’s strange to think it, but by the morning of the third day, I’m actually okay. Even little Jon isn’t asking anymore, simply choosing to go about his toddler day as he normally would. If he’s noticed the time passing, I can’t tell. I’m glad he’s still little.
She said she’d be back after no more than three days, so she’s either gone or on her way. There’s no rule that says that’s true. She could be laying somewhere, suffering but alive. I don’t think so, though. Emily would blow her own head off her shoulders or take a head-first dive off a building if that was going to happen. No, she’s either dead or on her way back.
I hope she’s on her way back. I hope.
Today - Farmer John
Riding along the highway is hair-raising for the first hour or two. Deaders are everywhere. They litter the roads, lay in piles under trucks with their faces glued to the undercarriage
s, or wander about in random directions. After the first fifteen minutes, our tag-team approach of one set of eyes on the road and one set ahead of us goes by the wayside. It’s all we can do to keep up with weaving around debris and deaders.
Lucky for us, they are so slow they almost look like a slow-motion movie.
Once we hit that stretch of houses, we speed up and spend a lot of time looking over our shoulders. The houses are older, but were well kept until this happened. Not one of them looks inhabited. They could be, but if they are, whoever is inside has taken pains not to be seen.
A tiny commercial area comes up almost too fast. It’s the center of some old, little town that used to exist before the city we live in stretched its arms to enclose everything. An old-fashioned clapboard gas station and a matching grocery store put some perspective on how people shopped before we got used to having everything the minute we wanted it. An antique store—or maybe junk shop—looks interesting, and a row of offices in a one story building fill out the rest of the commercial properties.
All of it is abandoned, windows broken in most of them and the grocery store clearly emptied out a long time ago. Drifts of last fall’s leaves lay piled up inside the askew doors. Deaders are thinner on the ground here and I’m guessing that this whole area was deserted before everyone was killed off. I hope that wherever it is they wound up, they’re safe there.
Just as Charlie said, the land goes rural almost immediately after that. It’s all farm houses and barns set well back from the road, long untended tobacco and cotton fields fronting the properties. A few years of winter and summer have left the old plants to stand as fossils of their former selves. In some places green spots show where self-seeding has perpetuated new generations. We both look at those with care—since we also plant food amongst weeds—but it’s all cotton, tobacco, real weeds, and kudzu as far as either of us can tell.
Along this stretch, we also keep our eyes tuned for anything that looks both orderly and green. A farm is a great place to get stuck if you can defend it and have the freedom to grow food. This land is fairly flat, and we should be able to see any evidence of organized planting on a large scale.
There’s nothing except the occasional burned barn or house and a whole lot of vines. Some of the houses have already become living mountains of greenery. Old school telephone poles are totems of green leaves. It’s amazing, really. Kudzu was bad around these parts before. In the summer, you could almost watch it grow. Eradication—or at least control—was an invisible, but huge, part of our local government. A few years without those efforts has made some things almost invisible. It’s even growing over and through deaders, binding them in place better than anything I could do.
We see a few figures in the distance as we round a curve in the road. They are far into the fields and not together. The way they lope toward us tells me that they’re in-betweeners. But, they’re too far from us to cause alarm. It’s almost the opposite. In-betweeners with free reign means the chances of there being people nearby are far less. Anyone nearby wanting safety would take pains to get rid of them. No one likes a free-range in-betweener in the neighborhood.
We don’t take any breaks at all. There’s no place either of us feel is safe to do so. We do see some things that make us decide we should come back and take a look if at all possible. There’s a feed and hardware store that looks fairly pristine. For sure, the rodents would have gotten any feed corn or oats that people didn’t, but salt licks are something we would be very interested in. We also pass a row of silos, rusting and covered in kudzu, but still of interest. They might have something edible inside. Tons of soybeans, or corn, or anything edible would be a huge prize. It would be nice to find so much food that the logistics of carrying it home became our main problem.
By the time the sun takes its late afternoon dip, I’m exhausted to the bones and I can tell Charlie is too from the breathy shortness of his already abbreviated responses. His body moves from side to side with each push on the bike’s pedals just like mine does.
I push myself hard for a minute so that I can ride next to him, then ask, “Find a spot?”
He nods, but his face is grim. He’s the one with the map in his head, but the last sign we passed indicated the military base was still more than thirty miles out. To get around it to the hospital complex—which is also where the dental unit, regular medical unit and the base services like shopping are at—we have to travel all the way around the base and then go a little further out. We may have made our forty miles today, but not by much. I know Charlie was hoping we would be able to get much more, so that delays by the base wouldn’t be catastrophic.
We’ve passed the only town of any significance between us and the hospital, so we’re going to have to scope out one of these rural properties for a place to stay tonight. Charlie starts watching them with greater care, his eyes cataloging everything. I do too, but all I see is ruin. I don’t trust that though. From a moving bike and fighting fatigue, I could easily miss some small, but vital, clue. My butt bones hurt enough for me to make a bad decision and I know it.
An old three-story house—or two-story with a very tall attic—sits alone behind a huge field of skeletal cotton. There’s not much in the way of spontaneous crop seeding, just tall weeds. A few barns for equipment sit even further back on the property. We both slow at the same time, liking the way this house looks. Alone, tall and with nothing inviting about it, it’s just right for us.
“What do you think?” I ask, stopping my bike when Charlie does. I let out a groan of relief when I lift my butt from the seat. It’s like someone’s had my hips in a vice trying to bend my pelvis into a bow shape. When the pressure is relieved, it’s painful but in a different way. I do not want to get back on that seat.
Charlie seems completely normal, his body unaffected by the long ride. Still, he arches his back and groans a little as he stands astraddle his bike. That makes me feel a little less like a wimp. He considers the house and then looks around. This is an area thick with kudzu, though it’s still confined to the trees and the areas just beyond the trees. That leaves this house and the majority of the fields around it relatively open, but aside from the road—which is also slowly being consumed—we are in an island of trees and kudzu. No one could walk through those woods without being in real danger of winding up as kudzu food. It is late spring after all, and the vines are going crazy.
I can tell he’s going to say yes before he does and I have to resist the impulse to throw a fist pump, I’m so glad.
“Might as well,” he says, a little glumly. I’m not too worried about his disappointment at us not making more miles today. I’ve got cinnamon-sugar and a couple of pieces of Savannah’s delicious flatbread in my pack as a surprise. He’ll cheer up.
We circle the house in a wide loop, watching the windows for any sign of movement and checking the barns from a distance. There are the bones of some sort of large animal, many of them actually, in a pen by one of the barns, but no people or things that used to be people. There’s an air of disuse, of a place long abandoned and left alone.
Charlie and I share a nod and we move closer to the house, taking care to ride slowly and carefully, yet primed to take off down the rutted drive and back toward the highway at the slightest hint of danger.
The paint on the back porch railings is well on its way to peeling away, the gray of old wood peeking out from behind the once white coating. The steps are brick and the porch floorboards still a remarkably bright green, as if to defy the decay surrounding them as the house succumbs to the elements. Drifts of last year’s leaves, or maybe the year before or the year before, are piled up in the corners and against the quaint porch furniture. Just looking at the twin rockers set side by side is enough to bring up a smile. I didn’t know people still did such things. Did they use them or were they just for show?
The boards creak, so we stop and wait for any response from inside. I think I hear the faint scritching of claws, but they are small cla
ws, like those of a mouse. I’m not worried about a mouse.
After a few very long minutes standing still while my sit bones ache and complain, Charlie nudges me with his elbow and whispers, “I think we can try to go in. Ready?”
I nod, reseat my crossbow in my arms, feel for my bolts and take a deep breath. We have a system for clearing, so I know what to do. The catch is that unless we’re in a subdivision with only a set number of house models, each place will be different and until we’re actually inside, we can’t know exactly what steps will need to be taken.
Of course, we also have to have an unlocked door. Which, in this case, we do not.
We look at each other and then at the offending doorknob. It’s not like we haven’t had it happen before, but most places we go through have been looted at least once, or were checked and abandoned. Half the time the doors are hanging off their hinges or simply standing open. This orderly locking business is unusual.
“Windows?” I ask with a shrug.
We each move to one side of the door toward the windows framing it. At my window, old-fashioned lacy curtains obstruct the view, but only partially. Inside is a cheery room, a table covered by a runner bright with some sort of yellow flowers, a milk jug centered on it filled with brown stems. The kitchen beyond the table seems neat and un-ransacked, the cabinets all closed. There’s even a little dish towel folded neatly over the sink.
I look at Charlie and after a moment, he looks at me and whispers, “Nothing. Want to go in?”
We try the windows all around the first floor, but they’re all locked. The front door, which we would normally avoid because it’s visible from the highway, is also locked. For some reason, the idea of busting a window bothers me. This house seems intact—at least for the moment—and I hate the idea of messing that up just so I can get some rest.
Some impulse makes me pick up the flower pots set on the stairs, a pair on each step of the front stairs. Under the second one, I find a key. It’s been there so long the outline of the key has eroded into the step.