by Ann Christy
I scoop it up, and say, “Bingo!”
“Shh,” Charlie hisses, but he’s grinning at the find all the same.
Inside, the house smells liked cooked dust and very old decay, as in a body. We both tense at the smell and shift back into a more alert mode. We turn back to back and clear the open spaces to either side of us. Nothing greets us and there are no tell-tale deader sounds.
The bottom floor is almost one big ring of rooms around a typical old farmhouse staircase to the second floor. Through the front room, we pass into another big room that might have once been closed off as a bedroom, but is now a family room. Beyond that, to the right behind the enclosed stairwell, a door to the basement is latched from the outside, but not in any particularly alarming way, just a normal latch. Then to the right again, there’s the kitchen, which is huge, and beyond that, the dining room up front.
That’s it. Everything is neat and well-tended, though covered by enough dust to tell me that this house hasn’t had anyone bustling about inside for a long time. At the bottom of the stairs we look up and listen, but there’s nothing.
Charlie goes up first, the old stairs creaking a song so loud it’s wince-worthy. The smell is stronger at the top of the stairs, but not fresh at all. Old death smells a lot different than new death. It’s no less noticeable, but it doesn’t cause that instinctive retching a week-old body in summer will.
Five doors surround a big square open hallway, all of them closed. But again, nothing is out of place really. Even the little rug on the central hallway floor is still straight. The first room is a bedroom turned office, farm paperwork and an old computer on top of a desk, along with a couple of chairs with brightly patterned cushions on the seats. At the second door, I know we’re in the right spot as soon as the door cracks open.
The scent billows out into our faces as we ease the door open. The master bedroom clearly, it is still occupied by its former masters. Curled up on the bed, I can see the back of a man spooning a smaller figure. He’s been there a long time, at least a couple of years.
When we move toward the end of the bed, I see who he is spooning. It must have been his wife, though she has no head to speak of. The towel covering what is left of the head is stained brown and almost flat, the lumps underneath very small. I can guess it’s his wife by the primly tucked nightgown and the plain, gold wedding band between the large knuckles on the remains of one hand.
The man is as rotted as his wife, but his white hair still clings to his clothing and the pillow under his skull. He’s wearing overalls. Honest to goodness overalls.
“I don’t even want to know,” Charlie says.
“I think we can guess,” I reply, and flip my bow to my back. I walk out, quickly check a door that I’d guess is the bathroom—it is—and look in the tall cabinets. There’s a neat stack of ironed sheets and I take one back to the bedroom.
When Charlie just stands there looking at the people, I say, “A little help here, please.”
He starts, shaking out of whatever dark thoughts had him there for a minute, and we lay the sheet carefully over the two people in the bed. I take the woman’s side and I can tell by the way the towel is laid that someone smashed her head to a pulp. I can guess what happened. There’s a bottle of pills on a nightstand on the man’s side of the bed.
“What were those?” I ask, nodding toward the bottle.
He tosses it to me over the two bodies. I give him a look, but he’s already turning away. Sleeping pills. Yes, I can guess what went on here and I feel terrible that this man had to do what he did, and I understand why he decided sleeping forever was the better option after having done the deed. The name on the bottle reads, John Farmer. It’s almost too much of a cliché, but it’s real, and that just makes it sad.
Unless we want to bury the couple, there’s not much we can do for them anymore. And, even if we had the time, I don’t think it would be a kindness to take them from this bed where they’ve been together all this time. We leave the room, closing the door behind us as if to respect their privacy while embraced in the intimacy of death.
Such delicacy doesn’t last long for me though. The first thing I want to do after hearing the click of the latch on their door is to search their house for anything I can take to help me on my trip. There is a shotgun in the office closet, but no other weapons that I can find and there’s no ammunition at all. There’s also not a scrap of food in the house except a single can of beans in a cupboard with a note.
One last can of food. It’s not much, but if you really need it, I hope it will help you survive another day. If you don’t really need it, save it for someone who might. God bless you. J.F.
Tears well in my eyes to see that note, written in the hand of an old man, schooled during a time when handwriting was graded and judged, the fine loops and curls eroded by aging joints. I place the can back inside the cupboard carefully, ensuring the note is under the can exactly as it was before.
We decide to take the attic and use the latticed vents as our place to watch from. They have screens, which is good, because at least the mosquitoes won’t bedevil us all night. Without saying anything, we move to the side of the attic that isn’t over top of the bodies in the bedroom below to lay out our sleeping bags. Charlie keeps watch, moving from vent to vent to get a good initial view of our surroundings while I get dinner ready. Charlie turns as the scent of flatbread hits him and he finally smiles again, the strained lines from what we found below easing some.
By the time we’re done eating and the sunset is glowing red and orange, we’re okay again. Farmer John—John Farmer, doesn’t bother me so much anymore. What a strange world we live in where that could be true.
Seven Months Ago - A Bite or Two
“These look pretty good, Emily,” I say, dabbing at her various scratches and bites with a cloth dipped in vodka while she lays belly down on a sleeping bag. None of us is really sure if vodka is any good for disinfecting, but they always use booze in the movies so we figure there must be some truth to it.
“I almost wish they would get infected,” Savannah murmurs as she peers at the deep bite on Emily’s lower back. I give her a look, which makes her blush and look away. “I just mean that then we could be sure there weren’t any of those things inside her.”
Emily pulls her shirt down, giving all the signs that she’s losing patience with my tending, so I hurry and dab at the bite on her ankle before she can sit up and pull her legs away. She does just that and I keep making jabs at it while she moves away like I’m the mom and she’s an unruly child unhappy with the stinging.
“It’s fine, V. I’m fine!” she insists, batting away my hand.
Savannah and I share a look but I don’t know her well enough to be sure what her looks mean. What does that particular look mean in her lexicon? It looked like an “Oh, well, what can you do?” look, but it might have been a “Stop pestering her already” look.
“Fine,” I say and start packing up the medical kit, putting aside the cloths to be cleaned and boiled.
Emily eyes Savannah then seems to decide something. She says, “Listen, you can’t make judgments like that. You can’t make decisions about who is safe and who isn’t based on stuff like whether or not their wounds are healing.”
“I’m not saying anything bad about you. I’m not suggesting anything,” Savannah breaks in, her face alarmed. That’s an expression I can understand easily enough. It means she’s afraid we’ll send her out after Emily nearly got herself killed rescuing her a week ago.
Emily holds out a hand to stop her. “I know. Just listen. What I’m saying is that there are so many different kinds of nanites that you can’t tell who has what. The First Responders do one thing, the Heart Insure do another, the ones for diseases, the ones for Alzheimer’s—they all do something and you can’t be sure which cluster you’ve gotten from any single bite. Heck, you might get none. All I’m saying is that you can’t tell who has what. It’s best not to make assumptions.”
“Or better yet, just assume everyone has everything,” Charlie adds as he walks up to the loading platform where we’re clustered as we tend to Emily’s wounds. He plops down next to Savannah and bumps her with his shoulder. She gives him a tentative smile in return.
I’m still not sure what I think of these two new people. After a week, I probably should have some idea, but it’s hard to get used to having more people around. It’s amazing how a person can get used to such a restricted existence and then, when something comes along to ease the restrictions, actually resent it.
It might be Savannah’s age that does it to me. She’s older and she acts it, like she’s the expert on life before things went wrong. But really, she was a college student. How much could she know? And she was getting a literature degree. How does that prepare you for flesh-eating formerly dead folks? Answer: it does not.
That’s catty and I know it. I just need to get used to another opinion mattering. And Charlie is another problem. He’s a guy. Until now, we sort of didn’t have to worry about stuff like stripping down to wash or hanging our increasingly ragged underwear along lines all over the warehouses. It was just Emily and me and little Jon, and he still poops his pants sometimes so he’s got no room to complain if I fart after dinner. But now there’s this guy. And he’s just a year older than me and it’s making me nervous and self-conscious. I’ve not cared about whether or not I get a pre-menstrual zit on my nose, or if my hair is washed, or even if I comb it once between washes—I mean, really, once you put it into a braid, is there any actual reason to take it out until you wash it again?
Now, there’s a guy. A cute-ish guy. I’m not sure how I feel about this at all. Except, of course, life is much easier already and I can sleep through the night every other night. That’s awesome.
Emily coughs a fake little cough and when I look over, I see her and Savannah looking at me with identical smirks on their faces. I was staring at Charlie. I could pretty much sink into the concrete right now.
“I was just thinking about assuming that everyone has everything,” I lie.
It works, because Charlie says, “That means anyone who dies is a danger. That’s how I’m looking at it. If anyone here gets really sick, I say they should go into that cage over there. So I, for one, am glad she’s not getting any infections.”
Emily gives a start at his words, looks toward the dim area beyond the open loading bay door where the cage is, then quickly away as if seeing that enclosure of chain link is somehow painful to her. I know she had someone in there because I saw her cleaning it again and again after I first got here, but the others don’t know that.
“I’d agree with that,” Emily says, and makes to get up from the bag.
Savannah stops her with a hand on her forearm, the only place she isn’t scratched or bitten. “No, you stay still for a while in the sun. It’ll help. Or, at least, you being still and not getting dirty will help.”
At that, Emily huffs and flops back down. I stifle a grin. I’m not the only one having trouble adjusting to having more people around.
Jon toddles over and sits down on her sleeping bag. “Squish,” he says, which means he wants her to move over. She does and he lies down in the crook of her arm.
So, this is it, I think. This is what family is like.
I guess I could get used to it.
Today - Deaders, Deaders, All in a Line
I thought it would be painful to get back on the bike, and to be fair, there was a tender moment between my butt and the bike saddle when I first climbed on, but overall, it’s fine. We make good time and the vast empty stretch as we near the military base gives us a little relief from the constant watching for any sign of humans or non-humans.
As the highway widens and we get nearer to the city, the riding is easier and the number of deaders actually diminishes. I hadn’t expected that. I’d thought that a few hundred-thousand inhabitants going in-betweener would have meant we would wind up sneaking through as quietly as possible.
Sam once told me that the military bases were still going after he holed up. He knew because he saw their trucks and plenty of neatly uniformed people going out and mowing down in-betweeners in the streets with gunfire aimed with peculiar precision at the heads of the afflicted. That’s how he figured out that it was the heads that needed to be destroyed in the first place, he’d said.
The problem was that the military simply shot everyone they saw, not because they wanted to kill people, but because it wasn’t always easy to tell who was an in-betweener and who wasn’t. Back then, they were still wearing their clothes and seasons outside hadn’t taken such a toll on their bodies. There were only a few times that Sam was ever able to make contact safely, and each time they told him the same thing.
Stay put. Stay hidden. Take these supplies. We’ll get this sorted out. Be patient.
But, by the time Sam found me, there were no more such forays and I never once saw a truck—military or otherwise—enter within viewing range of our windows. And I’d joined him and the other kids just a few months after things happened, when Jon was still tiny and drinking from bottles made with formula labeled as disaster relief supplies. So, the military must have been working for a while, just not long enough.
With tiny kids in his care, there was no way for Sam to bring all of us out here without being sure that the military was still around and helping those who might be left. We couldn’t have kept the babies quiet enough or moved fast enough to get here with our hides intact. There was simply no way to bring them to safety. Likewise, it was far too great a distance for Sam to go alone, not with us relying on his return. And once Emily found me, she didn’t believe there was anything at the military base except in-betweeners and deaders wearing military uniforms. And she wouldn’t hear of me—or anyone else—going there to find out, even to get help for her as she got worse.
We’re about to find out now. A sign almost covered in kudzu tells us to turn left for the main gate. Three miles.
Charlie let’s his bike roll to a stop and I pull up next to him. “Okay. Now we strategize,” he says, and reaches for the map. On the back of it there are a few blown-up sections of important things around this city, including one that details the area around the base. Inside the confines of the base, there’s nothing but green blankness on the map, but all that surrounds it—commissary, exchange, medical, visitor center, etcetera—are laid out in meticulous detail.
Heads together over the section, we both look down and then back up at the real world around us, trying to marry up the two visuals. I already know what we’re going to do, but I’ve mentioned before that Charlie is rather thorough about things, so I hold off.
“So, we need the old road that goes around the base, past the houses Emily talked about in that old neighborhood, and then onto the access road. From there, we just join up with the road that goes directly to the hospital. That sound about right?”
I nod and say, “We’ll be able to see the base near the flight line during part of our ride. I want to see if there’s anyone around.”
We share a drink of water, both of us tense now that we’re getting close to our goal. I’m afraid and I know Charlie is too, but we’ve come this far so there’s no going back. I’m not so much afraid of coming up on deaders or in-betweeners, because that’s our daily life. What I’m afraid of is what I might find. What if the hospital has burned to the ground? What if it’s occupied with a thousand deaders? What if the military is there and doesn’t feel like sharing any nanites?
We come upon the first pile of burned bodies a mile before we get to the turn off. It’s almost a little mountain really, at least two stories tall. It’s old, no longer stinking of decay, and only carrying the faintest traces of scent from the long finished burning. The forms inside the piles are black and gray and still, mercifully still. All of us know that burning works, but the amount of burnable fuel required and the resulting smoke means we don’t do that downtown. It’s not like there’s a f
ire department to come to the rescue if a fire gets out of hand.
Every block or so there’s another pile. Some are bigger than others, but even the smallest one must have a hundred bodies in it. I’m not stopping to count or anything, but that’s the impression I get. Charlie keeps searching the area as we ride, his lips pursed and eyes vigilant, but I can’t stop myself from staring at the piles. Who were these people? Were they from the neighborhood we’re coming up on or were they people who came here for shelter? Are they military members or civilians? The piles invite so many questions. At any rate, these piles explain why I’m seeing so few deaders.
Before we cross the main intersection that leads into the older housing development ringing one side of the base property—one that had been involved in many court cases over jet noise over the years—we settle our weapons more readily for drawing and check our loads to be sure nothing is hanging off or easy to grab.
“We go fast through this area. Okay?” I confirm, my nervousness showing.
Charlie gives me a grim nod, just one single dip of his head, and looks toward the street we’ll be going down. He’s readying himself for whatever gauntlet we’ll have to get through. I don’t think it will be thick with deaders or in-betweeners—thanks to those piles—but there could be people around. That’s what I’m worried about.
The neighborhood street ahead is lined with crepe myrtle trees. They usually bloom all summer here, making old neighborhoods like this amazing to see, covered in color. Even from where we are, I can see hints of hot pink. Though mostly green, the lack of tending and pruning means that they’ve gone wild and a few spots are blooming early. From here I can see piles of old leaves covering the sides of the road, masking any debris that might be waiting to pierce our tires or, even worse, rise up and try to grab us.