by McBain, Tim
Minutes of laughter went on as he crossed the city. When he tried to fight it, his belly shook, muscles flinging out laughs beyond his control. So he didn’t fight it, tried not thinking about it at all, and that seemed to help some. He thought he might be calming down, might be on the verge of curbing the laughter, when he came upon a park, a monument of some kind with a column in the middle of it and a statue right up front.
The sculpture depicted a revolutionary war hero on horseback. He raised his musket over his head, and the horse reared its front legs in the air. Someone had taken the time to chisel the soldier’s head off, his neck sheared off in a jagged cement line, turning him into a headless horsemen. And then someone — perhaps the same someone, he couldn’t be sure — had glued or otherwise adhered a giant black dildo to the horse’s groin so that it jutted out at the most pornographic angle possible.
He buckled at the knees in disbelief, and the laughs jerked out of him. Violent, unpleasant laughter with no end in sight. It almost felt like his eyes sizzled now, some high voltage juice cooking them in his head, making them itch and sting. He crouched on the sidewalk for a long time, tears drizzling down into the garbage. It felt like the whole universe had conspired to force him to laugh indefinitely. That somehow this had to be on purpose. It couldn’t just be a coincidence. Some higher being was setting all of this up for some sadistic purpose he couldn’t understand. And who knew what would happen around the next corner, what insane image would pop up the next time his chuckling slowed?
He pinched his eyes shut all of this time, afraid to open them, to look at the headless horse cock again. He tried to focus on breathing, on inhaling through his nose and exhaling through his mouth. It disrupted the laughing, at least a little, which felt like a victory.
And images came to him then. Memories of things he’d seen. Movies that seemed to move in time with his breathing. He saw the politician shove the gun in his mouth and squeeze the trigger. Saw the blood drain out of the hole in the roof of his mouth like water spiraling out of a bathtub faucet. And then he saw the soldier’s heads, the backs of their skulls like always. And he watched them come apart in slow motion the same as all the other times. First the left and then the right. The exploding brains. The spray of blood and bone.
And it was funny this time. All of it was hilarious in that moment like some violent cartoon, cruel without seeming real at all, pictures obscene to the point that they’d almost lost all meaning, but for some reason he wasn’t laughing anymore.
He stayed squatted on the sidewalk for a long time before he wiped his eyes and moved on.
Navigating the blocked up bridge was easier than he had anticipated, which didn’t bode well for finding useful items on the other side, in his opinion. The mustache guy – Rick or whatever – had made it sound as dire as possible, like the Francis Scott Key Bridge was some impenetrable line of defense in some way. He had almost imagined himself scaling walls and 20-foot chain link fences topped with barbed wire. But he walked over the bridge with relative ease, climbing over the hood of one car and weaving around several others. Nothing major.
The water from the river gushed out into the bay, babbling beneath him as he walked over the bridge. He liked the white noise it provided. Made it seem less lonely somehow.
He walked the final straightaway, the final 200 feet of bridge offering no significant obstacles, and he was now able to see the other side. A row of toll booths guarded the rest of the peninsula, and a sprawl of brick buildings looked almost connected to that. Houses stood further back nestled in clumps of trees, and looking beyond them, he saw fast food signs and gas station awnings stretching out into the distance. Lots to check.
He thought about Dalton as he walked, thought about how everyone loved the preacher, how Lorraine loved him. Nobody cared that he had been a fraud before all of this, a con artist who had funneled tens of millions away from mostly poor, uneducated people. Nobody cared about any of that. They wanted to believe, and so they did. And he thought that maybe all of this, everything that happened – the plague and the zombies and the riots that had conspired to wipe everyone out – had changed him, had forever altered the person he was. But it hadn’t changed people in any general sense. They were the same as they always had been, still lining up in droves to get duped by cheats and hucksters and coming away happy with the experience much of the time.
And it hadn’t changed his world. He still sat alone like he always did. He still dreamed of connections that forever lay behind doors sealed closed.
His shoes clapped the ground louder as he descended the sloping asphalt that trailed away from the bridge, gravity wrestling his feet out of his control some. His heels and ankles had grown a little sore after all of this walking. Crazy how quickly those muscles got soft again, got weak again. Atrophy undid all the hardening he’d undergone over the past year, wiped most of it out in a month or two.
He followed the highway as he was instructed, six lanes that ran right along the bay and kept him far from any of the buildings he’d seen on this side of the bridge. It was hard to resist the urge to leave the road, cross a little grass and start poking around, but resist it he did. He was to stay on the highway until he could take a sharp left heading north, and there his scavenging would begin in earnest.
The wind blew in and the top of the water rippled. It lapped against the sand and the scraggle of weeds along the shore. No choppy stuff. No waves like the ocean. The water was mostly still. Like a lake, or at least it sure looked that way at the moment.
The left turn came and he took it, walking along a stone divider wall meant to block out traffic noise he supposed. The street ran under an overpass and opened up in a residential area. The asphalt was narrow, almost more like an alley than a real street.
A church took shape in the distance, and dirt driveways gashed brown lines into the grass, running down toward houses. In no way did this look like anything he’d seen in the city. A circular driveway led into a cul-de-sac of tiny brick homes, most of them with bags of garbage sitting out by the curb that would never get picked up. A few of the bags were ripped open, their entrails trailing out of them, but it was almost shocking that raccoons, cats, and dogs hadn’t even bothered with most of them.
He didn’t really know where to begin. So he picked a house at random and went for it.
Erin
Valley Grove, West Virginia
262 days after
Erin jabbed a finger at the fraying hole in the knee of her jeans. Great. They’d barely been on the road for a week, and her clothes were already falling apart.
It was their first break since crossing the West Virginia state line. Even though it was an invisible boundary and essentially a meaningless one now, it still felt like it meant something. She was leaving her home state behind, and she wondered if she’d ever come back.
The sewing kit was at the bottom of her bag, and it took a minute of digging to find it. She pulled out a needle, holding it in her mouth. Her thread options were red or white, neither of which would blend in with the dark blue denim.
Beggars can’t be choosers, she thought, and picked red.
“Erin.”
Erin could only grunt in reply as she measured out a piece of thread.
“Hey Erin.”
Erin pulled the needle from her mouth.
“What?”
“Would you rather have no bones or no blood?”
Erin wet the end of the thread with her saliva and slid it through the eye of the needle.
“Would I what?”
“Bones or blood. You have to get rid of one. Which is it?”
“What the hell kind of question is that?”
“Language.”
“Hell is not a swear word. Did you know there’s a town in Michigan called Hell? If people can live in a place named Hell, then it can’t be a swear word. You’ll notice there’s no Shitsville, Ohio or Fuckwad, Nebraska.”
Izzy turned to Marcus.
“Erin h
as a potty mouth problem.”
Erin saw the way the corners of his mouth lifted into a smirk.
“I’ve noticed.”
When Izzy faced Erin again, her face was all business.
“It’s a scientific question.”
“You know, the human race has basically gone extinct, and there are rotting corpses gallivanting around eating what’s left, but I still get my balls busted on a daily basis for using a few four letter words.”
Izzy leaned in Marcus’ direction again.
“She’s not answering the question.”
“I noticed that, too.”
“Fine! I’ll answer your stupid question.”
She waited a beat, knotting the end of the thread. The hole in her pants looked like a gaping mouth. She smooshed the two denim lips shut with one hand and passed the needle through with the other.
“What was it again?”
“Erin!”
“OK, OK. No bones or no blood? Wouldn’t I basically die without either?”
She stitched through the fabric, pulling the thread tight. Her work wasn’t pretty or neat, but hopefully it would hold until she found a new pair of pants that fit.
“You’d just be made different. Like if you had no bones, you’d be like a worm or a slug or something.”
“A worm or a slug? No, thank you. I pick no blood, then.”
Izzy’s hands slapped the tops of her thighs.
“You can’t pick like that!”
“Why not?”
“You’re supposed to think about it and then decide.”
Erin tied off the end of the thread and broke it, returning the needle to the sewing kit.
“I did think about it. I thought about how I don’t want to be a gross slimy thing slithering on the ground like a worm or a slug.”
“You don’t have to be a worm or a slug. You could be a jellyfish. Or a squid.”
“OK, how about this. You name something that has no skeleton and isn’t a slimy blob, and I’ll consider it. But until then, I pick no blood.”
“You’re wrong.”
“How am I wrong? I thought this was one of those questions that has no wrong answer.”
“Nope. There is a right answer, and it’s ‘no bones.’ Ask Marcus.”
Erin blinked at him, and he shrugged.
“She’s right. It’s ‘no bones.’”
“You’re both weird.”
Decker
Dundalk, Maryland
295 days after
So far, the houses here all smelled like mold and soup inside. A little like goat cheese, maybe. It made it harder to imagine rummaging anything of great value from them, like one part of his brain was convinced that anything he pulled from one of these places would forever have the taint of goat cheese stank on it. So why bother, right?
He unlatched the gate in front of the next house, passing through it on his way up the front walk. It was a red brick home with white shutters, same as the rest of the neighborhood. Cookie cutter perfection. Walking the perimeter of the house, he found a propane tank still attached to the grill on the back patio. That was something. He’d leave it for now. Get it on the way back.
The stock of his rifle plunged through the back window. The glassy explosion rang out, the sound violent against the endless quiet all around, and the shards of glass tumbled away when he pulled the weapon free. He swiped at the opening, running the gun around the edges of it, clearing away the rest of the glass, and then he climbed through.
The shade inside sucked a little color out of the world, tinged all things a little gray. He’d landed in a child’s bedroom. A pink and blue bedspread adorned the twin bed, and toys cluttered the floor. Ripped out pages from coloring books hung on the walls. He stepped over stuffed animals and blocks.
Through the doorway, he found a hall and passed through that into the living room. Junk cluttered the surfaces here. Mail and fast food wrappers and coffee mugs with brown rings running around the rims.
He scanned for signs of prior scavenging, but it was hard to tell for sure. All of the houses so far, this one included, had been messy, but was that due to someone tossing the place or had the prior owners merely been slobs? He couldn’t say.
He glanced into the kitchen and did a quick sweep, poking his head in every room on this floor – another bedroom, a bathroom and a den or office of some type. Nothing grabbed him, at least not on this first pass. No gun closet or rack. No overwhelming stockpile of food or fuel.
He paused at the threshold where the kitchen and living room transitioned into each other. Swiveling his head to one and then the other, he chose the former. He’d dig in a little bit down here before he swept the rooms upstairs.
Sifting through junk in these houses brought back its own set of memories. He remembered handling that gargantuan ring of keys, unlocking each and every apartment in his building. He’d stalked from door to door, unsealing tombs, plundering and pillaging anything of use – food, shoes, a water filter, his machete. Just shy of a year later, he was still creeping into houses to look for loot, still doing the same thing, still spinning in the same place. Wasn’t a man’s life supposed to go somewhere?
There were cans of food in the cupboards – beans, corn, and a bunch of Chef Boyardee ravioli. More than a case worth, it looked like. That would certainly suggest the place hadn’t been picked through just yet. In fact, all of the houses had some food in them. Not as much as this one, but some. Weird.
He stopped, gripped his jaw with his fingers and stroked his beard as he considered what this meant. Something about all of this wasn’t quite adding up. They said it would be hard to get here. It wasn’t. At all. And yet they were right that these houses hadn’t been ransacked as yet. How did that make sense? How could they completely whiff on the cause and yet still make the leap to the right conclusion?
He counted up the cans and marked them on the ledger he had folded up in his pocket just as he had at the houses he’d already checked. Then he pulled the can of paint out of his jacket pocket and sprayed an orange “F” on the front door. For food.
The upstairs held nothing of value. Bedrooms with dirty clothes strewn about. The soup smell was stronger up here, overpowering the goat cheese smell. Something savory. Maybe creamy. Familiar but hard to place. He wanted to say clam chowder, but he knew that wasn’t quite right.
He replayed the briefing in his head as he walked outside and moved to the next house. Mustache Rick jabbed that pencil at the blue pushpins again in his thoughts, and they talked about the bridge and the congested traffic and the propane and the hostiles.
Hostiles? They hadn’t gone into great detail on that subject, and they were covering things so quickly that he didn’t get a chance to ask. Maybe that was why nobody had cleaned this area out. The hostiles.
But then, why wouldn’t the hostiles come get this food? It wasn’t like they could be scared of themselves. He considered the notion that perhaps they weren’t huge fans of Chef Boyardee Ravioli and smirked. And then another question occurred to him: When Mustache Rick told him these things about the bridge and un-scavenged areas, was he misinformed or was he lying for some reason? And if it were the latter, what could the goal have been?
Something stirred in the bushes of the house ahead, leaves rustling, branches shaking. A figure stood, head and shoulders rising up out of the green. It was a man.
Or at least it used to be.
Baghead
Little Rock, Arkansas
9 years, 128 days after
Smoke hung up above them now, just above the line where the tops of the office buildings cut off. It looked less black up close, Baghead thought. More like intermingled shades of gray that braided around each other endlessly.
The smell of it was everywhere, on everything. The smell of burning garbage, melting tires, plastic weeping into puddles. He could imagine smelling it on his clothes, on the bag that covered his head, weeks from now. But no, it seemed more intrusive than that, he though
t. Beyond merely clinging to fabric, the smell was inside his face, it felt like. Like bits of ash had entered his nostrils and nestled down in his sinus cavity to stay a while.
The wince and gasp ahead of him shook him from these thoughts. It was the man, the stranger. He’d stepped on a rock with the arch of his bare foot and flinched, shoulders jerking, a little injured gust of air sucking between his teeth, the hiss wet with saliva.
The man walked in front, Delfino’s shotgun pointed at his back.
Watching the shotgun bob along behind this figure, Baghead couldn’t help but picture fire blasting out of the muzzle, the man’s back torn open, bits of meat and bone and lung flying out of the exit wound where his chest used to be. Jesus, hopefully it didn’t come to that, he thought. He grit his teeth, not realizing he was doing it until that little grinding sound came out of his mouth.
He took a drink of water just to stop his teeth from grating against each other. Lukewarm liquid flooded his mouth. It had a mineral aftertaste to it he couldn’t place, one that lingered on his tongue long after each swig. Not so bad as sulfur but not too far off from that. Sort of like drinking out of an old bathroom faucet, he thought. Still, he’d had worse.
The water sloshed in the bottle as he let it dangle back at his side, and his eyes drifted to the shotgun again. The weapon jerked a little as Delfino scratched his shoulder.
Baghead checked his own gun, nestling his wrist at the bulge of metal tucked into his pants. Still there, of course.
A squeaking noise in the distance reminded him of his surroundings. They were in the city now. Ruined buildings hunched around them sporting busted windows and saggy postures. A few had crumbled to varying degrees, cinder blocks and bricks piled where walls had once stood. Most of the rest had stair-step cracks running from their gaping window-mouths out to the corners – the places that would eventually come apart revealing themselves early, foreshadowing their demise.