by Bryan Way
“A positive…” Mel starts, exasperated. “The only ‘positive conclusion’ is dying a quick, painless death…”
“She’s not wrong…” I interject, startling Ally in what appears to be a successful evasion from shattering her illusion that this too shall pass. “I think the day after might be a bit too soon to start, though.”
“Jeff… you scared me.” Ally begins. “And I don’t think you’re in a position to judge that.”
“I may not be.” I continue, sitting down. “I’m not a psychologist… and I’m as affected as the next person. But today’s Christmas. If it gives us a chance to unwind a bit… so much the better. Today, I think, we can take a break from our problems. There’s some value in that. We can get back to work tomorrow.”
“I’m not sure that follows…”
“Rich?”
“Seconded.” He affirms as Ally glances at both of us.
“I’m not sure either of you is in a position…”
“Ally…” Rich soothes. “You’re right, he’s not a psychologist… all the same, we’ve been trying to make decisions that are best for everyone…”
“But…”
“You know how people react when something like this is forced on them…” Rich asserts, raising his voice just enough to seem threatening. “Let’s avoid that, eh? We’ll discuss this as a group and put everyone at ease. Surely you’d rather have a group of patients…”
“Analysands.” Ally interrupts.
“Whatever… a group of people who want to be helped. Right?”
“I suppose… but…”
“So, tomorrow then?” Rich continues, uninhibited. “After breakfast you, myself, and Jeff here get together and talk about how to tackle this as a group.”
“I’m good with that.” I agree.
“Alright…” Ally sighs.
“Rich… me and Mursak were talking…” I continue. “We got a pretty big wave today…”
“Most I’ve seen since the big one.”
“Right… I was thinking about taking the cart out to have a look.”
“…now!?”
“Of course not. Just… with all the shooting and the helicopters… might be smart to see what’s coming. I was thinking about a mile in each direction, maybe less. No engagement… just so we can paint a picture of the worst possible scenario.”
“Seconded.” Rich adds thoughtfully. “I’ll go with you.”
“That… might not be a good idea…” I should have been better prepared for that suggestion.
“Why not?”
“Well… with Anderson out of commission…” I silently applaud myself for that bit of tap dancing.
“Right, right…” Rich moans. “Well, you’re the spotter on Alpha, Mursak’s the spotter on Beta, so who takes his place?”
“Oh, duh… well, Alpha’s not going anywhere without Anderson… Jake’ll do it.”
“If I ask him.”
“Touché.”
“I’ll come with.” Mel offers.
“Two’s plenty… we’ll keep our squawk boxes on.” I add, noticing a pointed glance from Ally. “Besides, Gamma’s gonna be on standby.”
“Then I guess I’m sittin’ around with my thumb up my ass.”
Mel claps her hands on the table, pushes herself up, and heads for the door while the rest of us watch.
“What’s eating her?” Rich asks.
“You seriously have to ask?” Ally sneers, her calm facade disintegrating as she stands up. “After last night? That’s just maladaptive coping…”
“…what?”
“She’s avoiding the situation…”
“…Ally, you haven’t been here long enough…” I start.
“That’s an understatement…” Rich continues. “She’s always acting like that.”
“That’s what I was getting at.” Ally stresses. “She hasn’t been coping with this from the beginning… and it’s just…”
“Ally…” I interrupt. “You misunderstand. I went to high school with her for three years. She’s always been like that.”
“…like that?”
“Absolutely. If you don’t believe me ask… ask Jake, or Mursak.”
Ally settles back into her seat thoughtfully. “C-…” She stops herself after a single syllable, exhaling as she stares into the table.
“So… when she wrung her shirt out in front of everyone…” Ally continues.
“Well… she’d never done that before…” Rich offers.
“Well, yeah…” I interject. “One time we were alone on the roof and she unzipped my fly.”
“…really ?”
“Yeah, really… why?”
“I just… uhh…”
Ally leaps up, and her meandering exit from the cafeteria is as long as it is unspectacular. Once she makes it through the door, Rich unleashes a derisive snort. Sensing an opportunity to cut off a series of comments I’d like to avoid, I seize the moment.
“So… I was talking to my friend Alan at Penn State.”
“Yeah?”
“He thinks the water is contaminated.”
Rich takes a moment to process this.
“Jesus…” Rich sighs. “What are they gonna do?”
“I dunno… how long can you last without clean water?”
“What’s ‘clean’?”
“Potable.”
“…what?”
“Potable…” I repeat. “They have to be able to drink it.”
“Obviously…” Rich snaps. “It depends on a lot. What kind of food and drinks they have, how they ration it, how much they’re exerting themselves… they could hold out awhile. What are their reserves like?”
“I dunno.”
“Do they have bottled water? Have they been bottling tap water?”
“I dunno.”
“Jeff…” Rich groans. “You’ve gotta ask those…”
“I know…” I interrupt. “Just give me a straight answer… assume the worst case scenario, where they don’t have anything else.”
“Did he say what’s wrong with the water?”
“It tastes bad.”
“Does it smell?”
“Rich, I’m on the phone with him for five minutes and he’s telling me one of his friends killed someone else in his group, I didn’t ask…”
“Oh, shit…” Rich mutters. “It’s falling apart.”
This grim assessment freezes my boiling temper.
“Alan didn’t sound like he was panicking…” I start quietly. “So it can’t be that bad yet.”
“They’ve got a week. Two at the most. After that they might as well be drawing straws.”
“…we can’t just let ‘em die.”
“Yeah… yeah…”
“I told Alan… we’d think about bringin’ ‘em down.”
I expect Rich to fly off the handle, but he instead lets out a huge sigh before responding.
“Alright… we’ll start by talking about it. What’s the best way?”
“Meet ‘em halfway? Reduces the risks for both of us.”
“How so?”
“If we make it halfway, we know there’s a safe way back.”
“Yeah… check the maps… let’s have a proposal by Wednesday.”
“Sounds good…”
I stand up, feeling as though the conversation has reached a natural stopping point. Rich disabuses me of this.
“Hey… you holdin’ up alright?”
“More or less…” I offer. “You?”
“Been thinkin’ about last night.”
“Yeah…”
Yeah. As soon as I say it, I consider what the one-word response is intended to address: killing a half-dozen people. The mere concept feels as though it should incur remorse, but I still don’t feel like I did the wrong thing. Perhaps the deaths of Julia and my brother sapped me dry. Rich looks at me as though he wants to continue, but it seems that my one word was the last one. After an appreciable silence, I exit the cafeteria
and return to my room.
Once there, I find myself waiting until the sky turns dark. The absence of the sun in winter feels as damning to the senses as the vastness of space; visibility is sacrificed for a clarity so divine it borders on spiritual. Since most of the lights have gone out, the sky is awash with a flawless expanse of stars, so much so that the densely packed band of our galaxy now glitters across the middle of the heavens. Seeing this as a perfect opportunity to offer my Christmas gift, I make use of the security office for an announcement intended to draw all who are interested up to the observatory in precisely twenty minutes. I use the delay to relocate and focus on Uranus.
Having already seen my gift, Mel offers to take the security post and check up on the kids, both of whom are sleeping. Having practiced it beforehand, I give them the same induction I shared with Mel and entreat them to share the lens. Rich, Jake, Rob, Mursak, and Ally are all enraptured, with Jake and Ally being moved to tears. Karen seems too distracted to enjoy herself and exits quickly, while Helen seems to find the gift unimpressive, referring to the astronomical display of a pale blue orb as impotent. Greased by Rich’s incisive application of vodka, I ignore her declarations and focus on the positives.
After an hour or so, we all help Rich and Karen move the king bed into room 222. The only downside to this room is the broken glass from the night we first escaped the high school, so we replace the shattered pane with cardboard on either side and carefully seal it with gray tape. Once we’ve furnished the bed with sheets, pillows, and a comforter, we help them move their essential supplies into the room and say goodnight, expecting to ignore any sounds of struggle.
The group breaks up and goes their separate ways. Mel ends up back in my room again, this time bringing every change of clothes she possesses. I consider probing her about this arrangement, but I can’t work up the courage despite the alcohol coursing through my veins. Before retiring to bed, I look at my call history to see what time Alan rang and find, to my surprise, that I attempted to call everyone I presumed was dead during the evening of my breakdown. I have only the vaguest recollection of this.
Content to shrug it off, I join Mel in bed. As we lay quietly next to each other, I consider how stupid it was to drink tonight, and how it would be foolish to do so again. Trapped in this thought, I find myself staring at the door. I’m sure I locked it, but if some intruder entered during the night, there’s no guarantee I’d be awake enough to anticipate an attack or manage to take arms before it began. I pull the covers up around my head and again drape my arm over my neck. Before I pass out, I manage to temper my own fear and admonishments by the fact that today is Christmas.
12-26-04, SUNDAY
My first waking thought concerns the fact that I’m sharing my bed. I turn over to see Mel sleeping soundly, glance at the locked door, and roll over to continue sleeping, but not before draping my forearm over my neck once more.
When I wake again, I have a lot of difficulty interpreting the sound that claps me back into consciousness. Finally, I manage to hone my battered mind to the point where I can identify knocking at my door. Considering verbal affirmation useless, I get up and hiss at the Gordian knot of nerve endings screaming in my lower back, jaunting over to find Mursak on the other side. “We’re under attack…” I start undressing before he can get another word out and have myself in suitable clothes just seconds later.
Mursak looks past me to see Mel in my bed and steps away, but not before drawing conclusions that are at least premature and more than likely patently false. “Meet me in the armory.” I say, just forcefully enough to get him going before returning to the bed. “Mel…” I say softly, grabbing my pistol from beneath my pillow. She rolls over and wrenches her eyes open. “Gamma’s on deck. Get ready.” She launches herself out of bed and starts grabbing a change of clothes as well. Mursak and I silently arm ourselves to avoid waking Jimmy or Elena, both of whom are being observed by Karen, and exit just as Mel enters.
“What’s the story?” I ask.
“About fifteen in all…”
“Zombies, right?”
“Yeah.” Mursak mutters.
“And Beta can’t handle it?”
“Rich wants you and me ready to move as soon as we’re clear.”
“Oh, okay…”
We arrive at the gate and exit to hear the familiar sounds of carnage; more specifically, the sound of melee weapons rending flesh and bone, accompanied as always by the lingering scent of the undead. By the time I’ve finished readjusting to the smell, the fifteen undead intruders are all finished off on the lawn, and I failed to get a chance to test my trench knife. After the always unpleasant tradition of clearing the bodies off the lawn, we repair to the cafeteria for some much needed vittles. I instruct Rich to go upstairs with Karen and await our delivery of a morning repast, as per yesterday’s promise.
Mursak, who has been practicing his espresso technique, processes some coffee beans with a hand-crank grinder taken from a box of kitchen supplies in my family’s garage, a score he received for Christmas when Anderson grabbed the picture of my family. Ally makes pancakes with some Canadian maple syrup while I prepare English muffins with cream cheese and blackberry jam. Jake heats up the remainder of yesterday’s bacon and sausage, and once the remaining condiments and amenities are arranged, we deliver breakfast in bed on some unwieldy lunch trays.
Rich and Karen, both in repose, smile broadly as we attend to their needs. Rich has apparently never tried cream cheese and blackberry jam on an English muffin and ends up shocked at the taste sensation. While taking another rapturous bite, he informs us that he intends to replace the tires on the bus before constructing concrete obstacles in the hallway near the gate for better cover. I insist that he relax and enjoy his breakfast first. Before we leave, Karen tells us that Rob, while watching an endless repeat of the previous news report, caught wind of a forthcoming live broadcast set for 8:00pm tonight.
Once we’ve left Karen and Rich to their devices, Mursak reasons that our set objective entitles us to the use of ibuprofen to aid our recovery. Ignoring his rationing insanity, we take the pills and split up to make sure our survival packs are up to snuff. Trying to think like a detective, I grab mentholated cream, notebooks, and pens, the latter two being something the high school unsurprisingly has in surplus.
Once ready, we put our radios on low and take the SUV out in two inches of snow, arriving at the community center in less than five minutes. As we exit the car, I look first at the small dusting of undead milling about the lacrosse field and decide they look too disinterested to warrant execution, so Mursak and I casually walk inside the community center, following the dark streaks of dried mud on the gymnasium floor to the locker room.
“Here…” I offer Mursak the tub of mentholated cream after applying a generous portion under my nose. My mom used to swab me with this when I was getting a cold, and the husky aroma proves useful in abating the scent of a rotten corpse. Keeping my hand clenched around my katana, I slink down the corridor and turn into the main component of the locker room, slipping a toothpick in my mouth before I catch sight of the anticipated cadaver.
Her body is in a depressing state of decomposition; a few insects scatter as we enter, leaving us to ponder the perforated skin, vestigial eyes, separated scalp, stained clothes, and visible bone structure. The blood stain on the wall has flaked into squares, giving the appearance of a riverbed caught in a drought. In spite of this sight, I’m most disturbed by my foolishness in ignoring the door immediately to her left; when I used to come here for recreation on Friday nights, that door was always sealed, so in my mind it simply became part of the wall.
I step over a cockroach and work the handle; the knob opens easily. Mursak glances cautiously into the dark hallway as my hand tightens around my katana. The silence and scent indicates that this passageway is free from the undead. “Well… my estimation of what happened just got thrown out the window.” Mursak nods, covering his mouth as he follows me throu
gh the offices into the back of the gymnasium.
“Okay… where to begin…?”
“Well…” Mursak sighs, pulling out his notepad. “Tell me how you found her.”
“She was sitting there with a Glock in her hand, looked like a cop’s gun… she hadn’t been dead long… the shower’d been run, and the door was barricaded from the inside. I guess… I thought she was trapped and killed herself. But there weren’t any Zombies outside when we showed up, and now I know the door behind her was open.”
I shake the handle of the door in question, pulling it open to reveal the unmarked wood on either side. “And not a scratch on it…” I mutter, walking past Mursak and around the corner to the main door. “This one’s scuffed up but good.” I return to the site of the body as Mursak writes on his pad.
“So, let’s assume Rob killed her.” He says flatly. “He sticks the gun in her mouth, pulls the trigger… runs the shower, puts the gun in her hand, and barricades the one door to make it look like a standoff?”
“But why the scratch marks?”
“Maybe some got in.”
“But, uh… I mean, people are always moving stuff in and out of here… tables, chairs, benches… maybe those scratches were already there?”
“Inconclusive. What about the room you found him in? Any supplies in there?”
“Why?”
“If his story checks out, he had to be there for days… if there were two people, she may have left something behind.”