Buried.2015.03.04

by Michaelbrent Collings

  Besides, he didn't want to look too closely at anything. Didn't want to see if rot had set in. If the appendages were loose or rigid. Didn't want to see any of it, because it was all his friend.

  He had seen dead bodies. Too many –

  (her head splitting open with the axe and she was dead dead already she had to be dead because nothing could live after that)

  – but he had yet to physically handle one he loved. He wasn't looking forward to it.

  The ground near the canal was soft. Loose dirt under a thin layer of weeds that had already grown out of control. He unfolded the spade. The edges were sharp, the point a cruel triangle meant to hack through anything softer than stone.

  He planted the tool in the ground. Pushed. It went in easily, but he didn't kid himself. This was going to be a hard job.

  Assuming the zombies don't show up. Or Aaron. Or something else that will probably try to kill me just to get on the bandwagon.

  He levered the blade. Picked up a mound of dirt. Turned to toss it in the canal.

  Froze.

  "Thought I'd find you here," said Aaron.

  36

  The words came from a strange place. Down, toward the whispering canal. Spoken in a near-whisper, but there was no mistaking the rough tone of the cowboy's voice.

  Christopher turned a bit further. And even when Aaron moved, it took a few seconds to see him. It looked at first like a piece of the embankment simply detached and glided across the nearby ground. A strangely tiny fault line that ran along an unknown tectonic plate.

  Then the shifting ground humped up slightly, revealing Aaron's glittering eyes beneath a thick blanket of mud. Weeds sprouted from the mud, seeming to root in his flesh, and Christopher was suddenly struck by the conviction that this was yet a new kind of zombie. Not the live ones, not the ones that rose from the dead. This one was a thing half-flora, half-fauna.

  The plants and mud shifted a bit more, exposing Aaron's outline. He had been mostly buried in the mud for an undeterminable period, but it had been long enough that rain or dew or both had sewn him thoroughly to the ground below his makeshift camouflage.

  One appendage of Aaron's getup pulled away, a mixture of sucking and tearing sounds as mud and dirt separated from one another. His left arm.

  It ended in a smooth round darkness. A gun. It pointed at Christopher's face, and he remembered Aaron hitting zombies while hanging upside down in a dark elevator shaft, hitting other targets from impossible distances.

  "Don't run, okay?" said Aaron.

  "I wouldn't dream of it."

  Christopher tried to sound flippant. But his voice cracked. He thought he might piss his pants.

  Aaron moved the gun toward Christopher. And he knew he was a dead man.

  36

  Then Aaron stopped. He stood slowly. Put the gun in the waist of his pants.

  "You going to bury him?" he said. Christopher nodded. "You bring an extra shovel by any chance?" Christopher shook his head. Aaron sighed. "Well that makes it harder, then."

  He looked around, then went to Ken's body. Grabbed the feet.

  Christopher didn't move. Didn't think he could move. What was going on now?

  "I'm not going to do anything," Aaron said a moment later. "I'll track you later, and don't you worry – I'll find you. But right now let's just bury our friend."

  37

  Hauling a dead body wasn't what he expected. Ken was loose, limp. Christopher would have thought that lifting something so unresisting would have been easy, but the body seemed to claw at the air itself, as though once at rest it did not wish to be moved anymore.

  It was heavy, too. Dense weight that dragged at Christopher both physically and mentally.

  He had never buried a friend before.

  Aaron seemed to know where to go. He pulled the body a dozen feet up the canal, to a patch of mud that looked tailor-made for burying a body.

  Christopher used the shovel. Aaron used his hands.

  "We can't bury him deep," said the cowboy.

  "I know," said Christopher.

  They dug. It took almost no time at all for Christopher's back to start aching. A dull roar that turned into a shriek in minutes. Then a kind of numbness, not just of body but of mind.

  Aaron dug his hands wordlessly into the mud. His right hand was a mass of broken bones, fingers crushed by one of the many attacks the group had endured. But he didn't make a sound, moving handful after noiseless handful of thick black soil. The shoulder of his shirt was stained black with old blood, but a moment later it was red, dripping.

  "You okay?" Christopher asked. The words came without thinking. Just one friend – one brother – to another. Aaron nodded but didn't stop digging.

  Digging.

  Digging.

  Christopher wondered where Amulek was. If he was just waiting for Aaron to make a move, or if he could even see them.

  And on that thought another pair of hands joined them. Brown, callused. Amulek dug into the dirt as well.

  "You the one who shot me?" asked Aaron. He didn't stop working.

  Amulek didn't respond. Didn't even acknowledge Aaron's existence.

  "He doesn't talk much," said Christopher.

  "So I see."

  "He wasn't the one who shot you."

  "Too bad. It was a good shot."

  Digging.

  Digging.

  Digging….

  The hole deepened and widened, and at the same time the world seemed to contract around them. Every time a stray sound drifted toward them, Christopher stopped and raised his head. The third time he did it Aaron looked at him and said, "I haven't seen any of the big groups. Just a couple little ones – five, ten."

  "What were they doing?"

  Digging.

  Digging.

  Digging.

  "Don't know. They seemed… lost. Like they were wandering around with their heads cut off, pardon the expression."

  "What about Derek? Or that big sonofabitch that bit him?"

  "Nothin'."

  Digging.

  "You worried about the girls?" said Aaron. "Or you think they're fine and dandy?"

  Christopher thought of the two facing off. Of Buck and Sally. He nodded. "I'm worried." He knew what Aaron was doing: trying to turn him, trying to put an enemy in the survivors' circle. But knowing didn't mean it wasn't effective.

  What if Aaron had been right? What if Theresa and Elijah had been right? What if the girls had to die to save the world?

  "Yeah, I'm worried about them," he said again.

  He caught a glimpse of Amulek looking at him. Didn't know if the look was approving or disproving, and figured it was useless to try and figure the human equivalent of a fortune cookie kept in the middle of Fort Knox.

  "Me, too."

  Digging.

  The hole was deep enough that the edges were at the level of Christopher's thighs. Aaron climbed out. Christopher and Amulek followed. Aaron took Ken's feet again, and once more Christopher took his friend's hands. Cold. So cold. Ken had hit him over and over with those hands – each time unintentional. The others had laughed. Christopher hadn't laughed, and it hadn't seemed at all funny at the times. But he would have given anything for Ken to jerk up, scream "Just kidding!" and sock him again.

  His friend didn't move. And that was well enough, Christopher supposed. The dead moved in this world, but it was never funny. It was serious. Deadly.

  That was the way of things now.

  Amulek stood slightly apart. Didn't help now, just watched. He seemed to know that he wasn't the right one for this part of the task. Christopher had read somewhere that in many primitive cultures only the family was permitted to bury their dead. And doing this he found out why: it was terrible, hard, heart-breaking.

  It made him feel better.

  He was the one to lower Ken into the ground. To cross his friend's hands over his chest. Ken still wore the tatters of his shirt, the one that had seemed so incongruous in this new order of
things. Long sleeves, with “I went to BOISE and all I got was this STUPID SHIRT (and a raging case of the CLAP)” written across it.

  Christopher kissed his friend's cheek.

  Cold.

  It was a goodbye.

  Before the dirt even began to rain down, Christopher understood why those old cultures did this. Why new ones lost something when they delegated burials to machines or to professionals who felt nothing for the ones they buried. Ken was gone, but he was at least truly gone. He among so many seemed to have found a final peace.

  Wasn't that worth something?

  Aaron worked again in silence. No complaint, no sound of pain or even discomfort.

  Who is this guy?

  The same question – all the same questions. And even though Aaron had tried to give them some answers when they were his captives on a speeding train, still nothing made sense.

  The girls – were they really the key to all this? Aaron seemed to think it possible, and Theresa and Elijah believed (had believed, in the case of the now-dead Elijah) it a certainty.

  What do I believe?

  He didn't know.

  Aaron was staring at him. Christopher realized the burial was over. Words had been spoken, but he had no real recollection of what they were or even who said them. Just that they were the last words. The final words that marked the end of a good man, the end of one of the few remaining good things.

  "Goodbye," he whispered. Then it was over.

  He looked at Aaron.

  "I'm not going to do anything," said the cowboy. "Not even if Robin Hood here wasn't waiting to put an arrow in me."

  Christopher looked. Amulek had an arrow nocked and ready. It was pointed down, but there was no doubt he could bring it up and fire it in an eyeblink. Faster. And Christopher suspected that in that same eyeblink he could bury the other arrows he held in his draw hand in whatever target he wished, near or far.

  He nodded at Amulek. The kid responded by utterly failing to relax or move in the slightest.

  So much for me being the head of this expedition.

  "Still," said Aaron, "I was wondering if we could talk."

  38

  "Is Theresa alive?"

  It seemed a silly thing to ask, but also terribly important. Like everything in this new and horrible world, it wasn't – couldn't be – just plain good. There wasn't anything "plain good" anymore. Just good mixed with bad… and bad-straight-up, on the rocks, 200-proof and ready to lay you flat with a single sip.

  Still, he wanted to know. Theresa had struck him with… well, love at first sight seemed a bit of a stretch. Particularly since there was that troublesome incident where she had him and his friends at gunpoint and threatened a pair of little girls with death.

  But still….

  He had felt something. Not love at first sight, but stupid at first glance? Certainly that, at least. She was utterly not his type. No trim athletic build, not a blond with a fast look in her eye. Not anything he liked. She was a redhead. Chubby. An attitude that made it clear she was used to leading any dance she deigned to accept.

  And he had felt like asking her out the instant he saw her. Only the fact that all his usual haunts were either rubble or populated by monsters kept him from doing so. "Hey, would you like to fight your way to Starbucks and have a coffee if there's any left and if we don't die first?" seemed a too-strange date offer.

  He remained tongue-tied.

  So the question "Is Theresa alive?" meant little. But everything. Because he had wanted to hold her from the first moment. More than that.

  And if there were feelings like that, if he could still find interest – even in a tough-talking woman dressed in body armor and with a cruel scar wrapped around her neck – couldn't the world be saved? At least a tiny corner of it?

  Aaron nodded. "Alive. Ken gave her a good thrashing, though. She's holed up right now. On some antibiotics." He grimaced. "I do think it a bit odd, truth be told. Something infecting everyone's mind, and we keep worrying about gangrene or blood poisoning or whatnot." A bigger grimace. "Hell, doesn't seem like losing a limb makes much difference these days."

  Amulek shifted beside Christopher. Get on with it.

  "What do you want to talk about, Aaron?"

  Aaron pulled a hand over his forehead. Wiped away sweat. It was dark out. The middle of a farm next to a canal that whispered in the black. Shhhh, shhhh, shhhh. Christopher could barely make out the movement, the stars the only light available. But he saw the motion, saw his friend's shoulders sag.

  "I want this over, son."

  "Yeah." Christopher had to struggle not to let his shoulders drop, too. "Yeah."

  Aaron took a step toward him. Christopher heard the creak of Amulek's bowstring tightening. He held out a calming hand.

  "No one's going to make a move, Amulek."

  Aaron stopped and looked at the teen. "Amulek, huh?" he said, as if that meant something particular to him. A nod. "You can calm your hands, son," he said. He gestured to the slightly darker patch of dark ground that marked their friend's grave. "There'll be no fighting from me. Not here."

  The string creaked again. Lessening tension.

  Aaron looked back at Christopher. Starlight glimmered, and for a moment his face was clearly visible. "But wherever you are, there's going to be action. I think I'm going to have to kill those little girls. And if you get in my way I think I'll have to kill you, too."

  39

  Christopher turned to sarcasm like a friend, something to enjoy good times with, something to hide behind when bad times loomed. It had been that way before the Change, it was that way now. He had one friend in a new grave, but his insulating sarcasm still remained, no matter what. "We locked in on the child-murder option, or is this something you're still spitballing around?"

  Aaron didn't laugh. Didn't smile. He stared, and the stare killed the laugh on Christopher's lips. It fell away stillborn. The night swallowed it.

  "I'm pretty locked in." Aaron passed his hand over his forehead again, and now Christopher realized it was the bad one. He had seen this before; wondered if Aaron was keeping himself awake through pain, or maybe just using the pain to remind himself that he was alive.

  One of the primary conditions of humanity is pain. Our pleasure bordered by darkness, our good defined by the ills around it.

  (birth by death, a tiny hand holding mine and a head split in two by an axe)

  "I don't want to do this, Christopher," said Aaron. "I don't want any of it. But the world's changed. And the only thing that stands out are the way the zombies act when the girls are around, or when their brother is."

  "Maybe it's just him, then," said Christopher.

  "You know it ain't. Not just him, anyway. They're all a part of it. You know it, you feel it." Aaron leaned in close. And Christopher knew he was right.

  The girls were part of what was happening. Not just the way all the zombies were. They were something special. They were changing in different ways. Buck had been attracted to Hope early, like a best friend become protective uncle. And now that Christopher thought back, the same had happened with Sally and Lizzy. He remembered the toddler asleep on the big cat, curled up on the furry belly of a predator that should have eaten her alive.

  And now it was more. The big man and the big cat were… what? Not mere protectors.

  Guardians.

  Of what?

  Royalty.

  The thing that had swung up and down a spine, in and out of this reality, pushed its way into its mind.

  "DIE AND BE REBORN AND LIVE FOREVER IN ME." That voice didn't belong to the spine-crawler. To the thing.

  Then what? What did it belong to? And what did it have to do with the thing that crawled up and down a too-small spinal column?

  They went together. Dream, nightmare, reality. It was all coming together. Converging to a point that would not merely change, but completely and finally convert the world to something horrible and alien… something anathema to all things that made
this place home.

  "What would you want me to do?" said Christopher. He couldn't believe he was asking. Couldn't believe, but also saw no other choice. He didn't know if he would do what Aaron asked, but he had to know.

  Aaron opened his mouth to speak. Hesitated. Shook his head. His eyes glimmered like two more stars, fallen to earth from the heaven but still somehow bright and hallowed.

  He inhaled.

  Then flung himself backward.

  Whatever he had been about to say disappeared. Swallowed in the scream that came out instead, by the ground that hitched under his feet.

  By the thing.

  40

  The zombies weren't static. They had changed, and continued changing. Fast but stupid at first, then slowly growing even faster, and much smarter. Teeth and hands and feet were their weapons in the beginning, but soon they could puke acid. An acid that – near as Christopher could tell – ate through anything and everything. Indeed, it was such a strong solvent that every zombie he had seen vomit up the stuff had practically dissolved under the power of the black liquid.

  Then they added another liquid to their arsenal. Bilious, nasty goo. Not used to destroy, but to build and heal. They secreted yellow pus that could harden into mortar that they built into walls – using human body parts as the bricks – or to heal impossible wounds.

  And they got still smarter.

  They stuck to slick vertical surfaces with some kind of suction that Christopher couldn't pretend to understand.

  Then their bones and skin shifted. Some of the monsters –

  (my baby)

  – had developed jaws that split into three or four segments, then vibrated so rapidly they could chew through steel.