Sparrow Rock

by Nate Kenyon

  We should have cleared the house first, I thought. Wasted precious time talking when we should have been making sure it was safe. I felt useless and stupid and furious with myself. There might be more of them; the house might be full of them, for all we knew, a buzzing hive of the infected, and we’d just stepped right into the middle of it.

  The smell was almost unbearable now. The lantern cast huge, misshapen shadows across the walls. One of the new arrivals was Sue’s dead grandfather. I could tell by the clothes he wore, but that was the only way I knew; the rest of him was unrecognizable. He moved more slowly than the others, a broken-down machine still driven to perform its function until the very end. His shirt and pants were darkly stained and wet with fluids. The damage to his face had become much worse as the rot had set in. His head was little more than a grinning skull, and what remained of his flesh was covered in a mosslike, fuzzy growth.

  As he turned to me, I shot him twice in the chest, and he went down easily, the insects already starting to boil out of him.

  The second figure was Jimmie. He was covered in sores, but from the look of him, he was still alive, at least in some form. There was nothing human about him though, not in the way he moved, or the blank stare on his face, or how his mouth was opening wider now, looking like a snake unhinging its jaw.

  The longer something’s dead, the harder it is for them to control.

  I wanted to feel some kind of satisfaction in figuring that out, but I did not. I listened to the hiss and pop of the valve in my mask and tried to settle myself. It didn’t matter. None of it mattered. I had just shot and killed my friend’s mother, faced the walking, infected corpse of her grandfather, and already I was moving on, rejoining the fight, feeling nothing but a numbness that had seemed to spread from my scalp down the length of my body, turning me to stone.

  What had I become? Some sort of monster? My best friend, here in front of me, who had begged for my help, and whom I had denied, not once, but twice, and all I could do was prepare to kill him like I’d killed the others.

  Like father, like son.

  Murder was nothing new to me. I thought of the jokes I used to tell, how clever I thought I’d been back then, how sophisticated and mature. I thought I knew loss, thought I had looked death in the face, had survived, and was stronger for it. I had known nothing.

  But there was no time for this, not now, not one spare second to question anything more. As Jimmie closed in on Dan and Tessa and the cloud appeared like a sinewy black tendril of smoke wafting from his mouth, I stepped forward and shot him in the head.

  The bullet entered just below Jimmie’s left ear, making a neat, round and nearly bloodless hole.

  Its exit, however, was considerably messier. Blood and bits of pink flesh splattered across the counter and cabinets, splashed and pooled on the floor.

  Jimmie’s head snapped sideways. He moaned, stumbled and slipped, and then fell with a loose-limbed crash, his skull cracking hard on the tile.

  I watched his legs tremble and twitch, making bloody snow angels. I shot him again in the spine, watching his body jerk and writhe.

  “Jesus,” Dan said. “Pete—”

  “Shut up,” I said. “Just shut the fuck up and put on your fucking mask.” My guts were churning, the numbness washed away all at once. Tessa was staring at me with a look I did not recognize. Was it a new respect, or was it disgust? I couldn’t bear the thought of her feeling that way about me. It was something like that red cloud that she spotted just now, the way fear could paint me into a corner and make me into a hero on the outside, while on the inside I was shaking like a little boy.

  Tessa saw through that, and it had never bothered her. She could see the weakness at my core. She knew the worst of everything, and she’d remained at my side all these years. But maybe something had finally changed. Maybe her eyes had been opened, while I felt like I were drowning, my head going under, and I had nothing to cling to and save myself.

  The pop-hiss of the valve in my mask had speeded up alarmingly. I broke her stare and looked down. Jimmie was shaking, his head tapping a violent staccato against the floor, his eyes squeezed shut tight and his mouth yawning open.

  I could see the hives opening up under his clothes, bursts of red soaking through the cloth as the insects began to chew their way out.

  Dan shouted a warning and I instinctively flinched left as something hit me hard from behind. I felt a biting pain and sudden warmth in my right arm. The weight slammed right through my kidneys and I went down, hitting the floor hard, a clattering sound near my head. As I lay there facedown and stunned, I felt a body on top of me, fists glancing off the sides of my skull, my mask wrenched free by the blows. I bucked and rolled, my ears ringing, got myself turned over and tried to grab and hold the arms that kept swinging at me.

  It was Sue, sitting on my chest and shouting at me as she tried to claw and punch her way through my body. I grabbed her as hard as I could and held her to me in an effort to protect myself and keep her arms pinned at the same time.

  “You killed her!” she screamed. “I hate you I hate you I hate you—”

  Her weight was lifted up and away from me all at once, and I lay there, gasping, my eyes watering, the pain in my arm sharper, a tightness and pressure like teeth clamping down. I glanced at the tear in my suit just above the elbow, blood seeping through.

  I pulled the fabric away from a long, thin slice through my skin, not deep enough to hit bone, but bleeding steadily. She had tried to stab me, and it was probably only the fact that she had lost the knife in the process that had kept her from finishing the job.

  “Stop it,” Dan was saying, as Sue struggled against his one good arm. He’d wrapped it around her waist, trying to hold her back, and I could see him wincing from the pain in his bad shoulder as he was jostled around. “It’s not his fault, don’t you understand that? He saved our lives.”

  I settled my mask back into place. I’d lost the flashlight and gun somewhere, and I sat up and looked for them, finally locating the gun against the kick plate of the counter near what was left of Jimmie’s head. He lay about five feet away, his entire body barely recognizable through the swarm of black insects.

  I picked up the gun, looked away quickly and climbed to my feet. “I’m sorry, Sue,” I said.

  She didn’t seem to hear me. She was clinging to Dan’s chest now, sobbing, while he held her in his good arm and stared at me over her head.

  I looked at him, and I knew, and he knew it too. I hadn’t saved him at all. He was sweating, and it wasn’t just from the suit. There were red spots across his neck, and I was willing to bet they were scattered across his body as well.

  It was true. Dan was infected.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

  “How long, do you think?”

  Dan’s voice held a strangely flat, emotionless quality, as if he’d already given in to the idea that he was going to die. He still wasn’t wearing his mask. The blood from his torn ear had dried now, but it looked bad.

  We were sitting on the floor in the downstairs den, our backs against the richly paneled wall, a beautiful handwoven Oriental rug under our feet. There were no windows in here, and it felt about as safe as we could get right now.

  “I don’t know,” I said. “It could take a long time. Maybe even long enough for us to get you to someone who could help.”

  I didn’t really believe this myself, and Dan just shook his head. “You can still make it,” he said. “I want you to promise me that you’ll do everything you can to survive. I don’t want it to all end for nothing.”

  “Look,” I said. “Stop the bullshit. We’re all going, we’ll get as far as we can, we’ll fight. We’ll—”

  “I’ll have to act long before that,” he said. “I can’t take the chance of…hurting someone.”

  I didn’t push him to elaborate. I knew what he meant. I stared at the elegant surroundings, the mahogany desk and leather chair and shelves lined with leather books, gold-leaf mirr
or and huge, colorful painting of a ship and white-capped sea that hung over the slate fireplace, statues on display that must have cost a fortune. All of it useless now. I thought about how I’d first seen Dan as a hero, and how I’d changed my mind somewhere along the way. I wondered if maybe I’d been a little too harsh in that assessment. He was still willing to die to protect us. If it came to it, I wasn’t sure that I could do the same.

  It was about three thirty in the morning. I found it hard to believe less than two hours had passed since we left the shelter, but a battery-powered clock on the wall confirmed it.

  After the fight in the kitchen we had retrieved our sacks quickly, and I had found some duct tape that I’d used to patch the hole in my suit. My arm had stopped bleeding, and I didn’t think I would need any stitches. I didn’t know if patching the hole would matter at this point. Whatever might have gotten to me in the past hour had probably had the chance to do its work. But I had to try.

  We’d done a quick sweep of the first floor and found nobody else lurking around, but we didn’t want to risk going upstairs. There weren’t enough of us to make that safe anymore. Sue was useless; she’d gotten into the scotch in her grandfather’s liquor cabinet and downed a third of the bottle before we could stop her.

  So we retreated to the study where the weapons cabinet and liquor were kept, and barricaded the door. We needed a little time to think and regroup, and this might be the last chance we got.

  “I’m going to my house first,” I said.

  My little surprise detour. I’d expected resistance, arguments, even shouting. But Dan just shrugged. “I figured you might,” he said. “It’s crazy, but it’s what I would do.” He glanced at me and then away. “You do know she’s dead?”

  I didn’t answer him. Of course I knew he was probably right, had to be. My mother was alone and damn near helpless, and it had been weeks since the strike. But I had to be sure.

  “It’s a dangerous road,” he said. “You’d be better off taking Route 1 to 95, head down towards Boston and then out 90.”

  “I was thinking up through Montreal. Stay north, where it’s colder. Better chance of losing the bugs that way.”

  “Either way,” he said, “going to your place in White Falls is a suicide mission. You might not even make it over the bridge. But I’m not going to stop you.”

  “I’ll need your help.”

  “You got it, for as long as I can hang on.”

  I hesitated. “You can really hear them? In your head?”

  He nodded. “It’s like a thousand voices whispering, but it’s not a language you can understand. It’s white noise. When you get closer to one who’s infected, they get louder. I think they can communicate with each other. I think that sound they make, it’s like a signal to join together. It…itches.”

  Hive mind. I shivered. “Are there others nearby? Can you hear them now?”

  He shook his head. “I don’t know.”

  Tessa was with Sue in the adjoining bathroom, using the water from the toilet tank to wash her face with a cool cloth, and the door was closed. I wondered if they were okay, and decided to let them be for now.

  “We shouldn’t have left,” I said. “I made a mistake. We should have stayed down there, where it was safe—”

  “No.” Dan shook his head again. “You’re wrong. We had to take a chance. You can’t second-guess yourself like that.”

  The house was too quiet. I never realized before how much noise a house made normally, the hum of a refrigerator kicking on, the soft tick of a clock, a furnace rumbling faintly from somewhere down below. Now there was nothing. Even the lantern we’d put on the desk made no sound at all.

  “You’ll have to take the lead,” Dan said. “Hell, maybe you should have from the start. I let you down.”

  “You’re injured,” I said. “Worse than any of us know, I think.”

  He waved away my comment with his good hand. “That’s not it,” he said. “You know, my father, he was a leader since the day he was born. He was made for it, and he figured I was too. The military was perfect for him, and I think he wanted me to follow in his footsteps. But the idea of it…that scared the shit out of me.”

  “Nobody wants to die.”

  “It’s not the battle. I’m not scared of that. It’s the idea of a whole troop of soldiers depending on me to make the right decisions. How can I lead them when I don’t even believe in myself?” He glanced at me. “With you guys, it was easy. Nobody challenged me, nobody saw through me and called my bullshit.”

  “You were a leader, Dan. We always thought of you as the strong one. You were the same way on the football field.”

  “That was different too. That’s a game, not life and death.”

  We sat in silence for a minute, listening to the noise of splashing water from the bathroom.

  “I always liked you,” Dan said. “Right from the first day we met. You were a little twitchy, you know? But there was something there, something harder than most of the other kids…something different. I admired it.”

  “You looking to get lucky or something?” I said.

  Dan just sat and stared into space. “You still don’t know much of anything, do you?” he said. “Clueless bastard.” He stood up and moved away, going toward the liquor kept behind glass doors.

  “Hey,” I said. “I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to come on so strong. We can slow dance first, if you want.”

  I regretted it, my old jokes feeling hollow and out of place now, even to me. But I could not change my own nature, any more than a river could stop running down-stream. Dan stood absolutely still for a long moment, and I thought he was still angry, but when he turned back, he was smiling.

  “Good old Pete,” he said, shaking his head and chuckling, and for a single minute it felt like the old days between us, and I half expected him to come over and give me a punch in the shoulder or a nipple twister or something equally painful.

  Instead, he poured me a drink, and I risked pulling the mask aside to take a long swallow. We toasted to life, love and happiness. If he thought it ironic, he didn’t let it show, and for that I was grateful.

  Somehow we drank more than we should have, and fell asleep. I woke up on the floor in the dark, with something brushing my face. My mask was off, but I couldn’t muster up the strength to care. I sat up.

  “Shhh,” Sue said. I felt her try to unzip the front of my suit, her fingers clumsy and shaking.

  My head was buzzing and throbbing softly, and the light from the lantern had been turned down so far I could see nothing but vague shapes.

  “I’m sorry about what I did,” she said. “I’m sorry I hurt you. I want to see your arm.”

  “Sue, you’re drunk.”

  I sensed her nodding in the slow, exaggerated way drunks do. She kept tugging at the zipper, getting it halfway down. “I am, it’s true. Aren’t you?”

  “You should sleep.”

  “I don’t want to sleep. I’ll sleep when I’m dead.” She giggled, put her fingers to her mouth in the dark. “Oops, did I just say that?”

  I put a hand over hers. Her skin was hot and sweaty and trembling. “You don’t want to do this.”

  She slipped to her knees in front of me, and I could barely make out the outline of her face, her hair and the slope of her shoulders. She didn’t move, or speak, and it took me a few moments to realize she had started crying again. I reached up and touched the tears on her cheeks, rubbed them away gently with my fingertips.

  “Remember when you asked me about those first few weeks after my father’s death?” I said softly.

  “You said you went to Florida with your mom.”

  “I lied,” I said. “I told that story enough times, even I started to believe it. But it’s not true.” I didn’t know why I was telling her this, but it just came spilling out. Maybe it was the drink, making my head fuzzy, or maybe I was just tired of holding it all in. Maybe it was time to finally let it all go.

  “I went t
o a facility. They said I had a…break. I don’t know. I don’t remember much of it.”

  “Shhh…” she said. “It’s okay.”

  “It’s not okay,” I said, alarmed to find myself close to tears too. “I should have told Jay about it. I should have tried harder to let him know that I understood how he felt, before—”

  “Don’t,” she said, a hitch in her voice.

  “I’m sorry, Sue. I’m so sorry.”

  “Stop it. Just be quiet.” She pulled at my zipper again, and I squeezed her hand.

  “You don’t want this,” I said again. But she shook her head.

  “Please, Pete. I…I do want to. I need to. I feel like I am dying. Please.”

  This time, when she pulled the zipper, I let her unzip me to the groin, and she helped me pull my arms out of the sleeves. Then she stood up slowly, weaving slightly in the shadows, unzipped her own suit and stepped out of it. The room seemed to rotate slowly around me as I felt my heartbeat thumping in my ears, watching Sue’s shadowy figure as she pulled the T-shirt up over her head, her soft, naked breasts catching the faint light for a moment before fading again into the rest of her as she moved closer.

  I wanted to stop her, wanted to hold her, make her feel safe and warm. I didn’t know what I wanted. As she pulled off her jeans and straddled my legs, reaching down and pulling me free, I thought about saying something important, something that would make her understand how I felt. She was drunk and in mourning, she didn’t know what she was doing. If this was her way of making something up to me, it wasn’t right. But I said nothing as her hand began to stroke me softly, and then nothing again as she lowered herself, opening her soft folds as I slid up and into her.

  She leaned forward and put her head on my shoulder, her breath shaky in my ear, and began to move up and down in my lap, slowly at first, and then faster, her warmth and slipperiness and friction building against me.

  I smelled her sex mixed with the sweat on our skin as her breathing began to speed up, and I held her tightly, my hands against her hot, slick back, her heavy breasts pushed against my chest. I thought about rain falling outside, not that dirty gray slush but a cleansing rain that washed the air clean, beating down the dust and broken glass and concrete. I imagined Jimmie and Jay, still alive out there, and that rain washing away their sores.