Notes from a Necrophobe

by T. C. Armstrong

  “What I want to know is, what would bring them out?” That sounds like Nemesis’s voice. “We were all at the dance, so it had to be something the soldiers did.”

  Everyone goes quiet for a bit. We’re all thinking of what the soldiers could have done to bring out the dead.

  “There might be something…” says my brother. “I was dancing with this girl and making small talk. She asked me what I’m good at and I asked what she’s good at and she said she has exceptional hearing. She then leaned in to me and whispered in my ear: ‘In fact, I swear I can hear a truck engine under all this music.’ I thought she was being weird at the time and decided I wouldn’t dance with her again, but now that I think about it…”

  “The soldiers might have been trying to use the dance to cover up their getaway,” says Doom.

  Whoa.

  “But there were soldiers stationed at the doors of the gym! Do you think they’d volunteer to be left behind?” snaps Kaboom.

  Ghosts sounds like he’s thinking aloud when he says, “We need to start storing things up here and make a plan to retreat, just in case.”

  “Now look who’s overreacting!” says Doom. “They didn’t leave us, they’re still here! And retreat to where? The only place we can hide is up here!”

  Hey, that’s not true! If they’d only ask me, I could show them plenty of hiding places. Oh, wait. They’re the kind of hiding places that would only fit me.

  “What makes you think we need to get ready to hide within our own refugee center?” Nemesis doesn’t sound like she’s having a go at Ghost. She sounds worried…and a little frightened.

  “I think last night was a dry run for when they do plan to leave.”

  I remember hearing the trucks start up every now and then after we got here. Houston told me they needed to run the engines sometimes to keep the batteries from dying out. Sometimes we’d see the big army trucks driving around the inside of the compound. That is, I think they’re army trucks. They’re army color, but they have no army symbols on them. They looked like little forts on wheels with all their extra metal bars over their windows and stuff. They’re so big and solid; I bet they could drive over a hundred zombies! It used to make me feel good to look at them ‘cause I thought that if things ever got really bad, we’d have a safe way out of here. We could get to the next refugee place without getting killed.

  I don’t feel good about them anymore.

  GHOST

  We’re back in class again. I would have preferred one of Mr. Cromwell’s lectures, even though they’ve been watered down since he was called to the General’s office. I wish KC were here with me. She makes the funniest comments, even if they can be a bit biting at times. I like the looks on the faces of the survivors when we’re studying something like hand-to-hand combat. I especially like it when she flips one of Buck’s goons on his back with one sweep of her leg and knocks the air out of them. She truly enjoys this class, and it’s always more fun to be around her when she’s in a good mood. She’s at the top of her game here; the drifters have all dropped out, which means the only ones left are the ones who show promise. It would be my favorite class too, if it wasn’t for the fact that I feel it’s being used to turn us into future soldiers.

  But KC has been asked to help out in the kitchen today, (“After they taste my cooking they’ll never ask again!” she laughed as she left for KP duty) so that leaves me with, well, a bunch of guys. There’s not one girl left in class. Wait, check that; today’s class is being taught by the disarmingly pretty psycho-spy. I’m not sure why she’s teaching today, but I’m guessing we won’t be learning how to take the heads off of dummies with a bat.

  She opens class up with a loaded question. “Who shall we save?”

  There’s a lot of muttering and murmuring at this. Kaboom is the first to answer. “What? Are you kidding? We save everyone!”

  The muttering and murmuring intensifies in volume, but not in coherence. “Everyone?” she asks with a raised eyebrow. “Are you sure about that?”

  “Of course! I couldn’t live with myself if I left anyone behind.” Kaboom sniffs. He’s clearly not comfortable with where this is going.

  She looks at me. “And what about you, Ghost? Would you save everyone?”

  I take a deep breath and say, “No.”

  Half the class gasps, the other half appears impassive. “What are you thinking?” cries Kaboom. The Psycho-Spy ignores him and asks, “Who wouldn’t you save, Ghost?”

  “Those who want me dead. And those who are a threat to others.” That silences the shocked, and the rest nod in agreement.

  Psycho-spy presses on. “Do you think you would be capable of killing someone?” Everyone leans in to listen to me. I think of how I condemned that neighbor kid to die by leaving him on the Jeep’s roof. I think about what KC did for me and what I’m willing to do for her, so I don’t care if I scare the others as I answer, “Absolutely.”

  She seems satisfied and ready to move on to another one of her specimens. Her favorite specimen, to be exact. “What about you, Buck? There are not a lot of us left on this Earth. Should we save the remaining few?”

  “You know how I feel,” Buck says with an edge to his voice. “I think this is our chance to start again and get things right. There used to be the weak and the strong, but soon there will only be the strong and the dead. The whiney and needy are still holding mankind back from his true potential! This is just natural selection on steroids—if we don’t ‘man up’ we’ll be chased to extinction.”

  “I find that pretty offensive, Buck,” Kaboom retorts. “Don’t you think—” But Psycho-Spy cuts him off with a question of her own.

  “Do you worry about how that makes you look?”

  “Look around you!” Buck replies sarcastically. “Do you see any journalists? Any pundits? Any lawyers? If my attitude hurts your feelings it’s because you’re one of the weak, so I don’t want you around me anyways. What I care about is surviving, and I’m going to build myself a team of those who will help me do just that.”

  “And the others?”

  “Collateral damage…look…whatever. All I know is that my mother died trying to save someone not worth saving. It was a lady in distress, but she wasn’t even a friend, just a neighbor! She was old and slow and useless…and she got my mother killed. She wasn’t worth dying for.” Buck’s eyes soften as he mentioned his mother, but he quickly blinks the tenderness away and replaces it with his usual stolid mask. The room goes quiet as we find ourselves unexpectedly feeling something for Buck other than dislike and distrust. Buck isn’t looking back at anyone, he’s done.

  Doom’s the first to break the silence. “Well, I’m with Buck. I don’t feel like sticking my neck out for people who can’t take care of themselves, and I really don’t plan on putting my life on the line for people you can’t trust.”

  “Well, that would be a lot of people to you; you’re paranoid!” says Houston.

  Doom looks miffed. “The paranoid of yesterday are the realists of today.” He rests his head in his hands and stares at the floor between his feet. Now Doom is done.

  This is the most fascinating class I’ve ever attended! It’s also the most disturbing. I throw a monkey wrench into the discussions and ask “What about the children? It’s not their fault they can’t look after themselves.”

  Doom grunts. “There are no children here—our experiences have scarred us into adulthood.” Okay, I can see where he is coming from, but I don’t agree. I can’t help but think of the difference between Jesse—who looks for the fun in everything even if it takes extra-long to find it, and Sara, who is practically catatonic as she bears the full weight of her grief. If there was anyone here who could restore her childhood, they’d do it. Sarah’s acceptance of reality hasn’t exactly turned her into a more effective grown-up.

  “I think one of the biggest threats to our survival are the emotional ties that bind us.” Everyone looks up in surprise because it’s Puddles speaking. Apart
from that one time in the Dumb Luck Club, Puddles has never spoken. “Buck is right. It’s stupid to die for others because we feel sorry for them or out of a misguided sense of duty. That’s why I think we have a better chance of surviving here. We’re not burdened by family responsibilities. We’re free!”

  “You take that back!” shouts Neckless Neal. “I miss my family! I was a better person when I was with them. I’d do anything to get them back!” Buck gives Neal a harsh look, which shuts him up, but doesn’t stop him from glaring at Puddles. I can tell by other’s expressions they’re offended too. He better watch it after this class, Neal isn’t the only one who looks like he could pound Puddles.

  But Puddles doesn’t pay him any attention; he carries on talking like he just can’t stop. His eyes take on a dark and faraway look as he’s ambushed by a memory. His words spill out of him like he’s been holding them back a long time and can’t hold them back any longer. “I lost my mother too, but not in the way everyone else here did. The bus took me home on the Lost Day…”

  “Hey! I thought you were home-schooled!” interrupts Doom.

  “I was home-schooled till about a month before the Lost Day. My dad had been laid off about six weeks before and all he did was hang around the house and complain about how his life turned out. The longer he stayed the more he and my mom fought. My mother wanted to spare me from all the yelling, so she signed me up for school. It didn’t make anything better. Instead of one problem at home that I could block out with my MP3, I had a bunch of problems to torment me over my clothes, my name, my naïveté’… I certainly wouldn’t put my life on the line to save any of those guys, that’s for sure.

  “I arrived home on the Lost Day to find my father in a state of shock. He said that something happened to my mother. He told me the rain infected her when she went out for her morning walk and was shot by the soldiers.

  “My mother was my whole world. She was my teacher for most of my life and my best friend. Nobody loved me like my mother did, and now she was gone. I didn’t know how to feel. Apparently neither did my father. I never saw him cry. He just isolated himself upstairs with his books and his music.

  “My house turned into a sepulcher of silence. We never had a TV and my father took the radio into his room. What he didn’t know was that I had found a radio in the toolbox. It was one of those cheap little ones that you get free when you sign up for some magazine, but it worked. I listened to it in the basement so my father wouldn’t hear it.

  “I never liked the basement; it was always cold and damp, dark and creepy. I liked it even less then. It gave me shivers just to be down there, but I needed to know what was going on in the outside world. The problem was, I kept hearing this constant scratching noise against the floorboards as soon as I turned the radio on. It also smelled really gassy, like a leaking sewer line. I couldn’t mention any of this to my father or he would wonder what I was doing in the basement. One of the things I heard on the radio was that there was a problem with vermin because of a lack of exterminators. I figured we had a plague of rats running around in the crawl space under the house.

  “It all came to a head one night. The scratching sound was more intense and urgent than ever before, and I was scared those rats wanted in the house so bad they were going to scratch a hole in the floor big enough to crawl through. I would have run upstairs, but I felt I had to keep listening to the radio; it was talking about fires that were spreading across the city and it sounded like they were coming our way. I listened for suggestions of what to do from the emotionless announcer, all the while trying to block out the frantic scratching from below. Instead I found myself training my flashlight on the spot where the sound was concentrated, unable to look away and yet wishing I could.

  “I couldn’t block out what I could see: something was pushing the floorboards up. The light from my flashlight shook violently as I tried to get a hold of myself, and through the jittery light effects I could see a flash of white as it burst out of its wooden prison through a weakened spot between the floorboards.

  “I had never been so scared in my entire life. This was no rat; this was a skeletal finger. Its tip had been worn right down to the bone, both white and brown with dried blood. A ragged remnant of a familiar red nail hung limply from what was left of its skin.”

  “It was my mother’s finger.”

  Puddles pauses, temporarily lost in his thoughts. No one moves; in fact we seem to be barely breathing as we concentrate on his freaky story. We don’t dare to interrupt him. We’re both drawn in and repulsed by what he’s telling us. Yet I think we’re afraid to say anything that will make Puddles retreat back into himself. We have a sick need to know how this story ends. Puddles body seems to shudder and it looks like he’s gone as far as he can go with his story, but then he seems to rally and carries on:

  “Fear and revulsion left me. My mother could still be alive! I didn’t wonder about how impossible this could be, I was too filled with hope and longing to think straight. ‘Mom! Mom!’ I cried as I crawled over to her. ‘I can get you out!’

  “But my mother didn’t answer. I stopped short of that rotting digit as reality struck me between the eyes. All those times she was with me down here, she didn’t say a word. She never called out my name and she never asked for help. I could feel all hope drain out with that last thought. I had to fight back the vomit that was climbing out of my throat. My hands started shaking again, making the beam from the flashlight dance all over the place. I held it as tight as I could in both hands so I could shine it down through the cracks.

  “The milky sunken eye that stared back confirmed my worst fear—my mother wasn’t just dead, she was the infected dead.

  “But how? She was supposed to have been taken out by the soldiers! And even if she hadn’t, she couldn’t have got down there by herself! I tiptoed back upstairs to the toolbox to get the claw hammer and then slunk back downstairs to confront what was left of my mother.

  “The urgent scratching resumed, than stopped as I pried up a chunk of wood above the eyes. I managed to get enough of the floorboard up to see her face. It lifted its head to bite me and as she came into view, I could see how she died.

  “I guess on CSI they would call it ‘Blunt Force Trauma,’ but there would be no Crime Scene Investigators coming around to match the hole in my mother’s forehead to the blood-covered hammer I held in my hand.

  “My father was not an idiot. I don’t believe he was too stupid to conceal the murder weapon. It’s just that he no longer had to worry about getting away with murder. Why bother to hide anything? It wasn’t worth the effort to him. Who’s free to investigate the cause of death when the dead outnumber you ten to one?

  “I rocked back on my heels, away from the thrashing head that still struggled to break free from its wooden prison. I couldn’t hold the grief and the horror in anymore—I threw up all over the place and then rolled over on to my side to cry it all out. I wept and I sobbed until I could feel no more. I stayed curled up in a fetal position for hours, just two feet away from the thing that could not die. My father never came to look for me. He didn’t even notice I was gone.

  “As the sun came up through the dusty basement window I had a brief flash of hopeful inspiration. Maybe my father killed her out of self-defense when she returned infected from her morning walk! Maybe he buried her down where he thought I would not go, sparing me the pain of seeing her and knowing he was the one who had to end her! Maybe he was actually trying to protect me and was still suffering the loss of his wife in a drunken stupor.

  “Maybe my father cared for me after all.

  “But my hope was quickly replaced with despair as I realized how impossible that was. She wouldn’t be moving now if he had hit her hard enough with that hammer, and he couldn’t have pried up the floorboards and nailed them back in place with an unbound hungry corpse snapping at his hands. No, he had to have killed her as soon as I left on the bus, before my mother went on her morning walk. He put her under th
e basement floorboards and used the hammer that sealed her fate to seal her tomb. Then he put it back in the toolbox like nothing happened. The one thing he didn’t think about was the likelihood of the runoff from the rain flowing through the crawlspace and reanimating my mother’s corpse.

  “At that moment I lost everything I felt for my father, which wasn’t much. We were never close; he was forever cold and without affection. We couldn’t connect on any level; there was nothing we had in common. He wanted a jock for a son, but he got a sensitive artist instead. He blamed this and everything else on my mother. ’You’ve turned that boy soft with all your mamby-pamby new-age hippy stuff!’ he used to yell. He always seemed to want to be free of her. How long before he felt the need to be free from me too?

  “I wasn’t about to end up like my mother. I scrounged around the house to put together a decent bug-out bag and waited for the right time to go. I didn’t have long to wait.

  “The first sign was the fires that glowed in the distance. I watched over the course of two days as the smoke got closer and closer to our home. I waited until I could hear the screams from those fleeing the fires, and presumably the infected dead.

  “I took the claw hammer from where I had returned it. I had carefully placed it just how I found it so my father would not suspect anything. I descended the stairs to the basement for the first time since I found my mother’s body. I had made peace with what she had become, but I still wasn’t prepared for how much worse the smell would be; it was enough to make me choke and gag and forced me to breathe through my sleeve.

  “It had made scarce progress since I had last seen it. Its arms and hands were free, although the skin was almost completely worn away from its fingers. It paused in its struggle and turned its sightless sockets towards me. All I could do was wonder: Can it see me? Can it sense the hammer? It probably thought I was going to cave its head in and end its so-called life. It wouldn’t be hard to do since it no longer resembled my mother. In its advance state of decay the only thing that reminded me of her was her yellow sundress with the little red flowers, and even that was more filth than fabric.