by Morris, Jacy
"I'm gonna be sick," Joan said, right before she noticed that Katie was bleeding. Panic welled in her, and before she could calm herself, she blurted out, "What the fuck is that?"
Katie looked down at her arm, where fresh blood flowed. "It's nothing," she said, attempting to hide the arm behind her.
"Nothing my ass," Clara said. "You were bit!"
"No, I wasn't," Katie stammered, fear making her eyes bulge as she gripped the pickaxe tighter in her hand.
"What do you call that then?" Mort said, pointing at her offending appendage.
Katie struggled for an explanation, and then said, "It must have been the dog. The dog must have bitten me."
"Well was it the dog or wasn't it?" Joan asked.
"You know, if one of us was bit, you would have put that pickaxe through our head already," Clara said.
"Everybody calm down!" Lou said. He walked over to Katie and held out his hand. "Lemme see it."
Katie hesitated, and then produced her arm from behind her back. "It was the dog; I swear."
They gathered around, looking at the wound in her arm, but it was impossible to tell whether it was a bite from a dog or a human. The wound was a single slash, nothing that would even require stitches, but it was what it was, and they were living in a world where a simple scratch could turn you into one of the walking dead. They didn't know what to do. They stood in silence, no one able to say anything. Outside, they could hear the dead trying to get inside.
"Can we cut it off?" Clara asked.
"Fuck that. I already lost two fingers yesterday. I'm not losing an arm today," Katie said, the blood draining from her face.
Joan said, "No, it wouldn't do any good. The body can move your entire volume of blood within only a couple of minutes. If this was a bite from one of them, cutting off the arm wouldn't stop it. You'd just have a dead person with one arm."
"None of this matters right now," Lou said. "We'll keep an eye on her, but right now, we have to get the fuck out of here."
They felt the truth in his words, the urgency. They had to leave. They had to get the fuck out of suburbia before anything else could happen.
"Let's grab what we can, and check out the garage," Clara said.
Joan hung back as the others moved through the house like a scourging wind, snatching up anything that could be of use. "Was it really a dog?" Joan asked conspiratorially.
Katie nodded her head, still shocked that the others had been ready to kill her just a few moments ago. "I think so. I don't know for sure. I was just running on adrenaline there. I don't really remember much of it."
"If you start to feel... different. Let us know. I won't let them kill you, but we also don't want to take the chance that you're going to turn on us. And, just so you know, if it was a dog, you're not out of the woods yet. There's still rabies to worry about."
"Rabies?"
"Yes, rabies. It's a nasty way to go," Joan said.
"Is there anything we can do?" Katie asked.
"Not without going to a hospital or a doctor's office, and I can guarantee that you don't want to go to any of those places right now."
Katie slumped on the ground, worry on her face. Joan felt bad for her, but she wasn't in the business of lying to people. She had given her the news as softly as she could, but in the end, shitty news was shitty news.
They spent the next few minutes tossing the house, pulling out drawers and dumping their contents onto the ground. They shoved whatever was useful into their pockets, the usual stuff, flashlights, food, toothpaste. In the kitchen, Joan found some paper bags, and they all began tossing their goods into them.
Clara ran up to her, something hidden behind her back, and a big smile on her face. "Look what I found," she said.
Joan already knew what it was before she even pulled them out. A pack of cigarettes. You would have thought that Clara had found the cure for the walking dead, but no, it was just a pack of generic cigarettes. Joan, fully knowing the consequences of smoking, found that she was actually pleased. "Gimme one of those," she said.
They lit them up, and stood smoking in the kitchen, puffing smoke into the air as the dead pounded on the outside of the house. No one noticed as Katie moved to a different part of the house to avoid the smoke.
****
In the garage they found a brand new vehicle. It was a dark blue SUV, the temporary license plate was still valid. That'll be good if the cops ever pull us over, Lou thought humorlessly. He had finally found the keys by fishing through the pockets of the dead man in the living room.
Fighting with the shovel had been tougher than he had expected. The balance of the shovel was such that all the weight was on the end. He hadn't been able to get enough power swinging the damn thing like a baseball bat. Instead, he had basically had to run at the man and drive him to the ground. Once the man was on the ground, that's when the shovel showed its true benefits.
Now they stood in the garage. They had already disengaged the garage door. From inside the house, they heard the sounds of breaking glass. The dead were coming.
"Well, this is it boys and girls. Either this piece of junk works, or we're trapped in this garage for the rest of our lives."
It was a bleak statement, but then Katie said, "Check out what I found." From a paper bag in the back of the SUV, she produced a bottle of wine and a bottle opener. "I found it in the kitchen... only damn alcohol in the house."
Smiles popped up in the darkness, illuminated by the pools of light cast from their flashlights, as if they were all camping and ready to tell ghost stories.
"No time like the present," Mort said. He had never been one for drinking, but things were different now.
Katie peeled the foil off the bottle and then jammed the corkscrew into the top. It seemed like she twisted the handle forever. Meanwhile, they could hear shuffling, crashing footsteps inside the house. They had locked the door behind them, figuring that they were never going to go back inside. Altogether, they had spent close to fifteen minutes combing through the house, scavenging supplies, and they had done well. Flashlights, batteries, cans of food, and even a brand new car. It was like they had come away victorious from a game show.
With a pop, the cork came free, and Katie held the bottle out before her. It was halfway to her lips before she decided that she shouldn't. She handed the bottle to Clara on her left and said, "You first."
Clara had no such reservations. She tipped the bottle back, and took a healthy swig of wine. It was classless, but class had little place in present circumstances. As she pulled the bottle away, she had a red-lipped smile on her face. "It's awful," she said, "but it's also the best damned thing I think I ever tasted."
She passed the bottle to Joan who took a swig, her face screwing up when she was done. They stood in the darkness of the garage, passing the bottle back and forth. When the bottle was close to done, she took it and had one last swig, figuring that a little wine wouldn't hurt the child growing inside her. She held the empty bottle in her hand, wishing that there was more. Then she brought it crashing down on the side of the car, where it banged off the back fender. "Shit. So much for christening our ride."
They heard shuffling feet and moans as the dead moved through the house, honing in on the source of the loud bang.
"Isn't that bad luck?" Joan asked.
Lou just laughed. "Shit, bad luck would be an upgrade for what we've had recently. Let's go."
Katie slid into the driver's seat while Joan and Clara hopped in the back. Mort and Lou leaned down and lifted the door of the garage, throwing it upwards, as fast as they could. Katie saw shadowy forms in the rearview mirror, backlit by the bright sunshine outside. She looked up and pressed on a compartment hidden above the driver's seat. She smiled as she pulled the sunglasses out and propped them on her face.
Mort and Lou scrambled into the car, slamming the doors shut. Katie turned the key in the ignition, and the engine purred to life after a few seconds. She threw it into reverse, released the
emergency break, and then stepped on the gas. A camera on the dashboard of the car showed her the shambling forms behind her. They went under the car as she plowed into them. The passenger side mirror ripped free from the car as it rammed into the head of a dead teenage girl standing too close to the car. It hung from wires, bouncing back and forth as she spun the wheel.
The tires of the SUV screeched as she backed out quickly onto the street. She slammed on the breaks, threw it into drive, and punched the accelerator again.
For the first quarter mile, she saw the pack of dogs loping after them, the big black Rottweiler-Doberman mix seemed as if it could keep up with the car forever, and then it just sat down in the street, its tongue hanging out of its mouth and its head cocked to the side. Katie turned the corner, and it was gone.
They were flying now, everyone grabbing onto oh-shit-handles as Katie weaved in and out of the traffic, Joan calling out directions in an effort to guide them along the backroads.
Chapter 21: A New Hope
"Are we there yet?" Clara jokingly asked. She was riding bitch in the backseat, and Katie could see her face clearly.
"I don't know where 'there' is, but we're not even close," Katie shot back, all of the sudden becoming nostalgic. Sitting in the driver's seat and cruising along the country roads brought her memories that she didn't much care for, happy memories that had soured into sadness, memories of road trips and vacations with her husband and her child.
"Man, I love that new car smell," Lou said.
"I don't know how you can smell anything over your own stink," Mort said, the rare joke catching everyone by surprise.
"Oh! Mort's got jokes everybody. Check him out. Fucking Bill Cosby in the backseat," Lou said amid the laughter.
"Pull over, I don't feel safe next to Cosby over here," Clara quipped.
"Why not?" Mort said, clearly not up to date on current events.
The banter made Katie feel sick, or maybe it was just the result of her pregnancy, the mood changes, the emotionality. She cursed Zeke for her plight.
They drove at a leisurely 25 miles-per-hour, It was fast enough to get them where they were going, wherever that was, but not so fast that they would die if some sort of obstruction popped up in front of them. It also allowed Katie to swerve around the dead, which she still had to do, even out in the sticks.
They weren't actually driving through the sticks per se, but it seemed like it compared to where they had come from. They were driving along Skyline Boulevard, a two-lane road that wound through the spine of the hills that separated Beaverton from Portland. It was a place of mansions, well-built homes with long driveways and expensive gated communities. It would be a prime place to scavenge.
Just thinking about some of the giant homes they were driving past pissed her off. They were the types of things that her and her husband could have never afforded, not on a teacher's salary. She had spent hours combing through the newspaper, clipping coupons just so they wouldn't have to live paycheck to paycheck.
She wanted to see what was inside the houses.
"Hey, what's today?" Clara asked.
"Uh... I don't know," Joan said.
"You're asking the wrong, dude. I never knew what day it was even before all of this happened. Why do you ask?" Mort said.
"I think it might be my birthday," Clara said.
Seeing her chance, Katie swerved to the right, up a dark driveway surrounded by fir trees and unmarked by lines. She could see the peaks of a large house over the hill.
"Hey, what are you doing?" Lou exclaimed as he grabbed onto the handle built into the ceiling.
"Let's get Clara a birthday gift," she said, though really, all she was thinking about was seeing inside one of those houses. Maybe they could spend the night.
Her voice pinched and tense, Joan said, "Are you sure this is such a good idea?"
In answer, Katie began singing the first bars of Happy Birthday to You. The others joined in, and Joan's complaints were washed away by the silliness of a group of zombie apocalypse survivors driving up to a mansion singing a birthday song to someone even though they had no idea if it was actually her birthday.
Their singing stopped abruptly when bullets smashed holes in their windshield. Katie cut the car to the left, and they crashed into a marble statue of a lion. Steam rose up from the car, and as they tried to orient themselves, they were greeted by the barrel of an automatic rifle.
"Hands in the air," a man in an FBI baseball cap said.
They put their hands in the air.
****
Saunas were nice. At least, that's what Mort thought as he sat on the tile bench. The people at the end of those guns hadn't been nice. He had a swollen lip to attest to that. He leaned his head back against the tiled wall. It was cool on his head. He reached up and touched the hair on his head. It was long, longer than it had ever been. If they ever got out of there, he would have to find some way to cut his hair.
Mort looked over at Lou. He was staring at the light bulb above them. It was actually on. They had electricity.
"What are you thinking?" Mort asked.
"That's just about the most beautiful thing I think I've ever seen," Lou said.
Mort looked at it, a coil of bright orange encased inside a clear glass bulb. Not only was it bright, but it cast heat down upon them, not enough to turn the sauna into an actual sauna, but it kept them warm. "Yeah, it's pretty great," Mort said.
They sat back and waited silently. Eventually, a man showed up. They heard noises outside the sauna door, and then it swung open.
The man was short, maybe 5'3", but he carried himself as if he were bigger. He had that look in his eye like he was the toughest son of a bitch in the world, or at least he thought he was. In his arm, he gripped an ice pick.
"Tell me about the woman," the man said.
"Are they alright?" Lou asked.
"I'm asking the questions here, boy. Now tell me about the woman."
Mort didn't know what to do. Confrontations had never been his thing. It's one of the reasons why he had run away as a kid. In the schoolyard, when he was younger, others would pick on him because they thought he was slow. Even though he was bigger than just about anyone at the damn school, they had sought him out. His inability to handle confrontations made him look weak, soft. In the end, they had pushed and pushed until he had snapped, and that meant his father had to come into to school to get him, and that meant another whuppin' when he had got home. But they kept coming at him every day anyway.
Now Mort watched Lou handle it, and he didn't back down; Mort didn't know if Lou even knew how to back down.
"Tell me what I want to know first," Lou said.
"Have it your way, playboy," the man said as he backed out of the sauna, the ice pick in his hand. "But you may have just cost that woman her life."
He was about to slam the door shut, when Lou said, "Wait. What are you talking about?"
"Oh, so now you want to talk." The man bit the side of his lip, and Mort could see that he was trying to decide if he was going to be an asshole or not. They were in luck. "I'm talking about that wound on her arm and those missing fingers."
Lou nodded.
"You got anything to say about it?"
"The scratch is from a dog. The fingers were blown off by a bullet. She's fine."
"That true?" the man said, turning to Mort.
"Yeah. It's nothing," Mort said, feeling as if he was being interrogated.
The man nodded his head, as if he had made up his mind. Then he backed out of the sauna and closed the door. They heard the ice pick slide against the door as he locked it. He bounced his fist off the door a few times, as if checking the security of it, and then his face disappeared from the tiny square window set in the door.
"You think they believe us?" Mort asked.
Lou didn't respond. That made Mort nervous. This whole place made him nervous. After a while, they just stared at the light bulb as the time passed.
****
They sat in the pantry with a fortune around them. It wasn't money. It was food. Cans, piled high as the eye could see. Everything you could ever want. Above, a single light bulb dangled on a chain, allowing them to read all of the labels, allowing them to hang their stomachs with their eyes.
There was only room for one of them to sit at a time. The pantry was deep, but it was narrow. Outside, the man with the FBI hat sat in a chair. The last time Katie had tried the door, the man had pointed a rifle at her until she went back inside.
Now she sat looking at the labels on the food, reading nutritional information, checking out how many grams of sodium were in a can of tomato sauce. If only she had brought her can opener. But she didn't have it. They had taken everything from them as soon as they got out of the car.
Then they had been split up, the men went one way, while the women walked in front of the man with the FBI hat. Katie would bet her life that the hat was just some fake piece of junk that he had bought, probably at a gas station convenience store. He didn't have the feel of a real lawman. She had been around plenty of them to be able to tell the difference. The man had curly brown hair that stuck out from under his hat, and his face had a quiet confidence that made him seem lax and overconfident.
When they pulled her out of the pantry and demanded to know about her missing fingers and the wound on her arm, she had told them the truth. Then they had thrown her back in the pantry with the others. A few minutes later, the man came back, not the man in the FBI hat, but the man with the alcoholic's face and the bull neck, the stubby little man who looked like he would just as soon start a fight as look at you.
Katie saw a can with a pull tab on it. Curious, she lifted the can off the pantry shelf and held it in the light so that she could see what it was. Potted meat. What the hell was potted meat? She looked at the pull tab, and her stomach growled at her. She knew she would regret it, but she pulled the tab anyway. Inside, was a grayish pink spread, not unlike pâté, but she knew it was nowhere near the quality of pâté.