Homebodies

by Cheryl Loudermelt

  “It might have hurt. It might have killed me, but it was my pain to feel, and you kept it from me. You kept me locked up in this prison of wallpaper and lies.”

  “You don’t understand. You don’t remember. But I know I did the right thing. If I had to, I’d make the same choice again.”

  It was difficult to ignore his desperation, the strange fragments of honesty and conviction slipping through him into the air, but pain, the pain he denied her, was a cure for many things. “I know you would. That’s why I have to leave. I’m going to be with the others. I don’t care what you do. Live here. Die here. Lie to yourself and think that none of this was your fault, but I am leaving.”

  “Others?” The sudden fear that caused Todd’s voice to crack made her sit back from him.

  She drew her eyebrows together, trying to figure out if he was in the process of spinning something new into his lies. “Yes, Todd. There are others. There’s a group. The man I saved took me to them and showed me I wasn’t alone with you. Did you think you were the last person on Earth, or hope you were?”

  “Em, I’d rather be the last person on Earth than let you do this.” Todd backed toward the door, blocking it with his body. She watched a bead of sweat run down his face. The fear, the concern, it looked so genuine, but even that, she could not trust.

  “It’s not your decision.”

  He pressed his body against the door as hard as he could.

  “I will go through you if I have to.”

  “Em.” He sighed. “If you want to leave, I can’t stop you, but first, just listen. I know it’s coming back to you, but you don’t remember everything. I can tell you. I will tell you anything you want to know.”

  She stood up. “I’d rather go and live in the dump than let you fill it in for me. I can’t trust a word you say.”

  “We’ve already tried living with other people. Please, Em. You can’t trust them. It’s going to end in misery.”

  “Then what difference does it make?” She huffed. “The same thing will happen if I stay.” She reached for the door, and like a child, he pressed himself into the corner. Red trotted past him cowering there and followed Emily to the SUV.

  21

  She had meant to be so strong, to drive straight to the plant like she knew it was her destiny, but at the first intersection that would have started her on that path, she couldn’t force herself to make the turn. She sat at the corner so long the dead came. She let them smack at the windows and stared at their black-veined, snapping faces while she tried to think.

  Emily wished she could delete Todd from her brain, and wondered, with all the other things she’d managed to forget, why he’d be the one thing that stayed. She wanted to write it off as something easy. She remembered because she’d seen him every day. She remembered because he caused her as much pain as anyone could feel, surely, but still not enough to drive him from her brain. Red whined in the seat beside her, mohawk in full bloom.

  Aside from the plant, there was nowhere else to go, and she couldn’t get the look on Todd’s face out of her mind when she’d told him there were others.

  There were a lot of things that Todd could fake, but fear seemed unlikely. She wondered why it was fear and not surprise. He spent so much time out of the house, it was possible he knew that there were other people alive. The idea only made her trust him less and hate him more.

  But she still couldn’t make herself drive toward the plant. Red did an impatient little dance in the seat as another of the dead approached the passenger side.

  She stroked his shoulders and told him it would be okay, then drove for the one other place she remembered ever feeling completely safe.

  Danny’s house was as empty as she’d last left it. She went through the side gate and let herself in the back after stopping for a minute to look down at Danny’s grave.

  The house wasn’t exactly a fortress, especially now that Emily had broken out the kitchen window, but it was good enough for an hour or two. She wandered through the empty rooms, running her fingertips over furniture and picture frames, like something in the house might contain some magic she could take into herself.

  Every now and then, she found a fracture of a memory, but nothing that could make her feel any more complete. She found a framed picture of Danny and herself, which she removed. Danny no longer needed the memory, and Emily didn’t think Danny would mind.

  She sat down on Danny’s sofa, an over-stuffed tan affair, and pulled her knees into her chest so she could feel as small as possible. Red jumped up in the seat beside her and laid as close as he could. He looked up at her with raised, sympathetic eyebrows, and she put one hand on his head to try and reassure him she was okay. Red was much too smart to believe that. “Stop looking at me that way. I’m allowed to not be okay.”

  ‘Of course, you are. I don’t blame you at all.’

  She looked down at the dog, knowing full well that he hadn’t said or heard anything. And really, she hadn’t heard it either; it was an echo of a memory.

  This is where she’d come when she’d left Todd the first time. Of course, it was. She’d had no real place to go before any more than she had now, and the only person she would have trusted with that much pain was now buried in the back yard. But the memory, that much at least, was alive inside the house. Emily closed her eyes and tried hard to imagine Danny as she remembered her, sitting in the armchair next to the sofa holding a cup of coffee. ‘Do you love him?’

  “I don’t know.” Emily said to the air. “I can’t love someone who doesn’t love me.”

  ‘If you thought he didn’t love you, you wouldn’t be asking me.’

  “How could he love me if he would do this to me?”

  Danny had smiled wickedly over her coffee cup. ‘He’s never been particularly smart.’

  They’d laughed, even while Emily was crying. “I don’t know what to do.”

  ‘Because there’s more to the two of you than just this thing.’

  “I don’t know if I can forgive him.”

  Danny had given her another mischievous grin. ‘Well I won’t, but I’m allowed to hate every ounce of his ass for the rest of his life.’ A moment of silence had passed between them. ‘You don’t have to decide now. You don’t have to think about it all as one big thing. That’s too much. Right now, you only need to decide if you want to try to forgive him. Maybe you won’t. Maybe you’ll go home and months from now you’ll bop him over the head with something and just leave. But that comes later, after you decide if you want to try.’

  “I don’t want to try. I could never trust him again. I never will, but I’ll try. . .” Emily had run out of memory, but it was enough at least to believe Todd might have told her the truth about that one thing. She had gone back to him. If she’d tried to forgive him, maybe try had led to succeed.

  And if she’d done it once, then maybe she could do it again. Even if all the pain was new all over, and it felt like the flood of anger would never recede. If she was only willing to try, then maybe.

  She wiped one eye and stood up from the sofa. “Love you, Danny.” Emily spoke to the empty house and hoped the love would somehow reach the memory. Red jumped down, always ready to follow where she might lead. “Come on, baby. Let’s go home and maybe kill Todd, or let him live, or love him. We’ll just have to see.”

  It wasn’t until she left the house that she realized how long she’d been inside. The sun was already setting, and it was dangerous to run around much without being able to see. They made it back to the SUV and drove toward home, but the road had changed in the hours she’d spent inside Danny’s. There was a large group of dead children that had wandered into the street by the elementary school, and though she knew she’d be doing them a favor, she couldn’t bring herself to run them down.

  Instead, she turned on to what she quickly realized was a familiar street, but it wasn’t the scenery that brought her to recognition, it was a feeling of fear so fervent she had to pull over and open the ca
r door long enough to vomit into the street.

  Red looked disgusted.

  “You eat dead people. Don’t judge me.” She said wiping her mouth with the back of one hand and pulling the door closed with the other.

  She sat back in the seat and tried to let the feeling pass, but it was slow to recede. She didn’t know the name of the streets that made up the intersection where she’d stopped, and she couldn’t tell because a large tan military vehicle had turned over and taken out the street sign.

  There was something about the overturned truck. She’d driven by it before, but it had never seemed any more important than all the other cars left to rust in the streets. But the world had changed, and now the truck was almost hypnotic. She opened her car door again and climbed out, careful to avoid the pool of vomit beside the car. Red followed her out, not content to let her go on her own and not at all happy to be out in the dark.

  She heard an awkward squawk and saw a few large vultures pecking at a body that had been mostly eaten from the arms down, and the head, still alive and chomping, desperately trying to eat the things that were eating it.

  “Weird time to be a vulture.” She said to one of the birds. Then, she circled the truck and put a hand on a thick tire to thumb at the tread. Adam said there had been an evacuation, or at least they tried to evacuate. She couldn’t remember which. There was a cover over the truck bed made of thick cloth, but it was shredded and bloody in several places. The driver’s side door was slightly open, and there was no one in the cab. Maybe the drivers got away.

  No. That didn’t feel right.

  The drivers were dead. Their bodies were gone. There was a bloody M4 laying near an overgrown shrub. She picked it up and checked the magazine, still loaded, but almost empty. Then she walked to the back again, and despite every urge to stop immediately and go straight back to the safety of the SUV, she lifted the shredded cover over the truck bed with the barrel of the rifle.

  The smell was so overwhelming even Red backed away. Inside, the bodies had bloated and split open before the sun had baked the whole mess into a sort of dry human tortilla around the bones. It was difficult to tell one hard roasted body from another but at least two of them were soldiers; she could tell by the uniforms, but the rest. . .

  Emily gagged and dropped the canvas, but it was too late. The sight had already branded her eyes. She knew them. Not exactly. She knew their faces, even almost dry to the skull some of them were familiar. Some of them she’d waved to every now and then, and others, she’d seen in photographs on the walls of the houses on her street as she’d gone through and done the messy work of mercy. All those empty houses were empty because their owners were packed together in the back of the truck meant to save them.

  And she’d hid behind them when the dead came. The convoy had gone on when the one vehicle had crashed, and the soldiers up front had climbed out and tried to fight the dead away.

  It was the sound. The streets were crowded with those monsters and the guns only drew more of the dead’s attention, so they came in a slow swarm and surrounded the truck. The soldiers had stopped firing, and there was nothing left to eat but their fragile human cargo.

  She’d cowered in the back, too terrified even to scream, and stuck on the idea that she shouldn’t have left home no matter how much she’d been urged and ordered to leave.

  She knew she was going to die, and she’d started to say goodbye in her mind to all the things that had made her human, and she’d clutched her things to her chest, as if a blanket, a bag, and a few pairs of jeans would somehow shorten the grisly ending that awaited her when the dead chewed through the others.

  But just as she thought she’d do nothing but surrender, she fought. One of the others pressed against the back of the truck with her handed her a piece of pipe, and they stayed alive a few more seconds with each swing at the skulls of the dead. There was the sound of gunfire again, and she thought, thank God the soldiers have come back for us, but when the dead had fallen there were no more soldiers. There was Todd, wearing his hardware store polo and a pair of blood-spattered jeans.

  “How did you find me?”

  “Luck.”

  “Let’s stay lucky.”

  He’d saved her, and two others who had survived the crash and the onslaught of the dead. The others, he helped into the truck bed, but her, he lifted into the cab and closed the door, and kept her safe.

  22

  When Emily got home, Todd was sitting on the sofa in the family room staring at a blank TV. He looked sunken and pale, and he said nothing when she sat down and nothing when Red growled at him before jumping between him and Emily.

  Emily stroked Red’s Mohawk and tried to tell them both that things might be okay. Finally, Todd looked at Red and then slowly up at Emily. “Do you hate me?” He blinked and looked more tired than she had ever seen.

  “No.”

  “But you don’t love me.”

  “I did. Now, I don’t know. It’s too soon to think. I know that we’ve been through it. I believe that we didn’t go through with the divorce, and I came home, and we tried to work on things. But I don’t remember how I forgave you. All I remember is the hurt. It’s old to you, but it’s new again to me.”

  He seemed to try and nod but could not escape gravity to lift his chin again. “You forgave me once. You won’t do it again.”

  “Last time, I thought maybe things would change, but they didn’t. You lied and kept lying.”

  “I just wanted to protect you, Em.”

  Already she regretted coming home. “Still lies. You don’t lie to me to keep me safe, Todd. You lie to me because you think I’m weak. How can I believe you love me if your opinion of me is that I’m going to crumble at the slightest thing?”

  Todd spoke, but there was no fight in him. They were just words, in empty space, in their empty house. “You are weak. It’s not an opinion, it’s a fact. If you weren’t weak, you wouldn’t have listened to me. You wanted to forget. You wanted to believe me.”

  The wind had picked up outside and rattled the glass of the back door and shook the garden leaves. Red stirred unhappily in his seat. “I didn’t forget on purpose, Todd. What other option did I have if the one person who could have set me straight would only lie to me?”

  “You’re less mad about me lying than you are about my doing it without your permission. But you were fucked up, Em. You weren’t thinking. And I was fucked up. What else was I supposed to do?”

  “Try and heal me, not keep me sick.”

  “I did try.” He said sadly, his arms dead weight at his side. “For a while. When we first came home, it was like you were haunting the house. You drifted from room to room, looking at the pictures on the walls, looking right through me. You said the pictures hurt you, so I took them away. I told you that your parents were dead, and you laughed at me. You told me I wasn’t funny. Then it was like you didn’t even have parents. You asked me once if I knew what happened to Danny. I didn’t know, and then it was like she was gone too. Everything that made you happy, everyone who meant anything, you just wiped them away.

  “There were moments, Em, when I’d make you see. I think it was only those times you ever really hated me, because I made you think about it. You would cry and scream, and the dead would come and rap at the windows. I’d have to lead them away. You made me choose for you because you couldn’t do it yourself. I chose to keep you safe. All I wanted was for us to be safe and happy.”

  “It was more than that, Todd. Don’t try and make me feel sorry for you. You didn’t do it only for me. You don’t have a bone of real selflessness in you. You had to get something out of keeping me here and keeping me stupid.”

  “I got you, Em.”

  “Since when I was enough for you?”

  “Since everything changed.”

  “You mean because the world changed?”

  “No, people. People changed.”

  “You have one chance left to tell me the truth, Todd. I’m here.
I’m listening.”

  Todd nodded like the truth might actually kill him and every word was suicide. “There were four sites at first. The stadium at the high school only lasted a few days. They weren’t careful. Someone infected got in, turned in the night and there was nothing to do but drop a bomb on the place. So that’s what they did.

  “The others took longer. A rec center on the edge of town lasted almost three weeks before a fence came down and they were gone. Soon there was only the prison and the base. The prison lasted almost six weeks before their supplies ran out. Some people talked about helping them, but food was so difficult to replace.

  “We lost contact with the prison, and when they finally sent someone for a fly over, all they saw were bodies and the dead wandering through the guard gate.

  “The base was overcrowded. A place meant for five hundred men and suddenly there were five thousand. We slept on the ground in the open. There were no showers, we made ditches for toilets. It made a lot of people sick.

  A few of the old ones and some of the kids died. The soldiers threw them over the fences to let the dead dispose of them.

  The soldiers had lost contact with everyone. They argued among themselves about what to do. Words became demands, demands became fights, fights became murder, and the guy that took charge of it all, he just decided.

  “No one on the base who couldn’t work or fight. Those that were too old or too sick were sent away. A few soldiers went at a time, and only the soldiers came back.”

  Emily could see every word he spoke like one of his dumb movies flickering through her mind. “They didn’t just kill them.” She shuddered. “They used them as bait to lure away the dead.”

  Todd nodded. “And then they went through the rest of us one by one, to make sure we had a reason to stay.”