by Yates, B. D.
Through the Valley
By
B.D. Yates
Dedicated to the memory of George A. Romero
Chapter 1: Summer Snow
Emmit Mills opened his eyes and was immediately blinded by bright white light. His head felt empty somehow, as if his brain had done a full memory dump and left no files behind in storage. There was a steady roar around him, a sound like rushing water intermixed with the creaks and snaps of tall, waving trees.
Jesus, I'm freezing to death.
Emmit's entire body, which was long and lanky and had little meat on it (his nickname among friends was Slim Em, or just Slim for short) burned with cold fire. He brought his numbed, stinging fingers up to his face and brushed them against the bridge of his nose, feeling for his glasses. They were missing, which meant he was essentially blind.
If I knew it was going to snow today, I would have worn a coat, he thought, running his hands up and down the stiffened flesh of his bare arms and then doing the same to his exposed calves. He was dressed in a short sleeved plain black T-shirt and camo cargo shorts, with ankle socks that were too small for his gargantuan feet stuffed into a pair of thin skater shoes. Glancing around himself, he found that he was sitting in a drift of crisp snow like a piece of freezer burnt steak. Why the hell had he left the apartment without a coat on? Or pants for that matter?
Come to think of it... just where the fuck am I anyway?
Emmit's vision was extremely poor, but he could still make out the tall black stalks of trees on all sides of him. It was like looking through a foggy window. He could feel that it was snowing or sleeting, but "feeling" was hardly the best way to describe it when he could barely feel his own limbs. It was painfully cold, and his teeth were chattering together beneath the stinging flesh of his scrawny face.
Panic began to hasten his pulse. He tried desperately to remember anything, anything at all. Where had he been? Where was he now? How did he get here, and... who the hell was he exactly?
He plunged his hands into the snow drift, grabbing icy handfuls of powder and digging like a hyperactive dog. The only image he could form in his mind was that of a dingy rundown apartment, which he recognized as his. He knew his name started with an E and sounded something like "damn it", but it was just out of his reach. He kept imagining that he could see a huge industrial wall filled from edge to edge with interlocking gears, but they were all spasming and jammed in place. It was like a default thought, the only solid information his brain had for him. He had to shake his head to clear it out again and again, but each time he did his mind was utterly empty. Then he would visualize the gears again, trying to mesh and rotate in unison but the rusty cogs and sprockets were frozen in place.
Okay, E, he thought, gasping and grunting through gritted teeth against the pain of winter. He could already feel his lips beginning to dry and split apart, and his eyes felt like they were filled with razor sharp ice crystals.
The rest will come later, right now focus on what you do know. You're out in a blizzard with no protection and you're blind without your glasses. Find them and then find some sort of shelter, or you're a dead man.
"Come on!" He screamed, his words muted by the roar of the wind through the trees. He had dug out a sizable crater before his deadened hands finally knocked something loose, something small and black that stuck out against the white backdrop of the snow like buttons on a snowman. He snatched at it, barely able to move his fingers.
Thank God.
He had unearthed his thick black framed glasses, and passing the pad of his thumb over the lenses, they felt intact. He rubbed them furiously against the frosted fabric of his shirt and jammed them onto his face. They were smudged and coated with ice, and looking through them was like looking through the bottoms of glass pop bottles. But dirty lenses were better than wandering around blind until he dropped dead of exposure.
Alright. Get up. Move.
His limbs were heavy and pulling his wet shoes out of the snow felt like wading through concrete, but he willed himself to start walking. He alternated between wrapping his arms around himself like bat wings and bringing his fingertips up and putting them in his mouth, trying desperately to warm them and cease the aching sting. It didn't do much good. Through his smeared lenses, he saw nothing but layer upon layer of endless trees, tall black trunks that seemed to tower all the way up to the gray haze of snow clouds that hung lazily in the sky. There was no sound except for the crunch of his shoes in the brittle snow, and the continuous whoosh of the arctic wind through dead branches. The snow was such a brilliant virgin white that he kept having to clench his eyes shut, his eyeballs swiveling madly behind the red curtains of his eyelids. He rubbed at them, watching the strange neon light show of his brain trying to interpret what his eyes were experiencing. They looked like ghostly fireworks hovering and drifting around the inside of his skull.
Fireworks.
The thought went off in his empty head, not unlike a firework itself in an otherwise empty night sky. The last place he could remember being before waking up in the freezer was an office building or something like one, with desks and pens and sharply dressed people bustling about inside. He had been waiting for something, and as he had been looking around, he had seen a calendar on the wall. The picture had been of the New York City skyline, with a shimmering garden of fireworks exploding above the skyscrapers. Fireworks, because the next holiday was...
The Fourth of July.
Emmit stopped dead in his tracks, wearing a stinging expression of confusion as the biting wind rippled his thin clothing. It had been July, a particularly hot July. How the hell had he lost track of four months, if not more?
He whipped his head from side to side, as if looking around fast enough might cause the scenery to change. Of course, it did not; on all sides of him, there was nothing but tree upon black tree, and little snow tornadoes that danced and whirled among the trunks. And that roar, that god damned constant roar.
Something is very, very wrong here.
It was strange, the strangest thing he had ever experienced in his short life, but it still didn't change his present situation. Perhaps he had been skiing (did he know how to ski?) and had struck his head. Perhaps he was still suffering the effects of that head injury. But that didn't explain why he was dressed for a sweltering summer day and not a frigid winter afternoon.
Maybe I'm not even awake yet.
"Fuck... it..." he stammered, and continued walking. The pain he was feeling felt real enough, and dreamscape or not, he needed to keep moving. For warmth, and hopefully, for rescue. The answers would come later when he was safe and toasty inside somewhere. Right now, he needed to walk until his feet fell off.
Emmit lowered his head, rubbing his reddening arms as if he were trying to start a fire on his flesh. The wind was a constant enemy, ruffling his short hair and sucking the air from his lungs. His legs were throbbing; trudging through the thick snow was wearing him down, fast. He watched his own feet as they plunged through the snow, sinking up to his shins. He knew he was going to die very soon if—
A tree trunk, one that appeared to be about three feet across, was suddenly in front of him. He looked up just in time to face plant into the hard black bark.
"Ugh!" He cried, stumbling backwards and falling on the thin padding of his ass. His glasses were knocked askew on his nose, throwing him back into the dizzying world of the blind. He touched his forehead with hands he couldn't feel. He would probably have a scrape and a knot, but no blood came away on his fingertips.
Getting loopy. Clumsy.
He didn't even bother to stand. He just needed to rest and recenter himself. After he caught his breath, he would trudge on among the trees. He was so cold that the snow he sat in alm
ost felt like a warm blanket, and he suddenly felt the ludicrous urge to lay down and burrow into it like a squirrel digging for a buried nut.
There's a name for that, and it's hypothermia.
Again, he passed his fingers over the lenses of his glasses, feeling for cracks as he looked up at the tree that had assaulted him. Through the whirling veil of ice and snow, he could see the dark trunk stretching up so far that the haze in the sky hid the canopy of branches. There was something strange about the shape of it; it looked like two branches jutted out to either side of the trunk, like the tree wanted to give him a nice cold hug. But the branches were fat, and they were square. For a second it appeared as a towering crucifix, backlit by the heavenly white glow of the afterlife.
When the glasses were secure on his nose again, he saw that it was a crude wooden sign, lashed to a knot on the tree with what looked like a multicolored rope. It swung gently in the wind, rocking from side to side and coming to rest again with an almost inaudible tap.
Emmit struggled to his feet and approached the sign, pushing his glasses closer to his eyes. The rope was not really a rope at all. It looked like strips of clothing had been shredded and braided together, handmade by someone.
Tap.
There were words scrawled on it in runny red ink or paint that had dried to a dark maroon. The bottoms of each letter stretched down into long drips of dried liquid. It looked like it had been written in blood, an almost comically creepy sign that someone might have made for a carnival spook house. But there was nothing fun about this place.
Tap.
This is something right out of a scary movie, and I'm going to do exactly what scary movie characters do. I'm going to follow it when I should be going the opposite direction.
The sign read:
SURVIVOR
CAMP
<——
Emmit's drying eyes followed the direction the painted arrow was pointing, and although the snow drifts were piled high around them, he could clearly see two tree stumps with small piles of rocks on top of them. They looked like crude gargoyles adorning the front gate of some old manor house. As he squinted through the makeshift gate, he saw two more chopped trees further off in the distance. These were also capped with rocks, although one pile looked like it had recently fallen over.
There's your path. You don't have a choice. Follow it.
Emmit did, shuffling through the driving snow, hunched over and folded in on himself like an old newspaper. His skin had begun to turn a deep angry red, and he was growing more and more certain that if he survived, he would be short a few fingers and toes. As he passed by a squat tree, he leaned on it for support, taking some of the strain off of his tired legs.
Look for smoke. If there's a survivor camp, they'll have fire.
That was when it dawned on him. Survivor camp? Just what in the hell had they all survived? A nuclear war? An asteroid impact? The rapture? His mind was just so fucking blank. Who he was, how he got in this mess and what had turned summer to winter would not matter if he was a frozen corpse. That was all he needed to remember, for now anyway.
There was movement ahead of him. Through the vortexes and wisps of snow wafting up from the frozen ground, he could just make out the gray silhouette of something moving. It was moving slowly, much too slowly to be a deer or some other animal that would be at home in these conditions. It also appeared to be walking upright, swaying in the wind, staggering against the snowdrifts.
It had to be another survivor of whatever catastrophe had happened.
"H... Hey..." Emmit attempted, his voice box feeling parched and weak. He tried to lick his cracked lips, and his tongue immediately went dry and lost all sense of taste. He began to clumsily jog, trying not to lose sight of the shadowy person. The mysterious figure lumbered on, hunching forward with one step, leaning back with the next. Emmit could just make out the motion of the person's arms, dangling and swinging lazily from his sides like hung criminals.
Injured. Frozen. Dying like me.
"Hey! Over here!" He managed to scream, cupping his ice cube hands over his mouth. It hurt to scream so loud, but it had gotten the job done. He heard his words echo through the woods for what felt like miles, reverberating off the watchful trees and coming back to him like ripples in a puddle.
The figure stopped, hesitated for a moment or two, then turned and began to slowly amble toward him. Emmit didn't know what he planned to do once he met the person, but he figured two heads were better than one. Maybe he would have a lighter and was just too delirious to use it.
Or, he thought, feeling awkward despite the circumstances, we could huddle together and share warmth until the storm passes.
Emmit waved his arms as hard as he could manage.
The silhouette didn't respond. Didn't look up. Didn't acknowledge him. It just kept up the slow, lumbering path towards him, lurching and lolling, occasionally lifting and swiping one hand in front of it as if trying to open the blowing snow like a shower curtain.
"I'm friendly!" Emmit shouted, running to meet the person. By the time he was close enough to notice that there were no clouds of breath coming from the thing that marched toward him like an automaton, it was too late.
Chapter 2: Dead Men Walking
Emmit got close enough to the stranger to get a clear view of his body and stopped jogging towards him so suddenly that his slick shoes skidded in the snow.
The man was mostly bald, a few patches of dark hair clinging to his thin scalp like growths in a sparse wheat field. He walked like a drunk or a sleepwalker, head hanging down and his steps unsteady and clumsy. His arms swung slowly from side to side, occasionally stretching out in front of him to maintain his balance. Each footstep caused his limp head to sway like a sock full of quarters.
He was dressed in a tattered blue business suit, the threads sun-faded to a light gray in sporadic spots. The shredded remains of a striped tie flapped from his chest in the icy wind like a leftover streamer, trailing loose strings that waved and fluttered like tentacles. He wore a heavy black overcoat that extended down to his calves, blowing and wrapping around the slender muscles, but it was becoming frighteningly obvious to Emmit that this man did not need any protection from the cold. As he took another shaky step forward, Emmit saw that he was missing one shiny dress shoe— and the dried, wrinkly skin of his exposed foot, like the rest of his body, was a bruised purple intermixed with splotches of crimson and brown. He looked like freezer burnt hamburger meat, and yet he was upright and walking toward Emmit with slow but determined progress. Emmit could hear the man grunting and groaning, but there were no clouds of vapor exiting his mouth.
That's because he's not 98 degrees on the inside like a living person. He's room temperature like a piece of sirloin.
Emmit took a step back, raising his own frozen hands defensively in front of him. One word seemed to flash before his eyes, a ridiculous word straight out of the horror movies. An impossible word. A word that belonged in the same realm as Dracula and Frankenstein and Pennywise, horror fiction from the ripped and yellowed pages of classic books. Not standing right in front of him. Not reaching for him.
Zombie.
The thing lifted its face to meet Emmit's, and as he stared into it, seeing it clearly for the first time, all doubt was clawed out of his mind with one swift stroke. This man was dead, frozen to death, and yet somehow, he was upright and walking towards Emmit.
The corpse's face had been mummified by the cold, the purplish flesh around its cheek bones pinched and tight like rotten plums. One eye was either missing or frozen shut, the skin of its eyelid matted shut and drawn down into a sad-looking fold. The other eye was wide open and unblinking, pale blue and shining dully in the bright winter light like a scuffed marble. The stranger began to open its mouth wide, as if it meant to try to bite Emmit. Its lips were partially frozen shut, and the flesh between them stretched into ribbons before snapping, pulling apart like chewed bubble gum. The mouth hung open in a breathless scream
, stretching the cheek muscles and dehydrated flesh to the point that deep cracks began to form in the dead thing's face, branching out from the corners of its mouth like forks of bloody lightning. The tongue, laying on the floor of its mouth like a strip of dried beef, began to twitch and work behind its teeth.
"Thiefffff..." the zombie rasped, its voice like two pieces of sandpaper being rubbed vigorously together. "Thieffff."
"I'm not a thief, pal," Emmit said stupidly, still gradually distancing himself. The adrenaline coursing through him made him oblivious to the cold, and his small muscles felt ready to run a marathon. The man-thing in front of him lifted its arm, slowly curling the stiff, frozen sausages of its hand into a fist. Then it jutted out one accusatory finger, the nail bed blackened and sunken. It pointed drunkenly at Emmit as it staggered forward, its one bright eye staring through him and filling him with raw, animalistic fear.
"Thiefffffff," it grated again hoarsely, the ripped flesh of its lips trembling as it spoke just as its tie had in the wind. Emmit shot glances all around him, looking for the path, an escape route, anything, anyone. There was nothing but trees, wind, and snow. He was alone with it.
"Whatever you say," he mumbled to it, turning to run in the opposite direction.
"Robberrrrr," said the emaciated husk of a woman who had been stealthily approaching behind him. It was dressed only in a tight black leather thong, exposed breasts deflated and blackened, swaying with each lurching step. Frost glistened in the scraggly black hair that hung in clumps from its skull, twinkling like stars in a nightmare sky. The dead woman’s eyes were wide and faded, full of hunger. A crystalline film of mucus had dried over its upper lip and chin like an amber beard. "Gunmannnnn," it hissed, the muscles in the skeletal face working as it graced him with a vacuous smile.
"Thieffff," the first creature repeated, closer now. Emmit spun to face it and found that it was smiling as well, a jolly, maniacal grin that was widening the cracks in its face.