Cattle: Chapters 6 - 10
6. Snow
The snow began to fall shortly after dark. It came in big moist flakes, some almost as big as silver dollars, splatting on the windows with such force that it sounded like moths batting against the glass. The tapping startled Brent, who was trying to cook some ramen noodles over a candle he had found in one of the cabinets. He jerked around, almost knocking over the sauce pan he was cooking the noodles in, which he had perched over the candle on two other, larger pans. He stared at the window a moment, his heart galloping in his chest, before he realized what the drumming on the glass was, and then he smiled, let out his breath with a gust, and even laughed a little.“Little jumpy, aren’t we?” Ghost-Harold asked.“I don’t like burning candles,” Brent said, walking toward the window over the sink. “I don’t like making any light at all after dark. It’s not safe. You can’t see what’s outside, but anything can see in.”“You covered the windows,” Ghost-Harold said.He had. He had emptied the linen closet, hanging the musty bedsheets over every window and door. Both for heat… and to keep anything from looking in at him.“I know,” Brent said. “The light still shows through, though.” He pushed the sheet that he had hung over the kitchen window to one side, just in time to see a big nugget of wet snow clout against the glass and slither down it.“Just a little,” Ghost-Harold said.“That’s all it would take,” Brent replied, and he let the makeshift curtain fall back into place. He tried very hard not to think about the creatures that might be wandering out there in the snow and wind right then, in the fields, on the empty highways. Had any of them seen the faintly glowing window, the wink of light that had escaped when he pushed aside the curtain to peek outside?The thought made his skin prickle with anxiety.Despite the difference in their age, Brent had always been the more cautious one. A person might expect Harold to be the careful one, being the older of the two, but it was not so. Harold had been the reckless one, the devil-may-care wiseguy, and Brent the nattering ninny. If not for Brent, the old Irishman probably would have died a lot sooner. It was a miracle he had survived as long as he had. “Tis the luck o’ the Irish,” he sometimes claimed, but his luck had finally run out, as luck almost always does-- even Irish luck. If it didn’t, there would have been a lot less casinos back in the day, and a lot more wealthy Micks.Brent returned to his pan and stuck a finger inside. The water was not even lukewarm, the brick of fossilized ramen noodles only slightly softer than it had been when he stripped it from its plastic wrapping. The water wouldn’t even be safe to drink if it didn’t boil. He had scooped it from a rain barrel sitting by the back porch. No telling what kind of bugs were swimming around in it.He returned to the cabinets, looking for shorter pans, something that would lower his soup pan closer to the flame. You could boil water over candles, but it usually took at least three of them, and he had only been able to find the one candle. Whoever had taken the guns out of Mr. Johnson’s gun cabinet had taken everything else of use as well: food, candles, batteries, weapons… He had found a few handy items in the farmhouse, but nothing to jump for joy about, nothing he didn’t already possess.“I miss microwave ovens,” Brent said, pushing through the pots and pans beneath the cabinet. He squatted down and reached into the far corner, feeling around with his fingers. He heard a snap and felt a sharp pain in his index and middle fingers. Cursing, he jerked his hand out and pulled the mousetrap off his hand, throwing it angrily across the room. “Stop laughing,” he said, shaking his throbbing fingers. “That could have broken my fingers.”“You ought to know better than sticking your fingers in places you can’t see,” Ghost-Harold said.Brent stood with a grunt and began to rummage through the upper cabinets. He pulled around one of the kitchen chairs and stood on it and examined the top of the cabinets. “Yes!” he hissed.He jumped down with an unopened package of tea candles. They had been hidden behind the trim of the cabinets. He returned to the stove, tearing the package open, and rearranged his cooking setup. He lit four of the tea candles, put the large candle aside, and placed the grill from one of the stove’s burners directly over the shorter tea candles.“Now we’re cooking,” Brent grinned, putting his pan directly overtop the tea candle flames.Within thirty minutes, the water in the pan was steaming. Forty-five minutes later, the soup was bubbling, and the noodles were soft and plump. He opened a can of mixed vegetables, drank the water, then added the veggies to his soup.“Gonna be go-ooood!” he sang excitedly, his belly gurgling.He ate quicker than he intended, then blew out all but one of the candles and crept upstairs, his shadow jumping in its wavering light. He had made a little nest for himself in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, using the sheets and blankets and pillows he had stripped from the beds downstairs. It would have been nice to sleep in an actual bed for a change, but it was safer to sleep on the second floor. He would have a better view of his surroundings from its window, and he would have more time to escape should anything nasty bust in through one of the windows or doors downstairs.“Always have an escape plan,” he said, and Ghost-Harold made a sound of agreement.He set the candle on a large tower speaker and shut and locked the bedroom door, then piled some boxes and plastic bins against the door. The bins were not very heavy. They looked as if they contained mostly women’s clothing, shoes, seasonal decorations, and family photos, but it made him feel more secure barricading the door.“I’m going to look through all this stuff tomorrow,” he said.“That’s a good idea.”“Maybe I can find some clean new clothes to wear.”“You could use some.”He sat on the bench of Mr. Johnson’s Bowflex machine and took off his boots, then retrieved his candle and walked to his nest of blankets and pillows and settled in. He had made his pallet on the floor beneath the window so he could sit and look outside until he got sleepy. The snow was still splatting against the window. An occasional gust of wind rattled the glass in its frame. He blew out the candle as soon as he was situated and then just sat there and gazed out at the snowy, benighted world, his elbows on the windowsill, his forehead and the tip of his nose lightly touching the cold glass.“This might be a good place to hole up for the winter,” he said softly. “It’s pretty warm for an old farmhouse.”“I don’t know,” Ghost-Harold replied. “It’s awful close to that town. I think you should push on north after the storm passes.”Harold was probably right. The farmhouse Brent was waiting out the storm inside couldn’t be more than ten miles from the nearby town of Manfried. They had come upon the village shortly after scurrying across the Ohio River, picking their way carefully through the wrecked and abandoned vehicles on the disintegrating bridge. It was just a small riverside town; population 5,000, the sign said. They had expected it to be like almost every other Midwest town they had encountered during their journey to the Free Zone: derelict, depopulated by the Phage, a few dumb deadhead shuffling around the streets. But it wasn’t. There had been a thriving community of deadheads occupying the town. Brent and Harold had watched the zombies for a little while, hunkered down in some woods at the edge of town, and then headed east, planning to circle around the zombie tribe. They had only put a few miles between them before running afoul of a meat patrol.It was dangerous and taxing traveling in the winter, but in some ways it was safer. Zombies were not as active in the winter. The smart ones hated the cold, and tended to stay in their homes where it was warm, and the dumb ones froze. Zombies were cold-blooded creatures. They turned into zombiecicles if the temperature dropped below freezing. You could walk right up to them and knock their frozen heads off. Harold used to call it Zombie T-Ball.“You can’t give up now,” Ghost-Harold said. “You’re almost there.”“I know,” Brent sighed, staring out the window. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he could see the snow swirling through the air outside. It looked like the snow on an old TV set when it was tuned to a station with no signal. It was coming down pretty thick. Visibility was only a couple hundred meters. The ground outside was already white, the collapsed barn nearly obscured but for the section of the roof that kept flapping up and down.Out there, past the storm, or maybe staring out their windows at the snow like he was doing, were the people of the Free Zone. The city of living men was only 300 miles away now. Harold had traced out a rough route on an old road map when they decided to make a run for it. That was over a year ago, but they had managed to travel over six hundred miles before his partner died. That was two-thirds of the way there. In the old days, a 300 mile trip would have taken about five hours. Less if you put the pedal to the metal. By foot, it would take at least a month to finish the journey, and that’s if he didn’t run into any trouble, that’s if he could walk ten miles a day, every day, until he got there. More realistically, he was looking at three to six months.And then…But it was too much for him to imagine. Too much, almost, to hope for. He tried to imagine it, being someplace safe, someplace with thousands of other living human beings, with food and electricity and safe drinking water, and it made his soul ache.“You don’t realize how much you need other people until they’re gone,” Brent said. “How much you need… to just be around somebody. To have some company, even if you don’t talk much. To just… feel their presence.”He sniffed and wiped his nose, watching the snow twist and flap at the glass.“You crying?” Ghost Harold asked.Brent nodded. “Yeah… a little.”His imaginary friend was quiet for a moment, then said in a gentle voice, “It’s all right, kiddo. You go ahead and cry. Sometimes you just have to let it out.”Sometime later, Brent slept.
7. Day
As often happened now that the world was dead, Brent woke disoriented. Without the distractions of modern technology, Brent’s interior life had become much more vivid. It was a thing he had noticed shortly after the world ended, when the initial chaos and violence had passed and the world became very empty and still. It was like his brain was a muscle that the technological world had caused to atrophy, and now, in the new silence of the post-modern world, that muscle had begun to develop, to grow stronger, to bulk up. In the absence of constant electronic diversions, that dormant, almost vestigialized part of his mind had reawakened, had blossomed, and he reverted, it seemed to him, to a nearly childlike state of awareness. His imagination was suddenly so overpowering that he constantly slipped into an almost dream-like state during his waking hours, talking to people who weren’t there, weaving fantasies in his mind, making up songs in his head, or poetry, or jokes. His dreams had become so intense, so potent, that they seemed real to him, even after he awoke, as real at least as the waking world. Sometimes, when he awoke, he was not sure which world was the real one, the world he had just departed, or the one he had just opened his eyes to, or even if such a distinction was important anymore.It was like that when he woke the next morning.He had dreamed that he was a child again, and that it had snowed the night before and school had been cancelled. In his dream, his mother had made hot chocolate for him, and then she had helped him into his winter clothes so he could go outside and play with his friends. He had played all day with his chums—Evan and Bobby Toothaker, twins who lived down the street from him—bobsledding down the big hill behind the old elementary school, building a snowman, making snow angels and having snowball fights. He played until his nose was red and running, until the sun had rolled all the way across the sky to the western horizon, and twilight had dyed the white hillsides the pastel blue of Easter eggs.“Bre-eeent!” his mother called, and he turned in the direction of her voice, a snowball in each hand. “Uh oh! That’s my mom, guys! I gotta go!” he said, and then he had awakened, and he looked up at the brightly glowing window, laced with the snow that had fallen overnight, and for a moment he thought he was a child again, and he hoped that school had been cancelled so he could go outside and play with his chums like he had in his dream.The truth came quickly back to him, but it did not hurt. He had long since finished mourning for the world that used to be. There were times now that he no longer even missed it. Sometimes he didn’t even remember it.“Rise and shine, kiddo!” Ghost-Harold cried.“I’m up,” Brent responded, shielding his eyes from the glaring light that was slanting through the window. The storm had passed. The sun was bright and warm and cheery, the sky clear and deep and cloudless.“I would have made you some coffee, but I don’t have any hands,” Harold said. “Or coffee, for that matter.”“Thanks anyway,” Brent said with a chuckle. He sat up and surveyed the room, letting his memories, like the pieces of a puzzle, slot back into place. He leaned up to the window and peered outside, making sure there were no tracks in the snow. The snow in the backyard was pristine but for a solitary trail of rabbit tracks. That was good. Maybe he would rig up a trap for that rabbit, too. It had been a while since he’d eaten fresh meat. The thought of rabbit stew made his mouth gush with saliva.Brent threw aside his covers, wrinkling his nose at the smell of himself. Maybe he would take a bath today, too. Look for some new clothes in all these boxes and bins. Mr. Johnson was a big guy, but the Johnsons might have had kids who were Brent’s size, clothes that Mrs. Johnson had boxed up and stored after her kids outgrew them.It couldn’t hurt to look.He got up, put his boots back on, and pushed aside the boxes he’d barricaded the door with. He listened at the door a moment, then unlocked it and peeked out into the hallway.“It’s clear,” he said.He crept down the stairs just as carefully, then surveyed the house and its surroundings. There were no signs of intrusion, and no tracks in the snow outside, in either the side lawns or the front. He allowed himself to relax a little.Brent grabbed a large pan from the kitchen cabinet and used it to transfer some water from the water barrel outside to the tank of the Johnson’s commode. It was cold outside, but not painfully so. Once he had filled the commode, he dropped his pants and took a leisurely crap, availing himself of the magazines Mr. Johnson had kept under the bathroom sink: Cheri, Playboy, Penthouse.“Why, Mr. Johnson, you old dog you,” he said when he found the magazines.The glossy pages of the magazines were brittle and faded, but the images and text were perfectly legible. It seemed to him a great luxury to crap in an actual crapper while flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine. Smoking a cigarette while he did it was the only thing that could have made it any more luxurious, he thought, and then he wondered at how spoiled he had been in his old life, how petty his problems had been back then.“You had it good, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “You lived like a king and didn’t even know it.”“Do you mind?” Brent said. “I’m trying to take a crap.”“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”Brent sighed, shaking his head, and returned his attention to his magazine. He rotated the magazine sideways to view the centerfold, ignoring the moist trumpet sounds reverberating in the toilet boil.“Hello, Miss August,” he sighed.Miss August, AKA Katrina Twain, stood with her back turned two-thirds of the way to the camera, dressed in just a pair of bright red stiletto heels and a few bits of glittering jewelry. Her hair was a honey-gold swirl around her face, her eyes like sapphires rimmed in charcoal. Her candy red lips were pouty and partially parted, as if she were about to whisper something breathy and vulgar to the cameraman. The puffy mounds of her pudenda were just visible between the smooth globes of her flawless derriere. In the bottom right corner of the pinup was written, Come on baby light my fire, XOXO Katrina, in a swirly cursive script.He wondered if she was still alive somewhere, or if she had died during the pandemic. Odds were, she was dead. Almost everyone had died during the outbreak. If the Phage didn’t get you, the zombies did, and if the zombies didn’t get you, your fellows survivors did, and if you somehow managed to survive all that, the radiation from the nukes got you, or you caught some other illness and died from lack of medical care, or had an accident, or got depressed and killed yourself. Humanity had gone up in a blaze of glory. People like Brent and Harold, the survivors in the Free Zone, were just the last warm cinders cooling on a mountain of ash.“So you gonna beat off or what?” Ghost-Harold asked.Brent laughed, a long, low exhalation. Whatever passions Miss August had begun to stir in him had been doused by his morbid ruminations. He looked around for something to wipe on.“No toilet paper, kiddo,” Harold said apologetically.Brent sighed. Sorry, Miss August…He flushed and watched the water swirl down the pipe with the same fascination a Neanderthal might have watched a DC-10 take to the air. It had taken humanity 200 million years to go from flinging their feces at each other in the trees to indoor plumbing, and like a careless gambler, they’d lost it right back to the house, and in spectacular fashion.Brent returned to the kitchen. He grabbed a pan and stepped out onto the back porch. The sky was clear now, the sun flashing brilliantly off the snow, though it was still cold and windy. It reminded him of the dream he had had during the night. Playing in the snow with his buddies, school cancelled, and nothing to worry about but the quality of the fun they might have until sundown.He stepped down off the porch and sank to mid-shin. Last night’s snow storm had dumped at least a foot of snow on the region, maybe more. He filled the pan up with snow, returned inside, and set it on the counter to melt. He would have fresh drinking water when it melted, no need to boil, though it might be a little radioactive. Several major cities had been nuked during the worst of the pandemic. A lot of people had died from radiation sickness in the years that followed the outbreak. But not Brent. Nothing ever seemed to make him sick. Even when he was a boy he had been unusually healthy. He could remember his mother remarking on it once or twice when he was a kid.He pushed the table against the back door again and went upstairs. For the next hour or so, he went through the Johnsons’ storage boxes. Most of the clothes in the bins were women’s clothes, but he did find a couple outfits that looked like they might fit him. The Johnsons must have had a son, or sons, and while most of the boy’s clothes were too small, there were a few that were just his size.Happy, he carried the clothes downstairs and laid them on the table. He raided the linen closet for towels and washrags, and then walked into the bathroom to look for soap and shampoo. There was a single bar of dried up soap in the medicine cabinet, shrunken and fissured, but the shampoo had turned into some kind of weird blue plastic inside the bottles. Looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. “Oh, well. This is good enough,” he said, carrying to soap into the kitchen.“You ought to take a bath,” Ghost-Harold said. “Might be your only chance for a while.”Brent shook his head. “Too much trouble. It would take me all day to heat up enough water.”“Take it cold,” Harold said. “Are you a man or a mouse?”“Mouse,” Brent said. “Definitely a mouse.”He fetched several more pans of snow, lit his tea candles, and began to warm the water up over their flames. He poured the contents of each pan into one of the sinks as soon as it was room temperature, then warmed the next. When both sides of the sink were full of water, he stripped down to his ragged grey skivvies and began to wash himself. He scrubbed and scrubbed, making multiple passes over his skin, until the left basin was soapy and gray with filth, then he switched to the right side sink and began to rinse off.“God, kiddo, you’ve gotten skinny,” Harold said. “You look like one of those concentration camp survivors.”Brent had noticed. Scrubbing the washrag up and down his ribs was like running his hands up and down an old fashioned washboard. He didn’t reply to his imaginary friend, just dipped his soapy hair in the clean water basin and rinsed it out.“Wash your beard, too. It looks like a bird’s nest,” Harold said.Brent grinned and shook his head. Harold was just as annoyingly helpful in death as he had been in life. He was one of those people who always tried to nudge you aside and take over what you were doing, whether it was cooking, making a fire, or skinning an old dead possum. If he had been a standup comic, his catchphrase would have been, “Here, let me do it!”Brent was just getting ready to put on his clean new clothes when something banged against the front door. He jumped and wheeled around toward the living room.A moment later, he heard a low, piping moan.
8. Deadheads
There were only two of them, thank God. There was a big fresh one, didn’t look like he’d been dead more than a few weeks, a couple months tops. He was dressed in a parka stained black with blood and tan Carharts pants. Judging by the vacant expression on his face, and the soulless gray marbles of his eyes, he was a dumbhead. The other was an old deadhead, smaller, dressed in rags, its limbs like sticks wrapped in dead vines, its face a leathery death’s head. Brent peeked at them from one of the living room windows, peering through the narrow gap between the window frame and the bookshelf he had barricaded it with. The old shriveled one was tottering around in the front yard like an Alzheimer’s patient, the wind tossing its rags and the thin, dark hair of its head. The big fresh one had clambered up onto the porch, and stood just outside the front door. Every so often he would step forward and smack his body against the door, or bat it with one of his hands. After a few minutes, Brent realized the zombie’s lurching movements followed the creak and bang of the barn roof in the back yard. Each time the big section of tin crashed in the back yard, the big zombie would jerk and step forward. Zombies were drawn to loud noises, and that loose section of roofing had been flapping and banging all night.“Damn,” Ghost-Harold said behind him. “Whatcha gonna do, kiddo?”If it were warmer out, he’d just abandon the farmhouse, slip out the back and put some distance between him and his uninvited guests. But it was below freezing outside, and windy. He would very likely freeze to death if he had to travel very far. He didn’t know how far the next house was, and it was just as likely there would be zombies there, too. There was only one thing he could do.“You’re going to take ‘em out, ain’tcha?” Brent nodded.Brent left the window and crept into the kitchen as quietly as possible. He snatched up the shovel he had propped against the cabinet and headed toward the back door. He looked outside, made sure there were no other deadheads stumbling around in the back yard, then eased the table aside.“Be careful, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said, his voice tight with anxiety.Brent nodded, his lips pressed together.The wind gusted in on him, blowing his hair back from his brow. He slipped out onto the back porch, his heart thumping rabbit-like in his chest. He wasn’t worried about the old one so much. The old ones were slow, easy to take out. It was the fresh one that scared him. They were stronger, faster, more violent. They could be tricky if they retained a little of their human cunning, even if they hadn’t fully reawakened. He had seen them use fake outs and ambush tactics, and it was hard to disable them. They just kept coming at you and coming at you until you brained them.He crept down the porch, keeping close to the side of the house, until he came to the steps. He started down them, slipped on the ice, and had to catch himself on the railing.“Careful!” Ghost-Harold gasped.Brent cursed silently at his clumsiness. He waited to see if either of the deadheads had heard him stumble. They were always very alert to noises. He listened to them moaning around front for a moment or two. They didn’t sound as if they were aware of him. If his fumbling had alerted them, they would have started howling. Perhaps the creaking and banging of the barn roof had obscured the scraping sounds of his near fall.He eased carefully down the last two steps, hanging onto the porch rail with one hand and gripping the handle of the shovel with the other. Now the tricky part. He had to scoot his feet through the snow, rather than move his legs up and down. If he tried to walk normally through the snow, it would make crunching sounds, and bring the deadheads running.Please, God, let them be stiff, he prayed. Cold weather slowed them down a lot. Deadheads would completely ice up if the temperature stayed below freezing long enough. Despite last night’s storm, however, he knew it hadn’t been cold enough long enough to turn them into zombicicles. He just hoped they had been exposed to the cold long enough to slow them down, to give him a bit of an advantage.The wind swirled around the side of the house, blowing fine flakes of snow into his eyes. The big sheet of tin at the collapsed barn went, Creaaaaakkk-BOOM!The zombies in the front yard groaned.He could see the old one now. It was a male, an elderly man when it contracted the Phage. It stumbled around in the snow, its movements jerking and unsteady. It didn’t notice him for several seconds, its cataract eyes rolled up at the heavens, then its head twisted in Brent’s direction and it let out a gravelly moan. It sounded more like a belch than a cry.Brent gripped the shovel tight with both hands, heart galloping in his chest, almost dizzy with fear, and then a kind of calmness settled down over him, a sense of unreality, as if he were viewing everything from outside his body.“Hey, assholes!” he yelled.The big one at the door began almost instantly to howl. Brent heard it thud down the porch, running in his direction. Ignoring the old slow one tottering toward him in the snow, he stepped around the corner of the house just in time to see the big one run into the porch railing with its hips. Its upper body catapulted forward over the railing, like a child turning a flip on the monkey bars, and it plummeted face first onto the ground.He almost laughed at the zombie’s graceless sprawl. He ran forward, lifting the shovel over his head, ready to deliver the coup de grâce before the revenant could recover from its fall.But it was fresh, strong. It lurched forward across the ground at him, hands reaching for Brent’s legs.Brent delivered one solid blow, the shovel clonging on the zombie’s skull, but the hood of the deadhead’s parka had flipped up as he swung on it, and the insulated material had absorbed much of the force of his strike.“Shit!” he grunted, as the zombie latched onto one of his ankles. He twisted free and went stumbling away from the big one.Almost into the grasp of the old leathery one.Belching, the old deadhead swiped at his jacket, gnashing its teeth.Still calm, still with that sense of altered reality that came over him in moments of extremis, Brent stepped back and swung on the old deadhead. He hit it hard, and the zombie’s head flopped over with the muffled crack of breaking bone.It went down on one knee, head rolling loosely on its right shoulder, then sank into the snow.But the big one had clambered to its feet. It sprinted at Brent, fingers curled into claws, mouth agape.Brent swung the shovel, struck it in the shoulder, but the blow was only strong enough to turn the zombie aside.It went to its knees, still howling, then launched itself at him again.Brent was howling, too. He struck the deadhead with a downward blow, catching the zombie in the back of the head. Black blood and a chunk of hairy flesh struck the snow. “Yaawwwpp!” the zombie gurgled, and jumped at him again, and Brent struck it on the head once more. It went down on its hands and knees, its thick, spoiled blood dripping on the snow in globs, and Brent hit it again, driving it onto its belly.“Fucking DIE!” Brent roared, and he hit it again.And again.And again.And again.He stumbled away when he saw brains, and tossed the shovel aside. Gasping, head swimming, he tried to catch his breath. He couldn’t see. The sun reflecting off the snow had blinded him. Blue and green afterimages obscured his vision. He headed toward the farmhouse, wheezing, and slipped. Went down on his knees. Tried to rise. Sprawled forward.“Easy, kiddo, calm down,” Ghost-Harold said. “It’s okay. You killed them. You’re safe.”Brent gasped. His chest hurt. He brought a handful of snow to his face, rubbed it onto his cheeks and forehead. There. That was better.“Oh, shit,” he gasped.“I know, kiddo.”“I hate that.”“I know.”He crawled to the porch, turned around and sat on a porch step. Brent sat there until he had calmed down, until he had caught his breath and his hands quit trembling. He stared off across the side lawn, squinting into the glare.“You need to do something with the bodies,” Ghost-Harold said gently after a little while. “You can’t leave them near the road.”“I know,” Brent said. Back by the barn, the big tin sheet went, Creaaak-BOOM!Brent grinned. “I know what to do with them, too.”
9. Cleanup
He listened for the sound of an approaching engine, and when he heard nothing but the wind whistling in the trees, crunched over to the big deadhead. The zombie was dead—what they called dead-dead—its head split open like a crushed cantaloupe, brains oozing out. Brent moved around to the zombie’s feet and took the big guy’s ankles in his hands. He took a deep breath and pulled, and the big deadhead scraped across the ground a couple inches.“Fuck, he’s heavy,” Brent said.“You gotta do it,” Harold said.“Yeah, I know.”In case of a meat patrol.The likelihood of a meat patrol driving down this particular country highway, at this particular time, was pretty low, but if one did happen to drive by, he didn’t want them to see anything out of the ordinary. That’s why he needed to remove the deadheads from sight.. They ate their own, and they might just check the farmhouse if they saw a couple deadheads lying in the front yard. If he planned to stay until the cold weather passed, he needed to eliminate any signs of activity—of the living or the dead-- and do something about that piece of flapping tin! Its banging had already attracted two deadheads. He didn’t want any more uninvited guests.He heaved, and the big deadhead slid across the snow, leaving a trail of black goo. It took the better part of an hour to get the zombie over to the barn, and another twenty minutes to drag him up over the collapsed boards and beams to the section of the roof that kept flapping up and down.Tugging the corpse by the parka, he rolled the deadhead onto the loose tin sheet, then tossed some boards on top for good measure.“There,” he panted, wiping the sweat from his face. The wind raked through his hair, blowing his sweaty bangs around, but the tin didn’t move. The world seemed suddenly very still. Too still, almost.Brent caught his breath, then returned for the other deadhead.Despite its broken neck, the other zombie was still alive. Its eyes rolled in their sockets, just like Mrs. Johnson’s eyes had, while its jaw worked restlessly up and down. And then he realized that Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons’ heads were buried somewhere in the snow nearby, probably still chomping, and he got a cold shivery feeling in his belly. He looked around, suddenly paranoid, then reached down into the snow very carefully and grabbed the ankles of the old deadhead.“Don’t bite,” he muttered anxiously.Following the trail he’d already made, he dragged the second deadhead to the barn and tossed it onto the first one.The second one was much easier to move. It was all shriveled up, light, like old dried sticks.Its face came up close to the big one’s neck when he tossed it onto the pile, and the old dead one started trying to eat the fresh dead one. It gnawed at the fresh one’s neck, making a weird grunting noise.“Ew, gross,” Brent said with a grimace. “Stop that!”He couldn’t stand the thought of the old one nibbling on the fresh one while he stayed in the farmhouse, so he retrieved his shovel and brained the nasty old thing.That done, he trudged to the front yard and used the shovel to obscure the signs of their battle as best he could. He pushed the snow around, trying to cover the streaks and stains of the big one’s blood. He used the flat of the shovel’s spade to smooth over their tracks, and obfuscated the trail of flattened snow where he had dragged the zombies to the barn. He did the best he could, but it was still glaringly obvious to him that something violent had transpired in the front lawn.“Maybe it’ll snow again tonight and cover it all up,” he said.“Ah, it’ll be fine,” Ghost-Harold replied. “You worry too much, kiddo. Go inside and get some rest. There won’t be any meat patrols running around in this weather. You know they hate the cold.”That sounded like a good idea.
10. Caught
He couldn’t rest though. Instead, he made a rabbit trap. He had seen rabbit tracks in the snow earlier, and just thinking of a steaming pot of rabbit stew made his mouth water and his belly gurgle hungrily. His battle with the deadheads had drained him, both physically and emotionally, but he knew that rabbit wasn’t going to catch itself, and so he rigged up a trap for it with a kitchen drawer, a piece of yarn and a wooden spatula. The yarn he tied to the handle of the spatula and a hunk of the ivy that was spreading across the living room walls. There were several green leaves on the ivy. Maybe Mr. Bunny would find them tempting. He hoped they would because he didn’t have anything else to bait his trap with. He didn’t think rabbits were overly fond of uncooked ramen noodles, and the only other food he had was a single can of mixed vegetables, and none of the veggies in the can were large enough to tie a piece of string to.He went out back with the components of his trap. After clearing snow from a four foot by four foot area, he propped the wood box on the end of the spatula and placed the ivy under the box. If Mr. Rabbit came along and gave the greenery a nibble, it would dislodge the spatula and cause the box to drop down over it.“And voila, rabbit stew,” he said, sitting back on his legs and admiring his handiwork.He had made traps like this before. They worked surprisingly well, though a few times he’d trapped wild critters he did not intend to catch. Once he’d caught a skunk, and got sprayed the instant he lifted back the box. Harold wouldn’t sleep near him for a month after that happened. Sometimes he caught feral cats, birds, squirrels. They were all edible, if not as tasty as rabbit.He returned inside. Wiping his cheek with the back of his hand, he realized there was zombie ichor splattered on his face. Grimacing in disgust, he stripped his clean new clothes off and washed again, then selected a second new outfit and put it on. Clean again, he cooked another package of ramen noodles, ate, then ambled upstairs to take a nap.Curling up in his little nest of blankets by the window, he found himself dozing off very quickly. He was exhausted-- by his exertions, and by the adrenaline rush he’d had when he was battling the zombies. His arms and legs felt like they were weighted with lead. His eyelids, too.He shut his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the day’s last light. Tomorrow, if it were warmer, he would think about moving on, maybe walk up the road a little way and see if there were any houses nearby. It was always tempting to stay somewhere secure, but he would never make it to the Free Zone if he gave in to that temptation. Besides, there really wasn’t anywhere safe in the world. Not anymore. Something dangerous would eventually come along-- a meat patrol, a herd of dumbheads, a group of violent survivors. In this new post-apocalyptic world, complacency was the most dangerous things of all. Better to keep running. Better to keep heading for the Free Zone.He finally drifted off, and dreamed about the Free Zone. He had no illusions about the place. It was no city paved in gold—not even in his dreams—but there were people, lots of living people, and they welcomed him through the city gates, embraced him, celebrated his arrival as if he had come to deliver them from their enemies. He was no messiah, no hero come to save them, but their joy was gratifying, all but overwhelming, and the feeling of being swept up in their love, the sense of community, brought tears to his eyes. He was a part of something again. He belonged. He was no longer alone.And then he woke upIt was still light out, but the angle of the light had changed. He knew at once that he had slept through the night, that it was morning. He knew because his bladder was full to bursting, and his body felt refreshed, if not a little sore. Particularly his arms and shoulders. Probably from bashing in those zombies’ heads, then dragging them to the back yard.But there was something wrong, too. He felt it in his stomach. A tingle of fear. The beginnings of panic.A sound, like a distant train rumbling, but there were no trains anymore.A truck engine!“A meat patrol!” Ghost Harold shouted.Brent scrambled up and ran for his boots. He sat and pulled them on and snatched up his backpack. Did he have a weapon? He turned in a circle, surveying the room. No! He had left his knife downstairs, after using it to make the box trap. It was on the kitchen table.“Hurry! Hurry!” Ghost-Harold shouted.There was a crashing sound from below. The scrape of something heavy scooting across the floor. The sofa. Someone was forcing the front door, pushing the sofa out of the way as they entered. There was a second crash, the tinkle of glass, and he heard the kitchen table squawk across the linoleum.“The window!” Harold shouted.Brent ran to the window and started tugging on the handle. It wouldn’t budge. He realized it was locked and flipped the lever to unlock it. He started to heave the window up, and two deadheads came around the corner of the house. They were armed, dressed in heavy winter clothing. Both of them had rifles. Brent stepped back before they glanced up and saw him.“I’m trapped,” he panted.“Hide in the closet,” Ghost Harold suggested.Brent nodded. He ran for the closet door as footsteps thudded on the staircase. Praying he was just having a particularly vivid nightmare, he jerked open the door. As soon as the door swung open, several plastic bins fell out at him. He had looked through them yesterday when he was searching for new clothes, had stacked them back in the closet haphazardly when he was done. That’s what you get for being lazy, he thought. He jumped forward, arms outstretched, and tried to keep them from hitting the floor. He managed to catch them all but the top one. It slid off to the side and hit the floor with a thump.“Oh, shit!” Brent whimpered, looking over his shoulder.He couldn’t remember if he had locked the door or not. He hadn’t barricaded it. He had fallen asleep too quickly.“Here,” a gravelly voice barked.The doorknob jiggled.Johnson’s exercise equipment! Brent let the boxes fall and ran over to the Bowflex machine. He snatched up a couple five pound barbells that were lying on the floor next to the exercise machine and prepared to fight.The door shuddered as one of the invaders kicked it. A crack appeared in the doorframe by the knob, but it held.“Sssomeonesss in there!” a croaky voice cried. “I ssssmell it!”The second kick sent the door flying open in a spray of splinters. It banged against the wall and swung back, but a deadhead was already stumbling into the room. It blocked the door with its elbow, both hands on a rifle, ready to shoot.It saw him.“Yesssss!” it hissed.It was a big deadhead, powerfully built. Obviously some kind of cop or soldier when it was alive, judging by its buzz haircut and the shape and bearing of its body. It had a flat featured, blocky head, and small sunken eyes. Its skin had a bluish-green cast, and there were several open sores on its forehead and cheek through which its bone and muscle tissue were visible. It also had no lips. Its face from the nose down had been gnawed off.“Put down!” it snarled. Without lips, it sounded as if it had said “toot down”, but Brent knew what it meant.Yelling, Brent rushed at the deadhead, swinging for its head with one of the barbells. The zombie jerked back, moving surprisingly quick for its state of decomposition, and the barbell came down on its arm, knocking the barrel of the rifle aside just as the creature pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the floor and ricocheted with a squeal, punching a hole in the closet door. The zombie tried to bring the rifle to bear and Brent struck at it again.Enraged, the zombie dropped its rifle and seized Brent by the shoulders. Brent stumbled back as the creature charged forward, holding him by the sleeves. The creature was nearly a head taller, and much heavier. Brent’s heels caught against a box, and he toppled back, the zombie following atop him.“I’ll tucking eat your cock!” the monster snarled, its bare teeth snapping out the words just inches from his face.“Get—Off--!” Brent grunted, twisting and pushing.The deadhead drew back a fist and punched him.The blow connected with his cheek and turned his head to one side, exposing his throat to those teeth. He saw stars, felt as if he had been knocked just slightly ajar with reality, as if his mind was lying just a few inches to the left of his body. He blinked his eyes, tried to reorient himself, and then another blow landed. And another.“Tucking eatchoo!” the monster was snarling, over and over again.Brent felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. The pain and fear was ebbing as the world dimmed quickly around him. I am just a piece of meat, he thought, seeing his left hand flopping bonelessly on the floor beside him. A piece of meat that feels no pain.A pair of boots stepped into his field of view. Another deadhead had entered the room. He didn’t look up. He couldn’t turn his head. There was blood in his eyes. Blood in his nose and mouth.
“Aw, hell, kiddo,” Harold said.
TO BE CONTINUED...
AND
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
The snow began to fall shortly after dark. It came in big moist flakes, some almost as big as silver dollars, splatting on the windows with such force that it sounded like moths batting against the glass. The tapping startled Brent, who was trying to cook some ramen noodles over a candle he had found in one of the cabinets. He jerked around, almost knocking over the sauce pan he was cooking the noodles in, which he had perched over the candle on two other, larger pans. He stared at the window a moment, his heart galloping in his chest, before he realized what the drumming on the glass was, and then he smiled, let out his breath with a gust, and even laughed a little.“Little jumpy, aren’t we?” Ghost-Harold asked.“I don’t like burning candles,” Brent said, walking toward the window over the sink. “I don’t like making any light at all after dark. It’s not safe. You can’t see what’s outside, but anything can see in.”“You covered the windows,” Ghost-Harold said.He had. He had emptied the linen closet, hanging the musty bedsheets over every window and door. Both for heat… and to keep anything from looking in at him.“I know,” Brent said. “The light still shows through, though.” He pushed the sheet that he had hung over the kitchen window to one side, just in time to see a big nugget of wet snow clout against the glass and slither down it.“Just a little,” Ghost-Harold said.“That’s all it would take,” Brent replied, and he let the makeshift curtain fall back into place. He tried very hard not to think about the creatures that might be wandering out there in the snow and wind right then, in the fields, on the empty highways. Had any of them seen the faintly glowing window, the wink of light that had escaped when he pushed aside the curtain to peek outside?The thought made his skin prickle with anxiety.Despite the difference in their age, Brent had always been the more cautious one. A person might expect Harold to be the careful one, being the older of the two, but it was not so. Harold had been the reckless one, the devil-may-care wiseguy, and Brent the nattering ninny. If not for Brent, the old Irishman probably would have died a lot sooner. It was a miracle he had survived as long as he had. “Tis the luck o’ the Irish,” he sometimes claimed, but his luck had finally run out, as luck almost always does-- even Irish luck. If it didn’t, there would have been a lot less casinos back in the day, and a lot more wealthy Micks.Brent returned to his pan and stuck a finger inside. The water was not even lukewarm, the brick of fossilized ramen noodles only slightly softer than it had been when he stripped it from its plastic wrapping. The water wouldn’t even be safe to drink if it didn’t boil. He had scooped it from a rain barrel sitting by the back porch. No telling what kind of bugs were swimming around in it.He returned to the cabinets, looking for shorter pans, something that would lower his soup pan closer to the flame. You could boil water over candles, but it usually took at least three of them, and he had only been able to find the one candle. Whoever had taken the guns out of Mr. Johnson’s gun cabinet had taken everything else of use as well: food, candles, batteries, weapons… He had found a few handy items in the farmhouse, but nothing to jump for joy about, nothing he didn’t already possess.“I miss microwave ovens,” Brent said, pushing through the pots and pans beneath the cabinet. He squatted down and reached into the far corner, feeling around with his fingers. He heard a snap and felt a sharp pain in his index and middle fingers. Cursing, he jerked his hand out and pulled the mousetrap off his hand, throwing it angrily across the room. “Stop laughing,” he said, shaking his throbbing fingers. “That could have broken my fingers.”“You ought to know better than sticking your fingers in places you can’t see,” Ghost-Harold said.Brent stood with a grunt and began to rummage through the upper cabinets. He pulled around one of the kitchen chairs and stood on it and examined the top of the cabinets. “Yes!” he hissed.He jumped down with an unopened package of tea candles. They had been hidden behind the trim of the cabinets. He returned to the stove, tearing the package open, and rearranged his cooking setup. He lit four of the tea candles, put the large candle aside, and placed the grill from one of the stove’s burners directly over the shorter tea candles.“Now we’re cooking,” Brent grinned, putting his pan directly overtop the tea candle flames.Within thirty minutes, the water in the pan was steaming. Forty-five minutes later, the soup was bubbling, and the noodles were soft and plump. He opened a can of mixed vegetables, drank the water, then added the veggies to his soup.“Gonna be go-ooood!” he sang excitedly, his belly gurgling.He ate quicker than he intended, then blew out all but one of the candles and crept upstairs, his shadow jumping in its wavering light. He had made a little nest for himself in one of the spare bedrooms upstairs, using the sheets and blankets and pillows he had stripped from the beds downstairs. It would have been nice to sleep in an actual bed for a change, but it was safer to sleep on the second floor. He would have a better view of his surroundings from its window, and he would have more time to escape should anything nasty bust in through one of the windows or doors downstairs.“Always have an escape plan,” he said, and Ghost-Harold made a sound of agreement.He set the candle on a large tower speaker and shut and locked the bedroom door, then piled some boxes and plastic bins against the door. The bins were not very heavy. They looked as if they contained mostly women’s clothing, shoes, seasonal decorations, and family photos, but it made him feel more secure barricading the door.“I’m going to look through all this stuff tomorrow,” he said.“That’s a good idea.”“Maybe I can find some clean new clothes to wear.”“You could use some.”He sat on the bench of Mr. Johnson’s Bowflex machine and took off his boots, then retrieved his candle and walked to his nest of blankets and pillows and settled in. He had made his pallet on the floor beneath the window so he could sit and look outside until he got sleepy. The snow was still splatting against the window. An occasional gust of wind rattled the glass in its frame. He blew out the candle as soon as he was situated and then just sat there and gazed out at the snowy, benighted world, his elbows on the windowsill, his forehead and the tip of his nose lightly touching the cold glass.“This might be a good place to hole up for the winter,” he said softly. “It’s pretty warm for an old farmhouse.”“I don’t know,” Ghost-Harold replied. “It’s awful close to that town. I think you should push on north after the storm passes.”Harold was probably right. The farmhouse Brent was waiting out the storm inside couldn’t be more than ten miles from the nearby town of Manfried. They had come upon the village shortly after scurrying across the Ohio River, picking their way carefully through the wrecked and abandoned vehicles on the disintegrating bridge. It was just a small riverside town; population 5,000, the sign said. They had expected it to be like almost every other Midwest town they had encountered during their journey to the Free Zone: derelict, depopulated by the Phage, a few dumb deadhead shuffling around the streets. But it wasn’t. There had been a thriving community of deadheads occupying the town. Brent and Harold had watched the zombies for a little while, hunkered down in some woods at the edge of town, and then headed east, planning to circle around the zombie tribe. They had only put a few miles between them before running afoul of a meat patrol.It was dangerous and taxing traveling in the winter, but in some ways it was safer. Zombies were not as active in the winter. The smart ones hated the cold, and tended to stay in their homes where it was warm, and the dumb ones froze. Zombies were cold-blooded creatures. They turned into zombiecicles if the temperature dropped below freezing. You could walk right up to them and knock their frozen heads off. Harold used to call it Zombie T-Ball.“You can’t give up now,” Ghost-Harold said. “You’re almost there.”“I know,” Brent sighed, staring out the window. Now that his eyes had adjusted to the dark, he could see the snow swirling through the air outside. It looked like the snow on an old TV set when it was tuned to a station with no signal. It was coming down pretty thick. Visibility was only a couple hundred meters. The ground outside was already white, the collapsed barn nearly obscured but for the section of the roof that kept flapping up and down.Out there, past the storm, or maybe staring out their windows at the snow like he was doing, were the people of the Free Zone. The city of living men was only 300 miles away now. Harold had traced out a rough route on an old road map when they decided to make a run for it. That was over a year ago, but they had managed to travel over six hundred miles before his partner died. That was two-thirds of the way there. In the old days, a 300 mile trip would have taken about five hours. Less if you put the pedal to the metal. By foot, it would take at least a month to finish the journey, and that’s if he didn’t run into any trouble, that’s if he could walk ten miles a day, every day, until he got there. More realistically, he was looking at three to six months.And then…But it was too much for him to imagine. Too much, almost, to hope for. He tried to imagine it, being someplace safe, someplace with thousands of other living human beings, with food and electricity and safe drinking water, and it made his soul ache.“You don’t realize how much you need other people until they’re gone,” Brent said. “How much you need… to just be around somebody. To have some company, even if you don’t talk much. To just… feel their presence.”He sniffed and wiped his nose, watching the snow twist and flap at the glass.“You crying?” Ghost Harold asked.Brent nodded. “Yeah… a little.”His imaginary friend was quiet for a moment, then said in a gentle voice, “It’s all right, kiddo. You go ahead and cry. Sometimes you just have to let it out.”Sometime later, Brent slept.
7. Day
As often happened now that the world was dead, Brent woke disoriented. Without the distractions of modern technology, Brent’s interior life had become much more vivid. It was a thing he had noticed shortly after the world ended, when the initial chaos and violence had passed and the world became very empty and still. It was like his brain was a muscle that the technological world had caused to atrophy, and now, in the new silence of the post-modern world, that muscle had begun to develop, to grow stronger, to bulk up. In the absence of constant electronic diversions, that dormant, almost vestigialized part of his mind had reawakened, had blossomed, and he reverted, it seemed to him, to a nearly childlike state of awareness. His imagination was suddenly so overpowering that he constantly slipped into an almost dream-like state during his waking hours, talking to people who weren’t there, weaving fantasies in his mind, making up songs in his head, or poetry, or jokes. His dreams had become so intense, so potent, that they seemed real to him, even after he awoke, as real at least as the waking world. Sometimes, when he awoke, he was not sure which world was the real one, the world he had just departed, or the one he had just opened his eyes to, or even if such a distinction was important anymore.It was like that when he woke the next morning.He had dreamed that he was a child again, and that it had snowed the night before and school had been cancelled. In his dream, his mother had made hot chocolate for him, and then she had helped him into his winter clothes so he could go outside and play with his friends. He had played all day with his chums—Evan and Bobby Toothaker, twins who lived down the street from him—bobsledding down the big hill behind the old elementary school, building a snowman, making snow angels and having snowball fights. He played until his nose was red and running, until the sun had rolled all the way across the sky to the western horizon, and twilight had dyed the white hillsides the pastel blue of Easter eggs.“Bre-eeent!” his mother called, and he turned in the direction of her voice, a snowball in each hand. “Uh oh! That’s my mom, guys! I gotta go!” he said, and then he had awakened, and he looked up at the brightly glowing window, laced with the snow that had fallen overnight, and for a moment he thought he was a child again, and he hoped that school had been cancelled so he could go outside and play with his chums like he had in his dream.The truth came quickly back to him, but it did not hurt. He had long since finished mourning for the world that used to be. There were times now that he no longer even missed it. Sometimes he didn’t even remember it.“Rise and shine, kiddo!” Ghost-Harold cried.“I’m up,” Brent responded, shielding his eyes from the glaring light that was slanting through the window. The storm had passed. The sun was bright and warm and cheery, the sky clear and deep and cloudless.“I would have made you some coffee, but I don’t have any hands,” Harold said. “Or coffee, for that matter.”“Thanks anyway,” Brent said with a chuckle. He sat up and surveyed the room, letting his memories, like the pieces of a puzzle, slot back into place. He leaned up to the window and peered outside, making sure there were no tracks in the snow. The snow in the backyard was pristine but for a solitary trail of rabbit tracks. That was good. Maybe he would rig up a trap for that rabbit, too. It had been a while since he’d eaten fresh meat. The thought of rabbit stew made his mouth gush with saliva.Brent threw aside his covers, wrinkling his nose at the smell of himself. Maybe he would take a bath today, too. Look for some new clothes in all these boxes and bins. Mr. Johnson was a big guy, but the Johnsons might have had kids who were Brent’s size, clothes that Mrs. Johnson had boxed up and stored after her kids outgrew them.It couldn’t hurt to look.He got up, put his boots back on, and pushed aside the boxes he’d barricaded the door with. He listened at the door a moment, then unlocked it and peeked out into the hallway.“It’s clear,” he said.He crept down the stairs just as carefully, then surveyed the house and its surroundings. There were no signs of intrusion, and no tracks in the snow outside, in either the side lawns or the front. He allowed himself to relax a little.Brent grabbed a large pan from the kitchen cabinet and used it to transfer some water from the water barrel outside to the tank of the Johnson’s commode. It was cold outside, but not painfully so. Once he had filled the commode, he dropped his pants and took a leisurely crap, availing himself of the magazines Mr. Johnson had kept under the bathroom sink: Cheri, Playboy, Penthouse.“Why, Mr. Johnson, you old dog you,” he said when he found the magazines.The glossy pages of the magazines were brittle and faded, but the images and text were perfectly legible. It seemed to him a great luxury to crap in an actual crapper while flipping through the pages of a girlie magazine. Smoking a cigarette while he did it was the only thing that could have made it any more luxurious, he thought, and then he wondered at how spoiled he had been in his old life, how petty his problems had been back then.“You had it good, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said. “You lived like a king and didn’t even know it.”“Do you mind?” Brent said. “I’m trying to take a crap.”“Oh, yeah. Sorry.”Brent sighed, shaking his head, and returned his attention to his magazine. He rotated the magazine sideways to view the centerfold, ignoring the moist trumpet sounds reverberating in the toilet boil.“Hello, Miss August,” he sighed.Miss August, AKA Katrina Twain, stood with her back turned two-thirds of the way to the camera, dressed in just a pair of bright red stiletto heels and a few bits of glittering jewelry. Her hair was a honey-gold swirl around her face, her eyes like sapphires rimmed in charcoal. Her candy red lips were pouty and partially parted, as if she were about to whisper something breathy and vulgar to the cameraman. The puffy mounds of her pudenda were just visible between the smooth globes of her flawless derriere. In the bottom right corner of the pinup was written, Come on baby light my fire, XOXO Katrina, in a swirly cursive script.He wondered if she was still alive somewhere, or if she had died during the pandemic. Odds were, she was dead. Almost everyone had died during the outbreak. If the Phage didn’t get you, the zombies did, and if the zombies didn’t get you, your fellows survivors did, and if you somehow managed to survive all that, the radiation from the nukes got you, or you caught some other illness and died from lack of medical care, or had an accident, or got depressed and killed yourself. Humanity had gone up in a blaze of glory. People like Brent and Harold, the survivors in the Free Zone, were just the last warm cinders cooling on a mountain of ash.“So you gonna beat off or what?” Ghost-Harold asked.Brent laughed, a long, low exhalation. Whatever passions Miss August had begun to stir in him had been doused by his morbid ruminations. He looked around for something to wipe on.“No toilet paper, kiddo,” Harold said apologetically.Brent sighed. Sorry, Miss August…He flushed and watched the water swirl down the pipe with the same fascination a Neanderthal might have watched a DC-10 take to the air. It had taken humanity 200 million years to go from flinging their feces at each other in the trees to indoor plumbing, and like a careless gambler, they’d lost it right back to the house, and in spectacular fashion.Brent returned to the kitchen. He grabbed a pan and stepped out onto the back porch. The sky was clear now, the sun flashing brilliantly off the snow, though it was still cold and windy. It reminded him of the dream he had had during the night. Playing in the snow with his buddies, school cancelled, and nothing to worry about but the quality of the fun they might have until sundown.He stepped down off the porch and sank to mid-shin. Last night’s snow storm had dumped at least a foot of snow on the region, maybe more. He filled the pan up with snow, returned inside, and set it on the counter to melt. He would have fresh drinking water when it melted, no need to boil, though it might be a little radioactive. Several major cities had been nuked during the worst of the pandemic. A lot of people had died from radiation sickness in the years that followed the outbreak. But not Brent. Nothing ever seemed to make him sick. Even when he was a boy he had been unusually healthy. He could remember his mother remarking on it once or twice when he was a kid.He pushed the table against the back door again and went upstairs. For the next hour or so, he went through the Johnsons’ storage boxes. Most of the clothes in the bins were women’s clothes, but he did find a couple outfits that looked like they might fit him. The Johnsons must have had a son, or sons, and while most of the boy’s clothes were too small, there were a few that were just his size.Happy, he carried the clothes downstairs and laid them on the table. He raided the linen closet for towels and washrags, and then walked into the bathroom to look for soap and shampoo. There was a single bar of dried up soap in the medicine cabinet, shrunken and fissured, but the shampoo had turned into some kind of weird blue plastic inside the bottles. Looked like something out of a sci-fi movie. “Oh, well. This is good enough,” he said, carrying to soap into the kitchen.“You ought to take a bath,” Ghost-Harold said. “Might be your only chance for a while.”Brent shook his head. “Too much trouble. It would take me all day to heat up enough water.”“Take it cold,” Harold said. “Are you a man or a mouse?”“Mouse,” Brent said. “Definitely a mouse.”He fetched several more pans of snow, lit his tea candles, and began to warm the water up over their flames. He poured the contents of each pan into one of the sinks as soon as it was room temperature, then warmed the next. When both sides of the sink were full of water, he stripped down to his ragged grey skivvies and began to wash himself. He scrubbed and scrubbed, making multiple passes over his skin, until the left basin was soapy and gray with filth, then he switched to the right side sink and began to rinse off.“God, kiddo, you’ve gotten skinny,” Harold said. “You look like one of those concentration camp survivors.”Brent had noticed. Scrubbing the washrag up and down his ribs was like running his hands up and down an old fashioned washboard. He didn’t reply to his imaginary friend, just dipped his soapy hair in the clean water basin and rinsed it out.“Wash your beard, too. It looks like a bird’s nest,” Harold said.Brent grinned and shook his head. Harold was just as annoyingly helpful in death as he had been in life. He was one of those people who always tried to nudge you aside and take over what you were doing, whether it was cooking, making a fire, or skinning an old dead possum. If he had been a standup comic, his catchphrase would have been, “Here, let me do it!”Brent was just getting ready to put on his clean new clothes when something banged against the front door. He jumped and wheeled around toward the living room.A moment later, he heard a low, piping moan.
8. Deadheads
There were only two of them, thank God. There was a big fresh one, didn’t look like he’d been dead more than a few weeks, a couple months tops. He was dressed in a parka stained black with blood and tan Carharts pants. Judging by the vacant expression on his face, and the soulless gray marbles of his eyes, he was a dumbhead. The other was an old deadhead, smaller, dressed in rags, its limbs like sticks wrapped in dead vines, its face a leathery death’s head. Brent peeked at them from one of the living room windows, peering through the narrow gap between the window frame and the bookshelf he had barricaded it with. The old shriveled one was tottering around in the front yard like an Alzheimer’s patient, the wind tossing its rags and the thin, dark hair of its head. The big fresh one had clambered up onto the porch, and stood just outside the front door. Every so often he would step forward and smack his body against the door, or bat it with one of his hands. After a few minutes, Brent realized the zombie’s lurching movements followed the creak and bang of the barn roof in the back yard. Each time the big section of tin crashed in the back yard, the big zombie would jerk and step forward. Zombies were drawn to loud noises, and that loose section of roofing had been flapping and banging all night.“Damn,” Ghost-Harold said behind him. “Whatcha gonna do, kiddo?”If it were warmer out, he’d just abandon the farmhouse, slip out the back and put some distance between him and his uninvited guests. But it was below freezing outside, and windy. He would very likely freeze to death if he had to travel very far. He didn’t know how far the next house was, and it was just as likely there would be zombies there, too. There was only one thing he could do.“You’re going to take ‘em out, ain’tcha?” Brent nodded.Brent left the window and crept into the kitchen as quietly as possible. He snatched up the shovel he had propped against the cabinet and headed toward the back door. He looked outside, made sure there were no other deadheads stumbling around in the back yard, then eased the table aside.“Be careful, kiddo,” Ghost-Harold said, his voice tight with anxiety.Brent nodded, his lips pressed together.The wind gusted in on him, blowing his hair back from his brow. He slipped out onto the back porch, his heart thumping rabbit-like in his chest. He wasn’t worried about the old one so much. The old ones were slow, easy to take out. It was the fresh one that scared him. They were stronger, faster, more violent. They could be tricky if they retained a little of their human cunning, even if they hadn’t fully reawakened. He had seen them use fake outs and ambush tactics, and it was hard to disable them. They just kept coming at you and coming at you until you brained them.He crept down the porch, keeping close to the side of the house, until he came to the steps. He started down them, slipped on the ice, and had to catch himself on the railing.“Careful!” Ghost-Harold gasped.Brent cursed silently at his clumsiness. He waited to see if either of the deadheads had heard him stumble. They were always very alert to noises. He listened to them moaning around front for a moment or two. They didn’t sound as if they were aware of him. If his fumbling had alerted them, they would have started howling. Perhaps the creaking and banging of the barn roof had obscured the scraping sounds of his near fall.He eased carefully down the last two steps, hanging onto the porch rail with one hand and gripping the handle of the shovel with the other. Now the tricky part. He had to scoot his feet through the snow, rather than move his legs up and down. If he tried to walk normally through the snow, it would make crunching sounds, and bring the deadheads running.Please, God, let them be stiff, he prayed. Cold weather slowed them down a lot. Deadheads would completely ice up if the temperature stayed below freezing long enough. Despite last night’s storm, however, he knew it hadn’t been cold enough long enough to turn them into zombicicles. He just hoped they had been exposed to the cold long enough to slow them down, to give him a bit of an advantage.The wind swirled around the side of the house, blowing fine flakes of snow into his eyes. The big sheet of tin at the collapsed barn went, Creaaaaakkk-BOOM!The zombies in the front yard groaned.He could see the old one now. It was a male, an elderly man when it contracted the Phage. It stumbled around in the snow, its movements jerking and unsteady. It didn’t notice him for several seconds, its cataract eyes rolled up at the heavens, then its head twisted in Brent’s direction and it let out a gravelly moan. It sounded more like a belch than a cry.Brent gripped the shovel tight with both hands, heart galloping in his chest, almost dizzy with fear, and then a kind of calmness settled down over him, a sense of unreality, as if he were viewing everything from outside his body.“Hey, assholes!” he yelled.The big one at the door began almost instantly to howl. Brent heard it thud down the porch, running in his direction. Ignoring the old slow one tottering toward him in the snow, he stepped around the corner of the house just in time to see the big one run into the porch railing with its hips. Its upper body catapulted forward over the railing, like a child turning a flip on the monkey bars, and it plummeted face first onto the ground.He almost laughed at the zombie’s graceless sprawl. He ran forward, lifting the shovel over his head, ready to deliver the coup de grâce before the revenant could recover from its fall.But it was fresh, strong. It lurched forward across the ground at him, hands reaching for Brent’s legs.Brent delivered one solid blow, the shovel clonging on the zombie’s skull, but the hood of the deadhead’s parka had flipped up as he swung on it, and the insulated material had absorbed much of the force of his strike.“Shit!” he grunted, as the zombie latched onto one of his ankles. He twisted free and went stumbling away from the big one.Almost into the grasp of the old leathery one.Belching, the old deadhead swiped at his jacket, gnashing its teeth.Still calm, still with that sense of altered reality that came over him in moments of extremis, Brent stepped back and swung on the old deadhead. He hit it hard, and the zombie’s head flopped over with the muffled crack of breaking bone.It went down on one knee, head rolling loosely on its right shoulder, then sank into the snow.But the big one had clambered to its feet. It sprinted at Brent, fingers curled into claws, mouth agape.Brent swung the shovel, struck it in the shoulder, but the blow was only strong enough to turn the zombie aside.It went to its knees, still howling, then launched itself at him again.Brent was howling, too. He struck the deadhead with a downward blow, catching the zombie in the back of the head. Black blood and a chunk of hairy flesh struck the snow. “Yaawwwpp!” the zombie gurgled, and jumped at him again, and Brent struck it on the head once more. It went down on its hands and knees, its thick, spoiled blood dripping on the snow in globs, and Brent hit it again, driving it onto its belly.“Fucking DIE!” Brent roared, and he hit it again.And again.And again.And again.He stumbled away when he saw brains, and tossed the shovel aside. Gasping, head swimming, he tried to catch his breath. He couldn’t see. The sun reflecting off the snow had blinded him. Blue and green afterimages obscured his vision. He headed toward the farmhouse, wheezing, and slipped. Went down on his knees. Tried to rise. Sprawled forward.“Easy, kiddo, calm down,” Ghost-Harold said. “It’s okay. You killed them. You’re safe.”Brent gasped. His chest hurt. He brought a handful of snow to his face, rubbed it onto his cheeks and forehead. There. That was better.“Oh, shit,” he gasped.“I know, kiddo.”“I hate that.”“I know.”He crawled to the porch, turned around and sat on a porch step. Brent sat there until he had calmed down, until he had caught his breath and his hands quit trembling. He stared off across the side lawn, squinting into the glare.“You need to do something with the bodies,” Ghost-Harold said gently after a little while. “You can’t leave them near the road.”“I know,” Brent said. Back by the barn, the big tin sheet went, Creaaak-BOOM!Brent grinned. “I know what to do with them, too.”
9. Cleanup
He listened for the sound of an approaching engine, and when he heard nothing but the wind whistling in the trees, crunched over to the big deadhead. The zombie was dead—what they called dead-dead—its head split open like a crushed cantaloupe, brains oozing out. Brent moved around to the zombie’s feet and took the big guy’s ankles in his hands. He took a deep breath and pulled, and the big deadhead scraped across the ground a couple inches.“Fuck, he’s heavy,” Brent said.“You gotta do it,” Harold said.“Yeah, I know.”In case of a meat patrol.The likelihood of a meat patrol driving down this particular country highway, at this particular time, was pretty low, but if one did happen to drive by, he didn’t want them to see anything out of the ordinary. That’s why he needed to remove the deadheads from sight.. They ate their own, and they might just check the farmhouse if they saw a couple deadheads lying in the front yard. If he planned to stay until the cold weather passed, he needed to eliminate any signs of activity—of the living or the dead-- and do something about that piece of flapping tin! Its banging had already attracted two deadheads. He didn’t want any more uninvited guests.He heaved, and the big deadhead slid across the snow, leaving a trail of black goo. It took the better part of an hour to get the zombie over to the barn, and another twenty minutes to drag him up over the collapsed boards and beams to the section of the roof that kept flapping up and down.Tugging the corpse by the parka, he rolled the deadhead onto the loose tin sheet, then tossed some boards on top for good measure.“There,” he panted, wiping the sweat from his face. The wind raked through his hair, blowing his sweaty bangs around, but the tin didn’t move. The world seemed suddenly very still. Too still, almost.Brent caught his breath, then returned for the other deadhead.Despite its broken neck, the other zombie was still alive. Its eyes rolled in their sockets, just like Mrs. Johnson’s eyes had, while its jaw worked restlessly up and down. And then he realized that Mr. and Mrs. Johnsons’ heads were buried somewhere in the snow nearby, probably still chomping, and he got a cold shivery feeling in his belly. He looked around, suddenly paranoid, then reached down into the snow very carefully and grabbed the ankles of the old deadhead.“Don’t bite,” he muttered anxiously.Following the trail he’d already made, he dragged the second deadhead to the barn and tossed it onto the first one.The second one was much easier to move. It was all shriveled up, light, like old dried sticks.Its face came up close to the big one’s neck when he tossed it onto the pile, and the old dead one started trying to eat the fresh dead one. It gnawed at the fresh one’s neck, making a weird grunting noise.“Ew, gross,” Brent said with a grimace. “Stop that!”He couldn’t stand the thought of the old one nibbling on the fresh one while he stayed in the farmhouse, so he retrieved his shovel and brained the nasty old thing.That done, he trudged to the front yard and used the shovel to obscure the signs of their battle as best he could. He pushed the snow around, trying to cover the streaks and stains of the big one’s blood. He used the flat of the shovel’s spade to smooth over their tracks, and obfuscated the trail of flattened snow where he had dragged the zombies to the barn. He did the best he could, but it was still glaringly obvious to him that something violent had transpired in the front lawn.“Maybe it’ll snow again tonight and cover it all up,” he said.“Ah, it’ll be fine,” Ghost-Harold replied. “You worry too much, kiddo. Go inside and get some rest. There won’t be any meat patrols running around in this weather. You know they hate the cold.”That sounded like a good idea.
10. Caught
He couldn’t rest though. Instead, he made a rabbit trap. He had seen rabbit tracks in the snow earlier, and just thinking of a steaming pot of rabbit stew made his mouth water and his belly gurgle hungrily. His battle with the deadheads had drained him, both physically and emotionally, but he knew that rabbit wasn’t going to catch itself, and so he rigged up a trap for it with a kitchen drawer, a piece of yarn and a wooden spatula. The yarn he tied to the handle of the spatula and a hunk of the ivy that was spreading across the living room walls. There were several green leaves on the ivy. Maybe Mr. Bunny would find them tempting. He hoped they would because he didn’t have anything else to bait his trap with. He didn’t think rabbits were overly fond of uncooked ramen noodles, and the only other food he had was a single can of mixed vegetables, and none of the veggies in the can were large enough to tie a piece of string to.He went out back with the components of his trap. After clearing snow from a four foot by four foot area, he propped the wood box on the end of the spatula and placed the ivy under the box. If Mr. Rabbit came along and gave the greenery a nibble, it would dislodge the spatula and cause the box to drop down over it.“And voila, rabbit stew,” he said, sitting back on his legs and admiring his handiwork.He had made traps like this before. They worked surprisingly well, though a few times he’d trapped wild critters he did not intend to catch. Once he’d caught a skunk, and got sprayed the instant he lifted back the box. Harold wouldn’t sleep near him for a month after that happened. Sometimes he caught feral cats, birds, squirrels. They were all edible, if not as tasty as rabbit.He returned inside. Wiping his cheek with the back of his hand, he realized there was zombie ichor splattered on his face. Grimacing in disgust, he stripped his clean new clothes off and washed again, then selected a second new outfit and put it on. Clean again, he cooked another package of ramen noodles, ate, then ambled upstairs to take a nap.Curling up in his little nest of blankets by the window, he found himself dozing off very quickly. He was exhausted-- by his exertions, and by the adrenaline rush he’d had when he was battling the zombies. His arms and legs felt like they were weighted with lead. His eyelids, too.He shut his eyes, enjoying the warmth of the day’s last light. Tomorrow, if it were warmer, he would think about moving on, maybe walk up the road a little way and see if there were any houses nearby. It was always tempting to stay somewhere secure, but he would never make it to the Free Zone if he gave in to that temptation. Besides, there really wasn’t anywhere safe in the world. Not anymore. Something dangerous would eventually come along-- a meat patrol, a herd of dumbheads, a group of violent survivors. In this new post-apocalyptic world, complacency was the most dangerous things of all. Better to keep running. Better to keep heading for the Free Zone.He finally drifted off, and dreamed about the Free Zone. He had no illusions about the place. It was no city paved in gold—not even in his dreams—but there were people, lots of living people, and they welcomed him through the city gates, embraced him, celebrated his arrival as if he had come to deliver them from their enemies. He was no messiah, no hero come to save them, but their joy was gratifying, all but overwhelming, and the feeling of being swept up in their love, the sense of community, brought tears to his eyes. He was a part of something again. He belonged. He was no longer alone.And then he woke upIt was still light out, but the angle of the light had changed. He knew at once that he had slept through the night, that it was morning. He knew because his bladder was full to bursting, and his body felt refreshed, if not a little sore. Particularly his arms and shoulders. Probably from bashing in those zombies’ heads, then dragging them to the back yard.But there was something wrong, too. He felt it in his stomach. A tingle of fear. The beginnings of panic.A sound, like a distant train rumbling, but there were no trains anymore.A truck engine!“A meat patrol!” Ghost Harold shouted.Brent scrambled up and ran for his boots. He sat and pulled them on and snatched up his backpack. Did he have a weapon? He turned in a circle, surveying the room. No! He had left his knife downstairs, after using it to make the box trap. It was on the kitchen table.“Hurry! Hurry!” Ghost-Harold shouted.There was a crashing sound from below. The scrape of something heavy scooting across the floor. The sofa. Someone was forcing the front door, pushing the sofa out of the way as they entered. There was a second crash, the tinkle of glass, and he heard the kitchen table squawk across the linoleum.“The window!” Harold shouted.Brent ran to the window and started tugging on the handle. It wouldn’t budge. He realized it was locked and flipped the lever to unlock it. He started to heave the window up, and two deadheads came around the corner of the house. They were armed, dressed in heavy winter clothing. Both of them had rifles. Brent stepped back before they glanced up and saw him.“I’m trapped,” he panted.“Hide in the closet,” Ghost Harold suggested.Brent nodded. He ran for the closet door as footsteps thudded on the staircase. Praying he was just having a particularly vivid nightmare, he jerked open the door. As soon as the door swung open, several plastic bins fell out at him. He had looked through them yesterday when he was searching for new clothes, had stacked them back in the closet haphazardly when he was done. That’s what you get for being lazy, he thought. He jumped forward, arms outstretched, and tried to keep them from hitting the floor. He managed to catch them all but the top one. It slid off to the side and hit the floor with a thump.“Oh, shit!” Brent whimpered, looking over his shoulder.He couldn’t remember if he had locked the door or not. He hadn’t barricaded it. He had fallen asleep too quickly.“Here,” a gravelly voice barked.The doorknob jiggled.Johnson’s exercise equipment! Brent let the boxes fall and ran over to the Bowflex machine. He snatched up a couple five pound barbells that were lying on the floor next to the exercise machine and prepared to fight.The door shuddered as one of the invaders kicked it. A crack appeared in the doorframe by the knob, but it held.“Sssomeonesss in there!” a croaky voice cried. “I ssssmell it!”The second kick sent the door flying open in a spray of splinters. It banged against the wall and swung back, but a deadhead was already stumbling into the room. It blocked the door with its elbow, both hands on a rifle, ready to shoot.It saw him.“Yesssss!” it hissed.It was a big deadhead, powerfully built. Obviously some kind of cop or soldier when it was alive, judging by its buzz haircut and the shape and bearing of its body. It had a flat featured, blocky head, and small sunken eyes. Its skin had a bluish-green cast, and there were several open sores on its forehead and cheek through which its bone and muscle tissue were visible. It also had no lips. Its face from the nose down had been gnawed off.“Put down!” it snarled. Without lips, it sounded as if it had said “toot down”, but Brent knew what it meant.Yelling, Brent rushed at the deadhead, swinging for its head with one of the barbells. The zombie jerked back, moving surprisingly quick for its state of decomposition, and the barbell came down on its arm, knocking the barrel of the rifle aside just as the creature pulled the trigger. The bullet struck the floor and ricocheted with a squeal, punching a hole in the closet door. The zombie tried to bring the rifle to bear and Brent struck at it again.Enraged, the zombie dropped its rifle and seized Brent by the shoulders. Brent stumbled back as the creature charged forward, holding him by the sleeves. The creature was nearly a head taller, and much heavier. Brent’s heels caught against a box, and he toppled back, the zombie following atop him.“I’ll tucking eat your cock!” the monster snarled, its bare teeth snapping out the words just inches from his face.“Get—Off--!” Brent grunted, twisting and pushing.The deadhead drew back a fist and punched him.The blow connected with his cheek and turned his head to one side, exposing his throat to those teeth. He saw stars, felt as if he had been knocked just slightly ajar with reality, as if his mind was lying just a few inches to the left of his body. He blinked his eyes, tried to reorient himself, and then another blow landed. And another.“Tucking eatchoo!” the monster was snarling, over and over again.Brent felt himself slipping into unconsciousness. The pain and fear was ebbing as the world dimmed quickly around him. I am just a piece of meat, he thought, seeing his left hand flopping bonelessly on the floor beside him. A piece of meat that feels no pain.A pair of boots stepped into his field of view. Another deadhead had entered the room. He didn’t look up. He couldn’t turn his head. There was blood in his eyes. Blood in his nose and mouth.
“Aw, hell, kiddo,” Harold said.
TO BE CONTINUED...
AND
MERRY CHRISTMAS!
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