Day Sixteen

I’m awake. I’m awake, but my eyes won’t open. My eyes won’t open, and I can’t breathe through my nose. I can’t breathe through my nose, and my mouth is open, wide. It’s dry, like the inside of an old suitcase. My tongue feels like leather. I use my fingers to pry my eyes open, and feel the swelling around the lids, puffy and full. The clock on Rachel’s dresser reads two thirty seven. It’s light outside, the sun blazing through the window onto the bed. Jesus Christ. I’m drenched in sweat, I realize, and I sit up slowly and work my wet tee shirt over my head. It doesn’t slide off; it rolls up my body, clinging to my skin and pasting my hair over my forehead as I work myself free. It weighs about twenty pounds. I’m thirsty.

In the bathroom, I gulp water from the faucet until I’m about to burst, and then I swallow some more for good measure. I try to avoid my image in the mirror, but it’s impossible. The face staring back at me isn’t mine. My nose is swollen like a boxer’s and the skin around my eyes is a deep, rich purple. Christ. The whites of both eyes aren’t white. They’re blood red, two deep brown spheres swimming in a sea of crimson.

As I’m staring at my damaged face in the mirror, I hear it for the first time. A soft moan. I’ve heard it before, but never inside the house. The sound is unmistakable; once you’ve heard the sad, pitiful crying of the dead, you can’t unhear it. It stays with you like a soft whisper in your ear.

The moan came from down the hall. My blood freezes in my veins and my heart stops beating for a moment. I can feel it stop, and then with a shudder it pulses and my blood flows again, leaving my feet and returning its nonstop journey through my body. My brain is still foggy and for a few minutes I just stand there at the sink, listening to the moans and trying to figure out why they’re not outside. When I finally realize the sounds are coming from the bedroom, my knees begin to give way and I’m shaking uncontrollably, my body sliding down the vanity until I’m sprawled on the floor, curled around myself. I realize I’m sobbing,

I rise to my hands and knees and slowly push my head out the bathroom door and look down the hall. The door is closed, and I don’t understand yet how a Walker got in the house, much less how one got in the bedroom. The window? No, it’s two floors up and as far as I’ve seen, the dead don’t climb.

Nothing got in. There are no breaches in the half assed security I’ve erected around the house. No, nothing got in. They were here all along.

 I’m crying as I crawl down the hall to the bedroom, big, heaving sobs sweeping over me. The doorknob is still locked. It washes over me, the horror and the grief of what’s happened beyond that God damned door while I was sleeping, unconscious, passed out, whatever. They’ve turned. It has to be both of them; there’s no way one could go without taking the other along with them. I press my wet cheek to the door, listening to the soft moans on the other side of the wood panels. My head drops to my chest and I’m hoping, praying they turned while they were asleep.

I sit there, listening, crying, listening again, for what seems like hours. I finally gather my energy and rise up from the floor and walk back to the bathroom. Above the door, perched on the casing, is a small key. I’ve only used it a few times, when Rachel has somehow locked herself out of the bathroom. My fingers run over the molding, gathering dust until they find the cold metal key. It’s in my hand, and I’m looking at it, and for fuck’s sake I can’t bring myself to walk the few steps down the hall and open the door.

Somehow, I manage to take one step, then another.

At the door, my hand shakes almost uncontrollably as I work the key into the tiny little hole in the doorknob. The lock pops with a pinging sound, and my hand closes on the knob. It turns. I’m hoping it won’t. I’m silently begging for anything that might keep me from seeing what’s on the other side. My luck, or lack of it, holds. The door opens silently, inch by inch. I can’t see anything. There’s a short little hallway before the bedroom opens up and I’m still on the wrong end of it. Fuck. I force myself to take a step, another, three.

They’re in bed, the covers over them. They’re just asleep, I tell myself, but I know it’s not true. They’re dead, alive but dead, or dead but alive. Either way, they’re not with me anymore. The moans are louder now, two distinctly different pitches blending together in undead harmony. Rachel is draped across her mother, who is on her back with her dead, cataract-covered eyes wide open. Mandy’s jaw is working slowly, chewing air. Rachel stops moaning and sits up abruptly. Her hair is matted to her forehead and her neck snaps and pops as her head swivels in my direction. Her jaw starts working, just like Amanda’s, biting at nothing. Rachel rolls off her mother and off the bed, her little body dropping to the floor with a thud.

I’m crying again, my chest heaving with each guttural sob. My nose is running and tears are pouring down my cheeks. Rachel is crawling toward me, not crawling so much as rolling, the way she did when she was a toddler, not quite ready to walk but too fucking impatient to stay in one place. Slowly, I back away from her and pull the door closed behind me.

Downstairs, I load the shotgun and drop a couple extra shells into my pocket. I take my time climbing the stairs, memories of Christmases and Easter egg hunts flooding my mind. Tickling Rachel on this stair. Holding the cat while Rachel pets her on that stair. Painting the edging along the banister while Rachel brings me a diet Mountain Dew. Fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck.

The bedroom door is still closed and I twist the knob and push it open. It bumps against something solid and soft and stops. It’s Rachel; she’s rolled in front of it. I push, gently, and she rolls behind it. She’s moaning. Purple veins are spread out over her have and her eyes are dark where the blood has pooled behind them. I put the muzzle of the shotgun to her forehead and she looks up at me, her dead eyes gazing past me, through me. I can’t see anything behind them, no evidence of who she was, nothing to tell me she sees me as daddy, her father, her protector. Nothing.

My finger curls around the trigger and I start to pull, watching the hammer draw back little by little. I’m crying so hard I can’t seem to keep the gun on her and the hammer drops. The blast misses her head by a foot, tearing through her little shoulder and blowing a six inch chunk of flesh and bone and thickening, dead blood across the carpet. The sound is deafening and Mandy sits up and screams, a guttural, animal scream that I tell myself I’ll be able to forget but know I won’t, not ever. I pull the trigger again and this time, Rachel’s head disappears in a thundering cloud of red and black and white little bits of skull and brain.

She stops moving. She’s gone, gone for real now.

Amanda is struggling to work herself from the bed. The sheets are twisted around her and she doesn’t have much muscle control. I let the empty shells fall from the shotgun and slide two more into the chamber. This time, I’m able to aim and fire, and my wife’s head disappears from her shoulders, leaving a spray of gore on the headboard and the wall behind it. Her body sits there upright for a moment as if it doesn’t know it’s been separated from a head, a brain. Gravity takes over, and what’s left of her falls back onto the bed.

I want to die. I want to die with them, and for a moment I seriously consider using the remaining shell on myself. But I don’t. I’m afraid to be alone, but I’m more afraid to die.

I back my way from the bedroom, trying hard to look away from the mess I’ve made of my family. I can’t look, I can’t look away. I leave the shotgun against the wall in the hallway and step over Rachel’s corpse to pull the comforter from the bed, careful to work it from beneath Mandy so she doesn’t roll to the floor. I spread it over Rachel’s body and tuck it under her, gently. When she’s wrapped in it, I lift her to my chest and cry again. I’m still crying as I carry her down the stairs, past the Easter eggs and the diet Mountain Dews and the memories that will never again be anything but fading images in my mind’s eye.

She will sleep in the back yard tonight, alongside her mother.

I repeat the process with Amanda, struggling a bit because she’s heavier. I lose my footing on the stairs and we slide down the last few steps, my back thumping against the stairs as Mandy’s weight forces the air from my lungs. At the bottom, I rest. I know I should drag her, it would be easier, but I can’t bring myself to haul her body through the house like a bag of salt.

In the back yard, I lay them side by side and I begin to dig. When I’ve dug two large holes and four additional smaller pits, I use the buck saw to cut through the muscle and bones of their arms, their legs. I’m covered in their blood now, dark black and cold fluid drenching my clothes. Their torsos go into the bigger holes, and the arms and legs go into the smaller ones. I don’t know what happens to Walkers when they go down for good; I’m not going to burn their bodies, but I don’t want them getting back up again.

When the last shovel of soil is laid, I collapse on the grass. I’m filthy and I’m sweating and I know I’ve lost something of myself. I’m not innocent, not naïve, but I’m not good at this shit, either. My heart is gone.

I crawl through the grass, across the pool deck and tumble into the water, letting my body sink to the bottom. I stay down there as long as I can, until my lungs are on fire. I push myself to the surface and gasp, sucking air into my lungs and fighting the urge to throw up. My nose is throbbing, my whole face aches.

I strip my clothes off and toss them over the fence into the side yard. Inside, I dry off and wrap myself in a towel. I make the trek back upstairs and take one last look into the bedroom. It’s like a slaughterhouse, blood and tissue everywhere. I toss the key onto the floor by the dresser, click the lock and pull the door shut for the last time.