Day Twenty Two

To say that I wake up pissed off is a dramatic understatement. I fell asleep pissed, and I slept fitfully the whole night, my eyes snapping open at regular intervals to stare at the ceiling, all the while pissed. The sanctity of my home, the resting place of the girls, has been disturbed, disrupted, disrespected. And I have Sanjay to thank for it. Sanjay, who crawled off to safety, leaving his wife where she’d died sitting in a spreading pool of her own blood.

I stumble to the sunroom, quietly remove the two by four and peer behind the plywood into the back yard. It’s empty, just the shimmering water of the pool and a pile of ash where yesterday’s visitors ended their stay. The sunlight bounces off the pool, and little glints of silver dance across the ceiling.

In the back yard, I take a leak next to the shed while I listen to the birds and the breeze and my piss as it splashes over the grass. There are no other sounds, which in another time would have been disturbing, but now comes as a wave of relief. The absence of sounds means there are no Walkers to deal with. Not yet, anyway. The day is new. 

The pool smells of chlorine. Still, I step into the shed and grab a fistful of tablets from the bucket and toss them into the water and watch as they float slowly to the bottom. The pump has stopped working along with everything else that operates by electric power; a thin, green line of algae is already starting to grow around the rim of the pool where the water laps at the sides. I want to kill it all.

I strip off my shirt and sweats and step into the water. It’s cool from the night air, but it will warm with the day as the sun works its way higher into the sky. I stand there on the first step for a moment, letting my feet adjust to the water before pushing off into a shallow dive, my belly lightly skimming the slick surface of the bottom of the pool. I keep my eyes closed tightly as I frog kick my way to the deep end until my fingers reach the far side, and turn and kick hard off the wall, gliding across the top of the water.

It’s as close to a shower as I think I’ll get for a very, very long time.

At the edge of the pool, I sit and let the sun dry my skin. I sniff at my arm pits; chlorine. I’m good to go for another couple days. Still naked, I walk down the path to the gate. It’s closed, the nails and boards from yesterday still holding fast. I pick up a handful of cigarette butts and bring them with me into the house.

Back inside, I rig the plywood on the sunroom door and dig through the pile of clothes on the floor until I find a Rolling Stones tee shirt and another beaten pair of Levis. I’ve given up on underwear. I figure if I’m going to be a commando, I need to dress like one.  I pull a pair of socks onto my feet, ignoring the bits of dirt and grass between my toes. There’s days gone by clean, and then there’s undead apocalypse clean. You take what you can get these days.

I pull a box of Total from the cupboard and shake stale flakes into a bowl and top it off with some warm condensed milk. It tastes like pure shit, but it’s food and I need it, so I choke down several bites without breathing, catch my breath and start over again until the bowl is empty. Total seems to soak up condensed milk a lot faster than regular milk, and the last few mouthfuls are a soggy mess that I don’t really even have to chew, which is good because chewing would mean tasting, and tasting would mean gagging, and gagging would mean heaving up the whole meal, leaving my stomach empty and hungry again. Thank God for small favors.

It’s time to visit the neighbors.

I pull the Harley boots over my feet and tuck the laces inside, and reach for the Glock on the counter. It slips easily into the waist of my Levis. I don’t plan on doing any battles today, but I still spend a few moments staring into the duffel on the floor by the garage door. There’s one thing I need, though, before heading across the street; in the sunroom, I drop the cigarette butts into a small Baggie and stuff them into my pocket.

The front of the house is clear, and I lift the garage door up to shoulder height, slip through and let gravity pull it back down to the floor. The birds are loud out here. From somewhere to the west, I hear a few gunshots, the pop-pop-popping of a handgun. The sound is like firecrackers, and a month ago I would have thought that’s what it was. Now, I know better.

My boots clump across the pavement of the street as I cross quickly. I don’t bother to look both ways, not anymore. I hear a fan humming to my right, and for a few seconds I think someone is too cheap to turn on their air conditioning until it dawns on me that there’s no air conditioning because there’s no power. The sound, I realize, is coming from the cloud of flies that buzzes over Emily’s bloated corpse. She’s still sitting on the walk, covered in maggots. I take a few steps towards her, and see that her skin is moving, ripples of fat rolling along with the tiny motions of tens of thousands of larvae as they devour her body from the inside.

The Glock presses against my lower back. Strange, but it’s every bit as comforting as a cup of hot chocolate after a long, cold day of skiing.

With Emily and her insect companions at my back, I slowly work my way down the sidewalk toward Sanjay’s front door. It’s closed. I catch myself as my finger reaches for the doorbell and knock instead. Through the sidelights, I can see into Sanjay’s living room. Liquor bottles and bags of chips litter the floor. I knock again. Nothing, but I can hear him in there. Even if I can’t, really, I can. He’s cowering, somewhere in the dark corners of his empty house. I can feel him. Smell him. His presence is like an electric current, keeping my nerves awake and alive and alert.

The door is locked. I can fix that. I reach back and slip the Glock out of my Levis and fire a shot into the latch, and follow it with a hard kick with my boot. The door swings open and slams against the jam, the hinges working loose from the wood frame. I pause for a moment, a little stunned at the force of the kick and the damage it caused. I’m stronger than I look. Definitely.

The house smells like garbage and it’s about a hundred and twenty degrees in here. I step outside and fill my lungs with fresh air before taking a few paces into the kitchen. From there, I can see the living room clearly. Sanjay is laid out on the couch, a bottle of Captain Morgan nestled in the crook of his arm like a teddy bear. He’s asleep. His feet are covered with a pair of filthy socks, and his big toe is protruding from one of them, the nail long and yellowed. I gently slip the bottle of rum from under his arm and he murmurs something that I can’t understand. He smells of liquor and piss and I notice the stain across the front of his Dockers. There’s dried vomit around his mouth and more on the floor beside the couch.

I unscrew the cap on the Captain Morgan and pour a few drops over his lips. Sanjay mumbles something again and his tongue slips out from between his teeth. As he tastes the rum, his eyes open and he stares at me, through me, foggy in his drunken stupor.  When it dawns on him he has a mouthful of the Captain, he starts to gag, and leans over the couch to retch onto the floor. When he’s done, he rolls back onto the couch, his face drenched in sweat and drool.

“How did you get in my house?” he asks me, panting as he speaks. I reach in my pocket and fish out the bag of cigarette butts and shake them out onto his chest.

“You left these over at my place.” He looks confused for a few seconds before the liar in him gets a grip.

“Doot.” Dude. “I don’t know what you are implying, but I left nothing there at your house.” He coughs, and he’s staring down at his chest, wondering if any of the butts are long enough to light and pull a drag or two from.

I’m seeing red. “I’m not implying anything. I’m stating. I’m stating you opened up my fence gate, you smoked a bunch of your shitty cigarettes, you left them in my fucking lawn, and then you left my fucking gate open. After you left my fucking gate open, some fucking creeps decided to have a little deck party in my back yard and I had to break it up. Any implications I missed?”

Sanjay’s eyes flutter a bit as he struggles to find a lie good enough to toss out. He can’t, so he just plows ahead with his version of the truth. “I wanted to see you, because I was feeling badly about our argument.” Argument. If that was an argument, I’d be interested to know what his idea of a fight is. “I wanted to see if you were ready to make some amends, maybe apologize and we could become a team, partners.”

My hand works a whole lot faster than my head does, and before I realize it I’ve struck him across the bridge of his nose with the Glock. The cracking of bone harmonizes with the soft sound of hard plastic resin meeting soft tissue, and blood begins to flow like water from his nostrils and the deep gash where the cartilage of his nose has spilt the skin. Sanjay’s hands are on his face and blood is already seeping from between his fingers, dripping down his wrists. He struggles to sit up. “That looks a lot like mine did a few days ago”, I tell him. “Your eyes are gonna get black, too.”

Sanjay leaps at me from the couch, but he’s still drunk and even if he wasn’t, he’s hung over and my synapses are firing about a billion times a minute. I step to one side and Sanjay sprawls on the floor, blood pouring from his nose like water from a faucet. He starts to throw up again, long, dry heaves working through his body. A long, thick strand of mucous hangs from his lips and he flicks it away with his tongue.

“So, you wanted me to apologize to you, Sanjay?” I’m not sure what I have to be sorry for. The fucker would have seen me dead if he’d had the balls to make it happen, and because of him my last hours with my girls were spent unconscious. “Then I’m sorry for this” I tell him as my boot slams into his ribs. The air explodes from his lungs with the force of the kick. I lift my foot and drive the heel of my boot into his ankle. It crunches and he screams out in pain. I’m not this kind of guy, I’m really not. But I’m unable to see reason, and I slam my boot into the ankle again, hearing the satisfying crunch as more of the bone shatters beneath the heavy sole of my heel. “Sorry.”

I reach down and grab Sanjay by the back of his collar and pull him up to his knees, half dragging him to the front door. He’s moaning and sobbing, his arms hanging loosely at his sides as he knee walks along with me. His left foot is hanging at the wrong angle at the end of his shin.

I struggle to work Sanjay across his front lawn, stopping a few times to catch my breath and get some strength back. He’s mumbling, something about music, but I’m not paying much attention. I’m watching three Walkers as they shamble through the intersection, stumbling as they make their way toward us. Sanjay sees them, too.

“Doot, get me out of here.” He’s pleading, begging. The three dead, all men, are moaning. One is wearing an EMT uniform. The other two are dressed in suit pants and dress shirts. The EMT has been dead longer, the skin of his face is tight over his skull like a mask. He’s missing some of his scalp, and a patch of shiny, white bone takes the place of his hair. I drag Sanjay into the middle of the street. His eyes are wide with terror and he’s pulling at my arms now, trying to stand up. His ruined foot flops like a toy and he falls to his knees. He looks up at me, and he smiles as blood rains from his nose. His teeth are red. “I pissed on them”, he tells me. “I watered them for you.”

I take several steps backward and watch as the EMT reaches for Sanjay, his dead fingers curling through Sanjay’s greasy hair as he pulls and twists. Sanjay struggles, trying to free himself from the dead man’s grasp. He fails, and I can hear a slow tearing sound as the flesh of Sanjay’s scalp gives way to the pulling of rotting hands. One of the well-dressed Walkers has Sanjay’s foot in his hands and he’s twisting and pulling as the foot turns, twice, before skin and muscle rip away and the foot is no longer a part of Sanjay’s body.

Sanjay starts to scream. He’s still screaming as all three Walkers tear him open, pulling out long, white strands of intestine, emptying him onto the hot pavement.

  I slowly work my way back to the safety of the garage and watch, through the frosted glass of the carriage windows, as pieces of Sanjay slowly walk down the block, clutched in the undead hands of three lonely men. 

Day Twenty One

I lay awake on the couch for a while before stretching my legs and pushing myself up. I don’t much care what time it is; there are no schedules to meet and no plans to keep.  The first thing I see as I step out into the sunroom is a dead woman in the deep end of the pool, the water not quite over her head, but nearly. She’s walking, her feet endlessly treading and slipping on the slick pool bottom, trying to get out but getting nowhere. It would help if she turned and worked her way to the shallow end, but the thinking and problem solving part of her brain died when she did. There are three other Walkers in the back yard, two more women and what used to be a teenaged boy of around fifteen.

 Sometime in the night, while I was sleeping, they got inside the back fence.

I take a step backwards, into the gloom of the house, and watch as the dead wander through my back yard. The woman in the pool is pressed against the far wall, standing there and moving slowly with her arms feeling along the edge of the deck. Her long, brown hair is spread out across the water. Her arms are bare and the skin is grey. There are large purple spots at her elbows where blood must have collected. I can’t see her face.

From out of nowhere, a sneeze erupts from all the way down in my feet and before I can cover my face and stifle it, my whole body reacts, tensing and ejecting a fine mist and likely a bit of dust or pollen through the air. The noise is impossibly loud, and the timing is incredibly bad.

The three Walkers in the grass freeze and at once, three heads snap and three dead faces are staring in my direction. The woman in the pool keeps working her way to nowhere. The boy stares for a moment, cocks his to the side like a dog, and takes one furtive step, then another, towards the patio.  His face is hideous, grey skin hanging in strips from what looks like claw marks that have shredded the flesh from his forehead to his chin. As he takes another step forward, I can see the white bone underneath where the flesh has been scraped away completely. Behind him, the two women step forward and follow the boy as he slowly stumbles onto the pool deck and then up onto the patio.   

The shotgun is leaning against the wall by the French doors and the dead kid is has made it up the steps at the patio door and he’s pushing his hands against it, his ragged fingernails scraping down the glass. One of the women stumbles and falls as she tries to step up from the grass to the patio. The other woman, still focused on the door to the sunroom and absolutely nothing else, gets her feet tangled in the sprawling legs of her dead compatriot and twists her torso as she drops, her head striking the block with a hollow thump. It’s not enough to put her down for good and she rolls over, twice, and tries to push herself up to her knees.

I pump a shell into the shotgun and take a step into the sunroom. The kid’s face is pressed to the glass and his ugly, purple tongue is out, licking the glass. There’s no spit, no moisture in his mouth, and his tongue makes a sound like sandpaper brushing against the window. Somehow, from deep within his dead grey matter, the kid must realize I’m in his space and he starts to get agitated, and he starts slapping his hands against the windows. This is new, and it’s more than just a little unnerving. I haven’t seen a Walker show anything besides mild interest in anything, and now this one is, what? Pissed?

Shit.

Both women have managed to rise to their feet and they’re lined up behind the kid. I can smell them through the thin walls of the sunroom. It reminds me of road kill from growing up in the country; there was always something getting run down by a car during the summer, leaving behind a rotting lump of fur by the side of the road and a never ending aroma of death accompanied by clouds of bluebell flies and their tiny little white spawn. The kid’s hands are slapping harder now and his gnarled fingers are starting to curl into fists. Each slap leaves a greasy smear on the glass.

I take a couple more steps into the sunroom and stop. I still have three steps to go before I get to the door and I’m having a tough time putting one foot in front of the other. The kid’s left hand slides down the glass and he stops slapping for a moment and cocks his head to the side again. “Oh, fuck” I say out loud. He’s actually thinking. This isn’t good. I’m supposed to be the only one of the five of us out here that has any cognitive abilities. The kid still isn’t moving, except for his head. His eyes are working, slick, milky pupils sliding around in the sockets. They leave me and drop, and his head follows. Slowly, his hand reacts to what his eyes are seeing and he reaches for the door handle. Fuck. His fingers curl around the lever and I watch in absolute horror as he applies some pressure and the latch starts to turn. Oh, dear God. The latch is completely vertical now and he pulls on the door. Nothing happens and for just a moment I’m relieved as I remember the door opens inward. Fortunately, the kid’s ability to reason hasn’t evolved enough to realize he should push instead of pull.

His hand slips from the door handle and I move, fast. I yank the door open with my left hand and drop the shotgun to my hip and finger the trigger. The blast blows a hole in the kid’s midsection big enough to see daylight through as he’s lifted clean off his feet, knocking both women to the patio as his body thumps hard onto the pool deck. I quickly slide another shell into the chamber and place the barrel against the head of one of the women and squeeze the trigger. Her skull explodes in a spray of brain and bone. The other woman’s fingers are working their way up my leg. They feel like spiders. I jerk my foot free and squeeze the trigger again and her head disappears, leaving nothing but a four foot wide smear across the patio.

The kid is sitting up. I’m completely dumbfounded as to how; the space in his gut where his stomach and lungs used to be is nothing but an empty cavity, curtained by little strands of wet tissue and the white of some shattered ribs. But that’s not the amazing thing:  I can see both ends of his spine where the shotgun disintegrated a couple vertebrae. The spinal cord isn’t just severed; a good three inches of it are completely missing. Somehow, the kid has managed to sit up where a living person, assuming a living person could remain living after losing twenty five pounds of organs and bone, would have lost every last ounce of the use of their extremities.  

I’m looking at the kid. The kid is looking at me, his head cocked to the side again with that curious “I’m trying to figure all this shit out” dog-like effect. He moans, a long, drawn out breathy sigh that hangs in the air for a while, and pushes himself up to his knees. Black sludge is spreading on the patio stones around him, not exactly pouring from the hole in his gut, it’s more of an oozing and seeping of thick, oily fluids that used to be the high octane stuff that fueled and oiled his body but now is nothing but congealed, jelly-like goo. His jeans are stained with it; they’re wet and soaked with the cold, ugly sludge. The kid looks down, the rent flesh of his cheek dangling and fluttering a bit with the movement. He’s on his knees, and his hands are in the gaping wound in his belly and he’s digging, reaching inside the hole and grasping at whatever’s left in there. He moans again and starts to pull, and his hands emerge, each with a fistful of pinkish white rope. Intestines. Oh, Jesus. Another moan and another effort from the kid, and he works loose another yard or so of his digestive system before slowly turning his head to face me and holding out his arms as if he’s presenting me with the crown jewels of some undead monarchy.

He’s actually giving me a gift. I don’t want it. Several feet of dead intestines aren’t on my Christmas list, I never put them on any registry at Macy’s or Target. He moans and pulls, emptying his body cavity of another length of his thick, ropy entrails. They’re piling up on the patio, dripping more of that black, oily fluid. His fingers begin to work in the mess and as his torn fingernails gain traction, he starts tearing his own intestines open. The smell is almost unbearable and I gag and cough. My hand covers my mouth but it’s not enough to stop the rocket propelled ejection of vomit that shoots from between my fingers and sprays over the kid and the patio. I retch again, this time without the assistance of my hand and pour yesterday’s rice out of my system and onto the grass.

The pool Walker has finally made the decision to try another direction and she’s now in the shallow end, slowly working her way toward the edge of the deck and the three steps that will lead her to me if she’s able to navigate them. Her attention isn’t on me, though; she’s focused on the kid and his pile of greasy, white intestines. She’s waist deep in the water now, her white Hello Kitty tee shirt tight around her. In life, she could have won a wet tee shirt contest. In death, she’d still have been a runner up, her large breasts still firm and full. She’d been pretty, once. Her arms are reaching for the kid, long fingers ending in manicured nails that still have a hint of the rosy polish that coated them in better days. Her fingers dig into the pile of entrails next to the kid and those manicured nails are now nothing but knives as they start tearing and shredding, ripping through the sausage skin and exposing the meat inside.

The kid is moaning. The woman is moaning. I’m moaning, mostly because I’m trying not to throw up any more but losing the battle. A fresh projectile of vomit jets from my throat and I’m doubled over on my hands and knees in the grass, trying to keep one watery eye on the pair at the edge of the pool. To my left, I can see that the gate is open, wide. I wipe my hands in the grass and reach into my pocket for two more shells, and manage to get them chambered even though my fingers are shaking wildly.

I don’t want to drop the woman in the pool because I don’t want to have to pull her out. I also know I don’t want to leave her in there, wandering around until she finally makes her way up the steps. It’s a little uncomfortable to sunbathe with a dead woman splashing around next to you.

The woman and the kid are engrossed in building sand castles from the kid’s large intestines. I walk down the path to the gate and look at the latch; it’s intact, the Master lock I’d used to keep it secure has been cut neatly through the clasp. On the ground are several Newport Lights butts. Sanjay smokes Newport Lights. That motherfucker opened my gate and let the dead inside.

I’ll deal with him, and the why of that equation, later. First, I have a little more cleanup to manage.

At the edge of the pool, I coax the barrel of the shotgun between the woman and the kid. The woman’s hands slowly wrap around the cold steel of the barrel and she looks at me with her dead, milky white eyes. I slowly pull her toward the steps and she holds tightly to the gun, and together we move, one step, then two, three, until she’s swaying there with the barrel of the shotgun in her hands at the edge of the pool deck. I take a step backwards and she takes a step forwards and when she’s several feet away from the edge of the water I slide the gun from her wet hands and place it a few inches from her face before squeezing the trigger. The blast carves a hole through her skull the size of a soccer ball, leaving a crescent shaped mass that used to be part of her lower jaw and her left ear and some of her scalp. Her wet hair lifts and flops over the cavity in her head like a bad comb over and she drops, face first, onto the grass.

The kid moans again and starts to crawl towards the woman, dragging himself with his arms. I work my way behind him and gently place the muzzle of the shotgun to the back of his head as he crawls. My finger tightens on the trigger and the gun explodes the back of his head, spraying brains and teeth hair and bone over the dead woman’s corpse.

The sonic boom of the gunshot echoes through the neighborhood and I can see curtains moving in the house behind me. Bob, or Robert, or whatever he’s calling himself these days, is a retired truck driver. He has two Irish setters, named Journey and Ozzy. He says his wife named them, but I’ve heard his music. Don’t stop believin’. The curtains part slightly and he’s there in the window, a cigarette hanging from his mouth. He waves. I give him a grim nod and open up the shed.

There’s a gas can there for the lawnmower, and it’s full. I roll the four bodies into a pile, careful to keep them a good distance from the girls, and empty the can over them. I use some lighter fluid from the charcoal grill as well, and flick the grill lighter, gently touching the flame to the cotton of the ruined kid’s shirt. It takes a minute or two, but soon enough the four of them are broiling away, fat sizzling and popping like steaks over a nice summer fire.

At the gate, I use a couple two by fours from the scrap pile to block the door from swinging open, nailing the braces directly into the posts. If I have to, I can get out by throwing myself over the fence, but if that’s the case, it means the house is overrun and I’m banking a whole lot on that not happening. I drag a couple half sheets of plywood from the pile behind the shed and cover one half of the French doors, and rig the other half with a two by four to swing away when I need access to the back yard. After today, I’m thinking the back yard isn’t much of a safe haven any longer.   

Tomorrow, I’ll deal with Sanjay.