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.