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.