I’m waiting for lukewarm water to soften up a bag of parmesan noodles. I’m not all that hungry. It seems like my appetite is lessening to accommodate my shrinking waistline. Maybe this is what starving to death is like. Outside, it’s raining hard; I can hear it drumming steadily on the roof of the sunroom and every few minutes, a rumble of thunder rolls across the sky like a nuclear bomb. I’ve retracted into myself so deeply I don’t even realize the sounds at the front door mean there’s someone knocking until the rap-rap-rap of knuckles on glass turns into the pounding of something solid on the steel trim of the storm door.
The dead don’t knock, and the living don’t seem to visit much anymore. But there it is again, another solid thud against the door frame, this time coupled with the muffled, angry voice of a woman,
Kathryn.
I open the slats on the blinds and there she is, her face red and her eyes demanding. I twist the dead bolt and turn the knob, and the front door swings open for the first time in weeks. Kathryn has her right arm drawn up tight against her body in an Ace bandage sling. In her left hand, she’s holding a compound bow, the limbs covered in camouflage tape. Over her shoulder, there’s a leather quiver stuffed with arrows dressed in bright orange fletching.
I give her a look up and down. “Afternoon, Robin Hood.”
She pushes past me out of the rain and into the house. “Fuck off.”
“Fuck off to you, too. The tea party isn’t for another hour, but you can help me stuff some peppers if you’re into it.”
She shoots me an evil glare and lays the bow across the back of the couch, then unslings the quiver and leans it against the wall. She stares at it for a moment and then drops heavily onto the loveseat and sighs. “You look like a piece of shit. Nice Castaway beard, Wilson. And nice sunburn.”
I hate this woman, but it’s been a while since I’ve had a conversation with another human being. I suppose I can stand her for a few minutes, at least until I can figure out why she’s sitting on my sofa in her wet clothes.
As if she reads my thoughts, she wipes the back of her hand across her dripping forehead and slides a loose strand of wet, greasy hair behind her ear. “I’m wet.”
“I see.” I don’t get her a towel.
Kathryn looks around the house, craning her neck for a peek up the stairs at the closed bedroom door. “Where are the Rachel and Amanda?”
“They’re in the back yard.”
Her eyebrows raise, the lower at me like I’m too stupid to tell them to come in out of the downpour. “In this weather? It’s raining, you asshole.”
“They’re in the ground, you cunt.” At this, she winces; I’m not sure if it’s the c-word that causes the wince or the realization that I’m telling her my girls are dead, not dead and then dead for good, slowly seeping into the soil next to the shed.
She looks at her shoes. “Oh… oh. Okay.” Kathryn slumps her shoulders and drops her head to her chest. “Oh.” Her body seems to go completely lifeless for a few minutes and then she starts to heave, big, silent sobs lifting her shoulders and then pushing them back down into her body. I do nothing. After what seems like forever, she stops and lifts her face. Her cheeks are puffy and they’re still red, and now they’re blotchy, too. She looks into my eyes and I look away. “How…?”
“Doesn’t matter and I don’t want to talk about it.” Half true; it does matter, but not to anyone but me and I’m not in a sharing mood. “Want to smoke a joint?”
Kathryn looks at me, then notices the bag of marijuana on the end table. “Yeah”, she says. I roll up a nice little blunt and light up, then pass it to her. She draws deeply and holds it, then leans her head back and exhales a cloud toward the ceiling, then takes another drag before passing the joint back to me. I take a quick hit and give the blunt to Kathryn. “Finish it. All yours.” Her eyes are already softer and I can almost see a smile on her angry lips. She takes another pull and then licks her fingers and pinches off the end, the embers tossing up tiny little sparks as the flame dies out between her index finger and thumb. “Thanks. I’ll use this later.” Kathryn lifts up the flap over a breast pocket on her vest and drops the joint in, then pats the pocket to make sure it’s there.
I’m looking at her arm, the one in the sling. There’s blood soaking through the brown elastic of the bandage. I tip my head toward the compound bow. “A little hard to shoot one handed, isn’t it?”
“Fuck off.”
“How’d you get hurt? Looks like you’re still oozing a little bit.” I stand and walk to the bathroom and pull the Tupperware bin from under the sink. It’s filled with Band Aids and hydrogen peroxide and Neosporin and tape and gauze. Back on the couch, I reach for her arm. “Let me take a look.”
Kathryn doesn’t move for a moment, then reluctantly starts to unwind the bandage, unwrapping roll after roll from her arm, around her neck, over her shoulder, over and over and over until three lengths of Ace bandage are coiled in a dirty brown pile on the floor. The flesh of her forearm is white and swollen, lines pressed into her skin from the bandage. She turns her palm up and there it is, a tablespoon sized chunk of skin and muscle gone and only a red, dripping cavity left in its place. It looks like a bite.
“It’s a bite”, Kathryn tells me. Thought so. “Martin did it. He did it before I shot him with this”. At the word “this”, she points her chin at the bow. “I shot him through the eye and he stuck to the wall with the arrow poking out of his eye and into the wall behind his head.”
I tell her it must have been a hell of a shot while I dab at the wound with a paper towel, sopping up pus and blood. It smells and I’m thinking it’s infected.
Kathryn starts to giggle. “I was trying to hit him in his chest.” With this admission, she begins to laugh, harder and harder until she’s convulsing, her cackles raising in pitch and ending in un-ladylike snorts.
“Party rock is in the house, tonight”, I tell her.
She stops laughing and looks at me with a weird little frown tugging at the corners of her mouth. “Where in the world did that come from?”
I don’t know. I’m a little high. In the bathroom, I wet some toilet paper and use it to clean her bite as good as I can. I’m not a doctor. I squeeze some Neosporin – “Sporin”, Rachel used to call it when she was little and needed boo boos fixed – onto a gauze pad and press it onto the wound. “Ouch”, Kathryn says, and then she starts to laugh again. I peel some tape off the roll and rip it with my teeth, pressing the pad over her bite and fixing it in place. Rinse, repeat. “How bad does it hurt?”
Her eyes are glassy. “Not so bad right now. Feels better when it’s up. Right now it’s not up, but it’s not throbbing like it was. I should put it up.” The bandages are disgusting.
“We’ll get you something else to use for a sling.” I glance at the Ace bandages. “Those are fucking gross and they need to go outside, or in a hole, or be lit on fire or something.” I ask Kathryn what happened that made Martin bite her. I would have bitten her, too. Her shoulders slump again and she tells me how Martin wouldn’t get off the couch, wouldn’t get them food, wouldn’t sit with the neighbors for the neighborhood watch meeting, wouldn’t even stand up to take a piss after a week or so. One morning, she tells me, she went downstairs to his basement man cave and found him standing in the laundry room, holding a tattered, bloody half of their cat Bugsy in each hand. She tells me how the blood from the cat was all up his arms and smeared over his chest and his neck and his face, how there was cat blood in his hair and on the floor and on the walls and how could he slaughter their cat without her hearing so much as a peep, anyway? She tells me how much she loved that damn cat, and then she tells me how Martin finally let both halves of Bugsy drop to the floor and come for her with his bloody hands reaching, searching, grabbing at the air but not finding her. She ran up the stairs, she tells me, and then she tells me how she had told Martin to put a God damned door on the basement, that she knew someday they would wish there was a door there, and how now she knows exactly why the door was so all-fucking important, because if there had been a door on that basement room, then Martin would still be down there and she wouldn’t be sitting here with a hunk of her arm in his mouth and him pinned to the wall in their kitchen with a hunting arrow sticking out of his ruined eye socket. She expends a good deal of energy explaining the popping sound the broadhead arrow made as it burst Martin’s eyeball, and how there wasn’t much blood, but there was some other kind of fluid, something clear and thick that leaked from his eyeball as it collapsed around the shaft of the arrow. I learn that Martin’s eyes were brown, and at that Kathryn’s blue eyes swell with tears, but she does not cry.
“He was a lazy prick and he wouldn’t go back to work, even though he could have”, she says. “His parents gave us money, their retirement money, and we lived the same way we did when he was working. Isn’t that selfish?”
Yes, it’s ridiculously selfish. “No”, I say.
“My sister took the kids.” Kathryn and Martin have two children, a boy and a girl. The youngest, Samantha, or Sam, is a couple years older than Rachel with blonde hair, already in eye makeup and cropped little shirts meant to drive tween boys ape shit. She is a rag just like her mother, and trouble waiting to happen. The boy, Sean, is in his mid-teens and completely engrossed in the Boy Scouts. He sells popcorn nearly the whole year, door to door throughout this neighborhood and the other communities that surround us. He’s a nerd and a half. I find myself not really caring about Sean and Samantha. “She took them before the phones went out and went to Indiana. I haven’t heard from them and I don’t know if they’re alive or if they’re dead and now Martin is on the wall in the kitchen like some kind of fucking decoration.” She laughs a little bit, followed by what I think is a sob. With her good arm, she wipes her nose on her sleeve. “It’s just me now on my side of the circle. Well, me and Robert, I think.”
I tell her it’s just her and share a little bit of my experience with Bob/Robert and the pups. Then I remember my noodles and pull myself off the couch. In the kitchen, I drink what’s left of the water from the bowl and mix in the powdered cheese, dump not quite half of the noodles into a clean bowl and walk back into the living room. I hand Kathryn the bowl and she looks at it like someone just put a plate of dog shit in front of her, but she starts to eat. After a few heavy bites, she’s polished off the noodles.
“It’s pretty much just me on this side”, I tell her.
Kathryn leans her head back on the loveseat. “I saw Sanjay go by last week. Well, some of him, anyway. A couple of ghouls were dragging him off through the yards out towards the park.” I decide not to tell her about my role in the ugly demise of Sanjay and ask her why she’s here. I remind her that we hate one another.
“You’re safe”, she says. “You seemed to find a way to toughen yourself up and fight. The rest of us, well, not so much. Everything, everyone, it’s all falling apart.” I remind her that things fell apart weeks ago, when the first cough sent tiny particles of the flu from a mouth to some hand rail somewhere to someone’s hand to another mouth, and so on, mixing up lines of DNA in an endless strand so that the body dies but the brain does not. When the first body got up off the ground and took its first furtive step, that’s when things went to shit, when the world fell completely and uncontrollably apart. “Yeah”, Kathryn sighs. “That’s when it fell apart.” She closes her eyes and in a few minutes she’s asleep, snoring softly. She looks less angry to me; she looks almost peaceful.
I want to shoot her bow.
I sling the quiver over my shoulder and lift the bow from the back of the couch where Kathryn left it, and walk into the back yard barefoot. At the fence, I see a cluster of six or seven Walkers milling about near the stop sign at the corner. Cool. I jog to the gate, slip through, and crouch low as I work my way through the front yard and around the side of the house. The rain has slowed, and everything is humid and wet. From behind the tree, I reach over my shoulder and slide one of the arrows from the quiver and slip the notch over the bow string. The arrow rests quietly on the rest and I flex my palm against the grip. It feels good, and I remember summers in the side yard of my boyhood home, shooting arrow after arrow into hay bail targets with my father’s hunting bow when he wasn’t home. I was never allowed to use his bow; when Dad was around, I had the privilege of using a thirty year old fiberglass straight bow that creaked and cracked when I pulled the string tight, and with it, my arrows never seemed to hit anything but air.
I creep slowly along the pool enclosure, then past Bob/Robert’s fence. Despite the rain, I can smell what’s left of the man already beginning to stew from behind the weathered panels. The Walkers are moaning and groaning, their twitchy walk leading them in circles, going nowhere in particular. I raise the bow and sight along the arrow, tracking a woman with grey hair. Her face is pointed in my general direction, but she’s not seeing anything, really, her jaw slack and her tongue leaking from the corner of her mouth like a slug. I draw the bow, aiming for her face, and let the arrow fly. It whistles as it carves a channel through the thick, damp air and flies in a perfect, straight line. The arrow continues to whistle as it sails over the woman’s head, a good three feet above my intended target. A couple seconds later, I hear the far off clatter as gravity plucks the arrow from the sky and drags it onto the blacktop of a driveway on the next block. Well, shit.
One more.
I nock another arrow and aim lower, concentrating on my breathing as I draw the bow for the second time. I release, and this arrow whistles, too. I watch as it streams through the air, a lightning bolt dressed in orange feathers. I hear a soft pop as the arrow slides cleanly through the woman’s neck, continuing on another few feet until the skull of a boy impedes its forward motion. The arrow drives into the boy’s head a few inches and stops. The boy stops, too, and drops to the pavement. The old woman has a large, black stain that spreads from her neck to her breast bone. She doesn’t miss a beat, and without so much as a glance at the boy, she continues her aimless march through the intersection.
It’s starting to get dark. The sun is sinking slowly behind the black clouds that are rolling in from the west and I’m hearing thunder far off in the distance. Back inside, Kathryn is still snoring peacefully. I lean the quiver back against the wall and gently lay the compound on the dining room table. It’s a fine weapon. The house is gloomy. I cover Kathryn with one of the fleece blankets I’ve been sleeping under and stretch out on the couch. Kathryn sighs in her sleep, and I remind myself I hate her.
I’ll throw her out tomorrow. Tonight, it’s nice to know I’m not sleeping alone.
