Day Twenty Four

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.

Day Twenty Three

The sun is streaming into the living room from between the gaps in the plywood. Another day in paradise. I fell asleep in my clothes; the house smells like pot and so do I. My mouth is dry and tastes like someone shit in it while I slept. I need water. My bare feet hit the floor and my head spins. I’m hungry, and as I stand I realize my jeans are loose. I pull my shirt up and notice my little Buddha belly is disappearing, slowly transforming into a bit of a washboard. Funny, I finally get that beach body I’ve always wanted only after there’s no one left to appreciate it.

I catch my reflection in the mirror as I pass by. My hair is getting longer and I haven’t shaved in a couple weeks. My beard is coming in with a whole lot of grey. I look like a morph of Robinson Crusoe and Charlie Sheen, the crazy tiger blood Charlie. Perfect. I’m the love child of two dudes, and one of them isn’t even real. I suppose neither of them is real, when I think about it for a few seconds. I wonder to myself if Charlie Sheen is still holed up somewhere, surrounded by porn stars, or if he got sick like most everyone else and is roaming the streets of Hollywood, dead eyes searching for something they’ll never find.

Same routine:  move the board, list the plywood, slip into the back yard through the French doors and pee. It’s quiet, except for the birds; there are always birds, always the sweet summer sounds in the trees. It’s already hot out, and there’s a cicada buzzing somewhere up above me. The flowers along the north side of the fence are in bloom, pinks and yellows and reds. They’re beautiful, and it’s nice to have something pretty to look at. When the people around you are dead, pretty much everything else looks dead, too. I zip up and pad over to the mulch bed and pull a few handfuls of weeds before plucking some flowers. They’ll look nice on the piles of dirt near the shed. I lay them gently and neatly at each little patch of raw earth. I miss the girls, terribly. I feel them coming, rising up from deep in my belly, big, heavy sobs that shake my whole body before erupting into long, wet tears that run freely down my cheeks and spill to the ground.  

I sit like that for a while, crying, smelling like stale weed and sweat. When the sobs finally subside, I rise and step into the pool with my clothes on. The water still smells of chlorine, but the ring of algae is getting thicker and the water level is noticeably lower. I strip my clothes off and work them around in the water, a half-assed attempt at a spin cycle. I let the Levis sink to the bottom of the pool and wring water from my tee shirt, soak it again and toss it to the deck, and repeat the process with my jeans, making sure I spend a few extra seconds under the water before bursting up into the warm, summer air. The Levis plop onto the pool deck with a wet splash; I work water through my hair with my fingers, scrubbing with the tips of my fingers. It feels nice, and I realize I’m longing for someone to touch me, someone alive and real.

I’ve always hated being alone. Now, I’m really alone. It’s been, what, a week that I’ve been the sole occupant of this house. Just one week. My God, it feels like fucking forever. I wonder just how long forever really is, if a week feels like an eternity. I suppose I’ll find out.

I pull on another tee shirt from the patio. It’s hard and scratchy from drying in the sun. The Levis I work over my legs are pretty crusty, too. But they smell like the outdoors, they’re clean. This pair is loose on me, too. I have some smaller clothes upstairs; I’ll need to break them out. I remember they’re in the bedroom and my heart sinks. I don’t want to go in there.

I look down at my arms. They’re pretty pasty; normally, I’d have a pretty decent tan going on by this time of year.  I guess survivors don’t get a lot of sun time in the new world order. Besides, the pool is now my bathtub, not to mention the fact I had a dead woman in it a few days ago. Ah, fuck it. I strip off my shirt and jeans and quietly drag one of the zero gravity loungers close to the door and toss my clothes onto the steps. I wipe a few spider webs from the chair and stretch out, leaning back so the chair lets me float on my back, delicately balanced on the pivoting brackets. The sun is hot on my skin and it feels good. I close my eyes and listen to the birds, trying to imagine the sounds of water splashing, of Rachel laughing… the taste of margarita salt on my lips. I can almost feel the tequila in my head, making my brain swim just a little. For the first time in forever, I can feel the tension leaching from my pores, dripping from my body with each bead of sweat. I’m… relaxed. Imagine that. Yesterday, I fed my neighbor to zombies, and today I’m peacefully sunning myself on my patio. Naked.

The birds are calling to each other from the tree tops. Rachel is playing in the pool. I can feel the cold, misty stem of the margarita glass slipping from my fingers, slowly. It drops to the patio with a thud. Another thud. And another. My mind is foggy; glasses don’t thud, they clink, shatter. Thud, again.

I open my eyes. Thud. The sun is higher in the sky, more than directly overhead now. I’m half blind. Did I fall asleep? Thud. For how long? Thud. Christ. Thud. At the south side of the fence, the far side of the pool, I can see the top of Bob/Robert’s head. It’s banging into the fence rhythmically. Another thud, this time followed by a long, hollow moan. Well, shit. It looks like Robert has managed to die, but not die.

I sit up and my skin is like ancient leather. Looking down, it’s red. Not just red, but fucking RED. I can’t believe I’ve actually found a way to get myself terribly sunburned, right smack dab in the middle of the apocalypse. Perfect.

Bob/Robert must have turned in the past day or two; I’d last seen him watching me deal with my back yard intruders a couple days ago. I slowly rise to my feet and groan as my skin, tight like a glove, stretches and pulls and flexes. It doesn’t quite hurt yet, but it will. I slip my Levis on and already wish for some fabric softener and the luxury of the washer and dryer as the rough denim works up my legs like twin sheaths of steel wool. I can’t wait for tomorrow, when the pain will be a hundred million times worse and there won’t be anyone around to hear me whine about it.

Bob/Robert is still banging his head against the fence as I make my way to the far side of the pool. The fence is white and there are flecks of red on my side dotting the spot where he’s been slamming his head against the wood and the blood from his forehead has spattered. I can imagine what his side of the fence looks like. Bob/Robert notices me and groans; it reminds me of the sound Tim “the Tool Man” Taylor makes at the beginning of Home Improvement. It’s almost identical, except for the fact that Tim Taylor isn’t dead and pounding his head against the back side of my fence.

My fence was built by the previous owners of our house. It’s not your typical subdivision fence with slats nailed to two by fours, at least not in the sense. There are slats, and there are two by fours. But the genius do-it-yourselfers who owned the place before I did decided to get creative and left a foot of open space at the top of the fence, so where there should have been an extra foot of privacy is a foot of open air topped by a two by four laid sideways and supported at the center of each span by another piece of two by four screwed in vertically. It’s one of these pieces of vertical two by fours that Bob/Robert has started pulling on, rocking against the fence with the full weight of his body. The entire fence is swaying with the motion; the lumber wasn’t in the best shape years ago, and it’s sure not going to hold up to the determined rocking of an overweight dead man for long.

Bob/Robert stops yanking on the fence and turns his head to look over his shoulder. He doesn’t turn his body, and I can hear the pop and snap as the vertebrae in his neck strain to swivel his meaty skull to an impossible angle. Journey and Ozzy, his Irish Setters, are growling from the patio, their heads low and the hair along their backs raised. Bob/Robert’s torso finally gets the hint and rotates with the rest of his spine and he turns to face the dogs with a jerk. His head cocks to one side, the same way the pool kid’s head did, and he takes one unsteady step in the general direction of his patio and the dogs. The fence is safe, for now. Bob/Robert isn’t.

It’s here where I get my first glimpse of how typical, loving family pets react to their undead guardians. It’s neither typical nor loving. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, springs from the patio and bounds across the small back yard, rocketing into Bob/Robert’s belly with the force of a small car. I can hear snarling and growling and teeth snapping. Bob/Robert stumbles backwards two steps, his arms pinwheeling, and goes down hard on his back. Journey, or maybe Ozzy, her hackles raised, slinks across the yard and digs her long teeth into the meat of Bob/Robert’s calf, shaking her head like she’s playing with a tug toy. But she’s not; the denim of Bob/Robert’s jeans tears as does the meat of the leg Journey has between her teeth. Blood flows freely over her muzzle and she shakes even harder, ripping chunks of flesh and muscle free from the bone. Bob/Robert lets loose a howl that’s stifled into a bleating whine, growing higher in pitch as Ozzy’s teeth sink deeper into his neck, finally tearing through his larynx and shutting off his cries forever.

The dogs are going absolutely ape shit and Bob/Robert is thrashing in the grass, his arms and legs waving and kicking wildly. I wonder if it’s him that’s doing the moving, or if the dogs are driving his activity at this point. Both Setters are drenched in slick, red blood. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, has given up on the gaping hole in Bob/Robert’s neck, trading gristle for the soft, loose flesh of his belly. Bob/Robert is no longer thrashing and I can see through the ragged flesh that used to be his flabby neck that the pearly white rings of his upper spine have chewed apart, leaving his skull and what’s left of his face independent of the rest of his body. Bob/Robert’s jaw is still working feverishly and his eyes are wide in their sockets. The rest of him, though, is no longer active aside from random jerks and twitches as Ozzy and Journey tear wet chunks of skin away.

And it’s here, in the warm summer afternoon, with my stiff jeans riding harshly over what will surely become one of the worst sunburns of my life, that it hits me, hard:  I’m no longer the husband, the father, the funny guy in the office that everyone used to like to be around. I’m never going to be that guy again. In the period of a few weeks, I’ve killed, I’ve escaped being killed, and I’ve watched death and undeath in just about every sense imaginable, and in ways that before The Flu would have been unimaginable. I’ve lost the capacity to feel, to care, to give a rat’s ass about anything but surviving. I realize, as the sun continues to work its magic over every inch of my still-exposed skin, that I don’t remember much about Bob/Robert, and even worse, I don’t very much care. What I find myself thinking as I watch his dogs chew flesh from bone and quarrel over a hand that’s been worked free of the wrist, is that beyond the carnage in Bob/Robert’s back yard, up two steps and through those sliding glass doors, is a kitchen, and a pantry. Food.

Bob/Robert didn’t acquire his considerable girth eating rice with condensed milk.

I summon the strength to turn my head away from the dogs and pad quietly across the pool deck to the sunroom and step into the gloom of the house. It’s cooler in here, but not a whole lot. It smells musty and humid, and the aroma of decay is drifting down from the bedroom where the blood-soaked carpeting has begun to ferment. I pull on a pair of socks, even my feet are a brilliant red, and then my boots. In my duffel, I rummage until my fingers tighten around the grip of the Glock. I pop out the mag and make sure the clip is full, and slap it back cop style with the palm of my hand and tuck the gun into the waist of my Levis along with the laundry bag and head back outside.

Ozzy and Journey have made one motherfucker of a mess of their master during the five minutes or so I was inside. Bob/Robert’s naked torso, along with one leg, is sprawled face down across the patio. A pool of red the size of a truck tire is spreading from half a dozen leaks where pieces of him have been bitten and ripped away. Another leg is next to the fence, with a good nine inches of femur protruding from the meat of the thigh; it looks like a ham. I don’t even see the arms. Ozzy, or maybe Journey, is tugging at a length of slick, grey rope leaking from a gaping hole in Bob/Robert’s belly.

Quietly, I lift a bistro chair from the patio and prop it next to the fence and climb over, dropping onto the grass next to Bob/Robert’s head. His eyes are still moving, and they follow me as I step over. His tongue is working, licking away at the air. Ozzy and Journey are oblivious as I slip the Glock from my jeans and wrap both hands around the grip, making sure to keep the muzzle pointed at the ground. Good thing for all those cop shows I used to watch. I side step my way across the back yard, carefully picking my way between chunks of flesh and skin and who-knows-what-else.

The patio door is ajar, and I quietly slip into the gloom of Bob/Robert’s breakfast nook. The kitchen is just to my left, and I step softly around the bar stools and high top counter. The window over the sink looks out on the back yard and, I notice, this vantage point provides me with a damn good view of my pool and patio. So much for privacy fencing. I’m standing there, getting pissed as I think about Bob/Robert watching my girls as they played in the pool, probably rubbing his dick against the cabinet while he did it.

Journey and Ozzy are still tugging at a hunk of slippery intestine. Good dogs.

I reach up and pull a cabinet door open. Dishes. The next one is filled with drinking glasses, and one whole shelf is dedicated to those Looney Tunes glasses from Burger King in the late seventies. Foghorn Leghorn, Bugs, and the Road Runner smile back at me from the cupboard. I’m not positive, but I think I’d broken every single one of those glasses before they were a week old, and I don’t remember getting into much trouble over it, either.

Door Number Three. The cabinet over the stove is filled with boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese and packets of rice pilaf and the modern version of Rice-a-Roni. Noodles with alfredo sauce. Noodles with butter sauce. Noodles with butter and garlic sauce, and they’re all coming home with me. I drop the contents of the cabinet into the laundry bag and try the next cupboard. There’s jelly, and jars of peanut butter and boxes of crackers, and they all go into the bag as well. The last cupboard is half empty; the remainder of packages of Twinkies and Hostess Cupcakes litters the first shelf. The upper level is crammed with little jars of vitamins and herbals and prescription meds. Since I won’t likely be making it to the Walgreen’s any time soon, these all go into the bag, which I pull tight and sling over my shoulder.

From behind me, there’s a low growl and I hear myself saying “fuck, oh fuck, oh fuck” in my head as I remember I didn’t close the patio door. Slowly, I turn my back to the counter to face the fucking Hounds of the Baskervilles. Ozzy and Journey are staring me down, the hair on their backs raised as they growl in harmony. Both dogs are completely drenched in blood; it’s literally dripping from the long fur of their necks onto the linoleum of the kitchen floor.

Ozzy and Journey aren’t moving; they’re just growling. I’m for sure not moving. I’m still not moving as I notice their eyes aren’t quite right. In fact, they’re wrong. The warm spark of life is gone from them, and a cold blanket of fear wraps around me as I realize I’m staring into the dead eyes of – wait for it – zombie dogs. Zombie. Fucking. Dogs. Unbelievable.

 The dogs don’t move. I don’t move. The Glock is on the counter to my left. It’s go-time. With my right foot, I kick at one of the bar stools, punting it into Ozzy (or Journey) just as he springs from the floor. The stool catches him in mid leap and he topples backwards as Journey starts her leap. The two of them topple onto the floor. I make a leap of my own, up onto the bar, my back scraping hard along the edge of the counter top. My hand slaps frantically along the counter until my fingers find the hard plastic of the Glock, and I manage to bring my arm around just in time to squeeze a couple rounds into Ozzy’s chest as he leaps up from the slippery, bloody floor. The slugs slam into him, driving him backwards across the kitchen and once again into Journey. With both hands on the grip, I take a slow breath and squeeze another two shots into Journey’s head, half of which peels away with a splash of   spatters onto the far wall. Ozzy growls and looks at me with those dead dog-eyes and I pump three shots into him; the first two blow holes into his neck below his muzzle. The third hits home, ripping through the soft black nose as it bores a tunnel through Ozzy’s sinuses and brain cavity and blasts a fist-sized hole out of the back of his head.  

Man’s best friends are dead. Again. I slide down from the counter and heft the laundry bag over my shoulder, which hurts like hell from my sunburn. I wonder if Bob/Robert has any aloe in here.  

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.

Day Nineteen

I don’t know what time it is. The clocks are out. I stumble to the sunroom, groggy from the weed, and step outside into the screaming morning sun. With the power out and nothing to pump water, I guess the great outdoors is my bathroom. I’ve pissed gallons in my back yard, usually drunk as hell, but always under the cover of darkness. Not anymore. It’s broad daylight and I’m taking a huge morning leak with half a boner right in the middle of the yard. If half the city wasn’t wandering around dead, it would be a pretty awesome moment. Considering any neighbors I have are either complete assholes, or dead, or dead but not dead, I see it as a bit of a waste. Too bad I don’t have to take a shit.

Back inside, I shake some rice into a bowl and pour some bottled water over it and set it on the counter to soften. I’ll have to start thinking not just about the day to day stuff, like eating, but the longer-term proposition of how to stay alive. There’s enough food in the house to last a while, but it will run out eventually and I’ll be fucked. I sit at the kitchen table and ponder whether or not I can continue raiding the neighborhood for staples or if I’ll need to make a real food run, and although the prospect of leaving the safety of my street isn’t  all that fulfilling, I decide it’s going to be necessary if I’m to ride out the storm. The duffel with my battle outfit is resting on the floor by the refrigerator, waiting for me to gear up. I pull the black Harley boots over my feet and tie them up, tucking my jeans in as I draw the laces tight.  I notice some splotches of old blood on my Levis and again, I’m not sure whose it is. This is getting old.

I clomp across the hardwood floor, across the kitchen, and pick up my watch from the counter next to my useless iPhone, which must have died out during the overnight hours. It’s about ten thirty. I look at my watch and smirk to myself. It’s a Tag Heuer, and once upon a time I was so damn proud of that watch. Now, well, it’s a watch. At least I’ll know what time it is for another year or so, until the battery decides to piss itself out. Gotta love the Swiss.

My rice is soft, at least soft enough to gulp down a few bites. I’m wishing for the days I’d pop a bag of Uncle Ben’s into the microwave for ninety seconds and pour a can of chili over it, drown it in butter and parmesan cheese (Rachel used to call it “stinky cheese”, but she loved it) and mix it into a thick stew. I have cans of chili, but they’ll need to last me for who knows how long. The butter is in the fridge, but the rice is room temperature. Fuck it. I swallow down a few more mouthfuls seasoned with some salt and some pepper, pour some more rice into the bowl and top it off with lukewarm water. It will be softer, later, but it won’t taste any better.

A nylon dry cleaning bag is hanging on the coat rack. I grab it and stuff it into my waistband. It will hold a few weeks’ worth of food.

I hoist the duffel over my shoulder and step out into the garage, again checking for the key and making sure the door is locked. The duffel gets tossed onto the front seat of my Volvo. Through the windows of the garage door, I do a safety check and find the coast clear. The door lifts up silently, again, and I back the car out into the daylight, and quickly push the door back down again. I can’t lock it from out here, so I’ll have to hope for the best.

The Volvo doors lock automatically as I get over ten miles an hour, and I goose her a bit to get up to speed, and the let off on the gas so I can look over the neighborhood. It’s deserted. At the corner, I roll through the stop sign and out onto the boulevard that links my neighborhood with the retail area a couple miles south. There are a few wandering dead out in the park, shambling aimlessly across the soccer field. They turn in my direction as they hear the car pass by and begin their slow march in my direction, but I’m in a car and their dead legs aren’t made for sprints, so I don’t pay them much attention.

Mine is the only car on the road, at least the only one under power. I pass by a Toyota pickup that’s run itself up on the curb. The driver side door is open and I notice a huge black spot on the pavement. It’s blood. I stop and look into the cab of the truck, but there’s nothing there that looks useful, so I drive on.

As I clear the tree-lined street at the corner, I see a huge plume of clack smoke rising up over the rooftops. It’s probably the elementary school; there is a lot of smoke. I’ve spent a lot of time at that school, watching Rachel in Christmas plays, watching Rachel play chimes, watching Rachel sing karaoke during Fun Day. Now I’m watching the residue of the fire that’s gutting the building, burning away all those memories while my little girl melts into the dirt in my back yard.

I make the left onto Golf Course Drive and find myself looking at a long line of abandoned cars, all of them heading east toward the main drag. There’s a lane open and I’m able to make it out onto Randall Road. The Dominicks Grocery is only a quarter mile south, and despite the junk yard of crashed cars and trucks and burned out school busses in front of me, I’m able to weave my way through. The first turnout into the big shopping center, by the movie theater, is clogged with a mass of twisted metal and broken glass; several cars are mashed together in a giant heap of crushed aluminum and rubber. There are bodies here, dozens of them. Some are inside the vehicles, slumped over steering wheels and draped out of back windows. Others are on the ground, slowly rotting into pools of thick, black sludge.

The broken body of a small boy is resting on the hood of a white BMW, a dark red swath of dried blood marking the trail where he slid after he was ejected from the windshield of the grey Taurus that came to  rest against the front bumper of the Beemer, its own hood and bumper rolled up like a sardine can. I look away and slowly drive on to the next turnout.

This intersection is just a left turn off the four lane road, and I’m through without a pause. The parking lot of the grocery store is nearly empty. As I get closer to the front of the market, I can see why. The front windows have been smashed out, and a thick coating of shattered glass litters the sidewalks like snow. Broken bottles litter the spaces in front of the doors, along with empty plastic cartons of milk and torn boxes of cereal. Mice have found the Frosted Flakes and the Cheerios, and they scatter as I pull my car as close as I can without risking a flat tire from all the busted glass.

There are no Walkers here. The lot is empty.

I turn off the car and step outside, half running around the front to the passenger side and pull the door open. I tug my ski jacket on and zip it up, wrap the shin guards around my legs and pull the Velcro straps tight and slip the gloves over my hands. The duffel gets tossed back onto the front seat and I nudge the door closed as quietly as I can. The store looks abandoned, but I’m not taking any chances. I want to lock the car, but I sure as hell don’t want to risk the sound of the horn screaming at me as the locks drop. Fuck it.

Dominicks is dark inside, and the air is stale and warm. The light from the shattered floor to ceiling windows that cover the entire front of the market doesn’t make it too far into the store; beyond the endless rows of checkout counters, the aisles are nothing but shapes and shadows. I don’t have a flashlight.

I hear skittering across the floor and as my eyes slowly adjust to the darkness, I can see hundreds of mice. Some of them are huge, and I realize they’re not mice. Rats. I shiver and take a few steps deeper into the recesses of the market. With each step, the darkness becomes blackness. Even the shadows are gone, replaced by an inky nothingness. I close my eyes, and I realize I can’t much tell the difference. I pull the clothes bag from under my coat and start feeling for shelves.

I’ve shopped here so many times, but for some reason I can’t remember where anything is. I know the produce is to the far left of the store, and the freezers and liquor is at the far right. The center of the market is a bit of a crapshoot; there’s the pharmacy aisles, dry goods and the “seasonal” aisle with all kinds of worthless plastic shit no one can seem to live without. I’m located roughly left of center.

I’m waving my arms around, feeling my way into the heart of the market. I figure I must be halfway down an aisle, so I turn to my left and flail a little more, taking little steps until my hands find the cold metal of a shelf. It’s empty. The one above it is, too, as is the shelf below. Shit. I turn around, hoping I’ve made it a full one hundred and eighty degrees, and start flailing again. To my far right, the windows are bright and glaring. I look away, trying to keep my eyes adjusted to the darkness, not that it’s doing me any good.

The shelves on the other side of the aisle are empty, too. I can feel a few wrappers of who knows what, but whatever they held is long gone. I curse out loud. From deep within the store, I hear a soft moan. Shit. I’m not alone in here. I freeze for a second, listening. Again, a low, sad moan and the shuffling of dead feet on the slick linoleum, and then the crash and thud of something heavy and solid, falling hard against the shelving down the aisle.

I turn back toward the front of the store and the light streaming in from the broken windows half blinds me, but not enough that I can’t see the silhouettes of three of them standing silently up by the checkout rows. I blink, wishing for my eyes to hurry the fuck up and get adjusted to the light. Behind me, the dead thing is moving again, struggling to get free of the shelving.

I try to hold my breath and I can’t. I’m fighting back panic and losing. My heart is pounding in my ears and I’m sweating underneath the ski parka. I left the house with a fucking laundry bag; I’m not holding a shovel, a shotgun, not even a stick to defend myself with. I reach into the shelving and frantically feel around for something, anything. My fingers find a can, then another. I start grabbing, dropping cans into the laundry bag. Four cans. Five. Six. They’re bigger than soup cans. Fruit, maybe. Green beans. I don’t care what they are, as long as they’re hard enough to swing and strike and do damage with.

The dead thing behind me is moving closer, and the dead things ahead of me are, too. I’m caught between bad and worse, and both are getting nearer with each breath.  The three Walkers are moaning, louder now. I take a step forward towards the front of the store as I wrap the end of the bag around my wrist. I can hear my heart thumping away in my chest. It sounds like a bomb exploding, over and over again. I figure I have about three good running paces before I’m in the shit. There’s no way I’m retreating deeper into the store; I’d rather take my chances with three Walkers and some precious daylight than fight one Walker blind.

Here we go; hammer down, motherfuckers.

I scream as loud as I can, some kind of pasty white-collar battle cry, and lurch forward into the group of Walkers. I swing the laundry bag in a sweeping arc and the cans inside connect hard with the skull of the closest. It’s a woman. She groans as the cans collapse the side of her skull and she tumbles into the Walker to her right. Together, they both spill into the shelving and onto the floor. The third reaches for me and I swing again, this time too low. A heavy thud, a wheeze and foul, heavy puff of gas pours from the dead lungs of my dance partner. The blow isn’t enough to do any damage, but it’s solid enough to knock the Walker back a couple steps, and it’s all I need to duck and dodge my way past the trio and sprint to the front of the market.

Fuck, it’s bright. I’ve never seen a cloudy day as bright as this. But I’m at the front of the store, and through the broken plate glass windows, and in the parking lot. I don’t slow down until I’m at my car, and I open the passenger door and toss the laundry bag on top of the duffel. Across the lot, I can see about a dozen Walkers ambling towards me. To the west, by the Taco Bell, there are about a dozen more.

I hurry around the front of the car and nearly slam into a toddler. She’s dead, but she’s still standing, her white eyes looking at me, through me. How old is she? Two, maybe, three? She has a little pink dress on and her feet are bare and covered in dried, open sores. Her skin is grey and there’s a ragged, ugly slice down her left cheek, skin hanging in shreds from the wound. She moans, a small, pitiful little sound that’s more like a cry. I lift my foot and plant my boot firmly against her little chest and shove, hard. She slams backward onto the pavement, her head bouncing like a rubber ball but sounding very much like a small child’s skull striking the hard earth. Her feet are kicking and I step over her and drive the heel of my boot into her forehead, hard. Again and again, until her skull gives way and the sole of my boot sinks deep into her brain. Her feet aren’t moving anymore.

 In the car, my hands are shaking so hard I can barely fetch the keys from my pocket and into the ignition, but somehow I manage. I shove the car into reverse and spin the wheel. The Volvo’s tires screech on the blacktop and I feel a jolt as the front wheels crush the body of the little girl under two thousand pounds of Swedish engineering. I drop the gear into drive and there’s another thump and then a third as I roll over her again with both sets of tires. I slam my foot to the floor and I’m across the parking lot in seconds, and out onto the highway.

The trip home is exactly the same as the trip to Dominicks, except there’s no hope for a full bag of food waiting at the end of the journey. I make it to my driveway and into the garage without another encounter. With the garage door safely closed and locked, I dig my arm deep into the laundry bad and pull out a can. I’m hoping it’s peaches.

Condensed milk. Perfect. 

Day Eighteen

When I wake up, the television is off. It was on when I fell asleep, tuned to CNN, which has been broadcasting public service announcements along with coverage of “the health crisis” that pretty much sounds a lot like the public service announcements.  Last night, there were intermittent test patterns as well.

It’s been two days since I lost the girls, the two longest days of my life. The house is empty and the silence is deafening. There have been no visitors, no undead to deal with. The phone hasn’t rung. I haven’t been off the couch other than to take a leak in forty eight hours.

I reach for the remote and hit the power button. Nothing. I tell myself it’s the batteries as I roll myself off the couch and onto the floor. The clock on the microwave is out. I flip the wall switch to the light in the family room. Nothing. The power is out. I’ve been silently dreading the day when electricity would cease to flow through the wires of the house. It’s today. 

I’m off the couch. My face is still sore but I can breathe, at least a little. The headache is gone, thank God, and although I’m scared shitless to sneeze, I can at least pretend I’m not still all fucked up. I stand staring into the refrigerator for a few seconds until it dawns on me that the light is out and I’m letting all the precious cold air escape into the kitchen. I slam the door shut and something inside clatters and falls. I’m not hungry, anyway.

I sniff at my armpits and realize I smell like a homeless guy. Outside, it’s raining, so I strip off my clothes in the sunroom and swing the back door open, spreading out the shirt, underwear and jeans on the brick patio to wash. I let the warm drops of rain cascade over my skin, working it in the creases and crevices until I feel at least a bit clean. I repeat the process for good measure. For my hair, I stand beneath the eaves of the sunroom roof and let the water pour over my head until I feel little gritty nobs in my hair and realize the rain is washing tiny little pebbles from the shingles away. I’m afraid of what I’ll find when I twist the faucet on the hose so I lay down flat on the pool deck and lower my head over the side and work the chemically enhanced water over my scalp. It burns a little and for a moment I wonder if it will make my hair fall out.

Who gives a shit, right?

  I peel my dripping clothes from the patio and drape the pants and shirt over the backs of a couple of the black metal chairs that complete the little patio set Mandy was so intent on buying from Lowes. When the sun comes out, they’ll dry all stiff and crunchy, but they’ll be somewhat clean. There’s a little blood spatter on the front of the shirt. I have no clue where it’s from. It could be mine, or it could be someone else’s. It’s kind of amusing; there’s blood on my clothes and I don’t know – and don’t care – whose it is.

I look over into the yard and notice water pooling in the muddy depressions where my girls lie sleeping. I choke back a sob and for some reason I wonder if their fingers are moving and twitching under all that dirt and mud. I hope they aren’t.

There’s moaning from the street and I work my way slowly to the fence in time to see two Walkers and a cat shambling across the intersection towards the high school. One is a man and one looks like a teenage girl. She’s dressed in black boots and a mini skirt, and she has no top on. The man is also shirtless and has a huge chunk of flesh missing from his lower back, exposing the bright white of his ribs and spine. They’re moving away from the house. Good for them. Good for me.

Inside, I towel off and dress in another pair of jeans and another tee shirt. I’ve put off  fortifying the house properly for too many days. It’s time to get started.

In the basement, I pull sheets of plywood from the storage beneath the stairs. I wish like crazy I’d done this while there was power, but I didn’t. A little sweat equity won’t raise the property values, but I grab a hack saw off the tool rack and use my four foot level to pencil a straight line across the middle of one of the boards and start cutting. It takes for fucking ever. When I’m done, I have two relatively square four foot by four foot pieces of plywood. Rinse and repeat on the second sheet and I have enough boarding to cover the windows in the living room.

I’m a little bit proud of myself for fully charging not one but both battery packs for my cordless drill. Upstairs, I use decking screws to fix the panels over each of the windows. They don’t quite fit, so I center them vertically, leaving six or so inches open at the top and at the bottom. This is good, I tell myself; I’ll be able to see out of the bottom without whatever is trying to see through the plywood seeing me. Bliss.

Back in the basement, I round up an armload of four inch flowing boards and use them to cover the windows at the back of the house, learning from the last job and leaving a little bit of space open at the bottom. The screws are three inches long; the wood will break before the screws give way. I hope.

The sunroom presents a bit of a problem; it’s a fucking sunroom, meaning there are too many windows and not enough walls. It’s all inside the fence, so for now I’m not too concerned. If the Walkers start getting stronger and breaking shit down, then I’ll have a bit of a problem on my hands.

I get the idea to create myself an escape hatch from the basement. I suppose in the event the house is overrun by the walking dead I’ll need some way to get myself the hell out. There’s a large window that we hid behind a bookcase, and it sits about three feet below ground level. It was intended as a fire escape, so I figure it will work just as nicely as a safe route out of the house if I’m trying to keep myself from being eaten. I dig through my junk can; it’s not a junk can to me, but to most other people it’s just a collection of pack-ratted shit that I never saw fit to throw in the trash can. And a good thing, too, because I find two screen door hinges. After rigging together a door from more of the flooring panels, I screw the hinges in and then mount the trap door to the studding above the window. It swings easily, and I use a hook and eye clasp to fix it in place. It won’t hold well if I wind up with some steroid-using Walker kicking at it, but first he’d have to find the basement window. It’s surrounded by a half circle of aluminum with mounts of ivy growing over the top. I’ll be OK.

With the house secure, or at least as secure as I know how to make it, it’s time to work on securing me. I suppose if I’m going to be spending any time at all outside, I will need to have some protection from undead teeth and fingernails.

 I grab my ski jacket from the clothes rack in the closet and put it on. From the shelf above the washer, I pull down a new roll of duct tape and start wrapping it around and around the arms, making certain to leave gaps at the shoulders and elbows so I can retain at least some semblance of mobility. I look at myself in the mirror next to the dryer and I see a half-assed astronaut looking back at me, silver and orange and utterly fucking ridiculous. I’m not in it for the fashion. The duct tape will keep teeth from getting through the nylon and minus forty degree-rated filling.

I drag my old, worn Harley boots from one of the storage bins, glad I didn’t let Mandy sell them in last summer’s garage sale. I hate garage sales. Who other than a sadistic money-hungry miser could stand arguing over a fucking quarter for a torn paperback? And what kind of idiot would pay five bucks for a VHS copy of Titanic? Idiots. Idiots and Mexicans. The Mexicans will buy anything.

In another bin, I rummage until I find my elbow guards from my two week roller blading stint. I could roller blade with the best of them, but stopping was another story. A torn rotator cuff takes a lot of fun out of the sport. My bike helmet is in the bin, and I haul that out as well. I’ll look ridiculous, but I’ll be safe.

My upper body is pretty well covered, and I intend the pun. I start thinking about my legs; old Levis probably won’t make the cut. Another pun, and I chuckle to myself.  I don’t have anything for my legs, and for a minute or two I just stand there, imagining myself wearing hockey goalie pads. Idiot.

Well, shit.

I make the decision to scout next door for some shin guards. The Pinarskis’ kid played soccer in high school. It’s worth a shot, and what else have I got going today? I dress myself in battle gear and lumber up the basement stairs, through the kitchen into the garage. It’s musty and hot out here. Through the frosted glass windows, I can see there’s nothing in the driveway and no Walkers in the front yard. I grab a pry bar from the corner by the garage door and slip my hands into a pair or worn leather work gloves I’d left lying on the work bench. There are a couple packets of seeds there and it strikes me as pretty fucked up just how hard we’d worked in the yard, the flowers and the shrubs and the mulch and the cultured stone, and how none of it made one shred of difference now. Nobody gives a shit about their yards these days.

I check the drawer in the workbench for the key and make sure the door to the kitchen is locked. It is.

I press the button on the door and nothing happens. I punch it again and remember the power is out, so I grab the pull cord and release the latch and lift the door by hand. It’s quiet and smooth and I wonder to myself why the hell it’s so fucking loud when it’s pulled up by electricity. I lift the door to halfway and crouch down as I pass out into the open air.It’s still cloudy, but the rain has stopped. It’s humid and I’m already getting hot in my undead-killer outfit.

There are no people outside, and it’s quiet except for the birds. The birds never seem to shut up.

I make my way across the street and cross the sidewalk towards the Pinarski’s place. There are two blackened smudges in the front lawn and I try hard not to look for pieces of bone and clothing, but I can’t help it. They’re there, little blackened hunks of, well, people, scattered in the grass. The lawn is getting tall again.

The front door is unlocked and I slip into the house. There are muddy footprints tracked across the carpet and little cakes of dirt leading down the hallway into the kitchen. I follow them, and find the cabinets thrown open and spice bottles and packets of instant gravy strewn over the tiles on the floor. A box of rice that must have been dropped sits on its side on the counter, little maggoty white flecks scattered in a two foot wide swath. Sanjay has been here, that fuck. Anybody else would have had the common sense to save the goddamned rice. The rest of the cupboards are pretty much bare, some flour and sugar and a few boxes of pasta. I slip off my gloves and scoop as much of the rice as I can gather back into the box, and gather up the flour and sugar and boxes of macaroni. I love pasta. I load up my arms and carry the food to the front door, pile it neatly on the floor and head up the stairs.

Ricky Pinarski’s room is at the top of the stairs on the left. It’s empty and dark, the curtains drawn up tightly. Ricky is away at college in Indiana on a baseball scholarship. His room is a typical teenaged boy’s room, posters of Metallica and Green Day tacked to the walls and shelves covered with baseball and soccer trophies above a small, neat desk. In the closet, I dig through piles of clothing and enough sneakers to fill a shoe store until I find a green and gold duffel bag with the high school logo on it. Gators. Inside, I find a gold mine; soccer cleats, shin guards (jackpot), a small baggie of weed (another jackpot) and a stash of Hustlers. The crumpled jock strap and cup can stay; I leave the rest in the duffel and head back downstairs, load the food into the bag and close the door behind me, but not before grabbing a set of keys from the little hook on the wall and locking the place up.

I look left, and then right. Nothing. With the duffel over my shoulder, I take my time crossing the street and crouch under the door. The garage is clean, just the cars and tools and all the stuff I won’t likely need again in the near future. Or maybe at all, ever.

With the garage door silently down and locked with the slide bolt, I’m at least somewhat safely sealed off from the decomposing outside world.   I tug off my gear and unload the duffel, replacing the food and weed and Hustlers with my duct taped jacket, gloves, helmet and the shin guards. The food belongs in the cabinets, not on the counter, I remember Mandy telling me, so I carefully stock away the pasta, the used up rice and the bags of flour and sugar.

The bag of weed is staring at me from the island in the middle of the kitchen. I stare back. There’s a little magnetic note pad stuck to the side of the refrigerator, and I tear off half a sheet os paper and sprinkle some of the pot into the center, carefully rolling a joint. It’s not thin like good rolling paper, but it works. I find myself smiling at how easily the muscle memory returns, my fingers twirling the joint at each end until it’s tight. There are some matches in the spice cupboard, and I light up and inhale deeply, immediately coughing my lungs out. It makes my nose hurt like hell, but the coughing stops and I pull another drag from the joint and hold it for a ten count before letting an impossibly huge plume of smoke escape from my lips. Two more, and my head is light and I’m seeing little specs of light dancing in front of my eyes. I lick my fingers and pinch out the joint.

Oh, look. Somebody brought Hustlers.