Dead Cities: Adrian's March. Part Four (Adrian's Undead Diary Book 12)

by Chris Philbrook

  “We’d get used to it,” Ben said. “People are good at that.” He stuck out a huge hand for them to shake. “I’m Benjamin Ryerson. You already spoke to my wife Jennie, and our son Hogan will make an appearance soon. Our daughter Terri is no longer with us. She died soon after this all started. Try not to bring that up.”

  “I’m so sorry,” Michael said. “That’s awful.”

  “You’ve my condolences,” Rachel said. “I can’t imagine.”

  “It’s something we struggle with. The wall you’re learning against is a stock room. We’ve turned it into our bedroom. It’s yours tonight. See the door right there? It’s one of those old farmhouse doors. I think they call it a Dutch door. We’ll keep the upper part open, the bottom part locked. I’m gonna string a length of twine across the upper part with some bells on it after you’re inside. We’ll be able to chat, but I’m asking you to not try to enter the rest of the store area.”

  “Fair enough. Will we have access to any toilet facilities? A bucket?” Rachel asked him. “We don’t need much.”

  “Where were you sheltering before this?” Benjamin asked.

  “We had a small flat south of London,” Michael answered.

  “No, no. Before that.”

  “Buckingham Palace,” Rachel said. “We were part of the group that held the Royal Palace safe. It didn’t work out, as you can tell, but that’s where we came from originally.”

  “Is the Queen gone?” he asked in the dark hall at the back of the small store.

  “At this point, we can’t say,” the doctor answered. “She was in hiding at a secure location last we knew. Government is gone. The military is spent. The economy and infrastructure on all levels is obliterated.”

  “What about America? Is America still functional?”

  “They were hit too,” Michael continued. “Overrun the same as us. Everywhere was. We’ve lost communication last I knew. No one answering long range calls as I understand it. Remember; I’m a doctor, Ben. I only know what the people in charge said.”

  “Did any of them mention Maryland? We’re from Maryland, near Washington. Town called Lothian?”

  “Nothing in detail. I wish I could tell you more.”

  “Don’t say anything to my son, Hogan. He’s been holding out hope that this will all blow over one day, and we can get back on a plane and fly back into Dulles. He misses his friends.”

  Michael and Rachel nodded.

  “May I make a gesture?” Michael asked. “Take my pistol. It’s unloaded, but I want you to know that we have come here in peace.” He extended their spare pistol, magazine removed.

  “Why don’t you set it right there on the shelf,” Benjamin said, pointing at a wooden shelf that had been attached to the wall near the dormant punch clock. “I do appreciate the idea though. As a bit of a skeptic, I do wonder how many other pistols you’ve still got with you. Now why don’t you get settled in there, and after dark, we’ll all come back and have ourselves a nice chat. I’ve got two buckets in there for emergencies. Red bucket is for number one, black bucket is for number two. We use the number two to fertilize some plants we have growing upstairs. The extra we throw in the eyes of zombies that bang on the front door.”

  “Pink-eye zombies. More unpleasant scenarios,” Mike quipped, ignoring the pistol comment.

  “This store is two stories?” Rachel asked, ignoring her boyfriend.

  “No. But whoever was living in the apartment above died with their sink running, and the floor rotted out in the first couple months. We smashed our way through the ceiling, and I built us some stairs to have an apartment. Ugly work, but the extra space has been nice. Please don’t throw your poop anywhere, if you have any.”

  “We will do our best,” Michael assured him.

  “Thank you. We’ll be over in the storefront, or upstairs,” the American said, and after they stepped inside the drywall and stud storage area, Ben clicked the waist-high portion of the door shut. He locked the knob with a key on a ring with several others, and then strung what looked like food twine across the open space above. In the center hung two small bells. He flicked them once, setting free a sad tinkling noise. He smiled at the two inside the room, then nodded, and ducked out.

  Michael and Rachel soon sat on the bed. The mattress was thin, and offered little cushion, but it was warm enough, dry enough, and safe enough for them, at least for a night.

  They shared a smile, and lay down to relax until sundown.

  The bell’s tiny melodic ringing woke Michael up from an unexpected and deep sleep. Beside him Rachel slept the same as he just had; her chest rose then fell with a deep, strong rhythm. The doctor and survivor looked up to the half-door where the bell dangled on its string.

  Peering through the gap, watching them with his wide, intent eyes was a teenager. He was semi-backlit from candles behind him and to his left. Perhaps it was a small woodstove in the main store area beyond. Either way, half his facial expression was hidden in shadow, making his expression inscrutable.

  “I’m Mike. You must be Hogan. Is that right?” he whispered after sitting up on the side of the shitty bed in the stockroom-turned bedroom. Mike squelched the tiny grip of dread threatening to flare up in the back of his mind. This is just a curious teenager. Not a monster in the dark.

  “Are you the doctor?” the soft voice of the kid asked.

  “I am. General Practitioner to the people of what was once Buckingham Palace.”

  “I have a rash that won’t go away.”

  “I see. Is it in a tender region?”

  “Yeah. My skin is red, and shiny, and itchy like crazy. Burns like there’s no tomorrow. Under my… you know.”

  “Bloody and cracked?”

  “Not yet. Been driving me crazy for all summer. Keeps getting worse. Baby powder helped, but we’re almost out.”

  “Yeah. May I ask how often you use soap? Take a bath? I know under the circumstances hygiene isn’t what we’d all want it to be.” Plus teenage boys are wretched little creatures, as a generality.

  “Once a week or so. More often if it rains a lot and we can collect extra water to boil. We’re running out of wood though. This winter will be… Anyway, what do you think my rash is?” He looked over his shoulder into the area where his parents must have been.

  Sensing his embarrassment, Michael thought long and hard before responding. “It sounds like jock itch. Very common, but a huge nuisance. Have you ever heard of it?”

  “My gym teacher cracked a few jokes about it, what is it? Is it permanent?”

  “Not permanent if you use a readily available medicine. Were you and your family able to get any of the medicines here in the store? Small tubes of ointments and creams?”

  “Yeah, some.”

  “Great. You’ll want an anti-fungal cream or ointment. Um… oxiconazole, or econazole. Desitin, Canestan, that kind of thing. Small tube. They’d probably have had it here. If you can find it, apply a thin layer to the reddened areas twice daily until it clears up. You should notice an immediate improvement. By the second or third day it should feel and look better.”

  “What if it doesn’t?”

  “Double down on the daily applications. If you aren’t being bitten by lice, or pests, it’s more than likely fungal. And, as we all know, our world is covered by all manner of fungus. So many we eat them now.”

  “I hate mushrooms.”

  “You’ll be thrilled to hear that there’s no worry of them growing in your crotch. Not the same kind of fungus. This is a common affliction, Hogan. You are still healthy, and you will recover from this with ease.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You’re very welcome. If you can’t find the medicine I prescribed, let me know. I have one tube in my backpack I can give you.”

  “Great.”

  Mike looked at his watch in the dark; it was almost midnight.

  “Your parents are asleep then?”

  “My turn for guard duty on you.”

  �
�I’m sorry for the disruption to your lives and space, but we do appreciate the safe, warm place to sleep. It’s getting chilly out there at night, and it hasn’t been safe for a long time.”

  “Yeah. My mom is real worried about you two. My dad is pretty chill though.”

  “Let them sleep. We just want to rest, and leave in the morning. We’ve a long way to go, and it’s slow going. Those things are everywhere.”

  “They come and go. You came on a good day. Not many outside all day, or even now. I wish we knew why. We could make a run for it if we knew how they were gonna move,” Hogan mused.

  “Me too. We were lucky to get this far without having to kill one yesterday.”

  “Yeah. I’m sorry I woke you,” Hogan said. “I’m gonna go find that cream and smear it on my junk.”

  “Thin layer, twice a day. If it isn’t getting better in three or four days, apply it four times at day. Especially after you clean up down there.”

  “Okay, thank you.”

  “And don’t itch it.”

  “I won’t.”

  “Let it air out. Keep it cool. That’ll help with the itching.”

  “I live in a store with two parents that barely get along. Sitting with my crotch hanging out might feel awkward,” the teenager said with a disbelieving grin. The grin switched to a quiet sadness.

  “Think of the greater good,” Mike said, ignoring the boy’s comment about his parents and their marital struggles.

  “I am. Get some sleep, Doctor. And thank you for not being the dicks my mom was sure you were going to be.”

  “I’m still a fair bit of an asshole, but I’m a healer. I swore that oath, and I intend to keep it. Rachel is a good woman. She never swore an oath, but she does swear good deal.”

  That got Hogan to laugh, which he quickly smothered with a hand over his mouth.

  “Hogan?” the mother’s voice called out in a stern whisper. “Don’t stand so close, Honey. They could grab you.”

  “Mom, it’s a half a door. They can just climb over it whenever they want. I think I’ll be okay.”

  “Do as I say, please,” she pleaded. Her voice had an unmistakable desperate firmness in its tone. Emphasis on desperate.

  She’s afraid, Mike thought. With good reason. “Go. It’s fine. Tell your mother I said thank you for being so kind.”

  Hogan nodded, and left for safer waters, closer to his mother’s harbor.

  Mike managed a sad smile in the dark, then put his head back onto the pillow beside Rachel, who hadn’t stirred a hair. He rested his arm on her waist, and kissed her temple. Sleep crept in then, and after his lids became heavy, he began to dream.

  Mara’s eyes opened.

  An hour later in the near-black of the room later, Mara sat up and assessed her surroundings. She slipped off of the bed she shared with Michael, and stood in the cramped room. Silent as the death she wanted to give to humanity, Mara slid around the bed to the Dutch door that held their attentions at bay. She leaned out the top, being cautious to not hit the bell with her head. To the right was the storefront with its boarded-over windows, and defensively arranged empty shelving.

  Her angle of sight didn’t show her the exact spots where the family of strangers slumbered, or took up their guard against her and Michael, but it did give her a rough lay of the land. She could see a tiny woodstove—salvaged from somewhere else, sitting on walkway pavers with its chimney exiting through the plywood blocking the windows off—and she could see that the front glass door was similarly reinforced with flat wooden detritus arranged into a barricade.

  Their reinforcements would hold against a few undead, but not the crowd she knew gathered just out of sight, just around the corners outside. Her silent army, waiting for her commands, creating a bubble around her and Michael, allowing them to travel unmolested by either the living or dead. If the family here in the store made too much noise, or created a spectacle that the undead could see… their meager shield against danger would fail within minutes. This assessment made the monster smile.

  Mara sniffed the air, inhaling the faint, musky scent of nearby Michael, who still carried a masculine hint of his deodorant. She moved to the door and inhaled again, deeper this time to pull in the scene outside their protective room, and it’s partial door.

  She smelled a medicinal unguent; something thin, and almost minty in its aroma. In Mara’s dual memories she remembered a mention from Michael about a suggestion to apply an ointment for the boy. That had to be it. Under that—diffused but pervasive—was the stink of sweaty humans. Thick like mucus in her nose, the smell of Benjamin, Jennie, and Hogan made her nauseous. Their salty perspiration, their piss, shit, and the curdled rankness of old shoes and boots threatened to creep directly into the fleshy brain inside the skull she currently lived in. Mara wanted to vomit, but knew wasting food would make Rachel’s body weaker, so she severed that notion.

  “Smell something?” a woman’s voice said from near the stove.

  Mara smiled. Just the one I wanted to make my appeal to. The lonely and afraid one. “I do.”

  “Yeah?” the voice asked. Mara heard shifting of motion as the woman got to her feet. Her silhouette blocked out some of the light coming from the stove, and Mara judged the mother as being small, and underfed.

  “I’m sorry you’ve had to live like this,” Mara said, testing the woman’s mood.

  “At least we’re alive,” Jennie said, taking another step closer to the stockroom.

  “If that’s what you call this. I wouldn’t call this a life,” Mara suggested, adding an empathetic-seeming sigh.

  “I have my boy, and I’m protecting him. One look out that smudged window on any given day tells me I’m doing better than a thousand other mothers.”

  “You’re such a good mom. I’m sorry if I sounded negative. It’s hard to stay positive with things they way they are.”

  “Well, that’s true. I struggled with it. Saying I’m depressed would be an understatement.”

  “What about Ben? It must be… a real challenge to be married in a situation like this.”

  “How long have you and Mark been together?”

  “Michael? Michael and I have been seeing each other for a few months. It’s working out. It isn’t easy. Losing the palace as a shelter was… devastating for us. We lost more than a few friends. I… I heard about your daughter. I’m so sorry. I can’t imagine.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I don’t know how I’d go on.”

  “You never really go on,” Jennie said. “You just find a way to make the suffering less shitty. Try to keep it out of your every thought.”

  “Sounds like drowning,” Mara said. “I don’t think I could suffer the loss of a child. I’d kill myself.”

  “I thought about it. More than once. Ben hasn’t been able to… be present, either. He’s all business. All work. No emotion anymore. All he can do is provide material support. He sleeps upstairs. Says it’s so he can look out the upstairs windows to keep watch, but it’s so he doesn’t have to sleep with us. He freezes every night. When our daughter was killed… he might as well have died too. Forgive me for saying that.”

  “No, no. I understand. Some people… some people never recover from trauma. They lose hope, or the only way they can find purpose is to avoid any kind of emotion. He might be an empty shell forever now.”

  “At least he forages for food. ‘Packets of crisps,’ are getting old though. I’d kill for a damn cheeseburger.”

  “You could always eat Ben,” Mara whispered, and added a chuckle to hammer home the joke.

  Jennie snickered. “Wouldn’t satisfy. Nothing of his I’ve let into my body has been worth the effort for going on five years. Six if you count this year here in England.”

  “Is he a good father at least?”

  “He teaches Hogan how to do tasks that make our lives functional. He’s friendly, you know? But he’s rarely present, and even less frequently loving. At least we’re warm.”

&
nbsp; “Until he can’t find furniture to burn in that little stove. It’s going to be a cold winter unless you start looking in more apartments and businesses here.”

  Jennie’s body stiffened in the dark, and she twisted to look over her shoulder at the small potbelly stove with its small glass window on the door. Orange light flickered, deceptive in the warmth it actually provided.

  “That’s tough,” Mara continued. “It’s just awful, and I’m so sorry. Look, can I make a serious suggestion that might sound crazy? I know I’m a total stranger, but sometimes that’s who a message has to come from. Like having a therapist.”

  “Sure. Anything for a half decent conversation.”

  “Leave. If he’s dead on the inside, and parts of him sound dead on the outside too… you’re just as well served leaving here and foraging for something more exciting than packets of crisps, or a half-squeezed ketchup packet from McDonalds. I mean foraging for people, too.”

  Jennie’s voice dipped into the barely audible range. “I’ve thought about it. More than once. I just… taking Hogan from his dad, after losing his sister, just seems like too much to put him through. He’s just a kid. He won’t understand.”

  “He doesn’t have to understand right now. You can explain it when you get somewhere else safe. There is a lot of danger out there, but there’s also many safe places. Places that might offer more hope, better role models, better food and drink. How are you explaining staying here and suffering to him? What will you say when the food runs out? Or the rain doesn’t fall enough for you to have drinking water? Will he understand that?” She paused. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be saying anything. It’s not my place and I’m far past the pale on this. I should go back to bed. Michael and I have a long trip tomorrow south to my family’s home, and I’m going to be tired.”

  “No, no… I um... It’s okay. I needed to talk with someone about it, you know? Being a foreign country, with all what’s going on… and continues to happen. I’ve been unable to think bigger than what will come tomorrow. I can’t get past the next conversation. The next sideways glance. The next moment of loneliness. It’s all endless.”