by Howard, Bill
"No, no. Leave me alone!" he cried.
I started to talk, but he was really panicking and kept walking backwards. He was walking to the edge of whatever he was dropping the bags off of.
"No wait, I'm fine, just . . . " I pleaded.
He took one more step back and his heel slipped right off the dirt edge and he fell backwards, hands wildly flailing into the air trying to grasp anything. He fell out of my sight in a flash and was gone. I pulled my legs out of the bag and walked to the edge where he had fallen. I looked down into a massive pit that had been dug out of the earth. It was filled with hundreds upon hundreds of black body bags, all piled on top of each other. Some were still sealed up, just looking like piles of garbage bags, other were torn open, bodies half spilling out. Some had fallen right out of their bags, or had been ripped open by animals, their tattered corpses scattered in pieces all over their neighboring bodies. The driver of the truck lay on top of them, his head sitting at an unnatural angle to his body. There were faces of all types in the pit; men, women, kids. All colors and creeds. I didn’t want to look at them anymore, yet I was drawn to them, beckoned by their lonely stares. I felt something cold on my cheek and wiped it away with my hand. I was crying. This was the first time I had really understood the loss that was taking place, the devastation that this outbreak was causing to my world. I cast one last look into the pile and turned away; wishing Father Clive was there with me. That was the first time I had thought of him as 'Father'. As I was walking back to the truck, something heavy weighed on me. I stopped. Something was drawing me back to the pit, but I didn’t know what. I couldn’t look again; it was too terrible. I walked a few more steps and felt it again, stronger. I turned around and stared at the edge of dirt surrounding the pit. The feeling was agonizing, colossal. I hesitantly walked back to the pit again and stood at the edge. I scanned the bodies, not knowing why I was subjecting myself to this again knowing the pain it caused me. I was standing on the edge of this horrendous pit of death and human destruction, looking over all these lost souls and not knowing why; wanting to leave and fighting the urge to stay. As I forced myself to turn back and leave again, my eyes caught sight of something right below me. I looked down to the edge of the pit, right up against the dirt wall ten feet below me. Pressed up against the rocks was a body half out of its bag, laid out on its back staring into the sky, into my eyes. My body collapsed and my soul screamed for mercy. It was my heart, my daughter, my Jordan.
CHAPTER 36:
AND DARKNESS FELL
When I awoke, the sun was high in the sky and beat down on my face. I was still lying beside the pit, from which arose the foulest of stenches in the hot summer sun. I sat up and looked around, checking if the truck was still there. It was. I turned back toward the pit, unsure if it was really Jordan I saw, or if my mind was playing tricks on me. I stepped to the edge once again and looked over into the crater of human carcasses. Jordan was still there, still staring at me with wide eyes. I ran to the truck, found a rope under the passenger seat, and secured it to the trailer hitch. I lowered myself down the dirt wall and into the putrid hole. Once I was down about ten feet or so, I was standing right beside Jordan's body. My eyes were streaming tears down my face, half from the situation, half from the smell. I slid Jordan carefully back into her black bag, zipped it up and hauled it over my shoulder. Climbing back up was excruciatingly difficult, but I somehow made it without falling back in. Once I was back up, I cleared the remainder of the bodies out of the truck and set Jordan's in, fastening her against one wall with the rope, it didn’t seem right to just let her slide around the back of the truck. I got in the cab, started up the engine and drove out of the dump and onto Taunton Road, heading north into farm country. Considering I was in a vehicle now, I didn't imagine it would be much longer before I got home to Diane. I drove along Taunton until I reached Winchester Road, then headed east down Concession Road 7, towards the farm.
We bought the farm just after Jordan was born; we had wanted to stay within a good commuting distance to the city, but we really wanted the space a farm would afford us. We found one we really loved outside of Pontypool, just north of the Ganaraska Forest. We didn't really operate it as a farm, but we loved the property and kept a few animals; we liked the idea of Jordan growing up around animals.
Once I passed Enniskillen, I came across a large tree that was blocking Regional Road 57. I could get home by doubling back, but it would cost me precious time. I was in a large truck, so I figured I would take a chance and try to push it out of the way. I drove up to the tree on the right shoulder of the road and nudged the bumper up against the bark. Slowly pushing down on the gas pedal started the tires spinning and the smell of rubber filled the cab. The tree started to move a little, but then stopped. On either side of the road were deep ravines; there was no way the truck was making it through them. I backed up the truck about twenty feet and sat with the engine running. I figured I had no choice but to take the longer route, so I backed the truck up and turned it around. Once I had the truck facing the right direction, I heard a loud crack from the forest off the east side of the road, and the truck jolted on the back driver's side. I hit the gas and started down the road, not wanting to know what the sound was, but the slapping of the flat tire rotating on pavement wasn’t a pleasant sound either. I looked in the side mirror and saw the rear tire on the driver’s side splintered into shreds all over the road. I stopped the truck and got out, intending to search the back for a spare. Once out of the cab, I caught sight of movement in the trees. I stopped dead in my tracks and watched. A man about of forty years old, wearing a tan jacket and red cap, stepped out of the darkness of the foliage and raised a shotgun at me, warning me not to take another step. I raised my hands above my head and froze. As the man approached, anger boiled up inside me; I couldn't believe this crap was happening to me when I was this close to getting home. When he was within twenty feet or so, I heard the gravelly sound of boots on pavement behind me as well. I turned my head slightly as two more men approached from the opposite side of the road. They came up to the truck and started inspecting the cargo door. The first man walked up to me and pressed the shotgun barrel into my chest.
"What's in the back?" he snarled.
"Nothing" I retorted "I was transporting bodies, that's all."
He hollered back for the other men to look inside the truck. I could hear the door roll up and the men hop inside. The first man leaned out, looking towards the back, anticipating what his minions would find. The men jumped back out of the truck and joined their friend by me.
"Nothing but a body bag Stevie."
The first man looked disappointed, then turned his attention back to me.
"You got anything up front?"
I thought for a quick second, then replied.
"I have some shotgun shells, some food and a radio, but no weapons and nothing else."
He looked a little happier, but not much.
"Get the stuff. And keep it slow. This doesn't seem right. You two check that body bag. Maybe it's got something other than a body in it."
The two henchmen jumped into the back again, and I leaned into the cab, showing the man that I was being slow and careful. As I leaned into the cab, I reached into the glove compartment, hoping to find something that could help me. There was a flashlight, some cassette tapes, the truck manual, and a folding pocketknife. I palmed the knife and flicked it open with my thumb. A voice came from the back.
"Jesus Christ Stevie, it's a kid!"
Stevie turned his head just for a second, just long enough for me to turn around, arc the knife blade at my shoulder level, and bring it across his throat. It went deep, much deeper than I had intended it to. The gush of blood covered the front of his tan jacket before he could even turn his head back, and he crumbled towards the ground. I quickly reached out and snatched the shotgun before he hit the pavement, swung around, and approached the back of the truck with the gun raised. When I came around the back, the tw
o men were rummaging through the body bag, presumably looking for anything they could steal off Jordan.
"Get off my daughter!" I yelled.
They both jumped up, startled, both with knifes in their hands. I pulled the trigger and buckshot rained out into the cubed room. It caught both of them in the torsos, and one caught some in the side of his face. They both spun and fell to the floor with a bang. I hopped up into the back and scuttled over to them, keeping my sights trained on them as I did. They had both dropped their guns and were writhing in pain, blood staining the wooden floor of the truck. I set the shotgun down against the side by Jordan and grabbed the men by their pant legs, dragging them out of the truck. I jumped out first, and then pulled them out after me. They hit the ground hard, the wind getting knocked out of them. I left their knives in the back and tied them up with some extra rope. I spent the next while pacing around them, muttering to myself, apparently putting quite a scare into them, judging by their expressions. They were torn up from the shotgun and bleeding in the dirt, and watching me talking to no one in particular. I finally turned to them directly.
"Do you realize what you've done? I was almost home and you fucked it up! Do you have a place near here, where did you come from?"
The one that didn’t have small bullet shards in his face spoke up.
"About a quarter mile in the woods to the east, there's a small barn; we were holed up in there, just us and Stevie. We just needed supplies man, that's all."
I pumped the shotgun until the two shells that were left in it were in the dirt. I picked them back up and reloaded the gun. One shotgun with two shells is better than nothing. I headed into the woods to the east, the two men calling after me with cries that they would die if I left them there. I really didn’t care if they did.
I reached the barn in about ten minutes, and the area seemed quiet. I snuck up to the back and looked into the one window that adorned the backside of the old barn. The inside was pretty ramshackle, barely put together as a living area. There was an old wood stove, a table, and a few chairs. I moved over to the left side to the first door I encountered. I slid it open on its rusty rails and stepped inside with my shotgun drawn and ready. There was no one here, just an empty hay-filled pseudo-homestead. I searched around a bit looking for anything that might help me get the truck back on the road, but there was nothing. I stepped back outside and looked around. There was a small house on the property as well. I wondered why they would stay in the barn instead of the house. I walked across the long, green blowing grass to the old white farmhouse. It was an eerie experience; there was no sound save the blowing wind, and an old house loomed before me. I was sure Tobe Hooper must have been directing this portion of my day. I reached the small front step and looked in through a few windows, which were not boarded up. The house looked empty; there were no signs of life. I tried the front door knob but it was locked. I stepped back and kicked my foot at the door handle, the old wooden door blasting open with a loud crack. The front hallway was clear of anything. No furniture, no rugs. It looked abandoned, but clean. As I took the first step up the stairs, the wooden plank beneath my foot creaked so loud it made me jump. Right after the creak, I heard a loud rattling coming from upstairs, like that of someone throwing chains around on a wooden floor. I proceeded the rest of the way up the stairs and turned towards the door where the sound was coming from. As I crept down the hall, the sound of voices joined the sound of the chains. Female voices, hard, raspy. They were calling out names. I could make out two. James. And Stevie. There was one more, but I couldn’t make it out. I turned the knob to the room and swung the door open. Three women were in the center of the room kneeling. They had animal collars around their necks attached to chains that were bolted into the floors. And they were very obviously infected. In fact, it looked as if they had been infected for quite some time; their skin was pale, their eyes a bright greenish yellow, their hair wild and tangled. They stared at me with vacant looks, still calling out the names of their husbands; animal carcasses were scattered all around the room, all eviscerated. I lowered my gun. I imagined Diane like this, how I would react, what I would do. I raised the gun back up. As I aimed the gun at the infected women, I heard a quick thudding sound of someone running behind me and spun around. A man was running down the hallway towards me with a kitchen knife held high above his head, screaming incoherently. I pulled the trigger and cycled another round into the chamber as the first shot hit the man square in the chest. The shot sent him stumbling back about ten feet, but he staggered back up, still holding the knife.
"Stay back, I swear to God I will . . . "
My plea was interrupted by another round of screaming as the man lunged again and I fired the last shell into him. This one caught his right hip and it spun him around, sent him into the banister and over it, hitting the wooden floor below with an echoing crash. I turned back to the women and gently closed the door behind me. Their screams continued as I made my way back downstairs. I looked upon the body splayed on the floor. He was young, maybe nineteen; the son of one of the women would be my best guess. I felt ashamed for shooting him, but I reasoned with myself that he was manic, and that he probably would have killed me otherwise. It was strange how nothing seemed to make sense anymore, all the usual streams of logic and reasoning had been replaced by a disjointed set of rules. Rules of survival that were very straightforward in their definitions. Kill or be killed had been the most frequent example from the past few days. Frankly, I was getting tired of it. I felt my humanity being drained away. Not being with my family was making me forget what it meant to care, to love. Yet it was those particular feelings that kept me going, kept me focused.
I rummaged through the house looking for anything that could help me get back on the road. I grabbed a bit of packaged food, just in case Diane didn't have much, and loaded it into a backpack. In one of the bedroom nightstands, I found an old Colt .357 revolver loaded with two magnum shells. I tucked it into my pack and headed outside. As I crossed the field, I saw a storage shed behind the house. I set all my supplies down in the grass, pulled out the Colt, and swung open the door. The first thing I noticed was a man hanging from a rope strung over a beam. He had to be in his seventies, but fit, he looked strong. The shed was full of tools, and buried in the back under some lawn chairs and rakes was a pile of truck tires, one of which looked like it might serve my purpose. I gathered up some other things I would need: a jack, a tire iron. I picked up my backpack out of the field and headed back to the truck.
When I arrived, I discovered the two men I had left tied up were now in bloody clumps all over the road. One of the men's hands were in the middle of the road still tied together, but not attached to anything else. The sight barely even fazed me. I think I was actually becoming acclimated to the site of destroyed people.
I checked the back of the truck to make sure Jordan had not been disturbed. The black bag was still secured to the wall, with Jordan still intact inside it. I changed the tire with the Colt in the dirt beside me, threw the supplies into the passenger seat, and started up the truck. As I looked out the dirty windshield down the road ahead, all I could envision was my house at the end of it. I had more reason than ever now; I had to get Jordan home to Diane. I had to get my family back together. At this point, nothing was going to stop me.
CHAPTER 37:
THE END OF THE ROAD
In the journey down that long road, I must have gone through the entire range of my own emotions. I was ecstatic to be so close to home, so happy at the prospect of seeing Diane. I was devastated that I was transporting my dead daughter's body in the back of a truck, crushed by the realization that she was even dead at all. I was angry as hell that any of this was even happening. Angry at every infected person that tried to attack me over the past several days. Angry at the people who tried to steal anything of mine, or who tried to kill me or anyone I was with. I was scared about what might happen to the world in the days to come; scared about what I might find once I
got home. I was sentimental about my life up to this point and uncertain about my life ahead. I alternatively laughed, cried, smiled, screamed, and dreamed while I drove down that road towards my farm.
I turned off Regional Road 57 and remembered about the unusually sharp left turn coming up that was hidden by trees. I slowed the truck slightly and noticed a large set of black skid marks burned onto the pavement leading right around the corner. As I rounded the turn, I could smell the stinging sweet smell of gas in the air. Now driving slower than my grandma, a large yellow school bus came into view, off to the right side of the road and on its side. One of the wheels was still spinning, so it must have crashed recently, and brown smoke billowed out from under its hood. I drove slowly past it, trying to get a look in the windows for any survivors. There was no sign of movement that I could see. One part of me wanted to check and see if there were kids in the bus at the time of the wreck, but I couldn't take the chance of being delayed any longer. As I passed the front third of the bus, one of the windows blew open and flipped through the air, landing in the road. Two arms popped out of the window and hauled the body attached to them out. It was an adult woman, and she was visibly infected. I turned my attention back to the road and hit the gas. Somehow, while I was watching the bus, a crowd of infected people had gathered in the roadway. I kept my foot pressed hard to the floor of the truck, intent on smashing my way through them. I hit the first one almost immediately and his face disappeared beneath the wheels of the truck, causing it to lurch up and back down onto the pavement. The other infected perked up at that and started running towards me. The next two met my bumper with a hard thump, one of their heads splitting open on impact, showering the front of the truck with a gritty red syrup. My blood started to boil and an anger rose from somewhere deep within me. I started to swerve to hit them instead of to avoid them. I bumped some, knocked some over and crushed the infected life out of others. Another small group of them started to come out of the trees just ahead of me. As their feet hit the road, I turned the wheel briskly and ran into the group head on, mowing down five or six of them at once. The front wheels jumped astonishingly high after hitting the pile of monsters and the truck tilted to the right. I hauled on the steering wheel in the opposite direction, trying to even out the angle to which I was ascending. The truck came down hard on the driver's side wheel, turning it to the right and spinning the steering wheel in my hands. The other wheels landed next, and the truck careened right on a sharp turn, the back tires skidding across the road. The back of the truck fishtailed and the back tire hit the dirt ditch on the side of the road, jarring the truck downwards and throwing off the whole balance of the turn. I held on tight as the world out the front windshield went the way of the washing machine, tumbling and rolling before my eyes. A very kind and very large tree was nice enough to stop the endless roll, and I dropped against my door, my head whacking the window with a crack. I quickly got hold of myself, grabbed my pack of supplies and climbed out the passenger door. There were still a few groupings of infected, and more climbing out of the school bus a couple hundred yards down the road. I pulled out the Colt, then thought better of it; two rounds weren’t going to do me much good here, better to save them in case I really needed them. I hopped off the truck and onto the grass, keeping my eyes on the infected, although none of them seemed too interested in me. I wanted to scream at my stupidity for getting too caught up in killing these things, instead of staying focused on the task at hand. I ran across the road towards the woods on the east side, and some of the things began to notice. There wasn't exactly any place around here to hide my running; I was out in the open. I reached into my pack as I ran and pulled out the folding knife. It wasn't a big knife, but it was all I had right now. The things were coming in my direction at full speed now, so I turned and stopped dead in the middle of the road. It was better to concentrate on one thing at a time was my thought. I stood braced, ready to fight, and fight I did. The first one reached me quick, arms out in front of it, mouth wide open and foaming. I let its hands reach me, putting me face to face with it, and I jammed the knife into the bottom of its jaw. The blade sunk with ease into the soft flesh, and kept going until I could feel the blade break bone. My hand was almost entirely sunk into its head when the blade stopped. Its eyes rolled back and I yanked the blade back out, a flow of fluids following it. The grip loosened and the thing fell. The next one was closely followed by another, and they both came at me simultaneously. I ducked low and swiped the knife at the first one, making contact right above the belt, cutting through the fleshy abdomen and instantly freeing its organs. It still grabbed at me, but it was distracted momentarily by its parting with its innards. I came back up right in front of it and swung my arm in a reverse arc, sinking the knife into its right temple. It let out a piercing scream and then the second one was upon me. Its hand grabbed my throat, its mouth opened and it struck for my face. My knife was still in the skull of the other one, so I thrust the head that my knife was attached to in between my face and the face of the attacking thing. It bit into its kindred's face instead of mine, a grinding crunch echoing through its skull. I snatched the blade back out of the infected temple and pushed both of them away, sending the dead one plummeting on top of the live one. Once they had fallen, I leapt on top of them, driving the knife into the face of the live one, pushing and twisting the blade until nothing moved beneath me. My head snapped up at the sight of two more approaching. I jumped up and ran towards them, yelling at the top of my lungs like a madman. They didn’t react to my screaming, just clawed at me as I grabbed the closest one by the throat right under its chin and slashed its jugular, causing a massive arterial spray to shoot out the side of its neck. With the infected thing being drained of blood in one hand, I slashed back the other way towards the other thing, catching it right in the face and slicing its nose clean off. The blood poured out of the exposed nasal cavity and it frantically clawed at me. I pulled the knife back and stabbed straight ahead, splitting the left eye in half and boring the blade deep into its eye socket. Both of the infected bodies dropped lifelessly to the ground, leaving me standing in the middle of the road alone. There were still other infected, but they were concentrated around and inside of the bus. The abundance of food for them in the bus must have been substantial. I seized my opportunity, picked up my stuff, and took off into the woods on the east side. My heart was pounding in my chest, my lungs raw as I ran faster than I've ever run in my life. I ran fast and hard, not even watching where I was going, just running blindly with all my might. I ran until I could run no more, and fell to my knees on the moss-covered floor of the woods. I flipped over onto my back and stared up into the treetops, my vision blurry and my head dizzy. I was thinking of Diane, how I would break it to her that I had Jordan’s body but fucked up and had to leave her behind. Maybe I could go back? If Diane still had the car, I could take it and pick her up, bring her home, and bury her on the farm, the way she should be buried. Not in some hole with a thousand strangers. My breathing slowed, my vision cleared, and I got back to my feet. I had to be close now. I started back into a run, only more controlled this time, steady, rhythmic. After a while, I stopped at a creek that crossed my path. I studied the area, searching the surroundings until I found it. The rock. I walked over to the large rock nestled into the bank of the creek and looked on the flat, broken off top for the place where I had roughly carved a message during a walk with Diane on the day we moved into the farmhouse. And there it was. Denny Loves Diane. Which only meant one thing. I was 10 minutes from home.
