by Howard, Bill
CHAPTER 38:
HOME
It’s been nine long days and I have lived through many things I never expected to witness in my lifetime, including the discovery that my daughter had died. Now I am sitting in the woods on the outskirts of my farm, the knot in my stomach feeling like a giant razor blade digging into the sides of my gut, tearing and ripping into me.
I pull out the binoculars I procured from the shed and looked at my house. I could see one infected person walking around the lawn, and another one seemed to be mulling around the barn, but that was about it. They were barely moving, just kind of meandering around the property like family pets. I figured that Diane must have the house boarded up pretty tight, so I decide to get to the barn and find something to pry open the old wooden doors to the basement. I stand up and sprint across the old cornfield. I say cornfield, but we had never maintained it as an actual cornfield; it had been years since it had yielded any edible crops, but I like to think of it as our cornfield regardless. As I reach the back of the barn, I search for the loose board that Jordan always snuck through when we played hide and seek. My hands search the coarse, dry boards until one gives and swings away from the rest. The planks were wide and I just barely squeeze through the gap.
The inside of the barn is musty, humid. I run right to the small tool room under the hayloft and searched through the rakes, shovels, hoes, and other assorted implements until I come across an old, sturdy double-bit axe that had been here when we bought the place. I heave the sturdy hickory handle into my hands, judging that the weight would be enough to get me through the cellar doors. I walk back out of the tool room and right into an infected man. I physically bump right into him and it startles the life out of me. It grabs my arm and stops me from falling backwards, and I fall sideways instead, swinging like a pendulum from where it is gripping my arm. I hit the wooden floor hard, but the axe remains in my right hand. The thing leans over and moans towards me with an open mouth, the stench of rotten meat emanating from its breath. I brace my foot against the side of the door and haul the axe up off the floor, clumsily swinging it at the thing. I overestimate the attack and the handle strikes the side of the things knee, which still ends up being pretty effective, cracking the knee unnaturally to the side and making the thing let go of me and fall. I get up quickly and pull the axe up over my head with both hands. As I stand there holding the heavy axe, the thing looks up and me and moans quietly. Not attacking, not fast or aggressive, just looks at me. For a fleeting moment, the thought passes through my mind that this is just some poor guy who happened to be infected by this horrible virus. The tenseness in my shoulder loosens a little and I feel pity for him. This whole time I have been thinking of them as things, creatures, beasts. But they were people. Just as the thought occurs to me, the man lunges up at me with a loud roar, his yellow eyes suddenly blazingly bright. I instinctively bring the axe down fast on his head, the sharp edge of the old steel blade neatly cleaving his head in two, splitting him easily as if he was some old Looney Tunes cartoon character, but with far more blood and gore. The blade stops at the collarbones with a jarring scrape and I pull the axe out with a thick sucking sound. The thing collapses, dead. I stare at the mutilated body briefly and conclude that I was wrong, these were no longer people, their former selves were gone now, replaced by bloodthirsty monsters. Thinking they were anything else would just get me killed.
I walk to the front of the barn and look through the barn boards towards the house. I can't see the other lone wandering thing, the path to the back of the house looks clear. Not wanting to waste any more time, I push open the barn door and run at full tilt towards my home. As I reach the huge maple tree that was about a hundred yards from the house, the missing vagrant thing steps out from behind it and looks right at me. Before it can even let out a sound, I send the axe coursing through the air as I run, right into the midsection of the former woman. The axe lacerates effortlessly through the flesh and breaks through the spinal column, exiting out of the things back, the stride of my run not even broken. The two pieces of the woman flop to the ground as I continue towards the cellar doors.
The doors are very old, painted a flaking and faded pale blue. I pull on the handle, and, as expected, the doors are locked. I take a quick look around; my property looks clear for the time being. I raise up the axe and let it fall against the space between the two doors. With a loud crack, the lock bar inside the doors snaps off and tumbles down the cement steps with a few tinny clinks. I reach again, this time the doors complying with my request and opening wide. I step down the cobweb-covered steps and try the rusted metal patch on the inner door. It too is locked, and there is not much room to swing an axe on the staircase. I hold the axe in both hands and position it like a battering ram, repeatedly butting the large steel axe head against the locked side of the door. After four hits, the door fractures and gives way, swaying open on creaking hinges. Ahead of me was my basement. Unfinished; we never got around to it and didn't really have a need, truth be told. It has a few workbenches, a table saw, a drill press, and an old radio and CD player that often drowned out the tools with the soothing sounds of Led Zeppelin, Bob Seger, or Joan Jett. Today everything was silent. I scoop up some scraps of 2x4s and barricade the doors back up. I was sure all the noise I was making was scaring Diane half to death, but I couldn’t leave us vulnerable in the name of hurrying to my wife. Endangering both of us would negate everything I have done since that day in Toronto.
The familiar smell and sight of my home brings a warmth back to me that I thought I had lost. Hope returns to my heart after fearing that it never would. I long to run through the house calling out Diane's name, but I think it unwise; I don’t know what is in my house, if anything. I ascend the stairs from the basement and open the basement door. It isn’t barricaded or even locked. I am standing in the kitchen; everything seems to be in its place, nothing disturbed or different from any other day I had set foot in this room. I look around, checking the cupboards, the fridge; they are empty but for a few lingering items. There is no power in the house, as I expected. As I move out of the kitchen and into the hallway, it occurs to me that if I do just sneak around the house quietly, I am liable to be shot by Diane, who won’t know who is skulking outside of her door, wherever she may be. I decide to take a chance and call out for her. I walk down the hallway I had walked down a thousand times before until I reach the bottom of the hardwood stairs. I put my hand on the banister and listen for any sound at all, any sign that Diane was here. There was nothing. I take one step up the stairs, a loud groaning creak coming from the step as my weight hits it. I forgot about this step, how I had to avoid it every time I was the first one awake, how it would wake Diane and Jordan if I didn’t. I stop and listen again, and think I hear a short scuffle coming from upstairs. No sound follows it. I call out.
"Diane! Diane, are you here? It's me, Denny. I'm fine honey. If you’re here, please answer me."
At first, there is no response, just more silence, but then there is a noise. A low rumbling like that of furniture moving. I take another step up the stairs, continuing to listen for a response to my call. I beckon again.
"Diane, is that you? Honey, I'm here, please answer me."
Then a voice, quiet, distant behind walls.
"Denny. Is that really you?"
My heart fills and my eyes well up with tears. It is Diane's voice, after all these days of not knowing the fate of my beautiful wife, it is her. I run up the rest of the stairs and towards our bedroom, which I figure is the room she would have taken up in.
About a year previously, we had found large antique church doors at a shop in Port Hope and bought them. It had been a huge undertaking to restructure the wall of our bedroom to accommodate them, but they looked impressive once they were in. And they were three inches thick with a large, steel sliding lock, so it would be the safest room. Not to mention our bedroom windows also look onto the roof of the front porch, so you can get out quickly if you need to.
I stand in front of the church doors and knock lightly. I call her name again, hoping I hadn't imagined hearing her voice. I hear the furniture sound again, followed by the scraping sound of the steel bolt sliding open. With a click of the old door handle, one of the doors pulls inwards and opens and my eyes settle on the face of my wife Diane, whom I had been dreaming of for nine days. We rush into each other's arms frantically, squeezing the life out of each other, both of us unsure if we are really seeing each other. I kiss her lips hard, barely being able to control my emotions, and it feels like I can’t kiss her or hold her enough. Her short brown hair is disheveled, but she smells the same as she always smelled, clean with a soft, subtle perfume to her skin. I go into the room with her and lock the church doors back up, sliding the large cherry dresser she was using back into place in front of the doors. The bedroom is almost unrecognizable. It is set up like a miniature version of our whole house. There is a seating area, a food storage area, the bed, with clothes and bedding all stacked beside it, and the old shotgun from the barn is leaning up against the headboard. She had built herself a solid fortress here; I feel a profound sense of pride. My wife is tough as nails; I had always known that, but seeing it laid out before me is something to behold. We sit in the leather club chairs that had always been in our bedroom and I begin to tell her the story of what happened, starting with my excursion with Thom into Toronto. I had barely started talking when she interrupts me.
"Denny, you haven’t asked about Jordan. I’ve feared for days what I would tell you about what happened, but you haven't even asked about her. Did you see her?"
I don’t know what to say. I am already anxious about telling Diane about Jordan, but I had been purposefully avoiding it.
"What did happen, Diane? Why isn't Jordan at home?"
Diane's face tenses and tears fill her eyes.
"The day after the outbreak happened, Jordan and I were downstairs eating lunch. I had seen on the news what was going on; I had talked to you on the phone briefly and had the house locked up, but I didn’t yet know the extent to which this outbreak was happening. The day before, I had picked up Jordan from daycare; she seemed fine but everyone at the daycare was understandably in a bit of a panic. The entire first day Jordan was fine. The second day, at lunch, Jordan said she wasn't feeling well. Her temperature was fine; I figured she was just overwhelmed by the previous day, the stress of everything happening, you not being home. Later that day, around seven at night, Jordan broke out into a cold sweat. I called my sister Louisa at the hospital, but she could barely get in two minutes to speak to me, she said the hospital was overrun with people claiming they had the virus, and some who actually did. She told me it was best to keep Jordan where she was until she could call me back.
That night, I woke up around midnight to a loud crash downstairs. I went down and there were men in our house, military men. They held me down in a chair in the kitchen, asked me questions about where I had been, and where Jordan's daycare was located. After I told them, they stormed upstairs and grabbed Jordan, all of them wearing respirators. I tried to fight them, but there were too many of them."
