by Jones, K. J.
“Um. No, we aren’t. Not by blood.”
“I noticed that.” Marge smirked.
“But we’re there for him.”
“Where are you intending on going? You’re welcome to stay. We could use the protection. But this is no place for pregnant young mothers and young boys.”
“We are intending to somehow get to Boston, where my family is. And Phebe’s family.”
“Boston is a long way from here.”
“Do you know where Carlisle is?”
“You’re looking for the base?”
“Yes, ma’am.”
“They evacuated our family through there. Sent them somewhere out west.”
“Yes, ma’am. We’re hoping, somehow, they can help us.”
“Where are you coming from, dressed like you are?”
“From south.”
“South where?”
Peter wished someone would come in and stop this line of questioning.
“Honey, were you in the bad Zone?”
He wondered why she said bad. Weren’t they in the Zone now, and weren’t all of them bad?
“Where it’s real bad,” she added.
“Um, yeah, we are, ma’am.”
“My husband suspected.”
“How, ma’am?”
“The looks in the eyes. He saw it in Vietnam. Recognized it in these young people.” Marge sighed and looked at the medals box on the wall. “He was only nineteen when he was deployed. We got married because he was deploying, so we could stay connected. We were high school sweethearts. He decided because his draft number was low, he’d rather go into the Marine Corps than wait to be drafted in the Army. I prayed every day for him. I guess people nowadays don’t marry when they’re high school sweethearts.”
Peter shrugged. “My little sister did.”
“She did?”
“Yeah. They’ve got four kids now.”
“In Boston?”
“Yeah.”
“That’s nice. Is this your first? I’m sorry, nobody said you were married but … since you both wear wedding bands.”
“She is my wife, yes.”
“Suppose people nowadays don’t feel a need to marry to have children.”
“We did it. Guess we’re old fashion that way.”
“What of the other young lady? I didn’t see a wedding ring. Not that it’s any of my business, but I am a nosy old lady.” Marge smiled.
“Brandon Pell, the Marine lance corporal, he wants to marry Emily. Just haven’t gotten an opportunity yet. He’s the father.”
“I see his devotion to her. That’s nice.”
Peter wondered if this meant he didn’t come across as devoted to Phebe. He needed to work on that. Although, Phebe may punch him for it. Compared to the ooshy-gooshy love bird stuff of Brandon and Emily, he and Phebe acted more like best friends. They never did the puppy love, nauseating-to-others stage. Jumped right over it into the together forever stage. It kind of felt comfortable.
He looked at her sleeping like a nodding-off old person in the old lady's chair and felt like laughing. Her mouth hung open. This was not the reaction a man in love should feel. Or was it? What was wrong with him?
Thinking back, he had been goofy about his high school girlfriend. Willow. That was her name. He wondered if life had been different, would they have been high school sweethearts who married?
If life had been different, which meant if his brother hadn’t gotten drunk after prom. If MJ had taken their mother up on their offer of the limo instead of showing off the Mustang.
Peter shook off the thoughts. No logic in going over the past. As he looked at Phebe, she suddenly jerked awake.
“What’s happening?” Phebe asked.
“It’s okay, babe. There’s beds upstairs. Maybe you and Em should go there.”
Peter wanted to lay down too.
“Come with me,” she said. “Where’s Ty?”
He had forgotten about the boys. They had gone to the attic. God knows what they were doing up there. “I’ll go find him.”
3.
Peter drifted off. They were in a cold bedroom, laying in a queen-sized bed. All three of them. Phebe in the middle, Emily and Peter flanking her, all squeezed in like sardines for body heat. They reluctantly took off their shoes – not nice to wear shoes in someone else’s bed – but kept all their clothes as they were, just in case. The boys slept in sleeping bags on the rug on the hardwood floor, unconscious before they were fully horizontal. They had grown distracted with Frank’s Vietnam memorabilia in the attic. At least they didn’t wreck anything.
Just drifted off, listening to the other four people breathing and the quiet that surrounded the house. Serene quietness. Beautiful quiet.
Bad sounds emanated from outside, disturbing the quiet. All five people sat bolt upright in sync. Peter moved to get out of the bed and came down on his bad leg. He involuntarily screamed in pain. The leg gave out and he crumpled to the floor.
“Sul.” Jayce moved to him.
“Find out the sound,” Phebe barked. She crawled out of the bed and dropped beside Peter. “What can I do?”
“Help me up please.” Humiliation as well as physical pain.
Emily hurried across the bed to help. “Ty, look out the other window.”
The bedroom was at the corner. Both teenagers checked the windows.
They got Peter up and sitting on the side of the bed.
“Fucking leg, c’mon.”
“I can’t see what it is.” Jayce had the window above the roofed porch. “But I hear something. Ty?”
“There’s nothing out here.
They could hear the men downstairs. The old couple had bunked downstairs by the fire, their arthritis needing the heat. They had slept down there every night since it began.
They heard Frank’s voice, “You gonna need my shotgun for that big sucker.”
“I’ll go down,” said Jayce.
“Yeah,” responded Peter. “Find out what’s going on and report back. Ty, with him.”
Both teens had slept with their sneakers on. The women laced up their man boots, but Peter’s leg made getting his boots on difficult.
“I’ll help you.” Phebe put on his boot and tied it up.
Running feet up the stairs, the way only Tyler seemed to do. “It’s a bear.”
“What?” Emily asked in disbelief.
“Aw, fuck,” said Peter. “A normal bear?”
“Don’t think so.”
“Oh, now that’s great.”
Downstairs, the cold bothered Matt’s injured leg, the one that took the hamstring severing. He favored it as he walked.
“Let’s just blow the motherfucker away,” Chris said. His usual solutions to things.
Pez hissed at him and shot a look at the old couple. “Watch your language, Sergeant.”
Chris looked at Pez as if he had lost his mind. “Don’t you get carried away by rank there, Yankee.” He was a hell of a lot bigger than Pez, who was shorter than Phebe.
“Where’s Alden?” Peter asked upon coming downstairs.
“Thinks he can nail the zom bear with a hunting rifle from old boy Frank,” Chris said.
Matt said, “We may luck out.” A sly smile. “Get a two-for.”
Peter chuckled.
“Suits me fine,” said Phebe. “Do we have any more guns?”
“Where is it?” Emily tried to find a place between boards to look out.
“This one.” Pez pointed.
Emily went to the boards where a peephole existed, looked out, and backed away.
“Oh, you gotta be kidding. That’s a fucking bear.”
“Guys, the language. Our hosts are norms.”
“What is that? A goddamn grizzly?”
“Emily,” Pez reprimanded.
“Think it’s just puffed up,” said Chris. “It’s a zom black bear.”
Emily looked again. “It’s foaming at the mouth. Where’s Brandon?”
“I�
��m over here,” Brandon called from the sitting room. “You don’t think I would go out there with a zom-bear when I’m having a family?”
“That boy makes me feel a little sick to my stomach,” muttered Chris.
“Aw,” said Peter. “You were probably the same way with your first. When you were, um, seventeen.”
“Thinking I wasn’t.”
“Probably not. Maybe the second.”
“Yeah, maybe then.”
They could hear the bear walking along the porch. And it’s Gollum-bark.
“Maybe it’ll just fuck off,” said Chris.
A rifle fired. The bear roared.
“Guess not now.”
“He’s gonna die out there,” said Cogan.
Cogan had kept himself scarce due to the wound. He looked unwell. Feverish. A glisten of sweat coated his face. His eyes dark and circles beneath. He had begun. They’d have to euthanize him in a matter of hours.
“I should be the one out there. Got nothing to lose. Huh?”
Emily said, “Alden’s one of the Nazi tribe, isn’t he?”
“Ooh, you caught that?” asked Peter. “Thought you were too out of it.”
“I know the innuendos you two do.”
“We have no secrets, babe.”
“I see that,” said Phebe.
“How’d he go out?” Cogan asked. “The back door?”
Before they could answer, Cogan took the double-barrel shotgun and headed out of the dining room. They heard him trip over something in the dark and curse it. So much for trying to keep foul language away from the old people norms.
In the sitting room, Marge cleaved to Frank in fear. Brandon watched the bear from between the boards of the windows.
Candles fluttered in the dining room as people walked around.
“If they fail,” said Phebe, “and it wants in, what have we got?”
“The upstairs,” said Matt. “You two and the kids.”
“And you,” said Peter. “Medical.”
“Damn it. I can’t be put on the shelf.”
“Tough. You can risk yourself when we get to Boston and hospitals. Until then, you go with ‘em.”
“What about you?”
Phebe snapped at Peter, “You’re going too. Don’t fuck with me, Sullivan.”
Peter swallowed hard. Somehow, her saying this had a different overtone than any other woman saying it.
Outside, two different guns fired from two different corners of the porch. A roar of the bear. A scream of a man.
“Y’all go upstairs now,” Chris ordered. “One man just got it.”
“Help him up the stairs,” Phebe ordered Matt. She rushed into the sitting room for the couple. “C’mon, we’re all going upstairs. Zoms have difficulty with stairs.”
Phebe’s mannerism negated anyone arguing with her. She grabbed a wrought iron fireplace poker.
“You have anything sharper? A machete maybe?”
Frank answered, “Why’d I have a machete in Pennsylvania?”
“I was just hoping.”
“You gonna use a machete against an infected bear, honey?”
“You’d be amazed what I can do with a machete.”
So much for hiding Phebe was a homicidal lunatic, Peter reflected. Matt helped him up the stairs. Going down the stairs was much easier than going up them. He felt like the old couple.
They may not have been a love-sick gooshy couple, but Peter was pretty sure Willow would never rise to the occasion the way Phebe did.
Emily, alpha Phebe’s beta wolf, helped get the old people up the stairs behind Peter.
Tyler and Jayce appeared from the dark hall leading to the kitchen. Their arms filled with knives and a couple wrought iron pans – the really good kind which made excellent food but could double in blunt force trauma.
“You gonna use them?” Frank asked.
“You’d be amazed what we can do with these things,” Tyler said, inadvertently saying the same thing as Phebe, though he hadn’t been present when she said it.
“I told you they were from the first Zone,” Frank said to his wife. “They’re like Nam vets from the jungle.”
“Are we safe?” Marge whispered, which for a partially deaf woman to whisper to a partially deaf man meant everyone heard.
“They’re on our side, honey.”
More firing. A moment later, the back door opened and slammed shut.
Kevin’s voice yelled, “Cogan’s down. The bear’s pissed off.”
“We just go quiet when the animals come around,” said Frank.
Peter had reached the landing with Matt.
“Probably what we should’ve done.”
“Now you say something,” Matt responded.
“I wasn’t there yet when idiots went Rambo on the zom-bear.”
Once the elderly couple was to the landing, Phebe broke off to check windows for a visual.
“Is it male or female?” she asked. “Alden? Where the hell is he?”
“You’re talking from a bedroom,” said Matt. “Maybe he can’t hear you.”
Phebe went to the landing and yelled, “Alden, is it male or female?”
“I don’t know.” Kevin appeared at the bottom of the stairs. “It wasn’t wearing a skirt.”
“Don’t be more of an asshole than you already are. Male means testosterone. He’ll be more aggressive than a female.”
“That’s usually the case anyway. Don’t know what your problem is.”
“Whoa!” Matt leaped and grabbed Phebe’s arms before she flew get down the stairs at her enemy. She did, after all, have the fireplace poker. “Ease down.”
“I’m gonna kill him.”
“You’re scaring the nice old couple.”
Chris’s voice from downstairs, “Why you gotta provoke her, bro? I told you how she is.”
“They’re gonna try to kill me anyway, Higgins. Don’t you get that?”
Peter looked to see if the nice old couple heard this. Fortunately, their loss of hearing from old age prevented hearing it. Or maybe they wouldn’t feel so safe with the veterans of the Nam with zombies.
4.
It took two hours for the bear to bleed enough from the gunshot wounds to die. By that time, it had gone through the dining room window, punched out the boards, and ransacked the first floor. Everyone was on the second floor.
“Well,” said Peter. “We learned something tonight.”
“What’s that?” asked Brandon.
“They have a poor sense of smell.”
“Makes sense,” said Matt. “All the saliva they excrete. Disrupts animal olfactory.”
The old couple looked even frailer. This wasn’t a good catastrophe to be elderly in.
* * *
As dawn came, the group thought the least they could do was remove the dead zom-bear from the kitchen.
“Anybody know how to butcher a bear?” asked Chris. “This pelt would keep somebody warm.”
“By somebody,” said Brandon as he pulled a paw. “Do you mean you?”
“I’m the biggest here.”
Peter stood in front of the gaping window of the dining room. “Wow. How do we fix this?” He turned to Pez. “Ideas?”
“Wood is all I can think of. The frame’s messed up too.”
“Everywhere we go, we bring death and destruction.”
“Can you not say that. I lost someone.”
“Sorry, man, about, um …?”
“His name was Darsi. Kenneth Darsi. He has a wife and kid back in Kansas.”
Peter cringed. “Sorry, man.”
“I couldn’t keep a hold of him.”
“I know.”
Peter placed his hand on Pez’s shoulder.
Pez looked to the ceiling to fight off tears. “We’d been through all that shit in Atlanta together and he falls out of a fucking helicopter. I hope it was fast for him when he hit. That’s all I can do is hope it was fast.”
“I hope it was.”
Pez pulled the emotions in and gave one last sniffle. “We’re gonna need warmer clothes if we’re walking. House loots?”
“Yeah. I think that’s in order.” Peter looked around. “We’re leaving this nice couple with their house all fucked up.”
“Let’s do what we can.”
“They’re looking at us like we’re crazy.”
“We may be. We’re Zoners.”
“Crap. We’re gonna go to Boston?”
“That’s the plan,” said Pez.
“How are we gonna fit in there?”
“Try not to scare the natives so much.”
“How? We hide and never see anyone?”
“Yeah, hopefully. I wonder if that’s where my family went.” Pez sighed. “And my fiancé.”
“Could be.”
“Maybe I can find them.”
“My family will help. Got a lot of cops in my family. And criminals, which can come in handy.”
“We got a long way to go to get there.”
“We’ll just keep steaming ahead like we do.”
“That’s right.” Pez nodded several times. “All we got is one step after another.”
“We sound like we’re in AA.”
5.
They stood over Cogan’s body. He had been ripped apart. Bone exposed in his chest.
“He probably wanted it this way,” said Matt. “Rather than the virus or us doing him.”
“Better way to go,” said Chris. “Fighting a zom-bear, that there something to proud of.”
“For what?” asked Pez. “To go to Valhalla?”
He referred to the Viking hall of slain warriors which the chief of the Nordic gods Odin ruled. Pez’s tone conveyed he meant this as sarcasm.
The guys smiled.
“Valhalla,” Peter roared. “That’s it, men. We go to Valhalla if we go out fighting.”
“Oh, no,” said Pez. “I didn’t mean it as a thing.”
“Too late,” said Matt. “It’s a thing now.”
“Hey,” Kevin asked, “He was hundred and sixth SOAR?”
“Yup,” said Chris.
“Figured he had to be to land the bird like he did. That was some real badass flying, right there.”
“What we gonna do with his body? Ground frozen.”
“Well,” said Kevin. “If he’s going to Valhalla, then we give him a warrior’s funeral. We burn him.”
For Kevin’s ‘God-fearing’ description of Southern rednecks, he seemed to have abandoned this as much as Chris had. God no longer advocated white supremacy, ever since the FBI intervened in the 1960s.
