Alone

by Jennifer Reynolds

  “If we aren’t waiting for you, come in and get us.” Then as an afterthought, she said. “Don’t burn us. There is a small cemetery outback; put us out there. Please.”

  Neither said anything else, and, after a long pause he pulled off.

  VI – The Dead

  Caleb and Eve had a full schedule the week after they met Kyle, Andrea, Ty, and Ella and joined the C.C., which is what she called the Cleanup Crew. Eve hated working with the crew, but she couldn’t bring herself to quit. The lack of human interaction that waited for her at home, if she did, was too unbearable to contemplate. Also, she couldn’t stand being surrounded by the constant reminders of her family. Everywhere she looked, she saw the ghosts of her loved ones. She heard the laughs and cries of her nieces and nephews, the condescending yet loving tone of her brothers, the inspirational words of her grandfather, the made up curse words of her mother, who refused to say the actual prohibited words. She couldn’t bear putting their things away, but she also couldn’t handle the sight of them when she was alone.

  As the days went by, she gained a better understanding of what kind of work the crew did. She continued with outside detail, not that that had made the job any less gruesome. Sometimes there were just as many rotting corpses outside as there were inside. Yet the stories Andrea told about the things she saw inside gave her nightmares. And she rarely slept as it was. She could only imagine the dreams she would have if she saw what the rest of the group saw.

  One particularly horrific story Andrea told her was about a young family their crew found two weeks before she and Eve met. The group was assigned one of the trailer park communities out by the old paper plant at the edge of town.

  “Most of the trailers had been empty,” Andrea told her. “Those that weren’t hadn’t been all that bad, relatively speaking. There was only one trailer, out of the nearly forty occupying the grounds that made the trip out to the city limits worth our time and effort.”.

  “The smell that came from the trailer when we opened the door hit us like an invisible wall of decaying flesh. We hadn’t needed the gas masks in any of the other trailers, and with that one being our last for the day, we hadn’t bothered to carry them with us after lunch. We haven’t made that mistake again.

  “Instead of asking one of us to go back to the van for the masks, Kyle propped the front door open with a chair, and we waited nearly twenty minutes for the trailer to air out, and for our noses to grow accustomed to the odor. Occasionally, one of us would chance the smell and walk up to the door to test the air coming out of the trailer. And each time we were able to get closer and closer inside to see what we were about to walk into. Eventually, we were able to get close enough to see that there was a man back in the far corner of the living room. He was turned at an angle that kept us from seeing exactly how bad his situation was.

  “The man had been in his late twenties, early thirties. He was short for a man, five-eight maybe five-nine. He had a stocky build. His looks were of a mixed race, possibly Hispanic-Caucasian. Oh, and most importantly he had a forty-five shoved deep into his mouth…like this.” Andrea turned her hand into the shape of a gun the way kids do when they are five and playing cops and robbers and shoved it into her mouth.

  “I didn’t need the visual,” Eve said, laughing in spite of the inappropriateness of the gesture.

  Andrea shrugged. “Anyway, he was leaning back in a recliner. All of the blood and brain matter that had splashed the wall and run down the back of the chair to puddle in the floor, had dried and turned a deep red, nearly black color.

  “Flies were buzzing around the back of his head. The sight of them flying around him was disturbing to watch.”

  “Of all the things that the virus is killing, the fly isn’t one of them. Nope, the virus seems to be feeding the fly population,” Eve commented, shivering at the thought of seeing those tiny little insects buzzing around the millions of dead bodies that lay forgotten in the world.

  “Watching them land, do their business, then take flight again was also gross. Somewhere inside the hole in the back of his head, I could hear maggots crawling around.” Andrea stopped to shutter at the images floating around in her mind. She could see the small, white skittering creatures crawling around eating the remains of his brain matter.

  “He had soiled himself as most usually do. When Kyle and Ty lifted him out of the chair, we could see that it had seeped through the seat of his pants and stained the rocker. Once we had him in the back of the garbage truck, we went back in to check out the rest of the trailer. I wished I’d opted to stay outside. I hadn’t thought that we would find anyone else inside, so I joined the rest in their search.

  “What we found in the back bedroom was disturbing beyond imagination. Ella and I were the ones who found them, of course. We always seem to get a raw deal when it comes to searching for the bodies. Without saying a word to me and without actually seeing the bodies, Ella left the trailer. Taking one look around the room, she covered her mouth and ran. She does well with everything except for the babies. Every time we enter a nursery, she runs. I’m sure there’s a story behind that, but I haven’t heard it or bothered to ask. I probably should ask her about it sometime, but she and I’ve never really meshed well together. There’s never been an appropriate time for me to ask her about it.

  “Anyway, the room was very simple. It had a plain, light colored, faux wood baby bed, a hand-me-down from the looks of it, a dresser, and nothing else. Only one picture hung on the wall. It was a picture of a newborn baby. I knew then I should have ran as well because there on the floor of the tiny room, cradled in a ball, was a woman holding what we assumed was a baby in her arms. Blankets and the mother’s body covered what it was. The mother was quite visible, though. Both of her eyes were swollen shut. Her nose was visibly broken. Dried blood had streaked down her face from a number of gashes around her head. The ones on her cheeks almost looked like tears. There were bruises all over the exposed skin.

  “One of the guys, I can’t remember which, knelt down over her to check her pulse, even though it was obvious she was dead. Her body had begun to decompose in places, probably from the heat. She most likely died shortly before the man put a bullet through his skull, but we have procedures to follow.

  “I bent down to take the baby out of her arms. The noise her arm made when I pulled it away to relieve her of the baby, sent shivers up and down my spine. I think I broke a few of her bones in the process. Don’t look at me like that. I had to pull hard enough to free the child, and rigor mortis had set in, which was even creepier because that told me just how close we had come to stumbling on the three of them alive and well.

  “Why didn’t you just leave her arm there then?” Eve asked horrified by what Andrea had done.

  “To make sure the baby was really dead. Judging by the condition that the mother was in, we were sure there was no way it had survived, but it’s our job to make sure.

  “Besides, once I had it free the baby looked fine, at first. It never crossed my mind that it wouldn’t. I had simply assumed that the mother had died protecting it and the father just left it. Nevertheless, as I unwrapped and turned it over in my arms to examine it, I saw the cause of death.”

  “How did it die?” Eve asked even though she was afraid of the answer.

  “The back of its skull was caved in. The head looked as if someone had beaten it against something or beaten something against it. The indentation was deep and a few shades of blue and grey with only a hint of fine blonde hair. I handed it over to someone—I’m not sure whom—and ran out of the trailer.

  “The worst part about it is I think the mother and the baby were fine until the beating they took. He must have beaten them because he was getting sick and knew he was going to die. He probably thought it wasn’t fair for them to be so healthy when he wasn’t.

  “Why do you keep looking at me like that? I told you it was a really disturbing story,” she scolded, seeing Eve’s look of extreme shock and disgust
.

  “I know…I just…why…”

  “Don’t try to understand it. It wasn’t logical. He obviously wasn’t thinking straight there at the end. There is no telling what he was dying of, but I’d lay money on the fact that his brain was mush way before that bullet scrambled his eggs.

  “Besides, we really don’t know what happened. We only know what looks to have happened. For all we know, the mother could’ve been sick with something we couldn’t see. She could have killed the baby. Then when the father came home and saw what she did, he killed her, then himself. We know nothing for certain.

  “However, because of what appears to have happened, that’s my worst story. Well, the worst one I’m willing to tell you, that is. There are others that are far more disturbing, but I have to relive them enough in my dreams as it is.”

  Eve didn’t ask any more questions after that. Mostly out of fear, but also because as the days went on she experienced enough of her own dead bodies to have to endure anyone else’s.

  -----

  The following Friday morning was the day she found her first body. The crew had pulled up into a normal looking middle class neighborhood. Cars sat in weird angles all over the road. Glass and blood covered every surface. A horrible car wreck had happened on this street; those who hadn’t died in it had left the rest to rot.

  Everyone had to help move the wreckage.

  Eve panicked a little inside at the thought. She hadn’t driven a vehicle in six months. She was scared that she had forgotten how. She didn’t tell Kyle this for fear of him laughing at her. Hoping that driving was like riding a bike—you never forget how—she went to her first car. She had picked one that looked like it hadn’t been part of the accident. In a discrete sort of way, she was going to try to let them move all of the other cars.

  “This one is a stick,” she told Kyle, getting back out of the car a few seconds later.

  “So,” Kyle said dismissively, walking toward one of the vehicles.

  “I cannot drive a stick. You are going to have to get it,” Eve yelled after him, annoyed with his annoyance.

  “I will get it in a minute. Go on to the next one,” he yelled back, getting into a newer model Toyota.

  “Thank you, captain obvious from the land of duh.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” she murmured to herself, not paying attention to the vehicle she was approaching.

  Nonchalantly, she walked right up to the driver’s side door of a two door, deep-purple Saturn. Caleb was in his backpack on her chest playing with a toy key chain attached to the pack. Luckily, he was facing her and not the vehicle. The stroller was in the van, but this early in the morning, it was still cool enough for her to carry him awhile. When she reached out for the door handle, she glanced down unconsciously to see inside.

  She froze.

  Looking back up through the tempered glass window at her with glazed eyes was an old man who had probably been in his late sixties at the time of his death. Taking a long deep breath to push back a scream, she tried to compose herself. He must have died looking up at someone. His head was leaning against the back of the seat and turned, angled to look out the window right into her face. His mouth was open as if he were about to say something. Quickly before Caleb could turn and look at him, she turned and took a few steps away from the car.

  “Kyle,” she yelled out once she could move again and took a few more steps away from the vehicle.

  “Yeah,” he answered back with a hint of annoyance in his voice. He was getting out of the car she hadn’t been able to move and thinking that if she kept calling him they were never going to get the road cleared, or so he told her later.

  “I think I’m going to need your help with this one.” She pointed at the car.

  Eve returned to the van and pulled out Caleb’s stroller, she placed him in it, and parked it a good ways from the car the dead man resided. When he was safe and secure, she pulled two large black garbage bags from a pouch she had attached to her belt loop and walked back to the car. After that, she removed the facemask from the loop it had been dangling from and covered her mouth.

  “Why…” Kyle began to ask until he noticed she had switched Caleb to the stroller, and was shaking out two trash bags.

  Tentatively Kyle approached, donning his own facemask, and opened the door wide. The two of them stood back from the car for a few minutes waiting for the smell to ease. The smell was a sweet, moldy smell that Eve could not compare to any known smell. She held back her bile as she watched Kyle push the man forward so that he could check his back pocket for a wallet. For a second the man hit the car horn and a loud honk exploded the silence.

  “Dude,” Ty yelled at them but no one else said anything, though they all wore startled looks. Eve didn’t turn to see what they were doing outside.

  Kyle ignored him and flipped open the man’s wallet. After checking to make sure he was who he was, Kyle pocketed the wallet. The man behind the wheel of the Saturn was a bloated version of the man pictured on the driver’s license, but not beyond the point of recognition.

  “Well, Mister Lyle Anderson from De Moines, Iowa, you are a long way from home,” Kyle said, laying him back against the seat.

  “I’ll pull him out by the underarms, and you can cover him with the bag,” he ordered over his shoulder as he began to unbuckle the man.

  Eve recalled the events in what seemed to be a foggy memory. Kyle pulled him out, then held him up for Eve to cover the top half of his body with one of the trash bags. Once they had him completely sealed in the two 39-gallon bags and duck taped, Kyle called over to the others to see where they were piling up the bodies.

  After that, they finished clearing the road. They found a few more bodies decaying in a few other cars. There were no bodies hiding in yards, storage buildings, or any of the other places they had to look.

  VII – Gladice

  Gladice Haines was Eve’s first suicide. Before starting their normal rounds that Saturday, the crew was again assigned to check up on two employees who hadn’t shown up for work. The first was a man by the name of Alex Harris. They found him sprawled out on his bed with trails of dried blood running out of his nose and ears. A brain aneurysm was most likely his cause of death, Eve surmised. But since autopsies had gone out of practice, no one would ever truly know. Gladice was the second. Eve found the woman in her second floor bathroom. Her cause of death was obvious.

  Gladice’s home was large like most of the homes in this small southern town—too large for just one person. The house reminded Eve of her own home. Because Gladice could have been dead in any room on any one of the three floors, the group split up to look for her. Eve and Caleb were allowed house detail on these types of runs because they knew, more or less, what they were walking into, and nine times out of ten, they found the person alive. No one worried about them catching the sickness; they were all going to die of it eventually.

  Kyle ordered Eve and Andrea upstairs to check out the second floor. Ty and Ella took the third floor, leaving Kyle to search the basement for the breaker box. Someone had cut the power to the house for some unknown reason, and it should have been their first clue as to what they would find. The woman knew the steps the crew took when searching the house, though Eve couldn’t figure out why she did it before they found her instead of letting them do it afterward.

  When Eve and Andrea hit the top of the stairs to the second floor, they split up. The first door Eve tried opened into a closet full of blankets. The second door led to a small room that looked as if it had been a playroom once upon a time. As she was laying her hands on the knob of the third door, the lights came on. Andrea let out a yelp of surprise as she was coming out of a room at the other end of the long hallway. Eve laughed at her. Andrea flipped her off and tried the door across from the one she had just exited.

  A blood-smeared mosaic floor was the first thing Eve saw when she pushed open her door. The second was a lifeless, grayish-purple leg dangling just below
the bottom hem of the plain, milk-white shower curtain. The bathroom wasn’t large, but it was big enough to house a clawfoot tub, a toilet, and a sink with a cabinet above it. When she entered the bathroom, Eve took up nearly all of the available free space.

  Eve quietly shut the door behind her. Caleb was sleeping soundlessly on her back, an answer to an unasked prayer. The fact that he was sleeping, and the fact that everything she had seen since the sickness began had numbed and warped her brain a little, made her decide to keep this particular find to herself for a few moments. She couldn’t take her eyes off the scene unfolding before her.

  She took a deep breath and moved closer to the tub to get a better view of the woman’s body. Slowly pulling the curtain back, Eve received small pieces of the scene. Second by second, it all opened up before her like a slow moving film reel, slide by slide. The woman stared up at a shower curtain she would never see again. Calm water reached the top of the tub. The water resembled pink lemonade. The sides of the clawfoot tub were streaked pink where she had jerked and splashed water about as she died. Her body had paled and was beginning to turn a soft shade of gray. The skin stretched over her bones was soggy and bloated.

  The right arm sat propped up on the side of the tub, wrist facing up, while the other was emerged in the tainted water. Both of her wrists were sliced wide open. She apparently wasn’t taking the chance that she would botch the job. The blood on the right hand had already clotted and dried. The puddle it made on the other side of the tub would also be thick as mud if it weren’t already dry. The whole scene reminded her of the one she had seen in a Stephen King movie.

  Thinking of the movie, and how the scene in it was so familiar to the one before her, caused a new wave of fear to flood through her. For the first time, everything about her situation became real to her in a way that she couldn’t describe. No, there wasn’t some million year old creature eating or cocooning people, but there was something out there, killing, destroying, eating at the world and it wasn’t just the sickness. It was something inside them that was working with the sickness to destroy them all.