The Dead and Empty World

by Carrie Ryan

  “Our chances of survival,” he says softly.

  Margie lets the rope trail from her fingers and stumbles to the other end of the porch until the railing bites her hips.

  “What do I have to do to prove my loyalty to you, Marg?” Calvin asks. “How many nights do I have to sit out here tied up when we both know your knots are crap and I could escape anytime? What will it take for you to trust me?”

  Margie slumps, sliding down until she sits on the edge of the porch. Fireflies flash in the gardens, bright reminders that for some creatures the world hasn’t changed.

  “I’m the one who had to kill my mother,” Margie confesses. Her chin trembles, her whole body shaking. A breeze trips up the mountain, cool and crisp like fall. “After the change we got out of the city and we found a place and for a while it was safe, but then we were ambushed. My father yelled but no one could hear. They took my mother, and my father resisted, and I didn’t know what to do but grab Sally and run into the woods. I watched what they did to my mother, and when my father tried to fight, they killed him and tossed his body aside. I could smell the death and hear the moans and then they just left my mother on the ground while they ransacked inside. I told Sally to stay and I found my mother and there were bite marks all over her and she said nothing when I held the gun against her.”

  She inhales as if she’s never known air before. “We had somewhere safe, and they took it.”

  Calvin strips the ropes from his arms and pulls her against him. More than anything else in the world, Margie wants to sob and grab hold. Just to know that there’s someone out there to help her survive so that she doesn’t have to carry it all.

  He holds her so tight she feels like she might snap, and she pushes against him because she needs to hear his heart and feel every inhalation. “Sally doesn’t know,” she says against his shoulder. “She doesn’t know what it takes to survive.”

  He presses his lips against the crown of her head and whispers, “Hush,” into her ear with his hot breath. Around them night peepers scream to each other, tree frogs wailing for the darkness.

  Margie doesn’t tie Calvin up but instead lets him help her inside, where they lie on the couch and she thinks that maybe there is such a thing as survival in this world.

  When the two men charge into the cabin, Calvin’s the first to reach for the gun. Margie falls from the couch to her knees and wants to scream for Sally but presses her lips tight, hoping that maybe the strangers won’t know there’s someone else inside.

  Calvin flips off the safety and raises the gun to his shoulder. The strangers are tall and broad, one of them with a tangled beard and the other with black hair slicked back behind his ears. It’s almost too easy to see the family resemblance to Calvin, and Margie goes numb as she notices.

  “How quaint,” the bearded man says. He strolls inside as if there isn’t a shotgun pointed to his chest. He glances around— at the map on the table, at Margie’s face that’s still rubbed a little raw from Calvin’s unshaven cheeks.

  He turns to face Calvin while the slick-headed man leans against the door frame. “Nicely done, little brother,” he says. “You checked there’s food enough for winter and the other guns are secured?”

  Calvin nods, eyes downcast.

  Margie chokes. Her body flames a deep burning red as shame churns inside. It feels like the moment her family was ambushed on the road, when time seemed to slow down and she noticed the most pointless details. Now she feels the grit of the hardwood floor biting into her knees and realizes how badly she needs to pee.

  Slick Hair moves toward the loft. “Where’s the other one?”

  Margie tries to block his way and she’s shoved to the ground, her head hitting the corner of a chair as she falls. She paws at the man, hooking her fingers in his clothes, but he bats her away, crushing her hand until she feels something pop and give.

  “Sally!” she screams, loud and raw and filled with rage. The bearded one grabs her, lifting and twisting until her arm’s behind her back, his knife against her throat. She struggles, not caring at the bite of the blade into her skin.

  “Margie,” Calvin says. It’s his voice that stops her. He’s still holding the gun. Her gun. She wants to close her eyes, but she doesn’t because she deserves this. To see what she’s brought down on her sister.

  Her lips still vibrate from when Calvin kissed her, and she spits at him, hating the taste of him still in her mouth. He blanches and sidesteps her attempt at outrage, and his two brothers laugh, Slick Head reaching out and slapping his shoulder hard enough to make him stumble. Calvin’s cheeks flare a bright embarrassed pink, and his eyes leap to Margie’s and then away again, a shuttered mortification flashing through them.

  “Tell her to drop the ladder,” Beard says into Margie’s ear.

  She shakes her head. Already she can feel the sobs coming, and they taste like failure. She swallows and chokes trying to get the words out: “Don’t do it, Sally. You stay where you are!”

  “Drop the ladder or I start carving your sister!” Beard shouts up toward the loft. He slides the blade along her collarbone and then digs it into Margie’s shoulder. Even though she bites her lips, she can’t stop the scream. The pain’s nothing like she’s ever known before, an explosion of fire as her body realizes how deeply the knife has sunk.

  Margie’s knees give out, her legs limp and useless. As she slides toward the floor she looks to Calvin for help, but he just stands there, his hands tight around her gun and his eyes on the blood curling down from the gash in her shoulder.

  He kissed that exact spot the night before. Traced his lips over that stretch of skin as she gasped and pulled him closer with a type of need he’d said he’d never been a part of before. Now the flesh is torn, the edges ragged from the unsharpened knife, and he looks like he can’t stop trying to figure out how something once so whole and perfect can become that broken so easily.

  Margie braces her uninjured arm against the floor, fingers splayed to hold her weight before she collapses. She’s wheezing— loud and gagging from the pain. Beard grabs her hair and drags her out into the middle of the room to make sure Sally can see what he’s doing.

  He pushes Margie to her knees, yanks her head back until her spine arches. Presses the knife against her throat, sweat glistening along the ridges of her tendons. “I don’t like asking twice,” he growls up at Sally, who huddles behind the banister, eyes wide and hands pressed over her mouth as her shoulders shake.

  “Stop it!” Sally shouts. “Okay, I’m coming down. Just stop hurting her!”

  She unfurls the ladder as Margie begs, “No, Sally, stay up there,” but Sally ignores her.

  She’s halfway down, her bare toes wrapping over the wooden rungs, when Slick Head grabs her around the waist with a thick arm. Sally’s already anticipated the move because she pushes herself back, twisting the rope of the ladder around his neck and hauling his feet from the ground.

  He kicks out, the rope tightening, and his mouth wrenches open— a black, choking maw ringed by yellowed teeth.

  “Jeffrey!” Beard shouts as his brother starts to scratch wildly at his throat, his face flaring red.

  “The knife!” Slick Head wheezes out, and Beard throws Margie to the ground. He jumps toward his brother, but Margie kicks at his feet, throwing him off balance so that he trips and falls, the knife skittering from his hand as his fists slam against the hardwood floor.

  Sally’s there in the middle of it, swooping in for the knife as it slides past her. Everything stills as the pieces of the moment reorder and shift back together again: Margie struggling to her knees, Slick Head choking and pawing madly at the noose, Beard pushing himself up with his hands out in front of him as Sally crouches, knife held steady.

  Calvin’s still in the corner by the door, shotgun clutched in his fingers.

  “Shoot her,” Beard orders him, never taking his eyes off Sally or her knife.

  Calvin jumps toward Margie, lowering the gun. She’s kneel
ing on the floor, one arm useless. She looks up at Calvin standing over her, the shotgun pressed against her temple in the same spot he kissed the night before. She doesn’t close her eyes. She won’t make it easy.

  “You said you understood what it takes to survive,” Calvin says to Margie. “How hard it is to find somewhere safe.” He’s sweating, his lips pale. “You’ve got Sally to take care of like I have my brothers.”

  Margie just stares at him. He knows what she’s done for her sister. What she would do if their situations were reversed. Behind them, Slick Head’s chokes become high-pitched wheezes.

  Margie winces, and Calvin’s finger jumps on the trigger before slipping away. “Cut him down,” Calvin orders Sally without taking his eyes off Margie.

  “You have to understand this.” He speaks like he needs Margie’s absolution.

  She feels the perfect roundness of the barrel of the shotgun pressed hard enough against her skin to leave an indentation. One flick of his finger and she’s done worrying. Done planning and patrolling and constantly fighting against the incessant fear.

  She’s failed Sally. She always knew that she would. In the same way her father failed her and she failed her mother. In the world with the dead, her failure was always inevitable.

  Slick Head’s gags become desperate— wet, smacking sounds that fill the cabin as streaks of blood tear along his neck from his nails scratching for air.

  Sally’s breathing hard and fast as she steps toward Slick Head, his face puffy, with busted blood vessels in his eyes turning them red. She draws the hand holding the knife over her shoulder as if preparing to hack at the rope. He claws at her, trying to get his fingers around the blade, but she just swings her arm hard, knuckles cracking against his jaw but the hilt of the knife keeping her fist solid like a brick.

  Blood dribbles from his mouth and she pulls back to strike again as the hanging man chokes on broken teeth.

  Beard roars and leaps for her, but he’s too late. She’s already sliced the knife across Slick Hair’s throat, a ragged gurgling gash of frothing blood that drips from his neck as his mouth gapes open and closed, open and closed.

  Sally spins toward Beard, holding the bloody blade between them, but that doesn’t stop him. He crashes into her, dragging her to the ground. His fingers rake at her, claw at her face, and pummel her throat.

  She tries to hold him off but she’s a young girl and he’s a massive man— it’s like a fawn beating back a bear, and Beard howls and spits with his rage as blood from his brother’s neck twines down his arms and drips to the floor.

  Margie’s eyes flare and she drags her broken body across the room to her sister’s defense, not caring that the barrel of the shotgun traces her movement. “Stop it!” she screams, reaching for her sister’s tiny hands, trying to drag her away from the mauling monster.

  Beard roars up, rising tall on his knees as he swipes at Margie, hand slapping at her busted shoulder, which causes a surge of pain bright and intense to shatter across her mind, shutting her down.

  Sally pulls into a ball, pressing her face against Margie’s side, trying to protect them both. Beard huffs, his mouth foaming as he stares at them huddled under his brother’s mangled body.

  He holds out his hand. “Give me the gun,” he demands of Calvin, but Calvin doesn’t move. He stares at the two girls. Two broken bodies that moments before had been whole.

  He did this. He helped break the world.

  Beard spins toward him, his fingers clawed in a fervent fury. “Shoot them, Calvin. Stop acting like any of this means something and just do it!”

  Margie’s senses clear bit by bit and she watches as something clicks in Calvin’s eyes. He aims the shotgun at her, and she takes a deep breath, waiting for him to pull the trigger. She always thought she’d be relieved in that moment but instead she feels the most intense regret.

  She’s spent too much time scared. She should have gone to West Virginia with Sally. She shouldn’t have locked them in a cabin she knew would one day fail to protect them.

  She thinks of all the notebooks filled with her sister’s handwriting. The trips had always been a lie.

  Calvin stares at Margie. “You care about me?”

  She doesn’t answer, just clenches her jaw as her cheeks burn with her own stupidity for trusting a stranger.

  He steps closer to her, urgent. “Would you kill me for her?” He says it like they’re the only two people in the room. As if one brother isn’t dead and the other asking for her and her sister’s murder.

  Margie doesn’t have to think before answering. “Yes.”

  Calvin pulls the trigger. Outside a few birds scream and scatter into the trees.

  “They wouldn’t have,” Calvin finally chokes out. “I’ve never meant enough to them. Ever.” Smoke twines around him, pungent and sweet. “Jeremy was wrong. It should mean something. Killing someone— I need it to still mean something. Or else everything in the world falls apart.”

  Next to Margie, Sally rolls to her hands and knees and beats at Beard’s shot-shredded chest, blood splattering her fists and arms, caking her hair. It’s not enough she’s given up the world because of the dead, but to have been asked to give up this place, and the dreams it held, because of the living is too much.

  Margie stares at Calvin. He pushes the gun into her hands, guiding the barrel until it’s wedged into the hollow of his collarbone. She doesn’t understand how everything’s changed again. How one minute she was death and then she was life and now she holds death in her hands again.

  “I understand,” he says. “I know you’ll never trust me now. I understand that, and maybe that’s the way it goes. My death can mean something too.”

  He pushes her finger onto the trigger. Behind her Sally finally sags against the wall, sobbing as her fingers curl on themselves, slick and bright.

  Margie climbs to her feet, shoulder screaming as torn muscle protests the movement. Clutching the gun, she walks to the table where the maps are spread out, blood now spattered along the mountains and towns. She tries to wipe it away, but only ends up smearing them red.

  She’d wanted to keep her sister safe. She’d wanted to keep a part of the world the way it was, before the change time, for Sally.

  But she knows, now, there’s no escape from the monsters. They’ll always be there; you just choose to live with them or not. Sometimes you have to plan for another day— sometimes that’s all you have. “You said you’ve been to West Virginia,” she says. “You’ll show it to us?

  • ♦ •

  BOUGAINVILLEA

  Introduction

  After we’d taken the bar exam to become lawyers, but before either of us had to start our new jobs, my husband and I spent ten days on the island of Curaçao off the coast of Venezuela. It was amazing (so much so that we went back to the exact same place a few years later).

  It didn’t take long for us to realize that Curaçao would make an excellent refuge during the zombie apocalypse: it’s surrounded by limestone cliffs (no zombies washing up on shore), it has its own water purifying plant and oil refinery, and is close to Venezuela for access to oil. Most importantly, it has one of the largest dry docks in the Caribbean which means that any large ship needing repair would need to dock there, a fact that would give Curaçao a lot of leverage in trading with all the ships trying to escape the zombies on land.

  Because of this, I knew I wanted to base my first zombie short story in Curaçao. Initially I’d intended the entire story to be about the pirates Iza sees at night, their hulls lashed with zombies. But as I wrote, it morphed into a different story entirely. One of these days I’ll write about those pirates.

  • ♦ •

  BEFORE

  Last year, Iza turned fifteen and her father threw a massive quinceañera. It was the largest party anyone on the island had seen since the Return, lasting an entire week. Every captain who wanted to curry favor with Iza’s father and gain access to Curaçao and its port or dry dock paid a visit at
some point. They pushed beribboned boxes into Iza’s hands, their eyes always on her father to see if he approved of their offerings.

  They brought Iza jewelry that she shuddered to look at, wondering which bracelets had once adorned reanimated arms. They brought scraps of useless money from various countries for her to collect. Many brought books that Iza couldn’t wait to devour, all covered with raven-haired men and redheaded heroines.

  But one of the men, a dark old Venezuelan with impossibly green eyes, brought Iza a game that belonged to his son. She knew it was the son’s because the old man made him be the one to hand it to her. The boy did so with a rage in his eyes that seemed too violent an emotion to be contained in his skinny teenage boy body.

  The game came in a box with edges worn white, the cardboard slightly warped, and the name “Risk” in faded red. There were no instructions, and the old man spent a sweltering afternoon teaching Iza how to play before he had to get back to his leaky boat. His son refused to join them, and instead spent the afternoon standing at the edge of the cliffs, staring out at the ocean.

  Iza spent weeks begging anyone to play with her. Some of the men and women who worked the landhuizen tried to play the game, torn between the fear of angering her father by not doing their jobs and the fear of his anger if they ignored his daughter. But they always let her win, and finally Iza would send them on their way.

  Still, every afternoon Iza set the board up on the table in the shade of a divi-divi tree, the little red, yellow, blue, green, black, and gray men arranged in tight rows according to rank. She once asked her father if he could make the old Venezuelan come back and play with her, but he told her it was impossible.

  “Why?” she asked, brushing away the yellow-breasted bird picking at the crumbs of her lunch.

  “I had his ship banished from Curaçao,” her father said.

  Iza’s eyebrows tilted into a frown. “Why?” she asked. The bird swooped in, nabbing a crust of bread, but she didn’t care.