“Morning,” he said with a smile. “Why you always ruffle my hair like that?”
“Because you’re soooooo cute!” she said with a handsome laugh. She bent down and pinched his cheeks, making him blush. Darin could fee his face get hot. “Is someone turning beet red?” She playfully raised and lowered her eyebrows. She looked so beautiful standing in front of him. Darin wanted to reach out and touch her.
“Shut up,” Darin said as he forced a friendly laugh to relax himself. Í have a skin condition. You know that.”
“OOoooohhhhhh . . . Mister two doctorates has a skin condition that only works around women. Tell me, Bill Nye the Science Guy, what’s it called?” She placed her hands on her hips and stood hunched over to face him . . . her face nearly touching his.
“Uhm . . . hey . . .” Darin’s voice dropped as he lot himself in her knowing green eyes.
“Yes, Darin?” she said in an expectant tone. Did she know? Was she waiting for him to tell her? What a perfect time in human history to feel such goddamn awkwardness.
“Nothin.’ We’d better head out.”
“You don’t want to say anything to me?”
“I was . . . wondering . . .” he stammered. Like always.
“Yes?” she asked, the corners of her mouth perking up.
“What do you want to do for breakfast . . .” he said in a breathless voice, feeling that all-too familiar sinking in his heart again.
She straightened herself up and nodded slowly . . . her smile gone. “Is that a trick question? Last time I checked, Denny’s was out of business.”
Darin laughed as Victoria grabbed the comforter off the bed and wrapped herself in it. “Funny, Vic.”
Victoria Rains was in a horrible place when they met. Then again, who the hell wasn’t? The life she had before seemed like someone else’s now. Just thinking about all she’d lost made her heart ache so badly that she found herself sometimes wishing she hadn’t survived. That life had a mother and a father, two sisters, one niece, a goldfish named Ferdinand and a string of really shitty men. Victoria Rains couldn’t figure out for the life of her. She often wondered what kind of man Darin was when the world was normal . . . back when things like money, success, material and the pussy-conquests of the menfolk were alive and well. It wasn’t the end of that world that can change a man from dirtbag to hero, she realized. No matter the state of the world, pieces of shit will always be pieces of shit. At first, her interest in the man that saved her life alarmed her. She feared she was feeling some kind of Stockholm syndrome, for lack of a better term. She wasn’t a captive, though. She was his equal. Darin dealt with her inherent hatred of all men – including him for a time. He dealt with it with elegance and never judged her. Doctor Miles was automatically lumped in with all the other swinging dicks that thought the sun rose and set under the sheets. Victoria treated him terribly at first . . . always having something condescending to say, refusal to speak to him unless it was absolutely necessary. She stuck with the man. Walking out of the safety of not only a doctor, but someone who had a method to render himself immune to the plague that had decimated the earth would be the epitome of foolishness. It really would, even though men disgusted her.
It wasn’t until they hit Washington DC that she saw his true colors. When they got to the lab there, she said something about how hungry she was. They hadn’t eaten anything in nearly two days. Miles had her wait in the main employee area while he ran to the lounge. He returned with one of those microwaveable cheeseburgers. “Aren’t you hungry?” she said, “you only brought one.”
“Oh . . . I ate mine already. Dig in.” He handed her a small grocery bag full of individually wrapped bars. “Found some granola bars for you, too.”
Sensing his strange tone, she waited until Doctor Miles walked outside for a ‘breath of fresh air.’ She ran into the employee lounge. The vending machines were broken into. Most of the food had been stolen or trampled over. A large French-door refrigerator was knocked over, allowing everything inside to quickly spoil in the hot and stuffy facility. She thought that was odd and peeked out of one of the windows to see Darin outside. He was sitting against an adjacent building with a painful grimace on his face. He was clutching at his stomach and rocking lightly back and forth. He desperately looked around him, his face clammy and pale. With a shaky hand, Doctor Miles snatched a dry, dead leaf off of the ground and started to chew on it. Victoria shrank back, sure that he saw her. She didn’t know why she hid herself behind the thick window shades like that. Perhaps she didn’t want to embarrass him.
Seeing enough, Victoria lifted up the window. “That cold cheeseburger and six granola bars was the only food left in the lounge, wasn’t it?”
Darin was startled by her voice. He quickly dropped the leaf at his side and turned his head away from her so she couldn’t see the bits of dirt and dead leaf on his chin. He brushed himself off quickly and turned back around to face her. “Yeah . . . yes it was. I didn’t want you to go hungry.”
Victoria Rains would have never known if she hadn’t decided to investigate that day. A man who does his kindness in secret is one with truly remarkable character. Here was a man who was literally starving to death, giving her the only food they had found in days. Vic just knew he would have never mentioned it, used it as ammunition during an argument of shown his discomfort in being as desperately hungry as he was. Ain’t that some shit. Vic runs into a wonderful, brilliant, well-educated, successful and thoughtful man. Finally. When the world is in pieces. Aside from whoever took the other Archies in the lab, if they survived months, Victoria and Doctor Miles could very well be the last man and woman alive. It certainly felt like it, especially now after all of the fruitless searching for a proper facility to house the bulbs. Nothing was found. It was obvious that the dead spread to other parts of the globe. Had to have been. The lack of presence from those other countries was disturbing to say the least. Why hadn’t anyone come and help them? Was America closed off, like a quarantine? Why bomb coastal cities instead of launch rescue efforts? It seemed like a last-ditch effort to Victoria when she thought about it. It was a final resort. She and Darin were convinced that whoever took the plants had to be military, but no matter where they travelled, no military presence was seen anywhere. They had driven coast-to-coast twice and hadn’t seen one living human being. There were signs of people recently getting supplies from gas stations, supermarkets and sporting goods stores. However, even after hanging out in those areas of suspected activity, no one ever showed up.
Victoria Rains had fallen into a deep; longing for Darin Miles and she knew he felt the same way about her. It wasn’t too farfetched. She was thirty-three and they had just celebrated his thirty-ninth birthday last week. Vic respected enough not to force him into it, though. There were attempts to crack the shell he had built around himself . . . but he seemed so disinterested sometimes. Maybe if wasn’t that. Maybe he was just nervous and frightened. He could have lost another lover to the invasion and the prospect of it happening again could break him. He could be protecting himself. Who knows. It is ironic that even after how the world was now, social unease and awkwardness still existed between people.
There were many times she had to fight herself out of just embracing him without warning . . . in fear that perhaps he would reject her. Life is really a motherfucker that way. Despite even the most extreme of paradigm or circumstance. A motherfucker. It was so incredible that this could exist in a world like it was now . . . when all they had was each other.
Truth was, she was falling in love with him. What did it was not only the selfless act of giving her the only food that day. That just began the process of seeing the doctor in a new light. Maybe even re-thinking that her opinion of all men was wrong . . . the realization that perhaps she’d been wrong about a lot of shit. About three weeks before they found this hotel, Victoria and Darin were walking through what used to be an outdoor carnival in Red Bay, New Mexico. There were no infected in sight. It looked lik
e someone had tossed a bomb into the crowd of people in attendance that day. In the midst of all the carnage were bodies of children. Everywhere. Darin stopped and stared at all the little bodies scattered across the grounds. Doctor Miles had removed all of their shoes and tied them to one of the main outer fences. There was a florist about a quarter-mile away from the fairgrounds, so Darin cleaned them out. He brought every rose, every bouquet, every wreath and every hanging plant the store had. He buried ninety-seven children in their own graves and placed flowers at each and every one of them. It took seven days.
On the last day, Darin tossed the old shovel he had used and told Vic that he needed to go for a walk to clear his head. Victoria felt bad about following him. Once he got out of earshot of the makeshift cemetery and Victoria hidden safely away, Doctor Darin Miles fell to his knees and wept. With all the pressing things, with all the uncertainty as to whether or not they’d make a cure or end up starving to death, the man stopped all that to bury those children. The smaller ones were buried with teddy bears and other stuffed animals taken from the florist shop. Every time Victoria Rains and the doctor passed though that part of New Mexico, they stopped to place fresh flowers on the graves. That man felt a weight on his shoulders that no human being should have to bear alone. Victoria Rains wanted to make sure she did that for him . . . provided him his due sanity.
They hit the road again a little after six in the morning. They’d found a grocery store not too far from the abandoned hotel. The produce was fucked, but there was a fantastic bottle of chardonnay in a glass case, along with a seventeen-year-old scotch in the manager’s office. The only foods their diets consisted of were the items that obviously had the longer shelf lives. Food consisted of oats, pastas, white rice, canned meats, powdered milk and the fish that were caught by the doctor. Darin said he’d never fished before in his life, so Victoria taught him. He wasn’t bad. Darin took to the ol’ sinker and bobber quite naturally.
It was there . . . four days later . . . when Darin had been practicing his newly-acquired fishing skill that their lives changed once again. At Sumpter Lake, a man-made recreational park right outside of Lakemore, Washington, Darin Miles happily pulled a large striped bass out of the water. The revelry was cut short when he and Victoria heard a plane land in the distance.
III
The dead outside had been pounding on the door all night. They had to have seen the candle light last night. Either they saw that, or the wife used her damn flashlight to read one of her late-night books. He fucking told her not to do that the first night they locked themselves in the basement behind that iron security door. That is a one-way ticket to get yourself killed. Christian was not going to meet his maker because of some stupid bullshit like that.
Christian was in and out last night. All he remembered was the pounding. The incessant pounding . . . like nails being driven into his head.
Christian woke up to the sound of a door being slammed. He muttered under his breath and got up, expecting the tray of his breakfast to be right there on the nightstand. The basement was stuffy already and the fucking sperm bank of his had forgotten the breakfast again. “Ana!” Christian Garner yelled to the footsteps running down the stairs. She didn’t answer him. From behind his head up above him, one of the wood planks screwed over the basement vent window was yanked off and the glass shattered inward.
“Christian!! Get the fuck out of there!”
“Harold?”
It was Harold Crawford . . . a neighbor about three houses down. He always had barbecues every weekend during the summer and would invite the whole block. Christian and Ana always went. Every Sunday afternoon. That guy was a queer if Christian had ever seen one, but the ol’ boy could grill his ass off. Harold was at the ground-level window, extending one of his meaty arms. His face was covered in a thick layer of sweat. Dark stains of what looked like blood dotted the white tank top he was wearing. He purposely bought shirts that were one size too small for him for some reason. His pot-bellied frame allowed those shirts to challenge the imagination of a heterosexual man. “Get out of there! Now! Ana is up here . . . they’re comin’ down the STAIRS!”
Christian turned around to see three of them running down the flight that led to the basement. All three of them were charred black. Their skin was loose and bubbling . . . their clothes tattered as if someone had simply attempted to boil them alive. The one at the front was wearing a belt that had a large metal buckle on it like those shit-kickers in Texas wear. The buckle had melted into its skin. Christian Garner jumped on top of the bed as Harold extended his arms. Christian took both of them and used his feet to balance himself on the headboard. “Christ, hurry up Harold, they’re coming!” he screamed. Harold hoisted his neighbor up. The man of the Garner household crawled through the window on his stomach just as the moaning, burned objects of his secret nightmares took him by the ankles. He could feel their hot breath on his bare feet; the horrible smell of burned flesh and hair. The window was tiny. If Christian were Harold’s size, he wouldn’t have made it. The second he got through the window and crawled away, one of the dead reached up and snatched Harold by the shirt and pulled him into the window frame. One of his arms was quickly seized and yanked into the hole. Christian immediately grabbed Harold and attempted to pull him back.
“Help me! They got my arm!” he screamed as he struggled to get out of their grasp.
Ana, who had been nervously pacing back and forth, yanked her husband back by his shoulders. “We’re out of time!” She pointed to the edge of the property line that spanned acres of dry farm land. At least a couple hundred of the runners were racing toward them . . . and gaining within one hundred yards from the house. “Come on!” Amy pulled her husband’s shirt collar, ripping it open to the middle of his back. Christian stumbled backwards, losing his grip on Harold. The man was pulled in farther and fruitlessly struggling against them. The tank top was torn from his body. The poor man’s mouth was open, but he didn’t scream. He couldn’t.
“I’m so sorry, Harold,” Christian said. He and his wife took off running into the dense woods at the edge of the property. They got well into the wooded area when they finally heard Harold Crawford scream. Just one scream . . . then silence. They stopped after God knew how long they had been running. “How the fuck did that happen . . .” Christian leaned against a tree to catch his breath. His bare feet throbbed and he still had such an awful headache from being awake nearly all night. Christian Garner slinked down the tree trunk and sat in the dirt, rubbing his eyes with his fists.
Ana sat down next to her husband and stammered for a moment. He hated it when she fucking stuttered. She sounded like a goddamn retard when she did that. “I . . . went upstairs to get something. When I left, I accidently left the door unlocked.” She spoke slowly and quietly, like a child in time-out.
“You what?”
“I must not have locked the door from the inside because I didn’t have my key on me. I’m sorry, Christian. I’m so sorry . . .”
He took a deep, shaky breath and clenched his fists so tight that his knuckles turned white. In a rare moment of self-collection, he loosened up his fists and stood up slowly with his back sliding against the tree. “We had to get outta there, anyway. If you didn’t make a mistake today, one of us would have eventually. We couldn’t spend our whole lives in that basement. They’d have found a way to get inside. I can guarantee you that. When something’s hungry enough, they will get through. I saw a dog chew through a chain-link fence once. Took him a week to make a hole big enough for him to walk through, but he did it.”
A flush of relief washed over her. She expected him to lose it. Maybe pick her up and toss her into the woods. Maybe tie her to a tree and make enough noise to send every infected human being in the area to a free meal. He didn’t. Much to her surprise. She turned her back to him; hands on her slender hips and spoke in the same whipped-puppy voice. “It’s not safe out here. We need to figure something out. Didn’t you say once that you had
a friend in Kentucky that had like a whole bunker built for himself? That’s what . . . eight hours away? State highway ninety runs all the way there, though. No one takes that road because it is almost entirely gravel and there’s always some big farm vehicle going twenty on it? I remember you talking about a place like that.”
“Hey, Ana?” Christian said in a small, friendly voice. She turned around. In no more time than it took to blink, Christian sailed his fist into her nose, knocking her back against the tree. She stared at him with watering eyes as her nose gushed blood . . . a sickening feeling that nearly caused her to swim away into the familiar unconscious void. As difficult as it was, she remained standing and lightly swayed on her feet to battle the coming unconsciousness. She had never been punched before. It wasn’t like in the movies when someone can get hit square in the nose and keep fighting. This fucking hurt. Her husband had smacked her around from time to time. Only when she was being stupid or unreasonable. He even shoved her into things before, but this time he balled up his fist and slugged her. He’d never done anything like that before. She just stood and stared – sorrowful eyes and bleeding nose.
“Let’s go. We need to move . . . darling wife of mine.” Christian smiled and rubbed the knuckles on his right hand.
The Zombie Letters Page 14
