by J. B. Beatty
Lights posed another interesting shopping question. In more than a few places we pass, the lights are on. Someone home? Violent people with guns or teeth? Perhaps a lonely survivor hoping we would save them? Or maybe just left on accidentally in the rush of turning into zombies and eating one’s family members? In the end, we decide in favor of lights, because we can see any hypothetical threats better, and the fridge wil be more likely to be stocked.
Cars outside. Indication of zombie occupancy? Then there is the whole debate over whether we would want a house with nice cars parked outside or beaters. “I don’t really like lousy beer,” says Maggie, in an apparent vote against working class beer and the rusted pick-ups that denote such affections. In the end, we come to no resolution on the car situation.
Then there’s architecture. “No fucking way we want a ranch,” insists Maggie. “They’re totally gay. And we need an upstairs for a good line of sight in case a threat approaches. Did I show you my sniper rifle? I would love to be able to finally use it for real.”
Justin objects, mostly to her use of the term “gay.” “We’re better than that, aren’t we?”
She doesn’t follow, saying, “Hey, I didn’t invent ranch houses. You can complain to whoever did. All I’m saying is we need a real house with an upstairs and not some soccer mom van house with no stairs. I mean, have you ever seen a zombie movie? There’s probably dozens of scenes with people using stairways in their last stand against zombie hordes. Take away the stairways and what do you have? You have a zombie victory party—and we’re the chips and the dip.”
The debate eventually leads us to a tall house that sits back from a crossroads. There are no big trees nearby—that was another consideration: being able to see any approaching threats. Let me reemphasize the tall part: it’s really an oddly tall house, with the basement foundation part being more exposed than it is in normal houses. “Geothermal,” mutters Maggie with no further explanation. And the house—fairly new-looking in the dark—seems to have been built on a hill. Outside a van is parked normally in the driveway. And a pickup is parked askew on the lawn with the door left open.
“I’m going to bet daddy came home feeling a little out of sorts,” I say.
“Could be the mom has the pickup,” responds Maggie. “I sure as hell would.”
We stop at the end of the drive, about 200 feet from the house. “Everyone grab a gun,” says Maggie. I loft my shotgun but Justin hesitates.
“What?” she says.
“It’s not science, I get that, but in the movies, gunfire can attract zombies. Maybe we want to kill them silently.”
“Dude, that’s just movies,” says Maggie.
“Yeah, I know, but we don’t know if that’s how these guys operate or not. I mean, none of us has seen the script, right? And it might not be a bad decision to play it safe, right? Is not it a truth that silence would be safe? I mean, even if these are sharp-hearing zombies, they’re not going to run at the sound of silence.”
“If anything,” I offer, “they would run from the ‘Sounds of Silence.’ ”
They both look at me quizzically. “Simon and Garf…” I stammer. “…It was a joke. A failed joke.” Their glare lingers on me an uncomfortable moment longer.
“What do we have in non-gun weapons?” asks Justin, still eying me oddly.
“I have an axe…”
“I’ll take it.”
“… also a hatchet, but I honestly don’t want to get that close to one of those fuckers. I don’t want to get bitten.”
“We have seen no evidence that the virus is transmitted by bites,” says Justin.
“Well, Mr. Let’s-Play-It-Safe, maybe we should just play it safe and be careful.”
“That’s cool. But let’s draw them out of the house. Make some noise. I’ll step in first with the axe. Maggie can back me up with her gun if things get out of hand.”
And that’s how I end up standing on the porch of this farm house, listening to ravenous zombies on the other side of the door. Justin is standing out on the front lawn like Braveheart, warming up with his axe. To his right and behind a few steps is Maggie, her AK-47 ready. And my job is to somehow open the door to let the zombies out without getting eaten myself. Plan A was that I would pull the door open and hide behind it. But only the storm door opens by swinging to the outside. The heavy wooden door swings inside, and that’s the one that they’re pounding against. If I manage the strength to push against them and open it, I don’t see how I get away from the door before they grab me.
“Maybe we should sneak around and open the back door while they’re all crazy at the front door?” I suggest.
“Just open it,” yells Maggie. Sometimes she’s not so tolerant of other points of view.
Justin seems indecisive, a mood he betrays with a shrug.
Then it hits me. The reason I can hear these zombies so well is that the window is open. It’s just a few steps from the door, and a screen window is pretty easy to get through. So I look around on the porch and spot a snow shovel. (Yeah, I don’t get that part either, since it’s a couple months early and most folks would have theirs in the garage at this point. I dislike people who take preparedness so seriously. They probably have batteries in their smoke detector too.)
I take the shovel and jab it hard at the screen, tearing it. The hungry ones move toward the noise, and are soon ripping at what’s left of the screen and starting to climb over the couch and out. I run off the porch as fast as I can to where I left the shotgun on the lawn behind Justin.
Two come out, the man first. He hits good speed coming off the porch. Justin is saying, “Come here, baby, come here, come here,” and then launches a swing with all his might. But the guy moves low for the kill and Justin’s axe glances off his head without doing appreciable damage.
“I’ve got him, move!” shouts Maggie but instead Justin leaps out of the zombie’s way and swings with a downward motion, cracking into the monster’s back. He goes down and Justin almost goes down with him, his axe stuck in the spine. He wrenches it out and brings the next blow squarely into his head.
“Watch out!” I yell as the woman lurches toward him. Justin, already out of breath, starts to turn. She’s not so fast and appears to have some injuries already. A crack echoes across the yard and she drops.
Justin turns to Maggie. “No guns! I would have had her.”
“Jesus, it was just one shot. It’s not like I had it set on auto.” She lowers the barrel. “Let’s take a look inside.”
The home’s interior has seen better days. The living room was the site of a bloody struggle. I carefully step over an orphaned leg. A body missing a leg, as well as most of its organs, is in the garage. The kitchen and bathroom are clean. So is the master bedroom. Justin pauses at the bottom of the stairs. “I can’t go up there. There’s going to be children. I don’t want to see that.”
Maggie snorts and goes up alone. In a few minutes she’s back at the top of the steps. “No one. The kid’s bedroom door is busted open, but there’s no kids or blood.”
They give me a look. I look back. Maggie clears her throat, nods toward a door off the kitchen. That sends me to the basement stairs. The light is on. A track of bloody footsteps comes up the carpeted stairs. I step down, avoiding the prints. In a corner of the TV room are several torn bodies. I turn around but can’t block out what I see. I take a step or two back toward the steps but am overcome by revulsion. I vomit painfully and repeatedly.
Finally I am empty—in every metaphorical sense—and I slowly head up, shutting off the light and shutting the door.
“Well?” says Justin.
“Let’s just stay up here,” I say, leaning against the kitchen counter with all the strength of a wet dishtowel.
We make the place secure for the night, Maggie bringing the pickup into the garage. Justin makes the decision to join us in the pick-up for tomorrow’s travels, so he starts moving his things from his car. I struggle to move pieces of furniture in fr
ont of windows after first closing the drapes. We want to make sure that virtually no sign of light or life escapes. Finally, it seems secure. And it is godawful late at night, nearly 3am.
“There’s no reason for us to get up early, is there?” asks Justin.
“Fuck no,” says an exhausted Maggie. “We don’t even know where we’re going. I say let’s get a good night’s sleep. In the morning, we’ll come up with a plan.”
“If anyone wakes up in the night or in the early morning, check out the windows and make sure we’re still alone,” I say. “We probably should have someone keep watch.”
They both look at me in an oddly unenthusiastic way. Then Justin says, “Thanks for doing that.” They both head upstairs, leaving me in the darkened kitchen.
15→FROZEN WITH THE MOST AWFUL FEARS
In the movies, people on the run through dangerous territory always take turns keeping watch in the night. They make it seem like the normal thing to do. And the only way to screw it up is to fall asleep. Which only the loser does, causing death and pain to all of his companions, or at least a good scare.
I really don’t want to be that loser.
I also don’t want to be so damn hungry. I open the fridge a crack, and find it fairly well-stocked. I grab a gallon of milk and start digging in the cupboards until I find a box of some organic peanut butter cereal. There is even a bunch of bananas that seem to be perfectly ripe. As I peel one, I realize that if civilization is truly collapsing, I may not see bananas again for a long time. Most likely the rest of my life. It’s a long way from here to—I check the sticker—El Salvador.
Roughly 36 hours ago I tried to kill myself. And because I failed, I get to see my world fall apart. This flu—without even infecting me—has destroyed all of the trappings of my life far more effectively than I could have ever done in that closet.
I settle on a kitchen chair in the darkness and eat my cereal. My mom. I think about her. There’s something about seeing torn-up children’s bodies in a playroom that makes you want to be held by your mother. I keep thinking—no, feeling—that we’re going to go home in a few days and she’ll be there, ready to counsel me. Not just hug me and bake lasagna from Costco, but she liked to do interventions. All the time. I cannot begin to list all the times my life has been intervened in by her. She had been a middle school counselor until she took a job a few years ago with this online education company, providing counseling through the Internet. She missed the kids. And she missed the feeling of being an effective, caring person and instead having to fake it through some video service that’s not Skype, which was another issue. Because every time she explained her job to someone, they would say, “Oh, I see, so you use Skype.” And she’d have to explain to everyone that no, her company doesn’t use Skype, but they use something just like Skype that’s supposed to be better. Only it’s not. And no one ever recognized the name of the Skype knock-off. And I can’t even remember the name now, and Mom won’t ever be able to tell me.
Fucking zombie flu. I don’t even know what is out to get us. Yes, actually I do. Zombies, for one. Though they seem a bit less effective than in the movies. Definitely easier to kill. It helps to not have to manage head shots every time you pull a trigger. Though that’s surely a disappointment to the classmates I have—had—who in disproportionate numbers had fantasies of being a sniper in the military. Maybe it was “American Sniper” that did it, but it seems like kids were getting woodies about killing people from a quarter mile away long before that came out.
A lot of them also had tattooed crosses because Jesus. Yeah. No comment.
Which makes me consider the next threat: the nutcases who survived and are living their apocalyptic dreams. They get to play soldier in the woods and after the minimal amount of grieving required by whatever token Christian values they have, they’re now gung-ho and ready to shoot. Kind of like the bumbling old guys that captured us earlier. Only, knowing some of the people I knew at school, I fear there could be much worse armed gangs of “healthy” people out there.
Starvation? As long as the electricity stays on, I don’t think we have any immediate worries. And the population—at least around here—seems to be so drastically reduced that we probably have food for a lifetime just in the pantries of a typical suburban block. Plus there are still cows and things in the fields, I think. I don’t know how to get meat or milk out of one, but we still have YouTube videos for now. I bet they show that. (Checked. They do.)
Every so often I think I hear a noise. Well, I do hear noises, but are they noteworthy? Or just normal night creatures and the creaks of the building settling? I prowl around the house peeking through curtains and drapes. I never see anything. In between my rounds I lay down on the big master bed. It’s neatly made, so I just lay on top. And that’s where I find myself in the morning.
“Hey buttercup,” I hear. Something jolts my foot. “We’ve got company.” It’s Maggie. She is holding her rifle and the sun streams through the top of the window. “Get moving,” she says.
When I come out to the living room I see her and Justin looking out the front window. Across the lawn, closer to the road than the house, is a group of 20 or so zombies. They’re walking fairly normally and it would be easy to assume they were uninfected by their gait. But occasionally one falls down and struggles before getting up. And they are dressed in a manner inconsistent with being well-adjusted. As in naked, or nearly so. And they’re jumpy. Every few minutes a few of them appear to be ready to pounce on something that we can’t see, or they look skyward when they see a bird fly over.
“It’s a hunting party,” says Maggie.
“Why aren’t they attacking each other? Some of the ones I saw in the city were doing that,” notes Justin.
“Maybe at some basic, primitive level they’ve reverted to some sort of pack psychology?” I say. “By hunting cooperatively they can be more successful?” Maggie looks at me oddly. “I mean, in evolutionary terms.”
“I’m no whiz at science, Arvy, but I think evolution takes a long time. It’s been two days.”
“If you have better ideas, please share,” I say, walking into the kitchen for another banana.
She changes the subject. “How long are we going to stay here?”
“There’s plenty of food for now,” I say.
“But it’s not very secure,” she says, plopping herself into the dad’s football watching chair. “We can probably avoid trouble with the wandering zombie hunting parties just by being quiet, but we are in a horrible spot to defend if any healthy people attack us.”
Justin turns away from the window. “You really think healthy people are a threat?”
“Where the hell were you yesterday?”
“I’d like to think that at this point in the crisis, most healthy people we run into are just looking for safety. That gang yesterday, they were just being overcautious.”
“Yeah. How cute,” she says to him. As if it’s a challenge. He looks back at her a little bewildered. But there’s something going on, something negative, I think. In the secret language of guys and girls. I can’t read it, but I can tell enough that Maggie is gasoline right now and nobody better light a match.
16→PROVIDING AT THE STORES
We still have Google Maps for now, so we use it to study the surrounding towns to zero in on the best place to rob a pharmacy. Justin is pushing us hard on the whole pharmacy thing. We need medical supplies, just in case. Antibiotics, just in case. And Maggie thinks we need fun drugs, not for her, but for trading. She thinks this will happen because of TV shows she’s seen. I’m not going to argue.
We do have a lively debate over what might be the most tradable drugs. Justin says more antibiotics. I say Ritalin. Then I say painkillers. Justin says blood pressure meds, since most of the survivors we’ve run into so far seem to be old men. Maggie says Viagra, same reason. In the end, we decide to get as much as we can of all of them.
The town is about four miles from us. Cornfields all
the way there. The place isn’t very big, but hey, they won a state wrestling championship 27 years ago, and they’re proud enough to have a sign about it. We could probably drive through the town in 5 minutes at the speed limit. It has a typical four-way intersection on its south side. Gas station, ice cream parlor, offices, and a CVS* pharmacy.
[*=About that CVS. We’re not talking about the actual CVS, which is an omnipresent pharmaceutical chain with over 7,000 outlets in the United States. Because their lawyers might have survived this apocalypse. No, we’re talking about a fictional CVS with like, 7,000 outlets. But totally different in every meaningful legal way.]
There aren’t any real neighborhoods to the south of the pharmacy, just scattered roadside homes blending into the farm zone. Justin thinks that gives us more safety from large bands of zombies. They’ll be more likely to occur near large population concentrations—suburbia. And given that the flu hit on a weekend, he makes the point that most people were home.
We decide to keep noise to a minimum. We still don’t really know to what extent these zombies are chasing noise, but in movies… Yeah. And we even though we have a decent collection of high-powered weaponry, thanks to Maggie, we pack it as back-up. A rifle on each of our backs. But we all have decent blades for close-up fighting. I have reservations about that, because it strikes me that one doesn’t get effective at close-up fighting until they’re doing graduate work in zombie killing. Maggie thinks I’m whining.
“Quit your goddamn whining,” she says to me.
But I riposte, “You don’t just stab through someone’s skull as easy as it looks on TV. A lot of blades are just going to bounce right off thick skulls. And at that range, we can’t afford to screw up.” I have her there. Plus, I got to use “riposte” correctly in a sentence and that opportunity doesn’t come up every day.
With a growl she allows us to get long-handled garden tools and baseball bats from the truck. The house we’re in had a decent supply. Justin goes for a bat. I grab a pitchfork, until Justin cautions me that while it might kill effectively, it might get stuck on the insides of people, and getting it out quickly for the next kill would be tricky. I grab a garden shovel instead. Maggie would really like a long Japanese sword that’s razor-sharp, but that’s not so easy to come by because we’re not in a movie. We have no props people. Instead she finds a long weed cutter that’s light but seems to have a sharp blade.
