“That’s pretty damn twisted.” She viewed him with skepticism. “You really think it’s true?”
Robert shrugged.
“Had he been drinking when he told you this?” she asked.
“Shel, come on…”
She immediately felt terrible about the suggestion. She was very aware of his father’s history with alcohol abuse, but also how he managed to overcome his addiction years ago.
“You’re right. I’m sorry. That was a shitty thing to say.”
He waved it off. “It’s okay. I know it’s a lot to take in, you didn’t mean anything by it.”
Shelly nodded. The initial shock having worn off; she was still trying to poke holes in the story. “Okay, but how? I mean… does your father—”
“It’s not just my father.”
“—really expect you to kill people? That’s murder, Robert.”
“I know.”
“It’s. Murder,” she said again with added emphasis. A sour, unpleasant sensation filled her. It reached from her throat to her bowels, and she wished she could reach into her body and remove whatever evil inhabited her. Hearing the word “murder” and its implication on both her and Robert made her sick. It seemed to echo and then linger, hanging above them like a dark, oppressive cloud for some time before either of them spoke again.
“I mean, let’s say for instance the”—Shelly had trouble rationalizing the word in her mouth—“zombies are real. Okay, so you kill them and move on. But people? Living people?”
“I know it’s messed up, but it’s something I was born into.” He had told her about the passage of the secret from father to first-born sons.
“You should at least have a choice, Robert.”
“I don’t think I do.”
“You always have a choice, Robert. You can’t do this, you just can’t.”
“You think people didn’t want to have a choice the last few hundred years?”
“Well, obviously some of them did if this has never been made public.”
He sighed. “I don’t know. Maybe.”
“Well, then maybe you should just say ‘no thanks,’ and we’ll both pretend we never heard this!”
He stood up and his face was inches from hers.
“It doesn’t work like that!” he hissed. Shelly rolled her eyes and rested her hands on her hips. Before she could respond, Robert said, “I think maybe the people who came before, the secret keepers, only targeted the ones they thought were the most likely to keep the secret going forward, and not the detractors.”
Her eyes widened and her jaw dropped open. “And which kind of person are you?”
His face twisted into a rage and he opened his mouth to speak, but just as the words seemed to form on his tongue, he lost his poise and cowered back to the bed.
Then Shelly hit him again. “Robert, are you a keeper or a detractor?”
His eyes still would not meet hers.
She knew the answer.
She knew he knew the answer, but she realized he wasn’t sure how to tell her. She waited for him to speak and wished for him to answer with eyes that suggested he should know the right answer. Finally, and visibly distraught, Robert spoke.
“It’s probably bullshit anyway, right?”
“You’re a keeper.”
“Shel--”
“Nope,” she cut him off. “You’re a keeper.”
“Shel, I only said yes because I know it’s bullshit. This is never going to happen.”
“Then why are we sitting here talking about it? Why are we busted up about this? This is some serious shit, Robert, even if it is all bogus. The idea alone is disturbing enough.”
“I know.” His voice sounded weak and defeated.
She stared at him quietly and they both sat in silence while the minutes ticked by. Robert didn’t speak and she knew he wouldn’t for fear of saying anything else wrong. To his credit, Shelly thought, Robert knew when to shut his mouth.
In the years they’d been together, he was never one to embellish like this, nor was he easily or often disturbed by anything. She still wasn’t sure she believed any of it, but the anxiety that was on Robert’s face when he first arrived at her house an hour ago was still there.
Eventually, it was Robert who broke the silence.
He stood from the bed and moved toward her. He took her hands into his own.
“Look, who’s to say anything ever happens? My dad said it’s such a rare thing that some people never have to go through it.”
She regarded him dubiously.
“Right,” she said. “While others have had to endure it more than once.”
“Come on, Shel. I need you to be with me on this.”
His eyes softened as he pleaded with her. He clearly wanted to move past this, but not without her complete understanding.
It was an ugly and vile story his father had told him. The idea of it all seemed preposterous, but the revulsion Shelly felt was very real.
It was still real.
The fleeting mental images proposed in her head were enough to churn the acids in her stomach long enough for her to have to suppress them. Still, while they were both appalled by the story, Robert at least seemed willing to overlook the atrocity of it by assuming it was untrue.
Why couldn’t she do the same?
Surely it was false? She thought. This will never happen.
She ultimately relented.
“Okay,” she said.
Robert’s head lifted up. His eyes softened and showed relief for the first time all evening.
“Really? Are you sure?”
She smiled. It was forced, but she had been with him for many years and was not ready to throw away their history. To lose him would mean having to start over, and being single didn’t feel like a real option—she and Robert had been together since high school—so maintaining the status quo made the most sense to her.
“Yes, I’m sure.”
He kissed her hard and passionately. She had not expected such a reaction, but she responded in kind and stayed there a long time.
They had shared many moments of passion in their years together, but to Shelly, this kiss felt different. The emotions of their conversation had not completely subsided, and her own skin suddenly felt alien to her. It was as if she wasn’t in her body while she kissed him back. They were not her lips pressing tightly against his. She could not feel his hands as they wandered over her body. She seemed to be outside herself, watching in third-person while she kissed Robert.
And the whole time she watched herself, she asked, What are you doing?
***
Present Day…
Shelly wiped away a tear and continued to read the journal. The story was heartbreaking and reminded her, paradoxically, of her own relationship. This woman never stopped loving Charlie and was now broken and lost without him. Shelly, contrarily, had never felt more lost being in a relationship.
The day she fell in love with Robert was one of the greatest days of her life.
The day he told her about his secret had been the worst, and she often wondered if he still loved her at all, or if he only wanted someone to be by his side on days like today.
Shelly came to the part where the woman wrote about Roy and the ‘secret’ he had told her, the same secret Robert had disclosed to her many years ago when they were barely out of high school.
Shit, Shelly thought. If Robert sees this he’s going to order her immediate execution.
Shelly was already certain that the woman’s death was imminent. After she left the hut, Robert had called over the radio to two men who were on the mountain, just to the south, searching for survivors and other evidence of the outbreak. Robert had ordered the men to intercept the woman. Shelly knew what this meant and decided not to intervene or try to dissuade them from killing her. Doing so would have brought about her own death sentence; however, upon reading her journal and seeing into the soul of this woman, Shelly felt an overwhelming responsibility
to protect her. Somehow. What she did not expect was any kind of opportunity to do so.
She was about to continue reading when Robert entered the room.
"Hey," he said.
"What? Oh, hey.” She closed the journal and set it down next to her on the chair. “See anything?" She casually rubbed her face in her hands, feigning tiredness, which was really an attempt to mask any of the emotions she had exposed while reading.
"Not really. Tell you one thing though... this place saw some nasty stuff.” He ticked his head toward one of the hallways. “There are some stains down there that you don’t even want to know about."
"Yeah, I'll bet.”
Robert’s eyes wandered the floor with twisted admiration. To Shelly’s relief, he did not notice she had been crying.
“Roy did a damn good job cleaning up the mess out here, but… goddamn.”
Shelly nodded pensively and said nothing in response, and hoped Robert was too preoccupied to continue the conversation. She looked out toward the windows in order to draw Robert’s attention away from her, and even more importantly, from the journal lying next to her. Too late, she thought when his eyes fell on the book.
"What's that? Is that the book you found?" He had seen it when she first discovered it and instructed her then to throw it out. The first rule of containment indicated as much—‘leave no trace’—and it sickened Shelly that the keepers of this abhorrent secret would spin an outdoor conservation principle into their twisted maxim.
"Yeah," she said tentatively.
"Huh. Anything interesting?"
She was surprised he wasn’t immediately annoyed by the fact she had removed it from evidence collection. She thought about telling him what the woman had been through, how she lost someone she loved, and about the mention of Roy. But Shelly knew if she did, Robert would ask to see the journal to find out what else the author had written. If Shelly gave Robert the book, the woman’s fate would be sealed.
"Nah," she said dismissively. "Just some little kid talking about how she misses the Internet." It was an insensitive thing to say, and it made her skin crawl with guilt as it wasn’t indicative of how she truly felt—she said it only because she knew it would appeal to Robert’s indifferent sensibilities toward kids. Robert never demonstrated any patience for adolescent behavior.
To her relief, he responded exactly as Shelly had expected.
"Kids,” he scoffed. “Mom and Dad were probably just trying to show the little punk there's more to life than Candy Crush and social media."
"Yep.” Then she added more caustically, “And Mom and Dad are probably dead or walking corpses right now."
She could tell by the way his left eye twitched slightly that she had connected with the verbal jab. Robert had long been aware of Shelly's disdain toward the containment effort, but she never let slip an opportunity to remind him.
Robert glared and stepped closer to her.
"Well,” he said, his voice low and the words devoid of emotion, “if Mommy and Daddy are still staggering around somewhere, I'll be sure to take care of them."
"I'm sure you will," she said through her teeth. It was as far as she was prepared to take the argument. If Robert carried on any further, she would simply walk away.
After several tension-filled seconds, Robert rolled his eyes and moved toward the second hallway. Relieved, Shelly was satisfied to have had the last word.
Chapter 8
Grace tripped over her feet and stumbled along the trail. She had been walking for two hours and the trail eventually moved away from the cliff and under the cover of trees.
She stopped when the pain returned in her stomach. On and off through the morning she fought through the intense discomfort. It had been many hours since her last proper meal and she clutched her midsection as a vice squeezed her insides until she thought her organs might burst.
Her head also pounded from the hunger. Grace wasn't prone to migraines and could not say with certainty if she ever had one, but the pain she felt now was as if the very matter that made up her brain had expanded inside her skull. It now threatened to compromise the integrity of the bone by contracting tightly and twisting like wet laundry being wrung of moisture.
A minute later the sensation passed, and she straightened and proceeded forward.
She walked with her eyes half-open. This measure was not effective enough for her to be able to see the worn-down trail in front of her and prevent the rising sun's rays from piercing her retinas and stabbing into her head, but it was all she could do in order to keep moving.
She advanced with an uneasy, shambling gait: shoulders rounded, legs buckling with every other step, feet dragging along, head lolling back and forth on her neck. If any passersby were on the trail at that moment, they might have mistaken Grace for one of the walking dead. Admittedly, Grace felt like a zombie aimlessly shuffling along, looking for anything that might cure her pain and hunger.
She felt her knees run into something and she could no longer move. It was another moment before she realized she had fallen to the ground after having bumped into the large trunk of a downed tree. Even on its side, the trunk rose three feet from the ground. Grace steadied herself and attempted to stand up, but it felt good to take a rest.
For the first time in weeks it felt good to do nothing, and she inhaled deeply and let out a long, exhausted sigh. She lay down slowly and closed her eyes. She concentrated on the sound of her own breathing and it began to relax her. The cool mountain air passed over her body and chilled the perspiration on her skin, creating a pleasant, tingling sensation that made her feel comfortable enough to fall asleep.
She could do it. She could simply take a nap. There was no food around to provide energy but surely a bit of rest would help.
What if the dead were still trudging around? If so, would they simply assume her to be dead, too, and ignore her lying there? Maybe they would move on in search of other living flesh. If not, maybe they would take a bite and send her unconscious mind into the dark and let her soul move on from its current wearied shell.
Would her soul pass on immediately though, after she became a zombie? Or would she need to be killed again in order to pass to the other side? Grace tried to think about how it all worked. Did the dead people still have souls? Grace’s out-of-practice understanding of her religion was that the soul left the body once it died. But these… things, though they were dead, were still walking around. Maybe the belief in the soul leaving the body no longer applied? Either way, the sooner to be reunited with Charlie…
NO!
She had to keep moving. Dying was not an option. It was never an option.
But she could just lie there a while... build up some strength... wake up rejuvenated.
Voices down below uncapped whatever adrenaline reserves she had left, and she sat up quickly and pinned her back against the dead tree. There was still pain in her head but it seemed lessened, conceivably by the release of endorphins.
Grace tried to focus on what they were saying. She pivoted quietly, switched position onto her knees, and stayed low behind the fallen tree. She stretched her neck and she saw two men. They stood and talked to each other but she could not hear what either was saying.
Are they dead? Impossible. Dead people don't talk.
There was a time when this kind of rationale would never have entered her mind, but thoughts like this were only too real and too logical, now. The dead certainly could not speak.
Upon taking a longer look, she saw they carried weapons. Military-looking stuff.
Strange, she thought, they don't look like military.
The men wore civilian clothes—khakis, hiking boots, vests with long-sleeved shirts underneath. But the long-barreled weapons, while certain to provide protection against the dead, seemed excessive.
Then Grace remembered Roy telling her about a ‘clean-up’ crew of some kind. A team of people who come in and eliminate the zombie threat along with any living people who might present a th
reat of a different kind.
Her body shuddered at the thought of innocent lives being exterminated for no reason other than to protect the mountain’s secret. She kept this in mind as she stayed low to the ground and tried to remain unnoticed.
Chapter 9
Robert performed a sweep of the second hallway to check for more evidence of life (or death) and Shelly stayed in the main hall. She stuffed the journal into one of the large pockets of her cargo pants and continued her search for anything that might tell her more about the woman they found at the hut.
She was sad to find nothing that would help her learn more about the woman whose experience she found tragic, and whose bond with Charlie Shelly envied. She was also relieved; Shelly took comfort in knowing Robert would not learn any more details about the woman, either. Shelly promised herself that the woman’s secret would remain safe.
Shelly turned her attention back to the hut. She moved from room to room and found sleeping bags that had been frantically tossed around and torn apart, shoes carelessly left on the floor, mattresses overturned, and backpacks unopened and abandoned.
They just got up and ran, she thought.
Shelly stood in one particular room, of which the crimson-stained walls, floor and bed sheets displayed the outcome of a very brutal exchange between the living and dead, and tried to imagine how immediate the threat must have been for people to have gotten up and ran out without any of their things. In an isolated environment, perhaps hundreds of miles from their homes, they decided the only thing to do was to take nothing and get out of this place as fast as they could.
Based on what she read in the journal and what her eyes told her, Shelly deduced the threat had been insurmountable.
"Hey," Robert said. Shelly jumped. She hadn't heard him enter the room.
"Hey," she said, attempting to hide her surprise.
"Sorry if I scared you," he said in a tone that sounded anything but apologetic. “And, uh… about before.”
“Yeah, sure.”
“Right, so,” he gestured back toward the hall. "How is it in the other rooms? You see much that can be traced back to people?"
Dead Summit: Containment Page 4
