“Yes. No.”
“Then you still might not be dead.”
“There’s the rub. Well, what then?”
“Then you would either be dead, or… not dead.”
“Yes, but I mean, what would you do?”
“Kill you.”
“You mean if I wasn’t dead?”
“Weren’t. Yes. But not living.”
“Right. I would too.”
“Would what?”
“Kill you.”
“You mean if I wasn’t dead?”
“Weren’t. Yes. But not living.”
“Good.”
They were getting hungry. It had been a long time since either of them had seen any of them.
“What if I were alive, but… bitten?” said Randall.
“So, not dead, and not not dead, but going to be?”
“Yes.”
“Would I kill you?”
“Yes.”
Kurt thought about this for a while.
“Why would I?”
“To keep me from turning.”
“Well, then, should I kill you right now? That would keep you from turning.”
“But I don’t know if I ever will turn.”
“Everybody does, sooner or later. You either get bitten and you turn, or you die and you turn.”
Randall thought about this for a while. “Unless my brains were blown out. The brain—you have to destroy the brain. It’s the only thing that matters.”
“Why?”
“Because if the brain is destroyed, you don’t turn into one of them. It’s a proven fact. And they eat brains, probably to preserve their own brain. Everything a brain needs is in a brain. A brain has what a brain needs.”
Kurt nodded, and then said, “Yes, I would kill you.”
“I would kill you too.” Randall rubbed his hand on his pants, and then held it out: “Let’s shake on it.”
Kurt extended his hand and took Randall’s in his own, sensing the seriousness of the pact.
“We will never let the other one turn,” Randall said.
“It’s a deal.”
“Wait a second,” said Randall suddenly. “Where were we going?”
“When?”
“Now.”
“We’re not going anywhere now. We’ve stopped.”
“I mean, in general.”
“Death.”
“What?”
“In the long run, we’re all going to die.”
“Well, in the meantime, we need to find food.”
“You’re right.”
They looked down the stretch of the cemetery path on which they were walking and saw that they were nearer the other end than the way they had come in, so they continued walking in the same direction.
“Do laws come from rules or do rules come from laws?” Randall asked.
“What do you mean? Laws are rules.”
“No, I mean, ‘thou shalt not kill’—that’s a law. But the idea that you shouldn’t kill anyone, that’s a rule.”
“I see what you mean.”
“Well, which came first?”
“Well, somebody probably thought of it before he wrote it down.”
“Did he though? Or did he write it down first, and now everyone knows it because he wrote it down?”
“Maybe it’s the same thing. Maybe a law is a rule if you say so. If enough people say it.”
“Yes, I think so. If enough people agree to a law, they probably think that it applies universally.”
They walked a little while longer, and Kurt’s face grew dark.
“But would that mean then that if everyone agreed murder were not wrong, then murder would be…not wrong?”
“Or maybe just not not right.”
“Is something bad only if there is someone there to say so?”
“I suppose.”
They continued walking. They were approaching the gate of the cemetery. Kurt felt as though he was having a hard time seeing, even though it was midday. More than once he had almost fallen into an open pit.
The graveyard was at the top of a sloping hill that led to a road cutting through a valley. From the top of the hill, where the gate was, they could see far into the distance. Under the flat, bright gray cloud cover lay vast expanses of derelict farmlands, overgrown now, the boundary lines between the plots of land almost indistinguishable. Everything seemed blurred. There was no sharp light, and there was no shadow. All had blended into a mass of varying but undistinguished shades of gray.
“I wonder what someone would say about us,” Kurt said.
“Who?”
“I don’t know. Someone who knew us, knew about us, knew what we did, who we were. A historian. What if someone wrote about us in a book?”
Randall sputtered a little. “What does it matter? People who write books are crazy do-nothings. They just sit around and write words. What good are words? Words aren’t actually anything, until someone reads them—but who reads them? People who read books are worse than the people who write them. They just sit and sit and stare at symbols on a page that mean essentially nothing—they think they mean something, and maybe they do for a while, in their brains, but then it’s gone again, and meanwhile time has gone by. What’s important is to live in the present, Kurt. Right now is all we have, all we know, all we can count on.”
“I think you’re right, Randall.”
“Besides, who would write about all this? I’d do my best to forget it!”
“Actually, I think it would sell quite well. People love tragedy—as long as it doesn’t involve them personally.”
They walked through the gate and descended the rolling hill. The tall, overgrown grass whispered against them as they went. Their heavy-duty pants and boots were their work pants and boots, and they had held up. But their shirts were not built for wear; they were stretched and worn thin, and very dirty.
They reached the road at the bottom of the hill, which ran around the rim of it like a wire in a corset.
They walked down the road for some time, side by side, Kurt walking rather slowly but still confidently ahead, and Randall strutting with his hands in his pockets, his hips thrust slightly forward, taking steps that began with an exaggerated and seemingly unnecessary kicking out of the feet.
“What are you thinking about?” Randall asked Kurt finally.
“Nothing,” Kurt mumbled.
They walked farther down the road than either expected they would have to before they found an abandoned gas station, the filling area populated by several abandoned cars. Kurt went up to the door of the shop casually, swinging it open and finding nothing inside. It had been so long since they had seen any of them that he had ceased to be very cautious when entering a new place. In fact, he had begun to doubt that they were even still around. It felt as though he and Randall were the last two people on earth.
The shop was empty, and Kurt and Randall went inside. The chalky light came in through the windows enough that they could take stock of what food remained. The store had been well plundered; most of the shelves were empty. All that were left were several identical packages of food—some crunchy corn product that had been rendered unrecognizable from its original form during processing. They tore into these hungrily, eating all of them. While eating them, they thought to themselves to spare some but their hunger got the better of their judgement. In the back of the store was a restroom, filthy from months of use without cleaning. Kurt went in first. He saw his dim reflection in the mirror and was surprised at what he saw. He had seen so little of himself in the past months that he had come to identify himself more with Randall’s features, which he saw all the time, than his own. There was still water in the toilet bowl. Randall tried the faucet. It worked, heaving out rhythmic gushes of rusty water. They drank this by the handfuls.
It was getting toward night by the time they decided to leave. They had taken to sleeping in the woods. They were not sure if it was safe or not, but so far, their survival rate suggested that it wa
s.
It was dusk when they left, although the sky had merely dimmed its shade of gray, so that it was difficult to say whether the sun were going down or the clouds merely growing thicker. Because they gauged it only by the darkness of the sky, the passage of time sometimes seemed faster, or slower, than it actually was.
A little way from the convenience store, the road took a sharp left turn and dipped downhill, all the while flanked with tall, dark trees that made it impossible to see down the road farther than a few paces. They were not sure exactly where they were or where they were going, but they had seen signs that had indicated that they should eventually reach a town.
The road led upward again, and then they rounded another bend and emerged on the crest of a hill where the trees cleared and they could look down into another valley, this one containing the promised township. Under the gray sky, the town appeared much like the patchwork of farmlands from whence they had come—blurred, indistinct, gray, and dead.
They descended the steep slope, entering at the edge of the town. Having drawn down to its level and coming out of the trees, they stood on the flat paved ground among the small buildings and walked down the street. They stopped suddenly before they reached the bottom of the road.
In the middle of a dead intersection, stretching across the whole of the road and into an adjoining parking lot, and beyond that even, beyond their ability to see the end of it and the full extent of it, was a pile of human bones. The pile was mountainous, and two of the peaks reached higher than the height of ten men, dwarfing the height of the dark streetlight suspended near it.
After pausing to take in its size, the two men drew nearer to it slowly. At this point, Kurt observed that the pile was darker in shade than the asphalt beneath it. The bones were relatively fresh, still stained with darkening blood and partially studded with bits of black flesh. Not only that, Kurt observed, but there were also chunks of offal piled in with the bones—dark lumps of organs, for the most part—kidneys, livers, bladders, lungs, hearts, intestines, all but the meat. Flies buzzed voraciously about the remains, a chorus of intoxicated ecstasy.
At the first sight of it, Kurt’s heart sank and his insides seemed to well up in disgust. He felt an acute revulsion. But then, almost immediately following this reaction, he felt a strange objectivity about it. It appeared to him as only a pile of matter—highly organized, biological matter, swarming with other, more energetic biological matter. He observed it very objectively, and without passion. It quelled his previous reaction, and did not create any new emotion. Its reality, properly and more fully sensed and understood, seemed to make it less real to him.
“What do you make of this?” he said to Randall.
Randall said, “I don’t know.”
They looked about them. The houses around were as dead as all the others. The unboarded windows were empty and black.
“Maybe this is why we haven’t seen anyone,” Kurt remarked.
Randall nodded, swallowing. “Could it explain why we haven’t seen any of them either?”
“How do you mean?”
“Well,” said Randall, “perhaps these are not all human remains.” He indicated a skull without its top that looked cleanly taken apart, as if it had been cut.
“I see what you mean. But when we kill them, we don’t strip the meat off of them.”
“True,” said Randall, nodding again and putting his hand to his chin. “How many bodies do you think there are altogether in this?”
“I’m terrible at guesses like that,” Kurt said. “But I’d say thousands, probably given the fact that there are no muscles. That would make the pile, what, twice as big.”
They observed a moment longer.
Finally, Randall said, “What if it’s a very large one of them…very large, and very hungry?”
“You mean a giant?”
“Yeah, like a giant… Maybe he rounded up a whole bunch of us, and then sat down and had himself a meal, you know, like we would… suck the meat off of a chicken bone, and toss it away after we were done.”
They looked around again. There was no sound; there was no wind. The silence and deadness of it begged Kurt to form his own judgement, as he considered it again as matter and was not repulsed by it.
Instinctively, and at the same moment, they turned away and walked back the way they had come, up the hill they had descended and back into the trees. They walked off of the road and tramped into the dense forest. The sky was beginning to darken heavily now. As they had done before, they found a sequestered patch of ground within the trees that would accommodate their two bodies, and there cleared away the undergrowth until all that remained was the dirt ground. Then they gathered piles of dead branches, mostly cedar, and arranged them into two piles. They laid on these just as the light had grown so dim that it was beginning to be difficult to see. They gathered up dry leaves under their heads, bade each other goodnight, and braced themselves for a night that they knew would bring only fitful, momentary bursts of sleep.
Almost as familiar to them as this routine of clearing ground and gathering the offal of trees was the chorus of sounds that arose during the nighttime hours. From seemingly within the very forest where they rested, and from all the miles beyond within reach of sound, came terrifying cries that echoed rhythmically between hills, through valleys, up inclines, and finally to the glade where the two men lay. The horrible cries were of the nightly orgies performed by the undead—horrible because of their admixture of something very human and familiar with the throaty call of the horde that had come to signify death, destruction, chaos, plague. In those cries, they heard themselves, and they heard something wholly alien, and they were terrified.
The morning light came, bringing the clay-white sky to full illumination gradually, distantly, dispassionately, and the two men awakened. Kurt found that he had drawn himself into the crook of Randall’s arm, presumably for warmth—the nights were getting colder and they were without provisions for keeping warm at night. He sat up and breathed in the crisp, dewy air, rubbing his eyes, his senses gradually coming to him. His ears began receiving the forest sounds and the memory of the pile of bones and organs surfaced in his recollection.
Then he realized that the sounds he was hearing were not merely the ambient noises of the forest awaking at dawn, but there was also a continual scuffling noise in the bracken.
He shook Randall, who bolted upright in his bed of leaves. They stood together and looked into the forest surrounding them. It was dense, and they were unable to see far. Looking closely, Kurt detected movement among the branches in the distance. He took hold of Randall’s arm and pulled it, turning around and running into the foliage. Randall spun and bolted into the trees, following Kurt.
Kurt dodged shrubs and tree trunks, making his way as fast as he could through the thick growth. He burst out between two tall pine trunks toward the open road, nearly tumbling into the ditch, and then fell out into the paved road, into the open. Then he felt mortified—had he realized his direction, he would have cut to the side and remained in the forest, to try to lose them in it, although it didn’t seem to make much difference. They seemed able to track people without the use of any of their senses.
He stood in the middle of the road, chastising himself. Randall burst out of the trees onto the road a moment later. He was more pale than Kurt had ever seen him before. Kurt read the terror on his face to mean that he had been thinking about the pile of bones, that he feared they were being pursued by a giant.
They turned to the tree line from which they had just emerged. At almost the very instant they turned, a number of them burst out of the foliage in a dark cluster, a flurry of ravenous teeth and outstretched hands. The men turned to the opposite bank of trees only to witness the same, a crowd of them hurtling toward them with incomprehensible ferocity and drive.
They met the two on the road, launching into them, their cold fingers brushing their skin. Kurt threw his fists at them, landing a blow against an attack
er’s face, sending it sprawling, but then another was on his back as his body drew downward with the follow-through, and he fell. Randall was overcome before he had even managed to prime himself for a blow, or some other offensive movement. Two were at his shoulders. They drove their fingers into the muscles of his shoulders, and a third had rushed at him from behind, so that while his arms and shoulders were pulled backward, his head was thrust forward and down, forcing his jaw against his chest and knocking his teeth together. His body twisted around and he too fell to the ground.
Kurt flailed his limbs desperately, but this effort lasted only a moment; before long, they were holding him down by their sheer weight, and had pinned his arms and legs to the road.
Then, he realized the astonishing truth—they were not eating him. At this revelation, he ceased his struggling and stared up at them in surprise. They returned his gaze with hollow impassivity. He looked quickly to the side and saw that Russell as well had only been pinned down, although he had suffered more upon impact and was bleeding from the mouth.
With the great strength of their number, they forced Kurt to his feet and held him as though he were a prisoner. They did the same with Randall, who struggled to hold up his head. Once the men were on their feet, the creatures ushered them forward, restraining them only by gripping their wrists. It was at this moment that Kurt finally thought to address them using words—to thank them for sparing his life, as ludicrous as it seemed, or to ask where they were taking them—but the look in their eyes made him think better of it.
So they led the two men on down the road, and before long, they reached the pile of bones and organs that they had encountered the day before. It appeared even larger now. Kurt was not sure if this was due to the difference in the time of day or intensity of light. They led them past this, taking a left at the intersection, and up the town road to the top of another steep ridge.
At the top of the ridge was an old stone church that, judging by the looks of it, had been built around the end of the nineteenth century. It was large—too large for the township in which it resided. Perhaps, thought Kurt, it had been built large in an unfounded optimism that the township would grow more than it actually had or that the membership would increase more than it ever really did. It was derelict, looking to have been abandoned long before even the scourge. Its stone façade had collected mildew that hung in shapes formed and flattened by the pathways of intermittent flows of moisture down the sides.
The Imminent Scourge Page 15
