by McCloud, Wes
He broke in with one word that sent a pang through me.
“Well?!”
I wasn’t even sure what the hell to say to that. I just stood there, gun pointed right back at him, unsure if I was even capable of killing an uninfected human, let alone an elderly man.
“You death or the devil?...Or both?” The inquiries raised my brow, Surely he had lost his mind in all this. But then when I thought about the fact that I was wearing a gas mask with horns, my opinions changed. I was lucky I hadn’t been shot already. I finally spoke up.
“I’m just a man…like you.”
“What?! Take that damn thing off, I can’t hear a word you’re saying!”
I took one hand off the gun and pulled the mask up on top of my head, being careful to keep a bead on him. He kept a steady return of the favor.
“I said, I’m a man. Just like you.”
“Yeah, we’ll see about that….You alone?”
“Alone? You mean…like is anyone else with me?” He smirked at the stupidity of the answer. I didn’t blame him. Jesus Christ, even in the apocalypse I couldn’t talk to people to save my life.
“Yeah, son, that’s what ALONE, means.”
“You shoot off those fireworks last night? “ I switched gears on him because that’s all that was in my head right then.
“Maybe I did, maybe I didn’t….You didn’t answer my question, are you alone?”
“Yes!...Are you alone?” I really wanted to know.
His eyes went soft ever the slightest.
“Yeah…I am.”
I had no reason not to believe him. An unnerving silence paved the way for what seemed like a whole minute. He took one hand off his gun and placed it to his chest.
“Frank.”
“Will,” I reciprocated.
Another silence came. Then…
“Well, Will, looks like you and me, we gotta a few things in common. I love for shotguns and fireworks. And we’re both alone in this shit-stained existence.” He wasn’t wrong, well I didn’t like shotguns at all, but other than that, he wasn’t wrong. I’m going to take the time to mention that his voice was ripping a hole through me. It wasn’t like he had a booming, shrill tone, it was just that I hadn’t heard another human being speak since the day the sheriff came to see if I wasn’t dead. It was just odd. It was as if not hearing anyone speak for that long made you unaccustomed to it. Then when it came back, it was almost intolerable. Ten times louder and terser than it actually was. Despite that, my rabid curiosities were kicking into overdrive. I had questions, maybe he had answers.
“What happened?”
“With what?”
I almost laughed. How could it be more obvious?
“With what? With this! All this! The people dying?! The infection!? This shit-stained existence?!” I just started belting it all out with rage. Which was a really intelligent move considering I had a gun pointed at my chest.
“You know what happened…The phones happened. They turned everyone into these damn things.” I thought he was being tragically, and maybe a tad insanely, poetic. I totally got that if he was, but within moments he proved himself to be quite literal.
“The choppers?” I asked. He nodded.
“I heard em’, I saw em’. Just like you did, I’m sure…Shit went a little nuts right after that. People got paranoid. No one turned though. Not until…”
“Until?”
“My granddaughter was at my house, she was talking about some video going round people were sharing and she watched it, and right then and there she fell on my floor and went into…a seizure or something. My wife goes into hysterics. She can’t even dial 911. She keeps dropping the phone over and over so I take control while she tries to keep our granddaughter from biting off her own tongue…” He paused. It was as if he was reliving it. I had to assume I was the first person he’d talked to about it, given the look on his face. He started in again…“But yeah…I couldn’t even get through to anyone. The lines were just bogged down because apparently the shit was happening everywhere right then. Not a few minutes into that seizure, my granddaughter jumps up and bites my wife’s arm. I mean, how the hell do you react to that? Bit her goddamn arm. I didn’t even understand what I was seeing at first, ya know? And then, within…I don’t know, a minute, my wife was behaving just like my granddaughter was. Mindless. Rabid...They both ran me down…” He trailed off again. I wasn’t having it.
“What happened then?”
“I’m here and they aint. Don’t use your imagination too hard on that one.” And I didn’t have to. The man had to do the unthinkable. Kill his own family to survive.
“So…so you got no one?”
“Naw…”
“Yeah…same here.”
He chuckled a bit. I won’t lie, it hit a nerve.
“How the hell is that funny?”
“It’s not that, Will. I was just sitting here thinking about something I told my granddaughter once. Told her she was gonna turn into a zombie if she kept staring at that damn phone all the time. It’s almost like I made this all happen.”
“Don’t say that.”
“Well, it’s been said, so…What about you? Any of your folks turn? Wife? Kids?”
“No…I didn’t have much of anyone to begin with before all this. Closest person I had was my granddad. He’s been gone for years now though.”
“Oh…Sorry to hear that. But if its any consolation, consider yourself lucky that you didn’t have to do what I did. I wouldn’t wish that shit on my worst enemy.”
I nodded. He went on.
“Yeah, I buried all four of them up by the old oak in my yard. Bout a mile from here.”
“All four?” I was confused.
“Yeah…when I reached the front porch Mavis, my wife, got ahold of me. And as I was trying to fight her off, my granddaughter ran down the steps…” his lip curled. He whetted his lips, “She ran down the steps and got to my two great grandkids before I could… They were five and six years old.”
He broke down a bit. I was fighting off the urge to do the same.
“Jesus, Frank, I’m sorry.”
“Ain’t your fault. Blame the phones. Blame the ones who did this.”
“Who did this? Do you know? How far does it go? The county? The world?”
“Don’t know, Will. The phones went down and The TV signals left almost as fast as my family changed. Far as I know, you and me might be the only two left on the earth. I ain’t got the answers, but I do know one thing, stay away from town.”
“What? Why?”
“Out here, there aren’t many of those sick people, but in the city…just don’t go there.” I went to speak but he cut me off. “Just promise me, you wont go there.” And I did. Before I could even speak again things shifted drastically.
“Do you believe in god, Will?” I couldn’t even answer. I just sort of let my mouth fall agape hoping something would come out that wasn’t “ummmm?”
“It’s a simple question,” Frank said.
“No it isn’t,” I was quick to respond to that. I truly believed it wasn’t. For in the mind of the biggest atheist or the most devout priest there was always doubt. Especially so when one faced one’s own mortality. And you’d never convince me otherwise. Frank went on,
“I didn’t believe in god before all this. I didn’t. I told my wife I did, I went to church every Sunday with her. Lived the lie. I’ve seen war, Will. My buddies killed right in front of me. Boys that had no business being there, torn to pieces by bombs and gunfire. And I always wondered, Why them and not me? Why anyone? But when I laid the bodies of my family in the ground out there in my backyard I started to believe. I had to believe, because the thought of believing those four souls I so loved were now nothing at all but mush and flesh beneath the earth, food for worms, was more than I could bear. I had to believe they were waiting for me somewhere. Maybe in some people’s eyes that makes me weak or stupid, or whatever, but I’m too old to give a shit anymore.
And besides, it’s not like there’s many folks left to judge anyway.”
I completely understood. I felt the same as him about it. I nodded to him. And then the darkness came in his words,
“My family though, they aint under that tree anymore. The thing came and took them away.” My blood ran cold. A chill tingled my flesh as I tried desperately to formulate the simple, redundant question.
“The thing?” I knew damn well what he meant.
“The thing that comes at night and eats the sick.”
“You’ve seen it?” I tried to hide my sick curiosity.
“I don’t know what I saw. There’s no words to describe it. But I have to wonder, when it runs out of rotten food, will it come for fresh meat? Will it come for me?”
“That’s not going to happen. You can stay with me. It’s safe, I got lots of dogs.”
“Dogs? Ha! You teach them to shoot or what?”
“Well no, the dead, they’re afraid of them.”
“You call them the dead?…Jesus Christ, son, you watch too many movies. And, no, those things out there, they ain’t afraid of dogs. And if they ain’t afraid of dogs, I know damn well that thing ain’t afraid of them either. I buried what was left of two of my beagles to prove it. The neighbors turned almost the same time as my family and the took care of my dogs before I even knew what was going on. They kill anything that moves, period. Dogs, sure as shit ain’t no exception.” As he further mumbled and grumbled the absurdities of my claim I couldn’t help but question them myself. Had I imagined the whole thing? Or were my dogs just more intimidating? No. June was a bioweapon. She turned zombies into soup.
“Frank, you don’t understand, I…”
“Son, Will, I appreciate the hospitalities but you need to just go. I got nothing left. I don’t know you. I like you, but I really don’t know you. Everything I knew, everyone I knew and loved is dead. And I gotta tell you, this ain’t how I pictured it.”
“Pictured what?”
“The end.” And just like that, he pulled a handgun under his chin and he painted the ceiling with himself. I wasn’t ready for that, but then again how do you prepare yourself for seeing someone end their life right in front of you. You see it in movies, and even then it can be hard to watch, but no amount of makeup or CGI laden effects can mirror the real thing. I watched his brain matter drip off the ceiling, back onto his lifeless body and I couldn’t help but picture all the memories that were still floating and slowly dying inside them. Did he go to heaven? Was he somewhere else? Was he holding the hands of his wife and grandkids? The horror of the existential questions plagued me like the dark menaces they were, but in the end, there was just nothing else I could do. I grabbed a large bag and filled it with fireworks, lowering myself into some childlike state to try and forget that a man was now dead in the same room as me. For old time sake, I signed a waiver at the door, and then lit it on fire, throwing it into a box of roman candles.
“Goodbye, Frank,” I whispered as I walked out the door. The dogs and I walked somberly back to the truck. The whole trip back down the road was filled with a symphony of cracks and bangs and whistles as one of my childhood memories went up in flames beyond the pines. I didn’t know him very well, but I feel like it’s what Frank would’ve wanted. I sat in the truck and watched the black smoke roll along the sky, trying to catch a glimpse of his soul in the serpentine grays that danced into the clouds. Hopefully he found his peace.
The drive home was profoundly odd. There really wasn’t a damn thing inside my head except the ring of the gunshot that had sent my only human friend into the ether. I didn’t even go straight home. I sort of drove around in circles and then swung into the parking lot of a tiny, country church I had passed many times in my life, but never entered. I walked in and plopped myself down three pews back from the front, because that’s what you do in church, you pick a good spot not too far back and not to far forward. Front row, you will more than likely feel like you’re being directly judged by the pastor and back row you? You might as well be holding a sign that says “I don’t want to be here.” But I really didn’t want to be there. So why was I there? And I’m sure it was quite the sight….a man of no religious convictions, donning a horned mask with dogs sitting on either side of him itching their fleas. Didn’t seem like proper church educate, but there wasn’t exactly anyone around to tell me to leave now was there? Besides, these mutts needed to repent before it was too late.
I’m not sure what I was doing there exactly. I just sat there in utter silence, staring at the crucifix on a gorgeous stained glass window behind the alter. I tried to pray, but I really had no idea what to pray for. What was I going to ask for? Maybe I was waiting for a sign? For a voice to just say “Hey, man, keep going.” But you’d be shocked to know I heard absolutely nothing but panting dogs and scratching claws. My mind started thumbing back through the book of my life, rudely stopping on pages of the worst days of all. Deaths, mainly. There’s was nothing quite like death that would bring the good old existential crisis front and center. Why were we here? What were we? Where do we go when we die? Is there a God? The questions circled like vultures waiting for the perfect phase of rot and rancidity to perch and consume, only stopping when they reached the bone beneath. As I spiraled further out into a feeling I couldn’t put a name to, I pulled out my handgun. I put it under my chin and just pulled the trigger. Yep, I did it. No hesitation, no regrets, just nothing in my head but escape. Sweet, sweet escape. I was leaving this world back to the dogs, they’d earned it, and would do far better with it than we ever did. Goodbye. I had actually gone through with it. I was following in the footsteps of Frank. Cashing in all my chips and going home. But there was nothing. No flash of pain. No darkness. It was just a hollow click, a flinch, and a gasp. There I still sat, very much alive, gun still under my chin looking confused. Had an angel stopped the bullet? Did god intervene in this holy house? I held high hopes for such things until I flipped the gun over to see the clip was empty. In fact the clip wasn’t even there at all. It was lying back on the kitchen table at the house where I’d left it…I’d never been good at much in my life, sports, academics, sex, pretty much anything. I would now have to add ‘killing myself’ to that list. God I was pathetic. As I dwelled in the thoughts of all that, my returning faith, if any, was shot down by a single question… If god was there, why the hell did he decide to leave me here? Certainly there was someone far better qualified to try and save the human race? And maybe that was just it, the human race didn’t need saving, because it wasn’t here any longer. This was the end, perhaps. Every idea had been thought, every song sung, every picture taken, and every sight seen. We had reached our apex, not only creatively but culturally, there was no such thing as perfection because perfection was nothing more than an opinion in the minds of every human brain that floated through this life. There were a billion ideas of what perfection meant as a whole. And not a single one of them was exactly the same. Yet we tried to force that to happen. Everyday through our thoughts and prayers, and worthless passive aggressive memes and Facebook posts. I would add our actions to that list, but no one did shit. If I had a dollar for every dipshit trying to save the world while typing from the comfort of their couch, I’d be a millionaire. We all sat around, waiting for things to happen. Maybe…just maybe, humans were finished. But Frank was out there, surely there were others…right? I let out the sigh to beat all sighs as I tossed the gun with self disgust into the lap of the pew in front of me. The dogs just continued to sit there and pant and scratch, blissfully unaware that I’d almost took myself out of the equation and left them to their own devices. I tried letting my mind go adrift, but it just kept getting washed right back to the thoughts of Frank and what he’d said…the phones had started this all. Had they? Surely not. He led me to believe that some signal, a noise or video or both, evoked some madness in the brain of whomever watch or listened to it on social media. Sounded like something out of a movie, or a shitty zombie novel written
in first person. If it were to be believed, it seemed I had inadvertently dodged more than one bullet by destroying my electronics. But there was more to it. It wasn’t like the ones who stuck up their middle fingers at technology weren’t affected by all this. Frank’s story proved that. There were missing pieces. Unfortunately I had no idea where to find them. I was basically right back at square one, confused and holding a single, proverbial puzzle piece in my hand. So, with nothing left to ponder at the moment, I left the church, not knowing whether I’d exited for the better or for the worse.
Once again I started driving around in circles, the dogs didn’t seem to mind. They watched the countryside go by as they donned those doggy smiles and sniffed the air for anything and everything. How I once again envied them. Though I’m sure they had their ideas of how things just weren’t the same, there was always light and life in them. To them, every single cloud, no matter how bleak, not only had a silver lining, but had sunshine punching holes right through it.
I made a new turn and headed for something I had yet to see since the dawn of the infection, a main road. Up to that point all I had traversed were the “safe” side roads. But now I was headed straight for Route 40. Okay it wasn’t the interstate, but it was once the national road, years and years back, so it definitely counted. I have to admit, the closer I got to that route the more my anxiety crept. Frank had warned me to stay away from town, perhaps the main roads were just as unsafe.
