Cleaver

by McCloud, Wes

  “No…you don’t want to see her.” She glared at me as if I had some nerve telling her what she could and couldn’t do, but in the end she walked away without a word on her lips. I didn’t follow her at first. I just stood there in the barn, letting the godawful flashbacks from earlier cut me further in half.

  Fifteen minutes later, I found her sitting on the picnic table with a group of the dogs gathered round her. She patted their heads but no smile snuck its way out. I sat beside her, staring off into the fields beyond.

  “How?” She asked. It was a broad question, I had no idea to what she was referring.

  “How, what?”

  She pointed out towards the mounds of the dead.

  “How? You killed them all….” She looked right at me, “By yourself?”

  “Yes and no.” She looked even more confused. “The dogs killed them, I just helped.” I went on to explain, as simply as I could, of how the dog’s saliva was deadly to the zombies. As I wrapped up the story, she just stared at me blankly. I’m sure it sounded insane, even to a teenager. She looked back to the dogs and started petting them once again.

  “So…we’re safe here?” I really didn’t even know the true answer to that, but I just winged it.

  “I guess so…yeah. Plus I have food, and electric, and running water.” I took a good look at her as I spoke. “Speaking of running water, we should probably get you out of those clothes.” Those words had barely left my mouth when she started pulling off her tattered nightgown. “Whoa! Whoa! No!” I spat out as I pulled her garment back down on her. She looked at me as if I were crazy. This fifteen year old had absolutely no qualms with stripping in front of a man she’d just met. It told me even more than I wanted to know of her past. I led her back to the house and into the bathroom.

  “I’m gonna close this door, and you can wash up in the tub. I’ll try and find you some new clothes, okay?” She nodded and I left her to it. I wasn’t exactly expecting the company of an adolescent girl in the near future, so I quickly found out that finding her anything more than a Star Wars T-shirt and a pair of basketball shorts was out of the question. Of course, I had no bra or underwear for her either, I was going to have to raid some of the local houses again or she was going to be looking like a jail-bait, Suicide Girl sans tattoos.

  After leaving the clothes in the bathroom with her, I walked back outside and started surveilling the damage once again. The thing that was the most odd to me was the absolute lack of turkey vultures. If a damn rabbit was dead up the road there’d be seven of them fighting over it, but there wasn’t one amongst this pile of a thousand corpses. It was a Vegas-Style smorgasbord for scavengers, but not even a crow was piddling about. It wasn’t the first time I’d noticed it either. None of the bodies had drawn carrion birds in in the past. It made me wonder if the meat was tainted and they knew it. But it really made no sense, most viruses didn’t jump from species to species. I mean, it’s not unheard of, but it didn’t seem possible. Maybe it simply made them sick. And if that were the case, perhaps they’d died off clear at the beginning of all this from consuming the flesh of the dead. I don’t know, it was all speculation in the mind of a man whose vast knowledge of biological organisms was garnered from Resident Evil games. And the more I stood there thinking about all of it, the more a terror grew. An epiphany hits me, and it’s not a good one. Though I’ve seen no signs of scavengers, there is in fact one out there. The deadeater. It was still at large, and had been out of my mind for a while, that was until that very moment. I’m surrounded by a plethora of death, enough zombies to keep that thing pleased for weeks…and they’re all in my yard. I went into freak-out mode as I watched the sun caressing the treeline. I only knew the beast to come out at night, and I only had a couple hours to get these mangled bodies relocated.

  I fired up the tractor and I’m going around scooping as many body parts into the front loader as I can as the dogs surround me, playing and barking, blissfully unaware of the danger I feel is coming our way. The effort got increasingly fruitless as I watched the sky turn from amber to sapphire, but I just keep going, dumping each load of death clear out past the creek where the beast had claimed so many bodies before. By the time it’s dark enough to turn the tractor lights on, I decided to call it quits. I returned back to the barn with the disappointing knowledge that I’d only managed to clean up less than a quarter of the mess. I see Maddie once again. She’s sitting on the back patio wearing the clothes I’d given her. The shorts and shirt are huge on her; she’s swimming in them, but it was better than a blood soaked nightgown. That girl looked completely different, I swear I didn’t even recognize her at first. Her hair was no longer a matted rag of macerated fluids and the flesh of her face looked healthy in the glow of the porch light. She’d been reborn into something she may have looked like before this hell had broken loose. There was an uneasy look on her face, and rightfully so. I don’t think I’d be set at ease watching a man scramble to dump hundreds of bodies before dusk. I skip the small talk and go right to the problem at hand.

  “We need to get inside. We need to get all these dogs inside. Can you help me round them up?” She nods with a fearful curiosity. There’s no time to explain it to her.

  For the next hour, we go to the ridiculous task of rounding up every last dog we can find on the property and cram them into the house. They’re upstairs. They’re downstairs. They’re in the basement, hell some of them are in closets, but if that thing out there has the slightest hunger for anything living, I can’t risk even one dog falling victim to it. That was all I needed, a beast in the darkness craving dogmeat. By the time we accomplish the job, I start wondering if it smells worse outside or in the house, but it’s something I simply can do nothing about. I’m quite sure by the time the morning would come I’d be spending hours just cleaning my floors of the piss and shit that I’m sure was going to rain down all night long.

  I grab the shotgun and hunker down as Maddie and I kill all the lights and then the generator. Our asses both find a seat in the living room and I light a lantern on the coffee table. Silence sets in, if you want to call silence the sound of a hundreds of panting dogs scratching thousands of fleas. Maddie hasn’t a word on her lips. She’s doing this nervous toe curling thing that immediately makes me realize she’s barefoot which is a thing that can’t be fixed with a men’s size twelve boot. I’m sure her anxiety wasn’t helped by the fact that I now had the shotgun laid across my lap and my mask back on. And then she finally asks it,

  “What’s happening?”

  “Precautions, kid.” Apparently I was calling her kid now. I guess that was okay considering she was young enough to be mine.

  “From what? I thought you said we were safe?”

  “We are…as long as we stay in here…I think.” Wow, I was a shiny ball of reassurance. She starts looking around from where she’s sitting, over her shoulder and out the windows. I have since drawn all the curtains so it’s a futile act on her part.

  “Is something out there?” I honestly feel like spinning her some bullshit story of how that was just my nightly routine around there, but since she showed up wearing a dog collar I’m sure she can handle the truth. I go into the explanation of the deadeater, a thing I haven’t even seen with my own eyes and is only backed up by the words of a dead man reduced to ash in a fireworks store. Much to my surprise, it doesn’t make the situation any better. I swear I can feel her heartbeat pounding down through the chair leg and into my foot now as her nervous toe curling turns into her bouncing her leg.

  “Daddy said he saw it.” Her words make my skin crawl. I can’t even open my mouth before she goes on. “In the graveyard, digging up the graves.” I can barely process what I’m hearing.

  “He saw it? What did it look like?”

  “He said…it looked like a big pile of dead things.” Wow that’s not what I wanted to hear. Of course I didn’t really know what I wanted to hear. Was I expecting it to look like a zebra or giraffe or some shit? Any numbe
r of non-menacing things? Of course I wasn’t, it drug off dead bodies for god’s sake.

  Hours pass. Maddie isn’t much for talking, at least not yet anyway. She answers me with one word most of the time and doesn’t keep the conversation going. And you know what? I really didn’t mind. It was nice talking to someone alive even if it wasn’t that in depth. No one was looking at their cellphones or the TV. It was just two people and a lantern. This had to have been what life was like back in the day. Back before electric, back when the narratives of the world were only told through spoken and written word. Mankind had apparently come full circle, returning to a past that few alive ever knew. Maybe we needed this.

  I asked her what school she went to. That was met with a shrug. The more questions I asked, the more I began to realize that this girl’s tribulations had gone on long before the dawn of the dead. I managed not to get what I thought was too intrusive because there was this part of me that just didn’t want to know the ghosts of her past. I wasn’t sure if she was being held captive along with other girls her age, or if they were part of some religious sex cult. She named off her sisters one by one, and seemed to mourn them as she did so, but she never clarified if they were her biological kin. She also talked about “daddy” a few more times, but it became increasingly evident that he was not her real father when she made mention of several other daddies she’d lived with. A fact that only unnerved me further. I thought about the others that had fled the camper. The ones who’d run the other way. Certainly one, or a few of her daddies had been amongst that group. I didn’t know if they’d made it or not, but there was this part of me that hoped they hadn’t.

  Midnight starts closing in and I decided to change the dressing on my new wounds. I dump an armload of first aid supplies on the couch and peel away the bandages on my forearm. Maddie tries to conceal a tiny gasp that I know is from the reveal of the obvious bite wound beneath the gauze. The girl is going into panic mode.

  “They bit you? When were you bit?” She started going off like she was expecting me to change any second and eat her face.

  “I’m immune.”

  “But…but, but Daddy said when you get bit, you turn into them.”

  “Yeah, well, daddy doesn’t know everything does he? This is like the fifth time I’ve been bit.”

  “Does it hurt?”

  I let out a laugh. I couldn’t help it.

  “Uhhh, yeah. It hurts.”

  “So…if they bite me, I won’t change?” That question made me wonder if she’d actually seen anyone change. If she hadn’t, I envied her at that moment.

  “I wouldn’t test that theory, kid. You’ll change.”

  “How do you know?”

  I had to pull out the big guns.

  “Because I watched one of your sisters change right in front of me, okay? She was bit, she turned.”

  “What happened to her?”

  I paused. I wasn’t going to go that route.

  “She…she just didn’t make it. You know that.”

  An eerie silence crept in. She opens up,

  “But what if I get bit, and I don’t turn? That would make me special like you.”

  “Again, I wouldn’t test that, and I’m not special. I was in the right place at the right time. I’m just a guy who got lucky…If you wanna call this luck.” It shut her up. For a moment, anyway. She pulled her legs up and laid across the couch for awhile as I finished up my wound dressing. Just when I think maybe she’s asleep she speaks,

  “Cleaver?”

  “What?”

  “Are you my daddy now?”

  Hearing those words come from a fifteen year old girl’s mouth was off-putting. It churned up strange emotions.

  “Kid, you just get some sleep, okay?” Was she asking me if I was her family now, or was she asking if I was her master? Either one honestly didn’t sit well with me as thoughts of the future came rushing in. Where did things go from here? How was this going to end? I wasn’t exactly going to send her off to school on Monday morning and come to her soccer practices. I was responsible for someone now, in the apocalypse no less. Goddamn, most of my life I’d only been responsible for one sorry ass and it belonged to me. Suddenly I realized why I never wanted kids, it was terrifying, like genuinely horrific. How was I going to keep us fed? For god’s sake, most of the food was going to be spoiled soon, even in the stores. Canned food would only sustain us so long. And winter was coming. I could swear I almost heard its chilling laughter, taunting me, telling me my pathetic ass was going to be dead before spring. It was right then and there I regretted not paying attention when grandma planted that garden every year. I had zero survival skills. I didn’t know how to grow things, can things, kill things, and I didn’t have YouTube around to show me. I just see this bleak future of this girl and I eating Vienna sausages for several years till we both die from sodium overdoses. Being killed by the dead was starting to sound better and better with every passing minute. It took me quite some time to pull myself out of that dark hole. It was the same type of spiraling shit storm you would get yourself into when thinking about the endlessness of the universe. You just had to slam on the brakes and turn around before you went over the cliff.

  “Cleaver?” Her voice sends a pang through me.

  “Yeah.”

  “Are you going to keep the bad thing from getting us?”

  “Yeah?” I wouldn’t call that a lie, but it wasn’t exactly accurate. If that thing decided it wanted us, it was going to get us. It dug up graves. The side of my house wasn’t going to be much of an obstacle for it.

  “Cleaver?” I was starting to like her better when she didn’t talk us much.

  “Yes?”

  “What’s Star Wars?” She had no idea what the shirt she was wearing meant. It made me smile, though I have to admit I was a little offended. What’s Star Wars? That’s like asking what’s birthday cake? Or who’s Jesus? This kid really was sheltered. I answered her.

  “It’s a story that happened a long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away.”

  “Tell it to me?” And so I did, the best I could anyway. I told it as it was told to me, starting with episode four, but I barely even got halfway to Empire when I realize I’d been talking to myself. She’s fast asleep, and I’m hoping dreaming of things that have absolutely nothing to do with where she currently is. I found myself trying to follow suit but around the 2 a.m. mark I notice the dogs are starting to stir. The hair starts raising up on all their backs and so does mine. I fruitlessly start trying to shush them as I walk to the front windows. Whimpers transform into growls. I was scared shitless. I really was. I cracked open the window and try to listen out through the darkness since I can’t see a damn thing beyond the scope of the yard. I’m still hissing at the dogs, hoping like hell this all blows over without waking Maddie up.

  “Clea…ver” I heard her groggy voice. Shit.

  “Go back to sleep, kid. It’s okay.” But judging by the actions of the dogs, it was very clearly not okay. I didn’t even have time to think and she’s breathing down my neck.

  “Is it out there?”

  “I told you to go back to sleep.” June and Jeff are mashing up against me, trying to get a look outside. June, out of all of them, seems to be the most pissed. She’s letting out this growl that is vibrating right through my ribs. ALL these dogs are agitated. But they’re not afraid. It’s like they want blood and they want it now. For a second, I thought about just opening the door and letting all of them out in one giant horde, but I just couldn’t risk it. So I just stood there, watching, waiting, thinking this thing is going to come running up at any minute and blast headfirst right through the front wall of my house. I hate to play the part of the asshole and build you up with all this suspense, but nothing happened that night. I kept watch at that window, every now and again hearing odd things across the field but in the end, nothing came into the yard or near the bodies that still littered the property. At some point I ended up falling asleep in the corne
r of the room.

  Are We Having Gun Yet?

  I woke up to the pressure of four dogs and one teenager laying across me like I’m a discount store air mattress. We’d survived the night. I was happy about that. But there was the issue of the hundreds of bodies still lining my yard. It was going to be a long day of moving corpses and I wasn’t sure if I’d be able to get them all gone before the next sunset. I roust Maddie and made her breakfast and go about firing up the generator and letting loose the two hundred dogs from my house. Yeah, the house was an absolute disaster. I spent the first half of the morning cleaning the floor of piss and shit and some spots that I couldn’t even identify. Then came the usual chore of filling the dog bowls, but I dropped the bag as soon as I hit the front yard. I look to the south and there’s a black plume of smoke bellowing high into the heavens. It gives me flashbacks of setting the fireworks store afire, but this is much closer to home. I run to the edge of the bodies and see it out there in the field; a charred pile in the shape of a turned camper. Ten minutes later, I’m out there with a group of the dogs and a fire extinguisher, putting out the last of the lingering flames. There isn’t much left of the vehicle. It’s a hollowed out aluminum shell that is a punch-in-the-face reminder that Maddie’s “Daddy” or “Daddies” were still at large. I felt like they’d returned to this thing to destroy any evidence of what they were doing inside of it. Though I’m not sure why, it wasn’t like I was going to call the cops on them. The whole situation makes the journey back across the field a solid mind-twist as I picture a cross hair from a sniper rifle turning my head into pink mist before I get back to the safety of my own house. Maybe I was being paranoid.

  When I get back to the yard there’s Maddie, bless her heart, she’s filling all the dog bowls. I didn’t even give the slightest inclination that I wanted her to do that, but she did it just the same. I could get used to a helping hand around this place, but unfortunately, the main task of that day is something she’s just not going to be able to help me with. I thanked her for feeding the dogs, but explained,