Cleaver

by McCloud, Wes

  One swing leads into him grabbing the sword by the handle and ripping it from my hands. I see a flash and he’s on the ground and June is just laying into him like nothing I’ve ever seen. He drops my sword quick to try and defend himself from June’s vicious onslaught. But it’s just not enough. The monster springs up and flips June over. In one fell swoop he bites the back of her neck and instantly paralyzes her. I hear a deafening yelp and see her limp body being thrown to the ground. He centers himself right back on me, but I’ve already gone back into my dark place. With one hack, I decapitated him in a violent display of blind retribution. I expect him to fall to his knees…he doesn’t. I’m now whipped into a flurry of confusion as I am forced to fight the headless body of my enemy. He’s clawing and flailing, but without his head, he’s easier to dispatched. I hack his leg off and he hits the ground hard; he’s still fighting, kicking and slicing the air with his claws. I go into berserker mode and chop every limb off his body until he’s nothing but a twitching torso that I stab into the ground. Everything is dead quiet except for the tiny sounds of the body parts writhing like beheaded fish in the weeds surrounding. After a minute, they die down and the thoughts of June come screaming back to me. I find her several feet away in a pitiful pile. The strongest, bravest dog among them is soon in my arms and I’m weeping like a baby once again. She’s gone. Not one thread of life remains inside of her. I run my hand through the giant bite wound on the back of her neck and just screamed out. I’m sure Maddie even heard it back at the house. I’m trembling. I want to gather every piece of that green thing up, grind them in a blender, and force feed it to that beast hiding like a coward deep in the depths of the dead. But I don’t. I gather June and gently place her into the back of the Bronco and I go home.

  I’m escorted back into the driveway by the same batch of dogs that lead me out into that hell. Maddie is standing there in my headlights looking terrified. I’m sure she’s waiting for it. For me to come out of that truck and scream at her, admonishing her for letting the dogs from the safety of the house.

  “Cleaver?...Cleaver? I’m sorry. I’m sorry.” It’s all I hear as I shut the engine off, but I ignore her. I’m not mad at her. I just…it’s done. What’s done is done. I gather up June in my arms and start walking towards the backyard. “Oh…no…no…what happened? Is she hurt?” I hear Maddie sniveling.

  “Just get me a shovel.” I was cold to her. She’s hadn’t killed this dog, but there was that one tiny part deep inside me that did the math and followed the chain of events, and she was the killer. I had to suppress that. It wasn’t fair. What is it about death that makes you want to get that person or pet you loved in the ground as fast as you can? Maybe it’s the weight of the grief…It stands on your chest like a lead elephant, sucking out every part of what’s left of the life inside you through the ducts in your eyes. As soon as you cover that memory with dirt, that elephant takes one foot off of you, and somehow, some way, things get a little less hopeless. Maybe it’s a selfish act, I’ll never know, the speed at which you bury a loved one. But it’s there. The faster you do it, the faster you can heal…or something like that.

  I don’t think I’ve ever dug a hole that fast in my life. My grief and my rage is driving the shovel into the dirt with the malice of a razorblade through flesh. Jeff is there beside me, whining and nudging at June’s lifeless body. He doesn’t understand why she isn’t getting up and it’s ripping me apart inside.

  “Get him. Take him in the house. PLEASE.” I growl out to Maddie. She did as she was told. Suddenly, I’m all alone, digging a grave, and as soon as I realize that fact my tears start in again. I laid her to rest ‘neath the old, maple tree that grandma buried her cat Rosy under. Part of me was afraid I’d dig that poor cat up but luckily I didn’t. I shovel the last bit of dirt and pack the pile down and that was that. It was if she’d never existed. Death is so strange. It will never be anything but. A thing dies and all that seemingly remains of it are the memories of the people or animals that it touched. And then after that? Nothing.

  Through my tear-blurred vision I see a flower land on her grave and I suddenly realize Maddie is standing next to me. She’s crying along with me and nothing quite rips your heart from your chest like communal crying. It’s like this gorgeous and terrible thing all wrapped in one. I pull her close to my side and squeeze her.

  “This isn’t your fault.” I said. She didn’t say it was, but she didn’t have to.

  “Is she in heaven? Is she with Pete?” The simple, child-like question sends a pang through my heart. “Yeah…yeah, kid. She’s in heaven. She’s with all the other dogs and your sisters.”

  I Dream of Greenie

  The dawn broke with fiery red sky that matched the wrath I held in my heart. I spent the twilight hours of daybreak searching for something specific, and by the grace of the powers that be, I found it. The thundering call of a diesel engine resounded as I rounded the backside of the quarry property and plowed the gas of an oil tanker up the rocky incline where June breathed her last. I laid on the accelerator until I reached the summit and let the beast idle there at the edge of the doom pit. Together, Maddie and I stood, looking over into the sea of bodies that seemed twice as vast in the daylight. In unison, we look into one another’s eyes through the glass of our masks. Yes, OUR masks. Maddie had found her own gasmask in the cab of the tanker truck. She was elated with it. She donned it and pointed to it proudly. We are now a masked duo, about to do what duos do, wreck shit.

  Fear is in her eyes as she beholds the sea of rot below, but no words come forth. I had made that same stare not that long ago. We didn’t bring any dogs with us for obvious reasons. My sights soon homed in on the eggsacks that held the green fiends ( wow, I needed a new name for them. It sounded too much like green beans. I’ll just call them greens ) There were far more than I had first noticed. They lined the better part of the quarry rim and numbered somewhere near fifty. They had to be destroyed. Just ONE had almost done me in, so a small army of them spelled the end of every living thing left on this planet. I had no idea what they were, and I no longer cared. They were vile, killing machines, and that was enough for me to sign their death certificate. Maddie clutched her sword and kept a look out down the hill for me as I started dousing the entire area with oil as far as the hoses would reach. To douse the remaining eggsacks, I let Maddie fill buckets up that I proceeded to dump over each and every one of them. The process took hours, but in the end was beyond worth it as I struck a match and watched the whole goddamn thing go up in flames. We retreated to the bottom of the haul road and, together, watched the sky turn black with crude oil burn off. Even at the bottom of the hill I could feel the intensity of the heat on high. I listened to the sweet music of crackling and popping and then we hit the ground as the tanker truck itself erupted into an explosion of flames that rained down ash around us.

  “Did we kill the bad things?” Maddie mumbled through her mask.

  “We did kid, you and me, we did it.” It felt good but yet it didn’t. Something felt off. All I could think of was, if there were more of these things around, they had to be stopped. I could only stand there and pray this pit was the one and only anomaly of this whole damn outbreak.

  As we went to turn and leave, a terrible scream rang out over the roaring inferno. We turned and we saw it, there, bursting through the smoking treeline at the base of the hill was a green. One had escaped. He was running at breakneck speed to get away from the heat.

  “Cleaver…is that?” I hear Maddie mumble in fear.

  “Yeah,” was all I could say as watched with a growing dread tugging at my gut. This thing proceeds to leap across a twenty foot creek gap and run on across the bottom, completely oblivious to our presence. I was froze there for a moment as the thoughts of last night’s terror rained down upon me. But I had to act, and now.

  “C’mon!” I hissed. I took off running along the fence-line and up another hill ahead, hoping to cut this monster off before it could get any
further. My hope is taking the high ground, hey, it worked for Obi Wan in Episode 3. We crest the hill together and I immediately hit the dirt, pulling Maddie down there with me. With wide eyes, we watch as the green below stops a stones throw away from a pack of normal zombies. There’s five of them, roaming the opposing bottom along the creek. They all stop as soon as they notice the green hominid glaring at them. What now happens is this uncomfortable stand off, not unlike the old spaghetti westerns. The group of zombies and the green one are not moving one muscle nor are they making a peep. They almost seem to be fascinated with one another. From our perch on high, we’re both engrossed in the same sick fascination, our eyes darting between them, waiting for something, anything, to happen.

  “Cleaver?” Maddie finally coos.

  “Wait…” I put a hand up. I don’t know exactly what the hell it is I’m telling her to wait on. Two solid minutes seemed to have gone by and finally, the green one just charges them. And you know what the zombies did? In some bizarre act of submission, they all dropped to their knees and let the green one annihilate them. I watched with utter dread and confusion, as the beast went around, slashing and biting till every last zombie was on the ground and laid to waste. And then there was silence in the bottom. Maddie and I looked to one another and then back down in time to see the green beast, lumbering off. The thing walked like it was one step or two back on the human chart of evolution, with this slightly hunched, forwarding gait, arms leading the way.

  “C’mon, C’mon,” I jump up and whisper to her. Together we run down the hill and reach the pack of fallen zombies. I rip up my mask and start walking around them, surveying the damage. They’re covered in gaping wounds and bite marks, and I wonder for a moment if they looked to the green as I looked to them, as my enemy, my ender, my omega. No…something was off. I would never drop to me knees in the presence of any of these things. So why had they? And then a thought crosses my mind. A hypothesis begins brewing and before I can even open my mouth to convey it to Maddie it comes into fruition…and I despair. The bodies at my feet begin to twitch and writhe, Maddie jumps back and lets out a tiny shriek as the flesh upon the dead begin to transform into a sickening shade of green. The meat upon their faces quickly rots away to reveal the bone beneath…The dead are rising once more, they are becoming something new. Green zombies.

  “Kill ‘em! Kill ‘em! Hack them up!” I start commanding to her as I cut the head off the first one that tries to get to its feet. I have to admit I was proud of that girl, she didn’t even hesitate. Together, we began carving up the group before they had the chance to attack us. Minutes later, we were panting, standing among a pile of twitching body parts. I went around stabbing them through the heart just for good measure.

  “You okay?” All she could do was cast me this shaky nod. “We have to go. C’mon. We can’t let that thing get away.” We took off along the creek-line and then into the woods. I had no idea how far it had gotten but all I could think of was the damage it could potentially do if we didn’t stop it. We were literally tracking Patient Zero of the second wave of this zombie apocalypse. It was the next stage in their evolution, a super zombie immune to the bite of the infected dogs and far faster and stronger. I was in absolute panic mode. The fate of what was left of humanity was now resting on the shoulders of an ex-insurance processor, and a fifteen year old girl, wielding homemade swords…the world was screwed.

  I ran and ran till I finally had to stop and catch some wind.

  “You see him?!” I hissed out as I watch Maddie’s head darting round the forest. She shakes her head no. “Shit…here.” I give her the handgun from under my belt. “You know how to use that?” I asked, as if I did. I see her fearing eyes glaring through her mask. “The safety is off. Just point and pull the trigger, okay?” She grabs it but is still looking at me like she has no clue. I sighed. “Okay remember when Solo blasted Greedo in the cantina?” She nodded. “That thing out there is Greedo and you’re Solo. Okay?” She nodded with the slightest bit more confidence. “Good. Okay. Let’s go.” And so we did. We ran and we ran and we ran. Eyes searching like two hawks for the last mouse on earth, but we saw nothing but trees and, in the end, corn. We’d lost the trail.

  A few hours later, I just led us back home. We needed a plan and now. Maddie is tending to the dogs and where am I? I’m around the back in my lawnchair, staring at the fresh dirt of June’s grave. I don’t know what I’m doing. Grieving. Pondering. Praying. I guess it was a mix of all that and then some. But really my mind is on that green bastard out there. All I can picture is he’s turned about fifty zombies into super zombies already, and those fifty zombies are out there turning another fifty and so on. What I’m trying to say is, we’re done. My only hope is to get that toppled gun running and set up a barrier around the yard to fend them off….but why? What is the point of all this now? The darkness really sat in thick right then. I guess it was a taste of reality, I have no idea but the question did loom - Why? What if we were the last ones on earth? Did we even really matter? Did any of it matter? Humans? What we did, the stories we told, the things we built, all of it…it was nothing if no one was there to remember it, to see it, to touch it. I felt at one point the world would belong to the dogs, but even they didn’t have a claim on it now that the greens would roam the earth. I sort of liked the idea of a planet of dogs. Now it would be millions of green monstrosities…and what would they do? Seriously, what was left when everything was dead except for yourself and others like you? Would they just cannibalize one another and then nothing? Wow, the ponderances of the human brain…they were unending and morose at best.

  Through the fog of all these thoughts I heard a whine…I reached out my hand, expecting to feel Jeff’s head go underneath it, but nothing was there. I looked around…there were no dogs around me at all. I raised a brow. The whine came back. It was muffled. Surely it was one of the dogs out front. The sound was just bouncing off something…but it seemed so close. Like it was right there. And then it happened. The ground in front of me moved. I was sickened and surprised. Expecting a groundhog, or the like, to come popping from the ground, unknowingly and ignorantly desecrating the grave of one of the few friends I ever had in this life. The whining got louder and the ground broke apart. I fell backwards over my chair as fear swallowed me whole at the sight of a dog rising from the ground like the undead thing I thought her to be. June was alive. Dread and absolute elation turn me into this blubbering mess that reaches out and grabs her paws and pulls her back into the land of the living. She’s covered in dirt and trembling, and so am I.

  “Oh god. Oh my god,” I just remember chanting that over and over as I held her and rocked her and wondered if life was surely a dream now. That I’d been killed by that green zombie and this was the last flash of light my brain had to show me. But no…this was real.

  “Help!” I finally just screamed that out. Not even sure why, it just came. Maddie comes running round the house and there’s this look of horror on her face. I really think she’d thought I’d lost my mind and dug up that dog, but when she saw her moving, she fell to her knees. I watched her face and realized that was the one and only face a human made when they saw a miracle. A true miracle. Your face melted into this euphoric state of believing. True believing. Like if there had been any doubt that god existed it was extinguished and would never return, and your heart could do nothing more than rejoice. And we cried. Together we cried and welcomed her back. We had no idea how or why it had happened, but we didn’t care. Right then, we just didn’t care. All the dogs came rushing round, circling us, barking and hopping and wagging their tails. And it was this surreal scene of absolute bliss. Something you’d only seen in the movies. And amongst this otherworldly joy Maddie looks at me and says,

  “Cleaver, God brought her back.” Maybe he did. Maybe dogs and humans weren’t finished after all. I wish this was it. That I could write THE END, right here. It would make a great high note to end on, but the threat was still out there and ti
me was ticking.

  We cleaned June up with the garden hose and I gave her a once over. The wicked wounds to her neck had healed over, leaving behind a scar surrounded by a bald patch where they’d been. I also took notice of a distinct change in her eye color. They were now a palel green hue. I watched with awe as her strength returned to her. Within an hour, she was joining the other dogs in their daily yard romping and I just sat there beside Maddie, both of us donning that same misty-eyed stare of wonderment. But then the doubts began to scratch at the back of my head. Life couldn’t be this fair. This went against everything natural that I’d ever learned in life or from a textbook. As happy as I was to see one of my best friends back with me, fear lingered. I was no scientist, but I had seen my fair share of horror movies. When something you loved came back from the dead, there was always a negative consequence. Pet Sematary, anyone? Needless to say, I was keeping one eye on her at all times from there on out. Perhaps the apocalypse had turned me into a cynical asshole, but I wasn’t taking chances. Who was I kidding? I was a cynical asshole before all this.