by David Smith
I came back with Daddy's gun as Mom was screaming and he was sawing back and forth into her arm. A little bit of blood was running down the arm of the chair, whatever was in there before he tied the tourniquet I guess and I was screaming for him to stop. Then I shot him. He turned and fell to his knees.
"Why?" He gasped for air. "We did this for you."
"You killed all those people." I told him. "And what after Mom's gone? Are you gonna feed me when I get hungry or are you gonna eat me?"
"I would never...you're my little girl."
Then I shot him again, in the head. The bullet went through him and killed Mom too. I cut him up, cooked him and ate him for as long as I could but Mom, I put her in the milk cooler. That was about a month ago I think. I'm sorry I didn't tell you before.
I just know somehow that it was his plan all along, keeping everyone in there like cattle, feeding them to each other so they could survive long enough to feed himself.
Chapter 9: The Big House
She was a step behind us and Beth was cutting her eyes over at me but not saying a word. For once in our lives, we were both speechless. I felt sorry for her but I didn't want her standing behind me with a loaded gun either, especially if she was hungry. Beth must've been thinking the same thing.
"I know you must be tired." Beth called out over her shoulder. "You want to take the lead for awhile, set the pace?" She said as nicely as I had ever heard her speak. We slowed down and Stephanie passed between us as Beth shot me a look.
The four lane passed by a guard shack, then narrowed into two lanes about a mile further and that's what we had been on for a little more than an hour when we saw the old, faded sign for I-59. Up till now there was almost nothing but pine trees and just a few skeletons lying in the road or in the high grass next to it. We had passed a couple of houses and an old cemetery surrounded by a short, decorative brick wall, barely visible behind the tall grass and vines that grew over it but that was the only thing of note up to this point.
When we made it to the top of the hill and started down the on ramp to the interstate though, there were more cars than I had ever seen. They were bumper to bumper and side by side, from the edge of the woods on one side to the other across and as far as I could see in both directions, all of them blending into each other in the haze of a distant mirage. A few skeletons lay picked clean and partially scattered laying on a few of the hoods or rooftops. There looked to be barely enough room to walk between them with the exception of a wide path heading toward the Louisiana state line from the southbound on ramp. The cars in the path were crudely stacked upside down on top of the ones alongside of it like a giant had walked down the middle of road flipping them over to make a place to walk. It made a wall that outlined the path on both sides for a mile and then curved along the ramp, up to the overpass and down the road past two gas stations, one on either side. They were both burned to the ground, the only evidence of what they used to be, the concrete curbs where cars once pulled in to fill up.
We followed the interstate from the woods for awhile, since the interstate itself was covered with cars. From the woods I could see that there were many cars with bodies still inside, rotted in the hot sun with the windows rolled up. I remember one in particular that the drivers window had been busted out. It was about three lanes deep and the driver still sat, completely eaten as far as I could see but when we passed by I could hear something moving inside. The seatbelt held the skeleton in loosely and I thought maybe there would be some small animal in the car we could catch with little effort and eat. I climbed over the hoods of the cars in the other two lanes and the bare bones started moving up and down slightly, pushing against the seat. I jumped back at first then the skull tilted forward and hung loosely. I then looked down into the car and I could see that maybe the dead hadn't been able to reach the bottom half of this one. The legs moved slowly, pushing against the floor as if it were trying to stand. Somehow, there was just enough left of the brain and spinal cord after all these years for it operate its legs, but just barely and without anything resembling intention or motive. We continued on.
We passed behind a weigh station and a little while later, came upon an open field with a few houses in the distance. It looked a lot the neighborhood Dad and I had passed through, only poorer. It wasn't till then that we started seeing the infected again. There were only three here, two there, three over there, a few by themselves walking slowly in different directions. I didn't want to draw their attention, knowing we'd have to kill them which might be noisy enough to bring more so we just watched them from the edge of the woods.
"I think as long as we stick to the woods and keep our heads low we can slip by." I said.
"Which way is the wind blowing?" Stephanie asked. "I can't even tell."
The air was stale and so hot and humid that if I had some instant coffee packs I could have wrung out a cup. I looked up at the tops of the pine trees and they were completely still. "I can't tell either."
"Well, if it's not blowing it doesn't matter right?" Stephanie asked.
"Makes sense to me." I said. "Let's go."
We continued through the woods behind the houses, keeping our distance but keeping them in view. We had to backtrack to the south to keep from passing between them but eventually crossed a narrow, washed out dirt road and was able to turn north again. After a short time, we crossed another road, paved but only one lane, and ended up in a swamp. The water looked about knee deep and a little high from the rain the night before, the stumps of several cypress trees barely holding their heads above the surface.
We moved slowly, trying not to make too much noise in the water. The ground underneath was soft and with each step my foot sunk in and was hard to pull back out which made it even harder to be quiet. Looking down, I could see mud swirling up around my knees with each step, clouding up the water which was already so dark that I couldn't see my feet. There were so many bug noises and bird sounds that the woods were alive with a droning hum that almost drowned out the grunting and cursing that both girls were making, fighting the mud and muck. Every few steps, one of us would slip or trip on a tree root and there would be a little splash to break the buzz.
"Wait." Stephanie said. "I've got to...stop and...catch my breath."
I looked around. "I think it's safe enough here."
Beth bent over with cupped hands together, scooped up water and splashed her face with it. This was the first time I realized the height difference. The water was just below our knees, Stephanie's and mine, but was a few inches above hers.
"What's that smell?" She asked, smelling the water on her hands then looking around. "It smells like when Mom would wash our clothes and wait too long to dry them."
"Ew, no." Stephanie said. "It smells like old dog pee."
"I think it's just the woods." I said. "You know, rotten leaves a stuff."
Suddenly, there was a swirl in the water, something moving just below the surface. Then, up popped a head, moving toward us through the water. It was only an inch or two long and made a tiny wake behind it as it swam. It came right at me and I brought the shotgun off my shoulder, ready to shoot. I realized I couldn't afford to make such a noise, not knowing exactly where we were or where we could escape too. So I just waited for it to get close enough and jammed the stock down on its head. Thankfully, I was lucky enough to pin it to the bottom of the swamp, its tail flipping at the surface and splashing violently. I held it there, its head buried in the mud till it suffocated then held it there a little longer to make sure. Reaching into the watery darkness with one hand and keeping pressure on its head with the other, I felt around and found its tail then pulled it up. I had seen these in a book before. Brown and black, fat and short, white showing at the edge of its mouth, it was a moccasin, a cottonmouth, one of the more poisonous snakes in the south.
"Come here." I said to Beth. "Turn around." I started to unzip her backpack.
"I don't want that in there! What if it wakes up?" She argued as
she squirmed away from me.
"It's not asleep. It's dead."
"Yeah, so were they."
"Come on. Don't be a girl. Only people come back." She just stared at me. "Do you want to eat tonight?"
It took her a minute. "Fine, but give it to me." She snatched it from me and pulled a small, folding pocket knife out of her pocket. The blade was dull but she managed to cut its head off by pressing its neck against a tree and sawing back and forth into it. The head fell with a small splash into the water then she handed me the rest of it and I put it in the back pack.
Just as I zipped it up, Stephanie screamed so loud that my heart almost stopped and took off running. If not for the water splashing higher than she was tall, I would've thought she was actually running on top of the water. Looking back to see what spooked her, I realized that the smell we had all smelled moments earlier, from that moment forward, would mean there was a cottonmouth nest nearby.
The water swirled as hundreds of little black heads poked up and glided toward us across the surface. I don't actually know how many it was but it might as well have been a thousand. We ran as fast as we could. I had never been that scared before. I knew I could outrun the dead as long as I had a place to run and flat ground but, running in water from things that live in the water, I wasn't so sure. I let Beth stay in front, knowing that she would fall behind with her shorter legs and there being more of her in the water. My black, leather combat boots were water logged in addition to the muddy suction and I kept waiting to feel the venomous burn in the back of one of my legs or my butt. We were kicking up so much water that I couldn't even see Beth or Stephanie ahead of me. Finally, the water began to get shallow until we were on dry ground again. I stopped, leaned against a tree to catch my breath and looked behind me. I had passed Stephanie, lying flat on the ground just out of the edge of the water. Beth was another thirty feet ahead of me and the snakes were gone. I guess we stayed ahead of them long enough that they lost interest, but it had cost us.
"Dane!" She screamed and came running back toward us.
I looked past her and there were five or six infected chasing her. I grabbed Stephanie, yanked her to her feet and started to flank them, turning east. I ran into another one that was behind a tree and knocked it down. Behind that were four more and not enough room to maneuver through them in the closely grown trees. We turned and ran only a few steps in the other direction, trying to get around them on the west side, only to find even more.
We were surrounded, the swamp behind us being our only escape and that belonged to the snakes. I knew at that moment that this was probably the end. Once we started shooting our way out, if we could shoot fast enough, more would come until we were out of ammo and then that would be the end. But as long as we had bullets, we still had hope so I started shooting. We almost couldn't shoot fast enough as they closed in and tightened the circle. Beth was slow at reloading the nine millimeter and not a very good shot. Stephanie had the rifle and couldn't figure out how to look through the scope so the shotgun was really the only thing halfway effective at such close range. We backed up into the water and kept shooting and reloading. I wondered how far back the snakes had given up and if the splashing would bring them back.
Once they were all dealt with though, I looked around and all was still. I took the rifle from Stephanie and gave her the shotgun. Looking through the scope, I scanned slowly to the left and right. There wasn't a very long range of visibility because of the overlapping of the trees but as far as I could tell, there was nothing for at least two hundred yards.
We moved forward, stopping every hundred yards or so to take turns looking through the scope. I showed Stephanie how to line her eye up with it and while she scanned I showed Beth the quickest way to change mags in the pistol. I was a novice myself, hadn't had a lot of hands on experience but I knew the right way to do it, if only in theory.
With the sun straight up in the sky, we crossed the pipeline and were behind the store. I had hoped the truck was still there and that I could somehow get it rolling with the tires blown out but it was gone and there were scrape marks leading out of the parking lot.
There were a few dead in the parking lot and more on the highway but they were all heading north. We walked up behind the ones in the parking lot and took them out by hand before they could turn around on us, knocking them down and beating their heads in. We followed the fresh scrape marks in the asphalt and they led us to the interstate. As soon as we made it up onto the four lane I could see hundreds of them, all walking north, and could hear the faint echoes of distant gunshots. They were spread out in the rear of the pack but were more of them further up and more closely packed.
As we walked, catching up to the dead, clouds started moving over us, giving us periodical relief from the blistering sun. Stephanie complained every time the sun would come back out from behind a cloud and I could feel my face and shoulders burning, myself. The further we went, the gunshots became louder and more frequent.
The dead ahead of us drug their feet, gathering from the woods across the other side of the highway, between abandoned cars, across the middle ground to the right side, joining into the northbound mob. There were too many of them now to wade through them, definitely too many to risk a firefight so we just followed behind them unnoticed. As we reached the off ramp and climbed the hill, the gunfire had gone from frequent to constant, the sound echoing back and forth through the trees.
I didn't want to be out in the open following these things into whatever was going on and be mistaken for one, so we ducked out and followed alongside the two lane road from the woods, just close enough to keep sight of it without being noticed. We passed several houses with grass grown up to our waists, each one separated by patches of woods. Along the next couple of miles, when we would approach a straggler in the woods, heading in the direction of the rest, we would run quietly up behind and beat it back to death, trying our best not to alert the mob out on the road. Finally, the road curved sharply away from us and we crossed a small creek to follow it. After the creek there was another road splitting off to the right and crossing our path, halfway through the curve.
We had caught up to the stragglers at the back of the herd so we laid down in the ditch and crawled up to the edge of the road just as it was starting to rain. The herd was focused on the sound of war, making it easy for us to cross the road unnoticed.
We continued through the woods, the sound of full scale war growing louder and clearer with every step until I could see a huge field with a high fence and what looked like a castle enclosed at the far end of the field. It was a house, five stories tall, the top three stories narrowing toward the top under the slope of the roof, with two large dormers extending from the top floor. The entire house was about ninety feet wide across the side facing the road and the last twenty feet on each end were two story and then turned ninety degrees and extended another thirty feet, making the house a U shape. There were crops growing in the field which was, more or less, 80 acres, starting at the main road and growing right up to a small yard behind the house.
On top of the house, running down the peak of the roof, was a wooden catwalk with spotlights and guards lined up and shooting down into the woods in every direction and toward the road. The dead were packed in, a few rows deep at the fence around the entire length of the south and east sides and there were people with steel bars, sharpened sticks and any long, sharp objects that were available. They were stabbing at them through the fence with deliberate precision, dropping them even faster than the guns on top of the house which were firing just over their heads at the ones accumulating at the rear. I was expecting a compound full of militant marauders but along the fence were women, adolescent children and even a few of the slightly elderly.
I heard a ricochet from a tree only ten feet ahead of us and a limb fell. I quickly dropped to the ground then pulled Stephanie down with me. Beth was already down and crawled up next to me.
"I don't think it's safe he
re." She said, forcing her voice over the noise.
"I couldn't agree more. Let's fall back." I said then started crawling back the way we came. We saw a few more stragglers as we crawled away but we were invisible, their attention drawn to the house.
We crawled until we were almost to the road we had crossed to get there, putting two sets of woods between ourselves and the house. The battle raged on, machine guns bursting like a room full of typewriters, rifles sounding off like a monkey with a snare drum. We just sat, leaning up against pine trees and waiting. They must've drawn in every dead thing for miles because where we sat, there was now nothing but trees and ourselves.
"So, what's the plan, big brother?" Beth asked.
"You're looking at it." I said as I picked a stalk of Bahia grass and started chewing on it.
"Aren't we going to try to get in there?" Stephanie asked nervously.
"Yeah. We'll wait and see if they can handle this first. No point in getting involved if they're just going to get overrun."
"Shouldn't we help them?" Beth asked.
"There's nothing we can do right now. They've got the big guns. They've got the fence. If we start shooting from out here it will either turn the dead around on us or make them think we're the bad guys, or both. Besides, I'm not sure what kind of people they are."
"What do you mean?" Beth asked.
"I guess you should know, these are the people who killed Dad."
"How do you know?"
"I don't know for sure but I think. That and they've got the truck, that's what the dead followed here. I saw the tracks on the road where they dragged it here."
"But you want to try and join them?" She asked angrily.
"Look, they might have just been as scared of us as we were of them, thought they were defending themselves. Didn't you see? They're a bunch of women and children, like an actual community."
"I guess so. I just don't know about this and they've still got to pay for what they did."
