This Is Not The End: But I Can See It From Here (The Big Red Z Book 1)

by Thomas Head

  As the sun sinks lower, I see shadows in the corner of my eye, and every time I’m sure a Shado is walking alongside me in the primitive striped light of the forest floor, it isn't. I stop over and over for actual shadows and little sounds buried in the noise of bugs. But there’s never anything. Not the Shado, or a snake. Nothing. Just flies. Little lizards that scuttle harmlessly up the trees around me.

  Should have probably already made a camp.

  Finally I do hear something, a low growl. It’s the Shado talking, I feel it. Or wild dogs, or it’s something else growling, tatters of sound coming and going. I lose it as the wind starts to blow the canopy overhead this way or that. It’s like I’m under a river. Difficult to decide whether to keep going.

  As a soldier, I have no choice. As a philosopher, I have too many. So I stay. Just a moment. And I listen.

  Again there is a shred of the growling noise, then nothing.

  I look ahead. The ground seems to be sloping away again in front of me. I edge forward and there’s another lip of a gully and a bank. Dropping down a bit, I marvel at a sudden, half-hidden clearing in the forest, just ahead. It’s littered with bits of garbage. Fresh garbage. Coming closer to it, I smell shit, I think. I edge out to get over the lip and look down. There isn’t much sun, but there is a shaft of light, shining down, like God reaching down to show me something. I look around a moment, letting my eyes adjust, then notice some pigs. They’re rooting up something to eat.

  Swine, I half-speak to myself.

  The garbage isn’t fresh, per se. Just freshly rooted-up. This is some sort of old landfill. Which means there was, or is, a city nearby. Which means, yeah. There it is: an old service road. Probably a few hold-outs nearby.

  I stare at the road in the gathering night.

  Crazy, but seeing a snake making its way across the little road I feel the worst pain in my head, all the sudden. Bad omen or something. I make my way down to a large flat rock near the base of the hill., my arrival scattering the pigs in every direction—would have thought they’d stick together.

  Beads of sweat feel cooler as a sudden breeze pushes across the forest. The moon glows a little brighter atop a slow-motion stampede of dark clouds.

  There’s a good-enough line of sight all around.

  Unloading my gear and taking off my helmet feels great. Sitting is heaven. The water in my canteen has taken on that familiar, clean taste. I take two more sips and retrieve the Mylar bag, which I assume will protect me against mosquitoes and whatever stinging things might crawl onto my rock tonight. I pull it carefully over my boots and slither down into it. I look at the moon another half-minute probably, starting to feel something close to pity for myself. But it’s okay to feel that way now. Like giving my nutsac a rest.

  Finally I reach to see if my wallet is there, and it is; it’s still got my Army I.D., U.N ID, seven silver dollars, a poem my dad wrote to my mom, and a picture of Emily eating peanut butter pie.

  Look at her smiling. Her eyes closed in peanut butter ecstasy. Pie on her lips and teeth, almost up her nose. Looks like she’s got a tooth missing, which she might have done on purpose. Sitting cross-legged like the daughter of a chief instead of the daughter of a captain.

  Sometimes the sight of her makes me feel like I’m going to be sitting in the sky if I don’t look away.

  Sometimes it makes me realize that when I do die, it will be ugly, and it will be in the middle of all our inconsequential arguments, and idiocy, and I should have did the sane thing a long time ago, asked that woman to marry me.

  Tonight, it does something different. It bridges disquiet and pride in that odd confidence that is universal, but as of yet, not accurately unnamed—I call it the inner jackal. It reminds you, hey, I have done some shit. Yeah, son. Went five tours without getting chewed. Gave that woman some moments that left her pale, that left her staring at me. Beads of sweat on that lip. It’s the inner calm. The fuck-it for now knowledge that she loved the shit out of me.

  It’s all of that.

  Like nodding to your life.

  A good woman’ll do that.

  Chapter 13

  I feel my eyelids getting heavy on me, which is a foreboding thing in all this. The silence maybe. The deep breath of an orchestra as the conductor raises his baton.

  There’s fear, too, respect for the immutable dark that seems to seep up out of the ground. My fear is not the enemy, but it matters as much the enemy, because it’s not a trick of the mind, sensing a million creeping things come to nocturnal life in the forest behind me. My head’s bobbing, sitting here, getting swallowed by darkness and fatigue. Otherwise I’m as motionless as a spider. Sometimes, at the edge of sleep, I can hear myself snoring. More rarely, I can feel the onset of a dream. The sensation is like slipping into warm linens. Maybe the sensation is the dream itself.

  So I slip, warmly falling. Like I’m still on the plane. Descending into great machines of wood, and leaf, and obliged to follow when the dream shifts to the pigs I saw earlier. It might be a dream, anyway. I am floating over that spot in the field where I saw them. One lies bleeding. It is damned, and that is a hard thing to explain about dreams, why you would know something like that.

  “You’re a tough one,” I tell it.

  The pig is old. Old as a groan. Old like a wizard. The eyes are pale as madness. It shames me, reading my mind, the parts where I won’t let Emily roam.

  The slumber is ended, the pig insists. Wake her up.

  “From what?”

  Denying her your evils. Her cold beauty stirs, boy. Her heart hovers over a vast, smothering abyss.

  What does that mean?

  McCarthy, what do you think you are? All of void spreads throughout her mind, wondering. And you stand beside her, telling her nothing. Like you’re some riotous sojourner. An alien prophet, returned from dark and unspeakable moons.

  “She grieves,” I admitted.

  No. She does not. You poor, dumb asshole. She deserves the animal you are. She breathes to have you as her tusks.

  Chapter 13

  When I wake in the heat and the black of night the thinking isn’t madness, and I understand the dream pig all too well. The woman loves me, uncanny love. You couldn’t watch a movie about it because it wouldn’t seem realistic love. So that might make getting back to her worth something more I guess. Like a souvenir from the jungle. Or some other fairytale shit.

  The more awake I am, though, the smaller and more nonsensical that thinking becomes. You can’t share the shit you see. Just can’t. In the real living human world, sharers get their asses chewed off trying to get back. Or stabbed by an Indian. Or they get fucking wore out and cranky and scared, staring into the predawn black of a jungle.

  I’m nibbling a K-Ration, wheat crackers and Spam, before I realize what I’m doing. Then I’m back asleep again, almost, the slumber of a bird.

  Strange roaring in the steamy murk beyond. Hisses. Scuttling, as if from the tree themselves.

  Chapter 14

  A few more nonsense dreams: Some bullshit about starving the wolves at her tits. I can’t make sense of any of it, which might be the point, I guess.

  Morning comes, and I manage some real sleep, but I wake with a jolt. There is a thing, something like anger, in me as I stand and survey the field before me, the hill behind.

  In time I groan, stretch. Then I gear up and set myself westerly. Crossing the field, I’ve already just about got the night out of my head. I kick at the garbage the hogs had rooted. Faded plastic bags. A few wires hooked to the lone speaker of an old radio. The remains of a doll. I dig a little porcelain piggy bank up with the tomahawk while rain starts plopping. Looking around, vigilant as a predator, trash-diving. The deeper you go the more indiscernible it becomes. The smells of the refuse are gone to the smells of rot and rain as I stand, holding a corded phone, trying to determine if any of this stuff is any newer than the onset of the outbreak. Not important. Just it’d be nice to know if some of us got a few more years of the
old ways, maybe, even if your old ways were someone else’s older ways.

  Drop that shit and move on.

  In the tricky ocean of vines at the far end of the field, I can look down a cavernous little path that was once a road. Doesn’t seem promising. I look back at the stone I slept on. There’s an odd temptation in the wild to hunker down in the unfamiliar and make it yours, make it familiar. Something like optimism. I want to go sit on that rock. Instead I force myself to glance down at the smaller holes behind me. The pitted pastureland might have, what, two, three dozen snakes per square mile? Death in perhaps one third of the tiny cavities, the others filling with water that has somehow stagnated instantly. I edge the last of the field’s brambles and climb slowly and awkwardly over them. When I drop over I find I’m under the edge of the murky old road.

  Out of the freaking sky, I get this headache again. My head is thumping with a new type of ache. A gnome in my skull. My eyes are twitchy, but adjusting. I’m hobbling with a more pronounced splash of concern in each step as I walk into further into the tunnel of trees and something that looks like bamboo.

  It smells vaguely evil in here. Further in. Deeper, still. Going, ever cautiously, until the field behind me is no longer visible. The rotund trunks support a tangled ceiling of branches. Another sniff confirms the presence of something I have felt in a dream.

  A noise, like an old woman’s cackle. From the right.

  I turn.

  Nothing.

  Just two wet nooks in a tree that resemble eyes. They seem to reflect the sunlight despite the overcast morning.

  ***

  The feeling of eyes is still with me an hour later, when the building appears.

  A building in the middle of tall grasses is still, in this age, an odd thing to behold. It took so little time. I was five when the outbreak began. By the time the Shado had tinned us so badly and began eating things with four legs, the recruiter was telling me all the benefits I would lose once I turned eighteen if I didn’t enlist. I mean, we all serve, he told me with, flashing salesman teeth. You’re either a guard or a ranger, though not even every ranger makes it into Z Company. Better pay. Guaranteed food and shelter for life. Guards’ entitlements are alright, the recruiter noted, too honestly. Trying to be real. Trying to gain my trust with honesty. It came off ridiculous but maybe he was just honest. Got their own challenges, he told me, getting paid in food, shit like that. We need our guards. Captains to run compounds. Generals to oversee entire watersheds. He admitted to a great deal, to shit I already knew. He goes on and on: But guards, they will never see ten miles outside their own compound. Probably never see a plane, much less fly.

  So as I contemplated scratching out a life on some independent compound, a real life, some of my friends had argued, no fields remained but the former interstates. Even the old paved roads were as impassable as the fields. Shit’s so decentralized some already don’t believe planes exist. Sergeants have to provide tours under flight paths to prove it. Knit the myth of government.

  I understood the thinking. I mean it. In the end, as the less fortified, more heavily infected parts of the United States transformed into an immense forest of saplings, the drains became choked with maple and willow roots. Only the hills and the forests that already existed offered any break where a man could walk, unless he followed the tracks of wild creatures or cut himself a path. The ditches had long since become full of angular, twisted branches. And the water that should have run off, collected instead, spreading out into hollow places that what had once been fields. It formed marshes where cattails and swarms of mosquitos hid the water. This was particularly the case along the rivers, blocked and obstructed as they brought down trees, branches, and islands of corpses, the bloated, pale islands on which the Shado sometimes fed. Sometimes, after great rains, the macabre piles swept away, weakened with rot and driven by the irresistible power of the water, the ensuing floods adding fuel to the growing, greening land.

  So yeah, I understood how a man comes to believe helicopters don’t exist. That government is a story they tell to keep captains in charge.

  Now I understand it completely. And don’t want to fall into it. Don’t want to see kids stare like befuddled morons at sky-dragons farting straight white clouds. Or wind up dumbfounded by why the gods would place what stands before me—a supermarket in the middle of a forest of grass.

  I scan the place and in the while it takes me to ask myself what I’m looking for, I hear the laughter again. Sick of trying to find whoever’s doing already. It could be a laughing elephant, I couldn’t spot his big wrinkly gray ass in this mess.

  Instead I just look a sturdy little building, as blunt, cracked, and uninteresting as a naked old man.

  No doubt something nasty and toothy lies within. But outside there are just a few freckly birds poking around. A pair of horse-looking gargoyles stand half-buried in the mud at either front corner. Used to put in a quarter in them and ride around in circles.

  Without a reason the birds scatter.

  As I step back, the windowless door opens with a sharp groan. In the next breath there is an enormous dog looking at me.

  Porcupine quills stick out like tusks. Two stick in the air like middle fingers. The beast’s pink eyes are scanning from the folds of its swollen face with far too much interest.

  That look on its face: Who is out there?

  Then, in half-terrified shock, I feel my blood cooling. My skin gets covered in goose flesh from my neck to my butt—it’s Big Early. The MP’s dog. The creature that is going to get me home, I know. I just do. Maybe God tells me this, not sure. But the thought runs as cool and silent through my mind as life-giving water.

  He’s staring at me from within the store.

  A whimper.

  The dog approaches. How did he live. How did he get here. Before I can freak the fuck out, that raggedy looking thing is coming, sniffing the air as if to make sure I am real. Like I’m the weird thing in all this. He’s licking the air like a snake now. The laughter noise seems to move all around me, like a whispering insect.

  What the fuck is this?

  It’s me laughing.

  He is three feet outside, maybe forty feet in front of me, silent as a nightmare when he halts. Looks at me.

  “Do you know how crazy it is you’re alive, dog?”

  That dog better not answer.

  “Do you!”

  I shake my head, better now that he is real. It just is. I cock an eye, but add nothing by way of justifying, even though he keeps looking at me as if demanding some reply.

  “Come here, boy. Let me get that shit out of your face.”

  Chapter 15

  Big Early bites down.

  The pain is enough almost enough to dissolve the sudden rush in my chest. To dissolve my questions. As he chews, growling, I can sense the pitiful thing searching my face for forgiveness. I lower my eyebrows with some effort. Relaxed. I think of nothing and breathe until my countenance is a calm sheet of ambiguity.

  Gotta put on a brave face for the poor thing, I think. Because, fuck, these things are in there deep, that’s why. No sense being optimistic either, making him think this shit’s going to be alright.

  Got some work ahead of me.

  I grunt as Early falls over, flopping in pain. Some time passes, I have no idea how much. All I can say is that it is later, and occasionally, I pet him, feeling myself being carried away by the fear that helping him is going to kill him. Sometimes I watch blearily as the blood pours out of his mouth. Pitiful, pitiful. It takes a couple forevers and I’m nowhere near done. It’s like I’m trapped in some kind of upper room of my mind, the only way out is a mile of torture for him. Death along for the ordeal, and I remember things, dream things, quill after quill, as I pull them out. Even in this cold, black bend of consciousness, fearful and trying not give a shit all at once, my mind wanders, but I keep my face calm. Maybe after we get this shit out of his mouth, he’ll live, or howl and run off, but that’s a big damn m
aybe.

  Sure isn’t happening yet.

  ***

  In the morning it’s done.

  And he’s not dead yet.

  There is no epiphany or thanks. Just a dog named Early, asleep with his head on my ankle. I pet at the wet tendrils and think, this dog needs a beer, to wash his face in, if nothing else.

  I pour some water out for him to frink.

  Early looks up, scoots away.

  He is lying a few feet away from me, breathing heavy. He looks at me, then looks away. He seems to consider something. Gets up again and walks a few more feet away. He does a few turns and returns to his belly, eyeballing me as I approach.

  I feel stupid for petting his sore mouth. It was probably a mistake to think he would appreciate what I was doing. More than probably. He walks off into the bush without looking back at me.

  I catch up with more than just a little effort.

  My best friend back home, besides Emily, is Doc. Hard to explain why. Friendship at first sight kind of thing. My uncles, all five of the cantankerous old bastards, love him as much as I do, which makes it better, somehow.

  And finally, I see this dog waiting for me, and I feel something close same thing. Love at third or fourth sight will have to do.

  Chapter 16

  We just walk.

  There’s two of us now. Better than one, bet your ass. We move to higher ground, get out of the brush somewhat, and Early doesn’t lead or follow. As it should be. He just looks at me like if I ever pull anything out of him again there’s going to be some bigtime flesh getting ripped out someone.

  We halt atop a gorge, on a rocky and thin trail, where we stop to take a light meal of jerky and biscuits. The dog, I shit you not, chews his food more than I do. He sits his dusty butt on a rock, a mottled tongue draping his lower canines after he finally swallows.