by Welker, Wick
His mind went to Ellen and Jayne, and he didn't think about Dean anymore. He could only feel that this new sickness of the world was either going to mark the beginning of a radically different life or the onset of a slow death. Either way, he needed a weapon fast.
Keith could now hear the presence of the dead lost behind him in the darkness and had made it past the wreckage. There were only clear tracks in front of him, and the overwhelming urge to run was feeding into his brain and jolting into his joints. He ran and limped and then ran some more, his stomach churning in hunger and his hip stinging with pain.
His eyes searched, combing the walls and looking for a ladder leading upward and looking at the ground for a blunt object. Violence had settled into his mind, changing his thoughts, driving him to find any sort of weapon for attack. Like a reel of gory images of people being shot point blank or severed heads from a car accident, the things he had seen today had conditioned his mind to seek and expect violence. When he finally spotted the rungs of a metal bar ladder jutting out from the wall, he ran and climbed it upwards into a hole that tunneled up towards the ceiling and saw daylight seeping in through a metal grate at the top. Pushing up, he slid the grate and escaped into open air.
People, bodies and cars were around him, encircling him. The scene could have been described as a battlefield, except that not everyone was using weapons, and no one was dressed like a soldier. To his left, he saw a very large woman with no shoes on thrusting sheering scissors into another woman's calf, while another man brought down a home coffee maker on top of the same woman's head. “Run, let's go!” he yelled at the overweight woman who left the sheering scissors in the woman's leg and tripped as she started to turn and run.
There were small groups of assaults happening. Groups of two or three made guerrilla attacks on the sick, momentarily stopping them to escape further into the residential neighborhood. The street was littered with lamps, table legs, crushed computer monitors, and any sort of household object that was hard enough to throw or ram into a human being.
Keith picked up the broken half of a broom and ran into a small front yard of home, and stopped when he saw the sprawled body of an elderly man. He coughed while gagging when he saw that the man's ribcage had been completely hollowed out into a gaping hole in his chest. He then faced the reality that the sick were not just trying to kill people; they were eating them. They were picking off straggling people that couldn't escape in groups, surrounding them slowly in large numbers, and taking them down like a pack of hyenas.
He leaped over the body and dropping the broom, lifted himself up on top of a fence going into the backyard. Perched on the fence, he could see one of the sick below him in a small garden patch lining the side of the house. Then looking back over his shoulder, he could see five more taking notice of him and approaching with sluggish steps. He jumped down into a garden patch full of squash and pumpkins and stared into the face of a muscular, short black man who had an open wound running diagonally across his face from the slash of a sharp object, exposing the bright white of bones and teeth showing from beneath his cheek. Keith waited in place trying to dissuade his approach but the diseased man moved at him. So he picked up a pumpkin the size of a soccer ball and slammed it down on top of the man's forehead, crunching into his skull and dislodging one of his eyes from its socket, making him fall to the ground with the pumpkin. He stared down at the bulging eyeball and then picked up another pumpkin and moved on through the backyard.
Another of the infected came from his side, so he grabbed the pumpkin by its thick root, lifted it high and then sunk it down into the man’s face as hard as he could. Another came up from behind the fallen, and Keith lifted his leg and thrust it down into his crotch. Seeing more approaching from the backyard, he tried opening a window into the house, which was locked. He picked up the same pumpkin he had used on the man's face and slammed it through the window, carefully crawling into a living room where a woman in a bathrobe was lying face down on a tabletop. He paused briefly and started to move after detecting no movement from her. He moved swiftly and methodically towards the stairs, scanning the environment and carefully placing his steps. Two by two, he went up the stairs, found the master bedroom and examined the shoes in the closet. Finding some bright yellow tennis shoes, he slipped them on. Snug fit but they would work. Anything was better than flopping around in dress shoes with the damn soles separating, he thought.
He heard movement downstairs so he grabbed a bed sheet off the bed and moved again, going from room to room until he came to a door with a big clown stenciled on it and stopped. Swallowing, he slightly nudged the door, hoping not to see a little kid he would have to slam over the head with a thick world atlas that he could see on a desk through the crack in the door. With relief, he stepped into an empty room, grabbed another sheet from the bed, returned to the hall, and looked straight up at the ceiling at a square of sheet rock nestled in a wooden molding directly above his head leading to the attic.
“Something, something...” He returned to the clown room and dragged out a small writing desk underneath the attic opening, climbed on top of it and removed the sheet rock exposing dimly lit wooden beams above. Tucking the two sheets into his belt, he grabbed onto the edge of the ceiling and lifted himself up. He crouched and looked around for the small source of light dribbling into the attic and moved towards a small circular window that he might fit through. He quickly kicked it out with his new yellow sneakers and stuck his head out.
“Okay, okay.” He tried to look around the neighborhood but had limited vision from the small window. “Looks like I'm going out.” Below him, a section of roof angled just slightly enough to stop him from sliding off the house, so he slowly crawled out of the window feet first with the two sheets secured in his belt. He lifted himself to higher sections of the roof and made it to a gigantic swamp cooler secured at the very top of the roof and rested his elbow on it.
“Where, where, where...” He looked all around him, not understanding the foreign streets and strange homes that surrounded him, having no idea which way to continue. Where am I, where is this, he whispered to himself while grabbing the edge of the swamp cooler, trying to find any sort of identifiable landmark for orientation. However, the only thing about the neighborhood that was beginning to look familiar was the streets littered with corpses and fleeing people. He spun around again and again, failing to find anything, and then he slowly sank to his knees. He sat with his back to the cooler, stared directly out into the neighborhood, and stopped. There was a tiny red Santa Claus dummy clinging to the edge of an obscure chimney in the distance.
“Hank! You amazing son of a bitch!” he yelled, remembering that his neighbor had left up the Santa Claus all year.
Quickly, he climbed down, lowering himself from one section of the roof to another until he came to the edge and tied the two sheets together that he had been trailing behind him. Looping one end through a bar in the gutter, he made a knot and let the other end fall, which came about ten feet short of the ground. Time to move, always move, he thought as he lowered himself, knowing that he was attempting something that he had seen in movies a thousand times but had never heard of anyone actually doing. Once he felt that the knot would hold him, he slowly released his grip, which turned not so much into rope climbing but into falling from the roof of a house with a bed sheet in his hand. He hit the ground hard, got to his feet quickly and started to run past a few of the sick, jumped over a dead dog, hopped a fence and stayed running in the direction of Santa while singing in his head, “Santa Clause is Coming to Town.”
He ran across a playground, into another backyard and out into another street, keeping Santa in his view as much as possible. Every footstep of running made the small yellow tennis shoes cram his big toe upwards into his foot, but he was thankful he could run with them now. He had to run continuously because he noticed that the only people he could see that weren't sick were either running or hiding in cars. The infected were everywhere
but dispersed enough by traffic and houses that he could manage his way through the war zone without drawing too much attention.
He breathed heavily, but still sang softly to himself, “You better not cry, I'm telling you why...” He kept losing sight of Santa but stayed in the same direction until he finally recognized the streets and knew exactly where he was. He knew he was close to home but seriously doubted that he would see his daughter or his wife there.
Down the last stretch of sidewalk, he turned down his own street and looked up at the Santa Claus of his neighbor’s chimney. Next time I see you, Hank, he thought, I'm buying you a beer my friend, and you can leave that thing up all year. Then he saw Hank, sprawled out on his driveway, dead. The next thing he saw was the door of his house wide open to the onslaught of a pandemic that had turned into a war.
He leaped up on the front porch and ran in seeing that the basement door was splintered off from its hinges and was leaning against a wall.
“Ellen, are you here? Jayne!” He yelled and moved towards the stairs, analyzing the blood droplets that seemed to trail up them. Dead body, broken doors and blood, his mind reeled with feelings of the flu and sickness. I can't find her like this, no, I can't find her here like this, not here.
With tears, sweat and fatigue dripping down his body, he followed the blood into the master bedroom and stared at the carpet. An empty gun case stared back up at him.
“Ellen, you badass bitch.”
Chapter twelve
With a pulsating shoulder and heavy breath, Ellen looked down at her neighbor, Hank Jackson inching towards her. Unwilling to understand his bizarre behavior and suspecting the same horrible motives from her attacker who was now slamming at the basement door, she backed away from the porch and climbed the stairs towards the second level with a single intention, a single purpose of action; something that she had argued so emphatically about with her husband just weeks before. A potential lethal danger in her suburban life had now become an instrument of rescue in the surrealism of a horror film, which had now exploded into her day: a 9-millimeter pistol.
She tightened her grip around the tender wound of her shoulder, forcing a tourniquet to slow the blood dribbling down her arm and could feel a sharp stab in her ribcage as she breathed heavily with every footstep up the stairs. A feeling of a sickening flu begin to creep into her stomach and a cold sweat rested in her eyebrows, whether from actually being sick or just from a sheer panic, she wasn’t sure. Screaming, which would have seemed an appropriate response, did not occur to her. She felt an unwavering goal of reaching the weapon, which she was mentally preparing to fire. In her mind, she envisioned checking the cartridge for bullets, cocking the gun and checking the safety. She had gone shooting with Keith enough to know where she might err in trying to fire the gun. Her mental focus on the mechanics of the pistol occupied her mind enough to distract from the pain in her body and the panic in her mind.
She approached the door of her bedroom and fell down, spilling into the room, knocking her head on the bedframe of the bed. Her senses blocking any further pain she could feel now, she got to her feet and pulled the gun case down from a shelf in the walk-in closet. Then disbelief, the case had a combination lock, which her panicked mind had forgotten. She stared at the case and then looked out the bedroom window, considering her options.
Then there he was. Jackson was at the door. His arms, hands and fingers were all curling upwards towards his chest as if he was in the middle of a seizure, which was tensing all the muscles in his arms. His tongue was hanging far below his lower lip, an aberrant position that could only happen because his jaw had become dislocated and it was stretching low to the left of his face.
Ellen moved to the other side of the room, making sure the bed was between her and Jackson. He inched closer, shuffling with his feet of which he had lost one of his sandals. He started to stretch his arms away from his chest but his muscles seemed to tense up in every direction. His biceps were fighting his triceps and the muscles in the forearm where pulling against the muscles of the fingers. It was a chaotic miscommunication of nerve impulses and muscle contractions resulting in erratic and uncontrolled movements of his limbs.
“Hank, what are you doing? You're not well, go home!” Jackson neared closer to her, trying to manage the anarchy of his limbs. “Hank! Get the hell out of here!” She screamed and backed up closer to the window of the bedroom. None of her screaming was deterring his approach, so she used the gun.
She smacked the gun case into the side of his face making his jaw swing loosely from the skin of his cheeks and rebound to a sickly slanted position. He was finally able to stretch his arms out and wrapped his fingers around her arms, her skin shooting into goose bumps from his cold touch.
“Get off of me, dammit!” She slammed the gun case into his head, again knocking his grip from her arms. She tried to side step away from him and dart out of the room. However, he suddenly fell on her with the full weight of his body, slamming into her chest while she was in a pivotal movement of shifting her body weight from the grounded position of her feet, making her immediately topple backwards with him into the window behind. It shattered outwards, spewing glass down the roof of the house and down onto the driveway. She began screaming out the window to the hopeful passing of a neighbor for help.
Jackson was now pressing all his weight into her, her lower back being compressed into the bottom of the broken window frame which luckily had no stray shards of glass sticking out. However, it did have a metal rim, which was digging into her skin. Her mind was harrowed up in the disbelief that a man was attacking her for the second time in her own home within the span of five minutes.
She gasped and cried in pain and frustration, constantly trying to push away from the window to free herself. Still holding the gun case, she swung it up from behind Jackson's head and knocked it into the back of his skull. His face, which was now buried in her neck, shook with running mucous from his nose every time she hit him. He was no longer using muscle power to pin her there but holding his dead weight in one position. She screamed in his ear, screamed at the ceiling and screamed out into the street, hating the exhaustion of helplessness.
Her ceaseless beating from behind with the gun case started to have an effect that she could see when he positioned his head lower to the left to avoid the blows. She felt the weight of his body lift slightly from hers, slipped from the side of the window, freeing herself and making him topple out of the window, slam onto the roof of the house, roll sideways down and onto the driveway below. He landed on his back with a force that shattered the bone structure in his face making it slightly sink inward. His body laid still, limbs spread out even with his mouth gaping open.
She looked down at his body then ran from the room to escape her home. As she left the bedroom, the gun case fell from her hand and hit the floor, knocking the gun loose from the padded compartment of the case. She discovered that the case wasn't locked and the beating on Jackson's head had loosened the latch. She dropped it in her purse, which still hung from her shoulder and ran down the stairs. There was still a pounding of her first attacker coming from the basement door. Without taking time to investigate, she ran out the open front door and past Jackson's body to her car. Fluids of various colors and textures began to flow from his body and run over the gasoline stains of the driveway. As she passed, she had time to realize the offending smell that surrounded his body.
She crawled into the driver seat of the car, slammed the door and reeled into the back of her seat with a wave of nausea. Leaning over above the passenger’s side foot mat, she vomited a remarkably bright green substance several times. Wiping her mouth with little thought, she reached for her cell phone in her purse. Her shoulder was throbbing making her fingers shake as she dialed the police. She had trouble seeing the phone with blood still dripping down from her scalp into her left eye. The line rang with a normal ring tone and then turned into a series of long beeping sounds that turned to dead air. The reality of
the mayor's address on the TV was hitting her now, turning into an acute sense of hopelessness. The blood on her face began to mix with tears from her eyes, wetting the already caked blood that was accumulating on her cheeks. She sobbed into her hand and swiped the fluids from her face, looking out the window at the dead man sprawled on the pavement. His eyes and mouth were open, staring into the recesses of an oblivious afterlife. She was no longer grasping for reason about what was happening, only questioning why now, and why her.
Ellen cried and screamed at the steering wheel. Then she honked the horn, loud and long, hoping for anything. She stared at the garage doors that were beginning to double in her eyes from a rapidly setting flu. She then thought of her daughter at school. She angled the rearview mirror down at her shoulder and saw her gnarled skin weeping with blood as she moved but turning to a slow bleed when she held the punctured flaps of the wound closed. Then she looked at her face, which had long lines of dried blood running down to her chin. She felt as if she had makeup on for a Halloween costume. Looking in the back seat, she discovered a sports bra from her workout a few days before and she formed a tourniquet by wrapping the bra around her shoulder and armpit. This one step towards improving the sanity of her situation gave her an insurmountable dose of confidence to start the engine and pull out of the driveway.
The car turned around the corner of her street and stopped. The entire block was jammed with cars. People were running across the street, into homes, over fences into backyards and past her car on the sidewalks. The street looked like it was blocked for a special parade or fireworks show for the neighborhood. Some of the cars had been abandoned while other cars had impatient drivers honking and flashing lights. The usual dull tone of her neighborhood had transformed into suspicious hostility from everyone she looked at. She could feel their eyes glaring at her, watching everything around them, looking over their shoulders constantly as they walked. It felt like a natural disaster had just struck, but without the unanimous spirit of altruism shown in news clips of people reaching into floods to rescue a trapped mother with her children. There were only the imperceptible glances of hardened faces.
