The Remnants (Book 1): Dead Loss

by Jonathan Face

  THE REMNANTS

  Part One: Dead Loss

  by

  Jonathan Face

  ©2017 Jonathan Face

  1

  It felt like April.

  Slovenly patches of snow sprawled about the property here and there, but they were in full melt; water ran from them in streams down the gravel driveway, and the icicles hanging off the barn dripped a mad rhythm. The air had a sharp taste, like new life, and Seth's breath no longer came in hot blasts of steam.

  He was crouched on the upper floor of the barn, peering out through the hay-hatch at the three intruders in the dooryard below. They stood in a semicircle, sitting on their motorcycles, keeping furtive watch on the farmhouse and the crop fields. They had guns.

  Only a week ago they would never have made it up the driveway on motorcycles. The snow had been knee-high, but a sudden spike in temperature had melted the worst of it away. The quick change was what his father had always called the thaw in mildly ominous tones.

  The fresh weather had put him in the mind of riding his bike, or helping his father with the planting before school. He knew the sequence well; first the potatoes, then the barley, then the corn. Sugar beets in the small plot behind the house. Year in, year out, for as long as Seth could remember. For as long as he'd been alive, as his father had been alive. That was the way of things on the Walker farm.

  The corn never did well – it wasn't suited to Montana soil, or to Montana weather. Corn belonged in flatter places with longer summers, but Seth's father had always tried. The sad and emasculated stalks that struggled out of the furrows never seemed to dishearten him in the slightest. A farm isn't a farm without corn, William Walker had proclaimed, and that had been that.

  Riding a bike on a breezy Spring morning, sowing barley behind the cultivator blades – Seth supposed he would soon lose track of all those seasonal associations. Already they seemed a little foreign, a little backwards, even – like planning your summer vacation in a September classroom. But he held on to them, for now, and as such felt dismay when he looked at last season's crops, bathed in frost and bent under the cold. They were hard gray husks gone to waste. Dead as his old man, dead as the whole farm. Dead as the whole world, for all he knew.

  He wanted to crane his head around and look at them now, but he didn't dare move. They might notice. Rapid, peripheral movement had a way of drawing a predator’s eyes.

  Seth was a thin boy, underfed and big-eyed. It had been a long while since he'd bathed, and his hair was too long and tangled with burrs. It was wheat-colored when it was clean and butterscotch-colored when it wasn't. Right now it was somewhere in between, because he'd tried scrubbing it out a few days before with rainwater and laundry detergent.

  A cold rain had poured all yesterday, and now the sky was a deep and radiant blue. The grass around the farm was beginning to stir, stretching out after a long winter's sleep – perhaps looking about in astonishment. Soon, Seth supposed, the grass would shrug and get on with things – growing wild, choking the crops out of the fields, assuming command of the driveway.

  No one'll ever mow the lawn again, he thought, and that conjured up an image of the push mower in the back of the barn, resting silently beside stacked fertilizer bags. He'd siphoned out most of its fuel to start fires this winter, and during one long, frightening week in which a dozen dead had congregated outside, he'd unscrewed the lawnmower blade and used it to hack up an old pig trough for firewood.

  Even if he replaced the gas and reattached the mower blade, what would be the point? There was no one left to admire a nice lawn, or to appreciate the smell of cut grass. Certainly not the dead. Seth didn't think the dead could smell much at all, because if they could, they'd surely scrub out the odor of rotten meat and evacuated bowels that hovered around them.

  The dead could hear just fine, though. A running lawnmower would draw every one of them in miles. Not to mention any passing survivor, who would no doubt turn a speculative eye upon a house with a neatly-trimmed lawn.

  Survivors were worse than the dead. While the latter seemed content to hunt the living, survivors would happily kill either. The few Seth had encountered had been violent and despicable, and now that the power was out and the cities overrun, they turned on one another for the dumbest reasons.

  In Bozeman he'd watched a man and a woman fight in the street over a kid's toy – a shiny red Tonka firetruck. After a brief and fairly ridiculous tug-of-war, the man had ripped it away and swung it at her, and when he overstepped and lost his balance, she'd bashed in his skull with a chunk of broken pavement. Then she'd stuck the toy under one arm, and as she walked away her eyes had passed over Seth, and she'd offered him a wan smile and a “Good afternoon, dear” before passing on by, the man in her wake bloody and unmoving.

  He thought about that as he watched the three intruders from his perch in the hayloft, gazing down on them through the hatch that overlooked the front yard. They were talking in hushed tones and throwing cautious – or maybe dimwitted – looks around the frost-streaked yard.

  Two of the men wore military gear – combat flak jackets and carbines slung to their chests. One of these two wore a battered cowboy hat on his head, and the other had hair sculpted in a meticulously stiff flattop. The third man wore a leather jacket and had a graying mane of perm-curled ringlets hanging past his shoulders – an aging rocker from some forgotten hair band.

  Their motorcycles were parked directly in front of the house and its window boxes of dead sunflowers. Cowboy Hat and Flattop had rode in on new-looking Hondas, but the rocker had a custom job – a three-wheeled monstrosity with unwieldy apehangers and a fiberglass canopy over the seat.

  Seth thought they were stupid modes of transportation these days – the throaty chop-chop-chop of their engines were louder than any lawnmower could dream, and had announced their arrival minutes in advance. A quiet little Vespa, a horse, even a bicycle would have all made more sensible choices.

  Seth had thought better of trying to use their old farm truck. Even if he'd known how to drive, its rattling pistons sounded like loose rocks sliding down a mountainside when it chugged up the driveway.

  One of the men – the one in the cowboy hat – gestured at the farmhouse. Rocker crossed his arms and shrugged. Flattop said nothing, but yawned mightily.

  More noises. More sound to echo across the fields and draw the dead on them all. Sound always had a way of carrying out here in farm country, and with the world gone quiet it was ever more apparent.

  A profound silence had fallen over the land after the people had left it. There were no more cars to be heard chugging down the dirt road at the foot of the driveway. There were no more airplanes painting vapor trails across the sky. No more air conditioners thrumming in windows, no more dogs barking in the distance.

  Not that dogs were gone entirely – they were around, but mostly feral. They didn't bark much anymore.

  The dead hadn't been much of a problem for months, when most of them had drifted off towards Bozeman, drawn by the fires and the sounds of gunfire. A good deal of them had frozen solid in the bitter Montana winter – Seth had come across them here and there, lying stiff and unresponsive on the ground. He wasn't positive, but he didn't think that freezing would actually kill them. He thought a lot of those same frozen bodies would be twitching by now, and would soon be dragging themselves to their feet as the days grew warmer.

  Winter had been tense, with dad sick in bed and Melinda in a state of shock. The dead had been a constant presence at first, trickling in a few at a time, mere days after the school bus had stopped coming to the house. They'd been friends and neighbors and distant relations. The bald-headed salesman who'd sold them their tr
actor, his jawbone missing and his eyes weeping blood.

  They'd hidden from the dead in the back rooms of the house, keeping away from the big windows in the front, living on snack food and water from the bathroom sink. Water from the bathtub, after the pump had gone out.

  When he looked out the window one morning and found the yard empty, he'd gathered the courage to venture outside. Brief little forays, at first – fetching fresh water from the hand pump outside, sneaking feed to the indignant, bellowing cow in the barn, or slinking down to the bottom of the driveway for a quick look around. He'd made one extended journey on snowshoes to the Johnson Farm down the road to scavenge butter tins and preserves from the root cellar under the house. He'd found Alan Johnson there, pinned under his overturned tractor and half-buried in snow, clawing at the sky and gibbering shapeless sounds. Seth had left him there, and for all he knew Al Johnson was still pinned under the block of the old Massey-Ferguson, his legs crushed and his guts spilled out and wound up around the gear shift.

  Below him, in the yard, the three men carried on their conversation, too quiet to overhear. Rocker picked his thumbnail with a Bowie knife, his face blank with disinterest while his companions bickered.

  The farm was pretty isolated, and other than Melinda he had seen only one other person up close since their father died, and that man had been a problem too. A smiling, grandfatherly problem in a banana-yellow raincoat and hat, the Gorton's Fisherman come to life. He'd come strolling up the driveway one morning, a jolly man who smiled and joked and then casually offered Seth $750,000 cash for Melinda, crisp bundled bills packaged up in a duffel bag with FIRST MONTANA BANK stenciled on the side.

  Seth had shot him in the leg and the man had screamed and shuffled the Texas Two-Step back down the driveway, and three days later, on a scavenging trip to town, Seth had seen a dead man in a yellow slicker dragging one leg behind it.

  Now, huddled in the hayloft and peering down at the intruders in the yard, he considered how he might handle these three living. He found himself wishing they were dead. It would be easier to deal with three dead than three living.

  You could shoot the dead and they would never shoot back, and never run for cover. It was hard to get them in the head, especially when they were coming at you, but Seth could manage it in a pinch. He had his dad's old gun, a .22 rimfire pistol, and a whole box of shells for it. In the old world it hadn't been good for much more than gophers, but Seth had learned that if you took your time and aimed just right, you could get them through the eye, and then they were dead. As in real dead. The kind of dead that didn't get back up and want to eat you.

  Still, that was difficult and he'd only resorted to the pistol twice on the dead. Once had been in the Safeway supermarket in town, where he'd gone foraging and been surprised in the cereal aisle by a dapper little corpse in a neat bow tie and work apron.

  The other time had been on his father, after he'd died from the bites and came after him, his eyes rolled back to the whites, and his skull lolling back and forth like a bobblehead doll. He'd grabbed the pistol from the night table by the bed and fired off four shots in blind terror and missed every time. The last bullet had knocked an old family picture off the wall, and the sound of breaking glass had distracted his father. It gave Seth the opportunity to scramble around him and out the front door of the house. He'd slammed it shut and dragged a wheelbarrow full of cinder blocks in front of it. And ever since that day Seth and his sister had lived in the barn.

  Seth thought that the rifles slung around the two men below would work a lot better than his old gopher pistol, if he could work out how to shoot them. He thought he could probably figure it out, even without any internet to look up how.

  He heard a rustling behind him, and half-turned long enough to shush Melinda, who was just waking up. She was seven years old, had hair like cornsilk, and had awful nightmares – she usually woke up afraid, calling out for him if he wasn't around.

  Before the world had ended she'd been a chubby girl, the sort that when you looked at her, you could sometimes see a fat lady peeking back at you from twenty or thirty years in the future. But when the food started to run out the two of them had gone skinny. Seth himself had never been especially large, but now his clothes floated around his slight frame like the billowing robes of a court magician.

  They'd slaughtered the old milk cow a week ago, and that had sustained them for awhile, but even the cold temperatures of early spring hadn't been enough to keep it from spoiling. Soon they'd have to think about planting if they wanted to get through the next winter.

  Melinda got up from her bedroll at the back of the loft and crept up to join him, her hair dangling over her face in dirty locks. She put a hand on his shoulder and gave him a squeeze. She was used to this – waking up quietly, getting your bearings before you do or say much. It was a necessity these days.

  The three men below were still standing around, talking and drumming their fingers on the grips of their guns. Their voices had lifted as they relaxed, and Seth began to catch snatches of conversation.

  “It's the same as in Three Forks,” Cowboy was saying. He was a tall, slight man with knobby forearms and a large, protruding Adam's apple that quivered when he spoke. He cradled the carbine in his arms in a loose and lackadaisical manner, slouching over his motorcycle seat. “No one's home, all the food rotten. Let's go on into Bozeman.”

  “Waste of time,” Flattop said. He shook his head, the plateau of his hair rigid enough to balance a dinner tray. He stood stiff and upright, and his head made methodical left-to-right sweeps as he surveyed the property.

  Cowboy leaned forward, picked a wad of tobacco from his lower lip, and flicked it at the side of the house. A pinch of brown goop hit the wall and left a streak all the way to the ground. “There'll be supermarkets there,” he said.

  “No. The cities are dead. It'll be just like Butte, just like Missoula. Deaders and empty shelves, and everything worth taking, taken. Outskirts like this are clean – not much dead and not much living around to take what's left.”

  “Should've gone north, like I said,” Rocker said, and his tone had a touch of rebuke. “There was an Air Force base up by Great Falls. Bet they got some good guns there. I say we turn around.”

  “We need food, and we don't have time to turn around,” Flattop said, and bobbed his head westward. He added, “I still think something's behind us.”

  “The dead, or the MPs?” Rocker asked, with a sly smile. “We haven't seen but two deaders in three days. And I'd say the Army's got bigger problems than you two AWOL dipshits.”

  “Something's on our tails,” Flattop said. “I feel it, sometimes. Felt it this morning, when I was peeing.”

  Rocker snorted. He had a long, horsey face that was perpetually glum. “I feel a tingling too whenever I hold my dick. No one's chasing me.” He threw his head back and chortled at his own joke, looking around for some imaginary audience, and Seth reflexively ducked backwards.

  Flattop didn't answer, and Rocker continued. “You know how long it's been since I had a Snickers bar? Three months. And Snickers are the finest goddamn candy bar man ever invented.”

  Flattop shrugged, unmoved. “I don't think they'll have any candy here, a shitkicker house like this. Maybe some canned stuff though. We can check that barn too. Maybe some livestock still in there.”

  “What I'd do for a Snickers, or even a Mars Bar. God Christ, anything with that fuckin nougat in it, you know?”

  Flattop shook his head at that, brought a hand up to the grip of the carbine dangling at his chest. “We'll clear the house, and if we find any candy-” he made a sweeping, mocking flourish with the other hand “-it's all yours.”

  He lifted his rifle, and went to the stoop leading up to the front door. Cowboy got off his bike, followed, and shoved the wheelbarrow out of the way before pulling the door wide. Neither of them looked like they grasped its significance, and Seth's lip turned in a cruel little smile. His dad was still inside. His dad
would be glad to see them.

  He'd been careful to keep out of sight, but still glimpsed his father from time to time, shuffling listlessly past the kitchen window, or banging on the walls when he sensed movement outside. He'd been quiet the past few weeks, and Seth wondered if he'd starved in there. He wasn't exactly sure if the dead even needed food. He'd surely watched them eat, but didn't know if that was due to hunger or some dumb, brutish instinct.

  Cowboy pushed his hat off the back of his head, where it hung over his back by a rawhide string. He and his companion moved inside with their rifles at their shoulders. Rocker, unarmed, stayed near the bikes, presumably to keep watch. He relaxed, unconcerned, picking his nails and throwing the occasional, mournful glance toward the road. Perhaps he was thinking of Snickers bars again.

  Seth couldn't hear what they were saying from inside the house, but he heard them calling out. Probably warnings for any inhabitants. Good, he thought. Dad will know right where you are.

  Below, Rocker put a leg up on his trike's running board and leaned over to stretch.

  Melinda tugged on his sleeve, began to whisper in his ear. “Are they-”

  A loud crash erupted from inside the house, followed closely by frightened yelling. Melinda's grip on Seth tightened, and he turned and clamped a hand over her mouth. In the yard, Rocker jumped to attention and looked warily at the house. A burst of automatic gunfire bap-bap-bap'd seconds later. There was another loud crash, then a high, keening wail.

  “Hey?” Rocker called out. “Boys? What's going on, hey?”

  It seemed a funny exclamation to Seth. Hey wasn't a question, it was something you said when someone cut in line at the bank.

  The house fell silent; then Seth heard heavy panting – hoarse and raspy and loud enough to hear from his perch across the yard. There was a clatter of stumbling footsteps moving towards the door. Rocker fell into a fighting crouch, but Seth could've told him to save his energy. He could tell automatically that whoever was coming was alive. Something in the sound of the footsteps made it obvious, but if asked, he'd never have been able to articulate it – the cadence, maybe. Or the lightness.