The Remnants (Book 1): Dead Loss

by Jonathan Face

  Then Cowboy pushed through the door, both hands clutching at the side of his head, where a line of blood ran down past his neck. He made it two steps, faltered, and collapsed on the stoop. He drew his gangly knees up to his chest and stared. His hat was hanging askew; an earlobe hung by a thin sliver of cartilage.

  Rocker flicked an eye to the open door, saw that nothing else was about to barrel through it, and stood cautiously over his wounded companion. He looked down, offered a sympathetic smile, and brushed a lock of curled hair out of his face with a casualness that Seth thought must be maddening.

  Cowboy was still breathing hard. The enormous Adam's apple swelled with each gasp.

  “Got bit, huh?” Rocker said, matter-of-fact.

  “Fucker bit me.” Cowboy sounded quietly disgusted, like he'd just discovered a fly floating in his soup.

  “Yeah,” Rocker said, gently. “Did you get it?”

  Cowboy stared blankly at him, and began to scream. “Fucking bit me! BIT ME. God-damn-it! Owwwwwww-”

  Rocker leaned in quickly, grabbed him by his shirt collar, and shook him. Cowboy kept screaming, twisting from side to side, until Rocker grabbed his head by the temples and forced him to gaze directly in the eyes – the way he might calm a panicky horse. Cowboy cut off immediately, stared back at Rocker.

  A moment passed like that, and Rocker said severely, “Quiet down, fuck-hole.”

  Cowboy nodded slowly, still peering up at him, and Rocker released his grip.

  “Did you kill it? Is it still inside?”

  “No,” he said, breathing hard. “No, but- maybe Kev did, but I don't think so. It tore his throat out before I even got my rifle up.”

  “Yeah?”

  “Yeah.” Cowboy put a finger to his mangled ear and winced. “It was in a closet, hiding like a goddamn kid. On me before I even saw it. I shoved it off and it went for Big Kev, and they tumbled into another room.” He looked up and met Rocker's eyes. “Tommy, Kev's dead – or he will be.”

  Rocker – Tommy? – just shook his shaggy head. “Yeah.”

  “I don't know what to do,” Cowboy said. He looked pained.

  “We made it all this way from Boise and you two idiots get killed by some fucking farmer.”

  “Well, maybe I'll be alright,” Cowboy said, still touching his wound and still wincing each time. “Just took a chunk, and it came off clean. Maybe it wasn't deep enough.”

  “Sorry, buddy. You know the rules.”

  Cowboy made a cartoonish gulp and looked around in both directions. “Come on. We brought you with us, didn't we? Kev didn't even want you, you know. I talked him into it.”

  “Well, thanks, pal,” Rocker said, and offered an apologetic smile.

  Cowboy lowered his eyes. “I wanted to die in Wyoming.”

  “You can't always get what you want. You know, like the Stones song?”

  “Hell.” Cowboy shook his head.

  “You know once you're bit there's no cure. That's just how it is.”

  “I guess so.” His face fell, but brightened again almost instantly. “Hey, tell you what. I got a candy bar in my saddle bag. It ain't a Snickers but it's chocolate. I didn't say nothing 'cause I thought Kev would take it away.”

  “Yeah?”

  Cowboy's voice stopped trembling, and he adopted a magnanimous tone. “I want you to have it, Tommy.”

  “Yeah, thanks.”

  “Just make it quick for me, okay? I don't wanna feel no pain. Put one right between my eyes.” As he spoke, he unclipped his rifle from its sling and it fell into his arms. He held it up to Rocker with both hands, a supplicant kneeling before a ragged and weathered rock god.

  “Can't waste no more bullets, bud,” Rocker said casually. He suddenly leaned in and snapped his Bowie knife across Cowboy's throat. Cowboy's eyes bulged and he pitched forward, falling on his rifle and bringing his hands to his neck. He stared up at Rocker, legs thrashing behind him, and wheezed something unintelligible. It sounded unflattering.

  Rocker just watched, impassive. “Sorry, chief,” he said quietly.

  In less than a minute Cowboy had stopped moving.

  Rocker stared a moment longer, then returned to the motorcycles. He rummaged around in one of them and came up with a candy bar. Seth thought it was a 3 Musketeers. He ate it ponderously, looking from the house to the bikes to Cowboy's body. Presently he walked back and nudged it with one of his boots. Cowboy didn't move, but Seth knew that he'd be twitching soon enough, once the bug got settled.

  Melinda tapped his wrist, reminding Seth that he still held a hand over her mouth. He dropped it and she stayed quiet, but her eyes were wide and, he noted with some worry, a little glassy.

  Rocker abruptly straightened, turned, and started towards the barn. They both froze. Had he heard them? Seen them out of the corner of his eye? Seth moved slowly backwards, out of the morning light, and pulled his sister along with him.

  The swinging wooden doors were closed and barred from the inside, but Seth thought Rocker could get them open quickly enough if he really wanted to. He pushed Melinda behind a hay bale and crawled further back, away from the open hatch.

  Reaching the barn doors, Rocker tapped on it. “Hello, hello, hello,” he said, his voice rising in sing-song mockery. “Anyone in there? Any pigs maybe? How about a cow?”

  When no answer came, he said, “Hell, I'll even eat any of you goddamn horses I find in there.”

  He gave the doors a yank, found they wouldn't budge, and took a step back. His eyes studied the pitted wood, the old rusted hinges, and then roamed upwards, settling finally on the open hatch above.

  “Hello?” he said again.

  Seth thought about it, shrugged, and stepped into view.

  Rocker didn't scare easily. He didn't shout out or jump backwards or run for Cowboy's rifle. A slow, dull smile spread across his face. “Holy shit,” he said, sounding genuinely awed and maybe even pleased. He said it again: “Holy shit.”

  “Hello,” Seth said.

  Rocker nodded back at him, the foolish grin still on his face. “Hey there, kid. You're about the first soul I've seen in a week, other than my partners back there. How you doing?”

  “We're fine,” Seth said, and shot him.

  Perfect shot. Right through the eye.

  2

  It took him some twenty minutes to drag Rocker into the barn, rolling him like a log into one of the empty cow stalls in the back. Seth had done some growing up in the last few months, but physically he was still a kid, and didn't yet have the bulging arms of his old man, who could've hefted Rocker's bulk over one shoulder with a sheepish grin and perhaps a dumb joke about dead weight.

  The thought made his throat swell up, the image clear as yesterday. A crisp and pungent memory of something that never happened, and never would.

  Melinda was watching him from the loft above, twisting her old rusted corn knife in one hand. They'd found it buried under a hay bale, a curved and wicked tool, forgotten by whatever Dust Bowl farmers had worked the land years before their grandfather had bought it at a bank auction. He'd told Melinda to keep it near her, and she'd used it to carve up the inside of the barn with etchings of cartoon characters, ragged stick figures that she said were Scooby Doo and Princess Jasmine and the cast of the Toy Story movies. On the opposite wall she'd duplicated the same characters, except here they were gaunt and humorless, their mouths drooping open to reveal jagged brown teeth.

  Those, she'd told him, were what happened when cartoons got bit.

  “Are you going into the house?” she asked him now, watching him maneuver Rocker's body into the narrow cow stall with great interest.

  “Yes.”

  “Can I come?”

  “Not yet. Maybe later.”

  “Is daddy still there?”

  “I don't know.”

  “Why did you bring that man in here?”

  “To keep him out of sight until we can bury him.” He straightened and stretched his arms. “Come on down. Help
me hide the others.”

  She clambered down the ladder and Seth pulled the pistol from his belt and replaced the spent shell. He would have to shoot Cowboy, who would be stirring again by dusk if left untended. Either Rocker didn't know to destroy the brain, or he hadn't planned on being here long enough to bother. Flattop, presumably still in the house, would also need shooting. And maybe their father.

  They made their way to the stoop, giving Cowboy's body a wide berth. Seth eased open the screen door. The house was dark, quiet. He waved Melinda back and listened. Something smelled bad – something fetid, rotting. Mildew and shit and expired milk.

  Seth stepped inside and paused in the entryway. The short hallway leading to the living room and the back bedroom was before him, and the kitchen opened up on his right. From where he stood he could see the same months-old newspaper on the breakfast table. AREA HOSPITALS AT CAPACITY, the headline announced. It had been a bare month since they'd been inside, but the curling edges of the newspaper struck him as a funny old curiosity, something you found in a cobwebbed stack in the attic, like MEN WALK ON MOON or DEWEY DEFEATS TRUMAN.

  A low groan emanated from somewhere towards the back of the house, and he froze. His eyes shifted to the little hallway and he saw a man's booted foot sticking out from the bedroom doorway – his father's room, the room he had died in.

  As Seth stared, the foot suddenly twitched, and he stifled a gasp.

  He thought about fleeing back out the front door, dismissed the notion. The barn was fine for now, but they couldn't stay there forever. The house had an electrical generator and a wood stove. Now was as good a time as any to deal with his father, or the man with the Duke Nukem hair, or both of them.

  Seth half-turned and waved his sister back. She gave a stoic nod – chin to chest, back to dead-center – and took three backwards steps off the stoop and into the yard. She watched him quietly through the doorway, turning the corn knife over in her hands.

  He turned back, pulled the pistol from his waist, and took a step down the hallway, and when he did he heard another groan, and the protruding foot retracted back inside the room.

  The hall was lined with framed photographs that had always struck him as old-fashioned, but now seemed virtual relics. Gaunt, black-and-white forebears posed before ramshackle old homesteads with set jaws and squinted eyes. They were long-dead and largely nameless to him, and he supposed they would remain that way forever, with no one left to remember them.

  The door to the bedroom was half open, not enough to see inside. Across from it was the linen closet door, hanging by a lone hinge, from where his father had burst forth. Seth wondered how he had ended up in there. Perhaps he'd heard a mouse, or a cricket's chirp, and wandered in. And the door had swung shut behind him and he'd... well, stayed there.

  Seth had seen it happen before. With the dead, out of sight really was out of mind, and with nothing to hold their attention, they tended to wander aimlessly or fixate on some meaningless, repetitive task. Hidden behind a wrecked car in a Home Depot parking lot in Bozeman, he'd watched a corpse in grease-splattered mechanic's coveralls stumble around in a circle with an old-fashioned transistor radio in his arms. He'd purposefully dropped it on the ground, picked it back up, shuffled forward a few feet, and then dropped it again. This had gone on for almost an hour until the radio had been a shattered hunk of plastic and circuitry, and he'd still been at it when Seth had finally managed to slip away.

  His father would have stood dumbly up against the back shelves stacked with folded bedsheets, staring at the wall and just waiting for something to happen. If Rocker & Co. hadn't arrived today, he might have stayed there until his flesh melted away and his bones cracked apart, and he crumbled to little more than a skull atop a pile of vertebrae and bone meal.

  Still inching down the hall, Seth tried to steel himself for what he'd have to do. Nudge the door open with the gun, he thought. Point it and blam! Right through the eye before he – before it – can even get up.

  From the bedroom, a moan that started in a low register but ended in a high keen glided gently up through the air. It sounded like his dad. It was his dad, and he sounded sad and wretched. Lonely, maybe.

  No! Not him! Not him at all! And it isn't lonely, it's hungry.

  He savagely wished to be somewhere else.

  Do it quick. Be careful not to think about how it's your dad, 'cause it's not him at all. That thing in the room with the wireframe glasses, that thing isn't the man who took the training wheels off your bike and pushed you down the driveway and hugged you when you fell and skinned your knee, not the man you caught wiping away a tear when you won the geography bee in 4th grade. Not the man. Not the man. Not the man!!

  But when he finally pushed open the door, he really did see his father. His old man with a sickly grin on his face but a glimmer of recognition in his eye. A feeling of profound relief surged through Seth, and the pistol in his outstretched hand shook and started to drop.

  And then the vision was gone, and it was the other man looking back at him, the man in the military garb and the dumb haircut, huddled against the bed and coughing weakly while he rubbed the bite marks on his forearms.

  Seth's father lay on his back nearby. A string of bullets had turned his head into a pulpy mess. His eyeglasses had split right through the middle of the frame, each lens resting independently on either side of the nose. He was smiling.

  He was, naturally and finally and blessedly, dead.

  The man with the flattop didn't bat an eye when the kid burst into the room, nor did he seem overly concerned with an adolescent waving a gun around. He quietly watched, and when Seth saw the body on the floor and slowly lowered the gun, he said, “You going to shoot me, kid?”

  Seth didn't know.

  3

  Flattop's real name was Kevin. His buddies called him Big Kev because he was 5'5, and Seth suspected at least an inch of that was from the combat boots. He said his last name was Mulligan.

  "You know, Mulligan," he said, between racking coughs. "Like a do-over. You ever play golf?"

  Seth hadn't.

  "Golf is a fine game," Kevin said gravely. He pushed himself back with his feet until he was sitting against the bed, then looked up at him. "This is your place?"

  Seth nodded.

  "And that was your pops?"

  "Yeah."

  "Well, sorry about that."

  "It's okay,” Seth said, and added, “I killed your friend."

  Kevin grimaced, and his tongue shifted back and forth in his mouth, as though tasting the new information. Finally he nodded. "Tommy? Guy with the long curly hair? Looked kind of like Robert Plant?"

  Seth shrugged. "He had long hair."

  "Wasn't my friend anyway. Riley and me ran across him in Idaho a week ago. He was trash.”

  “Why was he trash?”

  This elicited a second grimace, and a head shake as well. “Well, why is anyone? I know he killed a boy we found in a motel outside Missoula – not much older than you, and for no good reason at all, and I wanted to shoot him myself when I found out."

  "So why didn't you?"

  "Maybe I should have, but... you know that thing they say, 'strange bedfellows?' That was what it was. When it's only three of you and a million of those dead things, it's easy to overlook bad behavior. Or even horrid behavior."

  "The other one's dead too. The guy in the cowboy hat."

  "Yeah, I figured that. Your pops ripped into him pretty good before I could stop him." Kevin put a finger to his neck, which was ragged and bleeding, and winced. The wound was just shy of the jugular vein. "You know I'm done-in too, don't you?"

  Seth nodded.

  "That means you'll have to shoot me pretty soon.”

  “I will,” Seth said.

  “Maybe by nightfall, maybe just a few hours,” he said. “Neck wounds are quick. Blood pumping right up to the brain, carries the bug right along with it. Hits the old central nervous system like a hand grenade."

  Se
th brought the pistol around, pointed it at him. "Maybe I should do it now."

  "Yeah, you could do that, and I wouldn't blame you a bit," Kevin said, and nodded appreciatively, respecting the kid's pragmatism. They stared at one another for what seemed like a full minute before he went on.

  "I'll help you out a little first, though. My head doesn't hurt too bad yet, and I can walk, I think. The Army told us you get a killer headache right before you turn. Sometimes you puke.”

  “I don't need your help,” Seth said.

  “I believe it, but that don't mean I can't offer. It's all over for me either way, but I'll bury your pops here, and maybe tell you a few things you should know, if you promise to make it quick for me.” He ran his tongue over his lips. “And water. You got to give me some water.”

  Seth considered. Grave duty by himself would cost a lot of energy. He'd burn calories that were becoming harder and harder to replace. His too-thin arms quivered when he thought about hefting shovelfuls of hard soil. Digging this time of year would be like chipping away at a block of ice.

  Kevin said, "I don't want to be a deader, you know. Tommy, he'd probably like it just fine. He wouldn't shut up about it. Wondering if he'd remember anything from before he died, and if people would taste good." He grunted. “What a thing to say.”

  Seth turned Kevin's proposition over in his mind. If this was a trick he couldn't see the angle. The man was bit, and that was a death sentence. There was nothing he could do or say to get out of it.

  "All right," he said, and made a move-along motion with the gun. "We'll get you your water."

  4

  He walked Kevin back to the barn to get a shovel. Melinda saw them coming and took a few frightened steps back, until Big Kev gave her an exaggerated how-do wave.

  "Stay out here, Melly," Seth said as they passed by, but she followed along anyway.

  "Is daddy dead?" she asked.

  "Yes."

  "Real dead?"

  "Yes. We can go inside later, but stay out of the house for now."

  "Yay!" She started to shriek the exclamation, caught herself, and whispered it instead. "Yay!"