The Remnants (Book 1): Dead Loss

by Jonathan Face

  Their only reprieve from the tedium had been those brief, tense moments when a roaming corpse would wander into the yard, forcing them to huddle behind hay bales until it moved on.

  The dead always moved on. Usually they lingered for no more than a few minutes, long enough to navigate around the house and disappear into the crop fields. One – a morbidly obese woman in a ragged mumu with a nasty patchwork of varicose veins on her calves – had lurked in the yard for nearly twelve hours, staggering around in a little circle all day before abruptly disappearing into the frozen rows of corn.

  Seth wasn't sure where they went from there – whether some raw impulse in their brains compelled them towards a final destination, or if they were just natural wanderers and their heading a matter of whim. For awhile he had thought they were all drawn westward, chasing the sun when it dipped below the horizon, but he'd seen enough aimless dead to chalk that up to happenstance.

  Thinking about it made him glance over his shoulder at the driveway as he and his sister dragged their father into his plot. Had to keep alert. Had to keep watch. The dead only really made noise when they got close to you, releasing that plaintive, garbled wail that seemed to indicate both profound frustration and bitter contempt.

  When he turned to look, his eyes passed over the gas generator by the back door to the house, and that got him thinking about modern conveniences again.

  Seth didn't expect the phone lines to be up – and anyway, who would he call? – but he was eager to try the internet now that the house was theirs again. They had a satellite connection, teeth-clenching slow and weather-sensitive, but the best they had been able to get out here in the sticks. Now that the world had ended he was glad about that. If anything was still passing around data packets, it was orbiting three miles up in the sky.

  Of course, they would need electricity for that, and that meant firing up the genny. He thought he would do that just as soon as they were finished with the bodies.

  The world was no longer a place where you could put off chores; that world was as dead as Tommy, there, and its mouth was locked in that same ghoulish grin. You saw that grin in populated areas mostly, where word hadn't quite gotten around to all the little trinkets of civilization. You saw it when you noticed a crosswalk signal still activating at a desolate intersection, or when convenience store doors still whooshed open for you, the electronic eye suckling power from some dwindling generator in a back room.

  That, Seth thought, was how the old world mocked you. See? it said, with a dry, raspy chuckle, we had some nice stuff here once. Enjoy eating your shoes this winter.

  No, you did your chores right away. If Seth and his sister had delayed dragging their father's body outside, some dead might have wandered past – or worse, another living – and then they'd have to hunker down and wait, and that meant they'd have to smell him. That could make them sick, and there weren't any doctors left, as far as Seth knew. It wasn't a matter of getting your allowance, or getting to stay up and watch the late show on TV. It was a matter of everything.

  Not far from the hole Kevin had dug was their mother's grave, and Seth made a mental note to tend to it soon. She'd been gone almost five years. Breast cancer, that old pink-ribboned monster. Melinda had asked Seth what their mother would have done about their dead father shuttered up in the house, and Seth had told her that she'd have kicked the door in and whacked him with a skillet. Melinda had laughed. That had been his intention, and he was glad to hear her make that sound, even if it was halfhearted. Truth be told he couldn't much remember his mother. He had no idea what she'd do or say. She'd probably wind up dead again, just like dad, just like Not-So-Big Kevin, just like every other adult.

  And here was another one to get rid of.

  It took Seth an hour to fill in the holes. When he was done, they stood over the graves with their heads down and didn't talk. Melinda sniffled a little but didn't cry, and neither did he.

  They didn't have the energy.

  8

  “I'm going to make them crosses,” Melinda announced when they came back into the house. Her eyes were bright now and seemed to subtly shift focus between Seth's eyes and the tip of his chin in quick little jolts. “One for mom and one for dad and one for Kevin. How come mom didn't have one already?”

  “I don't know,” Seth said.

  “Can I use the old fence?”

  “Sure,” he said. Last summer their father had replaced some rotten boards on the picket fence outside and there was still a pile of old whitewashed slats stacked up in back of the house. “There's some nails in the barn. Just be quiet, okay? And keep an eye out for dead.”

  “It'll be fun,” Melinda said, and hurried outside.

  Seth was secretly impressed with his sister's resilience, although he'd never tell her so. She'd been shell-shocked for a while when the world had first ended and the violent, walking corpses had started appearing in their dooryard. And when their dad had expired and then unexpired right in front of them, she'd gone mute for almost a full week. But she'd bounced back, and now nothing seemed to faze her. Big Kev dying, and then their dad's funeral all in one morning, and now she wanted to do arts and crafts. He didn't know if he should be worried or relieved.

  She had nightmares often, and sometimes came out of them with strange notions about the future on her mind. The morning the fat lady with the spiderweb veins had shown up, Melinda had awoken and dazedly informed him that Mrs. Simpson, her teacher from school, was going to be paying them a visit today, and that on this visit she would scream at them, and chase them around the farm all day long.

  “She's mad that I haven't been in school,” she'd said.

  Seth had told her she was being dumb, but when he started to go outside to gather firewood she put up such a fuss that he'd stayed in the barn with her for another hour, and in that time the fat lady had shown up. The fat lady wasn't Mrs. Simpson, but she looked remarkably like her – down to the worn mumu and the flat, waxy curls in her hair. He wondered what would have happened if he'd been busy swinging the ax by the woodpile when she stumbled up the driveway.

  He watched Melinda go around the corner of the house, and went outside himself a moment later. While Melinda set about saving their dead parents’ souls – or whatever it was she thought she was doing – Seth started up the generator. It was an old rust-spotted Honeywell, and it took a few yanks on the pull cord before it finally sputtered life. It made a throaty, reverberating rumble when it reached its peak, about as loud as the lawnmower, and Seth looked warily at the road before going back inside.

  They hadn't seen a single dead all day, and that was worrisome. There'd been gunfire and there'd been motorcycles and there'd been screaming, and still no dead had come wandering up the driveway. He was of the mind that long periods of peace and quiet were bad omens, that it meant that somewhere the dead gathered and – what, plotted?

  No, of course not. That wasn't right.

  They couldn't think exactly, but Seth suspected they might be able to do something like it, the way honeybees could coordinate attacks, or how the flocks of Canada geese that passed overhead every fall knew to form a V.

  Something like intelligence, or something just shy of it.

  He tried the telephone first, and wasn't at all surprised to find it dead. Not a busy signal or an automated message, but a deep and menacing silence. The line was probably cut somewhere between here and Bozeman, ripped down by a car wreck during those last chaotic weeks of the civilized world. He held the receiver to his ear for a minute, listened to his own breath echo in his ear, and had the sudden eerie sensation that the phone was active, the line was open, and someone, somewhere, was silently listening to him breathe. And perhaps if he was to say something – hello? – he might just hear a guttural retort or a dry, mocking cackle coming from the other end of the line – someone else in another house somewhere, lying dead on a linoleum floor with the phone at their ear, or maybe a lone, maddened operator in some abandoned Pacific Bell service cent
er.

  Unable to resist, Seth did exactly that. His voice was a bare whisper. “Hello?”

  When no response came, he relaxed, hung up the phone and went into the living room.

  The last time he'd watched television had been months ago, and in those days it had been an unsettling mixture of measured analysis and Bedlam-grade lunacy. The news anchors had been more or less calm until the last few days, patiently questioning an endless series of unflappable experts – medical doctors, microbiologists, FEMA workers, police officials, and finally, military brass. For the most part their theories about the outbreak had been sound but inadequate. They had offered weak explanations like rabies and epilepsy at first, and when those were discredited they had patiently moved on to more exotic-sounding ones like necrotizing fasciitis and mutated encephalitis. Finally they had resorted to sputtered protests and befuddled silences. At that point cameras had started cutting away, usually to weather reports, or heartwarming stories about good Christian families taking in the needy in this, our time of trials.

  The polished and measured veneers had begun to crack around that time, and the media had become preoccupied with blame-laying and incensed condemnation. Withering, contemptuous gazes began slipping past the stony visages of newsreaders. Flippant parting remarks slipped past perfect teeth. You see? they seemed to suggest, It happened because of gun control. It happened because of the UN. Because of capitalism. Because public schools. Because: you.

  Other personalities blamed it on foreign interests, a genetically modified virus cooked up in a military lab somewhere. It was the Chinese. It was the Russians. It was the Ay-rabs. It was a US military experiment gone awry. One beady-eyed broadcaster with skin like raw meat said it was the pet project of a particular South American dictator, and promised to reveal the culprit at the top of the hour, if the good viewers would kindly stay tuned. Another claimed it was the devious scheme of his personal rival at another network, and that the virus had been engineered to disregard Republicans.

  The most surreal part was the advertising, which had gorged itself on the incumbent frenzy of 24-hour emergency broadcasts. Old Spice body spray keeps the dead away, they can't handle the scent of man! Kraft Cheese-N-Mac has a ten-year shelf-life, so stock up now for the uncertain times ahead! Put 'em back in the grave with Remington-brand ammunition!

  Seth's father had been bit around that time, and he'd stopped paying attention to the television. He'd had his hands full with taking care of dad, and with keeping an eye on Mel.

  Now he found only four channels still active. Three showed test patterns and the other a black-and-white episode of The Andy Griffith Show. That one had a scrolling message across the bottom of the screen urging everyone to report to designated safe zones, and then listed locations for various counties. Seth's safe zone was at the MSU football stadium in Bozeman. He'd passed near it weeks ago, and its wide tunnel entrances had been choked with still bodies.

  Mel came back inside then, and he left her watching Andy Griffith dole out cornpone wisdom while she pieced together wooden slats on the carpet. He went into his father's room and tried the laptop computer.

  It booted quickly, and he felt a pang of nostalgia at the start-up chime. He opened a web browser and was pleased to see his homepage load after a few hiccupy false starts. He typed “news” into the search bar and after an anxious pause, got a page full of results.

  The first three – Yahoo, MSNBC, FOX – were unresponsive. 404 PAGE NOT FOUND.

  The rows of hyperlinked headlines on CNN's homepage all read DAN'S WIFE IS A WHORE. The headline image at the top of the site, which would normally show something related to the top story – panicked villagers fleeing a volcano eruption, grim-faced soldiers piled atop tanks in the Middle East – now featured an extreme close-up of a woman's spread vagina.

  He stared at it blankly, feeling nothing. Wondered if it belonged to Dan's wife.

  ABC News hadn't been updated in three months, but seemed at least functional. The last story posted was rife with typos and concerned the federal government evacuating DC to some undisclosed location. Halfway through the story the text changed to capital letters and abandoned all punctuation.

  The foreign press had fared no better. The BBC had stopped updating shortly after posting a story about the dead roaming the tunnels of the London underground and a photo of a hollow-eyed bobby with a bloodied truncheon dangling loosely from one hand. The Canadian Broadcasting Company's website was urging citizens to evacuate the cities and head north, into the tundra. Al-Jazeera seemed undecided as to whether recent violence in Kuwait was a civil insurgency or a new, potent strain of rabies.

  Le Monde's website was still up, but Seth didn't know any French beyond merci.

  He looked at Twitter. He looked at Facebook. He looked at Instagram. Cries for help in the dark, and the people who Like them.

  On a whim, he decided to check his email. The browser pondered his request, and seemed to hesitate. Loading... loading... loading...

  With a whirr and a grunt, his computer was redirected to another website, and it wasn't his email account at all. It was a primitive, no-frills page of black text on a white background. The title read: YOUR INTERNET TEMPORARILY INTERRUPTED BY WHITE SANDS COLONY – SERVICE WILL BE RESTORED MOMENTARILY.

  Below that was a picture of an adobe arch with a road passing beneath it – it might've been a tollbooth or a checkpoint. Behind it were wavy dunes of white sand baking under a high desert sun. A smiling man in an Air Force flight suit stood in the foreground, waving at the camera. Wooden letters on the arch read WHITE SANDS MISSILE RANGE.

  GREETINGS TO SURVIVORS!

  YOUR NEW HOME AWAITS YOU AT "WHITE SANDS COLONY," A SOCIETY OF LAW & ORDER ESTABLISHED AT THE FORMER MILITARY BASE NEAR LAS CRUCES, NM.

  WE OFFER SAFETY, SECURITY & A NEW WAY OF LIFE!

  PLENTY OF FOOD, WATER & SPACE FOR ALL!

  ELECTRICITY INTERMITTENT BUT IMPROVING EVERYDAY!

  LODGING BELOW GROUND AND SECURE!

  POPULATION CURRENTLY [127] + 4 INFANTS.

  NO DEAD OBSERVED IN [28] DAYS.

  ALL PEOPLE OF PURE INTENT WELCOME!

  PARTICULAR NEED FOR:

  • MEDICAL PROFESSIONALS / SCIENTISTS

  • FARMERS / ANIMAL HANDLERS

  • ENGINEERS / TECHNOLOGISTS / MECHANICS

  • AIRCRAFT PILOTS (PPL CERT. OR GREATER)

  DIRECTIONS:

  1. I-25 OR I-10 TO US 70 EAST AT LAS CRUCES

  2. TURN RIGHT ON NM HWY 213

  3. ENTRANCE THREE MILES AHEAD

  KEEP ALL WEAPONS HOLSTERED AND/OR SAFETIED AND HANDS OVER HEADS WHILE APPROACHING (SAFETY FIRST!!)

  CLICK HERE TO RETURN TO THE WORLD-WIDE-WEB!!

  Naturally, the bottom of the screen was a pixelated animation of a yellow highway sign, which bore the legend THIS SITE UNDER CONSTRUCTION.

  Seth stared at it for a few minutes, then hit the print button and logged off the computer. He shifted restlessly in the chair, then got up. He went outside to look down the driveway, to make sure nothing was stumbling up it.

  Outside, he looked at the barn, and at the withered fields around it. At the sky towards Bozeman, where the wafting trails of black smoke had mostly cleared. The world was getting settled again, but summer was almost here. The frozen dead in the countryside would be stirring soon, like hungry bears emerging from deep hibernation.

  Kevin had said the Army might be coming, too, the Army and maybe a whole lot more dead. The Army guys sounded worse than the dead. The way Kevin had talked, Seth imagined they were men who would ride up to a house like his and spray it with machine gun fire before knocking on the door.

  For no particular reason, he knew they would kill him and probably Mel too, even if he dug up Kev's body and showed it to them. The word Kevin had used was principled.

  Principled men. That was them.

  When he came back inside, Melinda was finishing up the second of three crosses. She looked up at him from the floor and said, “Th
e TV's broke. It plays this one show over and over again.”

  Seth said, “It doesn't matter.”

  “Yes it does.”

  “No, it doesn't. We're leaving.”

  9

  That night they slept in Seth's room, and Melinda cried for awhile. Her brother stared at the ceiling until well after midnight.

  10

  Beyond the trees at the bottom of the Walker driveway, a man and a woman watched the house.

  Both of them were quite tall. The man was narrow and rangy, with hard veins popping out of his forearms. The woman was solid and strong, planted on powerful thighs like enormous chicken drumsticks. A large woman, but not a fat one.

  The man was watching the upper floor of the farmhouse, where moments before a dim light had winked out. It had been too faint for electricity, and too solid for fire. Flashlight, he thought, and grunted something.

  “Huh?” the woman said. She had been staring at his back and lost inside herself, which wasn't the same as being lost in thought. When she blanked out, which happened a lot these days, she seldom thought anything at all. She just floated along on a tranquil sea, staring off at nothing, until someone said something, or shook her, or hit her.

  “I said, smart kids,” the man said. “They got all the windows sheeted over to keep the light in, so you can't tell anyone's home. We wouldn't even known about them, if you hadn't spotted the boy.”

  “Oh,” the woman said. A blush rose in her face at the faint praise, and she added: “Oh.”

  “Farm's in good shape, too,” the man continued, cocking his head in the direction of the neat barn and the carefully shuttered windows. “Crop fields are all overgrown to shit, but they kept up the place pretty good. How many houses did we pass with the roof caving in? And after only six, seven months?”