by Black, D. S.
Barry Chance was his name. A blue eyed boy rebel that she followed everywhere. His long blonde rat tail ran down his tan smooth skin.
“Mary Jane! Catch!” The baseball cracked against her skull. She didn’t get mad at him, even though he knew she didn’t play ball and didn’t know how to catch. His daddy beat him black and blue for putting that lump on her head. She didn’t see him much after that, but she never forgot his screams while his daddy whipped him with a switch from a briar patch.
Soon after her daddy got a new job, and she left the Upstate and moved down to Horry County. That’s where she went to middle school, high school, and eventually college.
Damn good days.
She remembers watching the news with her father after getting home during her senior year, the class of 2001. The country was up in arms, ready to kill everyone and everything that looked different. “Nothing but bad news. Nothing but bad people daddy. Least that’s how it seems.”
“Focus in on the seems part, kid.” She always liked when he called her kid. It wasn’t disrespectful, but meant with enduring love. The love between a father and a daughter. “For every bad man, there are at least three good men; but the news ain't never gonna talk about good stuff.”
“If it leads, it bleeds. We learned that in communications class,” she said.
On the TV, a man in a blue suit and white hair screamed and pointed at the camera. He warned the “demonic terrorists” that their days were numbered. He said the war would be fast and precise. He spoke of smart bombs and special forces.
Her dad cut off the TV and looked at her. “Don’t let this old world get you down. Trust me, life is gonna go well for you. You’re one of the good guys. And believe it or not, us good guys outnumber the bad guys.”
As she lay half-conscious on the floor (right about then Rusty Ray was learning about anal adventures of the worst kind), the tears came as she remembered her dad.
Where was he now? A dead man roaming the highways looking for living flesh to eat? And where were all the good guys now? Dead! Gone and dead! Walking around dead. All the good people are dead. And she was never one of the good people because all the good people died early on. They died trying to help other people. She stayed hidden in those early days. Just her and her sister. She didn’t help anyone. She looked out for herself and her sister, and cared only for those two souls.
She didn't look for her husband, or her son; she knew they were dead. She knew she couldn’t save them.
So, she had saved herself. And that made her a bad guy. A rat that hides and comes out when everyone is dead or gone. What did she get for it? This bottle of booze? This half rotten city-state? The filthy inhabitants? The sex between her and Duras?
But what about Duras? Did she really hate him?
No! She really loved him. He was all there was now. She'd loved her husband too; she’d loved her son too, but she couldn’t save them.
“I could not! I swear it! I couldn’t save you!” She screamed and fell to the carpeted floor, cradled in a fetal position and sobbed. The bottle of wine dropping to the carpet beside her, empty except for a dribble of red that drooled out like blood and soaked into the carpet.
3
She didn't know how long she laid there, the wine drying in the carpet beside her head, the wind still softly pushing against the drapes; but the tears slowly dried up. Better memories came through. She was back with her father, out deep in the woods. A long weekend of hunting was almost over. Now they did what they always did, and wasted what was left of their ammo on his beer cans. He’d throw them in the air and she'd show him her skill with well-placed shots. The sound of the blast, followed by the echo through the woods always excited her and made her feel powerful. Her father brought her up watching Lethal Weapon, Predator, and she even liked the Crow; but she especially loved Aliens. The heroics of the “not so beautiful” (as her father put it), Sigourney Weaver emboldened the feministic side of her brain, and made her want to always be just as fast, smart, and good at killing as any man.
“ROTC? Really? Sounds great kid!”
It was freshmen year at Socastee High School. “Junior ROTC, but yeah dad; like a modern day Spartan Hoplite.” The year before, she'd become engrossed in ancient Greece, especially the Spartans. A proud warrior culture and dominators of Greece for centuries. Although her dad still struggled with memories and regrets about his days wearing the uniform and marching deep in dangerous jungles where he watched friends die, and saw the bodies of dead kids he knew his bullets had killed—he never bad mouthed the military or the government and always supported her positive warrior nature; a girl growing up in South Carolina had to have a little kick to her step, not to mention be able to handle the kick from a Colt revolver, double gauge shotgun, and any other weapon these local rednecks wanted to throw her way.
And it was a redneck that she fell in love with in early fall of her freshmen year in high school. Barley Thomas, a thick neck dumbass that had the disgusting habit of chewing tobacco. Why in God’s name she loved him never really made much sense.
It didn’t last, though.
He was driving her home. She slurped on a chocolate shake from Dairy Queen that he just purchased her with the money he made cutting lawns on Saturdays and Sundays.
“Listen Barley. It’s over.”
His neck pulsed and his eyes enraged. He slammed on the accelerator. His mildly retarded eyes jiggled in the moonlight. Rain fell outside and slapped hard against the windshield of his rusted red Chevy blazer. An ancient piece of shit vehicle if there ever was one, and in a moment she was going to find how shitty the brakes were.
He rounded a curb at blazing speeds, all while cursing up a storm. Nothing but dark trees dashed by on either side. She'd never seen him angry before, but he’d told her about his father, who he claimed had the temper of a wild alley cat mixed with a caged dog that hadn’t been fed for a week.
He rounded the curb and headed down a long patch of road that didn’t have any light on it. Trees arched over the road creating a dark green canopy.
White lightning crackled in the sky and dashed Barley’s face with hot light. His knuckles were white from gripping the steering wheel and a large vein pulsed on the side of his neck, “You ain’t gonna leave me! No way! No how! Not today! Not tomorrow! Nooooooo!”
She said nothing. She watched his shadowy face barking like a devil hound; she continued slurping on her chocolate shake. Then she felt the cup’s contents splash cold onto her face. She closed her eyes and tried to calm herself. She breathed deeply.
Only a moment in time. Only a moment in time.
“Yeeehawww! Bitch you are mine!”
She stared daringly up at him. His eyes burned with madness and tears. Snot and tobacco juice spurted from his mouth and nose.
Another streak of lightning lit up the road, and a herd of deer darted across the dark asphalt. What happened next is what she thought death would be like— at least what she thought it was like back then—a dark misty void where the slight echo of the living is faint, but hearable. Cause after waking up and seeing the paramedics she knew she was alive, but she also knew a few moments earlier she existed only in a dark world full of strange and soft voices; her world had been turned black. The lights had gone out and she didn’t even have a chance to say goodbye.
When she gained her senses, she stared around and saw Barley being lifted on a stretcher. Well, she didn’t see him exactly, because he was DOA and covered up with a white sheet. She'd broken his heart and he died for it. The tragedy was that she didn’t really care. The guy was sounding more like a crazed animal that needed to be put down. So while laying around the hospital with a broken arm, three bruised ribs and a hell of a concussion, all while drugged on pain killers—she concluded Barley’s untimely death wasn’t so untimely after all; indeed, it may have been a blessing, both for her and the pathetic redneck woman he would have eventually married, beaten, and impregnated. This would continue the violent Thomas line
age started by his granddad, Ted Thomas. Barley had spoken with great pride while telling her about how his granddaddy “strung up enough niggers to keep this town safe and pretty.”
Years later, as spit fire freshmen in college she fell in, at least for a short time with a crowd of hippy types; the people who are not really hippies, have no idea what it even means to be a sixty’s soul child, but nonetheless wore tie-dyed shirts, flowers in their hair, and smoked a shit ton of weed. It was with this group that she traveled to a little festival called Sun Shine in the Pines which isn’t anything, but a swelling of more soul child wannabes crowded in the trees of the hick county of Marlboro, SC.
This trip wouldn’t have been much of anything but a sad distraction of drugged up yahoos dancing around like colorful arrhythmic zombies. Had it not been for the loss of her once whether important virginity. It all happened in a fast bang; Tyler Bledsoe was in and out faster than sweat could form on her face.
His breath smelled like burnt weed pipe resin, and his body stank from two days without a shower. He climbed off her, and fell over onto his side of the tent; reached over and popped the top of a glass jar sitting next to him, removed a pre-rolled joint, took a red Bic lighter from his left pocket, and lit the joint.
4
Her baby sister. She was just a kid. Hell, they were both just kids back then. Her sister wore a black cap and gown. Mary was then a senior at College of Charleston, go Cougars. Her sis just graduated Socastee High, and was a spitting image of a Greek goddess. Her dark brunette locks curled up and flowed out from under her cap. She’d just stepped off the stage and Mary embraced her tightly, “Momma would be so proud,” Mary said.
Her momma had died when Mary was in eighth grade. Her lungs had turned black with cancer from decades of relentless chain smoking. Those last few months of her life were unbearable to watch. Vomiting, hair loss, and her father’s grim and pain covered face, with lines that said I’d take the Vietcong jungles over this any day.
Her momma’s face had sunk in so far in those last days. Just a pale and pasty whisper of a woman. “Death ain’t nothing but a thing. Just something we all face,” Momma said while lying flat on her back on the hospital bed. The room smelled of cleaning liquids, and her daddy sat in a corner chair staring out the large window down at the roof of another hospital wing. Momma held Mary's hand with her left, and Sarah’s with her right. They stood on either side of the bed. “Your daddy’s seen plenty of death. Ain’t that right, baby?”
Her daddy just kept staring. He didn’t say a word. That was his way when he was in a lot of pain, just plain silent. Mary always wondered what went through his mind in those moments. He never spoke about the war, at least not in detail. Nothing about the loss of friends or holding the entrails of his good buddies, but she knew he saw his fair share of hell. Mary could see it in his eyes, and while momma laid there dying, his eyes stared out like he was watching the war happen right there in front of him. “Your daddy has his ways, dont mind him. He will mourn how he wants.”
“Momma,” Sarah said with tears dripping. Mary watched her sister’s tears drip like rain droplets; then her own started to fall.
“Heaven ain't so far away, baby. Don’t cry for me. Things can only get better from here. Always remember, good people don’t die, they resurrect,” Momma said. She was a religious woman, raised by a stout, tall, and red headed fire breathing backwoods southern Baptist. He’d died of cancer too, the same kind. The Lord seemed proud to take his most faithful while leaving the skeptics behind to use their death’s as evidence of His nonexistence, but looking down at Momma’s dying face, all Mary could think of was a poem she once read by some unknown wannabe poet:
Old man sleeps, bones ancient, mind tired, skin splotched
Old man weeps lost years, dead wife, broken heart, forgotten dreams blotched
Old man falls, unsteady, unready, broken bones, ripped skin, blood falls
Old man dies, weak heart, people gather, people cry, six feet down old man decays
Momma wasn’t an old man, but that poem floated in Mary's mind while Momma breathed her final breaths. Momma's dreams died that day, blotched out of existence, now just a dead wife and mother. Her years lost and wasted, only religious nonsense and two daughters to show for it. A few days later, people gathered, people cried, and Momma drifted down six feet under and joined the ancient bones that had since melted away back into the earth as ashy decay.
Death is that way though, always ready to take you away at any moment on any day. Creeping around the corner, just waiting with an incurable cancer, a drunk driver, a busy day with a hot cup of coffee while crossing the street and a bus driver that didn’t get enough sleep, oh yes! Death is always waiting; it’s a plague that kills people over, and allows them to rise back up hungrier than ever for the thoughts of others, the ideas, the philosophies stored inside the mind, encapsulated in the brain. That’s what they want—a chance to think again. That’s why they crave the brain. They want the chance to dream again, an insatiable hunger for knowledge; that’s all the undead bastards want, a chance to live again. The world grew addicted to pop culture, TVs, smartphones that made people dumb and complacent, and caused humanity to take for granted all the wonders of the modern age, so nature decided to put everyone all on their ass and took it all away; figuring since no one wanted to use their reasoning powers anymore, then no one wanted to think, dream and create, so nature took it all away. Humanity’s death; Mother Nature’s final gift to the bipedal hominids.
5
Sarah was still in grade school back when Momma died, but years later staring at her sister in her cap and gown, and those locks of dark brunette chocolate; Mary could see Momma, or at least what Momma should have been had she not smoked herself to death. Mary and her sis were close as any sister could be. And on that fateful day, when humanity’s death came and took the old world down to hades, Mary and Sarah had spent the prior week together. They didn’t go out that day. They'd stayed home where Netflix helped try and heal wounds of a recent breakup.
“Who needs a man?” Sarah said as she sipped her red wine from a coffee mug. “All I need is my sister and this TV, and maybe that cute nephew of mine.”
“You can have him, but I warn you, he’s spoiled to the bones,” Mary said.
“Not to worry, if QVC keeps their stretch pay option, I can buy him all the video game consoles his heart desires. Really sis, a PS3? Come on now…” She sipped her wine, and then BAM!
…The front door shook hard. Mary jumped up in a start. “Somebody wants in, must be that bastard Cole looking for me,” Sarah said.
“God … you didn’t drag a stalker to my home, did you?” The banging turned to soft moaning and then scraping on the wood. Mary put a hand on her sister’s shoulder. “No! You stay right here. I’ll get rid of him.” Mary didn’t like overbearing men, and she especially didn’t appreciate some crazy asshole fucking up her door. A few feet in front of the door was a closet where all the jackets are hung, along with a baseball bat she always kept just in case; this time, the just in case turned out to be a lot uglier than she'd ever thought possible.
The eye she saw when she looked out of the peephole was like staring into white hot fire. The man, the thing, jerked back a few feet from the door, then slammed himself into the hardwood with a clumsy thud. The face was pale with a hint of green and those eyes … they burned like a white sun. His tongue hung out of his mouth, black and red. She didn’t recognize him. She never understood what caused him to stumble on her doorstep. And at that time, she didn’t know that the Fever was spreading rapidly all over the world.
“Tell him I don’t want to see him, and we’ll call the cops if he doesn’t leave!” Sarah shouted from the living room.
Mary didn’t say a word. She just stared at those eyes. Her heart rate was starting to climb. Then a loud BANG! from a gunshot caused her to jump, it came from somewhere down the block.
She had lived in a small neighborhood close to campus
, but far away enough so that she didn’t have to worry about frat houses or house parties. Most of her neighbors were old and retired. It’s what she loved about that area; the peace, and quiet. The well-manicured lawns. The jingle of wind chimes. The little old ladies wearing neon pink wind pants walking little dogs.
Nature decided to end all that and the gun shot caught the dead man’s attention and he jerked his way off her steps onto the lawn, and out of sight.
The rest of the day, her and Sarah watched the news, and kept an eye on the doors and windows. She couldn’t get her husband or her son’s cell phones. Just ringing.
But her dad had called. He said he was on his way to her. He said the dead walked; he said to lock and load and kill anything that didn’t look normal.
She never saw her father, husband, or son again.
6
Mary woke with a raging hang over. For a moment, she thought she was back home the day the Fever broke, the day the dead man had banged on her door; but it wasn’t a dead man banging on her door now. It was her sister, Sarah.
“What…” Mary Jane rose up and the sun blasted into her sore eyes, nearly causing her to vomit. The wine had dried beside her, and the temperature had risen, making the room hot and stuffy.
“Who is it?” She said in an irritated whisper.
The door burst open, and a wild eyed Sarah rushed into the room holding a sawed off shotgun.
“I’ll kill the son of a bitch! You hear me! I’ll kill him!”
Mary Ann rose up, and forced her mind to focus. It didn’t work well, but she was able to make the room stop spinning.
“Please, my head… just tell me what’s happened.
