Tim waited, to be sure that the creature was indeed dead before he left the room.
The house was no longer safe, he knew that, but the street was also crawling with the dead. Left with no choice, Tim watched the street, and slid outside. There were two zombies in the distance, milling around an overgrown garden. Their heads rose and snapped toward Tim the moment he came into view. Tim saw them and turned to run, but something stopped him. The zombies were making their way toward him but they moved slowly. They were handcuffed, together. Tim moved toward the police car he had crashed, and cast a quick glance for the knife he had dropped. It was on the floor in the passenger side foot well.
He opened the door and grabbed the knife. The two zombies were still some way off and another three shambled along behind them. Hurrying, he turned to leave, but caught sight of the flapping form of the woman he had hit first. The same woman had called to him for help; that had begged him with such pain in her eyes. Tim moved over to her, and crouched down. Her head snapped to one side, her body straining to reach the sweet meat of the living.
“I’m sorry,” Tim spoke to her, holding back the tears that wanted to fall. He felt sick from the drink, but vomited because of the guilt.
The zombie snapped noisily at him. Her perfect white teeth crashed together with a loud snap. Tim clutched the knife. Time had run short on him. The secondary line of the dead moved faster than the bound couple and was almost upon him.
“I had to,” Tim whispered again, before he stabbed the body through the head. The bone was just as softened as that of the creature he had killed with the mirror shard. The zombie fell still, with her eyes open. They stared at Tim, no longer pleading, but with an untamable anger.
Rising, Tim turned and moved quickly down the street, putting as much distance between himself and the pursuing group as he could. He followed the main road, and kept his head down. The silence was horrendous. The long line of abandoned cars, so neatly in line, waiting for the lights of forever to change once more and allow the living to continue their journey unimpeded. He passed a handful of zombies, but no survivors. One house he came to had smoke rising from the chimney and a crowd of six hungry zombies pounding at the walls. Tim didn’t slow down; there was no saving them. He could not beat them all, so told himself he would not try.
The continuous drone the zombies made alerted Tim to their presence, and gave him time to seek shelter from the approaching crowd. A good thing too, for when they passed, he estimated their numbers to be close to fifty. They moved in a group, but showed no visible signs of attachment to one another. Tim hid in the garden of a house under whose shadow he had retreated. He sat against the gate, his feet drawn up to his chest, eyes closed. He waited until the sound of their shuffles began to diminish. Once he was sure they had passed, he rose and looked for a way into the house. The back door was open, so he went inside. This house, unlike the previous one, was tidy to a degree. The shelves in the living room and dining room – two separate areas in this abode – stood filled with knick-knacks - clocks and figurines. He moved quickly, eager to ensure that he was alone. He didn’t even flinch when he found the bodies in the living room. It was a fact, which sickened him more than anything else he had seen until that point. The elderly couple had killed themselves. There was no question about that. They had slit their wrists. Tim looked at them, and saw his wife. He heard her, felt her hot breath on his neck. He remembered the touch of her fingers as they traced their way over his body as they lay in bed. He recalled the painful pinch of her strong arms as she tried to eat his face. The hole in her neck glistened in his memory of her as if encrusted with tiny jewels; romanticized to avoid the painful truth.
“Help me,” she whispered in his ear. That whisper was so real, he had to turn around. They all stood there: his wife, the people he had run down, and the faceless bodies of the family whose house he had walked past.
“Leave me alone,” he called, as he swiped at the air. The figures stared at him, but made no sound. “You’re not real!” he shouted. “There wasn’t time! I couldn’t save you! They would have killed me too, and I’m not ready to die!” He felt the tears begin to fall. Of course, his wife’s face held his gaze, with the look of sadness in her eyes. It was that sadness that cut him to the bone, because he knew that was not who she was…not any more. She was a machine; her mind set on one thing…death. Hunger had consumed her and unless someone put a bullet in her head, she would continue for…who knew how long those things could live for? Tim broke down. He collapsed to his knees. He had condemned thirteen people to death. While he may not have been able to save any of them, he had not even tried. It broke his heart, grabbed his spirit and choked him until his heart and lungs burned. He didn’t realize that he had been holding his breath until he began to grow woozy from the oxygen deprivation.
He looked around, eyes blurred and burned by tears. He was alone, save for the dead lovers.
Tim found two bottles of expensive liquor in the dresser, and promptly opened them both. He started drinking them with gusto, and carried on until he no longer recognized the world he lived in. He did not forget about the dead that wandered the earth, it was merely that he no longer cared. He drank, stared at the elderly couple, then drank some more. What began as warmth in his belly soon consumed him. It swallowed the hangover that had started to settle inside his skull and buried it deep back inside. Fire spread through his entire body, until he was an inferno. His skin tingled and burned to the touch. The feel of the carpet against his skin, his clothes, excited him and took his befuddled delight even higher. With one bottle finished and the second half empty, all concepts of time and space lost to him, Tim rose.
He staggered to the door, falling into the lap of the now decomposing corpses. The days had ticked past that much Tim was certain of. For it was raining when he threw the door to the property open and bellowed into the street.
“Fuckers!” he roared, before throwing up in the bushes. He replenished the lost fluid with a double helping of liquor from the second bottle, and then wandered into the garden.
The dead stirred, although their numbers were significantly depleted since his arrival.
“Come on,” Tim slurred his words and staggered into the street. A zombie approached him. Its lower jaw was missing. The tongue dangled from the hole that had been its mouth like a flaccid penis. Tim saw several of them, and launched the bottle he held at the central figure of the bunch. He hit the creature and sent it to the floor. Not that it bought him any time. Others were upon him. Three came from behind, while several appeared to flank him. One even emerged from the garden of the house he had left.
Tim collapsed to his knees, his arms out to one side in surrender.
“Mary!” he screamed as he closed his eyes and waited for the end…
Chapter 15 – Holding onto Hope
“I was ready to die,” Tim told them. During the telling of his tale, the shake in his limbs had lessened and his speech had lost the slur it had held when he made his first introduction to the group. “I mean, we do what we have to, to survive, right? Well, I’m done surviving.” Emotion poured from his mouth in a torrent. He was powerless to stop it.
“You would become one of them; a monster? I don’t get it. Why not…” Leon began but stopped himself short of suggesting suicide as a viable option. He looked over at Jessica, who lowered her gaze the instant their eyes met.
“No, my wife is one of them. When I saw that old couple sitting together I knew. I should never have left; I should have let her kill me.” There was an eerie finality to Tim’s words. They created a sense of hopelessness. Nothing they could say or do would change his mind.
“Don’t think like that, Tim. She isn’t your wife anymore,” Jessica began. She spoke from behind Paul, for there was still something dark about Tim that she didn’t trust.
“What would you know about it? You took the easy way out too. You don’t have the right to sit there and condemn my decisions,” Tim spat.
Paul interrupted. “Hey, let’s keep it calm okay? There’s no need for things to get ugly. We’re just talking here.” He felt Jessica stiffen beside him, ready for a fight.
“It’s so easy for you all isn’t it? To sit here, above the world, safe and sound. Looking back, it is always different. We romanticize the bits we want to remember, twist them into something less to make ourselves feel better about our actions, or in this case, to allow ourselves the freedom to say that we survived; to talk about hope. Bollocks to it. I won’t change my view.” Tim poked at the air as he spoke, yet his fiery gaze never left Paul.
Paul shifted in his seat and set down his pen. The story was over; there was no need to note the rest. He took a sip of the coffee Jessica had given him when she returned from the galley, and waited before he answered. A fight was not what he needed. It was not what any of them needed.
“I’m not asking you to change your view, Tim. You sat to talk with me. Sometimes, voicing our stories is as all we can do.” He realized that it sounded rather bleak, but he hoped that the others would understand his tactful approach.
Leon spoke up, “He’s right. Talking won’t bring back my wife – nothing will. Landing at the airport, wherever the hell it is they are taking us, won’t magically reassemble our lives. Everything has changed, Tim – everything. Talking is all we have left. It will unite us; bring us closer together. I mean, like it or not, we survived, and I dare say once we land we will be kept together for a while until our ultimate destination has been decided.” Leon showed Paul that he understood precisely what he was trying to do with the emotional man.
“Then you are all fucking fools. I was ready to fucking die, to be with my wife, and those army assholes come riding in to grab me and piss me off again! I didn’t ask to be rescued.” The tears had started to form in Tim’s eyes. “Where were they when the people I hit with the car needed help? They begged to be fucking saved, but nobody came!” he started to yell.
“You were there. You didn’t help,” Robert added. He spoke without thinking, with the quick-footed, narrow sighted enthusiasm of youth.
“Go fuck yourself, kid. If I wanted the advice of a child, it wouldn’t be you I would turn to,” Tim spat and slammed both fists into his thighs.
“There is no need for that now, Tim. We’ve all been through hell. We’ve all lost people. Turning on each other serves no purpose.” Paul’s words fell still as an image flashed before his eyes. It was his wife. She screamed and begged for help as the zombies tore her from his grasp. His children were asleep. They never got the chance to say goodbye to their mother. She turned quickly and came at Paul like a heat-seeking missile. He wondered if they were somehow drawn to their own family more than to strangers. He had killed her, and it broke his heart. “Now, I am sorry for the loss of your wife, but believe me, becoming one of those things isn’t the answer.” Paul felt his hand start to shake. The tears he had for so long managed to avoid were slowly rising to the surface.
“So what, I should just carry on as though nothing happened? Forget?” Tim gave an anguished sigh. He leaned back in his chair and stared at the underside of the baggage rack above his head, until he closed his eyes and covered his face with his hands.
“We never forget, Tim. We just move on. Things have happened that none of us could have ever foreseen. We have to adapt – to carry on. Live for your wife. She wouldn’t want you to become one of those things. She wouldn’t even remember you.” Paul raised the armrest and slid one seat further over, toward Tim, who still hid behind his hands. “I know it’s tough, but you did the right thing. You said it yourself: The world is now a question of survival of the fittest.”
Tim didn’t speak, but uncovered his face. He turned and looked at Paul, his eyes red with tears. The stench of alcohol that came from his body was strong, but only served to heighten the helpless air that hung about him. He looked at Paul. The two didn’t speak…not aloud. Their conversation took place within the eyes; a silent confirmation of deeds done, a shared pain, a common grief.
“You’re wife turned too, didn’t she?” Tim spoke after a while.
Tears had formed in Paul’s eyes, and when he nodded his head, they rolled down his cheeks. He wiped his eyes and forced them back down. Now was not the time. “Yes, she got bit on the first day it all happened. My kids …they were…” Two more tears fell. “They were sick in bed; both had the flu. When my wife changed, she came for me, and…I did what I had to do,” Paul stumbled over his words, unable to speak of the act he committed, however justified it may have been. He swallowed the lump that had formed in his throat and began once more. “I killed her, and believe you me, Tim, that hurts more than I can imagine. Every damned day I think about doing it differently. About leaving her alive, locking her away somewhere, but I can’t change it. Any decision we made would be wrong. Normal rules no longer count,” he continued, feeling a sudden weight lift from his shoulder and admitting his pain.
“What happened to your kids?” Jessica cut in. It was an act she regretted when she saw the color drain from Paul’s face. He looked as though death had brushed him with the dull edge of his scythe, a forewarning of what lay ahead for all of them.
“They…they died. I…” Paul stammered. His hands twitched and buzzed at the memory of holding their heads below the surface of the water. Their weakened struggles and the image of their still frames bent over the bathtub. He felt scalding tears burn his cheeks as the recalled their peaceful faces tucked up in bed. “I made the right choice,” he said in self-reassurance.
Tim stared at them, as the aircraft bounced around in another small patch of turbulence. He didn’t know what to say. The anger he felt still raged below the surface. He wished he had died, but none of that was their fault. They had all survived, and hearing their tales had only served to make him feel worse about his actions.
“I was a coward. I took the easy way out,” he spoke after a silence had descended over the swelling group. “Why did I deserve to be saved?” He looked at them, questioningly.
For a while, nobody spoke. It was a new voice that finally answered the question.
“Everybody deserves the chance to be saved. You will have a role to play in the future.
That’s just how it works,” a young female spoke. She sat three rows in front of them.
“Do you really believe that?” Tim asked, his need for validation partially met.
The girl turned around. She was young – a few years younger than Jessica – and her light brown hair had been cut brutally short by what seemed to be an unsteady hand with a pair of kitchen scissors. Yet none could deny that the haphazard hairstyle did nothing to detract from her fine featured beauty. Her skin was a delicate cream. The light sprinkling of pale freckles over her nose took even more years from her appearance. Had she introduced herself as being in school still, they may well have believed her. The girl tried to turn around to face them, but in the end stood up from her seat. They soon saw the reason for her difficulty in rotating herself in the cramped seats. Her belly was swollen, the child that dwelled within it was certainly close to making its entry into the world.
Paul’s first thought upon seeing her was about the safety of air travel at such a late stage of pregnancy. He opened his mouth, but Leon cut him off.
“Tracey, you need to rest. Sit down,” he spoke in a friendly yet demanding tone.
“Sorry Leon, but I have been listening to what you all have to say, and just…well, I think it is important that we don’t give up hope. Without hope we are no better than those creatures we have run away from,” she addressed the group as a whole, looking from each face in turn.
Everybody thought about what she had said. It wasn’t until the man she was travelling with, her husband, stood up and started talking that they realized how silent they had all fallen.
“You have said it yourself: these creatures, they are not like in the movies. They retain certain characteristics. I…we,” he took Tracey by the hand and gave
it a squeeze, “have seen it for ourselves. We have a chance. We have options. Whatever is waiting for us when we land, as long as we can hang onto hope, we can get through anything.” He smiled at them.
Paul had already reached for his notepad and pen the moment Tracey first stood. As he turned to a fresh page, the tears in his eyes dried. Their talk of hope struck a chord. He was not an overly religious man, but hope…that was something he liked to believe in. He raised his eyes from the page and looked at them; a happy couple. He thought of their baby, and instead of seeing the possibility of dark times ahead, he saw light. He saw hope…and it made him smile.
Chapter 16 – A Little Bundle of Joy
“If you don’t mind me asking, how far along are you?” Paul asked, looking at both Leon and Tracey, for they seemed to know each other.
“I’m thirty-two and a half weeks. Don’t worry. I’m not going to burst on you.” She flashed a smile – a genuine smile – at Paul. She looked across to Leon, also. “Leon took good care of me. He checked me out and said I was fine.” Another flash of white teeth and the entire world seemed to lighten just a little in the presence of such vibrant good cheer.
“She’s telling the truth. That one there is as fit as a fiddle,” Leon spoke up. “We were stuck in the same holding area. I gave her the basic check-up and monitored her every day. The military even gave me a few basic medical supplies and ran some blood work. I’m not too happy with her flying, but under the circumstances, we didn’t really have a choice.” Leon looked at Paul as he spoke. “I’m only a paramedic, but I’ve delivered my fair share of babies.” He smiled; an act that was infectious.
“That’s good enough for me,” Paul answered, finding that without even making any effort, the corners of his mouth had begun to curl upward.
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