by Joseph Souza
Aside from a few days of light snow, the temperatures remained in the fifties. With the exception of that one major assault, the dead kept a low profile. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their behavior, walking in and out of the driveway at will. Their appearance at the farm became more sporadic and random as the days passed, and more often than not they would merely wander aimlessly around the grounds. Dar and Thorn made it a sport to stand outside and pick them off. They had shooting contests, seeing who could be more accurate with the rifle, and invariably Dar won. They would aim for the mouth or between the eyes or maybe a perfect shot in the teeth. The fuckers would jerk their heads back and gray brain matter would spray onto the dwindling patches of snow. Then Dar and Thorn would laugh hysterically, exchanging high fives.
The creatures seemed more agitated with each passing day. Maybe I was imagining it, but they seemed to become more limber and agile, moving at a quicker pace. Their forms covered the localized animal spectrum: foxes, skunks, dogs, raccoons and even one with porcupine quills. There were a few with wings, though the adult ones were too heavy to fly. Of course, more of them resembled the human form, indicating to me that this bizarre contagion was spreading quickly by other methods.
Surprisingly, the house ran much smoother with Gunner gone. At first, the children had a difficult time adjusting to their father’s absence, but after a few days had passed under Kate’s care, they started to adjust to the new reality. The kids had already developed a strong bond with Kate, despite the fact that she kept an emotional distance from them, refusing to fully embrace them as their surrogate mother. And after what she’d told me about her past, I could understand why.
With Dar giving me pointers, I worked on becoming a better shot. After a month of shooting under her tutelage, I was soon able to put a bullet squarely between their eyes from twenty feet away. At the end of each day, Rick would plow whatever dead fuckers littered the driveway and push them into a pile roughly fifty yards from the house. The giant pile of melting snow at the end of the driveway had turned into a mound of slushy, rotting carcasses. Some days I would watch through the windows to see if any cars passed along the road. In all the days that I’d been watching, I counted less than a dozen vehicles. Of course, none of them stopped. They typically sped down the two-lane road like a bat out of hell.
The piles of rotting corpses stacked along the muddy meadow began to disintegrate and congeal into one gelatinous heap of decomposition. The stench of their unwholesome flesh filled the country air and was certainly the worst odor I have ever experienced.
Deep down, we all knew that another attack was coming and that this one would be fiercer and more prolonged than the last. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, I was sure Rick was correct when he stated that these things possessed some rudimentary telepathic powers. What triggered their mass gatherings was a mystery. Rick studied astrological charts and moon phases, and analyzed the brainwaves on his laptop. He left no leaf unturned in his quest to uncover the answers to this puzzle. And while he was looking for clues to their behavior, his computer ran non-stop trying to match the disparate chains of DNA, attempting to identify if there were any matches with these creatures.
Things between Kate and I had changed since I misspoke about Kate’s painful past. A strain opened up between us, and our friendship suffered. We continued to talk, but our conversations were not as organic as they’d once been. We focused mostly on the day at hand and the tasks that needed to be done. When it was her turn, she cared for the children with the alacrity of a professional nanny, competent but emotionally distant.
With the thawing came the local wildlife. They appeared restless and unpredictable, and their odd behaviors continued unabated. The birds zigzagged in the sky in bizarre formations. Foxes and wild dogs attacked each other in broad daylight. Raccoons staggered around in circles for hours on end. Deer appeared and seemed confused and agitated. Coyotes howled outside our door. Even the squirrels appeared sick and wasted, dashing up and down tree trunks at warp speed. All of nature seemed out of whack.
The wildlife did not fear us and made no attempt to flee when we approached. Some bared their fangs and charged, in which case they were shot dead, and then shot again once they reawakened. Dar thought it funny when their brains regenerated. The fact that she’d come to enjoy killing God’s creatures disturbed me, but in the back of my mind, I knew that the rules of engagement had changed and that from this point on the rules would be different. It was even possible that her new set of skills would be highly desirable in this new world order.
My mind began to play tricks on me. Apart from the cosmetic enhancements, I noticed that Dar’s body began to change. Where before her skin had been pale and blemished, her features puffy from antidepressants and a bad diet, she was now positively radiant with energy and strength. The remnants of her troubled past melted away. A slight paunch developed around her belly and seemed to grow with each passing day. At first I chalked it up to the amount of food she’d been consuming; the girl ate like a horse. But when we began to ration out the food, I noticed that her stomach continued to swell. The musculature of her arms and legs had developed significantly. Though I fought the truth, it soon became apparent to me that she was pregnant. This revelation left me stunned, but I didn’t chastise her for such carelessness. This crisis had caused her to grow up too quickly, and the severe isolation we were forced to endure had caused her relationship with Thorn to blossom. Under the circumstances, I found it normal for her to turn to him for companionship and love. Carrying the seed of my grandson in her belly, she would now have to learn how to care for her child and raise it in these troubled times.
By the time we had entered the bloom of spring, I’d filled three notebooks with my writings. Initially, when I realized we would be here for a while, I thought I might be able to write a novel during the winter months. But instead I ended up with something entirely different: impressions, dreams, passages of horrific nightmares, fantasy, gritty reality, and anything else that came to mind. Sometimes fiction blurred the line with reality, creating long passages of rambling, discursive narrative about the demons out beyond that threatened our existence. I frequently mentioned my brother’s journal, promising that it contained some of the most important discoveries known to man. I didn’t go back and reread my journal, happy to continue on in this creative vein, biding time until we could return to society as law-abiding citizens. The three notebooks comprised a chronological narrative of the horrific events we’d witnessed, and I hoped someday they might provide an expansive history of this troubled period in American history.
I wrote at all times of the day. It kept my mind off the dead as well as the hunger pains ravishing my brain and belly. My mind constantly brewed with ideas, stimulated by everything that had happened. There were days when I would sit at the dining room table and write for hours on end. More often than not, I had no idea what I’d just written. I seemed to be in a trance when I wrote. Where before I concocted charts and long, detailed plot summaries, I now wrote from the hip. Sometimes the smallest instance of beauty would set me off into a frenzy of narrative. It was usually something brutish and horrific that would propel me into a self-contained world of fantastical storytelling. I didn’t know when I would stop, so I just kept writing. It helped me deal with the terrible consequences of this crisis. It kept my mind off the dead loitering out on the driveway, waiting to consume us.
Somewhere in the middle of the third journal, I began to write about the unborn child. The child represented the future and carried forth the seed of my progenitors. I wrote incessantly about what this child meant to the future. This grandchild of mine, I prophesied, would be prepared to deal with the new order. I felt proud and protective of the child, though I wondered how well I would come to know it.
I despised the creatures outside and hoped they would soon be blighted from this earth. Rick, however, viewed them with the same care and observation that a medical examiner might study a c
adaver. They aroused his scientific curiosity like nothing else did. He appeared to have aged considerably in the last few months, having spent most of his days and nights down in the basement, running tests and poring over the data. His energy ran low, and his attention span became shortened because of the long hours. He kept detailed notes documenting every step in the scientific process, explaining his methodology and hypothesis, and whether his experiments met certain scientific criteria. I knew this because he would fill me in from time to time about his research.
Communication with the outside world had for the most part been cut off, but every once in a while, he would receive a weak signal from one of his contacts around the world. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, he appeared buoyant and happy, and he would relay to me what he’d been informed of. And Rick had important contacts in the U.S. government and around the globe. Most of the frequencies he surfed garbled with static, and in a state of paranoia, he came to believe that the creatures’ brains were responsible for jamming the airwaves. Because we could not communicate with the outside world, we felt isolated up here in the hills of Maine, set adrift and protected by geography and climate. This feeling of isolation was both restrictive and liberating, and that wide emotional spectrum propelled my creative bursts.
Though I had mixed feelings about him now, the one person I found most intriguing as time passed was Thorn. The more time I spent with him, the more intelligent and resourceful he seemed. He possessed a nasty streak, and there were many times he was moody, cold and distant, but he treated Dar with respect, and in time, I came to accept his relationship with her and the unborn child. Unlike Dar, he did not live to kill the dead, but he did it professionally and without remorse, and supported Dar’s enthusiasm for blood. He became her advocate and fiercest protector. When he looked at her, he did so in a reverential way. It eventually led me to the understanding that Thorn had fallen completely under her spell, and not the other way around. Thorn, as well as the rest of us, began to look upon Dar as the modern day Joan of Arc.
My relationship with Dar had undergone a radical change. No longer was I a father figure to her. Our conversations lacked the intimacy and depth that we once shared. We spoke in generalities, never quite delving beneath the surface about the life and death matters that now confronted us. Nor did we speak much about the remainder of our family down in Boston. She completely shed her previous personality and accepted her new role as a cold-blooded killer. Killing ‘fuckers’ became her mission on earth, and everything she did emanated from this zealotry, including her relationship with Thorn. I worried if she might be delusional or sociopathic. What would become of her if and when everything returned to normal? How would she function in civilized society while raising her child?
I wanted badly to grab hold of my daughter and tell her how much I loved her, and try to convince her to change her ways. But I never did for fear of being rejected. It made me realize that Margaret and I had failed miserably as parents. She needed much more than what we had given her. I felt like such a failure in so many ways. I failed in taking care of my wife and son. I failed to prepare them for the scourge that awaited us. None of us had learned any useful skills that would help us survive in times of crisis. We were too busy filling their heads with the nonsensical and trivial: ideas, words, concepts. Our children had attended the most exclusive schools and studied under the best of tutors. But these experiences proved useless when the time came to put food in one’s mouth, a roof over one’s head, or to kill those who threatened our existence.
And for that reason I failed to show Dar my love and affection, because I was ashamed, insecure and certain that it would never again be reciprocated.
We gathered each day to perform our assigned duties. At night we sat together and watched a movie or TV show on DVD. The general feeling amongst us was that our tight-knit community was coming to an end. Thorn and Dar’s outsized ambitions could not be contained in this small farmhouse, especially now that a baby was on the way. Dar’s nihilistic ambitions precluded a life of small-scale farming, solitude, and raising a child. She was a warrior and ready to fight all the death and decay that had descended upon us. Her moral authority and righteous indignation lent her an aura that even I found hard to resist. In the months leading up to spring, she had developed a no-nonsense, take-no-prisoners attitude that calcified with each passing day. All she needed was an army to follow her to the ends of the earth, helping her rid the world of these malevolent beings.
Dar had finally found her calling in life.
Chapter 18
THE SNOW HAD COMPLETELY MELTED, AND the mud season arrived. The rain bucketed down hard and flooded the fields, turning the main road into a raging river. The pile of rotting, dead flesh had by now formed into a liquefied mass of gelatinous human plasma. More of them were coming by on a regular basis, as if passing through town to make their presence known. By my estimation, we must have killed over a thousand of them over the winter months.
We sat around the dining room table early one morning, drinking coffee and nibbling on saltines. Outside, the rain came down in relentless sheets, soaking the cadavers stumbling about and moaning into the wind. The sound of it pounding down onto the driveway filled our ears and interrupted the silence of our meager breakfast. We didn’t have much to talk about; we had run out of things to say, unless it had to do with food. We had no news, no idea about what was going on in the outside world, no intellectual stimulation apart from our own interior dialogue, screaming for sustenance inside these hallowed skulls of ours. And no one, except for Dar, wanted to talk about fuckers.
This fragile, claustrophobic ecosystem that we inhabited was coming apart slowly, and yet completely. And Rick seemed to have less interaction with us as the days passed, choosing instead to throw himself fully into his science. Much of the day-to-day leadership duties fell to Dar, who accepted the role as her birthright. Rick appeared to be losing his mind. I could see it in his eyes and the carriage of his gait. He’d lost a considerable amount of weight, as had all of us, and his eyes had the futile gaze of someone who had witnessed unimaginable horrors, most of which he’d seen inside the recesses of his own soul.
He walked up out of the basement and seated himself at the head of the table one morning. Kate poured him a cup of coffee and a bowl of cereal, and then sat down next to him. We watched him sip his coffee and diddle a spoon in his cereal.
“We’re running dangerously low on supplies,” Rick announced.
“How low?” Thorn asked.
“Susan and I had enough food to last roughly two years. To be honest, I never figured on supporting this many people.” He rubbed his eyes and leaned back in his chair. “There’s not much ammo left either. By my estimation, we may only be able to make it two more weeks the way the dead keep proliferating. I thought that by spring or early summer I’d be able to resume my farming activities and begin caring for the livestock again. But all that appears to be for naught. We’re even running out of gas, and this crisis seems far from abating. In fact, it seems to be getting worse.”
“Then let’s go out and stock up on some more,” Thorn said. “The roads are clear. We can head to the general store and load up on more ammo and food while we’re out there.”
“And I can blow away any fuckers who get in our way,” Dar said, punching her gloved fist down onto the table.
Rick shrugged. “What other choice do we have?”
“None,” Thorn said.
“It’s not the solution. You all must know that it’s a temporary fix to a long-term problem.” We looked around at each other and nodded. “Okay, then let’s grab our stuff. We’ll head out in an hour and see what we can find.”
When the time came, we grabbed our weapons, put on our rain slickers, and headed out. Rick went first. He zigzagged past some slow-moving creatures and reached the barn. He drove the truck out a few minutes later and parked in front of the door. Dar sprinted out and climbed into the passenger side. Out on the str
eet, more of the creatures loitered about. Once they saw us exiting the house, they turned en masse and headed towards the truck. Rick pulled up a couple of feet past the door to allow Thorn and I to pile into the bed. I waved goodbye to Kate, who stayed behind to care for the kids. Once we were all safely aboard, Rick gunned it out of the driveway, sending a bunch of stray fuckers flying into the air. He didn’t hit the brakes as he turned onto the old country road, and it felt as if we were riding on two wheels as he took the corner. The rain pounded down all around us, and the mud flew up in our faces and mouths.
I held onto the side panel for support and peered through the cabin’s window, and saw hundreds of them stumbling up and down the road. The intermittent thump of the truck’s plow crashing into these dead creatures sent chills down my spine. I saw them flying off to the side and into the grove of trees. Many of them got decapitated in the process or had limbs severed from their trunks. Skulls lay crushed and flattened, greenish-gray brain matter oozing out of the schisms in their cracked craniums. The oversized truck tires crushed their spinal cords and caused their skulls to explode upon impact. Upon turning, I noticed that a good many of them were rising up to their feet, gaping wounds and all, and stumbling in our direction. It sounded like watermelons being flung against brick walls—a wet, liquid, squishy sound.
The constant sound of bodies thumping against the plow and skulls splitting under tires filled my ears. I tried humming ‘Born To Run’ to counter the noise, but it didn’t work. I covered my ears to block out the noise, but it did no good. The din vibrated in the base of my spine, and I wanted nothing more than to jump off this truck and be done with it all, let them have at me. But when I stood to my full height and took in the gray, rainy landscape, I saw swarms of them loitering around the general store and lurching towards the truck in desperate yearning. Thorn wasted no time moving into action. He removed the rifle from his back and began to shoot them in the head. I took out my rifle and followed suit, but upon killing one, it seemed that there were five more waiting right behind them. Our actions proved futile.
