by Joseph Souza
“Stop your firing! We don’t stand a chance against these numbers!” Rick shouted out the window. “I’m going to drive a few miles down the road and see what’s going on over there.”
“Okay, boss!” Thorn shouted, giving him a thumbs-up.
“Conserve your ammo. Use it only in case of an emergency.”
Rick accelerated out of the parking lot, smashing into a group of dead stragglers. I collapsed in the bed, closed my eyes, and covered my ears with my hands. It was madness. I tried to think of better days. Like the time our family went on vacation to Disney when the kids were much younger. Lazy days spent on Wells Beach, playing in the sand, and then going out for lobster rolls, fried clams and cocktails afterwards. But the hideous thumping noises brought me back to this stark reality. Their restless, ceaseless howling added to the insanity. Upon opening my eyes, I realized that the truck had stopped yet again. The engine idled loudly, rumbling with horsepower and strength. Exhaust filled my nostrils and flew up into the raw mist of the day. Thorn stood in front of me, blocking my view.
“Holy shit!” Thorn exclaimed.
“What?”
“Oh my God. You’re not going to believe this.”
I lifted myself off the bed and took in the full horror of what was happening. I saw an old cemetery and witnessed hands clawing away at the dirt, trying to emerge from beneath chipped old gravestones. I couldn’t fathom seeing anything more monstrous. About a dozen rotting corpses had climbed out of their muddy resting holes and were staggering toward the truck. Dar leaned out of the window and baited them. All they sensed was food—fresh human flesh. I looked inside the truck and saw that Rick was trying to pull Dar back inside the cab. Seconds later, the truck jerked forward and accelerated down the road.
We rode for what seemed like forever. At no point did we fail to encounter these monsters. Their numbers appeared to be growing. By the time we’d circled back to the farm, the driveway had scores of them loitering about and howling. Dar and Thorn began shooting them in order to clear a path to the front door. Rick wielded a M9 Beretta in one hand and his long hunter’s knife in the other. He exited the cabin and began to methodically shoot each creature that approached. I passed through the cleared path, and when I looked behind me, I noticed that it had quickly filled in with the dead. The rain poured down as their wet, fetid hands reached out to grab hold of us.
By the time we’d made it back inside, I realized that I was sobbing uncontrollably. Kate rushed over and held me in her arms. My eyes, ears and nostrils were caked with mud, and my clothes were soaked. Her embrace felt warm and loving, and I luxuriated in it. It had been so long since I’d held a woman in my arms that it felt like a revelation, a new and exciting discovery made by me and me only. I could hear her sobbing against my shoulder, and as I returned her embrace, I could see more of the dead gathering outside.
We sat down at the table. Thorn lit a cigarette and shared it with Dar. I kissed the top of Kate’s head and wiped clear my eyes. We sat quietly for a few minutes, trying to process the plague we had just witnessed. We all knew that we had no chance against that army. It felt like we were sitting here waiting for death to arrive.
“We have no other choice now but to pack our stuff and get out of here,” I said.
“Where do you suggest we go?” Rick asked, gazing at me with a faraway stare.
“I think we should head down to Boston. I’ll bet they’ve set up emergency shelters and soup kitchens. The military is probably patrolling the city as we speak, if in fact these dead things have even shown up there.”
“You think it’ll be any better in Boston? Those hungry bastards will migrate to the greatest supply of food, and where do you think that is? In the major cities.” He put his haggard face in his hands. “Besides, do you really think the U.S. government is prepared to handle a crisis of this enormity? They could barely hold their dicks when that hurricane smacked New Orleans a few years back.”
“True, but we can’t stay here. We’ll be sitting ducks if we just sit here and wait this thing out,” Kate said.
“I beg to differ. I say that we stay here a little longer, inside the fortress, and make sure everything is secure. Then we wait and see if this epidemic burns out, as all epidemics eventually do.”
“Why do you get to decide, man?” Thorn said. “This should be a group decision. Besides, I’m frigging starving.”
“My truck, my gas. Of course, you’re all free to make your own decisions. You’re free to leave any time you want. I’ll not stop you.”
“That’s bullshit! You know very well we can’t just walk out of here and expect to survive against all those sick fucks,” Thorn shot back. “Besides, Dar’s carrying my kid.”
“You should have thought about that when you went about your lives, ignoring the reality of the world’s deteriorating situation. Why should I suffer? I anticipated a crisis and prepared accordingly by storing food, gas, and ammo, which I generously shared with all of you when you showed up at my door. If not for me, you’d all be dead. Or worse, you’d have ended up like one of those ghouls out there.” He pointed out the window where the dead lingered. “And if not for all of you, I could have held out much longer.”
There was an awkward silence as we stared at each other, realizing that Rick was right.
“I agree,” Dar said, breaking the silence. “We have no right to take what is rightfully his. He shouldn’t suffer for having done the right thing.”
“I’m glad that someone finally sees things my way.”
“That’s all good and fine,” I said, “but how in the world are we going to eat? How are we going to protect ourselves when these hungry assholes start to pound on the doors and break through your unbreakable glass? These things are ravenous and will stop at nothing until they get us.”
“From this point on, the rationing reaches critical mass: water, food, ammo, gas. I will calculate the allotted number of calories each person should consume on a daily basis. I have canisters of powdered protein and carbohydrates, which we can mix with water. The children and Dar will receive extra rations, of course, but the rest of us will have to do with less. A lot less. The goal will be to stretch our supplies out through the summer, or at least until either help arrives or this pandemic burns out. I have an ax downstairs that has been sharpened to a razor’s edge and can be used in case of an emergency. We can use it if one of those creatures somehow makes it inside.”
“Okay, we’ll give your plan time,” Dar said, “but if by the end of summer things aren’t better, then we’ll have no choice but to move on. Agreed?”
“Agreed. That’s a very reasonable compromise.”
Dar’s piercing gaze told everyone that she was not to be trifled with. She’d spoken with a clarity and firmness that attested to her newfound confidence. Not one of us believed that she’d fail to follow through if she believed that Rick was not living up to his word.
My nerves felt jumpy as I watched Rick retreat to the basement. Thorn and Dar went upstairs to be alone. I stared numbly out the window and watched as the army staggered madly over the driveway, bumping into each other and searching for food. Never before have I hated anything more in my life. I got up and pulled down the shades so that I wouldn’t have to look at them. They seemed in a trance, sent here to infiltrate our waking consciousness until we delivered ourselves to them. If only I could understand their reasons and motivations, something I could wrap my head around. I desperately needed to make sense of this senseless event.
Kate excused herself and went into the living room. She needed to care for the children, who had begun crying. I went over and grabbed one of my notebooks and pen, and began to write. My mind was spinning out of control, restless and mad. I wrote down every detail that I’d witnessed from that truck. I wrote of the child ensconced in the womb and described the terrible sounds those things made as they got plowed over. After an hour of writing, I lifted my head and stared at the pages, wondering whether this creativity w
as real or the frantic ramblings of an insane mind. Or if anyone would ever even read these passages.
By the time I’d finished, it was evening, and the others were sitting down to dinner. Kate knew enough to leave me alone when I was writing. I looked down and saw with delight that the table was filled with steaming hot food: mashed potatoes, bowls of corn, slices of crispy fried chicken, and a cup of brown, homemade gravy. Kate had also made a pitcher of fruit punch from the reserve of powdered mix stored in a large plastic container.
Rick stood and held his glass of punch in the air. “Our gas supply is dwindling, our food and ammo are running dangerously low, but our resolve is strong and our hearts large. Therefore I raise a toast to our last hot supper in the foreseeable future. May we thrive and prosper in these troubled times.”
“To our survival,” Thorn toasted.
“To this feast,” I added.
“And to killing as many of those fuckers as possible until the kingdom is returned to its rightful owners.”
Silence. Then, “And may God in his infinite wisdom have mercy on all of us,” Kate added.
Chapter 19
THE MIDDLE OF MAY ARRIVED, AND the world outside started to dry up. The local flora and fauna began to sprout and come back to life. Each night, the moon rose higher in the sky, and the grasses, weeds, flowers and trees started to germinate. Clouds of green pollen filled the air and dusted everything in its wake. A small earthquake struck one evening as we sat down to dinner, rattling the shelves and dishes, and causing the few creatures outside to scatter about.
Dinner that night—and every night—consisted of eight scoops of protein and carbohydrate powder mixed in a large pitcher of water. It tasted terrible. Our sugared fruit drinks had long been depleted and so we had nothing sweet to mix in with the drink. The earthquake caused everything to tremble for thirty seconds or more, and then it was over, and the plates settled down. It felt like a sign. It felt like the end of the world.
We’d all lost a considerable amount of weight in a short time. Our clothes hung loosely off our frames, and we had the hollowed-out look of prisoners of war. Rick appeared spectral in the light. His eyes bulged out of his sinuous sockets, and his temples were lined with veins. His hair had thinned out and began to turn gray. He smoked like a fiend, though his supply of cigarettes was running low as well. Thorn appeared taller and more skeletal, having lost all the muscle mass he’d built up shoveling snow over the winter. Kate had the emaciated look of an anorexic in the final stages of life. Only Dar and the children looked like their former selves, the result of a balanced diet.
The lingering headaches were the worst, although no one ever talked about them. More nagging than debilitating, they felt like low-grade hangovers, and they came and went at will. Even aspirin and copious amounts of water had no effect on them.
Our conversations had changed radically since going on rations, and all we could think about was food. There were long intervals when the creatures outside never even crossed my mind, and I stopped worrying about them banging on the door or trying in futility to smash through the unbreakable glass in order to feed on us. Besides, there was nothing left of us to eat but skin and bones.
I dreamed of thick steak burgers smothered in bleu cheese, thin-crust pizzas from the North End, fat pillowy dumplings from Chinatown filled with pork and cabbage and billowing with steam once you bit into them. Many afternoons we sat around and talked about our favorite things to eat. What others craved surprised me, and I listened hungrily as they described their favorite meals down to the last detail. These food discussions fed the brain but tortured our shrunken bellies, and I frequently imagined sumptuous, sweet concoctions in my mouth, the powdered sugar dissolving against the brackish surface of my salt-lined tongue.
The irony of our immense hunger pains struck me one day as I stared out at the dead wandering throughout the countryside. We were them. They were us. Our mutual hunger made us more alike than different. I related to their ravenous appetite, even momentarily felt sorry for them. Because the notion of a grilled rib-eye with sautéed mushrooms brought tears to my eyes, despite my long history as a vegetarian. I felt desperate and depraved, and stumbled throughout the house like one of the dead. Through no fault of their own, their brains cried out for human flesh. Had I gone outside, I would have fit right in with the lot of them, even resembling the sordid physical characteristics that made them dead. They were starving, yearning, in search of the chosen ones, whoever these chosen ones were. I, on the other hand, was searching for my family and the truth about our existence on this planet.
The caloric deprivation caused my mind to play tricks on me. I hallucinated constantly and at the strangest times. My writing became more bizarre and phantasmagorical as time passed. I recalled these hallucinations down to the smallest detail, imagining the child in Dar’s womb as one of the dead creatures, consuming Dar from the inside out. I envisioned it eating its way out of the womb and emerging with a mouthful of bloody placenta. But the child was our salvation, the future. The child, I began to convince myself, would lead us out of this morass and into the Promised Land.
Rick would often come upstairs while I was writing and begin to ramble on about the scientific progress he was making, speaking in a technical jargon that went right over my head. He sounded as crazy as I probably sounded to him.
One night, I watched in fascination as Thorn flew down and landed on the dining room table, staring up at me as if he were a fly. I picked him up by the wings and held him in the crook of my palm. He looked cute as a bug. But then I cleared my eyes and saw him sitting in the chair across from me, drinking his powdered water and talking non-stop. Another night, I stared at one of the creatures looking in through the window, and I imagined the two of us to be having a long and discursive conversation about literature and philosophy, and specifically about the meaning of life.
Dar did not speak often during this time, but when she did speak, she did so in a measured, careful tone. I no longer viewed her as my daughter, but as someone who had transcended her former self and had attained a status wholly independent from her previous life. Her words seemed prophetic and spoke to me on a deeper level. When she spoke, I found myself hanging on her every word, which I put to memory and later jotted down in my notebook. I studied her tattooed, gothic image. She seemed mystical and otherworldly, and I could not believe that this beautiful, exotic creature was spawned from the juice of my loins—this martyr for the cause of mankind. I desired nothing more than to stay in her good graces and make her proud.
Kate and the children took to sleeping in my bed. We slept together on the mattress, our bodies intermingling as one unified organ. It felt like we were a small family. Sometimes, when I opened my eyes and looked at Kate, I saw my wife in repose, whispering to me, a sexy cadaver beseeching love. We spooned each other when we slept. Delirious with hunger, I would sometimes ask her in hushed tones what it was like to have watched her husband and children die. She laughed as she described her family’s final moments on this earth, her body detached from reality and soaring as a spiritual entity. How her estranged husband held her and their three children at gunpoint, despite the restraining order taken out against him. They’d been estranged for about a year when he forced his way inside and held them captive. Securing the children with rope, he took Kate into the bedroom and had his way with her. She complied willingly, hoping that by doing so she might convince him to leave the children unharmed. He was six foot three and two hundred and fifty pounds of muscle. He’d brought a bottle of whiskey along with him and watched a college football game for part of the time he was there. When he was good and drunk, and steely-eyed with determination, he pulled the gun out and stood above them. She prepared herself to die and prayed to God that she would be reunited with her children in the afterlife. He went down the line and proceeded to shoot each child in the head. Tears poured from her eyes when he finally came to her. He placed the barrel of the gun in her mouth and held it there for
a minute, laughing as if it were the funniest thing in the world. He shoved it down her throat until she nearly gagged. Then he took it out of her mouth, pointed it at his own temple and said, “Have a great life, bitch!”
I was rapidly losing my mind and keenly aware of it. There were moments of brief clarity when I realized my insanity, and understood that if we didn’t leave this house soon, we’d all be dead. These creatures were not going away. They seemed to be proliferating rather than diminishing. Their numbers would most certainly spread up and down the east coast and beyond. They had evolved, devolved, and had managed to wage a devastating psychological war on us, a war of attrition and terror more than anything else. They quickly learned how to get onto the roof and jump up and down, where they clamored and howled in an attempt to break into the house. Roof tiles began to litter the driveway as they peeled off shingle after shingle. Their hungry cries went on endlessly, apart from a few minutes at night, when they would abruptly stop for no reason. With each successive night, however, their complaints lasted longer and longer.
As May turned into June, the others began to realize the hopelessness of our situation as well. In our brief moments of lucidness, particularly in the morning, we began to huddle in the dining room and discuss an alternate plan. Dar, presiding over these meetings, kept the discussions short and to the point. It was agreed upon that there was not much time to spare, and that we had to act or else die. My mind was nearing its end, and one night I simply stopped sleeping, terrified to enter into that nocturnal pact, paranoid that I’d never wake up again. Conspiracy theories chattered in my head. In this deluded state, I even started to convince myself that Rick had been poisoning our food in order to keep us under his thumb.
