THE REMNANTS
Part Two: Dead Wrong
by
Jonathan Face
©2017 Jonathan Face
1
Melinda Walker seldom woke up gently. Usually it happened on the tail-end of some dream, her legs thrashing out in silent alarm, or the babble of some nonsensical dream-speak on her lips, which tended to sound like a hodgepodge of pirate talk and pig Latin. Where-say be the lost cats, Joey? she had found herself mumbling one morning, sleep still heavy in her eyes.
This time it was only a short gasp, but on the cusp of that gasp might have been a little chirp of a scream, and she lay under the blankets and watched her belly rise and fall for several minutes while her heart got settled.
She had done that before — screamed in her sleep. It made her daddy worry. He’d wanted her to go see a head-shrinker about it, a term that scared her, but she was too embarrassed to ask what it meant.
Melinda exhaled softly, let all the budding panic drain out of her lungs. She relaxed, glanced around, listened to the early-morning murmurings of the farmhouse. She thought about her dream while it was fresh.
She always remembered the vibrant ones, and was too young to recognize this as the double-edged sword it was. For all she knew, everyone remembered their dreams. She just assumed no one liked talking about them. Why would they? Who wanted to hear about being chased around the yard by your schoolteacher with her lips blue and skin flaking off her cheeks? Or how about your father's eyeglasses breaking neatly in half, and the pink-white orbs of his eyeballs rolling out of his head when the frames fell away?
Melinda’s dreams were elaborate productions that played out in her unconscious mind in all the stark and garish colors of overexposed Technicolor. She didn’t always know what they meant, but she didn’t always want to know, either — they were seldom pleasant.
This one had been bad, as bad as any.
In it, she'd been on a long journey with her brother. Both of them had long sticks slung over their shoulders with handkerchief bundles tied to one end, like the stubble-chinned hobo clowns she'd seen at the circus last year. Accompanying them on their trip had been two cartoon characters, the Walrus and the Carpenter from the Disney version of Alice in Wonderland.
The four of them had been walking merrily along, just out for a pleasant stroll, until finally they'd arrived at a shack built right on the sandy shore of an ocean.
Come in, come in! the Walrus had beckoned, leading the way, and Melinda had suddenly become very afraid, because there were dead people in that house. She could hear the listless drag of their feet and the subtle clink of dragging chains. The lonely sighs and the eager scratchings of whittled fingernails on walls made of driftwood.
Stop, she'd told her brother. Don't go in there.
But he'd just laughed at her and told her she was being a baby. And when he went inside the shack, the door had slammed shut behind him and the entire building had shuddered and then collapsed in a heap of splintered wood and discarded oyster shells.
She had rushed forward, shoveling through the rubble with her bare hands, and all she had found in the ruins was her rusty old knife, the one she'd discovered in the barn. And as she stared at it, perplexed and wondering how it came to be in a shack by the ocean, she'd heard a dead person behind her – right behind her – issue a garbled, triumphant cry as a wasted hand squeezed down on her shoulder.
That had been all. She'd woken up then.
She turned her head and looked at her brother sleeping beside her. He snored peacefully. He slept like a dog did, with one eyelid half-raised and a sliver of white peeking out from underneath. She’d told him that once at the dinner table, and he’d thrown a biscuit at her.
She thought about shaking him awake, telling him about the dream, but decided against it. He would tell her it was dumb and she was being a baby, just like in her dream. Then maybe he'd be so disgusted he'd get out of bed and go off to sleep in another room, and maybe he would die there. Maybe the house would fall on him, or maybe there was a dead-dead in the house right now, and it would get him.
Maybe that was what the dream meant.
Melinda knew that her dreams sometimes meant things, but they were never so kind as to come right out and tell her what things exactly, so she often made a game of matching up the world around her with dreamland abstraction. Of course, she wasn’t very good at it, and usually couldn’t narrow it down to any one specific thing. Dreaming about a train pulling away from a station might mean a million things, she’d come to realize. A coming journey, someone coming to visit the farm — death.
Her dreams weren’t always useful omens, either. More often than not, they prophesied the mundane and unremarkable. It will rain soon. You will lose a baby tooth. There will be a substitute teacher at school. Mostly she found them about as insightful as a TV weather report.
She'd had to feign surprise one Christmas morning when her dad had trotted a pony out of the barn (Prickly Pete, a taciturn little Shetland, which was a word she pronounced with careful precision). She’d practically expected him; recurring dreams in which she rode a ceramic horse round and round on a painted carousel had made it apparent. That, and her dad had forbidden her to enter the barn on the days leading up to Christmas.
Prickly Pete had been a good pony, and she still missed him. Several years ago, one of the hired farmhands had carelessly spilled a jug of antifreeze near his pen, and he'd died a bad death over the course of several days.
Since the adults had left and the dead people had arrived, the intensity of the dreams had increased, but the clarity hadn't sharpened. Like the dream about Mrs. Simpson from school, walking all the way out here to chase her around the yard – she knew what that had been about, in hindsight, and Seth did too, even if he didn't want to admit it. The trick was to think about the dream and work out how it applied to their situation.
She thought she was getting better at it, little by little.
She thought about the Walrus and the Carpenter from tonight’s dream, and could only conjure an image of the DVD box to Alice in Wonderland, and for some reason, heads of cabbage. She wished she could watch it right now, and thought she would make Seth turn on the generator in the morning – one last movie before setting out on their grand adventure.
He had left her in the dream, and surely that meant something. Was he going to abandon her? And the shack had fallen on him – was he going to die?
The thought made her anxious. Melinda was a child, but she knew death.
And then there was the knife. The knife had been important. She'd found it in the ruined hut and she remembered feeling mad at it. Like it had shown up too late. A where were you when I needed you? sense of outrage had washed over her when she picked it up.
Maybe that was it. The knife.
The knife was in the barn. She'd absently set it down yesterday, when she'd gone rummaging for nails to make the crosses.
She should get it. She was abruptly certain that the knife would be important. She glanced again at her brother's sleeping face, saw he wasn't stirring, and slipped quietly out of bed.
Seth grunted, turned over, and mumbled something in his sleep. It sounded like marlin or Marvin or maybe market.
As she padded down the stairs she thought she heard a noise coming from outside – a quiet, raspy sound, like sandpaper on wood.
She paused, listened. It didn't come again, but she was sure she heard it. Something was out there, far off but coming this way.
A raccoon, she thought instantly, or a skunk or a possum. Some night creature nosing its way up the driveway.
But what her mind conjured up was a vision of a dead man staggering toward the house, a
bloody rope of his own guts trailing behind him.
She danced lightly from foot to foot. She shouldn't go outside now, but she wanted the knife. Needed it. It suddenly felt urgent.
2
Cold dawn light was slipping between the slats of the window blinds when Seth woke, bathing his bedroom in a soft, amber glow. Outside he could hear a bird singing, and that was good. He’d been wondering about the birds, had been afraid they’d never return after winter left. He sat up in bed and listened to it for a minute, watched sunbeams spill over the oak planks of his bedroom floor.
Mornings were something he'd miss about this place.
He glanced at the other half of the bed and saw that his sister was gone, which didn't particularly concern him. She'd always been an early riser, and had been excited about their departure.
Melinda was five years younger than him, and he still had strong memories of her infancy. She'd been sick a lot – fever, diarrhea, and respiratory infection had all been household buzzwords once upon a time. This often meant pre-dawn crying from the baby room, followed by one of his parents shuffling past his door, their faces drawn but determined, cut from weary granite slabs. In time she'd managed to overcome the health issues, but never quite outgrew the lousy hours.
She was probably packing her things.
Seth got out of bed and got dressed. He went to the bathroom, brushed his teeth, put on a clean shirt. Toothpaste, he thought. Have to get more soon.
On his way downstairs he remembered to pick up Kevin's rifle, which he’d left propped by the bedroom door, and slung it over his shoulder. He'd hate to forget that.
The house was quiet, and he halted at the foot of the stairs, suddenly uneasy. He listened for his sister, heard nothing.
What he did hear was a slow, repetitive scraping. He identified the sound as readily as he'd once placed the sizzle of eggs frying in the kitchen. It was the sound of rotten flesh dragged over dirt. Lifeless feet with all the motor skills of a drunk. The sound of the dead being dead in the yard.
His mouth instantly dry, Seth slipped the gun off his shoulder and brought it to chest level. He unclicked the safety, just as he'd been shown. He took a slow, quiet step forward and peered down the hallway.
The front door was hanging ajar, and he caught a glimpse of a limping figure wrapped in a dirty, off-the-rack business suit as it drifted past the open frame. A yellowed white sleeve sticking out from under the arm of the jacket, a faux gold watch on blackened flesh. It was gone a second later.
He didn't move, and in another moment he saw another, this one female, with a pageboy hairstyle and a prim-and-proper polka-dotted dress. Somehow it made him think of a youngish schoolteacher. It passed by the doorway with its head down and its arms hanging slack at its sides like hanging ropes of sausage.
He still didn't move, even though by now a voice in his head was screaming at him to run, dumbass! and yet a third zombie passed by the front door, and this one was – had been – an older black man in denim overalls and a pair of canvass gardening gloves, a horseshoe of frizzy gray hair ringing its head, which jerked violently from side to side. Its jaw opened and snapped shut with each unsteady step. Click-click, click-click.
None of them saw him.
He was again aware of how quiet the house was, and he wondered where Melinda was hiding. Surely they hadn't got her. He would have heard the screams, or the moans of the dead as they rose to that exalted pitch. Surely.
He took three quick steps into the hallway and ducked into the kitchen, where the wide window granted him a better view of the yard. He crouched behind the breakfast table, aware that they would likely see him if he moved too quickly or made any noise. The dead didn't have the sharpest ears, but they did seem drawn to sudden movements, cat-like in that regard.
He saw the leader in the cheap suit now, a paunchy, iron-haired man with his head tipped backwards and his jaw hanging slack, a thirsty bird wishing for rain. His skin was badly burned, and one of his brown leather shoes had gone missing. Seth saw that the exposed foot was bulging and purple with unpumped blood.
The odd procession drifted along in the breezeway between the house and the barn, moving in a loose circle around the fresh graves Kevin had dug yesterday. They stared vacantly in no particular direction, the occasional, disconsolate moan drifting up to the skies.
Seth found their behavior slightly hypnotic, and forced himself to look away at the rest of the yard. His eyes caught a flash of wispy blonde hair from the hayloft hatch, and felt instant relief – there she was.
Below the hatch, the barn door yawned open, but so far the dead paid it no mind.
He wondered when they had arrived. He'd gone on a brief scouting run just before sunset yesterday, pedaling his bike up the big hill a mile down the road. He'd wanted to see if there were any dead around, half-convinced he'd find a shambling army en route to the farm after what Kevin had told him. He'd got off his bike and shaded his eyes with one hand and hadn't seen a thing. Just the outskirts of Bozeman and the snowy peaks that ringed it, a brief layover on their long march into Canada. He'd noticed a trio of skinny prairie dogs skittering alongside the highway, and thought that was a good sign. The dead would go after animals the same as humans, and if prairie dogs were willing to build a colony so close to the road, he thought they must feel pretty safe.
He brought up the rifle and rested its barrel on the edge of the kitchen table and peered down the sights. Three of them would be tough. He'd never had to handle more than one at a time. Still, he thought he could probably do it, if he could manage to take careful aim despite the panic that would coil around his heart when the other two turned and started for him.
They'll leave, like the others always do, part of him thought – the scared part that usually piped up when the dead wandered near. Sit tight and they'll move on into the fields, to do whatever it is they do out there.
Maybe. Maybe not. He doubted it. He'd never seen any with this degree of purpose, looping endlessly around the graves. The fat lady who had waltzed around the yard all day, maybe, but even she had seemed more confused than driven. Dead at the Walker farm usually felt more like a rest stop – a brief flyby to see if there was anything tasty around, then an onward shamble when nothing interesting was apparent.
The black man in the workman's garb made an abrupt Nnnnf sound, and its head cocked quickly to one side, the jaw still restlessly snapping. It stopped its staggering waltz and shifted to face the house. The others continued circling, oblivious.
Seth held his breath. It hears me, he thought. I haven't made a sound but it hears me somehow, or smells me. Maybe they can smell.
He lined up the sights on the zombie's head and started to pull gently back on the trigger. After he shot it the others would come at him, either through the open front door or by throwing themselves through the window.
“Nnnnf?” the gardener said again. “Nnnng?” It sniffed the air, stuck its tongue out — an ugly, purple thing — and waggled it around.
Seth exhaled and pulled the trigger all the way home. The gun barely kicked at all, which he hadn't expected, and as the kitchen window fell in a shower of glass shards, he knew the shot had gone wild.
“Urrrrgh!” the gardener shouted. It threw up its arms in a human-like gesture of exasperation. Its partners stopped in their tracks and lurched about towards the shattered window.
Dead I'm dead I'm DEAD, Seth thought. He repositioned the gun slightly, and when he did, the one in the business suit growled something and bounded towards the house.
As it rushed at him, Seth registered a man stepping into view behind the three, moving lightly around the side of the barn. The man had his arms folded across his chest, and was wearing what looked like cowboy boots and a wide-brimmed Amish-style hat. The fluidity of his movement suggested he was alive, but Seth didn't have time to think about it just then, because the businessman had taken three loping strides and was going to clamber through the window frame and into the kitchen.
> A CRACK cut the air, and the businessman's head exploded and his body dropped in mid-step. The head didn't rip off the spine and roll away or anything like that – it just disappeared. A jagged fragment of spinal column stuck out of the torso with nothing atop it, as though some divine finger had reached out of the sky and given the head a solid thumb-and-forefinger flick.
The noise agitated the other dead, and they turned angrily from the house and looked in the direction of the road. When they did, they caught sight of the man by the barn, who still stood with his arms crossed calmly in front of him.
The gardener bellowed and started at him, the jaw still snapping and its arms raising up before it. A second CRACK sounded in the distance, and a bullet caught its midsection. It fell to the ground, arms still flailing.
The female with the pageboy haircut had been right behind it, and when the gardener toppled, she tripped and went to her knees. The schoolmarm's dress ripped up the side, exposing slightly kinky garter belts beneath. The man in the Amish hat watched all this with thoughtful detachment. He might as well have been looking at a television screen.
The cloth billowed back down over the schoolmarm’s legs as she crawled to her feet, the dress so tattered it now looked more like a robe. She stared intently at the man with the cowboy boots, and lunged.
Seth saw that the man wore a revolver on his belt, hung in a crossdraw fashion at the front of his waist. He drew it, a nickel-plated .357 with engraved curlicues on the grip.
“Come on, now,” the man said, in mild tones that suggested he might have calmed a few horses in his day.
He let her advance to within grabbing range, took two quick sidesteps, and jammed the barrel of the gun under her chin. He let the dead woman get out another frustrated nnnngh! before he pulled the trigger.
The back of her skull opened up, and the man stepped nimbly aside to let the body slide away, and that was how Seth and Melinda met the Tompkinses.
3
The dead gardener flopped around on the ground, its spine snapped and jutting through its back like a bloody poker, all of which Seth's mind quickly translated into dragger, which was what he'd been calling the types of dead with shattered lower bodies and arms still strong enough to pull themselves along. He'd seen many of them, usually around the sites of car wrecks and gas main explosions.
The Remnants (Book 2): Dead Wrong Page 1
