And now, as he stared at her across the courtyard, she looked at him with love and a hint of playfulness at their shared secret. He was a lucky man.
Now - Winter
He thought of that day so long ago as he stood in the courtyard now. He looked to the barrel of his gun and saw that it was clotted with rotting flesh and burnt powder. The English garden was overgrown now. After things had changed, it had been left to go wild. The once trimmed shrubbery and grass was matted and coarse with briars and weeds. The winter sky was dark and stormy with curdled milk clouds and the desiccated crunch of brown oak leaves beneath his feet sounded like he was treading on a carpet of cockroaches.
The sun had disappeared again beneath the black and grey blanket of clouds overhead. The sun rarely shone anymore. He suspected it was because of all the fires. When the dead started to walk and began to outnumber the living, the fire department had other priorities. He could barely remember the stars in the night sky, or what a beautiful summer day filled with sunshine looked like.
Now he only remembered ghosts.
The cold was so much more bitter now as well. That was probably also because of the fires, but he also suspected that it was partly because he had no warmth inside his heart. The courtyard’s nine foot walls were covered in hoarfrost, and the sound of moans and shuffling, dead feet was louder out here. He didn’t care, though. The cold and the maddening sound of the dead were small irritations compared to the suffering he felt inside.
He looked to the large wrought iron gate that served as an entry to the courtyard from the rear alley. He had padlocked it months ago, and leaned a wooden picnic table up against it so that the undead couldn’t see him when he came out here. The charcoal grill was pressed against it to stop it from toppling over when one of them pushed against it, or in case there was a strong wind. He had run out of charcoal before things went crazy, so it was best used now was as a large paperweight.
He looked to the small grave. It was near the oak tree, very nearly at the same spot he remembered from that summer so long ago. She loved this courtyard, and she loved her garden. He knew she would have been happy here.
Then - Summer
Things had been going from bad to worse for a week. There were riots and the news had said they were because of food shortages, and anger at the economy, and growing joblessness. It was all a lie though. They had watched the news together when the government finally explained what was happening. A man with bushy black hair and an eye patch had a press conference. He was from the CDC and, if it hadn’t been July, it almost certainly would have been taken as an April Fool’s Day or Halloween prank.
The dead were coming to life.
It was crazy, and he said as much at the time.
The idea that there were zombies, and that they were real, was almost overwhelming. She had looked at him with her beautiful eyes brimming with tears. She held a hand to her stomach again, just like she had a month earlier, but this was different; a movement born of maternal protection.
“What does this mean?” she asked, and he took her in his arms.
“It will all work out. The government will have to have a plan for this. If not this exact scenario, I’m sure Homeland Security has a contingency for something similar. Besides, we live in a nice suburban neighborhood… all of the riots and attacks are happening in the city. We’ll be safe.”
He would regret his words the very next day. They had run to the store to get some essentials, but found that there was little on the shelves. They weren’t the only ones with that idea. They wound up at the same drug store where they’d bought the pregnancy test. They bought some essentials and returned home.
It happened when they were unloading the car. He was inside the house, having just carried in a case of bottled water, when he heard her screaming. He ran out the backdoor, across the courtyard, and out the gate to the alley to see her by the car, struggling with a woman.
“Hey!” he yelled, the possibility that this was one of them – one of the walking dead – never crossing his mind. All he knew was that his beloved, and their unborn child, was being attacked. He ran to them and grabbed the woman by the back of her pink and black athletic shirt. He threw her to the ground and spun to face her. Like a slow motion horror movie, the woman turned, and slowly began to get back up. The attacker’s yoga pants were torn at the knees, but the gaping wounds caused by her fall were oddly bloodless.
It was then that he saw, with growing horror, that her face was half gone.
Her torn cheek was hanging in shreds and he could see her molars gnashing through the gaping hole. Her right eye hung like a spider’s egg sac from the red, raw cavity where it should have been. She snarled and jumped up, coming at him hungrily. She was on him before he could react and he barely had time to grab her by the throat before she bit him. Holding her at arm’s length, she whipped back and forth like a trapped snake, her fingers clawing at his arms and shoulders like the teeth of a rabid, ferocious animal.
He spun her around and slammed her headfirst, as hard as he could, into the quarter panel of the car. There was a sickening crunch, like the snapping of a piece of celery, and she went limp in his hands. She dropped to the ground with a groan that sounded almost plaintive and sad.
The zombie lay on the ground next to his car, her body motionless, but her head still awake and aware. The woman’s remaining dead filmy eye rolled about wildly and her teeth clacked together like castanets. With dread he realized that, while her neck was broken and her body was cut off from her brain, the head was still alive -- alive and hungry.
“Honey?” He said, turning to her in concern. He couldn’t bear to look anymore at the monster that lay snarling and growling next to the rear tire of his Subaru Outback., “Are you all….”
The words suddenly stuck in his throat. What he saw terrified him.
His wife was laying near the front bumper, holding a hand to the juncture of her neck and shoulder. Her left side was covered in what looked like a bright, wet, dripping red blanket.
It was blood. Her blood.
“Oh, God,” he cried, his world suddenly twisting around him dizzily.
“ Babe…” she said weakly, her voice gurgling with what sounded like phlegm. A gout of blood came out of her mouth and she coughed, causing more blood to course between her fingers and down the front of her shirt.
She looked terrified and a little glassy-eyed from shock. She looked at him, pleading with him to tell her she was all right, that it wasn’t as bad as it looked or felt. He couldn’t lie to her like that.
He groaned and lifted his hand to his mouth. He unconsciously bit his knuckle to quell the scream of terror and panic he could feel fighting to erupt from deep within him. With a frenzied burst of movement, he knelt and scooped her up in his arms, cradling her like a wounded bird as he turned to take her inside.
As he lifted her, he heard more moans behind him and turned to see, at the end of the alley, several more of the undead running towards them, shrieking and moaning in hunger.
He ran into the courtyard and slammed the gate shut.
He buried her later that night. As he dug the hole, she started moving under the white sheet he’d wrapped her in. He’d known she was dead. He’d seen her bleed out and he still had her blood on his hands, and shirt, and face. He’d kissed her dead face, lips, and belly before burying his face into her lifeless breast and crying in despair at the silence in her chest, her now still heart filling the room with an endless roar of silence.
He remembered this all as he stood knee deep in her grave, watching her sit up and struggle with the sheet. He watched it fall from her elfin face. He saw her look at him with a cold, evil hunger. She wasn’t his love anymore. She wasn’t a beautiful, delicate, wondrous creature anymore. She was something dark and twisted and no longer human.
He raised the shovel over his head, and struck her with the sharp edge of the blade. He raised the shovel and struck her again. And again, destroying the monster tha
t was once the only thing he’d loved more than life itself.
Afterwards, he screamed himself hoarse. He was certain that the memory of what he’d done, the sound of the shovel as it split her skull, the feeling of the shovel handle in his hand as he’d struck her, would haunt him forever. As he screamed in horror and disgust, he held her now limp body. In the distance, he heard sirens, and outside the courtyard walls, he heard the moans and snarls and snuffling sounds of zombies as they tried to find ingress into this once beautiful garden.
He buried her later that night.
Now - Winter
He came up the steps from the basement with the box, his breath pluming in front of his mouth like a ghostly cotton ball. It was early morning, right before dawn, the coldest time of the night. The gas had been off for a few weeks. The electricity still worked, oddly enough, but the gas and the heat it would have provided stopped working just as it started to get cold. He spent his nights under layers of blankets in the bed they’d once shared, still lying on his side only. Never hers, though. He awoke most every night, reaching for her bed-warm body.
He had done that before the horror had started. He would wake from a bad dream and reach for her, running his hand across her side gently, feeling the magical curve of her hip through the light material of her panties. It was like a talisman against the dark, a reassuring caress to convince him that he was now awake and that she wasn’t a dream he’d had -- that she was real. Most nights, she would not wake, but her body would react to his touch and she would roll, snuggling against him with a sound that only he understood.
Now, whenever he woke to a house as cold as a morgue with the sound of a zombie snarling in the street below, he would cry when she wasn’t there. Her side of the bed was empty, but in his heart she would always be there.
It was like he was sleeping with a ghost.
As he trudged up the stairs, he heard more of them at the front of the house. He didn’t particularly care.
He returned to the courtyard and stood at her grave again. He set the box down and pulled out a small cross. It was a duplicate of hers, only a quarter of the size. He used the claw end of a hammer to dig a hole and placed the tiny cross next to the larger one. After patting dirt down around its base, he stood and looked at the grave again.
“I’m sorry, honey.” He said quietly, “I should have put one up for our baby. I’ve been meaning to, I just haven’t done it because…”
He started crying then and, soon, he was seized with sobs that shook his thin shoulders beneath his heavy coat.
“I’m going crazy, baby,” he finally said once his grief had passed, “I don’t know if it’s because I’m starving, or because I don’t have you, or because of the sound of those goddamned things. That’s probably it more than anything else. The sounds never end, those things are always out there, moaning and screaming, and waking me in the middle of the night when they rattle the back gate. I’m starting to lose it.”
He stood there for a long time. Eventually the sky began to lighten from the swirling, frigid black of night to the swirling, frigid grey of dawn. He reached into the box again and removed a round object wrapped in foil. He opened it to reveal a piece of wedding cake. The frosting was mostly gone, and it was still mostly frozen, but he set it in the box and used his knife to cut a slice of it. He took a few hungry bites of it. He chewed it soundlessly and, after a while, placed it on the grave.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s not right to eat our wedding cake without you. I know we were supposed to eat it on our one year anniversary, but you were gone. I tried to wait, but it’s the only food left. I’m sorry.”
He also placed a picture next to the wedding cake, and his wedding ring. The picture showed him as he once was – young, smooth-faced, full of love, and wearing a black tuxedo. His arms were around her, so beautiful and tiny in her white dress.
“Happy Anniversary, baby.” he said.
The man turned from the grave and walked to the far side of the courtyard. He grabbed the grill and dragged it to the side, its wheels scraping on the flagstones with a sound like a wounded rabbit. He did the same to the picnic table. He looked through the gate and saw no zombies in the alley. He did see his Subaru sitting where he’d left it so many months ago. The rear hatch was still open and it was covered in dirt and grime and all of its tires were flat. He could see the body of the woman who he’d had to kill, or re-kill, laying where he’d left her.
He reached into his pocket and pulled out the key to the padlock and quickly removed the lock from the gate. With a squeal of rusty, unused hinges, it swung open when he gave it a push. He pulled out his handgun and removed the magazine. It was empty. He dropped it with a clatter to the flagstones at his feet and slid the action of the gun back just enough to verify that it was loaded. There was only one bullet left.
He stepped out into the alley and walked around the Subaru. The zombie woman’s eye twitched towards him, but she was mostly a skeleton now.
He walked out into the middle of the alley, and that’s when they saw him.
Even in the cold, they were still deadly and fast. There were twenty or so zombies in the alley and, when they started screaming and moaning, he knew more would come. He retreated back into the courtyard, leaving the gate open. They started pouring into the courtyard and he stood with his back against the oak tree, near her grave. The first one through saw him immediately and growled, a deep guttural sound filled with unnatural hunger.
Right before it reached him; the man put his gun to his own temple and pulled the trigger.
As the courtyard filled with the sound of zombie moans, rending flesh, and the disturbing crunch of gristle and bones beneath blood stained teeth; it began to snow. Like fluffy, dirty, white dust motes, the snow fell soundlessly on a dead world.
A Darkness Within: Prelude
This is the short story that turned into my second novel, A Darkness Within. Reworked now as a prelude, it was originally cut from the novel version because it was too long, added nothing to the story, and negatively impact the first person narrative of the main character, Sully. I loved the backstory, though. It’s another example of the hubris of a government and smart men who think they can control the true evil they create to make all of us safe. - DAC
Prologue
September 17…11:19pm
Wisteria, Ohio
And so began the end of the world…
The town of Wisteria was a small bucolic place. It had a Main Street, a town square, and storefronts that hearkened back to the beginning of the nineteenth century. The Ladies Social Club maintained the obligatory wisteria trees that graced the small park in the town square, their grape-like flowers hanging heavily over manicured lawns and bright red, orange, and pink roses. A memorial statue dedicated to the young men who had given their lives in the last half dozen U.S. involved wars looked sorrowfully towards the south of the square. There, the Presbyterian Church cast a long, all day shadow on the small gazebo where the Shriner band played every Friday evening during the summer.
The side streets off of the square where all quaintly named after trees. Streets with names like Oak, Elm, Beech, and Birch ran quietly away from town, terminating in dead ends, cul-de-sacs and, in some cases, empty fields. On the east side of town, they ran for endless miles through corn fields and soy farms until they merged and emptied onto State Route 25. The side streets near town were populated by many gamble-roofed, Victorian style homes that slumbered beneath the thick, gnarled limbs of ancient trees. Flagstone walks led to immense porches with heavy, stained glass doors and foyers with high ceilings and real oak crown moldings. In the winter, radiator heat hissed in the large rooms and, year round, the floors creaked with age.
It was no different than any small town - save one thing.
Where Main Street crossed the Little Prosperity River, amidst the hulking and empty remains of several warehouses that perched over the brown, sluggish river waters - there was a newer building. It was a modern bu
ilding. Its green, glass face glinting blindingly in the afternoon sun. It seemed out of place between the abandoned warehouses that once thrived in Industrial Revolution corpulence.
It was a research extension for the Centers for Disease Control. Rumors about its purpose ran the gamut from bio-weapons development to medical research. In truth, it was somewhere in between.
As night fell, and the evening stretched into night, something very bad was happening at the silent, green building near the river.
Dr. Byron Walker was a brilliant, but eccentric, biologist. His specialty was contagious diseases and, in a lab in the basement of the research facility, he was working on pure evil. Working on grants provided by legitimate, if somewhat shadowy, government agencies, his objective had been simple - design and develop a virus that was genetically engineered to demoralize and destroy enemies of the United States
Dr. Walker had no qualms about his highly illegal work. In fact, he loved it. The idea that someday the world may very well go to hell in a hand basket appealed to him. He was an expert in contagious viruses and knew that it was only a matter of time before some terrorist in a turban walked into Times Square with an aerosol container of Anthrax, or Ebola, or Hanta, or any of a dozen other microscopic assassins. He was certain of it happening, and he was also certain that it would prove so destructive that the government would quickly not care about any silly little rules regarding ‘ethical’ warfare.
Disturbed Graves: Tales of Terror and the Undead Page 6
