by Aaron Polson
Saul knows when he hears the truck’s growl fade. He knows it will be a late night for his brother and an early morning for him. He closes that math book, knowing he will sleep in the morning sunlight and his teachers will overlook his absence. In his mind he counts the bullets in his father’s gun.
When his mother cries, Saul says, “It’s alright, Mama. He’s still our Tesoro.”
On some evenings, rare evenings, Tesoro joins the family and tells stories while his father drinks cold cerveza. He tells the story of the old woman in a black berka, the woman whose wrinkled fingers looked like wet tissue paper on a piñata. Unreal fingers. Fake fingers. Tesoro talks about the talisman, the blessed scroll of paper he bought and carried in his shirt pocket, a superstitious custom to bring him home alive.
Old magic, she said in her tongue. Dark magic.
The other Marines laughed. Tesoro smiled and laughed, too.
That afternoon, a car exploded in a small, Baghdad market.
That afternoon, Tesoro didn’t die.
Sometimes, in Saul’s nightmares, Tesoro’s eyes shine with a yellowish light, an amber light. He pulls his shirt open, and then pushes fingers into the scar where the bullet broke his skin. His fingers pull back, and the blood pours out like oil, thick and dark. Tesoro smiles, and says, “Magia.”
Sometimes, Saul wakes with a cold sheen of sweat and listens to the songs of frogs and crickets floating on the night air. He waits for the sound of his brother’s truck, but it doesn’t come. He sees the faces of the children from school in ditches outside of town, dead faces with open eyes, staring at him. He knows it is a nightmare when the dead reach out, clutching with gnarled fingers, accusing with their blank stares. His father’s old handgun hides under his pillow, an uncomfortable lump, but Saul keeps it close.
But Tesoro is his brother. The dead are strangers.
A night comes when the rumble of Tesoro’s truck takes away the dream. Saul wakes, creeps down the hallway, and listens at his parents’ door. Nothing. Another sound, a door clicking shut in the unfinished basement. Tesoro’s room is down there. Saul checks the locks on the door and glances out the window. The rusty Ford is in the lawn next to the drive.
His mouth goes dry. Tesoro is his brother. His flesh and blood. When he pulls the gun from under his pillow it is heavy and cold. A shudder crosses his body.
Saul starts on the steps, and a little creaking noise calls out with each. Halfway down, he stops breathing and waits for a moment. A light glows from under Tesoro’s door. Like a moth, Saul is drawn to it, likely to burn up in the flame. His hand rests on the knob, the other clutches the pistol grip. The smell of stale blood is back, worse now. Amplified.
“Saul?” Tesoro asks through the door, his voice cold like a block of granite.
Inside, Saul finds what is left of Tesoro on his bed. His shirt is off, bunched in a pile on the floor. Both hands rest on his knees. When Tesoro looks up, his face is streaked with blood. His teeth are dark and discolored, his mouth blotted. Tesoro’s face wears neither a smile nor frown—a blank expression with black eyes.
“You brought a gun?”
Saul looks at the pistol, his hand shaking. “Papa’s.”
Tesoro’s lips curl slightly at the corners and one hand stretches toward his brother, palm open. “They will come for me, sooner or later. They will need more than guns.” The other hand touches the lump of lead dangling from his neck.
For a moment, neither speaks.
In that moment, Saul understands; in that moment, he kneels to the old magic in his brother’s eyes. What crawls Saul’s spine is damp and black and dead. His eyes close and fingers uncurl. The gun drops into Tesoro’s open hand.
He smiles, showing the full horror of his tainted mouth.
“I’m leaving.”
Saul steps forward and touches his brother’s shoulder. The flesh ticks like a horse’s flank chasing a fly. The skin is cold and almost grey. “We can take your truck.”
“Si,” Tesoro replies. “Mi hermano.”
Saul hesitates, breathing through his mouth to avoid the smell. He looks at his fingers, imagines the skin peeling away from scrubbing. Blood makes a stubborn stain. “First the bleach. I will clean your clothes… the truck, and then we go.” He stoops, gathers Tesoro’s shirt, and leaves the room without another glance at his brother.
The Way of Things in Fly-Over Country
The search beams crossed in front of the gate when my buddy Dan, broad and strong like a spit of granite, hunched over on all fours and made a little scaffold out of his back for me to climb. I scrambled over his shoulders, flopped over the gate, and dropped to the ground on the other side. The first over, Davin, was waiting for me with his shotgun poking out into the kill zone. Once I dusted off a bit and straightened my glasses, we waited for the lights to swing by again before tossing Dan the rope; I held the outside end steady while he climbed. Davin kept me covered. I was scared, shaking like chimes in the wind, but Davin held steady.
Once Dan dropped to the ground, I reeled in the rope, and the three of us hunched in the shadow of the big gate while the lights swung by once more. Davin looked at Dan and me, smiled crookedly, and nodded. The lights rotated away, and we sprinted for the shadows at the edge of Old Town. I figured the guards probably saw dumb kids like us half the time, but no one ever fired a shot.
So there we were: seventeen, full of piss and stupidity, creeping through ruined streets on a Friday night with a couple of jars of Uncle Jeb’s homemade booze, our guns, and an ache to celebrate Dan’s eighteenth birthday. One week later, hopping the fence would land Dan in the stockade—a crime believed to endanger the whole village, but this was coming of age, our ritual. Plenty of other dumb bastards snuck out of the compound before they officially became men; Dad even admitted to sneaking out just before his brother’s eighteenth.
I glanced back over my shoulder at the wall: randomly fused sections of steel, brick, concrete, and stone. Originally a desperate measure against the walking dead, that wall had stood for something like eighty years. For boys raised in captivity, the world outside the wall reeked with mystery, and we devoured grand lies that became our motivation to hop the wall—a man’s right to be free, all that crap. The older men in the compound filled us with stories, baiting us like a lantern to a moth, knowing we’d bite, go over, and look for danger. The stifling closeness behind the wall pushed us, too—personally caught me in the throat.
“What’ll it be boys?” Davin asked once we found the shadows. The moon shone pretty bright that night, drawing the silver out of the world. Davin shimmered like a bit of fresh aluminum.
“Hell, I’m itching to splat a couple tonight.” Dan walked ahead a few steps with long, loping strides, the pinnacle of our small triangle.
“Old man Jantz says we have to check out the church. Says it’s beautiful, sacred ground. Inside the building, with a moon like this, the whole place lights up like a rainbow.” Davin stopped and cocked his head to once side, pointing toward the hill that led to the little building. We all knew about the church, the center of so many stories. Supposedly, that building remained mostly intact after all these years; a vestige of old superstitions lurking in our new ones kept folks from smashing it up.
“Fine, but I want to show you guys something first. Something my brother told me about.” Dan pointed the barrel of his shotgun into a thick patch of inky shadow ahead and strode forward.
Most of the big trees in Old Town were gone, knocked down for safety, but saplings, crooked grass, and snaking weeds groped toward the sky all around. I was surprised at how well I could see with just the moon. With the bright searchlights back at the wall, the rest of the night world look as black as spent oil, but the hunched backs of old houses, broken business, and other buildings rubbed against the blue night and field of stars in plain detail as we walked through Old Town.
I’d heard some stories, mostly from Grandpa, that the bigger cities had drained the plains of their population long
before the end. In the meantime, the big corporate farms finished off the aquifers and sucked the land dry. Without water, there wasn’t much reason to live in the flat land. Without too many people out here, there couldn’t be too many of them, the zombies. Hell, I’d only seen maybe a dozen in my life, but they left the taint of decay smeared across everything. You could see it all over Old Town.
As we stumbled down the split asphalt of an ancient street, Dan reached into his pack, rummaged around, and produced a jar of booze. It was nothing but rot-gut moonshine, but all we had because most drivers wouldn’t risk a run through the wastelands just to drop off some beer for a bunch of hold-out hicks. That’s the way Grandpa painted it, anyway. The scavengers in the wastelands seemed worse than a whole stockyard of zombies.
Dan screwed off the lid, tossed back a swig, and shook his head. “Not bad, boys.” He slowed, passed the jar to Davin.
“No,” Davin said, waving Dan off with the barrel of his gun. “Not until I’m kicked back in the church.”
“Nate?”
“Sure,” I said, cupping the jar in one hand while clutching my own shotgun in the other. The gun had my great-grandfather’s; Grandpa said he used it on birds—quail and pheasant mostly—as a boy. I’d only fired the thing a few times myself, mostly at wooden targets that wouldn’t bite. The guns did make me nervous—we were warned against using them as the report would rouse any undead in the area. I tossed back a swig from the jar. Damn, that shit tasted awful, but the warm humming feeling that grew out to my finger tips after a few swigs kept me going.
“Did hear about Stacy’s cousin, over in New Colby?” Dan asked, reaching for the jar.
“Yeah,” Davin muttered.
“Gawd, I never want to see another burning in my life.” Dan spat on the street.
Davin’s eyes narrowed. “I don’t want those superstitious old bastards to set me on fire when I kick off.”
I shook my head and fingered Dad’s old lighter in my pocket, fighting a shiver born of too many burnings. Mom, for one, after Melina was born. Too much blood, not enough medical knowledge, a bad mix of both. Dad tried to explain the need for a burning, the whole ritual, but I wanted none of it. I know you can’t just bury the dead anymore—paranoia, hysteria, and the real likelihood that the undead will sniff out a fresh corpse. When I was five, watching my mother burn to black ash, none of that rationalization amounted to a hill of shit. Grandpa whispered something about Viking warriors in my ear that day, trying to cheer me. “Great big pyres, big as a house,” he said, “it was pride, not fear and shame made ‘em build those pyres.”
Dan clicked on the lantern he’d taped to the barrel of his gun. “Here we are fellas. Used to serve food here. C’mon.” The light reached out, starting to grope the heavy shadow inside a mashed up brick building. I’d never heard anything about that particular spot, and I couldn’t figure what he wanted us to see.
Rows of benches stretched down a tiled hallway; some broken with bits tossed askew to the grid. Across a counter to our right sat the old kitchen, a steel grill and some broken cash machines. A few coins littered the floor, shining on the floor like dead minnows. The whole place rested under a thick dust like frost on a January morning.
“Ssssh.” Dan, walking just ahead of us, waved back with one hand. My heart started pumping against my ribcage until I thought it would spring free and skitter across the floor. I heard why Dan shushed us then—I could smell the thing, too, a rotten, fishy smell mixed with mud.
Davin pushed forward, raising his gun. “Dan, give me a little,” he whispered, and Dan obliged, poking his flashlight around the corner.
“Use a baton,” I whispered, fearing gun’s report and its siren song to other zombies. I reached down to my side and fingered the black rod hanging on my belt.
Davin glanced back at me and uttered a low, “naw.”
Then I saw it, a little thing, bobbing its matted blonde head up and down as it munched on something—most likely a rat or stray cat. Davin clicked his tongue to get its attention, and the thing rotated to face us. It was a girl, six or seven maybe, although she could’ve been six or seven for years now. The undead didn’t age like us. Her little mouth, blotted with blood, opened and a little moaning sound trickled out. I closed my eyes for a moment and saw my sister’s face.
Davin raised the gun, butted the stock against his shoulder, and said, “bye, bye sissy.” The building shook with his report, frozen for an instant in a muzzle flash, and settled under Dan’s dim yellow beam. Its body slumped over on the ground, headless.
“Nice shootin’, Tex.” Dan thumped Davin on the back. Davin nodded, fished in his pocket for a folding knife, and carved a notch in the stock. I staggered to bench and held my head.
“You alright, ya pansy?” Dan kicked my boots.
“Yeah. Fine. Hand me the jar, okay?”
After Dan and I swallowed a few more swigs, he led us out back, to the barrels. In my mind’s eye, every shadow grew arms and reached for us. All the warnings about the guns materialized in my imagination.
“This is what I wanted to show you boys.” He leaned his shotgun against the grey boards of an old fence, a little shelter that hid two black-steel drums. “My brother told me about this shit. Says they used to cook food in it, but even the rot-bags won’t touch it.” His hands worked one of the lids free, and it dropped to the ground with a dull thunk.
The barrel looked to be half full of thick oil, black as midnight blood. The smell—heavy and sweet—knocked me back.
“Can you believe people used to eat this?”
The world started spinning while we humped over to the church. Not the whole world, just my piece of it—my brains sloshing around inside my skull, knocking against my ears. I thought maybe it was the booze; loads of stories circulated about bad home-brew. Dan seemed fine, striding ahead like usual, and Davin hadn’t touched the drink.
“Gawd, you’re a pansy.” Dan called after I stumbled and called for a break. I didn’t wallow on his insult, but the shadows started poking their fingers at me. I kept seeing that little-girl’s face, smeared and dead, hissing at us as Davin sprayed her brain matter across the dusty tile. We slipped from the relative safety of the compound, only to find our freedom rotten and decayed.
I staggered to my feet after a few minutes. We made the church while the moon was still high, floating overhead like a glowing bobber in a still, blue-black pond. I huffed and puffed up the hill a little more than I’d like to admit. My stomach and head still danced, but I knew once inside we’d loiter a bit, and I could lounge, let my guts come to a rest. Davin spotted something ahead, and sprinted out in front of Dan.
“Mother fuckers,” he hollered.
“What?” Dan jogged to his side. I stumbled behind, nearly slipping to the ground on a patch of fresh mud.
“They chained the god-damn door.” A heavy chain wrapped in repeated loops around the handles, and Davin tapped it with the stock of his gun. “Somebody cries about a few ‘bags and they lock down the fucking church.” He was a small guy, but swelled when angry, his skin burning through a few shades of red. The compound militia had done it; they must have locked up the place.
Davin and Dan took a few steps back. Davin raised his gun like he was going to take a shot at the chain, but lowered the barrel a moment later. This was a thick, coiled bit of steel; a blast from his shotgun wouldn’t scratch it, and we weren’t prepared with anything that could get at the lock. If it was anything but the church, we’d quickly smash up the windows and hop in. All the stories were about the beauty of those windows, and I doubt any of us wanted to smash those stories.
“Give me the jar,” he called to Dan.
I stood apart from the other two and glanced into the night behind us, half expecting a few lumbering undead to stumble from the paper-thin shadows. The waiting, the not knowing, grabbed and twisted at my stomach. I turned back to the church, admiring the long windows decorated with faint images. Grandpa called them stained glass
. Almost every other hunk of glass in Old Town had been shattered many times over by guys like us, but something in the artistry of those high panes kept them from harm. I thought how odd and almost blank they looked from the outside, when inside they supposedly burned color across everything.
I looked around at Davin as he tossed an empty jar to the ground, having polished off the last bit. He reached down, palmed a hunk of rock, and stared at the building. “Nobody tells me what to do,” he muttered, taking a few steps closer to the big windows.
The next moment leaked into my eyes slowly, like the whole planet groped through molasses. Davin’s arm sprang forward like a little catapult; the rock tumbled end over through the air, and struck a window dead on. The glass cried out, split, and crumbled in a tinkling heap. It had been the picture of a lady in blue with a little kid on her lap—Mary and Jesus, I think. The frame held, but most of the glass fell, just leaving this odd grey outline of a woman suspended across the opening.
Davin went pale; I think he was struck by how easy the whole thing crumbled. The low buzz of night bugs and bullfrogs slowly swelled to fill the silence. I scanned the slope behind us; nothing.
“Damn, Davin. Nice toss. Well, might as well head back. Fun’s over, I suppose.” His voice fell flat, like he couldn’t really disguise his disappointment. We’d all expected something else out there, maybe legions of undead that would make us happy we stuffed our pockets with shells. Dan trudged downhill, back toward the road leading to the gate. I followed, still queasy and a little unsteady. Davin’s boots crunched against the gravel behind me, and then stopped. I turned and looked at him, this flat emptiness across his face.
“No.”
“No?” My palms started to sweat. The little guy had a temper. I remember one time he knocked Dan flat, bloodied his nose, just because Dan gave him shit about being so short. I’d seen Davin drop a handful of other guys the same way.
