by TW Brown
“How do you know?” Glad to see Jon was still capable of forming words. I was just staring like an idiot.
“The bones are cracked and brittle.” Dr. Zahn duck walked to the next one. “And if you look close enough, you can still see filaments of tissue. But for the most part, these people have been stripped clean of all the juicy bits.”
Now I wanted to be sick.
“So why not the heads?”
“Who knows,” Dr. Zahn said with an absentmindedness that let me know she was now fully engrossed in her inspection or autopsy, or whatever the hell you would call it.
“I never even stopped to ask,” Jon whispered.
“Ask?” I tore my vision away from the doctor and tried to focus on Jon.
“There were these big metal garbage cans—”
A flood of images filled my mind so quickly that I couldn’t shuffle them off to a nice dark place where they would only be able to torment me in my sleep. I fell on my side and threw up.
When I was finished, I looked up to see the doctor had moved down the line. Jon was at her heels and they were talking in low tones. I was too shook up to care. And now I understood the haunted look in Jesus’ face. Now I realized why he did not want to ever see this place again. If this was what waited for us outside the compound…what in God’s name was on the inside. What could be so horrifying that men like Jake and Jesus would make excuses in order not to have to return?
“We better get inside,” Jon said with obvious hesitation.
“So why would they freeze them to the fence?” Dr. Zahn made her way back to us, doing her best to stay on the narrow trail of packed snow. “This is very deliberate. They sat each of these bodies here and then, by the looks of it, poured water on them to freeze them in place.”
“Nothing about the fact that they left the entire head intact?” I gasped. “You fixate on them being frozen in place…not the fact that we have a half a dozen skeletons with heads staring out at us?”
“I agree that is peculiar,” Dr. Zahn spoke in a level tone. “However, that can be attributed to a number of possible reasons.”
“Such as?” I challenged.
“They wanted to remember the sacrifice these people made or simply the fact that there is little to be gained from eating a person’s face. Or perhaps they were aware of the possibility of kuru.”
“What the hell is kuru?” I wasn’t sure I wanted the answer.
“Basically it is like mad cow…but in humans. It comes from eating the brain or spinal material of a human being.”
Dr. Zahn said that with such matter-of-factness that I was stunned into shutting my mouth and simply going along. I followed like a scolded child as Jon climbed up onto a low hanging branch. I watched his face, but he remained as grim as always when he was doing anything that didn’t revolve around Sunshine.
That got me to thinking. It was obvious that the two were a couple, so why was he so set on trying to act otherwise? That was something I would have to find out later. And now that he’d been bitten, what could that do to a new relationship. So many questions about what many would consider meaningless drivel.
I glanced at the doctor who was eyeing the tree like it was swarming with cobras…or zombies. She caught me looking at her and scowled.
“You go on up,” she said with a curt nod. “I will require the two of you to pull me up as I will absolutely not be climbing that thing.”
“You ain’t that heavy, Doc,” Jon called down.
“I would prefer two sets of hands if you don’t mind,” she retorted with an icy glare that held its own against the temperature that was providing us with this frozen landscape.
I grabbed the lowest branch and slung my leg up. Just as I did, a dry mewling sound came from the nearby pines. They shook a bit just before an elderly woman and young child of about four or five stumbled out into the open. The elderly lady took a tumble but wasn’t quite heavy enough to break the icy crust that made up the top layer of the snow. The child stopped, glancing down at the struggling figure beside it that now fought for purchase and managed to punch one frail arm through the snow. That only made the situation worse for the pathetic creature as its left arm vanished up to the shoulder.
“I got this,” Jon called out as he swung his crossbow up into his hands. His shot was true and literally vanished into the crown of the woman’s skull. Not even the feather quarrel remained in sight.
The child looked up. I couldn’t say for certain, but it looked as if it might actually be angry. It wasn’t so much that the face changed. It remained slack just as all the other zombies that I’d ever seen. It was something around the eyes; almost as if they narrowed or squinted. I had to be imagining things and chalked it up to how few child zombies I’d actually encountered.
And then something strange happened. That is a statement I can make in a world where the dead walk and eat the living, so…
The child took a step back. It watched us intently, cocking its head from side to side a few times as if trying to consider exactly what we might be. In between those jerky head movements, it would glance at the downed woman. For some reason, I had a gut feeling that the woman must be this little boy’s grandmother. For the first time ever, a zombie was retreating. It slipped back into the trees and, for a few seconds, we could hear it moving away through the woods.
“Okay…” I was at a loss.
“Have you seen anything like this in your travels out and about?” Dr. Zahn asked, looking up at Jon with a raised eyebrow.
“We don’t run into many of the little ones,” Jon admitted. “But I have to be perfectly honest when I say that we don’t usually wait for them to get close enough for us to do any in depth studies.”
“This wouldn’t require too much depth,” I muttered. “The damn thing walked away.”
“And was giving us the zombie version of the stink eye,” Jon added. At any other time, that comment might have elicited a few chuckles, but not after what we’d just witnessed.
“I really wish I had a research facility,” Dr. Zahn grumbled.
“As much as I’d like to have an open forum about what we all saw, we need to get over the fence and inside this place.”
Maybe it was me, but I was having a real problem with the fact that we’d been talking in conversational tones—which, these days when you are out in the open where the danger of zombies is so great, is almost like yelling—and nobody had come to investigate. That did not bode well for the inhabitants of this compound.
Jon and I pulled the doctor up. Next, Jon inched out along the branch and then swung over and dropped to the ground with a crunch as he plunged through the virgin snow. I went next and had barely hit the ground when the mixture of smells hit me in the gut.
“Look out!” Jon hissed as he shoved me out of the way. Doctor Zahn landed rather unceremoniously beside me. She was in the seated position and so only her head and the tops of her shoulders were visible above the snow.
“My goodness.” The doctor squeezed her eyes shut tight and I heard her swallow.
“It’s gotten worse.” That was all Jon said as he headed towards the cluster of buildings that the barrier had encompassed.
I helped Dr. Zahn to her feet and followed. Every single step seemed to be a test of my resolve. I had no idea what could be waiting, but after what I’d already seen, plus the swirling array of various smells that seemed to lurk in the wind, I had absolutely no doubt that this was going to be unpleasant.
A sound that could have been a moan or a cry came from up ahead. Jon began to wade through the snow as quickly as he could. For some strange reason that I could not begin to explain, seeing him move in what was little more than slow-motion made me think of the opening credits of Baywatch. The wave of snow that was rolling off of him as he plunged forward and the fact that he was moving so slow had triggered this odd memory comparison, and now I was helpless to clear it from my head. It was as if my brain was already doing everything possible to minimize what
I was about to experience.
I rounded the corner and collided with the back of Jon. Further proof of just how strong he was in comparison to basically everybody, he didn’t even register the impact. I, on the other hand, landed on my ass.
“Hey there,” Jon said in as soft a voice as I’d ever heard from him. He was already crouching down. That was the only way I was able to see the little girl standing in the much-too-dark doorway.
I had to actually think for a moment to realize that she was the spitting image of the girl frozen to the fence outside this place. The resemblance was made even more frightening when my brain allowed me to process just how terrible this child looked. Her face was so drawn that it would be easy to think that this child was dead. The only thing that gave hint that she was among the living were the eyes. Besides the fact that they lacked the white film and black tracers…zombies don’t cry.
“Get out of the way, Steven,” Dr. Zahn hissed as she pushed past not only me, but Jon as well.
“Can you speak, child?” The doctor had already halved the distance between us and the child in the doorway before I could get to my feet. Her voice had changed into something that was completely foreign sounding to me having been around Dr. Francis Zahn for as long as I had. Sweet. Warm. Grandmotherly.
The child cast a look over her shoulder before taking two steps forward. As of yet, I hadn’t heard a sound from inside that building. In fact, other than that one cry, I hadn’t heard any sounds at all from inside this compound.
“Mommy…m-m-mommy can’t walk,” the little girl rasped. Had I not been staring directly at her, I would have thought that voice came from some chain-smoking truck driver of a woman. It certainly did not fit this wisp of a child standing before me.
“Is there anybody in there besides your mommy?” Jon asked.
Dr. Zahn’s head whipped around like an angry snake. “You keep your eyes open for trouble and your mouth shut, Marine. From here on, this is my mission and I will ask the questions that need asking.”
It was probably instinctive, but Jon snapped to attention and gave a slight nod of his head in acknowledgement. Just that quick, I watched the relationship between these two people transform. Suddenly, she was a military officer and he was an enlisted man.
“How many people are still inside, child?” Dr. Zahn asked. Just that quick, she was everybody’s sweet old grandmother.
The child seemed to consider the question for a few seconds before holding up seven fingers. She looked over her shoulder again, and then extended one more finger, then another.
“Nine?” Dr. Zahn asked.
The little girl nodded.
“And do any of them have something wrong with their eyes?” By now, Dr. Zahn was only a few steps away from the child. I could tell by the way her head was moving that she was trying to crane her neck enough to get a better look inside.
The little girl nodded. Once more she looked over her shoulder. When she looked back, her expression had changed. I could see what looked to me like pain.
“Mommy promised me that she would not be like daddy…she lied.”
Jon and I stepped up behind the doctor. The closeness to that doorway did almost nothing to improve our ability to see. It was still so dark that we could not even make out shapes.
And then the upper torso of a woman pulled herself into view. There was no mistaking that this woman was the child’s mother. The blonde hair was the easiest thing to lock onto, but even their faces were so similar that it left no doubt.
“Mommy…Mister Patton says that you are supposed to stay tied up,” the little girl said. Her voice had a scolding tone to it that reminded me of how Thalia spoke to Buster when she had a potty accident indoors.
The creeper raised its head and regarded the child standing a few feet away. After what I’d seen with that child-zombie outside the gate, I almost expected it to ignore the little girl and come after us. It didn’t.
One hand reached out and snagged an ankle. With a tug, the child fell on to her back. Both Jon and I leapt forward with blades drawn. I actually got the inside track and had my heavy machete raised when the child screamed.
“Don’t hurt my mommy!”
That threw me off and I hesitated. Jon didn’t. His blade crashed down, splitting the skull open. The legless creeper flopped to the ground, its open mouth dangerously close to the leg of the girl. I came in with the finishing stroke. Dr. Zahn shoved me aside and scooped the girl into her arms. Unfortunately for the doc, the little girl wasn’t having any of it.
“Let go of me!” she slapped Dr. Zahn and began to thrash about, her tiny balled fists raining blows on her captor.
“Hey—” Jon barked, but I cut him off.
“We got trouble!” I backed away from where I had taken position in the doorway.
In the shadows, I could make out five figures coming towards me. I looked over my shoulder at Dr. Zahn who had her hands full trying to get the child under control. For somebody so visibly malnourished, she had a lot of fight in her.
Jon and I took up a position on either side of the doorway and waited. The first figure to step through was so heavily bundled that it was impossible to tell if it was a male or a female. I was closest and stepped into my swing.
The howl of pain that followed was answered by a shriek from the little girl. I almost broke my wrists trying to pull up on my second swing aimed at the shrouded head of the next figure that staggered through the door.
“Please,” a voice whispered from the darkness, “we aren’t infected. The infected ones are tied up inside.”
“They killed my mommy, Mister Patton!” the girl bawled. “The bad man chopped her.”
“But she…” I glanced down at the remains of the child’s mother.
“She was infected,” the man managed to say through a lung-rending cough.
I looked down at the blood pooling around the head of the person I had just cleaved. The child’s mother might have been a zombie, but zombies didn’t really bleed. Not like this.
I heard something change in the struggle behind me between the doctor and the little girl. Dr. Zahn had her arm around the girl’s neck from behind. It reminded me of a sleeper hold that you might see on pro wrestling. However, unlike the dramatized version for entertainment purposes, this didn’t take more than a few seconds. The child slumped and Dr. Zahn laid her down in a clear patch of snow.
“Each of you needs to step into the light,” Dr. Zahn ordered. “And you two, as soon as these people are all out, go in and finish off whatever is inside.”
As each individual stepped out, the only thing that came to mind was stories that my grandfather used to tell. He had been in the US Army during World War Two and served in the 6 Armored Division. He was one of the men present at the liberation of the Nazi Buchenwald prison camp. The descriptions of some of the things he saw just did not seem possible. I’d always felt that perhaps he had exaggerated. When those five people stepped out into the light…I suddenly believed that perhaps he had cleaned it up for me.
I didn’t need to see what was or was not under the layers of clothing. What I could see of their faces told me more than I wanted to know. It was like seeing flesh-toned human skulls staring back at me. The mouths were a mass of scabs and sores at each end and it looked visibly painful when the man, obviously Mr. Patton, spoke. It was almost as if you could see the skin of his lips rip and tear with each word.
“There are three inside,” Mr. Patton managed. “One…Kelli Scott…she was immune…but passed in the night. She’s one of them now.”
I followed Jon inside. At that point, I thought I’d seen all the horror there was to see. Hanging from the rafters was a body. Or, more accurately, what was left. With a burlap sack or something over the head, you could not see the face, but this woman had been almost entirely stripped of every ounce of flesh. One arm remained untouched from the elbow on down. I guess they didn’t have to worry much about spoilage due to the cold, so they simply left it h
anging and cut away pieces as needed. A large metal barrel was off to the side. I imagine that would be what they would boil the rest off at the end when nothing more could be carved away.
Next to that barrel was another. It sat on embers and steam rose from it, swirling around the covered head that bobbed on the surface. That must have been the last person to serve the masses. The smell coming from the bubbling barrel was very upsetting. It was strangely reminiscent of beef stew. The fact that my mouth began to water brought on a merciful sensation of nausea.
I didn’t wait for Jon to say anything. I planted my foot against the barrel and pushed it over. The contents spilled out in a chunky rush that was made all the more disturbing due to the poor light given by the barely glowing embers of the fire that I’d kicked it off of.
He went over to a far corner and I soon heard the telltale sounds of heads being cleaved. It was over in seconds, but it would haunt me for however long I had left on this world. Once we were finished, I could not get out of that place quick enough.
Dr. Zahn had the five survivors sitting in a row as she went down the line giving them whatever sort of checkup that she deemed necessary. I kept finding my eyes draw to the little figure curled up in the fetal position at the feet of Mr. Patton. I tried to imagine what had led these people to this fate. I tried to understand what god could allow this child to endure what she had while Thalia lived in relative luxury by comparison. My brain sped through all the horrible events that my little Thalia had survived and kept returning to the fact that no matter how bad it had gotten for us…it had been infinitely worse for these people…for that child.
Suddenly, all I wanted to do was get home.
10
A Geek Reunion
Kevin knelt in the snow and looked up at the woman. Her close-cropped coif did nothing to lessen her beauty. The glints of silver sparkled like tiny filaments of precious metal against the fine black hairs. Her eyes were a dark brown, so dark they almost appeared black. Right now, those eyes were staring down at him with a curious mix of contempt and curiosity.
