This Dark Earth

by John Hornor Jacobs

  Her fingers feel cool on my skin, and I can smell the kiwi scent of her hair.

  “Well, you’ll never grow another mullet.”

  I stifle the laugh.

  “We won’t suffocate, will we? You know, from the candle?” I ask, and my voice sounds loud in the small space. “Since we’ve taped everything up?” She’s a doctor and knows these things. Except about witch hazel.

  “It’s either carbon monoxide poisoning or anoxia, using up all of the oxygen in an environment. I think we need to extinguish it at some point. It could kill us . . . maybe. But only if we’ve created an airtight seal, which I doubt. Cracks in the walls, gaps in the windows, spaces in the tiles . . . I don’t know. But sound travels through air. Radioactive particles travel through air. So we’re killing two birds with one stone by taping the windows. But we need light right now for a few minutes. And I’ve got the corner of the window still untaped. I hope that’ll be enough. I haven’t heard anything downstairs.”

  She falls silent. Maybe realizing she was talking, well, too much.

  Lucy finishes my ears, takes out another tampon, squirts more witch hazel, and rubs the backs of my arms.

  “Would you have really dumped me on the interstate?”

  “Not just yes but hell yes. You’d convinced me the crazy virus existed. Why wouldn’t I think you had it too?”

  She stops wiping my arms.

  “I’m worried that everyone has it.”

  Silence.

  “But you didn’t. Dump me.”

  “You were convincing. I’ve never—” I don’t know how to say it. “I’ve never met . . . never met someone like you. You’re . . . intense. And honest. And a little scary.”

  I can’t see, but she might be blushing. She’s quiet for a long while.

  I take another swig from the bottle and hand it back to her.

  She takes a swallow and says, “Do you have any more cigarettes? We shouldn’t, but—”

  “Yeah. The world is ending. Wait a sec.” I pull a rumpled flat pack out of my pocket. I ferret open the lining and inspect what’s left. Three cigarettes, butts smashed narrow. I draw one out. It’s bent halfway through.

  “Put your finger on the rip and it’ll be just fine.”

  I take out one for myself. She lights hers from the votive and then hands the candle to me. I spill translucent wax onto my hand and it burns, but by now I’ve become used to the sensation. It’s been a long day. This morning, I woke up in the back of my cab in a parking lot, ready to drive another thousand miles.

  The smoke fills the space and doesn’t dissipate. We look at each other and smoke, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I can’t help but notice her athletic legs, her long, willowy neck. She’s slim and delicate as steel and I feel awkward that I’m not. That I’m bulky and hairy and weak.

  “Why do they call you Knock-Out?”

  “Jim Nickerson. My name.”

  “That doesn’t figure. You do look like a Knock-Out, though.”

  I stay quiet for a minute.

  “I got the name because I was so good looking when I was a teen. I modeled.” Her expression doesn’t change. “Really.”

  “Fat chance.”

  I snort. Her shoulders rise in alarm and I look around, as if that could help.

  No sound from downstairs or outside. The light from Granny-shambler’s house has died, and the zombies have dispersed or died in the blaze and explosion.

  “A middle-weight fighter in the navy. Won some fights. Don’t know how to shoot very well, but I’m handy in a bar.”

  She squints her eyes at me.

  “Give me your hands.”

  I give her my paws. I didn’t realize it until my hands were in hers, but she is nut brown. I’m pasty white.

  “You’ve got an old boxer’s break and heavy scar tissue on your knuckles. That doesn’t mean you were a fighter, though. And you’ve already told me a lie once.”

  I duck my head.

  “Someday,” I say, “I’ll tell you.”

  She nods and rubs her face.

  “You don’t talk like a trucker.”

  “I went to college for a while. Okay, junior college. I listen to a lot of audiobooks.” When she stays quiet, I feel compelled to go on. “Truckers aren’t idiots.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “No, it’s okay. I guess there are a lot of idiot truckers, come to think of it. But most of us are just folk trying to get by, to survive.”

  She looks at me a long while with those big liquid blue eyes, and maybe something in her softens. She nods.

  I take another swig, then stretch. I’m tired but wonder how we’re going to sleep.

  There’s no way to stretch out unless we do it side by side, and suddenly, I’m so weary, I’m not even worried about asking permission.

  I twist, smooth out the towels, and lie down, my leg pressing against hers, but my head at the other end of the narrow room.

  It takes her a moment to force herself to get comfortable.

  I’m asleep before I know it.

  In the morning, I’m sore and stiff. I wake almost not knowing where I am—almost. My neck feels like the skin of a Thanksgiving turkey, golden brown and oozing fluid. Nuclear explosions are not my favorite.

  Gray light filters through the window. Lifting the untaped flap, we look out onto a snowy morning. It’s June.

  “Ash,” she says in a dead voice. “The easterly wind must’ve crapped out on us. This is not good.”

  “Look, tracks.” Two lines of footsteps in the ash lawn wander off around the corner of the house. The tracks are long and messy. They look like the tracks of dead people. Someone—a couple of someones—shambling.

  Lucy stands and shakes blood into her legs. She touches her toes. She looks older today than she did yesterday, but I imagine I do too. She hands me a shirt. I put my pants on under the towel. She’s already dressed in clothes she took from the other house.

  “I want to check out the house now that we have light.”

  I nod. “What about the ash?”

  “It’s highly radioactive, and we don’t want to breathe it or get it on our skin.”

  We slowly untape the door, and I heft my hammer. Lucy has kept track of the pistol, so we creep out of the bathroom and down the hall, opening doors slowly.

  Bedrooms on the left and right. We inch down the stairs, pausing to listen. I’m in front with the hammer raised. I glance back at Lucy and she’s got both hands on the gun, one hand cradling the other, weapon pointed at the ceiling. A shooter’s grip.

  “You look like a cop,” I whisper.

  “Shhh.”

  Something thumps and then slides.

  Running in the dark from the other house, we never even looked around enough to know if another door was open.

  At the bottom of the stairs, I inch around the end of the cheap-looking bannister and turn the corner into what I believe is the main hall. Kitchen to my left, unknown rooms to my right. Front door in a line before me.

  The front door is open.

  Brown stains are on the floor, leading toward the room to my right. Directly under the upstairs bathroom we slept in.

  I peek at Lucy. She nods at me to go ahead. She takes a hand off the pistol, points at it and mouths “too loud,” and then points at my hammer.

  I’m not real happy about what she’s saying; my knees are knocking and watery. But she squints at me and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to have her think me a coward. Even though I am.

  I turn the corner. The room is a dining room and lounge with a TV set and couch.

  There’s two of them. One stands in the corner looking at the ceiling—where we’d been sleeping—and the other sprawls out on the floor. It’s shaking a little and missing a leg at the knee. The standing zombie is a scrawny young man in his twenties with baggy britches and dagger tattoos on his arms that probably look uglier on bluish-gray flesh than they did on live skin. But they’re really shitty. He should’ve g
otten his money back.

  He turns, senses me, and immediately lurches forward, arms reaching out.

  Like Granny, he is pretty spry. Untracking eyes. Horrible breath, like rotten pork. I swipe him with the hammer, and he lets out a gargling yelp that sounds way, way too loud in the purposeful quiet of the house. I’m fending with my left hand, stupidly, and the shambler grabs my wrist and brings my hand toward his mouth. I wonder if his teeth were this nasty before he died or if they’ve become black zombie-teeth overnight. I’m betting, in life, he didn’t brush.

  Down South, we say “buck wild.” I go there, to Buckwildsville, with the hammer, beating the shambler’s head back and away from my hand. It doesn’t let go, which is bizarre. Normal folks, you give them a good whack, and they’re out cold or at least dropping everything. Not that I’ve ever actually given anyone a whack with a hammer. Scrappy-Doo here is my first. This guy hangs on with determination. He’s giving it 110 percent.

  I rear back and put everything into the swing. The hammer-head pops the shambler directly on his crown and I feel this satisfying crunch, like a gigantic soft-boiled egg being cracked with a spoon, and the dead guy’s head takes on a new, flatter and looser shape, like a flesh-bag of broken glass. He falls on top of the floor creeper, who’d been crawling toward me. Missing a leg, the crawler looks like a giant, human-shaped charcoal briquette. If Egghead hadn’t dropped when he did, he’d probably be chewing on my calf right now.

  I crack the crawler’s head too, and he stops moving. I rise up and Lucy is staring at me with big eyes, her pistol pointing at the zombie on the floor.

  “God, I came so close to shooting that one.” She looks at the charred dead guy on the floor. Doubly dead.

  “Thank God you didn’t. They’d probably be swarming us.” I smile at her. “Lemme go shut the front door.”

  No one is on the lawn when I shut and lock the front door. There’s a small spill of ash on the stoop and a bit inside the house. Silly, but I hold my breath and try to avoid it.

  We walk through the house, checking doors and windows. I find a garage through a door off the kitchen. There’s a Honda Accord hybrid in there. An empty space for another car or truck. The stuff stored in the room—hunting boots and camouflage coats, weed-eaters and lawn-care utensils, gas cans, a gun case—makes me think a truck. In the corner is a bulky, tarp-covered object. Lucy appears in the doorway to the kitchen. In lighter times I might’ve joked about a truck parked next to a hybrid, but the expression on Lucy’s face doesn’t warrant jests.

  “Go check the gun cabinet,” she murmurs. “I’ll see if I can find the keys for the car.”

  I walk to the cabinet and open it. There are a variety of hunting rifles and shotguns. Two scoped bolt-action rifles, .270 and A-Bolt 30-06. A semiautomatic .22 rifle. The smell of the cabinet reminds me of my Peepaw, the smell of WD-40. A pump-action 12 gauge. In the cabinet below, I find a variety of hunting knives, ammunition for the guns, and a matte-black gun holster with a dull pistol in it. It’s heavy, and it feels dangerous even securely fastened in the holster.

  I hear Lucy pad toward me.

  “You find the keys?”

  Raising her hand, she jingles a key ring.

  “I hope you have a belt,” I tell her.

  “Why?”

  “Because there’s a new sheriff in town, and she needs a gun holster.”

  “Don’t you want it?”

  “No,” I say, shaking my head. “I’ve always been a miserable shot. I’ll take this.” I heft the shotgun. “I might be some help with it. And I’ve got my trusty hammer.”

  She tries to smile and fails. She’s jonesing for her family, and I’m no help. But she takes the pistol, draws it from the holster, and checks the magazine.

  “Nine millimeter.” Obviously, she has experience with guns. More than me, it looks like.

  “Whatever happens, we’re gonna need some bags,” I say, watching her. She holds the pistol in her hand and stares at it like someone who’s picked up an interesting rock and thinks it might be worth something but isn’t sure. “You think you can find food or water or whatever we might need and bags we can pack it in?”

  She turns again and goes back into the house. I’m a little worried about her. Yesterday she was like a superhero, but today she’s a little lost. Maybe she’s not a morning person.

  There’s a camo bandolier for shotgun shells in the ammunition compartment, and I take it out and load it up and sling it across my chest. I feed the shells into the shotgun, work the action to put one in the chamber, and then feed a last one in. My fingers haven’t forgotten Peepaw’s lessons. It’s taken an atomic holocaust and zombies to make me start remembering my family. But I don’t want to think about Emily.

  I put the shotgun within reach and then go to the plastic shroud in the corner. I’ve got a sneaking suspicion what might be under it.

  Pulling off the tarp, I’m greeted by the sight of a Honda 4x4 ATV with front and rear racks for hunting and cargo. The bright red plastic fenders and cover plates still shine new, and there’s only a bit of mud on the tires. The key is in the ignition.

  I’m reminded of a tune, but I don’t have a head for music and even less of one for lyrics, so I can’t recall the song, but I start humming a happy little ditty anyway.

  I check the gas tank, and it looks empty. I turn the key over one click. Nothing. Not even the whir of solenoid or sparks from the battery.

  I’m shitty with guns, but I’m pretty good with things that scoot, so by the time Lucy returns with a duffel bag that looks stuffed with things, I’ve got the ignition plate off with a screwdriver from the toolbox I found and I’m ready to hot-wire the little red beast.

  “Shouldn’t we check the car first?”

  I blush. “I guess so. What about the electric magnetic—”

  “Hmm. Electromagnetic pulse. Comes before big hydrogen fusion bombs. Knocks out . . . overloads really . . . modern electronics. The higher the altitude, the wider the effect. I guess whoever made the call to nuke us didn’t want to wipe out the nation’s electrical grid.”

  “How do you know this stuff?”

  “High school science nerd.”

  I don’t even have to stretch my imagination to see it: Lucy, in glasses with an armful of books, making rockets and dissecting piglets and running track with skinny knees and awkward glances at boys and—

  I can’t get distracted thinking about a young Lucy, so I say, “Well, let’s check out the car.”

  Lucy pulls the keys from her jeans and walks around to the driver’s door. She opens it and sits in the seat, but her legs hang out the door still.

  She puts the key in the ignition and turns it over, one click, like the ATV. Nothing. She turns it over all the way. Dead.

  “I can hot-wire the ATV. Bypass all the complicated electronics that are dead anyway. No problem. I used to have one.”

  For once I can do something. She’s the superhero and I’m just her sidekick now, but that’s all right with me. As long as I’m breathing and not shambling.

  A horrible thought strikes me.

  “Do you become one of those things if you die of old age?”

  Lucy blinks twice, thinking.

  “Well, with luck we’ll find out, many, many years from now.”

  I laugh, a weak sound.

  “We’ve got to get dressed,” she says.

  “I’m dressed now.”

  “No. Here.” She throws the bag to the floor. “There’s a leather jacket in there that might fit you. Did you find any gloves or helmets?”

  “No, but—”

  “Armor. That zombie almost bit off your fingers.” She shakes her head disapprovingly. “We’ve got to protect ourselves. I know it’s summer, but we’ll hydrate and put on a bunch of layers. If one of them bites, it—”

  “It’s all over, isn’t it?”

  “No. I don’t think so. I think we all might be carriers by now. Everyone’s infected, and many patients had it withou
t bite wounds. There’s no way I couldn’t have been infected at the clinic, I breathed the air, I drank from water-fountains. I touched people.” She thought of the boy spasming on the floor, eating his own lips and fingers. “So . . . some folks suffer symptoms and die. Everybody else just turns at death. But yeah, if they get their hands on you, it’s pretty much over.”

  “Except for the shambling.”

  We search the garage. In a drawer of the worktable, I find a pair of grease-stained leather gloves.

  “Allergies, most likely.” Lucy pulls a stack of white dust masks, for yard work, down from a peg on the wall. In an oversized drawer, I find a circular saw with a couple of sets of protective glasses.

  I put on a pair and hand the other to Lucy. She hands me a white mask, like we were in Hong Kong for their monthly SARS epidemic. Actually, I wish I was in a SARS epidemic rather than this situation. Except for finding Lucy.

  Watching her move, I think of Angelyne, my girl back in Alabama. But where Angie was blunt and busty and, if I’m being honest, somewhat brutish, like an unhewn block of wood, Lucy is lithe and graceful. Full of thought. I should probably feel bad about everything. But I don’t. I don’t want Angelyne to shamble. But I don’t want to go back to her, either, and maybe that’s why I stayed a trucker and never settled down with her. I was always leaving, always finding somewhere else to go.

  I put on the leather jacket. She rummages in the bag and pulls out something that looks like a child’s version of an Indiana Jones jacket. She pulls it on. I hand her the gloves.

  “You don’t want them?”

  “I need to be able to drive the ATV.”

  She nods.

  “I’ll get the four-wheeler in shape and ready to go if you’ll pack the other stuff. We need to be running before opening the garage door. Should we take these other guns?”

  She thinks for a moment and then says, “No. They’ll just slow us down. If we had the car—”

  “Right. Take what we need, nothing else.”

  She turns to the door and then turns back.

  “When you were going to kick me out of your semi, you said you had a daughter. Were you going to kick me out to save yourself or to try and get home to save her?”