by Joel Arnold
“Why do we do this, Burke?”
Burke shook his head. Couldn’t say it but remembered—
His son Julian, his daughter Calley. They’d become infected. They’d become craving slobbering things he’d been forced to destroy. He almost didn’t. Almost let them eat him.
Wouldn’t that have been better? Wouldn’t that have been the right thing to do in the end?
“I don’t know,” Burke said, the words in his head, the thoughts too much to get out without jumping up from the table and smashing everything within sight.
How many of them would he have to destroy before becoming satiated?
All of them.
That was the unfortunate answer.
Every goddamn one of them.
And still he’d want to hurt something, someone, for what they made him do.
Concentrate, Burke told himself. It’s not Johanson. Not anymore. Johanson is gone.
Easier to say than to believe. There were rumors of cures just around the corner. Rumors of antidotes that could reverse the process, restore the tissue, the brain. But what about the soul?
“Hike!”
The center snapped the ball. Burke took it and dropped back to pass. Tidwell hurtled down the field, knocking aside two zombies with his large, powerful shoulders. He turned back. Burke threw a long bomb. It hung in the air. The crowd, the living and undead alike, became silent as the ball descended toward Tidwell. Tidwell sprinted past the fifty, the forty-five, Johanson matching him stride for stride, the apex of the ball’s trajectory and Tidwell coming to a point. It landed in his hands perfectly. But at the forty-two yard line, Johanson reached out his long tooth marked arm. Grabbed Tidwell’s face mask, and with one swift jerk, tore Tidwell’s head off.
Tidwell’s body twisted and fell forward. Good enough for a first down. Johanson reached into Tidwell’s helmet, and with strong bony fingers, scooped out handfuls of brain and ate. He ambled off to the sideline with his meal.
Jesus, Burke thought. He had drive before, but what drove him now?
The refs came in with their cattle prods and got the undead back in line. They shifted jerkily on the new line of scrimmage. The seconds ticked away.
They had discussed it over beers many times. Was the urge of the living to stay alive as great as the urge of the undead to feed?
“Depends on the individual,” Johanson said. “Some of us would do anything to stay alive. But then we’ve both seen players who just all of a sudden sit down in the middle of a play, take off their helmets, and let the feeding frenzy begin.”
“Why would somebody do that?”
“Cause they’re tired.”
“I’d never do that.”
“Some people just get sick of the way the world’s turned out. Maybe all their friends and family are gone. Maybe they think it’s inevitable, so better submit to fate rather than waste all that energy fighting a lost cause.”
At least Tidwell had gotten them a first down.
Burke looked up into the stadium seats, his eye landing on Tidwell’s widow. Her face was in her hands as she rocked back and forth. A woman next to her patted her on the back, talking to her, words that Burke knew would never matter.
The center snapped the ball. One of the undead, number fifty-three, leapt over the center as Burke scrambled backward. Fifty-three was on him in an instant, trying to twist his head around, trying to snap Burke’s neck. Burke landed on his back, number fifty-three on top of him, his brown ugly teeth gnashing around his face mask. The refs blew the whistle. Fifty-three continued to pummel Burke with rot-purple fists. When a ref zapped the thing with a cattle prod, the electricity flowed into Burke as well, causing him to bite down hard on his mouthpiece, streaks of black light crossing his vision. His body went rigid for a moment. Fifty-three rolled off of him. Burke took a deep breath and looked at the gray sky. Spence, a running back, helped him up.
“You okay, man?”
Burke nodded.
“You sure?”
“I’m fine. Huddle up.”
In the huddle, Aidan Carter, as much of a veteran as Burke, rubbed his hands quickly together.
“We’re coming down to the wire. This is way too close.”
“We’ll get ’em,” Tyrone Bishop said, his voice surly and deep beneath his helmet.
“I don’t like it this close.”
“We’ve done it before.”
“What if we don’t.”
“Don’t talk like that, bro. We’ll get it together.”
“We better. We better do it now.”
Second down. Still at the forty.
They lined up. It seemed as if there were sparks in the eyes of the undead, their ferocity, their hunger so great it seemed to animate them in a way Burke had never seen before. They drooled a green and yellow slime from the corners of their torn, misshapen lips. The humans in the stands got quiet while the undead in the giant cage beyond the goalposts howled and shook the large metal strips.
“Hike!” Burke yelled. The ball hit his hands like a bullet. He dropped back, handed off to Paine. But Paine’s grip was off. He grabbed it too far forward and it slipped from his hands. It bounced on the grass. Paine dove on it and clutched it to his chest.
The whistle blew. The clock ticked down.
Forty seconds left.
Aidan Carter’s eyes were wild. “How could you fuckin’ miss that? You know what this means?”
Paine wouldn’t look at Carter.
Carter punched him hard on the shoulder. “This is our life you’re fooling with. Don’t you know that?”
Burke grabbed Carter. “Come on. The clock’s ticking.”
Third down.
Burke took the snap. Stepped back. He looked to Carter, but he was trying to shake off two of the undead. He looked to Bishop. Bishop’s rage had gotten the best of him, and he was going ape on a zombie, bashing his head in with his helmet, screaming obscenities, tearing the cold limbs off the walking corpse.
There was no one to throw to. Burke tucked the ball into his chest, put down his head and ran. He straight-armed a tackle, his fist busting through the thing’s brittle decaying ribcage. He shook him off. The tackle fell in a heap. Another zombie dove for him, but Burke sidestepped him and brought his foot down on the thing’s face, crushing it into the ground.
Burke ran. He gagged at the stench in the air. He heard screams from the stadium seats. Howls. Shouts. A cacophony of rage and disbelief. His blood pounded in his ears. He saw the clock’s digital read-out on the balcony in front of him. The seconds blinked down in a slow motion pulse. It felt like his legs were encased in cement.
A hand gripped his shoulder. A strong hand. Burke spun around, tripped on his own feet and fell, the other player falling with him and landing beneath.
It was Johanson. Hungry. Rotting.
Johanson. Only a week ago Burke’s best friend.
Burke took his helmet off. Johanson struggled beneath him. Burke felt Johanson’s clammy hands circle his throat and squeeze.
Maybe it would be easier to just give up. Better that than to live in constant fear. Maybe it would be easier to die, let Johanson finish him off like he should’ve let his children do. He searched Johanson’s face for a sign of something. Anything. A memory of the times they’d spent together. Just a spark of something.
Burke whispered, “I love you, buddy.”
Nothing registered in Johanson’s eyes, his pupils dry and clouded. His nostrils flared with the scent of fresh meat hovering over him. Burke lifted his helmet in the air. Kept his eyes wide open as he brought it down on Johanson’s face again and again until he heard the crack of skull, the destruction of brain. The hand on his neck went slack.
The crowd, both the living and the dead, went wild.
They called a time-out. Ten seconds left.
“We need this.” Burke scanned the morose faces of his remaining players. “This is our last chance. You know what it means if we don’t win.”
The
huddle was silent. Strange how despite the roar of the crowd crashing down upon them in one continuous wave, they could notice the silence among themselves.
Bishop doubled over and vomited. Carter got down on his knees, clasped his hands together and prayed. There was another explosion in the stands, but no one in the huddle looked up. They didn’t even flinch as the flash of fire reflected off their helmets.
The ref blew the whistle.
Burke clapped his hands together. “Let’s get this fucking thing over with.”
The huddle broke.
The silence broke.
They cringed with the force of the noise as it pounded against their skulls, pummeled at their guts. Nothing mattered anymore except crossing the end zone with the ball.
The undead shuffled inches beyond the line of scrimmage, their fingers wriggling, waiting to tear into flesh, their mouths gnashing at air, eager to taste that which lived.
The living took position at the line. They set themselves, bending, squatting, then freezing that way. The grunts of the dead increased. Their thick foul slobber splatted on the helmets of the living.
Burke wiped the sweat from his hands on the rag hanging from the center’s hip. He paused. Looked out at the crowd. How were the living any better than the dead? The dead in their giant cage, climbing the metal rungs, falling backward onto their brethren below. The living standing, jumping up and down, pumping their fists in the air, screaming for blood.
He wondered where Sherry sat. He didn’t see her among the other player’s wives. He wondered if she was watching or if she was looking at her hands, nervously balled into tight fists, rocking back and forth the way she did in times of crises.
He closed his eyes for a moment and enjoyed the gentle breeze that wisped over his skin and through his hair. That was a gift, he thought. The best part of this whole damn day. That breeze. That simple breeze. He took a deep breath. Tapped the center on the small of his back.
“Ready! Set!” His words were lost in the cacophony. “Now!”
The center snapped the ball.
Burke took it and stepped back.
The noise in the stadium exploded.
Burke faked a hand-off to Carter. Watched for Bishop down field, but Bishop was trying to claw his way out of a duo of undead. Burke looked for Monroe, but saw a flash of ragged flesh charging toward him. He ducked, shoved the football up so that it caught the bastard under the chin. He heard a crack as its neck snapped, felt the thing fall in a heap behind him.
He spotted Monroe outrunning two undead toward the end zone. Monroe stopped abruptly and turned, tearing his own helmet from his head and using it as a weapon as the first zombie fell upon him, followed quickly by the second.
Monroe flailed at them, smashing their skulls in a blur of swinging arms. Then he was open.
He dropped his helmet, waved both hands in the air signaling Burke to throw as three undead noticed him and began to charge. Two more were honing in on Burke as his linemen crumbled. With a quick glance, he noticed his tackles Leo and Busby down, each with a corpse kneeling over them, digging through the skin of their necks and lapping at the blood that spouted upwards in a thick geyser.
Monroe continued to wave, only ten yards from the end zone. Burke cocked his arm back, then with one big exhale let the ball fly. Watched it sail through the air in a long graceful arc. Without taking his eyes from the ball, he sidestepped another attacker, dropping his elbow on the thing’s back as it sailed by, the satisfactory crunch taking a backseat to the view of the ball dropping into Monroe’s arms.
As Monroe hugged the ball tight against his chest at the ten yard line, as his muscular thighs pumped toward the goal line, he failed to see the remnants of a skull sticking up from the sod. The 240-pound receiver stumbled. Yet still he dove toward the end zone, his arms outstretched, his entire body now prone in the air.
It was going to be close.
He landed.
The whistle blew.
The ref had to run to where the ball lay, it was that close.
Burke held his breath. The whole team held it’s breath. Even the crowd was silent.
The ref shook his head. Waved his arms back and forth across each other.
It was no good.
The crowd erupted. The game was over. The undead had won.
Burke kneeled to the ground. Thought of his wife up there in the stands, wished he could tell her how sorry he was. He looked frantically in the stands for her.
The refs cattle-prodded the undead players back into the giant cage with the rest of their kind, howling and screaming, their rotting vocal chords flying from their mouths in shiny wet shards.
Then he saw her. She was escorted through the stands as people yelled at her, spit on her, tore at her clothing. She was with the other players’ wives. All of them in a solemn huddle being led by large men in black hats armed with cattle prods.
Burke couldn’t watch. He turned away. He heard the wrought iron doors of the undead’s cage being opened. He only turned to look at the last minute, but already his wife, the other players’ wives had disappeared beneath the bodies of the zombie horde. Burke waited for the men in the black hats to come for him. He hoped that once he was up there, it would be his wife that devoured him.
The Child Gate
The night the intruder entered our home, Davey was almost three years old, brown hair, hazel eyes, and as sweet as a boy can be. Yet, he still hadn’t said his first words. No “mama.” No “dada.” A giggle here and there, a scream or a cry when upset, but no words. His pediatrician told us he was a late bloomer; boys tend to develop a bit slower, he’d said. Nothing to worry about. But soon, even he changed his tune. The words would not come.
The thing that stopped the intruder from coming up the steps and into our bedroom was the child gate installed when Davey was learning how to walk. He was fearless, and when he fell, got right back up and tried again. To keep him from toppling down the stairs to the white tile floor below, we kept the gate closed whenever he was upstairs.
The night the intruder came, we’d left our windows open to take advantage of the cool autumn breeze, and it was through one of these that the intruder entered at two in the morning. Alone and quiet, he used a small knife to slice through the screen.
Jenny and I slept in the master bedroom, and Davey snored quietly in his bedroom down the hall. The tentative rattle of hinges woke Jenny first.
The gate opens with a simple latching mechanism that requires a squeeze to be released, but if you’re unfamiliar with it, and stealthily sneaking up someone’s steps at two in the morning, it poses a potential problem.
Jenny shook my shoulder, her breath warm and urgent in my ear. “John. Wake up. Someone’s on the stairs.”
“Davey?” I asked, shaking off the restraints of sleep.
“No, not Davey. Someone—” She stopped as we heard the child gate rattle again, louder this time. Jenny’s fingernails dug painfully into my bicep.
I sat up. “Who’s there?”
An adult male voice grunted, “Fuck,” followed by the heavy staccato of thuds — something heavy tumbling down the steps and banging against the wall. There was an awful crack, followed by a sharp cry of pain.
Jenny tore out of bed. “Davey!” she gasped.
“Jenny!” I yelled. Neither of us knew what waited on the stairs.
I first learned about autism many years before Davey was born through the movie Rainman. A good film, but I mostly remember it as a tragic series of parlor tricks. Guess how many toothpicks the waitress dropped? What’s the probability of being dealt Blackjack? And — watch the autistic man memorize the phonebook in one go-round.
But my son. My two-year old son…
Here’s one of his parlor tricks. He falls asleep in our bed, yet I hear him moving around a bit later while my wife and I watch TV in the living room below. Soon, all is quiet again. When I go upstairs to check on him, an unpleasant odor greets me. I know what’s making the smell,
but when I look into the dim light of our room, I see Davey asleep, arms at his sides, but—
Something darkens his hands, and—
Something darkens the sheets around him, and—
As I turn on a lamp to see more clearly—
That same darkness is smeared across the nightstand, the dresser, swirled onto the walls in circles and curlicues. His diaper is still on, and he has merely reached inside for the ammunition, the medium of this art.
I choke back a cry and brace myself. Freaking out will do nobody any good.
I start a bath. Gently shake Davey. “Wake up, hon.” I pick him up, holding him away as much as possible from my body, but then I realize it’s just shit and it’s going to get on me, anyway, so…
He wakes slightly and I strip off his pj’s and set him in the tub, scrub the crap off of him, drain and refill the tub to let him soak and play while I strip the bed, use bucket and sponge and Lysol to clean the furniture, the walls, until it’s all gone, and Davey plays in the tub like nothing’s happened, it’s just another night in the Kendall household.
But the night the intruder came…
Jenny ran to Davey’s room, a mother bear protecting her cub. I got out of bed, the journey from bed to doorway seeming like a thousand miles. Heavy, labored breathing came from somewhere on the steps. I heard a groan as I peeked around the corner. The child gate remained shut. “Who’s there?” I called again.
The stairway curves from foyer to upstairs hallway, taking two small turns, each punctuated with a small landing. I forced my eyes down the steps until they came to a shape huddled on the landing six steps up from the tiled floor.
Jenny called from Davey’s room, “What is it? What’s going on?” In her rush to his room, she hadn’t even glanced at the man on the stairs.
I kept my eyes on him. Black shirt, black pants, black skull-cap. There was something odd about his shape. His leg — bent at an odd angle. He clutched at it, his face twisted in anguish. Jenny gasped behind me.
