by James Cook
“Do you think you can?” The desperate hope in her voice made my chest tighten.
“I don’t know,” Tyrel said. “But I can try.” He held out a hand for the keys. Lola hesitated before handing them over.
“You might want to stay in the house until this is over, Lola.”
She nodded and shuffled back to the living room. When she was gone, Tyrel turned to me and jerked his head toward the back door. “Come on.”
The backyard was spacious, boasting a large brick patio, top-of-the-line grill, outdoor fireplace, wooden terrace strung with party lights, and a pool and a hot tub to my left. Both had a thin layer of algae across the surface along with several weeks’ worth of leaves and enough ashes to color the water gray. The lawn had been left untended and un-watered, the longish grass brown and yellow interspersed with a few surviving islands of green. There was a sprinkler system, but it looked like no one had turned it on in a while. Without water, the lawn had dried and withered in the baking Texas sun. The dying lawn led down to a narrow strip of sandy beach as wide as the property, with the carefully crafted lines of something manmade. Soft waves lapped lazily at the rocks along the edge of the shore.
“Over there,” Tyrel said.
I looked where he pointed and saw slanted wooden shutters butting up against the exposed portion of the house’s foundation. It looked like a tornado shelter only smaller, barely enough for one person to fit through.
“Too narrow for stairs,” I said. “Must have a ladder.”
“Probably right.” Tyrel walked over and inserted the key in the padlock holding the shutters closed. A quick twist, and he set the lock aside.
“You ready?” he asked.
I took position beside him and aimed my pistol down at the center of the entrance. “Ready.”
He tossed the shutters open and stepped back, hand going to his pistol. I peered down, but couldn’t see more than a few feet. The entrance led straight down, lined on two sides with painted white cinder blocks. I reasoned we must have been standing at the corner of the basement. There was a ladder leading down, but I could only see the top four or five rungs.
From my vest, I produced a tactical light, pressed the switch, and shined the light downward. Other than dust motes and a few dead bugs, I didn’t see anything. All was quiet for a few moments.
Then the shuffling began.
“You hear that?” I asked Tyrel.
“Yeah. I think he’s coming our way.”
We waited, feet braced, weapons aimed. The shuffling increased in volume until the top of a man’s head came into view. He was tall, about my height, dark hair, a bald spot beginning to form in the back. He did not walk with the smooth rolling stride of a healthy, able-bodied person. It was not the carefully coordinated series of controlled falls that normally comprise human locomotion. His feet dragged, as if he had to keep them in contact with the floor or he would fall over. His head bobbed back in forth in jerky, unsteady movements, arms stiff at his sides, hands clasping and unclasping.
“Mr. Torrance?” I said.
His head snapped up, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe.
“Jesus, Mary and Joseph,” Tyrel whispered.
His face was gray. Not pale like he hadn’t had enough sun, or the light pallor of someone who is very ill, but a different color entirely. It was the gray of hurricane clouds over the Gulf of Mexico, the color of the ashes that settled on my car the day my family and I fled our home, the leaden pewter shade of oil refinery smoke arcing toward the sky. I had never seen that particular tone on a human being before, but I knew instantly what it meant. It was as though some dim, forgotten part of me remembered that color, the same as it knew to fear the night and find comfort in the brightness of the sun. If not for Tyrel standing next to me that day, I might well have turned and fled. As it was, I shifted my aim, finger tight over the trigger.
“Tyrel, wh-”
Whatever I was going to say died on my lips when the thing that was once Perry Torrance let out a shrieking, hungry wail. It was loud enough I felt it rattling in my chest. The dead man’s voice went ragged as he cried out, the vocal cords in his neck rupturing from the force of the scream. No living person could ever have made a sound like that unless they were in the grip of indescribable agony. It was primal, animal, but at the same time, all too human.
Fear coursed up my spine and made my bowels clench. The urge to shoot the thing squarely between the eyes was almost overwhelming, a physical force that made my face burn and my hands tremble. I watched in horror as the man-thing slammed against the wall hard enough to dislodge a tooth. It showed no sign of pain as it scraped and clawed at the wall, desperately trying to reach us. Tyrel reached out and laid a steadying hand on my shoulder.
“Easy now, son.” His calm voice cut through the panic like balm on a fresh burn. The heat in my face cooled, followed by a loosening of the tension in my arms. I took a deep breath and let it out slowly, shakily. The thing in the basement—I couldn’t think of it as a person—continued to howl and scratch futilely at the wall.
“I didn’t really believe it until now,” Tyrel said.
“What?”
He pointed. “That, is not a living person. No fucking way.”
“You think he’s dead? Like, really dead?”
“Look at him, Caleb. You ever seen anything like that?”
I shook my head. “No. But he’s up and moving, Tyrel. He couldn’t do that if he were really dead.”
The former SEAL holstered his pistol. “I know a way we can find out.”
*****
Two lessons I learned that day:
Lesson the first: The infected are terrifyingly strong.
Lesson the second: Subduing one without breaking every bone in its body is damned near impossible.
But we managed it, sort of. The first thing we did was search the Torrance’s garage until we found an old canvas duffel bag, a tennis ball, some duct tape, and a couple of bungee cords.
We duct taped a couple of trimmed saplings to the duffel bag and used it to cover Perry Torrance’s head, figuring it would make it harder for him to fight us. But after forcing him backward from the ladder and descending so we were on the same level with him, he seemed to have no trouble locating us despite the fact he couldn’t see us.
Next, we hit him with a classic schoolyard tackle, me hitting high and Tyrel hitting low. We managed to get him down, but the strength of the thing was enormous.
For a long time afterward, I thought the Reanimation Bacteriophage did something to human muscle to make it superhumanly strong. Later, I learned it did not. It simply eliminated the pain response, making it possible for ghouls to use a hundred percent of their strength at all times, something no living human could have done in absentia of psychotropic drugs. The human body is far stronger than people think it is, we just never realize that full potential because doing so damages tissues and muscle fibers, which causes pain, which causes us to back off. The undead do not have that problem.
I pinned Torrance to the ground by sitting on his chest and holding my rifle across his throat. One of the fundamental rules of body mechanics is if you control the head, you control the body. I managed to hold him down long enough for Tyrel to tape his ankles and knees together, but it was a near thing.
In the process, while desperately trying to keep him from sitting up, I heard the crunch of Torrance’s hyoid bone giving way. I cursed, but kept my grip on the rifle. I kept expecting to hear him choking and gagging, but the only difference was his moans now came out in a disjointed rattle instead of the previous mewling. In that moment, it finally began to sink in that this man might be really, truly dead. And still moving around.
With this realization came an odd, inexplicable rage. I pressed down harder with the rifle, teeth bared, wanting nothing more in the world than to kill the thing underneath me. The sound of harsh, labored grunting came to my ears, and after a moment of dimly wondering where it was coming from, I realized it
was me.
“Caleb,” Tyrel said.
I spoke through clenched teeth. “What?”
“Ease down, kid. Just hold him, don’t rip his head off.”
I relaxed, forcing myself to breath normally. “Sorry.”
Once Torrance’s legs were secured, we rolled him over and forced his hands behind his back. His right shoulder popped out of socket in the process, but again, the stricken man gave no indication of discomfort.
“That is just fuckin’ weird,” Tyrel said as we stood up and took a few steps away.
“No shit. What now?”
Tyrel picked up the tennis ball where he had dropped it, cut a hole in two sides, and threaded a bungee cord through it so it made a makeshift ball gag. “Now comes the fun part.”
I held Torrance’s head as still as I could while Tyrel applied the gag. He poised the ball over the man’s mouth and waited for him to open it between gnashings. When the time was right, he grasped the gag by two ends of the bungee cord and forced the tennis ball into Torrance’s biting mouth. A few quick motions later, and he had secured it in place by looping the bungee cords around the head and tying them off, then double securing it with duct tape.
“Okay,” Tyrel said. “Let’s see if he has a pulse.”
I did my best to hold Torrance still while Tyrel laid two fingers on the left side of his neck, and then the right. He repeated the process two more times, eyes closed in concentration. Finally, he sat back with a sigh.
“Anything?”
“Nothing. No pulse.”
“How the hell is that possible, Ty? Look at him.”
We stood up and backed away, watching the thing that was once a man thrash around, its head smacking with wet hollow thuds on the concrete floor. “I don’t know,” Tyrel said, voice shaken. “That’s the damnedest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve seen some shit.”
“What should we do with him?”
Tyrel mopped sweat from his forehead with a sleeve. “I guess we let Lola decide that. He’s her husband, after all.”
“Used to be, anyway,” I said.
Tyrel glanced at me but said nothing.
NINETEEN
“I don’t know what to do,” Lola said.
Tyrel rubbed a hand across his beard. “Well, it’s not something I can decide for you.”
She stood with us in the basement staring at her husband under the harsh glare of my tac-light. Perry Torrance’s milky white eyes bulged from their sockets in impotent rage, his mouth working incessantly at the tennis ball. At some point during his struggles, he had dislocated the other shoulder so that both arms now hung limply from their sockets.
“Lola,” I said, “did you catch any of the news or radio reports before the grid went down?”
She looked at me with red-rimmed eyes. “Yes.”
“Then you heard what the government was saying about the infected?”
“You think that’s what happened to him?”
I thought, I think it’s pretty fucking obvious, lady. But my mouth said, “I believe so. There’s no other explanation.”
“We checked his vitals,” Tyrel added. “He has no pulse, no respiration other than when he breathes in to make that damned moan. I cut a vein to see if anything came out. His blood is like sludge, partially coagulated. You only see that in corpses, Lola. I think it’s safe to say he’s dead.”
Her voice rose. “Then how is he still moving around like that?”
“I don’t know,” Tyrel replied evenly. “Even the government’s best scientists can’t seem to figure that part out. But he’s dead, Lola. There’s no doubt about it. Whatever that thing is over there,” he pointed, “it’s not your husband anymore.”
She turned away from us and walked to a far corner of the basement. Minutes passed while Tyrel and I waited, shuffling awkwardly, unsure what we should do. Finally, she heaved a breath and faced us. “The news reports said to sever their brain stem or …”
“Destroy the brain,” Tyrel finished.
“Right.”
“I’m going to go inside and have a glass of wine,” Lola said. “In fact, I think I’ll have several. We have a collection, over a hundred bottles, some of them rare vintages. Perry loved wine, said it was an investment. That we’d leave them to our kids someday.”
Her voice choked on the last sentence, hand coming up to her mouth, tears spilling over her knuckles. She looked imploringly at Tyrel. “I think I’ll stay in the house until tomorrow morning,” she said.
Tyrel nodded. “He’ll be gone by then. We’ll clean up when we’re done.”
“Thank you. When I first saw the two of you I thought you were here to … you know.”
“We’re not like that, Lola. We’re not that kind of people.”
“I know that, now. Will I see you in the morning?”
“Of course.”
“Until then.”
She climbed the ladder and left without another word. Tyrel drew his knife and started walking toward Perry Torrance. As he reached down to roll him over on his stomach, a thought occurred to me.
“Wait,” I said.
“What?”
“Have the others seen one of these things yet?”
Tyrel’s eyes glimmered in the dark. “No. But they should.”
“Maybe we wait a while, let Lola get a few glasses in. Take care of things later, after she’s asleep.”
“Take the truck,” Tyrel said. “I’ll wait here.”
“On it.”
The air was cool, the afternoon sun low in the sky when I climbed out of the basement. A breeze picked up from the south, drying the sweat on my face and hands. I stood for a moment, eyes closed, mind empty until the breeze died down.
The truck was where we left it. I drove slowly through the empty streets watching brown grass, empty houses, and the leftover ashes from distant fires passing by on either side. I kept the truck pointed in the middle of the road, straddling the lanes for no better reason than I could. It was not as if I had to share the road with anyone.
Dad and Blake had already returned to Dale’s cabin. They radioed me coming in, and I told them I was on my way, but I was alone. No, Tyrel is fine. We found a couple of survivors and one infected. I’ll explain when I get there.
So I did.
They all went to the Torrance’s lake house. Sophia did not want to, but Mike deemed it necessary she see an infected for herself. I told him to make sure she stayed no less than ten feet away. For a second there, he seemed to think I was joking. Then he caught something in my expression and clamped his mouth shut on whatever he was about to say.
They were gone for the better part of two hours. I later learned they spent some time examining Perry Torrance’s reanimated corpse, tried to kill it a few different ways, and finally settled on slipping a knife into the base of its skull. Afterward, they drove the body a few blocks away, wrapped it in a tarp, and buried it deep in an abandoned back yard.
I spent that time sitting on the front porch watching the sun slide down the horizon on the western side of the continent. Clouds in the distance blazed orange, then purple-blue, then burnt scarlet, dark as blood over the corona of our nearest star. Birds took flight and bats emerged from hiding under a neon sky as I drank Dale’s bourbon and wondered what the sunset looked like in California.
*****
I was in bed by the time they came back.
From the chatter I heard downstairs, Lola Torrance was falling down drunk when they returned to her house after burying her late husband. Tyrel decided she should not be alone in that condition and stayed behind to keep an eye on her. Having dealt with the drunken shenanigans of my father and Dale Forrester enough times, I did not envy him the task.
Mike volunteered to take the first watch, Blake the second, Dad the last before dawn. Blake suggested waking me up to shorten the watches, but Dad vetoed him.
“The kid’s been through enough today,” he said. “Let him rest.”
That settled, th
ey dispersed. I stayed still and quiet as Sophia entered the room and eased the door shut. It was night outside, but moonlight through the thin curtains gave enough illumination to see her silhouette in the dark. She sat on the bed a few minutes, saying nothing, head in her hands, legs folded beneath her. Then she stood up, took off her shirt and bra, and changed into a pair of tight mesh shorts and a clingy white tank top. I’m not proud of it, but I couldn’t resist the temptation to watch.
She kept her back to me, the only part visible her left side, the moonlight painting her tan skin a pale bluish-silver. I studied the sweep of her torso and flare of hip as she raised her arms to untie her hair and let it fall down her shoulders in a deliciously tousled platinum cascade. The urge to reach out and run my fingers through it was strong, but I remained still.
It was too hot for blankets, so she covered up with a thin sheet and lay on her side, pale light outlining the valley descending her side and sweeping up over her hips. I stared and wondered how well my arm would fit in that space.
“Caleb?” she said, startling me. I waited a three-count before answering, pushing as much grogginess as I could manage into my voice.
“Yeah?”
“That guy, Perry. He was dead. Like, really dead.”
“I think so, yeah.”
“But he was still moving.”
“Just like they said on the news, Sophia.”
“It’s not the same, somebody telling you something and seeing it for yourself.”
“No, it isn’t.”
“He wanted to kill us. I could see it in his eyes.”
“I saw the same thing.”
“What does it mean, do you think? Dead people walking. I heard a lot of people saying it was God’s judgment, the end of times, all that shit. Is it the end of the world? Like, for real, no fucking around, we’re all gonna die, end of the world?”
“I don’t know, Sophia. I don’t think anyone does.”
“So what do we do?”
“The same thing we’re doing now.” I rolled over so my back was to her, letting her know the conversation was over.
