by Kody Boye
Erik nodded. He bowed his head and covered his eyes with his hands.
“You didn’t happen to pick up any Excedrin,” Ian said, “did you?”
“It was near the front counter,” Steve said, “so I just shoved the last few bottles into the cart.”
“Good. His headache’s killing him.”
“I can tell,” Steve mused. He reached into the backseat, pulled the pills and a bottle of water out, then tapped the door shut with his foot, gesturing Ian back toward the building. “Anything else happen while I was gone?”
“No. Erik was worried about you going by yourself, but it’s not like we could’ve done anything. You’d already left and he couldn’t have been any use with his head. And it’s not like I could leave him alone like this.”
“I get you.” Steve pulled the door open, frowning when Erik barely tilted his head up before immediately dropping it again. “I’ve got painkillers.”
“What kind?”
“Excedrin.”
Erik held his hand out. Steve pushed the bottle into his hand and set the water at his side. “We ready to go?”
“In a few minutes,” Ian nodded. “Steve said we should bring some blankets along.”
“Don’t blame him,” Erik replied. “You care if I go get in the car?”
“No,” Steve said. When Erik started to stand, Steve pulled his parka off his shoulders and wrapped it around his friend’s body, taking care to pull the hood up and over his head in the process. “So you don’t get wet.”
Erik mumbled his thanks, pulled the door open, then stepped out into the weather. He took extra care to pace himself toward the car.
“Not much we can do about it,” Ian said, returning with an armload of quilts, blankets and sheets. “I figured we could put the sheets up over the windows and rig them up in the backseat so we can block the light out.”
“Has he mentioned anything about it being too bright?”
“No, but if it’s anything like the migraines my mom used to have, it’ll hurt to look at anything too bright.”
Great, Steve thought, unable to resist the urge to turn his head to look back at Erik. Now one of us is sick. What the hell are we supposed to do if something goes wrong?
“Get some more quilts,” Steve said, looking down at the impressive load already before him. “We need to fix that backseat up. He’s going to be miserable without it.”
“He asleep?” Steve asked.
“I dunno,” Ian said. “I’d move the curtain to check on him, but I don’t think that’s the best idea.”
Steve reached up, adjusted the blanket across his shoulders and accelerated his pace, taking care not to clip any cars that happened to line the road. He didn’t think a fender-bender would do much to the SUV, much less keep them from moving, but he didn’t want to risk hitting anything with Erik lying unbuckled in the backseat.
“You ok?” Ian asked.
“Sure. Why?”
“You looked like you were thinking pretty hard about something.”
“I was thinking about not hitting the cars in front of us,” Steve replied. “It won’t do much to the truck, but Erik isn’t buckled in.”
“Best not to hit anything if you can help it,” Ian agreed. “Relax. You’re doing a good job. Better job than I probably could.”
Steve maneuvered the vehicle around a pileup of cars and continued down the road toward where he knew the road split into a Y that led to the interstate they’d just left last night. This particular passage didn’t put him at ease. Though he knew they would soon be safe, he dreaded the amount of metal they’d have to drive over. The rain had shifted most of it off the road, but some of it remained strewn across the path, metal snakes and barbed cone shells just waiting to be run over.
You can do this, he thought. You can.
Something stumbled out from behind a broken car, and Steve rolled to a stop.
“Just hit it,” Ian said. “It’s a fuckin’ zombie.”
“No,” Steve said. “Look at it. This one is…different.”
The black-skinned entity before them lifted its head and acknowledged them with a simple tilt of the head. Seemingly gauging them, it straightened itself into an upright position, then tilted its head in the opposite direction, like a child trying to see something from every possible angle. Throughout this entire process, it remained standing in the road, content with the distance between them.
“See?” Steve asked.
“What the fuck’s it doing?”
“What’s what doing?” Erik groaned from the back seat.
“There’s something in the road in front of us,” Steve said. “It’s not a zombie.”
“Then what the fuck is it?”
“Look for yourself.”
A hand stabbed through the curtains and parted them. Erik’s head appeared soon after, face contorting in pain at the light that stabbed through the window. “I can’t see anything.”
“Give your eyes a second to adjust.”
Erik blinked. “What the hell?”
“That’s what I was saying,” Ian said. “You think it’s a person?”
“No. If it were a person, it’d already be down the road and by the truck by now.”
The creature tilted its head back into its regular position. It took one look to its right, then its left, then back over its shoulder before it began to make its way down the road. Stumbling, but not completely awkward in its movements, it coasted the wreckage in the street and regarded the metal on the road. Once, it even bent forward to remove it from its path, holding the piece of metal like a delicate artifact before tossing it into the bushes.
“What the hell is going on?” Erik whispered.
“I don’t know,” Steve said. “What am I supposed to do?”
“It’s heading right for us,” Ian said. “It’s not taking its time either.”
At the rate the creature was moving, it would be upon them within minutes. That realization forced sweat from Steve’s face and made the hairs on his arms stand on end.
It’s not a zombie, he thought, coaxing himself to remain calm. It didn’t come straight for us when it heard us in the road.
“Here it comes,” Ian said.
Now no more than a few feet away from the vehicle, Steve could make out its features in gross detail. Its skin wrinkled like a raisin and darkened as though as though it had spent one too many hours in a tanning bed, it appeared to not be dead, but something completely unlike it. Steve would go so far as to say it was alive, but didn’t as its hand touched the hood of the vehicle and directed his attention toward its head. Its eyes—the original color now indeterminable—shined like black onyx under an intense fixture of light. They didn’t glow, but their boldness alone forced him to keep direct eye contact with it.
“It’s coming toward the window,” Erik said.
“I know,” Steve replied.
When the creature was directly at Steve’s side, it reached forward.
Steve swallowed a lump in his throat.
What’s it going to do?
It didn’t touch the window. Instead, it stopped, regarded him with a tilt of its head, then extended one single finger and tapped the glass with a long, purplish fingernail.
“Fuck,” Ian said, shocked. “It knows what’s it’s doing.”
“That’s obvious,” Erik said, “but what does it want?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said slowly. The creature tilted its head again. Its mouth seemed to replicate the action, as though disappointed, before it tapped the glass again, three times instead of just once. “I think it wants me to roll the window down.”
“Crack it,” Erik said. “Don’t be stupid.”
“I wasn’t planning on it.”
Reaching forward, Steve set his finger to the dash and pressed his finger to the button.
The window rolled down a crack. A gust of rain and the smell of fruit blew into the SUV.
Fruit?
“S-sir?”
he managed, waiting for the thing to respond.
The thing brought its hand back and let it dangle at its side. It tilted its head again, this time obviously acknowledging Steve for the fact that he wasn’t an inanimate object, then shifted its lips. A purple tongue, still very much wet and free of rot, slicked its lips.
“Sir?” he asked again.
“Ruhh,” it gasped.
“What the fuck?” Erik said.
“It’s talking!” Ian gasped.
“What are you trying to say, sir?” Steve asked, heart firing in his chest.
“Ruh… ruh… run.”
“It’s telling us to fuckin’ run!” Erik yelled, clawing at Steve’s shoulder. “What the fuck are you waiting for?”
“They… ur… here.” It pointed.
A horde of zombies stumbled out from inside a building and turned their eyes on them.
“GO!” Erik cried. “GO!”
Steve slammed his foot on the ignition.
The SUV went soaring up the road.
In his haste to leave, he barely noticed that the thing had stopped to remove all of the metal on the road.
CHAPTER 10
They pulled into southeastern Idaho around three-thirty, despite the rain that followed them throughout the lower parts of Denver and Utah. A breath of fresh air at the tail end of October, they each breathed a sigh of relief as the air warmed and the sun came out to celebrate their joyous victory.
By the time evening began to crest the horizon, they pulled into the neighborhood Jamie had once called home.
“This is it,” Jamie said, coming to a stop outside a row of three houses.
Dakota looked on in awe at the sight of the three two-story, perfectly-restored country homes before him. Flanked by a long-dry field on one side and a road on another, each house looked toward the south, where an expanse of neighboring houses lay a few hundred feet in the distance. Here, poised almost at the tip of the range, he could just begin to make out snow forming on the jagged peaks of one of the most beautiful things he had ever seen.
“Jamie?” Desmond asked, drawing Dakota from his thoughts.
Turning, Dakota frowned when he saw that Jamie had bowed his head, hands tightened around the steering wheel and face obscured by his arm. His first reaction was to ask what was wrong, then he looked at the houses before him and sighed when the realization hit him.
Oh, he thought. Home.
To see your past before you when the rest of your life had failed, to realize that the people you loved would never be home again, to understand that your happiest moments were only memories and there would never be any more of them—how did it feel to come home after so many years, after so much had happened and after the world had ended? Was it a stab in the heart, a punch in the gut, or was it something worse—evisceration by a rotting hand or decapitation by a wrongful step? Either way, it didn’t much matter, because when Jamie let out a startled sob, Dakota leaned forward and wrapped his arms around him.
“I’m sorry,” he whispered, bowing his head into the man’s shoulder. “I’m sorry, Jamie.”
“It’s ok,” Jamie said. “Just…give me a moment.”
They waited.
Jamie began to cry.
Dakota and Desmond eventually left the car by Jamie’s instruction. Told to walk to the front door and take the key from under the flowerpot, they entered the house and seated themselves within the living room, atop the vanilla-white furniture in front of a stonework fireplace. The whole while they sat there, the silence more than total and the tension extremely thick, Dakota tried not to look back out the window and at the truck parked in the driveway.
He’s gonna be ok. He turned his head down and away from the window. Everything’ll be just fine.
“It’s a nice house,” Desmond said, “isn’t it?”
“Sure is,” Dakota said, looking up at the living room before them. “Really nice.”
“Have you looked at anything?”
“Not really.”
“Just wondering. I’m kinda surprised you haven’t, considering this is where your boyfriend grew up.”
“I will eventually.”
“Maybe you should go talk to him.”
“He wants to be left alone.”
“You’re his boyfriend. I really doubt he’d push you away.”
Knowing Jamie? Dakota thought. I highly doubt that.
“I don’t know,” Dakota sighed, preparing to rise, but not sure if he should. “I think I need to let him have his moment alone. He is coming home, after all.”
“I guess it’s hard,” Desmond said.
“Desmond, can I ask you something about your past?”
“I lived with my parents,” Desmond said. “Yes, they loved me. I loved them. I have pretty much given up on the idea of ever seeing them again though.”
“Are you ok with that?”
“No, but I’ve accepted it.”
The door opened. Jamie stepped in, eyes red and cheeks puffy. “I just needed a moment to myself.”
Dakota stood and crossed the short distance between them. He wrapped an arm around his boyfriend’s side and leaned into his chest. “I love you, Jamie.”
“I love you too, babe. And I love you, Desmond.”
“Thanks,” Desmond replied. “And thank you for getting us here safely.”
“We had a few bumps, but it’s ok. We’re…we’re home now. Right?”
“Yeah,” Dakota smiled. “We are.”
The rest of the morning passed in silence. Desmond lounged in the living room, Jamie sat in the kitchen poring over documents and scratching things down on paper, and Dakota wandered the house and tried to distract himself from the eerie calm, despite the fact that he knew they were safe. He examined family pictures, peeked into bedrooms, slid his fingers over the neat, colored tile in individual bathrooms and pressed his hands into the fabric of beds, all in an attempt to familiarize himself with a time and place he knew he would not be familiar with had the end of the world not occurred.
Eventually, his search led him to a portrait of Jamie that had been taken years before. Dressed in fatigues and clean shaven, he looked younger than Dakota could have ever imagined him.
He looks, he thought, then paused, reaching forward to embrace the frame with his right hand. “So young,” he said aloud.
How long ago had this been taken? It couldn’t have been less than five years, because the lines around Jamie’s mouth hadn’t deepened and his cheeks didn’t have that much fat in them, and it couldn’t have been only five because he looked younger than the twenty-one he would’ve been.
This was taken years ago, Dakota thought. When he was my age.
The sight of the young man before him forced a shiver through his body. His chin still softened and the fat around it still dense enough to hide the hard square; his cheeks fuller, plump with youth; his skin lighter beyond compare—he looked Nordic, compared to how dark his skin was now, like he’d been living in a frozen wasteland complete with narwhales and penguins.
A hand touched his shoulder. Dakota jumped.
“Hey,” Jamie said, wrapping an arm around his waist from behind. “Looks like you found my enlistment picture.”
“This was taken when you were my age, wasn’t it?”
“Yup. I’ve sure changed a lot, haven’t I?”
“No kidding,” Dakota said, pulling his hand back from the picture.
“I can hardly remember being that ignorant little boy who knew nothing about the world.”
“What were you doing in the kitchen?”
“Going through my mother’s stuff, trying to figure out what we’re going to do about the house. I’d rather not board it up if I don’t have to.”
Dakota nodded. Drawn by a second picture just slightly above Jamie’s own, he looked up when he saw another man staring up at him, face hard and jaw set. The glimpse of a smile could be seen on the corner of his mouth, despite the desert behind him.
“Jam
ie,” he said, “is that your dad?”
Jamie reached out to touch the picture. “That’s pop,” he said.
“You look just like him.”
Jamie tightened his hold around Dakota’s waist.
A tear dropped down onto his shoulder.
Dakota reached down and set his hand over Jamie’s.
“You want to do what?” Dakota asked.
“Build a wall,” Jamie said, setting his hand over a large piece of poster paper before him. “See the perimeter around the property? We’re gonna dig a trench, build a wall and fill it in with concrete. Call me vain, but I don’t want anything happening to the houses, especially not the one next door.”
“How come?”
“Erik grew up there.”
“Really?” Dakota said.
“I remember that now that you mention it,” Desmond said, looking down at the table of figures off to the side. “What’s this?”
“The amount of wood and concrete we’ll need.”
“Those are some pretty heavy numbers,” Dakota said. “How do you expect to get all of those supplies, much less get them back here?”
“Simple; we wait for Ian, Erik and Steve to get here, scrounge up an extra car or two, then make our way to the nearest U-Haul. I doubt they’d care if we borrowed a truck, considering the circumstances and all.”
“You didn’t answer my question though. How do you expect to get all those supplies?”
“We’re only going to dig the trench a certain number of feet,” Jamie said, tapping the empty section of the rectangle around the three properties. “Once we set the foundation, we’re going to fill it up with concrete, then install support beams along the inside of the property.”
“You seem to have it figured out,” Dakota sighed, looking up at Desmond. “What do you think about all of this?”
“I think it’ll work,” the boy said. “What about the ice though? I’ve heard something about concrete breaking apart if moisture gets into any cracks and freezes.”
“We’ll cross that barrier when that time comes,” Jamie said. He looked down at the figures, reconsidered the detailed sketch before him, then looked back up at Dakota and Desmond. “Guess you guys know what comes next.”
