In The Season of The Damned (Book One)

by Shannon Allen

  I was just to happy to be in there away from the madness, so much so that I didn’t tell her to piss off yet, but I did say to her, “I can take care of myself, sweetheart.”

  “What did you call me?” she said. Zen looked at her and frowned shaking his head and she sighed and turned away. She then grabbed my seat belt and buckled it, which is always weird when someone treats you like a child.

  “You know I can do that?” I said. Zen was seated and ready to go, and Ira climbed into the seat beside him. She asked where we were going next.

  “Straight to the cabin,” he said, “this place is going to hell. It just keeps growing. That virus isn’t normal, you both heard the reports, people are attacking each other, eating each other’s flesh, whoever gets this thing bites or scratches another person and they get it, we need to get away from the people, now. Peter, over the years I have noticed you’re pretty much a loner like me, you can come with us, or we can drop you off along the way, if it’s on our way. They are talking curfew and shutting places down, so the faster we go the better. They aren’t going to be able to stop this thing, the social unrest, people are rioting and robbing, government’s going to clamp down, more people outside mean more people to carry and spread the virus…Damn that company!”

  “Is there a phone there?” I asked. “I left mine, network was down.”

  “Yes,” he said, “but it might not have service. A lot of the networks are down; I think it has something to do with the government and all the calls taking place.”

  The service had been on and off lately. I wanted to call my uncle and let him know I was okay, or at least see if he was, but I didn’t know how to reach him. I doubt mail was getting through. For now, I knew it would be better to go with Zen and Ira and try to reach my uncle later, sometimes he left the country without a moments notice. My mom and dad had, well, they had passed on earlier in the accident that paralyzed me.

  Maybe it was because death was happening all around us these last few days, but I was thinking about my father a lot. I stared into his eyes, watching him trying to mouth words as the weight of the car crushed him. The only thing I could make out was “goodbye,” but there was my uncle, my uncle who had forced me to keep going after I lost the use of my legs. Maybe it was arrogance, or sheer stupidity to think of at a time like this, but I also thought about the harmful words Ira had said to me: “dead weight”

  They’d returned to me sooner than I thought they would. Shame how so many people assume we’re invalids. I’d been living by myself and doing almost everything for myself a very long time. Sure, there had been rough spots, but I was doing well once I learned a few things. What should I expect from a stranger? In a room full of family and friends you still could be alone, sitting there wondering what everyone in the room was thinking. Sometimes no one asked questions, and that could be worse than if they had asked them.

  Strangers could be the worst, with a deluge of inappropriate questions. I’ve always been like, get to know me and then I’ll tell you anything you want to know. In some ways losing my legs seems to have made me stronger, but there were just a few people, like Ira, who managed to get on my nerves. I owe so much to my uncle. Those first weeks home, he really kicked my butt. He taught me to be strong, he hollered at me, and he said I needed to get over it. At the time, that was tough to hear. I could have strangled him at what I thought was his indifference to my situation, but it gave me the anger I needed. I just had wanted to lie down; I didn’t want to watch TV for fear of seeing people playing sports or riding a bike.

  One night he screamed at me, “You’re not fucking broken! Everything you are, the person we love, is still here hiding, hiding from himself, not the world.” Now if only he could have helped me break myself out of the habit of trying to wiggle my toes, or thinking that with enough willpower, I could do it. And I wasn’t dead weight, though getting some people to see that was always a challenge. I’d had to make myself see it first, and my uncle helped. Anyway, there were even sensations below my injured spinal cord; I could feel things in my pelvic region, though sometimes numbly.

  After twelve hours of driving and news reports we arrived at a dark brown colored cabin; it was double logged, hidden in the woods, the sky stretched for a little, and there was a group of trees. “This is a good place,” Zen said. “No one knows about this here, at least there doesn’t seem to be any of those things around. Ira, you help Peter.”

  Surprisingly, Ira grabbed my chair out and unfolded it without saying a word. She looked like she had something else on her mind. I moved to the camper door and used my arms to lift myself into my chair. In the movies they always have people who can’t walk cursing their chair, but to me, my chair meant I was better in control; I felt nude without it. Ira did something I don’t usually like, she grabbed my chair and began to push it. I prefer to operate it myself, well, with strangers.

  “You’ll like it here,” she said. “We always come up in the winter, my dad and me. We haven’t been up for a few years together; he inherited this place from his father. It’s pretty big, with a cellar, attic, fishing, and hunting. We could be okay here for a while; it’s hidden, and no one ever comes by.”

  “I’ll take it,” I said, “if it beats the riots that are happening in the cities.” I didn’t think about it at the time, but there was a wheelchair ramp, and she smoothly pushed me over it.

  The inside of the cabin was dark, she hit the light switch. The light flickered on and a stuffed moose in the corner became visible. “Damn it!” I yelled. “What the hell is that?”

  “You’re not too comfortable with stuffed things?” she said, chuckling, finding a sense of humor at the end of the world.

  Zen came in with a radio. “Listen,” he said. On the radio, they were telling everyone to stay in their homes, anyone seen outside would potentially be shot, and there could be a mistake, they continued. Well, that last part didn’t make me feel any better. Mistake seems like a justification. “Everything is already far out of hand,” Zen said, “there are going to be a lot of mistakes.” We listened for hours as it grew from daylight to night, and the world found itself at the brink.

  There was report after report of sheer madness: newscasters attacked and turning into zombies mid-report, areas of resistance, where people were held up, phone service down for the longest it had been since this started. The doctors were saying they couldn’t stop the spread; it was happening to quickly and the patients were too dangerous. The Internet was not connecting here at the cabin, and many other places, according to the radio. “How could the satellites just fail?” I asked Zen.

  They were blaming some weird electro magnetic pulse from the sun, but to me, the timing was too strange. Would it ever come back? You knew it was bad when the president started bringing troops home from all stations. Every country started closing their borders. A hundred million people died of the Spanish Flu after the first world war. It was estimated that whatever this thing was, it already had infected 100 million people. They were all infected by this plague, a plague that seemed to infect and spread like wildfire. People were eating other people, and nothing can prepare you for that fact, but the news was consistent on the stations we had left.

  That first night at the cabin was terrible for what was going on, but I sometimes think back to it. Oh, to feel that naive again. None of us knew what we were facing, nor did we know we’d become an upside-down number, where we were the minority and they were the norm. We’d sit by the fire and discuss the “zombies.” We talked about the fact that it was some kind of virus that spreads. We would listen to that radio until all voices went off air. The last to go was a show called Ghost Radio. Some stations still had the music looping, but there were no more regular news reports after awhile. Some of the last reports were about famous people killing themselves. I thought they had bunkers.

  Zen didn’t have a TV, but I think TV might have made it all worse. I mean, if we could actually see all of this happening, it would have stolen s
ome of our hope. No zombies seemed to find their way to us those first weeks. We talked about feeling almost guilty; the world was falling apart and we were hidden away in the hills.

  Zen knocked out a wall, making the bathroom accessible for my chair, which was nice, but it left one side open and Ira would randomly come by, shaking her head, rolling her eyes, or smirking. I think I would just be happy if she stopped leaving the chair I’d placed in the shower in the hallway. I kept telling her it was much easier for me not to have to put it in there, but I think she just did it to get on my nerves.

  The food was holding up well. Zen said in summer we’d have to plant. When winter came, the snow kept us partially hidden, and we only turned on the smoke stack as we had too, so as not to attract human attention. Zen also said we’d have to make the cabin area more secure over the winter.

  Then there was an event none of us really could explain. Zen swears that he and Ira had the same dream; they woke up in the middle of the night. They say they looked out the window in the dream and they saw a man; he instantly noticed this and started grinning at them, the man had eyes of fire. When they woke up, both of them heard the first reports of this. The strange thing is, I’d also had the same dream. We all knew that each other had experienced this, and we took it as a sign we were supposed to be together, for better or worse, or rather, better or Ira. I never did reach my uncle. We’d talk about a plan to go get him, but I knew he’d want me to stay put.

  I thought that the phone service would endure longer, but it went pretty quickly. No calls could make it through. However, Ira was seeming to warm to me some. She made sure I got extra food at the meals, and she’d cover my feet at night, even though I couldn’t feel them. Maybe that would keep me from catching pneumonia, one of my greatest fears, and something my injury makes it hard to fight off. They told me that if the injury had been any higher I might have lost all control of my bladder function forever. All the guys at the center have this problem; we had to get our bladders drained a few times a day to avoid accidents. I somehow was stuck thinking how this would be if I had not regained some control. Still, sometimes accidents happened, but at least so far not in front of Zen and Ira,.

  I remember the terrible time I was in the elevator of my building and piss started pouring down like a shower. Some kids were in there with me: “Hey, look, that guy’s pissing on himself!” They got real quiet when I threatened to run over them with my chair if they told anyone. Most guys at the center had learned to live with little or no control. Could we learn to live in this new world? I wonder how much we can get used to. These were always my thoughts at night, me lying on my pillow in my room. It was small but comfy. We had boarded the windows, and it held just a bed and nightstand, but it was all I needed.

  More weeks passed. This was the first time Zen had left us in the cabin; he took supplies and headed into the woods to hunt. He made us promise to stay put, but he also refused to let us go with him, saying it would be better for one person to go and it would use less supplies. I forgot to ask him what he hunted up here. A fat, crispy, snow squirrel even sounded good right about now, with gravy and mashed potatoes and buttermilk biscuits, yeah…

  I suspected something strange with Zen, like there was something he and Ira were keeping from me, maybe for my own good, or maybe I was just being paranoid. However, I just went along with the program. It was a bit creepy without Zen’s presence. I got ready for bed that night just like I always did. Just at that moment, I felt a slight tug. “It’s me, Ira,” she said, lying next to me and stealing part of my blankets. “I don’t want to be alone.”

  “Oh, so you wait till your dad leaves to take advantage of me?” I joked. “What, do you think I can’t fight back without legs?” She just looked at me like, are you serious, and then busted out laughing. Ira was weird; sometimes you could impress her with your humor, and other times she’d look at you very much like you’d told a joke to a robot, one without a laughter chip. I was getting better at making her happy with my jokes. Oh, but she always laughs at her own terrible jokes, usually leaving me and Zen looking at each other sideways, as if to ask, did you get that one?

  “Hey, tell me about your life before any of this,” she said.

  What do you want to know?”

  “Did you have a girlfriend?”

  “No, I didn’t have a girlfriend. Well, I did, but the ‘loss of my legs’ as she called it was a bit too much for her to overcome. Guess she was escaping a life of dependency from me. What about you?” I asked. “Have a boyfriend?”

  “Yes,” she said, “there was someone. He is a shop owner on Mayblin Street where dad lives. That is why I was visiting. He’s named Sonny.”

  “Sonny. Sonny?”

  “Yeah, Sonny,” she said, smirking. “Okay, what’s wrong with Sonny?” she asked.

  “Oh, nothing,” I said.

  “I called him and told him we were coming here. He said he’d be right up, you see, but it hasn’t happened.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said to her, noticing the strangeness in her voice. “Are you okay?” I asked.

  “Of course,” she said. “I’ve figured out what your Indian name is. I’ll call you, ‘Sits With A Fist.’”

  “Sits With A Fist? Really,” I said. “Haha, very funny.” I was noticing her beautiful smirk again and thin smile lines, her brilliant skin, and her soft hair. I really wanted to kiss her, but I just didn’t know how she’d react.

  “What’s the best thing that’s happened to you since the accident?” she asked.

  “Let me think,” I said. “Well, one day I found a road that went down at a very sharp angle. I rolled my chair to the top and I went for it, just let myself go, and for that time it was like I was not only walking again, but I was flying, the world was whizzing by, the soft breeze, it felt perfect, no time to think about anything, and that was when I knew it. I knew life could be just as rich as or more so than before, because I never appreciated the small moments back then. This accident has forced me to live a million small moments, to find heaven and comfort in the smile of a stranger or the naïveté of a child. The small things. The worst thing is when people pat me on my head. I’m in a wheelchair, I’m not a dog, idiots, go pat your mom on the head.”

  “WTH?” she said. “Okay, one more thing, you say your girlfriend left because your legs didn’t work. Was it…”

  “What?” I asked.

  “Was it the sex?” she said looking like she’d swallowed a canary.

  “What kind of question is that? Are you asking me that because you want to handle this?”

  Her mouth flew wide open, surprised, or so I thought. “I’ve seen you in the bathroom,” she said, “it’s not all that much to handle.”

  “Wow…” I said, not having a comeback, “err, we’ll get back to this later. Hey, what’s Zen’s Indian name?” I asked.

  “I call him ‘Smells Like A Boar.”

  “You should call him, ‘looks like a boar,’ I said, “it’s really good you got your mother’s looks,” and at that, we both laughed. “I don’t get you,” I said. “How are you two different people? Why are you so…”

  She cut me off, putting a single finger to my lips. “Save it for another time. I have another question: What were you like in school?”

  “Um,” I said with true hesitance. “I was different in different stages, I guess.”

  “You were one of the popular kids?” she said.

  “No, I was never really popular. I just fit in at times, and other times I was picked on. Maybe that’s everyone? What were you like?” I asked her.

  “When I was in grade school, I was beaten up so bad by a group of girls, that’s when my father pulled me out and started teaching me himself. With guys, I always got along, but girls could be bitchy and jealous. I remember this girl; she was really mean to me. Pulled my hair, and I remember her words just as plain as day: ‘You think you’re something because you have long hair?’ The thing is, I was always so jealous of her and t
he people she ran with, I’d have done anything to fit in there. I wasn’t stuck-up, I was shy.”

  “Did you have any friends?”

  “Yes, my father, he taught me the sciences. I remember one day I came home crying. Those girls kept kicking my chair, and my father gave me a lesson, he said that animals create a pack to survive. The ones that need a group or a clique, those are usually the weakest. So, I caught Amanda Warsaw alone. I was going to kick the living crap out of her, until that plan backfired and she threw me around like a ragdoll, she broke my glasses and knocked out a tooth.”

  “It’s okay Ira,bitch was probably on steroids.”

  “I guess the crazy thing was she actually came to my house to check on me, even though we’d had this major one sided fight. I guess I gained her respect. And I should have been furious with her, but I was happier that someone of her popularity level had come to check on me. I was just looking for someone, anyone there to be friends with. Amanda never messed with me again.”

  So I asked Ira again, “Where does that occasional attitude you have come from?” and with that she put her hand to my mouth again and said no more questions, let’s just sleep and that’s what we did, but only after I told her not to sneak any rubs on my legs in the middle of the night. “No freaky stuff, no jokes like the ones my uncle used to play on me, no drawing rude things on me. Hey, Ira?” I said.

  “What?” she said.

  “Nothing,” I said.

  That morning, I noticed she was missing. Most people use their body to swivel them out of bed, but I use my arms. Lift me up, grab a leg, put that one in, and then the other. It took me time to learn things like how to roll over, sit up, and getting dressed was a hassle, but now it was like my nature. I wondered about my uncle, he always gave me my motion exercises in those early weeks. I won’t even talk about urine bags, catheters, or suppositories, the horror of those early months before regaining more feeling, learning to catheterize your bladder, a lot of embarrassment faded over time for sure.