[Dying to Live 01] - Dying to Live

by Kim Paffenroth - (ebook by Undead)

  I was right at Milton’s back. “You okay?” I asked. He coughed slightly and nodded.

  Jack and one of his men came through the hole, firing pistols. Headlights were shining through the hole as well. Jack spotted us. “Come on!” he shouted, as the dead regrouped and began pressing toward him, tripping over the body parts and corpses of their fallen comrades.

  I shoved Milton forward and told him to hold back the zombies. Then I hustled the others out of the cell. “Run toward Jack!” I shouted.

  They made it through the hole in the outside wall, and I was following them when a hand grabbed my ankle and tripped me up.

  “No!” Milton shouted, and he slammed his staff down on the undead wrist. Its hold wouldn’t break, and it was pulling its maw up to my ankle. But with a second blow, Milton severed the arm at the rotted wrist. I got up and dashed through the hole with the bony appendage still attached to my ankle. Jack and his partner were right behind me, leaving Milton to prevent his former army from coming through the hole after us.

  Once outside, I kicked at the undead hand until I finally got it off of me. The small dump truck was parked thirty feet from the hole in the wall, and we all climbed into the back of it, while Jack got in the driver’s seat. He pulled the truck right up next to Milton and opened the door. Milton turned and jumped in as Jack tore off, with dead hands grasping at the side of the truck.

  As we drove off, the helicopter rose from the roof of the prison and headed toward the museum.

  A few raindrops hit us in the back of the dump truck, but the storm was passing to the south and east. The stars were coming out above us now, and the moon was half hidden by the retreating clouds. The storm had cooled everything, and the air had the freshness that it has after a cleansing storm. It was especially pronounced after the stale and rancid air of the prison, and the reek of death from the undead.

  I looked up and breathed in deeply, and almost in spite of myself muttered, “Thanks, God. Really, this time.”

  Four of us had gone into hell, and three had come out. We were hardly unscathed, but we had survived. In the world of the undead, this was as close to victory as one dared hope for.

  * * * * *

  As we drove through the gate in the razor wire fence, I could feel the truck stop. I jumped down to see what was going on.

  Jack and Milton got out of the truck. Milton walked over to the gate and closed it. Then he threaded the chain that had locked it back through the gate and the fence. “Jack, do you have something to hold this with?” he asked.

  Jack slapped his pockets, the way people do when they’re trying to see if they have the exact change or something. “You mean people-proof, or zombie-proof?” he asked.

  “Just enough to hold it for a while, if some zombies come sniffing around and press up against it.” Jack fumbled around in the cab of the truck for a minute. He came back with the key ring from off the truck’s ignition key.

  “Will this do?”

  “Perfect.” Milton put it through two links of the chain holding the gate closed.

  “What are you doing, Milton?” I finally asked.

  “I think he wants to make sure they’re stuck in there with his zombie army for a while,” Jack replied. “Until they’re all eaten.” Almost on cue, screams and gunfire could be heard, coming from the prison.

  “More than that,” Milton said in his dreamy sort of way. “When I was herding the zombies into here, I began to think, why couldn’t I just herd all of them in here? It would be perfect, a place to keep them, so they couldn’t bother the living anymore, and we wouldn’t have to kill them.”

  I shook my head. “Milton, there are several billion of those things wandering around on the earth now. The most you could push around in front of yourself with a staff would be a dozen or so. I assume you only got so many into the prison tonight because they were all bunched up at the gate.”

  Milton smiled back and shook his head. “Now don’t jump so far ahead, Jonah. Just because there are too many in the world is no excuse for me not to round up the ones I can, to protect you all living at the museum, and make your lives easier and safer. I realized as I led this army in there, against those evil men, that it had been wrong of me to fight against the dead, once I learned they couldn’t hurt me. I should’ve been trying to help them.”

  Jack laughed. “Help them? Now you really are just talking crazy, Milton. Get back in the truck and let’s get back to the museum.”

  “No, it’s a beautiful night now,” Milton said wistfully. “I’m going to round up a few of our dead brothers and sisters, and put them in their new home, away from you all, and where they can do some good, punishing and eliminating the evil living, and turning them into docile, calm dead. You’ll see how well it works out.”

  Jack knew that arguing with Milton was usually pointless. He knew Milton couldn’t be hurt by the undead, so letting him wander around outside the museum with a new project wasn’t that bad of an idea. “Well, Milton, okay,” he said. “You know where to find us. Stop by when you need food or supplies. Give him back the radio,” Jack said to me, and I handed it to Milton.

  “You know I will, Jack,” Milton said. “I’ll come back to see you all, and to see my beloved books, that helped me so much. And you’ll excuse me if I don’t round up the dead too much in the winter. But I have a few months before that, to help you out.” Milton turned toward me. “I am so sorry that you all suffered so much in there, and that Frank is gone. Be good to one another and heal your pains. And I’m sorry I misinterpreted your name, way back when we first meant.”

  “I don’t understand,” I said.

  “Cain slew his brother, as we all have now in this undead world, and that was all that you and I remembered about him. But I was rereading the story again, last night. I was looking for some guidance as I prepared to come into battle to save you all, and for some reason I turned there. And I saw I had forgotten that Cain also built the first city. Help build our city, Jonah, the right way. You’ve been in the belly of the beast—thank God for less than three days, but I think long enough to see how bad the city of man can become.” He gestured back toward the prison.

  I nodded. “Yes, Milton, I have. And yes, I want to help build our city.”

  He smiled and leaned close. “And one day, when I’m too old and tired to be rounding up the dead, I hope you’ll let me take some people to a meadow I know, where there’s plenty of fresh water and green grass, and we can live there and pick strawberries, and grow old in peace.” I hugged him like the friend and mentor he had become to me.

  He stepped back and turned to address everyone. “You will all see me again,” he said. “This is not goodbye. Our friends’ suffering, and the destruction of this terrible, evil place have made me see a new way! Together we will grow and live, like we never dreamed we ever could again! Finally, there will be more living, and less dying!” He waved to us, then turned and wandered off the road, into the moonlit fields, whistling a little tune.

  The rest of us returned to the museum, where we wept for poor Frank, and for all the horrors we had seen, until we all dozed off finally, shortly before dawn.

  Epilogue

  Milton’s idea turned out to be his best ever, by far. Within days, we saw the zombie population near the museum drop to where we could come and go much more safely, barely having to set up distractions. Within weeks, they were seldom seen anywhere near the museum.

  Milton got so good at rounding them up that we had to clear the barricade from the other end of the bridge to allow him freer access to herd them across the river and out to the prison. It was good to see the barricade go, for it made us feel we were less under siege and could live a more normal—if still difficult and dangerous—existence.

  I was so gladdened by the barricade being moved that I talked Jack into taking one of the small sculptures from the museum grounds and setting it up on the site, with a makeshift plaque, to commemorate the battle there. The war with the undead would h
ave its own Gettysburgs and Normandys, and we would honor those who fought. We could even now afford to honor and respect the dead, rather than just cower in fear behind walls from them. Most of all, we could feel that this war would have the one thing that all wars were supposed to have, but which we had long since lost all hope of seeing—an end.

  Jack began plans on extending the museum’s walls to include the park across the street and some other nearby buildings. He had found a building site with plenty of supplies and began hauling them back to the museum. The park would be a special prize, as it would dramatically increase the amount of farmland for next year. And the farming this year was successful enough. By the fall, we were eating fresh fruits and vegetables every day, though we still didn’t have enough to set aside for winter, nor did we have the equipment necessary for preserving them.

  My experience in the prison had convinced me to talk the museum people into doing some hunting in the nearby countryside; we deserved to have some benefit from our brief and violent association with those carnivorous monsters. On one of these raids into the countryside, someone thought to grab some small farm animals, and we began to look more actively for them, acquiring a small number of chickens and goats, with plans for more once we had the space.

  With material prosperity improving in the compound, Jack and I would gaze across the river and dream of the day we’d reclaim the city completely. “Looks like we’re getting close to taking that rowboat out on the river, Jonah,” he would kid me, “and do some fishing, like we planned.”

  The emotional and personal lives within the compound had kept pace with the material improvements as well. Sarah and Jack had, for all intents and purposes, adopted Zoey. Among the luggage Frank had brought, they found some few pictures of Frank and his wife, and they kept these to show Zoey when she grew up. She was the child of two of the bravest people who ever lived, and she should know the pride and responsibility that came with such parentage.

  One day, shortly after our ordeal in the prison, I found Tanya sitting on the grass, painting her toenails. “You and Milton seemed to get such a freak on about this stuff,” she said coyly to me, “that I thought I should finally humor you all, before the damn bottle dries out.” She grinned up at me. She was almost giggling, and once you met Tanya—at least as I had known her in a world of the living dead—you knew giggling was not part of her behavior.

  I sat next to her. “They look good,” I said. “I knew they would. What are you so happy about?”

  She put her arm around me and leaned close. “Oh, it’s pretty normal, I think: happiest times in a gal’s life are usually when she learns she’s pregnant.” And, allowing for all the irregularities of our situation, it was one of the happiest times of my life, too.

  Soon after, we learned that Jack and Sarah were also expecting a baby. I had always thought the idea of pregnant women “glowing” was more or less concocted to distract them from the weight gain and nausea, but I had to admit that in Sarah’s case, it was completely accurate. She was as radiant and joyful as a person could be.

  Jack’s reaction was harder to gauge. I could only suppose he had either seen the logic of procreating; either that, or the logical, foreseeable, and inevitable outcome of sex had simply caught up with him, and he just accepted it. It was impossible for me to tell with him, given his ever-joking manner about personal matters and feelings. But either way, they were both happy with having a future, and things to worry about other than shooting zombies in the head and consuming enough calories from canned food to stay alive.

  And if we saw less of “our dead brothers and sisters,” as Milton now liked to call them, we hardly saw any less of him. If anything, his constant sojourns to round up the dead and put them in their new home seemed to cure him mostly of his illness, so he had more energy and was in less pain.

  Those of us without his affliction whispered darkly that it seemed like a terrible price to pay—having to walk among the reeking, rotting dead in order to feel more alive—and it seemed to bespeak a frightening, shameful kinship between Milton and his dead brothers and sisters, but there was no denying that it benefited all of us immensely. So even though Milton slept every other night out in the countryside somewhere between the museum and the prison, we saw him nearly as often as we used to, and he was always in the highest of spirits.

  I remember one time, in the early fall, when the weather was about like it had been when I had first arrived at the museum—a glorious, clear, warm, almost painfully bright day. But in the fall, such a day would always hold the threat of cold and death to come, rather than the springtime’s promise of rebirth and life and growth. But this day, such thoughts did not really make us sad, so much as they made us merely thoughtful and introspective, like Milton always was, regardless of the weather. Jack, Tanya, Sarah, and I were out on the roof of the museum, watching Milton move a particularly large mob of the dead. He had with him two dogs that he had found on his trips, and which had become instantly devoted and loving, while he had likewise become instantly enamored of their simple loyalty and good sense. He now used the dogs to help him herd the dead, so that he could now handle hordes over a hundred.

  “It’s so damned weird, watching him herd them,” Jack said.

  “I think it’s cute,” Sarah said. Unlike Tanya, giggling came quite naturally to her.

  “It’s still weird,” Jack continued. “He looks like he’s their shepherd. It’s like they like him or something. I don’t know if that’s right.”

  “He looks like a damn zombie Jesus,” Tanya added. We all turned to stare at her. She was right, of course, but it still sounded strange, almost taboo, even if you weren’t religious. “Well, he does,” she insisted. “I mean, I don’t remember Jesus having any dogs, but you got to admit—it’s what he looks like. But maybe it’s how it’s supposed to be. Jesus was part man and part God, so he could save man. Milton’s part man and part them—no offense to him, you understand—so he can save them. And us.”

  Tanya was, as usual, quite right. We had our messiah. We had our little community. We had our love and our children. And as hard as the past year had been, there was nothing more that we could legitimately ask for, and nothing more for which to blame God. We had been tried in a way more horrible than any of us could’ve imagined, but we had survived when none of us would’ve guessed it possible. Jack’s million little coincidences and lucky breaks had all come together in such a way that the gates of hell—quite literally—had not prevailed against us.

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