Apocalypse of the Dead

by Joe McKinney

  “There’s too many of them,” he said. “We’re gonna have to get out of here.”

  “Ed,” Margaret said. “They’re coming through the back.”

  Ed looked around. They were surrounded. The infected stared in at them from every window. They were pushing their way over the desk at the front door. He could hear them breaking more glass somewhere in the back.

  He saw a flash of orange in the hallway to his left and looked that way. Billy was pulling the attic access ladder down from the ceiling, unfolding it.

  “Come on,” he said. “Up here.”

  Ed ran over to him and looked up into the attic. Then he looked at Billy.

  “That’s brilliant,” he said.

  “Not my idea. I got it from Night of the Living Dead.”

  Ed just laughed. “It’s still brilliant,” he said.

  Ed was the last one up the ladder, covering their retreat with his revolvers.

  “We’re in,” Billy said.

  Ed looked up again. Billy was holding a hand out to him.

  “Hurry it up, old man.”

  Ed scrambled up the ladder after him. When he reached the top, the two men turned, folded up the ladder, and pulled it closed just as the first of the zombies reached the space below them.

  Billy fished down through the rungs of the ladder and grabbed the pull cord and yanked it up into the attic.

  “Can’t leave this hanging out,” he said.

  Ed nodded. Smart kid, he thought.

  CHAPTER 12

  Kyra Talbot stood in the doorway of her trailer in a sleeveless green dress, listening to the little West Texas town of Van Horn, population 987, waking up. A pickup truck was accelerating down Eisenhower, and from the straining note in the exhaust, Kyra guessed it was Mr. Azucena’s Chevy. She heard children yelling at each other from somewhere behind her and figured it was the Kirby kids, Jack and Joanna, fighting over something. Off in the distance, she could hear the occasional car passing through on IH-10.

  It was a hot, stifling morning. Kyra focused on the heat and the dust against her face and bare arms. There wasn’t even a trace of a breeze in the air. She could smell dry grass. She was already starting to sweat and the small of her back and her breasts under her bra were wet.

  Next door, Misty Mae Burns let her screen door slam and walked outside, her shoes grating against the cinder path that led down to her curb. Kyra heard bottles clanking together softly, as though in a bag, and guessed Misty Mae was taking out the trash.

  “Morning, Misty Mae,” she said.

  “Morning, Kyra.”

  Misty Mae’s voice sounded rough, scratchy. There had always been a smoky hoarseness to her voice, but this morning she sounded rougher than usual. She almost had a wheeze to her, like there was a ball of phlegm caught in the back of her throat.

  “You feelin’ okay, Misty Mae?”

  “Lousy.”

  Misty Mae’s husband Jake had come home from the oil fields over in Odessa for the Fourth of July weekend and the two of them immediately got after each other like two alley cats in heat. They’d been at it most of the afternoon, started drinking around dinnertime, and didn’t quit until long after Kyra had gone off to bed.

  There was a muffled clatter of bottles being tossed into a metal trash can and then the sound of the lid being replaced.

  “You hungover?” Kyra said.

  She had been hungover once, and she hadn’t liked it. She hadn’t liked being drunk, either. Being blind, Kyra relied heavily on her other senses, and the alcohol had left her with a feeling that she’d had a blanket tossed over her. Everything had seemed muted and washed out, and it scared her.

  “Yeah, maybe,” Misty Mae said in answer to her question. “Hung over, or maybe I’m coming down with whatever Jake brought back from Odessa.”

  “What’s wrong with Jake?”

  “Flu, probably,” Misty Mae said. “He come home yesterday complaining his back was hurtin’ him. Last night he started throwing up. I thought he’d just drank too much, you know? But this morning he looks like something the dog coughed up.”

  “You gonna take him over to see Doc Perez?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know. Maybe. I ain’t feelin’ so hot myself. Jesus, if that man got me sick, I’m gonna kick his ass. I can’t afford to miss no more work.”

  Kyra could hear Misty Mae’s labored breathing.

  “Is it hot out here to you?” Misty Mae asked. “I don’t mean summertime hot. Good Lord, I think I’m burning up.”

  She coughed, and it was a deep, rattling sound.

  “I’m gonna go inside and take a nap,” Misty Mae said. “I’m sorry if we kept you and Reggie up last night.”

  “You didn’t keep us up,” Kyra said, though that was a lie. They’d had Tim McGraw’s Greatest Hits blaring out of the tape player in Jake’s truck till at least two.

  “Okay. You take care of yourself, you hear, Misty Mae? You let me know if you want me to call Doc Perez for you.”

  “Yeah, sure. I’ll see ya.”

  “Yeah,” Kyra said.

  She listened as Misty Mae trudged up her steps and let the screen door slam behind her. Then Kyra turned and felt for the doorknob to her own trailer and went inside.

  She was feeling troubled, and it didn’t have anything to do with the way sighted people so carelessly said things like, “I’ll see ya” or “See you later.” Kyra had been blind since she was four, and she had long since gotten over it.

  No, it was something else that was bothering her. She was afraid and trying hard not to show it.

  She made her way into the kitchen, the fingers of her right hand dancing along the wall, placing her in her mental map of the world she knew. She felt the hard, cool edge of the refrigerator, and she stopped and turned around.

  Directly in front of her was the sink.

  She reached for the cabinet above it and took down a plastic cup and filled it with water. Growing up, she had developed the habit of putting the tip of her finger down inside the top of the glass and waiting for it to get wet. That’s how she knew when to shut off the tap. She no longer needed to do that. These days, she could tell just by how long the water had been running.

  She took a few nervous sips and put the cup down.

  She let her fingers glance over the counter, over a damp hand towel, over a few pieces of used silverware her Uncle Reggie had once again neglected to drop into the sink, and finally to the radio.

  Kyra touched the baffled cover over the speaker, moved to the right side of the unit, and found the volume knob. She gave it a quick twist and listened as the voices flooded back into the kitchen.

  All her life, the radio had been a warm and wonderful friend. She loved music. She loved listening to the high school football games on Friday nights with the cool desert night air blowing in through the open window over the sink, carrying with it the sweet, smoky smells of a nearby barbecue. She even loved the preachers on the AM channels, the way they could give the word “blasphemous” six syllables, the quaking timbre of their voices as they shouted about sin and immorality and turning to Jesus in your desperate hour of need.

  She felt the thrill of inclusion when she listened to the radio. But this morning she was not feeling that way at all. None of the regular programs were running. Instead, it was the news. There had been an outbreak of the necrosis filovirus along the east coast of Florida sometime in the last thirty-six hours, and it was spreading out of control. There was talk of moving officers from the Gulf Region Quarantine Authority into the area, of calling in the National Guard and even the military to support local and state police, but no one had any real answers. They talked all morning, and within just a few minutes, Kyra realized the newscasters were talking just to fill up the silence of what they didn’t know. It was the same thing over and over again. Breaking developments were just some other person saying the same things that had already been said, and nowhere in there did she hear anything new.

  It reminded her o
f the first outbreak, the one in Houston. She was nineteen. She could remember everything from that morning, the same way the old-timers in town told her they remembered exactly what they were doing and where they were the day Kennedy was shot. That Tuesday, like every Tuesday back then, she’d stayed home from school till 10 o’clock, when Uncle Reggie would help her into his truck and together they’d make the drive to Fort Stockton, where she and six other blind kids from surrounding towns met for their real-world-skills class. She had been standing right where she was now, listening all morning to the sometimes frantic, sometimes stunned radio announcers babbling the same thing over and over again, and the monotony of it had terrified her even more than the insanity of what they were actually saying.

  She heard footsteps from off to her left, Uncle Reggie’s heavy tread on the linoleum tile.

  “Are you still listening to that?” he asked.

  She nodded. She was standing still, arms crossed over her chest, cupping her elbows in her hands, chewing on her lower lip.

  “Anything new?”

  She shook her head.

  A moment later, she felt his hand on her shoulder. He was a big man, with heavy, meaty fingers that could completely envelope her delicate shoulders, but he was also a gentle man, kind.

  She put her hand over his.

  “The world is so big,” she said. “I don’t know if I can make you understand that, Uncle Reggie. I don’t know if I can make you understand how much it terrifies me.”

  “It has nothing to do with being blind. You know that, right?” he said. “Everybody feels that way. If the world doesn’t seem absurd to you, then you’re not alive. At least you’re not living a life worth living.”

  She smiled faintly. Those were pretty words, but they didn’t make her feel any better. She thought of telling him so and then reined herself back. It was pointless.

  She dropped her hand back down to her side.

  “I’m scared,” she said.

  “I know you are.”

  “But you’re not scared, Reggie?”

  He hesitated. She knew he was deep in thought. He always thought before he spoke, and it made her wonder what his face looked like at those moments.

  “I lost a lot of people during the first outbreak,” he said finally. “A lot of friends. Yeah, it scares me to think of what might happen. I hear this stuff going on in Florida now and all the people who are still inside the quarantine zone trying to bust out and it scares me.”

  “Will it spread?”

  “I don’t know,” he said. “I hope not.”

  “The man on the Abilene station said they’ve already had twenty reported cases.”

  “Abilene’s a good, long way away, Kyra.”

  “Yeah but, are we…okay here?”

  “I think so.”

  “The radio said we should get some supplies. Bottled water, extra gas, stuff like that.”

  “We’re gonna be okay, Kyra.”

  “Uncle Reggie, please.”

  She heard him sigh.

  “What do you want me to do, Kyra? You want me to go over to the Walmart in Fort Stockton and get some supplies?”

  She nodded.

  He sighed again.

  “You gonna be okay here while I’m gone?”

  “I’ll be okay.”

  “You’re not gonna let that radio scare you, are you?”

  “No, I promise.”

  She heard his boots scuffing across the floor as he moved to the door. His keys jangled as he took them down from the hook on the wall next to the light switch.

  “You sure you’re gonna be okay?”

  “I’m sure,” she said.

  “Okay. I’ll be back in a little bit.”

  Kyra nodded. She listened as he fired up his truck and pulled out of the drive and accelerated up 6th Street. A moment later, she was alone again, with the sounds of the newsman on the radio and the sound of dust blowing against the windows and the weight of her fears pushing down on her, making it hard to breathe.

  Inside her shell of blindness, she wondered why the world had to be this way.

  CHAPTER 13

  Aaron Roberts stood with two hundred other members of the Family—Jasper Sewell’s affectionate nickname for his congregation members—watching as Jackson, Mississippi, burned to the ground.

  The Family stood at the large wall of windows along the south side of the New Life Bible Church’s sanctuary, staring out at the crowds fighting in the middle of Manship Street. Faces were lit by wild-eyed desperation and blank, unknowable vacancy. In the distance, towering black columns of greasy smoke rose into a gray, overcast sky like angry tornadoes. There were bodies in the street, and the infected were tearing people apart right in front of the church. Aaron could see wrecked cars and dead cops and rivers of blood flowing into the gutters. The air was full of distant sirens and screams and the roar of buildings on fire.

  He thought maybe he was going to be sick.

  No one spoke, and that was perhaps the scariest thing of all. He swallowed hard and happened to glance down at his watch. It was thirteen minutes past four. Only an hour had gone by since Jasper brought them all together and warned them this was coming. They had seen it on the news. They had all watched the quarantine collapse and the hordes of the infected spreading across the maps behind the newscaster’s head like ripples in a pond. Jasper, in the white choirmaster’s robe he always wore when preaching, had climbed down from his pulpit, his microphone in his hand, and sat on the steps.

  “The form of the plague is new,” he told them, and let his words hang in the air before them like the promise that all would be explained shortly. Surprisingly, it wasn’t his pulpit voice he was using. It was the calm, kind voice he used when he talked to you man to man, the two of you sitting next to one another on the couch, talking about church business. Hearing him speak that way, the entire congregation grew silent—not even the babies cried. You could feel it in the air. Jasper was starting to work his spell.

  “The form of the plague is new,” he said, “but God’s message is the same as when he spoke through Jeremiah of the destruction of Jerusalem. ‘And I will smite the inhabitants of this city, both man and beast,’ he said. ‘They shall die of a great pestilence.’ Look around you folks. Can any of you doubt the prophecy of those words? Do you not see it right outside your door? We are on the verge of something here, my brothers and my sisters, my children. Things are happening. There is a ring of hatred and conspiracy tightening around us all. There are people out there who want to take away the good thing we have in here. We will not let them do that. We will stand strong in our faith and our love, and we will resist the advances of those who would betray us and make us compromise our faith. I will not let this good thing disappear.”

  And of course they had all answered with a great and resounding yes that prompted Jasper to close his eyes and hang his head to his chest, nodding slowly.

  It had been a powerful moment, and Aaron, sitting there in the front row, had felt his wife, Kate, squeeze his hand in fear. He heard her sobbing.

  He squeezed back. Their eyes met. She whispered, “Aaron, I’m so scared.”

  Aaron was about to tell her that he was too, when suddenly Jasper was there, standing by her side. His hand was on her shoulder, and his fingers were long and slender and delicate, yet undeniably strong.

  “What did you say, Kate?”

  She looked startled.

  “It’s okay,” he told her. “Tell me what you said just now.”

  “I said I was scared,” she said, though it came out as a muffled whisper spoken into her chest, for she always had a hard time meeting Jasper’s gaze.

  Jasper didn’t speak right away. He cupped her chin in his palm and gently lifted her face to his, holding her with his eyes.

  He put the microphone up to her mouth and waited.

  She leaned forward into the microphone, the way people do when they’re not used to speaking publicly.

  “I said I
was scared,” she repeated.

  Jasper smiled at her, then took a few steps back. He scanned the Family, all of them caught up now by the man’s dazzling presence and the good feelings that seemed to radiate off him like heat waves off the summer pavement. Then he raised the microphone to his lips and said, “Sister Kate is scared, people. How many of you are scared, too?”

  There were murmurs all around.

  “It’s okay,” he said. “We tell nothing but the truth here. How many of you are scared like our Sister Kate?”

  The murmurs became voices. A few members of the Family spoke out. Sister LaShawnda, a heavyset black woman in her early sixties who was sitting in the row behind Aaron, stood up, her right hand raised high over her head as she begged Jasper to save her.

  Jasper came to her. He raised his hand to hers, and the old white choir robe sagged down to his elbow, showing the starched and sweat-stained shirtsleeve beneath. It was hot in the church. He locked his fingers together with LaShawnda’s and eased her hand down. Then he leaned close to her and kissed her on the cheek.

  She melted, and if the pew hadn’t been right beneath her, she almost certainly would have fallen to the floor.

  He said, “You asked for me to save you.”

  “Yes,” she pleaded.

  “I will do that. If you need me to be your friend, I will be your friend. If you need me to be your brother or your father or your husband, I will be those things for you. If you need me to be your Jesus, I will even do that for you. Because I love you. I love all of you.”

  He took a deep breath and scanned the Family once more, seeming to pause on every face and take the measure of the soul within.

  “It is okay to be scared. There is nothing wrong with that. Look outside. These are scary times. But let me tell you something about being afraid. God gave you fear for a reason. He gave you fear to wake up your common sense. It is His way of pressing the button that makes you realize you must act. And act is what we shall do.”