Only the Light We Make

by James Dean

  We were about to have a neighborhood-sized brawl when I heard a couple of the Smith girls screaming. A few zombies had made their way onto our street and were sneaking up on us. Damn, those things were quiet. Ryan and I immediately went into action and started shooting them.

  There was a silence in the air like I had never heard before. We went from total chaos to melancholy in the matter of seconds. In retrospect, I admit that I was a little hot headed and I made things worse by knocking that dickhead on his ass. But I am not going to apologize. Dominance needed to be established, and I was not backing down.

  We cleaned up dead zombies and threw them in the back of Mr. Pickett’s pickup truck. Him and his two sons hauled them down the road and threw them in a ditch. Ryan and Mr. Winston cleaned up the Keegan’s while the Smith boys dug a hole in the backyard and buried them. Nobody said anything over their bodies, which is really a shame. I’m still kinda upset we didn’t do anything for them, but the day was fucked by all the violence and nobody had it in them.

  A day later, the Kirks left the neighborhood. Mr. Kirk was nice enough to tell Ryan, Anna, and I thank you for our troubles, but they were going to go out on their own and try to make it to Albuquerque to find their family. That left us with five occupied homes and with less mouths to feed. It sucked to see them go, but I get it. I had hoped that Russell and Mel would leave as well, but we weren’t that lucky. Out of respect, we waited a couple of days before we raided the Kirks empty home. We didn’t find any food, but there were a lot of items we could use during the winter. With help from the Pickett family, we logged all the items and then nailed the windows and doors shut.

  I tried to get the Smiths involved in the task, but they decided they were “Team Russell” and said they didn’t want our help anymore. They also asked us to stop coming by their place and checking up on them. Apparently, we were no longer welcome on their property since the fight, and that they would “take action” if necessary to protect themselves.

  A pretty uneventful week followed that. The only thing of note was that the Smiths held a bunch of barbeques that week and had loud music. I thought for sure they’d draw something in, but nothing ever showed up. It was stressful to me, because they keep eating massive amounts of food and they keep wasting gas running that generator all the time. I have no idea how they are going to make it through the winter if they keep this stuff up. I haven’t even seen them leave the neighborhood once for supplies.

  Things had pretty much gotten back to normal, but it didn’t last long. Mr. Pickett and his boys came to us in the morning and said they were going to go on a supply run. Ryan and Anna were getting ready to do a supply run on their own, so the two groups laid out a plan of where they were going to go and how long they would be gone for. I opted to spend the day patrolling the street and cleaning weapons, so I waved goodbye to both groups and watched them drive away. It was midday when Anna and Ryan returned with a truckload of stuff. We backed it up to the garage and unloaded it beside the police cruiser. I asked them where the Pickett’s were and they were surprised that they weren’t back yet. They split up halfway through the day because Mr. Pickett wanted to nab some lumber from one of the many construction projects in the valley.

  Something seemed off, so we loaded up into the pickup truck and went looking for them. It took an hour to find their vehicle at a construction site. It looked like a shootout had taken place between them and a group of zombies. There were bullet holes all over, including one in the engine compartment of their vehicle. There were bodies throughout the construction site, and it looked like the Pickett’s had lost the numbers game. Mr. Pickett was all chewed up and covered in blood when we found him. He managed to put a round into his head at some point, so he never turned. I pried the gun from his hand and wiped it on a handkerchief I kept in my pocket. After clearing out a few more zombies towards the middle of the jobsite, we found his boys had both been turned and they were in poor shape. We finished them off and picked up their weapons. I thought about burying them, but it was getting late. We could always come back later and do it.

  Of course, we never did.

  I told the Winston’s first, then I told the Smiths. The Smith’s wanted to know what we were going to do with the Pickett’s place, and I told them that in the morning we would go in and divide up all the food and items. I never went and talked to Russell, because honestly, fuck Russell. After a long day, I crashed around ten o’clock and started dreaming of my parents for the first time since this whole thing started. Anna woke me up around three AM and said that Ryan could hear a commotion coming from down the road. As best as we could surmise, the Smiths were raiding the Pickett’s home. For a minute, I contemplated going down there and stopping them, but what good would it have done? Ryan couldn’t believe that they would do such a thing, and Anna was ready to go down there and kick someone’s ass. I just stared out the window and watched them move stuff across the street, taking in the fact that the neighbors didn’t trust me anymore and that they were taking things into their own hands. It was stressful.

  With the death of the Pickett family, we were now down to four occupied homes. Anna and Ryan were going to move into the empty place next door, but they decided against it when the Smiths started doing their own patrols during the day. I guess they felt pretty tough after they found guns at the Pickett’s place. What irritated me was that Russell and Mel would always walk with them. It was a sign of unity between them all, and they were making it very apparent that they wanted the three of us out of the neighborhood. At one point, Russell even came up and knocked on our door and wanted to know, "if we were okay, and if we needed anything, to let them know.”

  It was really unsettling.

  Just to be safe, we never left our home unoccupied from that point forward. I just knew that “Team Russell” was waiting for the right opportunity to get into our place and see what we had. The only thing keeping them from rushing in was the fact that we were heavily armed and much better shots. The Winston’s would come over periodically and ask for food and we would give it to them, but the four of them started to distance themselves from everyone all together. At one point, I wasn’t even sure if they were on our street anymore, but I could see candlelight coming from their second story windows.

  It was our fourth month into the plague when shit really went south. Anna was cooking us breakfast when we were startled by gunfire. The three of us put on our gear, grabbed our guns, locked the house, and rushed out to find out what was going on. The Smiths were all in the front yard with the Winston’s and Russell. They looked shaken up really bad, and when I asked what was going on I heard that four of the Smiths had turned in the night. Apparently, one of the younger boys was playing on the swing set and he jumped off and landed on his head. The family took him inside, and the kid ended up dying. Of course, when someone dies, they don’t stay dead, so the kid ended up biting one of the brothers and caused a chain reaction. When it was all said and done, four of the children were zombies and they were upstairs in a room pounding on the doors.

  Baffled, I mentioned that we had heard a lot of gunfire earlier and was concerned with what they were shooting at. Mr. Smith replied that one of the eldest boys tried to go up there and shoot them, but he only shot them in the chest before running away. I guess that kid ran into the backyard and now they couldn't find him. Everyone was crying and I knew what had to be done, but I wasn’t sure if I could do it. Mr. Winston reluctantly offered to go up and put the kids down for good, but in the end, it ended up being me. I went up there and shot four kids and it sucked ass.

  Somberly, Ryan, Mr. Winston, and I wrapped all the kids up in blankets and brought them outside for burial. Of course, Russell and Mel left when the hard work started. Ryan and I dug the holes with Mr. Winston while everyone in the Smith family sat on the grass and prayed. Eventually that kid showed up that had run off, and they all just sat there and cried. It was awful. I tried to get them to help us bury the children, but none of them woul
d talk to me. Anna whispered to me that she saw lots of empty canning jars in the kitchen area, and that the place was pretty disheveled overall. I think their days of living large were coming to an end, and the reality of a zombie winter was setting in.

  After the kids were buried, the Smiths went inside the house and never said another word to us. The Winston’s went home, and we did a perimeter check of the neighborhood before heading back to our place. When we went to go inside our home, we found that the lock had been tampered with. Someone tried to break into our home when all of this shit was going on, and I’m pretty sure it was Russell and Mel. I was livid and ready to go and shoot them. Ryan tried to get me to wait until morning, but I was extremely pissed off. I marched over to my asshole neighbor’s house and banged on the door hard. Nobody responded and I started to list off everything I was going to do to them if they ever tried to break into my place again. It was colorful and very therapeutic for me. I had so much anger that I couldn’t handle it anymore and I just went inside my house and locked myself in my room. Ryan and Anna attempted to get me out for dinner, but I told them I wasn’t hungry and that I needed to decompress. I could tell that they were worried.

  Later that night, I felt uneasy about everything that had happened and I just stared at the ceiling until the candle burned out. I’m guessing that this is what post-traumatic stress is like, but I’ll deal with it later. It was time to get my shit together and formulate a plan for stocking up the Smith house again. I wanted them to survive winter.

  The next day, things went from bad to worse. One of the Winston kids woke us up with frantic screaming while pounding on my door. We rushed outside to find that the entire Smith family were zombies now, and that they were eating Mrs. Winston in their front yard. We went to work and put bullets in all of their heads. Ryan and I breached the home and started popping Smith kids left and right. Mr. and Mrs. Smith were dead in their bedroom and we killed them as well. I did a body count and came up with twenty-one dead Mormons, all accounted for.

  None of the Smith’s had bite marks on them. Only after a long investigation did we discover that they all had drank rat poison sometime in the night and killed themselves. The entire house was filled with puke and shit, and it stunk so damn bad. Cleaning the place up was going to be a nightmare.

  In the front yard, I relayed our findings to the Winston’s and Russell (Mel was still in her house). Mr. Winston was still in shock over the loss of his wife, and Anna was taking care of his two daughters back at our home.

  “What are you going to do with this place?” Russell asked.

  “Tomorrow we’ll start cleaning it up. We’ll need to get the bodies out and bury them, but it’s gonna take a lot of holes. I’m going to need your help this time,” I responded.

  “I think we should burn it to the ground.” Russell responded.

  “That’s not a good idea,” Ryan replied. “The smoke would be a beacon for everything in this valley to come to. Besides, there is a lot of stuff inside that we can all use.”

  “I’m not burying this family. We need to burn this house down to prevent disease from spreading,” Russell snapped back.

  Mr. Winston shook his head and started mumbling. He was standing over the body of his dead wife (who I made sure to put a bullet in when I was killing her attackers) and he began to sob, asking why this had to happen to them. He began to throw up and started wandering back towards his place. I walked after him to make sure he was going to be okay, and I could hear Ryan and Russell really getting into it. That fucker was bound and determined to burn that house down, but Ryan finally got it through to him that it was a stupid idea. Russell stormed off towards his place and was yelling a bunch of things, but I couldn’t hear all of it.

  After we consoled Mr. Winston, we decided that it would be best for Ryan and I to dig the grave and bury his wife. Afterwards, he could bring his kids down and we could do a memorial for her. We drug all the bodies back into the Smith house for safekeeping, and wrapped Mrs. Winston in a blanket and carried her into her backyard. Anna opted to stay in our place with the Winston’s for moral support (and to make sure that nobody tried to run off with our stuff). Forty minutes into our digging, I caught a whiff of smoke and knew exactly where it was coming from. We rushed around the front of Mr. Winston’s place to see that the Smith house was fully engulfed in flames with black smoke rising high into the air.

  “You fucking idiot!” I screamed at Russell, who was standing back away from the heat. The flames were now roaring and it was terrifying to see the destruction unfold before us. I stormed right up to Russell to knock his ass out, but opted to pull my pistol out and shoved it right into his face. I was there, man: I was I was going to kill my first living person and I had no qualms about it. I expected Ryan to stop me, but Ryan stood there quietly. Russell began to shake in fear and he begged for his life.

  I was at a crossroads—do I kill this man and rid the world of one more asshole, or do I let this fucker walk away and wait for him to make a stupid decision that will kill us another day. How do I decide who lives and dies?

  I cocked the hammer back and lined up the sites on his forehead. It felt like hours, but it probably was only seconds. I lowered the gun and heard a collective sigh from everyone around me. I had a crowd now, consisting of every last living member in the cul-de-sac. Mel stood there quietly, watching her husband fall to his knees and begin to sob. He started thanking me, which caused me to let out a frustrated scream. I aimed the gun into the burning house and fired off every round in the magazine. Anna came up to console me when I heard screaming coming from behind me. I turned to see Mr. Winston and his children being pulled into a mob of zombies. I thought I was hallucinating from the heat and the stress, but Ryan yanking on my arm brought me back into reality.

  I didn’t have time to reload my gun as we began to run. The zombies were coming from all sides. I had no idea where they had come from and how they had gotten here so fast, but it appeared that the black plume of smoke was exactly what they needed to find us. I looked over my shoulder and saw that the Winston’s were gone, and Russell and Mel were running towards their place. I pushed a zombie over as we fumbled with the keys to get into the house. Once I got the door opened, we hurried to shut it, but the door was already cracking under the weight of the dead.

  I rushed up the stairs and headed straight to the ammo room. The front door crashed open and for the first time in four months, zombies were inside my home. Anna and Ryan took up positions and started to open fire on the incoming horde. I could hear the shots ring out as I slapped another magazine inside the .45 and then holstered it. I picked up my Ruger 10-22, grabbed the bag of ammo next to it, and then rushed back to help. When I got there, Anna had yelled “reloading” and I took up position and started opening fire.

  Just like we had practiced, the shooting was precise and accurate. When one of us would run out of ammunition, someone else would pick up the slack. There was constant firing into the horde and the closest any of them came to us was fifteen feet. As we continued our home defense, the shots started to become limited. There were so many zombies on the ground that it was hard for the rest of them to get inside, and eventually they got to where they couldn’t even climb in. Every so often I’d fire off a round at one who got lucky enough to find a gap, but the zombies were tightly stacked as high as the doorframe. All in all, I’d guess there were close to eighty bodies. After five minutes of nothing coming inside, I noticed that they then started beating on the side of my house. Glass began to break, but I wasn’t worried because we had nailed the sheets of plywood on the inside of the home and they were reinforced with 2x6 boards. Aside from the doorway full of dead bodies, the house was secure.

  “I thought we shored that door up enough,” Ryan grumbled, checking his safety on his pistol and then holstering it. He gathered the empty magazines dropped on the floor.

  “I thought so too, but we didn’t account for a thousand zombies all pushing at once,” I replied
.

  “Do you think Mel and Russell got into their house okay?” Ryan asked, kicking spent shell casings aside so he could kneel next to me.

  “I saw them make it to their door!” Anna shouted from the kitchen area, “This window is secure! They are breaking the glass outside, but the wood is holding!”

  We heard a giant thud coming from the backyard, which indicated that the privacy fence had collapsed. I rushed to the backdoor and made sure that our braces were still in place. The door soon began to moan, but it held. Another crash signified they were in the chicken coop. I could hear the chickens freaking out, then nothing but silence. I let out a sigh and went back into the living room. Anna was sweeping the shell casings into a pile while Ryan was keeping a watchful eye towards the body “log jam."

  “The chickens are dead. I’ll check the garage. Ryan, you keep an eye on this door,” I mumbled, already walking away.

  Carefully, I pushed the door open and looked into the garage. Expecting the worst, all I saw was the cop car and the loot we had collected to prepare for the winter. I could hear the fists hitting the walls and garage door, but nothing was getting inside.

  I shut the door and then turned the deadbolt. If the garage doors held, we could load up the police car with our stuff and haul ass out of here. The push bumper on the front of the cruiser worked great when it came to hitting undead. We had used it quite a few times that day we escaped four months ago. Since then, it’s been our go-to for whenever we needed to cruise around town looking for supplies.

  “Garage is holding up. We should start packing the car with supplies so we can make a daring escape when the time is right,” I said.

  “Where we going to go?” Anna asked.

  “I don’t know. We need to find a more secure area, free of asshole neighbors,” I replied.

  We heard the windows starting to break on the backside of the house now. We were completely surrounded at this point.