Planet of the Dead

by Thomas S. Flowers

  Ahead, the signal light was dead. Checking both ways, she turned right onto Bay Area Boulevard. Speeding up, she relaxed slightly in her seat. "Everything is going to be okay, trust me," she said.

  Kristy didn't respond.

  Karen glanced at her sister, passed out in the passenger seat, her head slumped to the side, resting on the glass.

  "Everything will be just fine, you'll see," Karen said, turning her focus back to the road.

  Silvio

  Part 2

  Seoul,

  South Korea.

  For a moment, Silvio thought it had been his master who broke through the door. The smell of the man was familiar, but it wasn't right. The clothes and shoes smelled right, almost like potato chips. Still, there was something else there too, deeper beneath the skin. A smell that reminded the miniature Schnauzer of dead squirrels at the park. A rotting, sour fungus kind of smell, like when the man left fruit in the trash too long. The man smelled like that, like dead things at the park or in the trash.

  He had broken into his home. Busting the wood frame around the front door. Master had never done anything like that before. It couldn't be him. The dog growled, baring his teeth, barking. The dead man still came toward him, as if Silvio hadn't growled or barked at all. There was something about the dead man's smell, its approach, that made the Schnauzer not want to be touched.

  Snarling, the dead man reached for the dog.

  Silvio, whimpering, jumped down from the couch he'd been perched on to look out the window and skirted between the man's legs.

  Turning and jittering, the man tripped and fell to the floor. Groaning, unfazed from the fall he kept purposing the dog. Crawling towards Silvio, clawing at the rug, the wood floor. Drool drooping and soaking into the master's nightshirt.

  Silvio trotted to the open door. Sniffing the air, wondering if he ought to leave.

  But his master, what if he came back?

  Turning, Silvio gazed at the lumbering moving dead man as he worked his way to his feet. White and yellow foggy eyes glaring. Mouth agape and wet. Again, the dog sniffed the air, hoping to maybe find some trace of his master. But there was nothing. Only that putrid stink of death and mold.

  The dead man growled, standing now and starting for him, picking up momentum.

  Silvio whimpered, hesitating, and then turned and ran out the door. Glancing around, he saw no one. The hallway was empty. Remembering all the times his master had taken him outside, he quickly found the stairs and descended to the first level. Out in the grass, the Schnauzer paused, unsure of where to go. Everything was still so busy and chaotic out here. Loud sirens and rushing vehicles. More and more were idle and motionless in the street than before when he'd watched from the upstairs window. And there were more of those with that dead smell, walking stiffly and aimlessly. Herding together in the streets and down the block. Everywhere. Pooling, corralling towards some unknown place.

  Behind him, he heard shuffling and moaning.

  The dead man was coming down the stairs of the apartment complex. Each step looking like it would be the last before he came tumbling down. Silvio didn't want to wait around and see.

  Sniffing, he followed a path that smelled the least like death.

  Crossing the street, being careful of fast moving vehicles, Silvio climbed a sharp grassy hill. On top, he gazed out at the stretch of highway that led to a bridge and further along the glowing flickering lights of downtown. Smelling around, he got a good look ahead.

  Shuffling slowly, the sound of countless groaning things that smelled spoiled and rancid, were moving across the bridge into the city, towards the glowing flickering lights. Silvio typically enjoyed trips into the city. But not now. He didn't want to go that way. The smell was wrong. The look of the people was wrong.

  Turning, Silvio started away from the city, following another path he hoped would lead him to his master, or maybe people like his master, people who didn't smell like death.

  Russel Kilgore

  Shadeville,

  Florida.

  Kilgore hated Shadeville. But he hated Shadeville House even more. His brat kids had sold him a lemon, promising him beaches and babes, though the latter made them even more uncomfortable. What could he say, it had been over ten years since their ma had passed. A decade is plenty time to grieve. And besides, he was a man and a man has needs. Yet here he was, a goddamn Vietnam veteran, sucking down pills out of a paper cup and coasting the bleach smelling hallways in his godforsaken fuzzy loafers instead of a warm sandy beach on the Gulf of Mexico. How could he had been so blind?

  His kids were morons.

  And yet, here he was.

  The only French benefits at Shadeville House was getting scrubbed down in the weekly scheduled bath. If only there were a merciful lord watching over him who would send him someone younger and with less mileage than his current resident nurse. Where was a boom-boom-girl when you needed one?

  To think, after eighty years, two tours in the bush, over thirty years working a wrench, a dead wife, and what did he have to show for it all? His legacy? Two dumbasses who outsmarted him and stuck him in the swamp to rot while they played around in Tallahassee with his life savings. What he wouldn't give to be able to walk out the front door and tan their backsides...but how? He was eighty. No cash. No ride, his kids had sold his 1970 Impala, the very car he bought following his stint during the Fall of Saigon, the very same he'd promised himself he would buy if he ever made it out of that nightmare in one piece. And he had; and now it was gone too, those bastards.

  And truth be told, he wasn't quite sure where his Velcro sneakers were.

  His jungle boots were tucked away in his footlocker, along with some other items he managed to keep away from his greedy children, but the laces were a real bitch on his arthritis.

  And he didn't like the smell outside, it stuck like watered down salt water that'd gone stale in the sun.

  He didn't like the look of the townsfolk much either, too many banjo playing toothless hicks that'd soon as tell you about your pretty mouth than give you a reach around.

  Shadeville. If they were going to put him in a home, they at least could have done so somewhere a little more habitable. Somewhere like Miami with all the little putas sunbathing in those tiny mini bikinis, sipping mojitos without a single fucking care in the world.

  Didn't he deserve as much?

  Hadn't served his time?

  Goddamn kids...

  Oh well, it was a dream, right. He was allowed that much, they haven't taken that away from him, not yet anyway. At any rate, he was awake now and staring up at the ceiling, counting how many brown water stains there were now. Looking for the switch to raise his bed into a sitting position, he glanced over to his roommate's bed, some colored fellow by the name of Charles.

  Charles had shitty kids too, that much they had in common.

  What they didn't have in common was that Charles loved to ramble.

  He was a talker the likes Kilgore had never seen.

  And as for Kilgore, well, he wasn't much of a talker. He liked to consider himself more of a thinker, but really, he just didn't have much stomach for conversation. He'd much rather read one of his beloved sci-fi books. Give him Isaac Asimov, H.G. Wells, George R. Stewart, Robert Heinlein, Philip K. Dick, Leigh Brackett, and John Wyndham and he'd be just fine.

  So, you can imagine his smile as he raised his seat to find his neighbor's bed unoccupied. Spared from another lengthy discussion about the seasoning, or lack thereof, in the sty that passed as food in this place. Yeah, it was stale. He had worse.

  Nancy, his late wife, was a great cook.

  She made the best banana bread, better than his mama's.

  Licking his dry lips, Kilgore swung his legs over the edge of his bed, testing the cold tile floor for his fuzzy slippers. Yawning, he looked around, listening for the typical sounds of life at Shadeville House. Crying in the next room. The constant never-ending squeak as wheelchairs and walkers passed up and down t
he hall. The rush of orderlies and nurses responding to some buzzer, some wailer refusing to take their meds, or worse, the ones who'd completely forgotten where they were...the ones they all feared of becoming eventually. Senile. Lost in a maze created entirely within the mind. What remained of any shred of dignity, gone. Thrown out along with the soiled adult diapers.

  But there was none of that.

  Frowning, Kilgore reached for his black padded cane and stood, ignoring the creaking of his bones as he did and shuffled over to the door.

  The door was closed, so that meant Charles must have closed it. The nurses and orderlies never closed the door behind them. Why would they? What was privacy to the elderly? What was privacy in nursery?

  Turning the cold knob, he quietly peeked through the small opening.

  Nothing.

  All he saw was white tile.

  Opening it further, he stuck his head out, glancing down the hall in both directions.

  Still nothing.

  No buzzers.

  No orderlies.

  No squeaking walkers.

  "Hello," he called out.

  No answer.

  Something sure wasn't right. His chest felt tight. The hairs on his neck stood on edge. His stomach was doing somersaults. What was going on? Where was everyone?

  Leaning on his cane, he strode toward the nurse's station where he normally got his daily dose of potassium supplement, sertraline, tetracycline, alendronate, ticlopidine, beclomethasone nasal spray, warfarin and dorzolamide.

  Someone was talking. He heard voices.

  "Hey, what's going on around--" he started calling out.

  He stood at the edge of the hallway, staring at the nurse standing in the closed in nurse's station, or Pill Highway as he often called it.

  He swallowed hard. His throat suddenly very dry.

  "Miss, are you...okay?" he asked.

  Inside the closed off nurse's station, one of the older nurses, Blanche he thought, stood, aimlessly walking back and forth, knocking into the sides as if she were stoned or drugged or drunk or worse. What that worse was, Kilgore could only imagine. Looking closer at her, he could see a gnarled wound, several of them, like bite marks, running up the length of both her exposed arms. Her skin seemed pale and bruised in places. Her eyes, glassy orbs of white and yellow.

  "Miss?" Kilgore called again to her, louder.

  She turned his way, as if hearing his voice.

  He took a step back.

  Her gaze was feral. Her teeth gnashed at him, drooling on her uniform with a yellowish-red film. Knocking harder against the side of the nurse's station, she clawed wildly towards him.

  "Sweet Christmas," he whispered, backing up farther. Keeping his eyes on the crazed nurse. Turning, he started back down the hall, hoping to maybe find some help, find someone with some answers about what in the hell was going on around here.

  He froze.

  More people at the far end of the hallway. Like the messed-up nurse, they aimlessly shuffled around. Knocking into chairs, tipping over carts of food from the chow hall. Clanging metal.

  This situation is completely fubar, he thought.

  He glanced at his room and back to the shambling group of orderlies and elderly.

  Quickly and as quietly as possible, he started for the door. Rushing in, he held his breath and slowly closed the door, doing his best not to make the slightest sound.

  Satisfied none of them heard him, he exhaled and then looked something to lock the door with. Glancing at his chair, he dragged it across the room and braced it against the door. What he wouldn't give for a traditional lock right about now, but heaven forbid if some senile bastard got himself locked in his room without any way of remembering how to get out.

  God, am I going senile? Is that what this is?

  Am I imagining all of this?

  No...too real.

  --But isn't that what a senile person would say?

  No. No. No. If I was senile I'd be drooling on myself ignoring or unaware there was even a problem. This is like that. I can see, dammit. I can see there's something wrong with them. Bite marks. Foggy eyes, and that smell, we ought to know what that smell is. Even after fifty years, only one thing has that smell, and I don't know how it's possible, I don't. but something isn't right here and the fact that I can recognize that proves I'm not going senile.

  --Right?

  Waving off his thoughts, Kilgore went to his bed stand and snatched the remote for the TV mounted to the wall. Clicking the on button, he said a silent prayer of thanks that Charles insisted the boob-tube be kept on mute. Surfing past Pappy Daniel's Power Hour, he found the news station. With wide greedy eyes, he watched a Breaking News report, live from downtown Tallahassee. The reporting journalist was staring unblinking into the camera. His mouth moved rapidly, as if whatever he had to say that was going on was extremely chaotic. Around the reporter, rushing past the camera, uniformed officers and National Guardsmen struggled to keep a surge of what appeared to be a mob from pouring across their sector, wherever that may be. Random people, some crying, others shouting, buzzed by in a blur. Helicopters zoomed above them. Authorities in uniform yelling into a bullhorn. But none from the crowd seemed to listen.

  As the camera zoomed in on their faces, Kilgore could see the same expression the messed-up nurse and the others down the hall have. Drooling, growling, moaning, clawing at riot shields. Uncaring and unresponsive to the threats or teargas or anything else levied upon them.

  "Shit, what is this? Some beaucoup epidemic?" he whispered, rubbing his grizzled chin.

  Looking back at TV, he stumbled backward and sat blindly in his bed. He read in large bold letters across the screen, "Doomsday."

  Suddenly, the rioters broke through the line of police and national guardsmen. Uniformed officers fell or were dragged down. The camera shook as the cameraman and the reporter started backing away from the incident. With the camera still on him, the reporter was saying something, briskly, with the familiar look of despair on his face that Kilgore recalled from Saigon and the men who protected the city, or at least tried to.

  Kilgore bit his lip, glancing at the chair- braced door, and back to the screen.

  "Fuck it," he aimed the remote at the TV and turned the volume up two bars so he could listen.

  "The barricade has been compromised. I'm being told to evacuate two blocks down..." the reporter said. The screen buffered, glitching slightly as they continued moving away from the mob. "Wait--now we're being told something else. Hold on." He started talking off screen. "Where? That doesn't...wait, slow down...where are...oh Jesus...oh fuck...they're coming this way. We got to go, come on--"

  An off-screen voice broke though the static. "Tom, are you still there...? Tom?" He waited until the cameras in the studio panned to the voice, a worn looking anchorman who looked like he hadn't had a wink of sleep in days. He ruffled the papers in front of him, clearing his throat. "It seems we are experiencing technical difficulties..."

  Kilgore had seen enough. He turned the channel.

  Pappy Daniel's stared into the camera, the screen filled with his white haired, wrinkled face. His gold fillings glimmered from the lights cast on him as he smiled wide toothed. "Are you ready to repent now?" he asked, pausing for dramatic effect, or so Kilgore thought.

  "Judgement is upon us. Hell is overflowing. And Satan is sending his dead to us. Why? Because you have sex out of wedlock. You kill unborn children. You have man-on-man relations. Same-sex marriage. Transgender bathrooms. You have politicians who serve only themselves. Pornography fills cable programing. You lie, cheat, and steal. You've forgone relationships for social media. Fornicators. Blasphemy. Gluttonous. Lust. The air is thick with violence and hate and bigotry. How do you think your god will judge you? Well, friends, now we know. When there is no more room in hell, the dead will walk the earth..."

  Kilgore turned off the TV.

  Moaning resounded just outside his door.

  Scraping, thudding now against
the wood.

  He glanced at the chair, wondering if it would hold. And then he glanced at his roommate's bed, the sheets, and then he glanced above him, calculating if the ceiling fan would hold his weight.

  If this really was doomsday, the end of the world, etc. etc., what was the point of going on? What, if anything, could he do at seventy-five?

  Another volley of thumps and bangs on the door. The chair gyrated and slipped.

  Rushing over, Kilgore reasserted the back of the chair against the door knob.

  Panting, out of breath yet strangely exhilarated, he smiled.

  "Well, I guess that answers that." Satisfied the chair would hold for at least a little while longer, Kilgore strode across the room and unlocked his footlocker. Inside, he gazed at aged spotted photographs of another era, a much younger self in green fatigues. Rooting, he pulled out what remained of his uniform and laid them out on his bed. As quickly as his muscles would allow, he changed. Amazed it still fit, he tossed his fuzzy slippers and pulled on his jungle boots. Keeping his hands steady, biting down on his lip, shaking slightly, he laced up the boots tight.

  Looking in the mirror beside his footlocker, if not for the white in his high-n-tight haircut and the wrinkles in his face, he would have sworn he was fifty years younger.

  "Okay, sergeant, you ready to do this?" he asked himself.

  Kneeling, Kilgore dug a little more into his footlocker, pulling out a worn box. Opening it, he took out the K-BAR hidden within, a twelve-inch serrated utility knife. "I missed you, Cherry-Red." Clipping the handle to his belt, he stood, knife in hand.

  Turning, he glared at the door eyes narrowed and teeth gleaming as he smiled. "Alright gooks. A little killing don't mean nothing to me. Let's see how you like my girl, Cherry-Red."

  Sister Reina del Carmen

  Puebla,

  Mexico.