The Rabid: Fall

by J. V. Roberts

  “She got popped with a cannon at point blank range; you’d be tore up too.”

  “Looks like a .357.”

  Sonny barely makes it out of the room before he starts puking.

  “You better not be getting any of that on the couch! We may have to sleep there tonight!” Katia yells. She plucks the gun from the guy’s hand and opens the cylinder, giving it a spin before snapping it back into place with a flick of her wrist. “Can always use more guns. He’s probably got shells around here for it.”

  “Probably.” I sling my rifle under one arm and walk to the end of the bed. “What do you think made them do it?”

  “Hell if I know. Could be anything. Way things are, I’m more surprised when someone hasn’t offed themselves.” Katia tucks the .357 into the front of her hip-hugging cargo pants. She raises her hands above her head, stretching and yawning, her white undershirt riding high. “I’m so tired.” She brushes her black and blonde hair over to one side of her head, exposing the side she keeps shaved.

  It hits me. “The kid!”

  “Say what?”

  “We need to search the rest of the house. They have a kid in the pictures.”

  “Oh yeah, you’re right!”

  She follows me into the living room.

  Sonny is standing propped against the far wall, breathing heavy;there’s a puddle of puke at his feet.

  Katia tosses the revolver to him. “Do something with that.”

  “You guys need me?” he asks as we start towards the kitchen.

  “Why don’t you just hang back,” Katia says. “It’s liable to get ugly again, and we don’t need you puking all over the damn house.”

  “Alright…well…I’ll be here…just holler.”

  “Guy’s as useless as bicycle pedals on a wheelchair,” Katia says.

  “He’s just gotta acclimate to all this, give him time.”

  “He better hurry up about it, the world ain’t gonna wait.”

  There’s a hallway off the kitchen. Me and Katia drop our backs against either side of the entryway and go silent. From my vantage point, I can see a bathroom, door propped open.Then I hear something. It’s muffled. It sounds like a pile of change being sifted around in someone’s pocket.

  “You hear that?” I ask, hoping Katia will shoot me down as paranoid.

  “Yeah, I hear it. Sounds like it’s coming from in there.” She’s talking about the closed door directly across the hall; another slider, just like the master bedroom.

  “Should we get Sonny up here?” I ask.

  “Nah, we got this, just cover me and I’ll open it up.” She draws a sword, keeping the other hand free to slide the door open.She steps across the hall and I raise my rifle, aiming at the opening, preparing myself for the worst. She gives a silent three-count, nodding her head to denote each number. She yanks the door back and the same necrotic smell comes pouring out of the room—though not nearly as strong as before. “Ah man, not again.” She folds an arm across her mouth and nose. “You see anything?”

  “Too dark.” The metallic thud is no longer muffled and sounds like it’s coming from directly in front of me. “There’s movement on the bed.” I remain just outside the room, taking cover around the corner, rifle trained on the bed. “You, on the bed, say something quick and clear or I’m gonna put you down!”

  “Really, Tim?”

  “What?”

  “You’re just gonna shoot them?”

  “You wanna go in there?”

  “Not really, but what if they’re gagged or hurt or something and they can’t speak?”

  “And what if they’re just waiting for us to get close enough to strike?”

  “Oh…damn it, just cover me.”

  I step in after her, but I remain by the door.

  Just like last time, she skirts around the bed to the windows and throws the curtains back.

  “Oh my God!”

  “What the hell!” Katia jolts back, slamming up against the wall as she draws her other sword.

  The childlike monster is made up of leather skin, wrapped tightly around brittle bone. It’s handcuffed to the bed and fighting to get loose. It’s fully Rabid, but unlike most Rabid we’ve come across, it’s starving. It appears as if the poor little bastard has chewed off its lips and half its tongue.

  “Do you guys need me? Should I come back there?”

  I lean out and see Sonny standing in the kitchen. “No, you hang back. Trust me.”

  “You just stay in there, Sonny.” The little Rabid snaps at Katia as she draws closer to the bed; it can barely lift its head off the pillow. “I guess we know why the parents ate a gun barrel.”

  My first thoughts move towards condemning the parents. How heartless, how soulless, do you have to be to chain your kid up to a bed to rot? Then it hits me, I already know the answer. If it were just me, I’d have left Bethany to turn Rabid under that tree, and it would have had nothing to do with me being heartless, quite the opposite. But Katia was there, she was able to pull the trigger that I could not. These folks didn’t have Katia around to carry their burden. “I honestly can’t imagine.”

  “Chaining your kid up to a bed? No, I can’t imagine that either. Fuckers.”

  “No, just…being put in this situation. How do you even make that decision?”

  “Simple, the moment it turned, it wasn’t their kid anymore. The moment my parents turned, they weren’t my parents anymore and Ruiz did what he had to do. This was their kid, their responsibility. They took the easy way out and left it to suffer. It’s fucked up.”

  The little Rabid is barely squirming now. Whatever burst of energy it got from our presence seems to have dissipated. “Nothing about this seems easy to me. Fucked up? Yeah. Easy? Nah, not at all. We’re not all built like Ruiz or you. I was doing interpretive dance and spending my free time watching Woody Allen films before all this. I don’t come from a military background. So this gun probably feels a lot heavier in my hands than it does in yours. And these folks,” I motion back towards the master bedroom, “they were raising cattle, probably drinking lemonade, and watching the sunset when all this went down. They weren’t ready for this. You can’t get mad at us for not being like you.”

  “I know, Tim, but…” she trails off. “You better get ready, okay? If it ever comes down to it, if I get bitten, you better not chain me to a bed, you hear me? I’ll haunt your ass.You put a bullet between my eyes and know that I’m thanking you for it.”

  I nod. I know she’s right. There’s softness in me that still shows no sign of hardening. It’s the one chink in my armor. “So, what do we do with…it?” I stare down at the emaciated monster, my palms growing sweaty.

  “We do the right thing. We take care of it.”

  “Suppose it’s my turn.” I can see my blurred reflection in its eyes.

  Katia comes around the bed and squeezes my arm. “I’m gonna go check on Sonny. Let me know if you need me.”

  “Yeah.”

  She kisses me on the cheek and leaves.

  I walk around to the end of the bed and stand my weapon up on the mattress, stock down, leaning forward and using it to support my weight. “Looks like it’s just me and you.”

  He responds with a dry crackle, but it’s distant and small. His feet, gray and decaying, kick out at me, ruffling the sheets.

  “It’s okay, kid. I’m sorry.” I reach out to touch its leg, but pull back at the last second. I excuse my lack of courage by telling myself that the Rabid are unable to comprehend or benefit from the comfort of human touch. “Really shitty thing that happened to you. But I just want you to know, me and my friends, we’re looking to make it right. I know that probably doesn’t seem like much, considering. But, well, just wanted to let you know.” I’m stalling. What I have to do is weighing heavy on me. I’ve killed so many Rabid and so many people without thinking twice. My hands are stained with blood. What am I feeling that’s causing me to hesitate? Pity? Familiarity? The realization that, somewhere out th
ere, this is the fate of Momma? Hell, I guess that’s all the more reason for me to pull the trigger; do for him what I can’t do for her.

  So I do.

  The kid’s head shatters. The body tenses up one last time and then the muscles release and the little monster is still.

  “You okay?” I turn and find Katia in the doorway, sipping a can of diet soda.

  I nod and relax my weapon. “I’ll get there.”

  “You want some?” She extends the can. “There’s a whole hell of a lot more where this came from. These people were stocked up.”

  I’m not surprised. Plenty of country folks I knew shopped a month at a time, especially once gas prices started rising; the drive to town got brutal on the wallet. “I could use some food too.”

  She loops her arm through mine and guides me towards the kitchen. “Come on, I’m buying.”

  6

  We closed off the bedroom doors and forgot about the dead, or at least we pretended to; compartmentalization is one of the big keys to surviving in the new world. We gathered in a small circle on the living room floor to dine on canned goods: tuna fish, baked beans, fruit salad. The can opener wasn’t hard to find; it was in the second drawer I checked, peeking out from beneath two charred oven mitts. We ate with plastic spoons and Styrofoam bowls. We didn’t say much, there were a few cursory glances and some small talk about how good the food was (we packed up that can opener and every canned good we could find as soon as we finished eating).

  Once we finished, Sonny volunteered to take watch out front in the hammock, “I haven’t been in a hammock in…oh, man, probably since I was a kid. You guys mind?”

  Neither of us minded. We didn’t give a damn about the hammock and we sure didn’t want to take watch. So while Sonny raced for the hammock, I stepped out onto the back patio. Katia said she’d be joining me, but she wanted to dig around for a change of clothes first.

  The backyard is impressive, as far as backyards go: small, square outcropping of cement, a black, gas grill, some assorted patio furniture, a swing set, and a seven-foot tall fence (I’m guesstimating). It’s everything a family needs to enjoy an afternoon outdoors. The only thing it could use, in my humble opinion, is a pool. We used to get the three-foot tall vinyl ones from Sam’s. I know, it’s tacky and it’s white trash, whatever. But when you’ve gotta be outside in those triple-digit temps, it goes from tacky to inviting something quick.

  I set my rifle on the ground and lounge back in one of the patio chairs, lacing my fingers behind my neck. The night sky stretches out for eternity, pockmarked by silver stars, with a curved slice of white moon visible beneath the surface of the onyx waters. This is why I’ve always preferred the country to the city. It pulls at my soul, at the very fiber of who I am; stardust calling to stardust. I’ve always loved looking at the stars; I used to lay in the backyard and count them while constructing dance routines in my head as the crickets chirped and the living room television played muffled laugh-tracks through the screen door (Momma loved her evening sitcoms). I think I relate to the celestial blanket now more than ever. After all, stars shine their brightest before they blink out of existence. That’s what I feel like me and Katia and Sonny are doing; we’re shining our brightest, showing the best of ourselves as the end draws near. Soon we’ll be no more, and no one will even know we were here. In a few millennia, once the chaos is stilled and the dead have gone back to their graves, something else…something better…will come along to take our place, and the night sky of humanity will once again twinkle with life; I just hope they do better with this planet than we have.

  “Look at you, looking all dreamy and shit.” Katia pulls the back door shut with a dull thud.

  “Just enjoying being back in my natural habitat.” I turn to look at her. “My, girl, you are a sight for sore eyes.”

  “Stop it with your cowboy poetry, I might actually blush.”

  “That’s the goal.”

  “Seriously though, how do I look?” She walks around in front of me and twirls. She’s wearing a pair of baggy jeans with the knees ripped out, a V-neck white tee, and her combat boots; the swords are already fastened at her hips.

  “You look great, jeans are a little big.”

  “She was a small lady, but not small enough.”

  “It’s probably about as good as it’s gonna get for you.”

  “Tell me about it.” She takes a seat beside me. “It was hard finding clothes before all this. Now I’m practically in toddler sizes.”

  I laugh. “You look great and you know you look great, so stop it.”

  “Meh,” she shrugs, “I suppose I’m not bad, considering your options.”

  “Ain’t that the damn truth.”

  She brings her feet up in the chair and folds her knees against her chest. “You doing okay?”

  “I’m getting there. I’ll just file all this away with the thousands of other nightmare-inducing memories I’ve managed to gather.”

  “You’ve just got to shut those thoughts down whenever they begin to creep in.”

  “Like most things, that’s easier said than done.”

  “I dunno, it’s like any other skill, it gets easier with practice.”

  I’m familiar with the concept. Momma used to mention it, positive visualization is what she called it; one of the things she picked up from therapy after our dad passed. I’m prone to reminiscing on the good times, but it’s not something I’ve ever done with an end result in mind; maybe Katia is onto something. “So what do you think of?”

  She rests her chin on her knees. “It just depends; I tap into different memories depending on whatever’s trying to haunt me. If I’m missing my parents, I might think of the way my dad’s cheek felt pressed up against mine: like sandpaper and velvet. Or the way his aftershave smelled. With my mom, it’s always her cooking or the way she laughed; I’ve never heard anyone laugh the way she did. It was so unflattering and grainy, but unguarded and genuine, it was just her, you know? I loved that about her. Everyone loved that about her.”

  “Sounds like you had some awesome parents.”

  She turns her head and smiles at me. “They were. I was lucky.” She stands, crosses the small gap between us, and sits on my lap, looping her arms around my neck. “So what about you?”

  “What about me?”

  She takes my hat off my head and deposits it on her own. “What are some of the good memories that you have?”

  “Of individual people or—”

  “Could be people. It could be a particular moment. It could even be a thing…an object…something that made you happy.”

  The images in my head start rolling backwards like a flipbook. “Trying to come up with something good.”

  “Take your time, cowboy.” She tips the brim of the hat.

  “You look damned good in that thing, by the way.”

  “Thank ya kindly, sir,” she giggles. “Did I get the accent right?”

  “You were this close.” I pinch my fingers together in front of her face.

  “I’ll try harder next time. So what’d you come up with?”

  “Still thinking, don’t rush me.”

  “Okay, just tell me the next thing that pops into your head.”

  The pages in my head stop and the scene begins to paint itself. “My family had this ritual when I was younger, sort of a bi-weekly thing. Every Sunday, we would get ice cream and go to the lake.”

  “An after church sort of thing?”

  “More of a during church sort of thing. We tried to avoid the church people whenever possible; they’d come out in droves, crowd everything up with picnic blankets and stuff.”

  “You didn’t go to church as a kid?”

  “Not really. You?”

  “Catholic.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “We’ve all got our burdens to bear. Anyway, go on.”

  “So thinking back now, the lake was really nothing special; pretty much a dirty brown patch of water occupied by di
rty ducks. But as a kid, it seemed like so much more.”

  “When you’re a kid, everything does.” She sticks my hat back on my head and then hugs me, laying her face on my shoulder.

  “We’d walk around the lake, talk to the ducks, and me and Bethany would chase each other while our parents yelled for us to stop running. They had these duck food dispensers where you could stick a quarter in and get a handful of food to throw out to the ducks; sometimes they’d eat it and sometimes, if the place was crowded and they’d been overfed, they’d just stare at it.” A smile starts to break across my face as I recall Bethany pouting and kicking at the ground, demanding that the ducks receive her offering. “There was a little patch of woods just behind the lake. Me and Bethany insisted on exploring it every time we were there. In the middle of the woods was this small creek made up of runoff water. There was a strip of rocks running across the center of it just begging someone to cross.”

  “Let me guess, you ran across and busted your ass?”

  “No, not exactly, but good guess.” I pat her on the back. “My dad would never let us do it. He said they were too slick and that we didn’t know what we were doing. Well, eventually we wore him down. He said we could do it, but first he was going to show us the proper way to cross. Momma didn’t think it was a good idea and told him so, but he insisted. So she crossed her arms, sat back, and let him go.”

  “Oh no, really?”

  “Yeah, really. He got two steps over the water and wiped out. His legs went right out from under him. It was like slow motion. I swear, for a minute he was just frozen horizontally, his arms stretched out like wings; he looked like some sort of cartoon. He came down like a lead weight, knocked every bit of breath he had right out of his body. All three of us were frozen, just watching him as he laid there, rocking back and forth with his eyes squinted shut.” I can feel Katia shaking with laughter. “Finally, Momma rushed to his side. Me and Bethany just burst out laughing. First thing my dad said when he got his breath back was, Now kids, that’s how not to cross a creek. Any questions?”

  Katia throws her head back, howling with laughter as I hold her by the waist. “Oh my God, Tim! That’s one of the funniest damn things I’ve ever heard.” She’s got a hand on my chest and is using the other to wipe tears away.