by Jay Wilburn
I looked back at him suddenly. He was facing forward again. I had no idea why we would want to go back. It took me a moment to realize he was talking about Chef and Short Order. I had not given any thought to them as we trudged through the woods away from our struggle on the tracks. I was still in flight mode.
I looked down at his calf. There was a long tear along his pants leg over the wound. The ripped material puckered open as he walked. One side of his sock was red. As our feet swished and crunched more loudly on the straw than I liked, his bloody foot came down inside the boot and squished. I started looking around in the straw to be sure he wasn’t leaving a trail of blood. I stared back at the knob of bone on the back of his skull as we kept walking.
We walked up behind a wood pile with a rotten canvas over it peppered in pine straw. Doc crouched down and looked over the top. There were the backs of two story houses beyond much smaller, chain link fences. Most of the windows were intact. The vinyl siding was falling away from the houses in places. Rotten wood slats were exposed underneath. A gutter was hanging loose from one roof. The fine, green lawns had been overtaken by tall, yellow grasses. The three houses we could see from the woodpile looked the same except for the shade of the fading siding.
After a moment of watching, Doc waved me forward and put his finger over his mouth to signal silence. He was the one that was always talking, but I followed him anyway.
We walked around the woodpile and up to the fence to the white house between the blue and tan ones. Doc lifted the rusted latch at the gate slowly. He pushed it open a foot with a loud screech of metal on metal. He froze and waited. We could hear birds again.
Doc nodded and slid through into the tall grass of the backyard. I followed him through without touching the gate. He walked slowly being careful to spread the grass with the toes of his boots to be sure he wasn’t stepping on anything or anyone.
He paused over a skeleton. The bones were separate, so it was difficult to identify it. It wasn’t human. It also wasn’t going to attack us, so we kept walking.
The back deck was collapsed on one side. The furniture and large umbrella were cast aside in the broken lumber on the ground. Doc walked up the steps and on to the splintering wood on the other side. The top layer of wood crumbled dry and peeled away with each step. It wasn’t much louder than walking in the pine straw, but I was worried about the strength of the boards. I followed Doc across.
He reached the door and cupped his hands over his eyes to look through the streaked glass. After a moment, he reached down and pulled the door knob. The entire house popped, but the door stayed sealed. He tapped the glass pane above the knob either testing it, trying to get something to reveal itself, or thinking about what to do next.
I tapped his shoulder and he jumped. He sighed and looked back at me. I pointed down next to the door. Doc looked down and saw a green, ceramic frog. He reached down and picked it up. He smiled back at me as he pulled the key out and held it up for me to see. He started to say something, but I held my finger over my mouth. He nodded and turned to the door.
I had snuck into a few houses during the confusing days that I was alone and looking for food before the Complex. Sometimes there had been food for me and sometimes there were monsters trying to use me for food. The people sometimes hid keys outside before they became monsters.
The key was stubborn, but Doc finally fiddled the lock into submission. He turned the knob and pulled the door open with a long, ripping crack.
***
The plastic weather stripping tore away from the door and stuck to the frame in several places. Doc waved me in and then pulled the door closed behind him. He reached down and turned the tiny lock switch back. If the zombies came to this door, the lock wouldn’t be much protection.
The kitchen still had dishes in the sink. Pots of dirt were set around with the plants long decayed. The refrigerator was spotted black all around its surface. Doc placed the frog and key on the faded section of the table cloth near the back window and open curtains.
There was a door in the kitchen that we would discover led to a basement with one of the family members under the stairs. We decided to bypass that for the moment.
In the living room, there were dead cats around the floor. Their bodies were curled and dried black. Their smell was still deep set in the carpet. There were small, bloody, paw prints along the carpet and the separating boards along the walkway to the front door and stairs.
As we went forward, we found the lady of the house still waiting for us on her sofa. Her mouth was open and turned up at us revealing a dark, decayed crater. Her tongue had rotted away to a stump or had been bitten off. She still held a .45 revolver in her hand. There were bite marks in her exposed skin around her loose dress. Some were from the cats. Others were not. Her leathery skin was grey and as dry as the cats around her feet. There was a black spray that was caked and dried on the wall behind her open head.
Doc went over and took hold of the gun. He pulled at it to get it loose. The woman’s arm crackled as it lifted off the fabric of the couch cushion. Swatches of the material came up with her skin that matched the thread pattern underneath. The elbow popped out of joint under the mummified flesh. The hand held her weapon in a literal death grip. It broke loose from her hand finally. Some of her fingers snapped off and bounced on the carpet.
He opened the chamber and spun it before snapping it back into place. He looked up at me and back at the gun.
Doc said, “It might work. It has been sitting a long time. There has to be a kit or something to clean it, I would think. I’m afraid it might explode in my face. Depending on how this scratch works out, that may not be a problem.”
His voice echoed off the walls around us and rang off the light fixtures above us. Houses that had been left for dead reacted oddly to sound. I looked around at the ceiling and over the banister that disappeared up into the second floor.
Doc said, “There are two empty chambers.”
I looked at him and then back up the stairs. We walked up together. The cat prints coated the stairs in several trails moving in both directions. We could already see the hand dangling over the top step. Blood was pooled and solidified underneath it.
The body was across the floor coming out of the bathroom. The shower curtain with an intricate, flowered pattern had been pulled down and laid over its legs and back. The hand not hanging over the stairs was sunk deep in the carcass of one of the cats. The cat’s body was missing its head as the man’s hand disappeared into its decayed side between the exposed rib bones.
The back of the man’s head was caved in around a perfectly round hole. He was face down in a wash of blood that had coated the carpet under him in a smooth, thick film.
I thought about the woman with the duct tape bonds back in the bathroom at Doc’s secret house surrounded by dead police. I started wishing I had been teamed up with Chef or Short Order instead of being alone with Doc in this house. I would find out they did not make it out of the Super Max that day, so this was sadly the better option.
“That would be shot number two,” Doc said. “Or I guess that’s actually shot one and the wifey-poo on the couch did herself with shot two.”
We searched the upstairs and found Doc’s gun kit in the master bedroom. Doc also pulled out some clothes and a pair of sneakers. We found a first aid kit in the bathroom. We moved everything we found into the guestroom. It was less worn and there were two windows looking out on two sides of the neighborhood. We went through the kitchen and found a few cans.
Then, we opened the door in the kitchen and discovered the basement.
The stairs creaked as we went down. Doc whistled twice to awaken anything that might want to grab us in the dark. I didn’t like how unfinished basement stairs opened in the back to let something reach through to grab ankles. Light was coming in from small windows high on the concrete walls, but it was still dark. There were rows of boxes. We found a shelf of preserves. I started to pick up a few when I saw
the body.
Doc saw it too. He kicked the shoe sticking out from under the stairs. Doc reached down and grabbed an ax handle. He pulled it dragging the body out from under the stairs by the ax where it was jammed into the forehead of the skull. He pressed his foot with the bloody sock against the side of the head. The skull crumbled under Doc’s boot. He lifted the blade out without having to pull it.
Doc hoisted the ax on to his shoulder. He looked over at me by the shelf of jars.
“Grab a couple,” he said. “I need to get back up and treat this cut just in case I am going to live through the night.”
Once we were back up in the guestroom, I set done the jars I had carried and Doc leaned the ax against the door with the head on the floor. He opened the alcohol and peroxide bottles first. He waved them under his nose.
“They’re denatured. I might as well spit on my cut,” Doc mumbled.
He found a small bottle of iodine and swished it around. He shrugged and started untying his boots.
I looked out the window to the blue house across the side yard. In the backyard of the blue house, there were at least a dozen skeletons. With them lying in the tall grass and not being able to see the back of the house where they seemed to be heading, it was hard to get an accurate count. I couldn’t see their skulls clearly, but I had a suspicion of what they all had in common.
I looked back at Doc’s bare feet. I could smell them from where I was standing. Bloody gauze was piled in the waste basket with the pink flowered pattern. The hair was matted down on the side of Doc’s calf around the cut. His legs were zombie pale except for a smear of brown and yellow around the small gash. It was still seeping blood.
Doc screwed the top back on the iodine and dabbed with another length of gauze.
I walked to the front of the room and looked out the window between the thick, faded curtains. They smelled dusty and burnt. They helped cover the stink of Doc’s feet.
The road curved in front of our house and went out continuing down through the neighborhood. Yards were being reclaimed by wild grasses, tall weeds, and medium-sized trees. The gutters that still clung to the houses were planters now. The sides of the houses looked to be heavily dented from past hailstorms. Storm drains along the street were packed with trash and debris. Dirt had washed into piles in the streets around the clogged drains and plants were expanding over the new land in waves out from the yards.
There was a minivan over the sidewalk with every door open and every window broken. Bodies were sprawled on the seats inside, but I couldn’t see them well. There was a skeleton on one of the sidewalks with its head under a riding lawnmower. I was curious about that story.
Something was bumping over and over again deeper in the neighborhood. There were long gaps between bumps sometimes. I looked to see if I could spot the source, but I couldn’t locate it.
I turned back around and saw Doc pulling on a fresh sock over his bandage. The tape he used seemed to be highly suspect in its stickiness. He pulled on the sneakers and tied them. He tossed his bloody, smelly boots out into the hall.
“I need stitches,” Doc said. “I have it packed with cotton and the bleeding has stopped, but I will have to walk again, if I’m not infected. I guess I might walk again even if I am infected. I won’t be worrying about the stitches in that case. Do you know what to do, if it is a bite or the wrong kind of scratch?”
I nodded my head. He wasn’t going to get his stitches.
He started disassembling the .45 and began cleaning it. The bullets in the gun were smeared with green when he popped them out. The ones in the box with the cleaning kit seemed to be better preserved.
We ate from some of the preserves. I located a can opener in the kitchen and we ate cold from a few of the cans. My stomach started bothering me from the day’s action and I stopped eating.
Doc opened and sniffed at a bottle of aspirin. He made a face and tossed them aside.
The thumping noise started up again somewhere in the neighborhood.
I pulled up my sleeve and inspected the dark bruise around my wrist. The skin was puffing up giving my arm a misshapen bulge at certain angles. I pressed the bones. It hurt, but it wasn’t excruciating. I was able to wiggle my thumb and close my hand with some effort.
Doc dry fired the gun a few times letting the hammer click on the empty chambers. Everything seemed to move okay. He loaded it and handed it to me.
When I took it, he said, “I’m not feeling feverish and none of the poison lines are traveling up my leg, Mutt. That’s a pretty good sign, but not certain. Make sure I’m really dead before you cap me, if that’s okay, buddy.”
I nodded. In that moment, I still didn’t think this was going to be the gun I used to kill Doc once he became a zombie.
I sat down against a wall and let my eyes close. Doc took out his bloody magazine and leafed through the pages slowly before tossing it in the waste can with the bloody gauze. As afternoon approached evening, Doc spoke again.
He said, “If things don’t go bad in the night, we will make our way out in the morning. We need to be careful, but we should be able to circle back toward the store and see if we can pick up on a trail for David and Shaw. I’m not sure if they left the building before we got separated. If they fell back inside, they probably got trapped and killed. Those things were coming out the back of the store by the time we got to the tracks. Of course, if they went out the front before us or after us, they probably didn’t fare well either. We need to check anyway, if we can.”
Doc started gripping his stomach as the day wore on and he eventually lay down on his side. His eyes clinched tight and his breathing became raspy. He was sweating and the color was fading out of his face. I offered him some more of the food, but he shook me off my offer.
We needed water.
***
I looked through the house but didn’t find any options. I grabbed a few things from the kitchen, I picked up the key, set the frog on the floor, wrapped my stuff in a bundle using the table cloth, and I slipped outside leaving Doc alone upstairs. I slipped back into the woods through the gate that we had left open.
I stood at the head of the trail by the woodpile looking down the way we had come. I knew what might be that way, but I was tempted to follow it just the same because I knew what kind of monster might be waiting up in the guest bedroom. Doc had saved me more than once, but I wasn’t sure I wanted to be around him for a number of reasons.
I looked back at the houses. The hail dents I had seen in the neighborhood were missing on the back sides. The sliding glass doors on the back of the blue house were shattered and the skeletons trailed inside. I recognized the scene.
I heard the thumping noise again.
I followed the tree line through the woods behind the houses. I wasn’t exactly sure what I expected to find, but I knew the sorts of things I was looking for from our brief time on the road since leaving the Complex and from my time alone before they found me.
Rebuilding the Complex alone didn’t seem so bad at this particular moment. I did not like what I was doing or where I was. We had not accomplished anything to justify this adventure. We had not found what we said we were looking for and I did not like any of the things I had discovered so far.
The thumping stopped again.
There was someone leaning against a tree in front of me. I could see their shoulder and one foot braced against the root of the pine. I set my bundle down. I was still holding the .45 Doc had handed me that I didn’t trust. I pulled my hunting knife out in my right hand. My thumb closed over it without too much pain, but I didn’t trust it either.
I circled around the tree and then put my knife away in the sheath.
The body was pinned into the tree with the pole of a solar light. The base was jammed through the body’s open mouth and up through the top of its head into the trunk of the tree. The tree was dark and pitted around the body leaning against it. The bark had grown out and around the body in several areas.
&nb
sp; The thumping started again.
I picked up my bundle and continued on through the trees. As I did, I heard the thumping getting louder ahead of me somewhere between the houses. I stuck the .45 into my pocket and pulled out the knife again.
I slipped up behind a large pine and looked through the side yards of two houses. A baseball bounced off the side of the house and then out of view. There was a pause. Then, the ball flew against and back off of the dented siding of the house again.
I walked forward through the open space and got behind a thinner pine farther along the tree line.
The pitcher was a boy.
He reached down and lifted the ball back out of the grass. He was at least a foot shorter than me. He was wearing a tee shirt. It had something printed on the front, but was distressed beyond legibility. He had on cargo shorts that sagged below his waist. His face was misshapen. His nose was flattened and twisted to the left. His eyes weren’t level and his lips were broken in several splits. His forehead was elongated and curved into his skull below this patchy, crew-cut hairline.
He threw the ball against the house again. It thumped back off and flew by his throwing arm. He made no attempt to catch it. He slowly picked it up again. He walked a few feet closer to me. I crouched down behind the tree with the knife ready. He threw it against the house again. It thumped off and struck him in the chest. He rocked back slightly, but stood staring at the house with his uneven eyes. He looked down and picked up the ball at his feet. He threw it against the house again. It bounced back and hit him in the face. He picked it back up and walked toward the house next door. I could see the dark scar of a bite mark around his calf at about the same position where Doc’s wound was on the side of his leg.
I used to throw a baseball against my house. My mother had made me switch to a tennis ball because the baseball left dents. She was sorry that my dad wasn’t around to throw it with me.
My stomach tightened with fear and something else I couldn’t place. I had never remembered my father or thought about him since the day I left my house. I hadn’t remembered anything from before the day my mom hid me under the bed and told me to be quiet.
