Matthew nodded at the calendar. “Look in the front, there.”
Casey opened the very front cover. Inside was a photograph of a smiling family. A young girl, a boy, a woman in a dress, and a man wearing Army fatigues.
“This is your family?”
“Yeah.”
“Cool.” Casey looked at the photo a moment longer before closing the cover with a certain gentle reverence and handing it back.
Matthew blew out the candle next to his bedroll. “Night, Casey.”
Instead of saying goodnight Casey scooted over to Matthew’s bedroll, stretched out next to him and laid down, face to face.
Neither shied away, instead losing themselves for a moment as they stared back, holding each other’s gaze. After a long stretch of comfortable silenced, Casey leaned toward Matthew, and he met her half-way. The kiss they shared was gentle, something tender and sacred, and it was electric.
The kiss broke, and the two smiled. Matthew placed his hand on Casey’s shoulder, then wrapped it around her back, holding her close. Casey, in turn, tucked her head into his chest and fell asleep listening to the wild trip-hammer beat of Matthew’s heart.
The other candle burned out in the middle of the night, and when Casey awoke in the early morning hours still wrapped in Matthew’s arms, she didn’t mind the darkness.
Before, in the time before zombies, such a kiss would leave boy and girl feeling awkward. The following morning, they kissed again, and the two reveled in a tiny moment of real joy in a dark and dead world.
During breakfast Casey asked, “Can we go shopping?”
Matthew tilted a quizzical look at her, his mouth full of canned corned beef hash.
“I want to get some clothes.”
Swallowing, he said, “You have clothes, we got you some the last time we went into Morganza.”
“I know, but none of it really fits well. Besides, I kind of want something pretty, ya know?”
“Pretty?”
“I haven’t worn a dress in ages. I used to hate it. Now I kind of miss it, and I was never safe enough to wear something like that.” She smiled her bright smile, and Matthew felt his heart trip over itself all over again.
“Well, there’s really nothing in Morganza, and I don’t know about you, but I really don’t want to go back to New Roads.”
“Isn’t there anywhere else?”
“Well, there’s Melville, I guess. It’s the next closest town. Only gone there a couple times since I’ve been out here. It’s about twice the size of Morganza, and they had a few small places we could check out.”
Matthew checked his watch, “It’s almost seven-thirty now, if we leave by eight we can probably be there by eleven, spend a couple hours shopping and get back here by four or five.”
“Well alright then, Captain Spontaneous.”
Matthew laughed at her jab, stood and took the empty plates and the skillet. “I’ll get these washed and we can go.”
Casey’s face lit up with a smile. “Awesome, dude! A fun day of shopping. We should get a latte, too,” she said with a wink.
Twenty minutes later the adventuring duo stepped out onto Fordoche Bayou Road/LA 10 and turned west. About a mile down the highway, they left the blacktop and cut through a strip of woods along the road. From there they walked in relative ease, crossing empty fields for most of the seven mile walk.
At just after eleven a.m. Matthew and Casey stood at the end of the train trestle spanning the Atchafalaya River, looking over into Melville.
From their slightly elevated vantage point they could see that the town appeared deserted.
“You see any dead ones?”
Matthew shook his head, “I don’t see much of anything, really. Wait, look,” he said, passing her a pair of binoculars.
Several slow moving figures could be seen in the distance, crossing over a narrow street and disappearing behind several trees.
“Ok, so we’ve been standing here for, what, ten minutes and we’ve seen a total of three shufflers? Let’s go shopping, dude”
Half-way across the trestle, Matthew said, “What was that old movie, the one where the boys are walking across some tracks and a train comes, so they all run like crazy?”
Casey, picking her way carefully across the evenly spaced ties, thought for a second, “I honestly have no clue, but I don’t think we have to worry about a train coming along and knocking us into the river.”
“You know, I’d say you’re probably right,” Matthew said with a laugh.
Minutes later they left the tracks and turned north, up Landrum Street. They passed the Kingdom Hall and continued along a street that was once clean and well kept, but was now bordered by wild overgrowth and cracked sidewalks where trees and other flora had begun to reclaim the area.
“Is it just me, or is the quiet here just creepy as hell?” Casey whispered.
Matthew felt the eerie silence as well. “Every place is quiet now. You just haven’t been here before, you know? That’s probably why it feels strange. That and the fact that there aren’t a bunch of dead walking around all over the place.”
“Yeah, that’s weird too.”
They turned up Church Street, taking their time; once, about two blocks ahead, they spotted an undead shambling around a corner and they simply stopped, moved behind a blue car and waited for the creature to pass.
Finding nothing they were looking for on Church the duo took Oak Street two blocks to 1st. This they followed south until they came to Landrum Street.
Turning the corner onto Landrum put them in front of a wide building with four different store-fronts. The first was a hardware store, the second an antique store. In the large window of the third two female mannequins modeled print skirts and tops.
“Oh Matthew, look! They’re so pretty! I bet there’s tons inside.” Casey reached for the door-handle and thumbed the button.
Matthew, lost in thought, was several steps beyond the window, in front of the last store-front. The only thing in its window was a FOR RENT sign with a phone number and contact Mel written in shaky scrawl.
Behind him Casey rattled the door hard several times before releasing the handle and moving in front of the window again. She reached out and traced a fine crack that ran up from the lower corner of the window to the upper right hand corner. Beyond her finger the mannequins in their pretty skirts stared of out the window with blank eyes. Casey imagined she could feel the smooth silky texture of brand new clothes. “Matthew! Hey, can we get in here?”
Matthew was just past the end of the building, standing in a driveway that separated the store-front building from an old single story white house next to it. He turned, realizing he was nearly fifty feet from the girl. “Sorry, I was thinking. What if I find some nice clothes, and then you and I can have us a little dance later, dress up nice and all that.”
Standing in front of the window, her hand out on the glass, Casey turned and graced Matthew with a radiant smile that warmed his heart. “Oh, that sounds awesome, dude!”
She turned back to look at the lovely skirts, and blank-eyed mannequins.
She had time to gasp in shock, just enough time for that, before the huge cracked window exploded outward on her. Six undead piled through the opening all at once, easily bearing Casey to the ground under an onslaught of rotting, grasping death.
Matthew’s eyes widened and he reached out, taking several steps forward. Casey’s screams from beneath the pile of biting dead were a real and brutal assault on his ears.
Between the shifting corpses, Matthew saw her face turn toward him, her hand reaching between the rotting bodies as they bit into her flesh.
Time drew out, as if it all happened in slow motion, and Matthew himself felt mired in viscous mud, his own body unresponsive to disjointed commands.
Casey’s eyes seemed to widen forever when one of the dead buried its hands into her abdomen and began tearing out her insides. She mustered one last scream just as Matthew got his legs to move toward
the melee.
“Matthew, RUN!”
She arched her back as a zombie bit into her neck, her order to run turning into a keening wail meant only for the ears of God himself. Her bright eyes went dark and the movements of her body became the jerky shifting of a marionette puppeteered by demonic hands.
Matthew stood frozen, his body unwilling to accept his commands to move forward, to help Casey. His hands clenched at his sides, grimy fingernails digging into the meat of his palms.
(Matthew, RUN)
Casey’s voice rang in his ears even as her screams died.
“No, no, no….”
His voice was weak, soft, but slowly building. One of the zombies crouched over Casey heard him over the wet, crunching noises the pack was making and stood, turning to face him.
Moving on split, suppurating dead feet, it began to stalk toward Matthew, hands dripping bright arterial blood as it grasped for the new meal.
Matthew looked directly into its dead eyes and knew the creature saw only meat. There was no life, not even a glimmer, hidden deep inside behind the grimy cataracts.
The dead thing approached, but his feet still felt anchored.
(Matty, Matty help!)
(No, Matthew, run! Just run! Go!)
The remembered screams of his sister and mother played on a brutal loop and their memory released his feet. He took a shuffling step backward, just barely avoiding the reach of the zombie. Behind the undead thing, the rest had stood and were following, their insatiable appetite already craving more, always more.
He couldn’t bring himself to look back at what remained of Casey. Matthew turned and fled, keeping her bright eyes and soft face centered in his mind as he ran.
He did not stop running until he reached the railroad trestle. Violent tears blurred his vision and he had to stop half-way across and sit down on ties that smelled of age and black oil.
He sat there, with the acrid, dark smell of the creosote-soaked wood filling his nose and the acidic green taste of bile stinging the back of his throat.
He sat there until the sun was nearly down, and in falling darkness he made the slow, agonizing trek home.
Matthew stumbled to the door of the shack several hours later, and nearly forgot to set the safety catch on the axe trap. His hand was on the doorknob and twisting before habit and habit alone reminded him of the deadly device.
He paused there, arm outstretched, hand grasping the knob. His mind was a vortex of brutal emotions and violent memories, each screaming for attention and all of them overloading his thought processes. Somewhere in that bitter swirling of nightmare a thought surfaced and receded quickly, but he recognized it and considered it, briefly. Open the door, step forward and let it be done.
Matthew released the knob, stepped around the side of the shack, felt for the cable that set the safety and engaged it.
Once inside he closed the door, shuffled forward in the dark and collapsed on his bedroll. He lay there in silence for almost an hour before crawling over to Casey’s sleeping bag. He pressed his face into the pillow she had used, inhaled deeply and began to sob.
For days he wept, sleeping on her make-shift mattress, only leaving the shack when nature demanded it.
I ran… again was the only thought that pressed through the mire of emotions. Inside, deep, in that place of memory so few can truthfully examine, Matthew knew that he would have died if he had tried to help his mother, his sister, or Casey. He would have died in vain. When they told him to run, he ran, and he hated himself for running.
He felt hollow inside, gutted and empty.
Once more, Matthew Cormier was alone.
8
Days passed slowly again, the time spent with Casey seeming to be a matter of seconds, there and gone, but as real and painful as anything Matthew had ever felt.
He returned to the daily routines he had followed before Casey’s arrival into his life, practicing with his bow, hunting, scavenging, and checking his alarms and traps. Life before was life after, only sadder.
Most mornings began the same way, with Matthew waking up shouting from a nightmare, calling out for Casey, Sadie, or his Mom.
He sat up in his bedroll, flailing an arm, and knocking over a stack of paperback books. “MOM!”
Night sweat poured from his face and dripped from his hair.
Matthew dragged himself up, slipped on a dirty t-shirt and went outside. Not caring to make the walk to the toilet he urinated beside the shack.
He went back inside briefly, to put on shoes. Casey’s sleeping area had been rolled up and tossed to the side. In the past two weeks, piles of clothes had begun to reclaim the empty space. He didn’t want to forget her, but the constant reminder had been too much for him to bear.
After a quick breakfast of cold canned pasta and a bottle of water, Matthew began his day by assembling his take-down recurve bow and spending an hour practicing.
After his final round of arrows, he walked to the target, looked at it for a moment and said, “Not bad, not too bad. Gettin’ better.” The words sounded hollow, even to him.
Matthew dismantled the bow and slipped it into his pack, along with the arrows.
He spent the next several hours wandering the junkyard, checking his can-alarms, and tripwires, taking the time to adjust or repair them as needed.
He spared a few minutes to draw his name in the dirt while taking a leak, chuckling at his own silliness.
The day wore on, and he walked the perimeter, twice, simply for something to do. As always, he kept an eye out for wild game, though most of it was gone by now, it seemed. He would spot the occasional rabbit, even a deer, once.
Lunch was a pouch of beef jerky and a half-melted candy bar eaten sitting on a stump in a copse of trees on the other side of Fordoche Bayou Road. He stared at the junkyard compound as he ate and wondered about the word home and what it meant.
Finished with his meal, Matthew dropped the empty packages on the ground, stepped to the edge of the road and looked both ways down the empty stretch of black-top.
He had no plan for the remainder of the day, and the thought of sitting in silence was one he dreaded.
Matthew began walking in the direction of Morganza, walking for no other reason than he had to keep moving.
Upon reaching the town he made his way to the levee, and stood atop it for an hour, simply watching the river flow by in its constant and quiet journey to the ocean.
From far away, Matthew thought he heard the faint rumble of a vehicle. He cocked his head toward the sound, listening for it to draw closer. It disappeared after a moment, and he wondered if he had even really heard the noise, but it did move him to head back to the shack.
The walk back was the same as the walk into town. Quiet and lonely.
Matthew dropped his backpack beside his bedroll, next to an old camp hatchet he had found when he first moved in. He left the door open to let in light and let out smoke.
In the rusted tire rim that he had sealed up to create a fire-bowl, Matthew lit a small fire. As he sat waiting for the flames to die down some, Matthew marked off yet another day on the small pocket calendar. The red X he had placed in it a reminder of the day Casey had died. He flipped it closed and slipped it under a flap and into his backpack.
When the coals were ready, he sat a wire grate on the rim and a small pot on that. He popped open yet another can of ready-to-eat pasta, something he had always considered ‘kiddie food’ and stirred it until the thick sauce started to bubble. He ate directly from the pot.
Food finished and pot set aside, Matthew grabbed a tiny bag of stale potato chips and a bottle of water. He stretched out on his sleeping bag, grabbed a comic book from the pile he kept nearby and started munching on the chips while flipping through the pages of the brightly colored superhero comic.
Matthew reached into the chip bag once more, feeling for crumbs when a shadow filled the doorway.
“Well, isn’t this place just cozy as hell.”
M
atthew looked up to see a large man, wearing a biker’s leather jacket covered in patches and dark spots that could have been dried blood. His greasy hair hung lankly near his shoulders.
Matthew reacted without thinking and rolled to the side, scattering comics. He slapped at the emergency lever he had installed for the axe trap that was mounted on the wall near the floor.
The weighted axe dropped just as the big biker shifted. Instead of catching the man full in the face it grazed the right side, the keenly sharpened axe head shearing away a thick layer of skin and the man’s right ear.
Matthew heard a woman’s voice, from behind the man. “Landry!”
Matthew recognized that name.
The big man’s hand flew up to his face as a heavy scream ripped from his throat. Blood splattered when the hand slapped the peeled hole of his missing ear, eliciting another scream even as he shouted, “Mitch, get this damn kid!”
Landry spun to the side, blood streaming from his torn face.
A woman took Landry’s place in the doorway, her dark brown skin splotchy, with dirt on her bare arms and face. At one time, Matthew might have thought she was pretty, but the dirt and short filthy hair coupled with the evil glint in her eye, made the woman appear hag-like.
Matthew sprang up from the floor, grabbing both his backpack and hatchet as he gained his feet. He stared at the filthy woman, anger filling his eyes.
She stood in front of the bloody axe and from Matthew’s angle the dripping blade bisected her face.
“Come on, boy, let’s make this easy,” Mitch growled. Her eyes flicked toward Matthew’s cache of food.
He was incensed that these filthy, hateful people were invading his home for what he’d worked so hard for and his inner child, petulant and angry burst forth. “Just go away! I found it! I found it, so it’s mine!”
Mitch snarled, “God, I hate kids.” She lunged, brandishing a wicked looking blade.
Matthew lobbed his heavy backpack at the woman’s shins.
The bag caught her legs, surprising her and she stumbled, going down hard. The knife flew from her right hand, and she cried out in shock when her hand sank into the still hot coals inside the tire rim Matthew used to cook. Glowing coals flew out in a fan, spreading around the room.
American Revenant (Short Story 2): Dead South Page 6
