For two days he and his twelve year old daughter Sarah had wandered the wreckage in a numb stupor, chased ever onward in a blind frenzy of helplessness by the living dead and the looters and the flood waters. Shots rang out constantly. The bodies of deer and dogs and human beings festooned the limbs of fallen trees. And worst of all, they were unable to tell the difference between those bloated, lifeless corpses bobbing in the water and the infected zombies that could seem part of the trash, but were in fact only waiting for someone to come too close. All the hospitals had become necropolises, and they learned quickly to avoid those. The flooded houses, too—for the moans coming from the attics were not all made by the living, and they could never be sure when a submerged section of a roof had been punched through by the limbs of a live oak or a snapped telephone pole, allowing the zombies an easy place to hide.
On the morning of the third day they saw a bass boat appear from behind the leafy top of an upturned pecan tree. A National Guardsman with a rifle was waving them on.
Turning to Sarah, Canavan stuck out his hand. She was holding a pink backpack by the straps, splashing frantically as she struggled to keep up. “Come on,” he shouted at her. “They’re right there.”
The girl was exhausted, and every word out of her mouth took the form of a plaintive whining that at first had touched the atavistic protectiveness all fathers possess for their daughters but now met only with an impatient hardness and more shouting.
“Daddy, help me.”
“Come on, move!”
A zombie sprang out from beneath the canopy of an immature live oak right next to Canavan, and in a moment of pure base fear Canavan leapt onto the roof of a nearby car. He spun around, only to see his daughter bent forward at the waist, her hands reaching for him, her eyes flashing with fear as the dead man strapped his arms across her middle and pulled her down.
She sank beneath the debris-strewn water yelling, “Dad-dy! Dad-dy!” and he reached for her, but she was already gone.
“No!” he shouted. “No.”
He scanned the water, unable to believe what had just happened, when more of the living dead emerged from the water.
Another wave of burning ash hit his skin and he swatted at his face.
The memory of Houston vanished and he was back in the dusty ruins of downtown San Antonio, disoriented at first because the memory had seemed so vivid and so very horrible. A small crowd of zombies, about a dozen or so, were closing on him. There were more behind them, picking their way through the rubble of a collapsed building.
With his mind still numb with guilt and loss for Sarah, he raised his pistol and tried to fire.
Nothing happened.
Confused, he looked at the weapon. It took him a moment to figure out it was empty.
He had two more magazines on his thigh next to his holster and muscle memory took over as he ejected the spent magazine, slapped a fresh one into the receiver, and released the slide.
Canavan fired through his second magazine and reloaded the third.
Moaning behind him.
He turned and saw another badly burned zombie coming toward him, trailing a shredded leg. Canavan pointed the gun at the zombie’s head and fired until it fell. Then he dropped his hands to his side and staggered off into the swirling clouds of ash and dust, the moans of the dead trailing away behind him.
* * * * *
He walked on until he heard the sounds of a woman sobbing.
It was coming from a white stone building with all the windows on the first six stories blasted out. The lobby on the ground floor was littered with plaster and garbage, lath visible through the walls. There was an acrid, dusty taste of aerosolized concrete and ash in the air that collected in Canavan’s mouth, leaving his tongue dry, like it was wearing a sock.
Looking in through one of the openings he saw the woman in the red dress, the vivid splash of color he had seen earlier muted now with a fine powdering of dust. She was sitting on the floor, her legs spread out in front of her like a little child, her hands on the floor between them. Her hands were wet with blood.
He stepped inside the lobby and the crumbled plaster and broken glass on the floor crunched beneath his boots.
The woman in red spun around and screamed. Her sudden movements scattered photographs across the floor. Canavan watched the pictures skid toward his boots, then turned his attention on the woman. Her chest was heaving, her eyes wild. She held her injured hands out in front of her, as though to push him away, the gore dripping from them a stark contrast to the bloodless pallor of her face.
“Don’t hurt me,” she whimpered. “Please.”
She thinks I’m one of them, he realized. Without his gear, and with the blood leaking from his nose and mouth and the punch drunk stagger in his walk, he must have looked just like a zombie.
“I won’t hurt you,” he said.
A long pause.
She lowered her hands and made a low huffing noise that came from the somewhere deep in her throat.
Canavan reached down and picked up one of the photographs. It showed the woman in front of him, younger, smiling, nestled in the arms of an overweight, dark haired man in a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses. They were on a small boat, a heavily wooded shoreline in the distance behind them.
He held the photograph out to her. “Your husband?”
“My brother, Paul.”
He nodded. When she didn’t take the photograph from him he dropped it in front of her. “What’s your name?”
“Jessica Shepard.”
“I’m James Canavan.”
There was a beat. The muscles at the corners of her mouth twitched, as though she might smile. “Are you a James or a Jim?” she said.
“Either. Jim to my friends.”
“Well, Jim, pull up a chair. The place is kind of dead tonight.”
He couldn’t really laugh, but he liked the easy way she used his name, the gallows humor, the way it gave him a glimpse of her personality.
She was staring up at him, her eyes yellow and bloodshot and almost lifeless, rimmed with red. Her face was lost in shadow and her hair clung to her damp forehead and cheeks like wet thread. When she breathed she made a labored, painful sound, as though she had fluid pooling in her lungs.
“Can you get me out of here, Jim?”
He shook his head. “You’ve been infected.”
She closed her eyes and let her chin sink to her chest. She was silent for so long he thought she hadn’t intended to answer. But when she lifted her head again there were tears cutting rivulets down the dust on her cheeks and a knot was working itself up and down furiously at the base of her throat.
The look in her eyes made him turn away.
“I’m sorry,” he said.
“You’re sorry? You fucking bastard. You God damned fucking pig-headed bastard.” She wiped a forearm across her eyes, her bloody fingers trembling. “I’m dying,” she said. “I don’t want to die. I don’t want to be one of those things.”
The air seemed to go out of her lungs.
Then, so faintly he barely heard her, she said, “I’ve been one of them for too long as it is.”
Canavan had no idea what to say, and it shamed him. She was pleading for some sign of human compassion, and it was just her lousy luck to meet with a man who could no more give it to her than he could cure the riot raging in her bloodstream.
“Will you do it?” she asked.
“Will I...?”
“Please. I don’t want to be one of those things.”
He followed her gaze to his right hand and was dumbfounded to see his pistol still there, the slide locked back in the empty position.
“I don’t,” he said, and trailed off. “It’s empty. I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that.” Her voice was muted in resignation. “Stop saying you’re sorry. It only makes it worse.”
He nodded.
A helicopter passed overhead, its blades a padded staccato rhythm. Soon they would start hearing
more gunfire, he realized. He’d need to be ready to signal the rescue squads before they gunned him down like one of the dead.
She started to cough, and to Canavan it sounded like her insides were being shredded by knives. The coughing went on for a long time, and when it subsided and she could once again lift her head to look at him, the deep valley between her breasts was flecked with black, clotted blood.
“Can’t you do it? Please, Jim. I don’t want to be one of them. I can’t…”
Canavan forced himself to swallow, as though there was an almond was stuck in his throat. His chest hurt when he breathed. The shame of his own impotence in the face of this woman’s pathos at first left him speechless; but gradually, his feelings of sympathy gave way to a vague, unfocused anger. He resented her for making him remember how lost and helpless he could feel.
He turned to leave.
“Wait!” she said. “Please, don’t go. Please. God it hurts so bad.”
He knew it did, and he wasn’t without pity. During their training, Canavan and his fellow Marines had been given the skinny on the necrosis filovirus and how it worked its way through the body, how it waged war in the bloodstream and gradually took complete control of the host body, leaving only a staggering train wreck of a virus bomb.
This woman was pretty far along. Infection had probably happened as much as an hour ago. Her temperature was spiking, leaving her face flushed in sweat. Already the blood in her veins was coagulating. A blueberry stain of cyanosis was forming around her mouth as her cells starved for want of oxygen. Her eyes were milking over. The coughing and the fluid in her lungs had affected her ability to speak, her voice taking on a whiskey-edged roughness that was becoming less and less human with each passing moment.
He wanted very much to leave her.
She began to cough again, the hacking shaking her like a rag doll in a dog’s mouth. She seemed unable to control her movements. A sudden sour odor of defecation reached him, and he knew she voided her bowels. She didn’t have long to go. Complete depersonalization would no doubt happen within the next ten minutes, probably less.
“Please, I need you to do this,” she said, barely able to lift her head now. “One bullet. Don’t you even have one bullet? That’s all it would take. Please, I hurt so bad. I can feel it inside me.”
He shifted uneasily and the glass crunching beneath his boots sounded very loud in the sepulchral stillness of that ruined lobby.
She watched his feet. She lifted her milky eyes and webs of wrinkles spread from the corners of her mouth. Within the few minutes he’d been with her she seemed to age horribly, as though she was a peach left on the sidewalk and puckering in the sun.
And then her face cracked with rage as she screamed at him.
“Why won’t you fucking help me? You bastard. All I want is a bullet.”
Canavan had to force himself not to look away. The look on her face, the baffled anger and desperation, brought images of his daughter into his head. Once again he saw her slipping under the waves. Heard her screaming, “Daddy! Dad-dy!”
He realized he was crying and swiped the tears away angrily. But the dying woman didn’t notice. She had started to cough again. When it subsided, she seemed detached and blunted, as though her mind had been scrambled and left her little more than a babbling idiot.
But he would not have told her about the depth of his self-loathing and shame, even if she had been capable of comprehending it. Perhaps she had her own issues, her own regrets, and perhaps she too had failed someone who had depended on her for their very life; but there were some things that cut so deeply into a man’s conscience that they could not be mentioned to anyone.
“One bullet,” she said.
“I’m sorry.”
She groaned once and his gaze fastened on her. Her breathing slowed, her mouth working like a fish that has been left on the shore by a wave. She tried to speak and couldn’t. He watched her struggle through two final breaths. There was a phlegmy rattle in her throat and her shoulders sagged, as though at rest after carrying a great weight.
Stillness descended on the lobby.
And then, slowly, laboriously, she climbed to her feet. Her head drooped to one side, her mouth hanging open. A fine patina of dust coated her lips. She reached for him, but he did not move until she began to moan; and when that happened he slid the collapsible baton from its holster at the small of his back and snapped it open.
She never acknowledged the danger. He sidestepped the woman and slapped her in the back of the head with the baton, knocking her forward onto her face. But he was still dizzy from the concussion bombing and was uncertain on his feet, and the force of his swing also knocked him onto his hands and knees.
In the stillness that followed he heard something small and metallic drop to the floor.
He looked into the puddle of broken glass below him and saw a single, perfectly clean bullet glittering amongst the dusty rubble. At first he didn’t know what to make of it, but gradually it came to him, the loose round he’d accidentally ejected while clearing a malfunction in his pistol during the fighting the evening before. He’d forgotten it was there.
That one bullet.
He stared at it for a long time. He could have helped her if he’d only had his wits about him. It was like Sarah all over again.
The thought curled around his heart like a cold, wet vapor.
He heard the echo of automatic rifle fire in the near distance, like people clapping in the next room.
“Marines, stand and identify.”
“In here,” Canavan shouted.
Another Marine appeared in the doorway, his rifle at low ready. “Identify,” he said. “Are you wounded?”
It was a question Canavan didn’t quite know how to answer.
* * * * *
Fourteen months later, Canavan made his way up the front walk of a one story white wooden house in a Nashville suburb and rang the doorbell. It had been raining all that evening and the air was thick with the damp scent of mown grass and pulsing with the sound of frogs. He had researched a lot of dead leads, but now his hunt was at an end. This was the house.
Paul Shepard was the spitting image of the smiling fat man Canavan had seen in Jessica’s photograph, though he had begun to gray at the temples and the bright smile had been replaced by nests of wrinkles around his eyes. He invited Canavan into the entryway but no further, and the two men stood in a web of soft white light and shadow cast by three glass chandeliers in the hallway that led to the rest of the house.
“My twelve year old has the flu,” he said in a whisper. “She just got to sleep about twenty minutes ago.”
Canavan nodded, though images of Sarah rose in his mind like corks that won’t stay submerged.
Then Canavan told him about San Antonio, and about his sister Jessica’s final minutes. Shepard listened to it all without interrupting, the expression on his face never wavering.
A woman poked her head around the far corner of the hallway and said, “Paul?”
“It’s okay. This is Mr. Canavan. He was with Jessica when she died.”
The woman looked at Canavan without expression. “I have Cokes and Dr. Pepper in the icebox,” she said. She waited a beat. “Scotch, if you’d like something stronger?”
“No, thank you, ma’am.”
She nodded and slipped back into the quiet darkness at the back of the house.
Shepard said, “You’ve come a long ways, Mr. Canavan. Are you sure I can’t offer you something?”
“I’m fine, really. I ought to be going.”
But before Canavan could leave, Shepard put a hand on his arm. “A moment, Mr. Canavan.”
“Yes?”
“Fourteen months is a long time to spend looking for somebody.”
“Your sister wasn’t completely lucid there at the end,” Canavan said. “She never told me anything about you. Besides your name, I mean. It took a while to find you.”
“I don’t mean that. I want to know
why you didn’t stop looking. You didn’t have to come tell me this. We all figured my sister was dead. Deep down we knew it. You must have realized that too.”
“I guess I figured I owed it to...I don’t know. To her.” Canavan’s eyes slid off of Shepard’s face. “Maybe to myself.”
Shepard’s brown eyes seemed to soften, and the knots of veins that stitched his temples seemed to slacken.
He said, “Mr. Canavan, when my sister left for San Antonio she did so to escape our mother. The woman was dying of cancer of the small intestine. Have you ever known anyone with that particular condition? She was in terrible pain. There at the end she was living with Jessica because we couldn’t afford a hospice nurse and sometimes when I’d visit I’d see Jessica sitting on the curb in front of her house, crying her eyes out. You could hear our mother moaning all the way out in the driveway. I’ve sometimes asked myself if Jessica didn’t go down to San Antonio knowing what she’d find there. I think maybe she found what she was looking for.”
Canavan just stared at him.
“Did you know, Mr. Canavan, that the Japanese have a word for the people who survived Hiroshima and Nagasaki? Those people with the thousand yard stares. Those people who cannot hold down a steady job or stand in a crowd without wanting to cower into a ball or even carry on a conversation that goes beyond a few inane pleasantries. They called them Hibakusha. It means sufferers. Our word for it is survivors. But I think their word seems much more fitting, don’t you?”
Canavan said, “Are you trying to tell me something, Mr. Shepard?”
“I think I just did, sir. I think all survivors carry hell around with them like a turtle does his shell.”
Canavan thought about those words several hours later, as he washed his face in the sink of a gas station bathroom south of Nashville.
Aberrations Page 6
