(Book 2)What Remains

by Barnes, Nathan

  Correspondingly colored plastic cups sat with every setting. Inside each was what looked like apple juice. Each place setting had a fork and a knife carefully aligned to complete the scene. Centered in the whole thing was another box topped with a covered serving tray.

  Then I noticed that my setting was different. Placed slightly askew on my blue plate were three silk flowers. The color was so similar that I didn’t spot them with my initial survey. Tears threatened to tease my vision again.

  Calise wouldn’t allow her five-year-old patience level to be tested any longer. “Well, Daddy? Aren’t they pretty?” Her wavy hair bounced around her shoulders while she awaited my approval.

  I looked at Sarah. She had a matching tear that escaped the corner of her eye. “Calise insisted on doing something special for your first dinner back with us. She spent most of the afternoon going through my craft box to find the flowers. Then she did a wonderful job setting up our dinner tables.” Calise got even more excited hearing that her mother recognized a busy day’s worth of effort.

  “They are almost as pretty as you, baby girl.” I said while wiping the salty stream of tears from my stubbled cheek. “Come here and give me a big kiss.”

  She had leaped over towards me before the sentence was even finished. About three feet from me she stopped, placed her hands down and behind her back, then stepped calmly up to me with her chin up and lips puckered. I bent down and gave the little angel a big kiss on the lips.

  Calise flinched, pulling away while giggling. “Daddy!” she said like I’d embarrassed her. “Your beard tickles! I think you need to shave.”

  “What for? I don’t think I’ll need to go back into work anytime soon. Now enough stalling! I’m so hungry I might just eat you up.” I said back in a silly, scary voice.

  Maddox laughed quietly with Sarah. Calise turned into a bouncing blur of pink and was quickly seated behind her plate. Sarah leaned over to reveal the dinner. “I hope hot dogs sound good to you,” she said while exposing a platter of a dozen beef franks.

  “Sounds delicious!” I underestimated the distance and plopped painfully down on the pillow, quickly recovered, and scooted to the plate. “Are they still good?”

  “No, I thought I’d wait until now to try and give you food poisoning.” She made a raspberry sound and both kids giggled. “We froze them before the power went out. As long as we’re quick when opening the chest freezer things shouldn’t thaw for a couple more days. The buns are about to go bad, though, so we’ve got to eat them.”

  “How did you cook them?”

  Maddox chimed in. “We boiled them outside.”

  “Outside?”

  Maddox was about to explain when Sarah cut him off. “We can talk about that later. For now let’s just have a nice dinner.”

  Calise had already chomped up half of the hot dogs on her plate. The ravenous appetite of a five year old and an eight year old is rivaled only by the undead. I smiled and took a sip of the diluted apple juice.

  We all ate in an uncharacteristic silence. Normally, Sarah and I had to remind the kids to talk less and eat more. This time we just sat relishing the combination of sustenance and company. Outside I heard the clatter of distant gunfire. No one else reacted. Either I’m the only one who had heard it, or I had become such a regular sound that they didn’t react.

  I tried not to think about what the gunfire meant. Somewhere there was a human being fighting for their life while necessarily desecrating the fallen life of another. Could their children be watching them as they fired that gun? How long before mine would see me fight the dead? The new world was far too overwhelming to be removed from my thought process. I couldn’t even enjoy a meal with my loved ones without succumbing to anxiety of inevitabilities.

  Maddox inhaled all three hot dogs, then dabbed the ketchup off his mouth. “Do you know what tomorrow is, Daddy?”

  I thought for a second about what it might be. During my recovery period I’d lost all track of the days. “No, Monkey, what is tomorrow?”

  “It’s Thanksgiving, duh!” he snorted.

  Sarah immediately smacked him in the arm with a rolled up napkin. “Don’t talk to your father that way. He’s been through a lot to get here. It’s not his fault he didn’t know what day it was.”

  His head dropped shamefully. “Sorry, Daddy…”

  “It’s okay... I really didn’t know. I suppose we’ll have to make a bigger dinner for tomorrow night then won’t we?” The shame washed away from Maddox as soon as I said it.

  Calise eagerly raised her hand. Her little wrist twisted around and all five fingers danced. The mini pink beauty acted like she was in school and wanted to be called upon. “Yes, baby girl?”

  “Can I help make it? Mommy said last year I was too little but now I’m big,” she said with a mixture of hesitance and pride.

  We all chuckled. Sarah said, “Yes, honey, you can help,” prompting a gleaming smile from Calise.

  I nodded my head in approval. “Good. Tomorrow we’ll have a nice Thanksgiving dinner. I’d like to see the zom… eh… the monsters take that from us!”

  Sarah gave me a justifiable scolding-wife-styled look. She and I had briefly discussed not saying the word ‘zombie’ in front of Calise. She was too young to worry more than she absolutely had to. I almost slipped and said it. However, referring to the infected ‘monsters’ was equally fitting.

  “I think tomorrow I’ll try to make it outside too. It’ll make me feel better about you guys doing it if I can see its safe with my own eyes.” Sarah began to gather a protest to my saying it. “And yes, sweetheart, I am feeling up to it.”

  Everyone looked happy. It was a nice change to see because the world was anything but happy. I hoped to God that there were other families out there still able to plan their Thanksgiving dinners.

  2210 hours:

  I decided to stay upstairs for the night. The high I’d gotten from an illusion of normalcy made me feel like I was up to the task.

  Sarah went downstairs and got more drugs. She also pulled some of the blankets from our bed hoping to make me more comfortable. When she returned she quietly eased the ladder to the upright position, which isolated us completely. If the dead were to break down the barriers while we slept, they would have been rewarded with an empty house. Everyone nestled in for the night.

  The attic was chilly. It wasn’t ever an area that was built for occupancy, however, the modifications done in my absence compensated for that somewhat. Collapsing the stairs also created a bubble of body-heated air throughout our pseudo-second floor. The four of us huddled up there combined with a few carefully burned candles raised the ambient temperature by easily twenty degrees. Regardless of the changes, our breath was still slightly visible in the pre-winter air.

  Maddox and Calise were both sound asleep. They look like plump, happy grubs in their thermal sleeping bags. Sarah prepped our double sized bag for the two of us. I saw her doing this and must have advertised my thoughts through my worried expression.

  She looked at me with playful yet serious eyes. “I don't care how you smell or where you hurt. If you don’t crawl into this sleeping bag with me then I’m going to be cold. And as you well know, when I’m cold I get angry. If I get angry and cold then you’ll be better off outside with the monsters.”

  I reached my aching arm out and placed my finger over her lip to shush the playful threats. “I was just going to ask you to go easy on the spooning. You know, Hun, we’re going to have to leave here sooner or later. When we do, I have to be as close to normal as possible. If my ribs don’t heal right because you insisted on spooning then it could end up getting me bitten. That’s right, your vicious cuddling could actually kill me.”

  “You’re an ass. Now hurry up, I’m getting cold,” she said with a devilish smile. It didn’t take any more motivation for me to get nestled up to my beloved. Not long before being so cozy with my loved ones I was huddled between railroad ties atop a bridge above a river that seethed with
the dead. Those palpably nightmarish memories permeated my subconscious. While I lay there with my wife those memories they faded from feeling peace for the first time since before the world ended. Evidently, it was easy to overlook the scars of hell when heaven cradled you. Finally, everyone and everything I held dear was within a few feet of me.

  2340 hours:

  Something stirred me from a hellacious dream. Every time I closed my eyes I was punished for what had already happened. I’d begun to think that dreams existed for two purposes: to give you hope for what might be and to punish you for what had already been. I spent hours in bed trying to focus on happy times of the past so that any final waking thoughts might leach into my dreams. However, anxiety over what was to come for all of us made the effort a futile one.

  Hope can be one of the most powerful forces imaginable. As potent as it may be, it was also the biggest victim that came from the shattering of death’s finality. Beyond the millions of lives lost and lasting threat to mankind, the most tragic toll was the extinction of hope. Any living soul that had the luxury of thought could not consider even the most insignificant aspect of life without the infected coming into play. We may survive encounters with those afflicted by the Reaper virus, but their impact was one of profound pollution. Now the living were cursed with no hope for a return to real life.

  There was a constant pressure around my waist. Sarah nestled into my side and gripped me like a life preserver. A few feet away Maddox and Calise were both in their separate sleeping bags under a thick comforter. The reasons I must force myself to hope again were all around me. I couldn’t let them see how worried I actually was.

  My thought process was interrupted by a sound outside. It must have been the same sound that had pulled me away from my nightmare. I tried to ease my way out of Sarah’s constriction. She mumbled something in her sleep and squeezed tighter.

  The wince I let out partially woke her. “Where are you going?” she asked.

  Her death grip loosened enough for me to sit up. I whispered, “I heard something outside. I’m going to go to the peephole and see if I can get a look.”

  “Don’t, baby.” Sarah shivered when I sat up. Puncturing her warm air cocoon brought her out of her sleepy state just enough to look irritated by my stubbornness. “There’s no way they can get to us up here. Just go back to sleep and whatever it is will leave… they always do.”

  She was implying that this wasn’t a random disturbance. I was angry now. A few weeks ago I would have countered a late night intruder around our yard by turning on the flood lights, calling the police, and going to the door without enough clothing while holding something menacing. Now I was huddled in the attic of our home feeling helpless. I wouldn’t be able to rest again until I knew what was out there.

  “My muscles are starting to ache from not stretching them. I’m just going to loosen up and peek out. Stay bundled, sweetheart – I’ll be back in your bubble before you know it.”

  I made it into the chilled air before she could muster another protest. Standing up was easier than I anticipated. I felt confident that I had been healing well, because rising this way would have been impossible a couple of days before. The kids were blissfully knocked out. I tiptoed around them and made my way to the improvised blockade.

  My arms creaked out towards the removable box. An odd sound outside stopped me in my tracks. There was a thud followed by rhythmic scraping. The pattern was baffling. Nothing I could imagine matched the clatter I actually heard. After the peephole section was removed I slowly peered out.

  The figure caught my attention immediately. At that time of night, I should have only seen a view of my neighbor’s fence. Instead, a trespasser marred the normally peaceful nook. It hobbled along the fence with an outstretched arm, every step dragging his rotting digits along the planks. The perplexing rhythm I had heard was created when the scratching went from one board to another.

  Darkness hid most of his details from my view. It almost seemed like he was staring up at me with those black, soulless eyes. I blinked hard, hoping that doing so would kick the view out of my imagination. When I opened them again he had gotten closer to our side of the fence. Most of his silhouette was obscured from my vantage point by a spindly oak tree that lined the fence. A wisp of late November air caught my face bringing about a shudder. Even though I couldn’t clearly see the ghoul, I still heard the nails digging across the wood.

  This was the first time I’d observed the zombies in such a way since arriving home. When the infection initially broke out I tried to study them as much as possible. Doing so might prepare me for my flight away from the dead city. Now I’d reached my loved ones… and so had the reapers. Feeling like my wretched curiosity had been appeased, I moved to reseal the peephole.

  Then a blast echoed from somewhere up the street. It must have come from someone living firing a shotgun or maybe a large caliber rifle. Whatever it was caught the attention of our trespasser. He ceased scraping and let out a ravenous growl. On the opposite side of the house I heard a similar racket from another member of the undead. Three seconds later a car alarm sounded from the area towards the gun blast.

  I quickly sealed the peephole before any lurking sounds of nocturnal horror could bother my sleeping family. Sarah was correct; I should have just ignored what I heard. There was evil out there literally lurking at our doorstep. Another sound from the other side of the house confirmed that the trespasser I saw wasn’t the only one on the property that night.

  Adrenaline added a dangerous potency to my pain killer-filled bloodstream. Anger had surfaced above my worry. If I knew I could get out of the attic without waking anyone I probably would. Right then I was so infuriated by this invasion that I wanted to grab my Kukri and quench its thirst for blood. I sat down next to Sarah and our sleeping bag nest. She startled me by placing a gentle hand on my shoulder.

  “Calm down,” she whispered softly. “At the moment we are safe and you are here. We can worry about the rest later.”

  I didn’t say anything back because once again, she was right. My response came in the form of my stiff return to a horizontal position under the warmth of our blankets. She kissed me gently and was asleep in minutes. I lay there stewing in my thoughts.

  We were safe for the time being. As long as the dead stayed on the other side of the fence we would have time to plan. The reaction from the infected that I witnessed to a distant sound reinforced the need for us to remain hidden. The following day I planned on going out in the yard to check the perimeter. I was sure it would feel good to do something beyond remaining still in the name of healing.

  My storm of thoughts eased to a drizzle. Before sleep returned to open the door for my nightmares, I pondered the blast outside. Something like that must have come from someone that still had a beating heart. For their sake, I prayed that the single trigger pull that I heard brought that person peace instead of more pain.

  Chapter 5 – Relative Safety

  Day Four - November 26th

  0935 hours:

  Life before the end offered so much comfort in its routines. I never realized how much I took the simple daily tasks for granted until Thanksgiving morning. This thought occurred to me as I stood atop my mangled back deck-turned-platform. It was also the first time I’d been outside since getting pulled inside the house unconscious and wounded. The aching in my ribs was numbed down by a potent blend of painkillers and adrenaline. Being outdoors was unnerving. Although, I’d never admit feeling that way to the little one that watched me through the crack in the kitchen window boards.

  Calise stood on the chair that she normally would have been sitting at waiting for her morning sugar rush. Either Sarah or I should’ve been pouring milk into two bowls of Frosted Flakes under the intense scrutiny of hungry children. Instead, Calise watched me as I nervously observed her brother and mother. Maddox was in the grass keeping a close eye on his mommy’s every move. He gripped a camping machete tightly in his eight-year-old hand.
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br />   My son is out there with a machete. What has this world become? I thought to myself while trying to control increasingly panicked breaths.

  Signs of anxiety were far less apparent in the rest of my family. This may have been my first time observing the routine but they had spent nearly every morning since the dead rose turning this into a necessary morning ritual. The morning hours of each day evolved to include an expedition of Sarah tiptoeing around the fence line. She did this holding her own blade, a heavy piece lethality I bought her years ago as a silly gift. Who would have thought that the sword I painted partially pink would actually be used to fight the undead? I longed for the days where such a thought was nothing more than a foolish outlet for generalized angst.

  First they embarked on a pulse pounding, slow inspection of the fence lengths that connected to the house. Once this was completed they patrolled a wooded portion of our yard that the kids have always referred to as ‘the jungle’. In reality, this section is far from a jungle; however, to a child it must look like walking from a golf course green into the bowels of Vietnam. Before Calise was born Maddox began getting adventurous during outside playtime and the wooded area quickly became one of legend for the little man. To him it was a place where monsters played and demons lurked. He continuously tempted the boundaries to see how far we would let him wander. Sarah hated when I’d go back there with our curious ball of energy; random vines of thorns and a host of biting insects made the area one where children didn’t belong.