“I’ll move out eventually,” Jack said. “I just need to find what’s right for me.”
“Sometimes we don’t ever get what we think is right for us,” Henry said.
“Like you would know! You got out of here the first chance you got!”
“Because I couldn’t stand it!” Henry said, and stood up. “Every minute of every day, it’s ‘Let’s watch Night of the Dead this,’ or ‘Let’s play zombies and survivors that!’”
“Night of the Living Dead—”
“Or it’s planning stupid dress-up games with your internet friends, or making plans for some event that can’t possibly happen, or doing anything but actually having a life!”
It was silent for a moment, and Henry sat back down.
“I have a life,” Jack said. “I just didn’t force myself to like it, like you did.”
Henry sighed. “Jack, I’m sorry. It’s the flight… You know I didn’t mean—”
Jack stood up.
“When did you become everything we hated, Hen?”
Jack left the room. Henry couldn’t see his eyes. He heard footsteps go down the hall, and then the door to the basement opened. Henry turned around and called down the hallway.
“You know I didn’t mean it, Jackie!”
The door slammed shut, and the footsteps faded away.
“You know I didn’t mean it,” Henry said to himself.
****
It was the ringing phone that put the two brothers in the same room again. The call was from their mother. Henry answered it in the kitchen, and Jack entered the room soon after.
“Hey, Mom,” Henry said.
“Henry, do you have the television on?”
“No, why?”
“Turn it on, sweetie.” Henry looked into Jack’s eyes, telling him there was something wrong, then made his way to the living room, and Jack followed. Henry turned on the television.
“—how to explain what’s happening, other than people all over the country, perhaps the world, are turning insane and violent in mass numbers, attacking each other, reportedly with nails, teeth, and sometimes even eating other people. It is heavily advised that everyone stay at home and lock the doors, and don’t answer them for anyone. If anyone around you becomes unresponsive, violent, or sickly, it is advised that you lock them in another room and don’t go near them. Again, this is not a test, we are facing a countrywide catastrophe…”
“Hen, what’s going on?” Jack asked.
“Mom, are you and Dad all right?”
“We’re fine, honey. But we’re stuck in traffic, it’s only gotten worse. There are people on the sidewalks, and in the streets… So many people, some are running, so much blood…”
“Mom, don’t get out of the car!”
“Don’t worry. We aren’t going anywhere. A few of them are trying to get in, though. We can hardly move at all, there are wrecks everywhere!”
“Hen, put it on speakerphone!”
Henry put the phone on speakerphone, and the sounds from the other end of the line filled the room. There were horns honking, screams, and occasional bouts of broken glass.
Jack flipped the television to the local news, and the chopper was aiming the camera at the downtown streets.
“Hen, look!” Jack said.
The streets were grimmer than their mother had been able to describe. There were bodies strewn about, and wrecks everywhere. A line of vehicles stretched to either edge of the television set, most of them not moving at all.
“Again, we want to warn our viewers that the following images are extremely disheartening,” a male anchor was saying, “but also extremely important. We aren’t quite sure what’s going on, but there seems to be some kind of event sweeping the nation. We’ll keep you posted from our news chopper anchor. Dave, what do you have for us?”
Another voice broke in, this one distorted somewhat, as though it was coming through a telephone.
“Well, Marty, as you can see, traffic has come to a halt, people are basically sitting ducks in their cars… oh God, I don’t even know what to do. They’re not safe there, but they aren’t any safer outside their cars. This is… this is the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life. Oh my God.”
“Look, there’s Mom and Dad!” Jack said, pointing at a little blue car on the screen. It was in the middle lane, safe from the crazy passersby, but wasn’t going anywhere.
“Mom, we can see you on the TV.”
“Your father and I want you to know that we love you both very much. If anything happens out here—-”
“Mom, don’t talk like that,” Henry said. He was starting to tear up, and that made Jack follow suit.
“… If anything happens, you boys take care of each other, do you understand?”
“Of course, Mom.”
The chopper anchor came back on in a hurry. “Marty! Oh God, there’s a plane coming in low! I think it’s going to hit! Christ Almighty!”
The camera panned up, and a blur of motion went by.
“Mom, Dad, we love you!” Jack shouted at the phone.
“We love you too, swee—”
The phone went dead at the same moment the anchorman on TV screamed, and the picture showed little but a fiery mess of crumpled metal. The camera cut back to Marty in the studio, muting Dave’s cries.
Henry let the phone fall to the ground. The two brothers found themselves in each other’s embrace, where they always had when they didn’t know what else to do.
****
Jack sat on the ground, a hammer before him, between his legs. The window above him was neatly boarded up, along with the other windows and the doors. He rested his head on his hands, staring off into nothing, thinking.
It had been several hours since the event had come into their lives. Within the first two hours the television had stopped broadcasting, and phones and radios stopped working, as though something was jamming them. The two brothers had finished boarding up the house and gotten used to ignoring the screams and moans and explosions coming from the outside world. Morning would come soon, yet neither could sleep.
“So,” Henry said from the chair where he sat, across the floor from Jack. “What do we do now?”
“How the hell should I know?” Jack said.
“Well… you’ve been waiting for this, right? You have to know something about it.”
Jack looked up for the first time in several hours.
“Waiting for it? What is that supposed to mean?”
“I’m not trying to be offensive,” Henry said. “I know how absurd this all is, but you have to admit, whatever’s going on… it’s pretty similar to your zombie fiction.”
“That doesn’t mean anything. Those are just movies and games. They aren’t real. Whatever’s going on out there, that’s real. I wasn’t waiting for this. I didn’t want this.”
“Yeah.” Henry sighed. “Yeah, well, we need a plan.”
“And you think I have one?”
“Isn’t that what you and your friends were up to?”
“I don’t think anyone could’ve prepared for this,” Jack said. He stood up. “I’m going to try to get some sleep.”
“I’ll stay, you know,” Henry said as Jack began to walk away. Jack stopped. “At least until this all clears up. And for a while after.”
“Thanks,” Jack said, and then he headed for his room.
One sleepless night was followed by another, and another after that. Jack and Henry didn’t talk much, but when they did, it was just like old times. They spoke only of casual things, rarely mentioning their parents or the world outside or their lives before the event.
One morning, as Jack came up the stairs out of the basement, he found a note on the kitchen table.
Jackie,
I needed some air. Don’t worry, I went somewhere nobody can find me. I’ll be safe. See you soon. Don’t come look for me.
-Henry
Jack froze with terror. He hadn’t even comprehended venturing outside unl
ess it was necessary, let alone finding himself without his brother. He wondered where Henry could’ve gone, and then a feeling came over him. Jack peeked between boards out a window to make sure the back yard was empty. It was, and he headed out. His feeling turned out to be correct. He found his brother by the river.
“Hen! What are you doing out here?”
Henry looked up at Jack from the bank of the river.
“I told you not to come look for me,” he said.
“I was afraid something would happen to you.”
“So you came out to find me unarmed? You could have at least grabbed Dad’s old revolver from his closet.”
“Dad kept a gun?” Jack said. Henry looked up at him, confused for a moment, and then laughed. Jack sat down on the ground next to him.
“I envy you, you know,” Henry said. It took Jack by surprise. Why should Henry envy him? Henry had a job, and a lot of money. He had gone out into the world and gotten everything he wanted.
“Why?”
“Because you’re still innocent. The world never got to you.”
“Why’d you let it get to you?”
“I said it was your fault, didn’t I?” Henry said. He tossed a rock into the calmly flowing water before him. “Well, it wasn’t. I was jealous, I guess. I saw the way the world was for you. You could’ve had a good job, you could’ve moved out on your own, but you chose not to. You decided to wait for something better.”
“You could’ve done the same,” Jack said.
“I didn’t think I deserved it,” Henry said. Jack looked at him.
“So you’d settle for something you didn’t want?”
“I thought I could have both. I thought I’d go down this path and find a better one along the way. That it was better than being a burden.”
“Which is all I am?”
“No. But both of us would have been.”
“So you left,” Jack said, fighting back the tears that tried to well up in his eyes, “so that I wouldn’t have to.”
“It doesn’t matter, now. We’re both here. That’s what matters.”
A little while passed. There was the occasional crack of a twig somewhere nearby, but no one came to bother them.
“I should’ve died, here,” Henry said.
“No,” Jack said. “You shouldn’t have.”
“I wonder sometimes, what things would’ve been like if you hadn’t been there. If I had just gone down the river and disappeared.”
“Why would you want to think about something like that?” Jack said.
“Because the world finally caught me, I guess.”
“You really think it would’ve been better if you had died?”
“I can’t help it, sometimes,” Henry said. Jack could fight the tears no longer, and he wrapped his arms around his brother.
“You’re stupid! Don’t you understand that I need you?”
Henry hugged his brother.
“Yeah,” Henry said. “And that’s why I’m still here. Why I didn’t go down the river.”
“Brothers until death,” Jack said.
****
The electricity stayed on for a while, but Jack had given up on his movies and games. He spent most of his days just trying to get by. He and Henry made a few trips out to the local store for food and supplies, and because they lived in a quiet area, they did so with relative ease, defending themselves with a baseball bat and a shovel they had found in the garage.
On one of their trips, Jack’s baseball bat broke when he clubbed a zombie in the head. He and Henry made it home safely, but the bat was useless.
“Maybe it’s time to get the revolver out,” Jack said in the living room. He looked out the window to make sure nothing had followed them, and saw only the empty street.
“It’s pretty old,” Henry said. “I hope it still works.”
“It probably works better than a broken baseball bat,” Jack said. They made their way to their father’s closet.
“It’s on the top shelf,” Henry said. “In a little black box.”
Jack found the box, barely reachable, and lowered it from the shelf. He opened it, and there lay the revolver, as well as a few boxes of ammo.
“Know how to load it?” Henry asked.
“I think so,” Jack said. He took the gun from the box and opened the chamber, which was more difficult than it looked in the various TV shows or movies or games he’d seen. He loaded it with six rounds and tried to close the chamber. It didn’t move at first, so he pushed harder. The chamber snapped shut, and the gun fell from his hand and onto the floor. It fired, and Jack flinched at the deafening sound and kept his eyes sealed shut as he felt drops of warm liquid splash his face.
The next few seconds were a blur.
He opened his eyes, unable to breathe, unable to hear, wishing he was unable to see. There lay Henry with a large chunk of his head missing, slumped against the wall. One of his eyes was gone and the other was open, staring forward at nothing, to Jack it looked permanently accusing. A trail of blood ran down the wall from a splatter where the bullet had entered Henry’s head, and bits of blood and bone and brain were everywhere.
Jack screamed. He couldn’t hear himself for the longest time, but it didn’t matter. He cradled his brother’s body, hated himself for this thing, this stupid, pointless thing. He wanted everything to be all right; he wanted to gather the bits of brain and bone, scrape them back up and put them together, to believe that Henry would be okay if he held it long enough. But he knew it was too late, and in a way had always been too late. His brother was gone, his family and his hope and his life and that day at the river and the closeness that had followed were all gone, left summarized by a stain on the wall of his parents’ bedroom.
Jack grabbed the revolver and put it to his head. He didn’t hesitate to pull the trigger and be with Henry, but nothing happened. The fall had broken the gun, the hammer wouldn’t move and the trigger wouldn’t pull all the way. Jack threw it across the room, still screaming. He held his brother’s body, rocking back and forth, and screamed until he couldn’t, and then he cried, and then he sobbed, and eventually he fell asleep.
****
A few days went by before Jack felt like he had gotten a hold on himself, though he knew deep down that he never really would. He made no sound, he ate very little and drank even less, and he thought about everything.
He wrapped Henry’s body in the bedsheets that had adorned Henry’s bed for as long as he could remember. Very carefully, he carried his brother’s body out of the house, across the yard, and all the way to the river.
When he got there, he stepped into the water. It only came up to his waist, now. He let Henry’s body float on top of the water, holding it with an almost taunting ease.
“Brothers until death,” he said. It was his final goodbye, and he stood in the water long after he could no longer see that angelic white figure floating on it, long after his brother had gone down the river and disappeared.
“You won’t,” he said. “You won’t disappear.”
When Jack got back home, he found an empty notebook and a pen, and he began to write. Finally he had something worth writing. He wouldn’t let Henry disappear, wouldn’t let the bloodstain on the wall be the summary of his brother’s life, or of his own.
At the top of the paper, he began.
The River: The Story of My Brother
It didn’t matter that what he wrote wouldn’t make him any money. He had finally found his calling. He would write volumes, and he would set them beneath the stain on the wall, and then he would leave. The world had finally gotten to him, and he would leave home, leave his paraphernalia and collectibles and everything else behind. But the story would be there, so anyone passing by could read it and know more than just a stain on a bedroom wall. They would know that somewhere in time, two brothers played in a river, and the world could never catch them.
On the Road
It was very hot in the abandoned filling station
on the outskirts of Chicago, where Larry Ellington had pulled over to take a shit and scavenge for useful items.
He stood up from the porcelain throne and went to wash his hands. His eyes fell over a quarter-operated condom dispenser mounted on the wall by the sink. He couldn’t help but chuckle when he saw some of the flavor choices, although his voice had a hollowness to it. When Larry finished cleaning up, he realized there were no paper towels. He chose to use the front of his pants as he exited the bathroom.
A good ten feet away from the bathroom door was the register counter. All sorts of goodies lay on it, begging to be purchased, but Larry was more interested in what was behind it.
As he walked around the counter, he saw the mutilated body of the clerk and a cardboard box hanging partially out from a cubby under the counter. Inside was a clump of brand new plastic sacks, inscribed with brick letters: KUM & GO. He opened one and inched toward the cigarette rack. Larry grabbed a carton of Winston Lights and dropped it into the bag. He thought for a second and then grabbed another. He wasn’t a chain smoker, but things had become very stressful lately, so he grabbed a third carton.
A small display of metal flip-top lighters sat in a little plastic tray on the counter. Larry snatched one up and inspected it. The top made a metallic click as he flipped it up. The flame shot up brilliantly, dancing about. He took the last cigarette from the pack in his breast pocket, lifted it to his mouth, and inhaled generously as he lit the cigarette. The end glowed brightly, and it burned a half inch toward Larry’s mouth, then he took it out. He closed his eyes, enjoyed the taste. He opened his mouth and watched the smoke swirl out past his lips into the air around him. One more drag, and he was able to form two near-perfect smoke rings. The third was a little ragged, but still a ring in Larry’s book.
With the cigarette in his mouth, Larry moved around the store, gathering items for his voyage. He took a collapsible cooler, filled it with ice, and grabbed some sandwich meat from a deli cooler. He passed the beer cooler, but decided against taking any. He really wanted some beer to help get him through this, but it just wasn’t smart to be inebriated. Some chips, cookies, and granola bars made it into the plastic bags. Larry stood near the drink coolers, leaning partially on the ice cold door, taking the final drag of his cigarette. He dropped the butt on the tiled floor. It landed in the filthy grout, followed by Larry’s foot, crushing the heat out.
After the Bite Page 2
