Beyond the Barriers

by Timothy W. Long

  I tossed the rest of my coffee back, wandered to the back window, and stood there for some time. The trees made it hard to see far, so I crouched down to the level where I’d been when I saw the figure and stared for a long time. I found the copse and watched it. Birds flitted from tree to tree, and I heard the unmistakable call of a hawk as it soared somewhere over the woods. It was green, pastoral, and I felt at ease once again. The sense of normalcy, the comfort of having Katherine with me, sank in, and I smiled at my imagined apparition, then went to join her in the other room. The smell was all Pacific Northwest. Trees and fresh dirt. Moisture in the air. Everything just as normal as it should be.

  “No monsters?” She sat on the chair, legs crossed demurely while she sipped her coffee.

  “Not that I could see.”

  “Then come and kiss me.”

  * * *

  The trail was hard to pick out. I had been this way a few times while hunting last year, but it was far from the lake, and I didn’t think I would have much luck hunting here. Now, with food being scarce and necessary for the two of us, I would settle for cooking squirrels if I was fast enough to take one down.

  I was dressed in my jeans and a long flannel shirt. She wore her jeans and a shirt of mine belted at the waist. She had to roll up the sleeves, and she wore one of Ray’s camouflage caps at an angle that made her look just as cute as could be. She followed behind me, hunting rifle pointing at the ground. I had the .20-gauge in hand and one of the handguns in the waistband of my pants.

  “I think it was near here,” I said as we crashed through the low vegetation. Any pretense at moving in quietly as we stalked prey was cast aside as we made for the spot. I was still trying to convince myself I hadn’t seen anything at all—just a trick of the light, a ghostly mirage brought on by mist and the low moon.

  The air was crisp and clear, and the smell of evergreens was pungent. There were fallen pinecones to crunch across, wild blackberry branches to step over and push aside. Too bad it wasn’t closer to summer. With all the berries, we could solve our vitamin C problem and make a sweet treat. She kept an eye on the ground, because she wanted to find some tubers and cook them. Tubers sounded strange, but she told me they were similar to potatoes.

  I dropped to my knees as if I knew what I was doing, looking for footprints or broken vegetation near the ground. Nothing stood out, so I moved around the spot, but still nothing caught my eye. I didn’t really know what to look for anyway. I was far from a scout. In fact, if a game trail jumped up and bit me, I wouldn’t know what to do with it.

  “See. It was nothing,” she said as she moved behind me.

  “I know, but thanks for humoring me.”

  “No problem. Someone has to straighten you out, living out here alone for this long. I’m just glad you don’t run around naked with a bunch of paint on your face yelling that the cavalry is coming. A person needs companionship.”

  “Well, I have you now. You’ll just have to stick around for a while and make sure I’m not crazy.” I grinned at her. “I was thinking of running some sort of alarm. Just some fishing wire with bottles. It would alert us if something was trying to get to the cabin.”

  “Good idea. There is a lot of land to cover. How are you going to differentiate between game and a green-eyed asshole?”

  I shrugged. She had a good point. We should be so lucky as to have a buck wander near the cabin and alert us to his presence. He might as well show up with a dinner bib on.

  She blew a piece of hair out of her face where it escaped her cap. Her eyes had a bit of tightness to them, like she was still holding back. I was willing to wait her out. She was worth it. All the horror of the world that we lost, she had seen it. She witnessed the worst and came out of it stronger. I admired her willpower, and promised myself I would keep her safe. Of course, she was one tough cookie. She would probably end up keeping me safe. I smiled at myself. Later I would ask her to spar with me, teach me some of those reverse hook punches I had seen the first night. She put a wicked snap on them.

  As if one of them had read my thoughts, I managed to bring down a deer a few hours later. We dragged the whole thing back to the cabin and butchered it. She even sipped at some of the blood, so I joined her. When I looked up at her, I recoiled. She reminded me of the ghouls we’d fought just a few days ago with the blood dripping down her mouth and chin.

  I shuddered and looked away.

  * * *

  We cut up the meat, and then she showed me how to make strips of it so we could smoke it. I made a fire outside, and we used an old barrel lined with small branches to chamber the smoke. We put as much meat in as we could, and let it sit outside all evening. We had fresh steaks, and then I made a stew with some of the meat and rice. It wouldn’t last long. In fact, none of the meat would.

  “We can’t stay here,” I said.

  “I know. We have no way to refrigerate stuff, and if we don’t cure the meat before smoking it, we run the chance of getting sick. We would need a lot of salt for that.”

  “Think we should go back to that store and see if we can find some?”

  “It’s worth a try, but I think we should try for Portland.”

  I had to agree with her. The thought of staying in the cabin was one I found hard not to love. I wanted to spend as much time as I could with her. I wanted to make her happy, and show her how much she meant to me now that she had rescued me from loneliness. She stared into my eyes in a challenging way. I think that if I’d said no, she would have tried to go without me.

  “I think so too. It’s a good idea to go soon, since we may have wiped out a lot of those ghouls from town. We can probably zip through that barricade, or what’s left of it, and then set out after the group.”

  She leaned over and kissed me, but I caught a hint of sadness in the gesture. I looked away, because I was reminded of Pat’s sacrifice at the barrier.

  We buried the remains of the deer a ways from our home. I went out with an old shovel while she straightened up the cabin. I put all the parts in an old, black plastic bag I had been using for various functions and dragged it away. The thing had a hole in it somewhere, so it leaked a trail of blood behind me. At first I tried to flip the bag over, but it was overloaded, and I was afraid it would break. I tried to cover it up by kicking leaves and pine needles over the stain, but I knew it was useless. A predator would smell the blood from a mile away.

  I found a patch of ground and went at it with the shovel. It was hard, and there were a lot of roots in the way. I had to really work at it, but it felt good to stretch my muscles. At one point, I found a thick root and went back to the cabin for my axe. I tugged it from under the edge of a bench on the porch. When I looked in the window, I saw Katherine with her back to me. She was standing in the kitchen, staring out the window. I watched her for almost a minute, but she didn’t move. Then her hand went to her forehead, and I saw her shoulders move up and down as if she were sobbing.

  I walked back to the hole and finished with some judicious use of the sharp blade. As I dug, I thought of my companion. She was close to me in years, but she had the weariness of someone much older. I found it very hard to put myself in her shoes, to imagine losing my entire family to those things. I knew that it made her a bit of a wildcard; I had seen the battle and the way she reacted to the things at the barricade. She had been almost gleeful while she fired into their ranks. As we drove away, she had swerved to hit some of them with my car. Just ran them down, even though they were trying to get out of the way. I had a feeling that when, and if, we did battle again, I would need to keep a close eye on her.

  I looked up, because I had a strange feeling between my shoulder blades, like someone just ran a feather over my skin. I had that feeling before, a few times, when the action was hot in Iraq. Ducking had usually been the thing to do, reacting to the strange sixth sense that we humans had when being watched.

  I spun in a circle as I studied the thick vegetation. It was probably Katherine coming to ge
t me for help with something.

  “That you, babe?” I called out with a smile, determined not to let her know I had seen her earlier.

  Nothing.

  I walked around the spot and looked toward the cabin. I sighed, dumped the bag in the hole, and pushed dirt over it. Covered in sweat, I slipped my shirt off, just as I heard movement in the distance. I snapped my gaze up, and could have sworn I saw a man walking away from the site, a good fifty feet away. Goosebumps burst out all over my body, and I reached to the back of my pants for the gun.

  Only I had left the gun at the cabin.

  I should have gone back and grabbed a weapon, gotten Katherine, made sure it wasn’t her I had seen. I should have done a lot of things, but instead I picked up the axe and walked toward the place where I had seen the shape. I moved as quietly as I could for a man in size 12 iron-toed boots, which wasn’t very quietly at all. Branches and twigs crunched under me, as did pinecones and green needles left to rot.

  A pair of birds shot out of the woods ahead. I gasped when they took flight, but kept my cool. If I had my shotgun, I might have dropped them and had roast bird tonight. They weren’t quail, but they looked very tasty after the stuff I had fed on for the last few days. Deer was tasty but gamey, with a slight musk that reminded me of lamb. The little birds, though, with some salt and pepper on the open fire would be quite a fine meal, even if I had to spit out buckshot.

  There was a small clearing ahead, and I stopped to look around, turning in a full circle. I listened when I didn’t see anything, just stood in place with my eyes closed, but nothing … wait. Was that a keening sound?

  It reminded me of a dog or something, maybe caught in a trap. As much as I had traipsed over this area, it was still possible that I missed a snare left by a hunter. If it was a raccoon, I wasn’t sure what I would do. I’d probably have to kill it rather than face getting bitten trying to set it free.

  I moved toward the sound, which came from the direction of the sinking sun. The bright light blinded me, so I shaded my eyes with one hand as I crept up on the location.

  I came upon a man who seemed to be stuck on a tree. A branch had snagged his jacket, and he wasn’t able to get loose. He was dressed in rags, like he had lived in the woods for a long time. His hair was disheveled and full of twigs and pine needles. How long had he been out here? His jacket was green, which explained why it had been so hard to see him. It wasn’t camouflage, but the color was just the sort of green to make a person’s eyes slip past it in the woods.

  “You okay?” I asked in a low tone that was meant to make him aware of my presence. I was carrying an axe, after all, and having someone creep up and scare the shit out of me was a good excuse to turn around and attack first, then ask questions while cleaning up the wounds. He did turn around, but I wasn’t expecting the vacant look on his face that proclaimed him to be dead.

  I backed up as the zombie turned. He moved slowly and moaned at me. His face was a nightmare of wounds, I guessed from walking through the woods and getting his face scratched. I supposed when you didn’t feel pain, you didn’t really care about twigs whipping against your face and body.

  I shuddered at the thought, then I got a look at his mouth, which was dry and covered in old blood. This contrasted against the blue lips and jagged, yellow teeth. He continued to turn and shuffle at the same time. He keened in that tone I had heard earlier, taking it for an animal. The analytical part of my brain pondered how the thing could make noise like that when he clearly wasn’t breathing. His jacket was open, and his shirt was in shreds. He even had a gaping wound in his gut, and out of that horror fell a mass of maggots and things that would haunt my sleep that night. He tried to stagger forward but remained caught. I backed up and wanted to run. I wanted to go back to the cabin and forget about what I had seen. I wanted to run screaming, then come back with one of the assault rifles and blow this horror away.

  Instead, I unlimbered the axe, as if suddenly remembering it was there. I held it in two hands and regarded my opponent. Though it offered no real fight, I had to kill the thing on principle alone. When I was back in Vesper Lake, I had been fighting for my life. Now I was just doing preventive maintenance. It had to be done for our safety; I would put a rabid dog down the same way.

  I lifted the axe high above my head. The back of it was flat, and I hoped it would splatter less if I hit him on the temple, and then crushed his skull while he was on the ground. I lowered the haft in a horizontal plane to the ground, watching him raise one arm toward me like an automaton. Then he tugged forward, and with a rip, the man’s jacket tore as he staggered toward me.

  I swung too late and hit him in the shoulder, which pushed him to the side. He spun nearly around with the impact, but turned again to come at me. I backed up, stepped on a fallen branch, and stumbled backward. Reaching out with one hand, I found nothing to catch me, so I had to take a few steps to recover. He came at me, eyes livid and teeth bared. He moaned, and the remains of his jagged teeth and torn lips were the only things I managed to focus on.

  If he touched me with those teeth, I would be dead before I could curse him. Just a bite—that was all it took. I would have enough time to fall over before he was tearing into my flesh, and in the event I managed to fight him off, I would still have the wound to contend with.

  Giving in to gravity, I fell back, landing on my ass in a heap. I rolled to the left as quickly as I could, dropping the axe in the process. Before his hands came up to grab me, I was back on my feet. I pushed his arms down then thrust him away. As he spun to the right, I planted my boot in the small of his back and kicked him back the way he had come.

  I was panting hard from the rush of adrenaline, from the sudden exertion, and from the fear that was ripping at my brain like a bird of prey. I looked for the axe, but it was lying in the brush, and I was frightened of going for it. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him for even a second. I kicked him again, harder this time. He was driven into the tree, and, as he staggered away, he went down. He made no attempt to break his fall; he just flopped over like a rag doll.

  Staring up at me, he cocked his head to the side and went for one leg. His teeth were bared in a rictus that looked plastered there. This thing wore one expression, and that was anger.

  I lifted my boot and smashed his face before I could think about what I was doing. Oh Jesus, it crunched under my heel, nose compacting and blood spurting. I lifted my heel again, and this time thrust down so hard that I felt his face cave in under the blow. He still flopped his hands around and kicked at the ground like a struggling animal. The third kick cracked his skull like a giant egg, and soft brain matter flowed around my foot, so that I slipped and almost fell down for the second time that morning.

  I staggered back and rubbed the bottom of my shoe on the soft vegetation, as if I could wipe away the guilt of what I had just done to the man. I wanted to throw up my breakfast. I wanted to run back to the cabin and hide in the bedroom for the rest of the day.

  I backed away from the corpse. He didn’t move one bit, no final shake or shiver. Limbs didn’t twitch; he was just dead. Again.

  Feeling sick, I turned away and went back to the hole I had dug and finished the job. Pushed dirt over the remains of the deer, stared at the ground for a few minutes, looked back at the place where I had crushed a man’s skull.

  How in the hell had the guy found this place? Was there another cabin nearby? Were there more of them? I should have taken a moment to walk the area and check for them, but I needed a gun for that. I wasn’t eager to be faced with hand to hand combat again anytime soon.

  I returned to the cabin, and Katherine was herself once more—composed, cool, and relaxed, except for the tightness around her eyes. When I kissed her, she hugged me tight, but it felt mechanical. How I wanted to ask her about the sadness that had come over her, about the pain that made her hold back, but I was too afraid of the answers to those questions. I wanted her to be mine. The selfish part of my brain wanted her to be
long to me, and not to her family from before the event. I wanted her to love me, not the memory of the things she had lost.

  Sighing, I went to collect a gun and some ammo. I told her what had happened in the wood, and she agreed that we should sweep the immediate area. I took one of the handguns, a .40-caliber pistol, and checked the load. The magazine was full, so I tucked it into my belt and loaded my shotgun with as many shells as I could shove in there. Then I tucked a few into my pockets.

  She took a 9 mm to cover me, slinging the hunting rifle over her shoulder. I wished we had another shotgun, for up-close work if we needed to fight. The spread would be devastating with both of us shooting. She held the pistol at her side as we left the cabin. I wished I could lock it, but we had never found a key. It was silly. The thing that had attacked me in the woods was surely a lone incident, a lone man—zombie—lost in the woods, and I just happened to stumble upon him. Maybe he had lived somewhere nearby, another cabin or lodge, perhaps. Maybe he had some vague recollection of the area and was just lost. He was probably the same shape I had seen the night before.

  We walked outside the cabin, establishing a perimeter a hundred feet in every direction. The day was cool, which suited me just fine. I was too amped up to deal with heat today.

  We found—nothing, and I was more than a bit relieved. We went back to the cabin, both exhausted after stomping over the vegetation, through bushes, over piles of needles, around large copses. She kept a compass out and was good with the device, keeping us on the perimeter at all times. She would point back in the direction of the cabin with a grin every time I looked worried about how far we had gone.