by D. J. Molles
Lee made his way up the stairs and cleared the house, the knot in his gut that was always there before shit hit the fan starting to abate as he went through the motions. Each time he prepared to enter a room, the anxiety would flare, then dissipate as he moved. It reminded him of Fallujah, fighting house to house. At the beginning of those long nights he would be sick to his stomach and his hands would be shaking. Then after they breached the first door, the nerves would begin to fade. By the time they were on their third house of the night, he would feel relatively normal.
On edge, as he was now, but normal. After clearing the house, he went to the kitchen and found that Tango’s curiosity had gotten the best of him and he’d made his way to the top of the stairs and was peering into the kitchen, his nose working the air. Lee held back admonition. Good working dogs were sometimes hard to control.
“Come on.” Lee tapped his thigh and Tango padded into the room. “Sneak,” he reminded Tango.
He made his way to the front door. It still stood intact. The sick feeling made a comeback. He edged over to the sidelight and angled his vision around the front porch. A pale foot lay there, stretched out away from the front door, toes pointed down. The foot was small, petite, even. The girl from yesterday, he knew, and fought acid rising in the back of his throat. He stared, though he couldn’t see anything above the calf. The skin was gray and waxy-looking. It was covered in scrapes and harsh bruising, as though she’d run recklessly through a patch of briars.
The logical part of Lee’s brain told him that she had to be dead. But something else inside of him cringed, expecting the worst. Lee angled his body and pointed his rifle in the approximate location that he felt her head would be. For a moment, the gun felt heavy and awkward in his hands. For someone who had grown up around firearms, Lee felt that brief feeling crumpling his already shaky confidence. He could taste his half-digested PowerBar creeping up into his mouth. He didn’t want to shoot this girl again. He reached forward and touched the cool metal of the doorknob. The door swung open.
Her hand came down, still holding that small knife.
Lee jumped back and only just kept himself from firing a round. The girl lay dead, but her arm had been propped against the door and had fallen when he’d opened it. She was no longer a threat.
Tango rushed in, fascinated and wanting to stick his nose in it. Lee shoved the dog away with his leg and stated in a stern voice, “No! Leave it.… Leave it.”
Tango pressed at his leg until Lee gave him a good jab in the ribs with his knee and repeated the command. Finally Tango stood back, but he let out a pitiful whine and stared at the dead girl, transfixed.
The door was covered in smeared blood and pocked with tiny dents made with the point of her knife. She had somehow managed to crawl onto his porch after being shot several times in the chest with a .45-caliber bullet, and had obviously spent some time pounding on the door, whether in rage, or desperation, or perhaps a bit of both.
The front mat was entirely soaked in blood. The sight of blood in large quantities never ceased to turn Lee’s stomach. There was something so… not Hollywood about it. Artificial blood looked artful and pretty. The splatters were perfect, the pools were all one homogenous color. Paint by Numbers gore. In reality, the aftermath of a traumatic wound was chaotic and disgusting. There was always some strange chunk of anatomy that came out with the blood flow that made you lean in closer and say to yourself, What the fuck is that?
These images also had a cumulative effect. Lee found them harder to bear now than when he’d been a younger man. Looking from the dead girl to the pockmarks on the door, he noticed the piece of paper he had not had time to read the day before. It was lined and clearly torn from a spiral notebook. It was held to the door with a single bit of clear tape. The words were handwritten and short.
Lee reached up and plucked it off the door, eyeing the dead girl while he did it. Her failure to die when most others would have made him highly uneasy and he kept thinking about her getting up, even now, and cutting into him with that knife. Before diverting his attention to the note, he kicked the knife away from her hand. Tango tracked it with his eyes as it skittered across the foyer, but he didn’t make a move for it.
The note was from Marla Peterson.
Lee,
Jason did not come home from work today and didn’t call. We thought maybe he was with you. If you find this note, FEMA is evacuating us at 1 PM today to a camp in Sanford. Please tell Jason to find us as soon as he can and tell him I love him. We will wait for him in Sanford as long as we can.
Marla
The note was dated 7/05.
Lee felt somehow responsible for this, though he couldn’t tell why. Sanford was a small city about fifty miles southwest of Raleigh. It seemed like an unlikely and out-of-the-way place to put a FEMA camp, but then again, in a viral outbreak, you would want the safe zones to be a significant distance from major population centers.
Where Lee stood now was about thirty miles directly east of Sanford, outside the small town of Angier. He could make the trip in two days, three at the most. Of course his pickup truck was parked in his garage with a full tank and would theoretically get him there within an hour, but in a social collapse, without the threat of force from police officers and highway patrol, thugs and psychopaths reclaimed the streets and made them the most dangerous place to be.
Driving was out of the question for now. He would stick to cross-country hiking. And then there was the question of Jason and his whereabouts.
Obviously, he had not been with Lee. As a police officer, he was probably one of the last to be able to run with his family. Lee saw four likely possibilities. Either Jason was already with his family, was trying to make his way to his family, was holed up in his house waiting for help, or he was dead.
In any case, Lee’s objective remained the same. He folded the note carefully and placed it in his pants pocket. Attention back on the girl splayed out on the welcome mat, Lee gingerly poked the body with the toe of his boot, not sure why he still felt that he would garner a response. They say the less distance there is between you and the person you kill, the more traumatizing it can be. In Iraq, he knew he’d killed people, but mostly it was shooting at muzzle flashes in windows. Only once did he gun a man down while clearing a house. In that instance, the man had been about twenty feet away, reaching for the AK next to him. Through the night-vision device Lee had been wearing, the man had appeared expressionless, emotionless. Just a green specter.
Barely even human.
In the girl’s case he had looked her in the eye, as demented as those eyes might have been, and shot her at point-blank range. Then he’d stood up and shot her again. Finally, he’d left her to wallow in a crazy rage as she tried to stab his door and eventually bled to death.
He prayed to God for forgiveness and refused to think about it anymore.
When he was satisfied that the girl was dead, he stepped over her body and, with gloved hands, pulled her by the ankles off of his welcome mat to clear the doorway. He had first intended to pull her off the porch completely, but after yesterday’s surprise attack, he didn’t feel comfortable backing his way down the stairs. Besides that, it was still dark, and Lee wanted to check his perimeter before he left for the Petersons’ house.
He pulled the girl as quietly as he could to the left of the door so she was out of the way. He would dispose of the body when it was light out and he knew his perimeter was secure. While dragging her he noticed rather detachedly that she’d defecated on herself, though he wasn’t sure whether this was during her death or whether the infected insane were unaware of their bowel movements.
Loss of muscle control was a symptom of late-stage infection; however, she’d seemed quite in control of her muscles the previous day and had even talked, though it was only one word. He felt that most likely, she was in the early stages of infection and that self-defecation was a by-product of her loss of sanity.
Once he had her moved, he patted h
is leg, getting Tango’s attention. “Come on. Sneak.”
They left the porch, taking the stairs very carefully this time. Every shadow held a ghost and every grass blade that blew in the soft breeze drew his attention. They made a circle around the house, checking all the nooks and crannies, and found everything secure. Whoever the girl was, she had been there alone.
Died alone. Covered in blood and shit.
By the time Lee had checked the perimeter of his house, the horizon to the east was getting gray, and the cacophony of early morning birds had begun. He also found himself sweating, and noted that it was already warm and humid out. Today was going to be a scorching North Carolina summer day. One of those “jungle days,” where you got more moisture than air in each breath.
They’d completed a clockwise circle around the house, checking the garage and the crawl spaces underneath the house. Tango never alerted or growled. Just kept his head down and stalked along Lee’s side. Lee felt more secure with the dog there, and with his keen nose and guarding instincts, he would serve as an early warning of any human activity in the area—good or bad.
Back where they started, at the northeastern corner of the house, Lee veered off toward the edge of his yard, where his once-manicured lawn turned abruptly into woods. Heading directly north for a little less than two hundred yards would land him in the Petersons’ backyard.
He moved slowly through the woods. The light of dawn on the gray trees gave everything a monochromatic look. Each new section of woods looked exactly like the last. The damp air and the dew covering the forest floor made movement quiet and limited the crunch of the leaves he stepped on. Aside from his own breath rattling in the gas mask, the woods were silent.
Finally, the woods opened up into a clearing.
He was at the bottom of a steep hill, over the top of which he could just make out the roofline of the Petersons’ house. To his left was a shallow gully with a stream passing through it. Making his way through the woods, he felt that it was less and less likely that he would find anyone in the house. There was no reason for Jason to be there if his family was gone. He was a good guy and a family man, and he wouldn’t let Marla and Stephanie sit in some FEMA camp alone. If he hadn’t made the evacuation, he’d be making his way across country to them.
Still…
He wanted to know that the Petersons had made it out. The thought of them in safety gave him a bit of hope, a positive feeling.
He and Tango made their way up the hill. More of the house came into view as they gained elevation. Unsure who—or what—might be in or around the house, Lee approached with caution, using trees as cover and concealment as he got closer to the house. Between stands of trees, he ran at a half crouch, keeping his eyes on the shadows.
He noted only one thing as he got closer: An upstairs light was on, causing a single window to glow with muted yellow light.
This meant a few things to Lee. He knew that the Petersons, not being survival-minded people, had not rigged their house for off-grid electricity as he had. If there was a light burning in the house, it meant that the grid was still up. He only assumed that with all the evacuations in the surrounding area, the power plant employees would have also left, but perhaps the National Guard had replaced them or perhaps the power plants were on an automated system.
It wasn’t long into this thought that he noticed the light flicker. It was a candle. This told him something completely different. A candle did not burn indefinitely. If a candle was burning inside the house it meant that someone was there now or had been there very recently. Jason? Or a squatter.
Lee still held firm to his opinion that Jason would not stick around when his family was elsewhere. Which meant someone was in the house who didn’t belong there. Lee considered how he would approach this situation.
On the one hand, breaking and entering became less of a criminal act and more of a necessity during times of social collapse, when finding shelter was tantamount to surviving the night.
On the other hand, it was his friends’ house and he felt a responsibility to keep it secure until they returned. Who knew when the crisis would be over and people would be returning home? He wouldn’t want the Petersons finding their home and belongings ransacked and stolen in the name of some hobo’s “survival.”
It was a gray area.
He would have to feel out the situation. The squatters could be shitbags, using the house as a base to set up roadblocks or store whatever they stole. Or it could be a family traveling on foot, trying to find a safe place to spend the night.
Lee moved to the back of the house, Tango following at a trot. He kept his rifle trained on the windows, in case a lookout spotted them. The Aimpoint sight mounted on his M4 was dialed low so the red dot was not overpowering in the dim morning light.
At the back of the house, he moved left toward a set of wooden stairs leading to a large back deck, lifted up on stilts. The house was built into the hill so that the ground floor when looking at the front was the second floor when looking at the back.
The stairs creaked treacherously as Lee made his way up to the deck. He kept his eyes locked on the dark patio doors. They were sliding glass with no curtain covering them. Anyone inside was shrouded in the darkness and would see Lee long before he could see them. He moved quickly across the fatal funnel and posted on the left side of the sliding glass doors. Closer to the glass he could see inside.
The doors led into the living room, which appeared mostly undisturbed. There was a TV, a coffee table with some magazines on it, two couches, and a leather recliner that Lee could picture Jason sitting on every Sunday, watching football with a cold one in his hand. To the left of the room was a long hallway that led to the front door.
He tested the patio doors and found them locked. Shit.
He thought about his options. He could break the glass or try to find another entry point. Both had their risks. Whoever was in the house would almost definitely hear the glass break. Depending on how many were inside, and if they were armed or not, it could be a problem.
Lee was about to move away from the doors when he noticed someone was lying on the couch. It was a girl, young. He saw the dark, curly hair. He had missed her at first because she was lying with her back to the door, and in the half light, she blended in with all the pillows lying there.
Stephanie.
Lee wanted to get her attention, but he knew she would be scared and not recognize him in his gas mask. He made a quick decision and pulled off the mask, clipping one of the straps to a carabiner on his chest rig. He thumped the window with a gloved knuckle and whispered: “Steph! Steph!”
She didn’t respond.
He was about to knock again when he saw a dark figure standing in the hallway, watching him.
“Fuck,” he whispered and backed up a bit, leveling his rifle.
The figure wasn’t concerned with his rifle. It hobbled forward with an awkward gait. It seemed like its legs and arms were stiff. Twice it almost fell, but recovered. Clutched in its right hand was what Lee thought might be a meat cleaver.
Stephanie still hadn’t moved. The concept hit him like a punch in the gut. Stephanie wasn’t sleeping. She was dead. And the lunatic with the meat cleaver was the one who had killed her. Lee stepped back another foot as the man inside hobbled around the kitchen counter and raised the meat cleaver as though he didn’t realize the glass door was between them. Who the fuck was this guy and why was he in the Petersons’ house? Lee had never killed anyone in anger before, but now it seemed like an easy thing to do.
He lifted the rifle and put the red dot on the man’s chest, then pulled the trigger. The stillness of the morning was shattered, the bark of rifle fire jabbing fiercely at Lee’s eardrums. The glass exploded inward, and through the shower of glittering shards, he saw the man still coming forward, meat cleaver raised.
Lee’s brain sent the signal to his finger: Don’t stop!
As Lee pulled the trigger repeatedly, watching the man’s ch
est lurch with each recoil, he saw the man’s demented eyes, saw his face, and, for a split second, thought he knew him. Then a round caught the man’s jaw and ripped it off, and the following round caved in the front of his skull.
The body dropped face-first into the broken glass but was still twitching erratically. Then Lee realized he was still firing and pulled his finger off the trigger.
Lee didn’t even look at Stephanie. In the back of his mind, he registered that she had not moved through the gunfire. He knew she was dead. Instead, his eyes were locked on the body lying before him. Something was wrong but in the moment he couldn’t think of it. He wanted to take the time to inspect the body, knew he had recognized that person, but also knew there could be other hostiles in the house.
Lee moved quickly into the living room and surveyed the scene as detachedly as possible. After giving Stephanie a cursory glance, he saw that her throat had been cut and that she had been dead for some time. The stench of decay in the room was suddenly overwhelming. In the kitchen, which he could see from where he stood in the living room, he observed another body. He immediately knew it was Marla. He moved in closer and looked at her face, confirming his fear. Though bloating and decay had robbed her of her kind and caring face, he knew it was her. Someone had hacked away most of her midsection. The kitchen was covered in blood spatter, obscenely reminding Lee of a Jackson Pollock painting.
The wrongness of the man with the meat cleaver finally swam to the surface of his mind. The duty belt. He was wearing a patent leather duty belt.
Lee stepped over to the body, keeping himself angled toward the hallway that led to the rest of the house, in case any other attacker came at him. He pushed hard with his foot, rolling the body onto its back.
Jason stared up at him with blank, dead eyes. Deep cuts scoured his face. Had he done that to himself? His hair had either fallen out in chunks or he had ripped it out. What was left of his face to recognize him by was sunken and sallow. The whole bottom half of his face and neck was covered in dried bloodstains. Like he had been eating the others.
