by Morris, Jacy
Her naked body danced in his mind, so real he could almost touch it. So real he could almost taste her lips as they grabbed onto each other. So real he could almost feel the wetness as he… That was the first time that he woke up, the world around him resolving into the bleak existence that he had come to know as reality.
He heard Walt whimper in his sleep and toyed with the idea of waking him up as well. In the end, Allen let him sleep. Maybe they were good whimpers. Plus, the boy probably needed the sleep. They all did. With that thought in mind, he closed his eyes and tried not to dream of Diana.
Upon waking up from a nightmare of being torn apart by cold hands in the dark, he decided not to try that technique again. Better to dream of Diana and her loss than to dream about being torn apart.
The third time he fell asleep, he managed to find a nice balance of the two, sadness mixed with fear as he walked through the fields with his father. He held a hunting rifle as he stalked through the cornfields around his parents' old house. They were shooting crows and the dead that drifted through the rows, unseen until they appeared out of nowhere, growling and reaching for him and his father. As always, his father was the better shot, but he didn't lord it over Izzy. They killed without speaking, the dust rising up around them, and the breeze making the corn rustle. His mom wasn't there, and that was the cause of the sadness in his father's eyes. But for a while, they had each other, and then he was being shaken awake.
"Go fast, I'm timing your asses. We need to be able to be packed and out of a place in no less than three minutes. Go, go, go."
It was Tejada's voice. Allen glanced at him only long enough to see him looking at the face of the old-fashioned windup watch he carried. He didn't look up from it as he said, "Come on, Allen, get the sand out. Pack up your kit, or we're leaving your ass."
Allen popped to his feet. With his mind still clogged with images of his own death and his body pumping adrenaline, he moved fast. He straightened his bag, zipped it up, and then rolled it up tight so it would take up hardly any space. He fastened the nylon cords around the ends to keep it in shape and then fastened it to his backpack. He threw his backpack on, situated his rifle, and then turned to look at Tejada.
"Time," Tejada called.
Allen looked around the room to see everyone else ready to go.
"Last place, Allen. I expect you to be quicker next time."
"Yes, sir," Allen said.
"Alright, everyone, grab some chow, then we're gonna get our ass out of here."
Tejada hobbled to a chair sitting around the conference table that dominated the room. He sat with a heavy sigh. Allen fished around in his bag to find something to eat. He came out with a can of chili, but he stuffed it back in. He wanted to save the chili for some other time. He was rooting around in his bag when he remembered the toilet paper situation. They didn't have a lot of it. The aisles had been mostly cleaned out. In a few weeks, it was going to be mostly a leaf situation when it came to number twos. He pulled the can of chili out and used the little can opener he had to pop the lid off. Might as well eat the chili now, just in case it turned into a nasty situation afterward.
With a metal spoon, he scooped a bite of the chili into his mouth. It only took a moment before he realized his mistake. It was hot. The chili was burning his mouth. He picked up the can and noticed the word "hot" centered in a red oval. "Hot" might not have been the right word to describe this chili. "Nuclear" seemed like it would be more accurate. He had never been one for spice and heat. Now he was suffering from it. He only hoped it didn't come out as hot as it went in.
"You ok?" Brown asked.
"It's hot," Allen said.
"Shoot. You white boys can't handle the spice. It's all that white bread you all eat when you're growing up. Kills your spice receptors."
A thin sheen of sweat broke out on Allen's forehead, and his nose started to run. The others laughed at him.
Brown said, "Here. Lemme trade with you. Can't have you dyin' from a little spice."
Allen gratefully traded with Brown, who handed him a can of beef and barley soup. "Thank you," he said. Allen could barely taste the soup as he spooned it into his mouth. The spice clung to his tongue and lips, and he wondered how long it would stick around. The soup was bland, but after the heat of the chili, he was in no position to complain.
They left their cans sitting on the table. There was no point in cleaning up. The assisted living facility would reek of rot until the day it crumbled. In pairs, they searched the building, keeping out of sight of the front doors. The dead were still out there, waiting for them—as if they knew the living were somewhere in the area.
In the kitchen, Allen and Epps rifled through the dry goods. They didn't touch the freezers. Whatever was in there would have gone bad long ago. The summer had been hot, and the power had gone out near the end of June. There was no way that anything in there would be good.
"Found some flour," Epps said.
"What are you gonna do with some flour?" Allen asked.
"I don't know. Bake bread?"
"Do you know how to bake bread?" Allen asked.
"Not really."
"Then forget it. Grab stuff we can actually eat."
Allen flipped the lid off a large silver canister in front of him. It was filled with grains of rice, a large plastic scoop sitting in the middle. "I got rice."
"Shit yeah. Rice travels. Lots of good energy in rice."
"We're just gonna sit around eating plain rice?"
"You think they got grocery stores in the mountains? Only food up there walks on four legs, man. You'll be happy to have that rice when we're in them mountains."
"You're from Alabama. What the fuck do you know about mountains?"
"More than your Midwest ass," Epps smirked. "My family went on a ski vacation once."
"You? Skiing?"
"Yeah, my dad was like the type of guy that wanted to make sure that we weren't stereotypes. He wanted us to be 'well-rounded' individuals as he'd always say. So, he taught us to swim. He took us places other black people didn't go. He showed us the world. This one time, we went to Colorado in the winter. Man, I ain't never been so cold in my life, at least until now."
"So, you know how to ski?" Allen asked.
"Fuck no. That shit was boring. I sat in the hotel room on my phone the whole time. But, when I did go outside, there wasn't nothing out there. Just pine trees and snow. We get into that kind of situation, you're gonna want some goddamn rice."
"Good to know," Allen said. "So how are we going to carry this shit? The canister's too big to throw in my bag."
Epps ran around the room, opening cupboards until he found what he needed. He pulled a small rectangular box out from underneath the cupboard and began pulling Ziplock baggies free. "Here, this oughta do. Measure that shit out. Fill each bag up equally. Then we don't need the canister."
Allen set about the task of scooping out the rice.
"Wish we had some soy sauce for all this rice."
"You sure it's not too spicy?"
"Fuck you."
****
They stood in the lobby, their food supplies augmented by the rice and some pasta that Epps had discovered. The others brought back various candied items that had been stashed in the old people's rooms. They stood ready to go. Their rifles were loaded. Their bags were packed. Tejada stood leaning on the shoulders of Rudy and Amanda.
Walt was ready. He was always ready now. He felt the reassuring tug of the bowling ball on his back. If he ever ran out of ammo, he would be glad to have it. When he had first started his training, the bowling ball had acted like an albatross around his neck, but he had grown used to its weight, his body adjusting his muscles until the bowling ball became like an extension of himself. He would need it, perhaps soon.
He had maybe fifty rounds of ammo for his rifle, and unless they stumbled upon an untouched store that sold ammunition, that's all there was ever going to be. But the bowling ball, American Express… that nev
er needed to be loaded.
Of course, his body was sore today. He had never trained with this much weight on his back. Altogether, he probably carried around fifty pounds of gear between his food, his sleeping bag, the bowling ball, the hatchet, and various other odds and ends. He looked forward to the time when the pack became lighter. Though that would only happen if he survived long enough to eat his food supplies.
Overnight, the snow had piled up, and their footprints were just shallow shadows on the surface of the snow. The dead swayed in place as if they were conserving energy. He watched them wave from side to side as if they were bobbing slightly to a gentle song that only they could hear.
"No time like the present," Tejada whispered.
The group moved down a hallway to a side door, away from the front lobby. They weren't entirely sure what was on the other side of the door. Only a small parking lot could be seen through the rectangular window, but it certainly had to be better than stepping out into the front of the building where the Annies waited for them.
The first blast of cold wind stung his face, and his hands, glued to his rifle, went cold immediately despite his gloves. He knew it was temporary and that as soon as they started moving, his blood would get going, and he wouldn't be as cold. But in the meantime, he cursed the weather, the clouds, and even though he didn't think there was a god, he cursed him as well.
They filed out the door silently. The courtyard abutted an apartment complex. From what Walt could see, the complex was large and sprawling, a ghetto without charm. They had to cross a chest-high fence.
Walt hopped over easily enough, and Masterson followed him. Together, they received Tejada from Day and Gregg as they passed him over the fence. Tejada stood hobbling while the rest of the people climbed over, and then they were fleeing through the parking lot of the apartment complex.
Signs of death and destruction were all about. To his left, a ground-floor apartment sat with its curtains billowing out in the wind, the glass smashed months ago. To his right, the burned-out hulk of an SUV sat gray and smudged, its tires melted into nothing. And then there were the Annies.
They were spread out, and Walt wondered when the Annies had last seen a living human being. He wondered if there was some sort of scientific formula one could craft to judge how long it had been since a human had passed by examining the spread of Annies in a particular area.
The snow was two-feet deep here, and they had to work to move through it. Walt had a frightening image of an Annie popping up from under the snow. A crawler could be lying under there, unaware that any humans were passing until he stepped right on top of it. He had seen several crawlers since it had all begun, Annies who had broken their legs or their backs. Who could say what a crawler would do in the snow once its senses were muted? Would it just sit there, waiting for some unlucky soul to come along? Or would it keep crawling?
The Annies made him feel colder just by the way they were dressed. Short sleeves, shorts, all of the Annies were dressed for summer, and watching the occasional Annie walk through the snow in bare feet made him feel nauseous. Frostbite. He knew the word—had even seen some pictures of it online back when the internet was still a thing. The Annies didn't seem to suffer from it. They were as oblivious to it as they were to everything else. The only thing they noticed was human flesh moving through the cold, gray morning.
The flesh of the Annies looked different than it had in the summer. In the summer, they had turned almost to leather. Now they were drying out in the cold, and that leather had begun to crack and split. He wondered how long the Annies would be able to hold onto the skin on their faces. How long until they were nothing but skeletal faces with tendons? Disturbingly, their eyes still seemed to be intact, none the worse despite the weather and their own decomposition.
The soldiers were halfway through the apartment complex when the heat from his own exertions finally started to catch up to him. That was good. He couldn't get the images of frostbite out of his head. He remembered seeing a picture of a man lying in a hospital bed, his lips and nose turning black on his face. That meant the skin was dead, and that meant the skin had to be cut away. Walt brushed at his face absentmindedly. He'd have to keep his eyes out for a scarf. Maybe that would help stave off frostbite.
He looked at the others, admiring their beards. He was still too young to grow one. His cheeks were covered in fine hairs, not quite peach fuzz, but not far from it. Allen, in particular, had a nice brown beard growing on his face. As another gust of wind cut through the apartment complex, howling like an actual live animal, he wondered if he would ever get to the point where he would have a nice beard.
A bald male Annie appeared in his path. Walt let his rifle drop to his side and pulled American Express free. He swung it in an arc, the orange glitter of the ball muted by the gray day. The ball swung and smashed into the head of an Annie. It dropped to the ground, and Walt eyed it for a second to make sure it wasn't going to start crawling. It remained still, its skull broken.
They continued onward, coming to the end of the apartment complex. Walt scratched absentmindedly at his cheek as if that could stimulate the growth of thick, coarse, beard hairs.
Then they were on the streets again, moving quickly and quietly. Well, as quiet as they could with two feet of snow on the ground. They marched without speaking, a line of people tromping down a street named Cornell Road. Lines of townhomes and apartments blocked the sky to their left. To their right, businesses that had seen their last customer sat empty and abandoned. The stalled traffic was thinner out here. If they had a working car, they could have hopped in a vehicle and driven pretty easily. Fat chance of that with two feet of snow, though. They'd need to find a snowplow now, and there wasn't a lot of those sitting around ready to be taken out for a spin when the apocalypse had first started in the summer.
That's how Walt thought of the times he lived in… the apocalypse. He had no misconceptions about being one of the chosen. His life, his continued existence, was just a matter of coincidence. He was just a random bullet or stumble away from being one of the Annies himself.
He wondered what that would be like. Would he still have some sort of semblance of what was going on around him? Would it be like sitting in the passenger seat of a semi-truck while some unknown force piloted the truck around? That wouldn't be so bad, he guessed.
The wind howled against his ears, and he wished for something more substantial to cover them with than his thin brown hair. His hair had never been this long. It was greasy and hung in chunks down to his shoulders. He had looked in a mirror at the assisted living facility, and he hadn't even recognized the man that looked back at him. Mirrors were not a priority in the apocalypse, so when he did manage to catch his reflection in a mirror, he noticed all sorts of changes.
His face, always rounded and soft, now looked more defined, as if the real him had finally pushed through the cocoon of his old, child-like face. His eyes scared him now. They were brown and cold, more intense than he remembered. He had tried smiling in the mirror, but it looked forced, unnatural. In the end, he decided that he looked like a man now. How funny that all it took was a few months living in the apocalypse to make that happen.
The road continued on ahead of them, and they walked, trudging, huddling in against the cold. No one talked. No one had anything to say. Behind them, the trail of the dead shuffled forward, breaking the snow they had left untouched in their wake. If only there was some damn way to get the Annies to walk ahead of them, then walking down the road wouldn't even be a problem, and maybe he would be able to feel his shins again.
As if to mock him, more snow fell from the sky, piling up by the second. At the intersection of Cornell Road and 185th, they passed a particularly nasty traffic snarl. Cars sat locked together like copulating, metallic, praying mantises. Walt counted five cars in the pile-up. He counted more bodies than that trapped in the abandoned wrecks. Their bodies were mangled and twisted, trapped in driver seats by seatbelts. Snow blew in a
nd out of the shattered windows of the vehicles, and the Annies inside waved to them with their broken arms and fingers and jaws.
Walt took the time to wave back, drawing a cockeyed glance from Day. Walt didn't mind. They continued onward, leaving the wreck behind.
****
Amanda estimated they had trudged three miles altogether before stopping, although the actual distance they traveled must have been something like five miles with all the twisting and turning they had done to lose the tail of the dead. They looped around buildings and through neighborhoods upon finding a likely resting spot. This time, they settled on a storage facility.
Amanda rolled her shoulders out. She and Rudy had carried Tejada for close to half the trip, only switching out when all three of them had tumbled face-forward into the snow. At that point, with some minor grumbling from Tejada, they gave over the duty of carrying the sergeant to Walt and Gregg. Tejada wasn't tall, but he was solid, and having him leaning on their shoulders for two-and-a-half miles was draining, especially as the snow piled up. Another half-foot of powdery flakes had accumulated while they had walked.
Once she was relieved of the heavy burden of Tejada, she felt like she was floating through the snow. Rudy, who had lived in Oregon most of his life, said he had never seen snow like this before. Amanda had only spent one winter in the state before this one, and it had been completely underwhelming, especially for someone from Florida. She remembered the first snow day at college like it was yesterday.
She had never seen snow in person before. There had only been a dusting on the ground when she woke up, maybe an inch or an inch-and-a-half of snow. The entire city of Portland shut down, and her college classes were canceled for the day, despite the fact that she lived on campus and could easily walk to class without risking her life. In the morning, she had gone out to the field in front of her dormitory and joined a couple of familiar students who had started building a snowman. With a piece of cardboard, they would run and scoop up the snow, leaving behind a cold stretch of bare grass. In this way, they were able to make a small, diminutive snowman sitting in a bare field of grass. By noon, the thing was half melted and unrecognizable as a snow personage.
