by Lukens, Mark
Ray was sure he didn’t know this man, yet the man seemed familiar to him for some reason. The man walked down a deserted road through the woods, a road that seemed similar to the road that led here to Craig’s house. The man walked down the road with his head down, his light brown hair hanging in his face. There was a defeated posture to the man, apathy in his gait; he looked like he’d lost everything. And Ray knew how the man felt.
Ray stood at the edge of the road as the man approached—they were the only two people around.
“Hey,” Ray yelled at the man. “Hey. Over here. Can’t you see me?”
The man kept walking. Either he couldn’t see Ray, or he didn’t care. He walked on by, his shoulders slumped under the weight of his backpack, his weapon held loosely in his hands, his exhales pluming in front of his face in little clouds in the cold air.
“Hey,” Ray yelled at the man again. “Can’t you see me? Can’t you hear me?”
Am I dead? A ghost?
Ray was about to run after the man, grab him, make him turn around and face him.
But then Ray was somewhere else, in a different dream. He was in a town now that looked like some war-torn village in another country. There was a man in this dream; this man was maybe a little older than the last man, or maybe he just seemed older. He was about Ray’s height, and muscular. His dark hair was buzzed short, his dark eyes were intense. This man had a backpack and a gun, but his wasn’t a shotgun—it was a pistol with a silencer screwed onto the end of the barrel. Again, Ray was sure he didn’t know this man, but at the same time the man seemed familiar for some reason.
“Hey!” Ray yelled at the man.
This man didn’t seem to hear or see him, just like the last man. And like the first man in his dream, Ray felt an overwhelming sense of loss and hopelessness coming from this man, like he had nothing left to live for.
Ray ran towards the man. This time he was going to grab him, but he passed right through the man like he was a hologram.
Or maybe I’m the hologram, Ray thought. I’m the illusion. I’m the ghost. I’m the one who’s not here anymore.
Ray woke up with his breath caught in his throat—and for just a second it felt like he’d stopped breathing. He sat straight up on the couch, exhaling a breath that sounded like a wheeze.
Just a nightmare, that’s all.
It was light inside the basement now, the morning sun managing to shine through the curtains over the rectangular windows at the top of the basement walls on the one side.
Mike was crying again.
Ray looked at the other couch. Mike was curled up at the end of the couch like he’d been last night, but now he was sitting up and slumped over, turned to the back of the couch, his face buried in the fabric as he sobbed.
And Emma was gone.
Ray jumped off the couch and rushed over to Mike, sitting down right beside him, reaching out to touch him, to bring him closer so he could hold him.
“Mike? What is it?”
Dumb question. What did he think was wrong with Mike? His son was devastated because his mother and his sister were gone. He was devastated because now they were living minute-to-minute like some war refugees, waiting for an attack to occur at any moment.
“Mike?”
Ray pulled Mike closer and saw that Mike was grinning, a sinister smile that reminded him of Kim’s smile as she was turning. What Ray had mistaken for sobs was laughter. Mike lunged at him, grabbing him, biting down on his neck.
Instant pain shot through Ray as he tried to push Mike off of him, but Mike had bitten down hard and he was pulling a hunk of Ray’s flesh away, shaking his head back and forth like a pit-bull.
Ray finally pushed Mike off of him and jumped back away from the couch. He looked beyond the couch and saw Emma standing there. She didn’t have her dark glasses on now and there were deep holes where her eyes used to be.
Behind Emma, there was a man hidden in the shadows, but he was coming closer. He was a tall man, a big and muscular man, but his features were hidden in the darkness. The man’s eyes shined in the darkness, just two pinpoints of light as he rushed forward. Ray had seen this man before, in the dream he’d had in Emma’s condo—he’d been the man standing behind Mike in that dream.
Ray woke up with a start, sitting bolt-upright on the sofa. He tore the blanket off of him as he tried to catch his breath. It was light in the basement, the morning sun managing to shine through the dark curtains over the rectangular windows.
Just like in the dream.
He was awake now, wasn’t he?
Mike and Emma were on the couch, in the same places they’d been last night, curled up, one at each end under their own blankets.
Ray rubbed at his face and got up.
Emma stirred and seemed to be looking at him. She didn’t have her dark glasses on, but her eyes were still there, half-closed now. “Bad dream?”
“Yeah,” he told her. No use lying—it seemed like she already knew the answer. Maybe she’d heard him talking in his sleep, or even crying out. The image of the shadowy man in his dream came back to him, the features of the man’s face hidden in darkness. Except for his eyes—his eyes had shined in the darkness. He’d dreamt about the same shadowy man in Emma’s apartment.
And then he realized where he’d seen Emma before. He stared at her, remembering how she had seemed so familiar to him when he’d first gotten to her condo yesterday. And he knew now where he’d seen her before. He’d had a dream about her the last night he’d slept in his own bed next to Kim.
Ray decided not to say anything to Emma about his dreams. He grabbed a bottle of water from the supplies he’d brought down last night, managing to convince himself that he had the timelines mixed up a little, mixing up dreams and imagination. He was still overly tired, and still in shock. He had more important things to concentrate on now than strange dreams. He opened his bottle of water and drank half of it down. He was thirsty. His body was stiff, his joints aching from the cold.
“You want some water?” he asked Emma.
“Please,” she said as she sat up. She kept the blanket around her legs and stretched her thin arm out to him.
He handed her the bottle of water. “You want something to eat? I could open up a can of something.”
“No, thanks,” she said, showing a slight smile.
“I need to get upstairs,” he told her. “I want to find a way to barricade the doors and some of the windows.” And that was true, but the urge to look through Craig’s office was even stronger.
Emma nodded.
“I’ll come back down when everything’s safer. You going to be okay down here?”
Again, she nodded. “I might try to go back to sleep for a little while.”
Ray thought it might be a lie, but he didn’t question it. “Okay.”
“Ray,” Emma said.
He looked at her.
“Just be careful, okay?”
“Okay,” he said and slipped his socked feet into his sneakers and grabbed his golf club. He went up the basement steps, treading softly. He didn’t want to wake Mike up—Mike needed as much sleep as he could get.
He felt bad for not inviting Emma upstairs with him, but he couldn’t look after her while he searched through Craig’s office. And maybe it would be better if she was down here when Mike woke up.
It was irrational, but Ray couldn’t help feeling like Emma was somehow a cause of all of this, of Kim dying and leaving Vanessa behind. He felt like if he hadn’t kept his promise to Helen and stopped at Emma’s condo, maybe Kim and Vanessa wouldn’t have gotten infected. Or maybe they could have gotten here to Craig’s house sooner. But he’d had no choice but to stop at Emma’s condo; the rippers would have overrun them if they tried to drive through the street that day. Or maybe the soldiers would have shot them.
The truth was that they had been infected before they’d even gone to Emma’s condo. It didn’t matter if they would’ve avoided Emma’s place, Kim and Vanessa were
going to get sick; they were going to turn no matter where they went. They would have turned here at Craig’s house.
He scolded himself for those thoughts as he entered the kitchen. It wasn’t Emma’s fault, none of this was. And it wasn’t his fault, either. Maybe it was someone else’s fault—government scientists playing around with super-plagues or terrorists unleashing bioweapons—but it wasn’t his or Emma’s or Mike’s fault. Then again, maybe it was nobody’s fault. Maybe it was just nature fighting back against the plague humanity had become to this planet. Or maybe it was God wiping out the masses, like the stories in the Old Testament of Noah or Sodom and Gomorrah. Maybe the world had gotten too wicked and it was time for God to hit His reset button.
Who knew the answers? Maybe some of the answers were in those papers in Craig’s office. He hoped so.
As much as he wanted to get started in Craig’s office, he knew that he needed to barricade the doors and windows. He needed to find some supplies, some extra wood and a hammer and nails. He looked through some “junk” drawers in the kitchen. He found a few screwdrivers, a pair of pliers, and some electrical tape. He piled these items up on the countertops, which were covered with papers, dishes, canned and boxed goods. It was more evidence of the panicked packing Craig’s family had done before they’d left, but something seemed strange—it seemed like they had left quite a bit of food behind. He would have to check more drawers in the laundry room, and then the garage attached to the house. He wasn’t holding out much hope of finding an array of building supplies—Craig hadn’t really been the handyman type—but he was pretty sure that he would at least find a hammer and some nails, maybe a cordless screw gun with some battery life left.
He walked over to the refrigerator before heading to the laundry room, bracing himself for the smell as he opened it. There was more bottled water inside. He grabbed one and opened it, drank some of it down. The smell inside the fridge wasn’t too bad, or maybe he was just getting used to it. There might be a few salvageable items in this refrigerator: a jar of pickles, mustard, a can of olives, packets of condiments from restaurants. Along with the five bottles of water, there was a six-pack of beer, three sodas, and a bottle of wine.
After taking what he could out of the refrigerator and loading it up into a cardboard box he found underneath the sink, Ray went to the laundry room. The smell from the refrigerator they had opened last night in here still lingered a bit. The large washer and dryer were still pushed in front of the door that led outside.
He stayed low as he approached the washer and dryer, peeking out through the window over the sink first, and then through the glass panels in the door.
Nobody out there.
He stared at his wife’s dented and battered SUV parked a few feet away, the front of it run up partly onto the brick walkway and the grass, one tire resting on a small line of border plants along the walkway. The brick walk led down the side of the home to the screened-in pool enclosure in back. The SUV looked untouched, there didn’t seem to be any sign of rippers anywhere out there.
Ray looked at the door that led to the garage. A now-useless security panel was attached to the wall on the left side of the door. He unlocked the garage door and opened it.
The smell in the garage hit him right away—an overwhelming chemical smell, a familiar smell. The air was thick with a haze, and his eyes were watering. He closed the door to the laundry room and pulled his shirt up over his mouth and nose, trying to hold his breath as much as he could. It was warm in here too, much warmer than the rest of the house.
And Ray knew why.
There were two vehicles parked in the garage side by side, both of them carefully backed in so they could drive right out when the garage doors were opened. The vehicle closer to Ray was a large black SUV, a Chevy Suburban. The one on the other side of that was a Mercedes SUV, it was smaller but sleeker and sportier. And it was full of dead people.
CHAPTER 36
Emma sat up straighter on the couch. She’d been awake, but about to drift off to sleep again. But now she knew Ray had found the bad thing in the garage, not a thing that could hurt them, but it was still something bad.
Mike groaned and rolled over on the couch.
Emma sat back.
“Where’s my dad?” Mike asked. She heard the sound of his blanket rustling as he sat up on the couch.
“He went upstairs,” Emma told him. “He went to see if he could board up some of the doors and windows. Make things safer.”
Mike was quiet for a moment.
“You hungry?” she asked him. “You could fix us some breakfast. Canned something or other, I’m guessing.”
No answer. She thought he might be nodding at her. “I can’t hear your head rattle,” she told him, smiling at him so he knew she was joking.
“Sorry,” he answered sheepishly. “Yeah, I’m hungry. And I need to pee. Can we use the toilet down here?”
“I don’t see why not,” she told him. “It should still flush as long as there’s water in the tank.”
*
Ray opened the two windows on the back wall of the garage. He knew there was a danger of rippers being around, but he needed to get the remaining exhaust fumes out of the garage. He was sure most of the exhaust had leaked out around the main garage doors over the last few days, and maybe the gasses weren’t deadly anymore, but it was still overwhelming and he needed to air the place out.
He walked to the Mercedes, but he stopped before he even got to it. There was a plastic flexible pipe taped to the exhaust pipe of the vehicle—the flexible hose ran from the tailpipe to the driver’s side window, the window rolled up enough to hold it there snuggly.
In between the two vehicles, lying on the garage floor, was Craig’s dog. She was on her side, her belly a swollen mound, her tongue hanging out of her mouth.
Ray walked down the space between the vehicles, bracing himself for what he was going to see, but he still wasn’t ready. Craig’s two daughters were in the back seat. One of the girls was Mike’s age, maybe a year or two younger, the other a few years older. They both had their hands bound behind their backs and their ankles were tied together with lengths of rope. They also had their seatbelts on. The daughter on Ray’s side of the car, the older one, Laura, had her face smeared against the glass. Her eyes were still wide open and glassy, her skin ghostly-white. Her mouth was caked with dried blood, some of that blood smeared against the glass of her window. Her blond hair was disheveled, strands of it matted across her forehead and face.
A few steps forward and Ray was standing beside the passenger window. He was careful not to step on the dead and bloated dog. He imagined that when Craig decided to kill his family (because that’s obviously what he’d done, wasn’t it?), he had called his faithful dog in here to the garage so she could die with them. Ray could imagine their dog laying on the floor while the car ran, perhaps confused about why her owners wouldn’t let her inside.
Craig’s wife Julie was leaning against her window much like her older daughter was, her hands behind her back, her ankles tied together, the seatbelt snug over her body. Her eyes were closed and she looked more peaceful than her daughter, almost like she was sleeping. She didn’t have the face of anguish that her two daughters had.
In the driver’s seat, Craig was slumped against his own car door, his head resting against the window that held the flexible plastic pipe at the top of it. The hose came in through the window and across Craig’s lap to the center console. Craig looked like he was sleeping. He had vomit crusting his chin and staining the front of his shirt.
Ray had always heard that dying of carbon monoxide poisoning was a peaceful way to go, and maybe it was, but judging from Craig and his two daughters, it hadn’t looked peaceful at all.
The ignition was still turned on, but obviously the car had run out of gas and now its battery was probably dead. Ray thought it was lucky that Craig hadn’t slumped forward when he’d died and leaned against the car’s horn, which would have been
a siren to any rippers who wandered close to this house. But maybe his seatbelt had kept him in place—maybe that’s why he had put it on. Craig had always been a smart guy; he’d always been a man who thought of every angle, every possible scenario in a situation. Apparently he’d thought this suicide and murder through thoroughly.
Now the picture became clear to Ray. At least one of Craig’s daughters (most likely Laura), or maybe both of them, had begun to turn, or already had. At least one of them had been tied to the chair in the dining room. Craig might have known about the disease before others and he might have been able to spot the symptoms earlier. Maybe all four of them were beginning to turn, and Craig felt it was better to put himself and his family down rather than become more of those monsters out there.
A horrifying thought came to Ray. What if Craig had been turning when he had called a few days ago? What if those things Craig had said on the phone while it had been breaking up, those things about roses and Avalon, were just gibberish and didn’t mean anything?
Ray remembered Kim in Emma’s spare bedroom, how she had squatted in the corner, mumbling to herself, saying things that didn’t make sense. Vanessa had acted the same way. So had the old woman at the bank and the ones who had chased his truck into the street. And his neighbors surrounding Kim’s Tahoe had been speaking the same gibberish when Ray had been trying to get his family out their neighborhood.
He tried to remember back to that phone call from Craig, which seemed so long ago now. Craig had seemed rational enough before the phone started to break up. But Kim had had her lucid moments too in between her confused mutterings. She’d been lucid enough to beg him to kill her so she didn’t turn into a ripper.
Ray wondered if he had risked Emma and Mike’s life by coming here because of a man who was already turning into a ripper and losing his mind. Ray could even imagine that Craig had made that phone call right after placing his bound daughters into the back seat of the Mercedes, and then his wife. He could imagine Craig trying to explain to his daughters and his wife in his slow and patient cadence how suicide was the best option.
