APOCALYCIOUS: Satire of the Dead (47 page)

“It’s all clear,” Hito said then scooped up Annie’s body from the passenger seat. He carried her to the front yard and laid her gently on the ground. Juanita stood watching, crying quietly while Shere stood beside the little woman, staring off toward the woods with a vacant, haunted look dulling her brown eyes.

Hito walked to a rickety wooden shed and returned with a rusty shovel.

Once the shallow grave had been dug they slid Annie’s body into the ground. Juanita opened Annie’s pack, retrieved a shirt that had belonged to Hito, and placed it in her friend’s stiffened arms. Hito blinked back tears as he covered her with dirt. He was unsure how long it had been since he had last cried.

He listened as Juanita uttered a prayer in Spanish and they entered the house leaving behind a mound of freshly turned dirt with the shovel driven down into the loosely packed, turned earth. A piece of rawhide from Annie’s hair tied a piece of kindling across it forming a primitive and rugged cross. The ends of the rawhide danced in the wind.

                                                                 
Chapter 54 – Parallels

Coopermill
, Ohio 

              Juanita had left the pair during the night without a word to either of them and Hito thought that was probably the best possible course of action for everyone.

             
Hito thought of Annie again. She had been the focal point of his thoughts since her death; he had planned to kill her when he had found her for abandoning their pact but he couldn’t remember where that anger had come from and now he was guilt stricken as he longed for that righteous purity of vengeance again. It wouldn’t come though; he felt only guilt.

             
She had sacrificed herself for him. Why had she done that?

             
How many lives had he taken in that righteous anger? Questions and guilt were all that he seemed to have left; that and a woman that now seemed to hate him.

Shere.

              Shere didn’t hate him like Victoria had; Victoria’s hate had been wild and sadistic, while Shere’s incarnation of hate was quiet and subtle.
Indifference;
Hito thought
that might be the purest form of hate.

             
He tried to hold Shere when they settled into the double-wide and after he had secured it, but her arms had lain at her sides limp and didn’t return his touch. He tried to kiss her, but her lips refused to respond.  He tried to talk to her, but his words echoed unanswered in the silence of the candle lit room. The shadows of the flickering flames danced on the walls like serpents, frenzied by the drafts that leeched into the building and seemed to mock him.

             
“Do you remember what you told me before we went into the woods?” he asked looking into her vacant stare.

             
Her expression remained slack as she stared at the nothingness that the hopeless always seem drawn to.

             
He removed the remaining ‘Twin’ from its holster and laid it on the pack beside her but Shere continued to stare blankly at the wall.

             
He knelt down beside her head and in a whisper he said. “I don’t know why you hate me or maybe I do Shere, I’m not sure, but I can feel it regardless.” He paused, looking at her eyes, searching for a semblance of the way she had looked at him just the day before. She seemed entranced by the serpents dancing on the walls. “I can’t blame you for hating me. I know that I deserve it for many reasons…I know that.”

             
He felt the burden like a dead weight in his heart of the love he felt for her. It was real; maybe the first time in his life, he felt a genuine, deeply rooted emotion for another. “I killed my wife Victoria. Maybe I didn’t shoot her or stab her, but I left her for the dead and I heard her screams and felt no pity for her. I just drove away.” His voice was soft and he choked with emotion.

             
“I betrayed her. I tried to make excuses for it; I tried to reason it away. I betrayed her because she treated me like shit. I betrayed her because she was a bitch, because she was such a hypocrite. I betrayed her because she betrayed me first,” he said all this as if he were making a confession to God in prayer. “But there is no excuse for the inexcusable. I betrayed her because I hated her as much as she hated me.”

             
Hito stood up but his eyes remained on Shere’s. “I should have told you before we went into the woods that I love you too. I wanted to tell you that I would have given up everything for you. I would have given up all that hate and revenge which was unjustified anyway, but now I know that it’s too late.”

             
He looked around at the shambles that had become his kingdom. “I let you down; you trusted me and I let you down. I couldn’t give you the one thing you most wanted. I know you wanted revenge. That is the one thing I know all too well and I pulled you from it.” He followed her eyes and glanced at the snake charmers routine silhouetted on the wall.

             
“I have failed everyone. God, myself, my parents, Victoria…” his chin quivered and he choked it down, “…Annie….but my greatest failure was with you; the one person who I truly loved and now when I look into your eyes I see the absence of the life that I stole from you.”

             
Hito walked to a shadowy corner of the apartment, retrieved Riley’s pack and tossed it beside where Shere sat. “Inside that,” he said, “there’s a map, marked with directions that will lead you to the others you might want to kill. Riley kept a journal in there and I know what he and his low-life friends did to you. It’s all there.”

             
Hito reached into his own pack, pulled out a black hooded sweatshirt and pulled it over his head, leaving the hood up. “I’m going to leave now; I know that you don’t want me here with you anymore.”

             
He turned from her and walked to the front door. He swung it open before him. Maybe God would give him a chance for redemption. He had laid down his weapons and would face the world that wanted his flesh, unarmed.

             
Dawn was breaking, and in that early morning light, it shone in glories of reds and purples. Hito could see the dead trudging ever closer toward the double-wide. The early bird gets the worm, but so do the dead. He stepped over the threshold and took a moment to look at Annie’s shallow grave.

             
“Hito,” Shere’s voice sounded far away.

             
It had been the first word she had said to him since being in the woods and he stopped, his heart skipped a beat, but he didn’t turn. Hope of a second chance threatened to overflow from his heart and he silently thanked God for it.

             
He heard the hammer of the remaining ‘Twin’ cock back. It was a familiar sound. How many times had he drawn it back in just such a way, with murder on his mind? Hito sighed and hung his head as he waited for the impact, then the sweet darkness of oblivion.

“
OK, Shere,” he said quietly. This death was well-earned, he knew, and there was a part of him that wanted his life to end every bit as much as the dead that lumbered toward him with ratcheting jaws. Hito heard a set of jaws piston down an inch from his ear.

             
She pulled the trigger and saw the black hood flap in the wind as the bullet passed through it. “I forgive you Hito,” Shere said as she watched the zombie that had reached out to grab Hito from the porch propel backward, it’s arms flailing and falling with the back of its skull shredded.

             
There was something inherently wrong with jarheads, every damn one of them. She stood and watched Hito’s body lurch, clumsily, forward with a heavy thud on the concrete patio. In his place, she could see her ever approaching fate of death and their snapping jaws. Their faces looked angry and filled with hate. It was as if someone had taken the living’s masks from them and exposed them for what they really were in life.

             
She felt no fear of the dead as they mechanically hammered each step closer to her.

She would change. She had been another nobody and there was no life in being a ‘nothing’. It was a heavy thing that nothingness.

              Life had given her hope only to take it away. She thought of Lucy holding the football for Charlie Brown. Charlie Brown knew that Lucy was going to yank the ball away as he tried to kick it and he would end up flying and landing in a heap on his back. Lucy would call him a blockhead and walk away with the ball, laughing at his stupid ass. He fell for it every damn time and Shere had known that frustration. Hope is for suckers stupid enough to believe in fool’s gold; it’s just iron pyrite. It glitters but it is worthless. Even if hope was genuine then she knew one thing for certain.

             
Hope is a dangerous thing in the hands of the hopeless.

             
She unloaded the magazine into the leering faces of the dead that seemed to laugh at her misfortune. The good thing about being a ‘nothing’ was that there would be no one looking for her if she was only that. The dead dropped, piling up behind where Hito lay and soon their numbers had divided and then divided again until they dropped to nothing...just like she had.

             
She walked to the porch and knelt beside Hito, smoothing his shiny, black hair that was slick with blood. Hito stirred and turned to look at her. “You shot me, Shere,” he said, still groggy. A large goose egg covered the top of his forehead where his head had hit the concrete patio. Would she and Hito prove mathematicians wrong? Would two little ‘nothings, two zeroes, still be ‘nothing’, or would they become more than the sum of their parts? Would their arithmetic become indivisible? Would zero plus zero invent a new equation that became one? In a world where science was irrational, why couldn’t simple math become quantum in its complication?

             
“I just grazed you, maybe if you would have ducked down to give me a better shot…” Shere said and helped Hito to his feet. “Let’s load up our gear; those shots will bring more of the dead.”

             
Hito straightened and looked her in the eyes. There was that spark again, that life, and she smiled at him. “Thank you, Hito,” she said and kissed him softly.

             
He blinked, confused “For what?”

             
She reached up; the remaining ‘Twin’ still in her grasp, the slid locked to the rear, where it had stayed when she had expended her last round, and touched his cheek gently with the soft skin of the back of her hand. “Purpose,” she whispered and with a smile playing upon her lips she added, “We’re going to need a lot more ammunition.”

                                                          
Chapter 55 - Separation anxiety

State Route # 35

Jackson, Ohio 

             
Death Wagon drove in silence determined to wait for Nan to initiate the conversation. For now he would give her time, let her think and she would talk when she was ready. Death was just thankful to have her in the Winnie with him and to be taking her someplace safe. He knew that Nan was devastated by not being able to go with Mia and Mick. This was to have been her first real adventure. Although Death felt for her, he was also happy that she was unable to go to a place with unknown dangers. She would be safe with him at the mine.

             
After several minutes of silence, Death finally heard her sweet, soft voice.

             
“Tomorrow I want to go exploring,” she said wiping away the last of her tears.

             
Death glanced over at her “Are you sure you’ll feel up to it?” he asked, testing the waters.

             
“I need something to keep my mind occupied,” she answered.

             
He wanted to tell her that he had something to keep her occupied, but he refrained. Nan had asked Mick to wed them their last night at the mine, and he had. Death could still see Mick’s expression when Nan had asked him to preside over the impromptu service; it had been one of relief that Nan would have a man to take care of her, but also one of absolute horror that his little Nano would be doing the same things in the privacy of her bedroom that he and Mia enjoyed. Death Wagon smiled as he replayed that scene in his mind. Unfortunately for Death and the scythe in his jeans, they still hadn’t consummated their marriage. They had lain in bed together, naked, but she hadn’t been ready. They had gotten into some intense making out and had allowed their hands to explore where ever they would, but she had gently pushed his hips away when he had tried anything further.  Death had thought that he might explode below the waist, but he waited until she fell asleep and had went to the bathroom and taken care of himself; it hadn’t taken him long, but he still didn’t get much sleep. Every time he closed his eyes his mind kept replaying images of her body lying atop his own. He snapped out of his reverie.