Crowded Yet Desolate: A Zombie Novel (21 page)

Ryan had no idea how to respond. He did the best he could. “Thanks, Joe.”

“And for what it’s worth, I think you make a pretty goddamn good leader.” He handed Ryan a large bundle of intestines, as if it was an award. Holding the gore in his hands, Ryan nodded and stuffed them into a huge, black trash bag. The stench burned his nostrils, though it too was comparatively nothing.

“And I think I’m ready now,” Joe said.

“For what?”

“Roe and that dead bitch in the shed . . . ”

Ryan winced at the word.

“I’m sorry man. I’m just . . . not really up to normal functioning right now. But it’s been what, four–five days now? We know they ain’t going to change now so it’s time to give them a proper funeral. And I think I’m ready for it now.”

He wasn’t. It was delayed two days.

Ryan shoveled the last pack of dirt onto Roe’s grave and, feeling the strain from the earlier injury, packed it tight with the back of his shovel. Joe was next to him, mirroring the motion with a touch more ferocity. Both of their arms and faces were caked with dirt and sweat. Ryan forced the shovel into the ground and leaned on it, recalling the way the bodies had looked in the hole, Roe on top of Marge, their heads on opposite sides of the hole. It had been an open casket funeral without the casket. The others, who had been sitting in the shade of a tree, then stood and walked to the mound of dirt. At the beginning the shoveling had been easy on the body but hard on the heart, but as the sun faded deeper into the sky, the roles reversed. The entire process had been eerily silent, except for the sound of the shovel separating dirt, the strong winds rustling through the leaves, and Joe’s muffled crying.

Joe said very few words, making the funeral a mainly physical endeavor. Ryan didn’t mind. Funerals had always left a nasty taste in his mouth, ever since attending his parent’s as a young boy. That one especially had seemed overcrowded with cheesy words and traditions, used up bible passages by a preacher Ryan hadn’t seen since, all of which gave blessed assurance that his parents were now with Jesus. At least this funeral lacked all that; this one was real. Unfortunately, the pain was real too. Ryan couldn’t help but think of Deborah as he had packed and covered the bodies. How could he not? Her grave was the apartment, in which she would stay until she rotted away. This then would be the only funeral she received, one separated by both time and distance.

He then thought of Kyle and some of his last words: People show who they truly are when no one else is looking
.
Ryan grinned. What did Ryan’s actions after the outbreak tell of him? Did Kyle think him weak? insecure? blind? He was being too hard on himself, he realized. And even if those things were true, Kyle would never think that lowly of him. Ryan reflected over this time and then over his entire life, not only on what others saw, but also on what was hidden from their eyes.
I’m a survivor
, Ryan thought.
No matter what life keeps throwing at me, I survive.
When his parents had died, he made it through, as a disillusioned young boy naive about his future, but alive nonetheless. When his grandfather passed away and he left for college, he struggled to fit in until he found Deborah. And now she and the rest of those people he at one point had tried to blend in with were gone, and Ryan was still here.

The sky had grown dark, and it was no longer safe to be this far from the house. Ryan wiped his sweaty forehead with his blistered hands. “We need to get going soon. The dark is setting in.”

Joe looked up from the grave he had been staring at. “Ya, no, of course. Can you just give me a moment alone?”

“We’ll be in the car.”

The group–Ryan, Cam, Albert, and Reginald in Molly’s arms– went to the truck. Cam and Albert jumped into the truck bed. Ryan opened the door and climbed in, sliding to the middle of the bench. Molly came in after him and shut the door.

“That sure was rough,” Ryan said.

“Ya,” Molly said. “I didn’t know either of them, really, but it kind of felt necessary. You know what I mean?”

“I definitely do.” Ryan tried to pretend not to notice Joe’s puffy eyes when he came back to the car. They drove in silence through the dark back to the house, then prepared themselves for bed. Ryan made sure all locks were set, and the house was safe, swearing never to make that mistake again.

The following afternoon, Molly and Albert were outside, preparing the deer meat and doing their best to minimize the smoke, so as not to attract attention, live or otherwise. Albert worked the charcoal grill while Molly fanned the smoke away with a towel, causing it to diffuse outwards and disappear after raising a few feet into the air.

Ryan sat on the couch in a surprisingly good mood. There was a dull ache in his arms and a stronger pain in his back, the shoveling the day before re-straining the injury there. Cam was on the ground, rolled onto his back, looking up at Reginald, who would slap Cam’s face and then laugh.

“This game was fun about ten minutes ago,” Cam said to Ryan, as another hand smacked into his face, resulting in another bout of laughter.

“You’re the one who encouraged it,” Ryan said, laughing with Reginald.

“Well it’s over now.” Cam stood, taking Reginald with him. They sat on the couch next to Ryan, and the baby looked from Ryan to Cam, face full of hurt, right before he began to wail. “Oh come on, not this again. We just got you to finish. I swear, I think the only person here who cries as much as this damn baby is me.”

“Maybe that’s why he likes you so much. A pair of cry babies.” Cam didn’t find this amusing. “Don’t get upset. It’s probably a good thing to let your emotions out like that.”
“Ya,” he admitted, raising his eyebrows indifferently. His face grew serious. “I just miss my beer is all. God, what I wouldn’t give for a nice cold one with some of that deer meat.”

Ryan laughed. “Never much cared for beer. But I bet there might be one laying around here somewhere. Can’t promise you it’s cold, though.”

“Nope, those days are over. Say, they gotta be almost done by now. Let’s go check up on them. And maybe we can leave this thing outside, so we can get some peace and quiet.”

Before long the food was ready and the table prepared. Joe, less of a recluse since the funeral, joined them for dinner. The table sat four, so they had to crowd around to enjoy the meat, bread, and drink. Cam had found warm Busch light in the refrigerator, and he downed two of them with dinner, and Joe drank three. The dinner table was full of more laughter and conversation than any of the previous meals.

Half an hour later, Reginald became restless, fidgeting and whining in Molly’s lap, and Molly took him upstairs for sleep. Joe proposed a game of poker, and after they agreed to play, he left and returned with a deck of cards and a large jar of coins. They divided the mass into stacks of pennies, quarters, and dimes and distributed the stacks evenly between the members. The game began when Molly returned. Cam and Ryan’s stack quickly depleted as Molly’s and Albert’s stack multiplied. Apparently, poker was the game to play in the MIT biology department when Albert attended graduate school, and not a hint of his experience had been lost through time. Molly had a poker face that was impregnable.

The conversation remained on the topic of poker skills (or lack thereof) for the better part of an hour, but now as the silence fell between them, Ryan knew the topic that they had all avoided since arriving here was about to be discussed. Throughout the outbreak, Ryan had become aware what masters humans were at covering up what needed to be brought to the table; maybe they were becoming a family after all.

After losing another hand, Cam broke the silence, taking the roll of the young adolescent of the family, Ryan supposed: “Has anyone else been completely shocked and surprised by the lack of government? Seriously? Where the hell are they?”

“What do you mean?” Albert asked.

“Fucking think about it. No quarantine was established, no public broadcasts were made, not even the local police organized. I would at least expect them to blow Atlanta to hell, if nothing else.”

“No, way,” Molly said. “You don’t think they’d really do something like that?” She turned to Ryan. “Do you?”

“If you asked me before the outbreak, I would have said no. But now, if it could have contained it, ya, I think they should have blown the whole place up.” Harsh words he could hardly believe he was saying, but he knew they were true.

“You don’t mean that,” said Molly.

“Forget Atlanta,” Joe said. “Think about what the broadcast said. The virus spread all the way up to Charlotte in only two or three days, not to mention how far west and south it went. They would have had to blow up the whole fucking south east.”

“I’m sure not too many people would be upset about getting rid of we red-necked, nigger hatin’, right winged radicals,” Cam said in an impressive impersonation of Rick.

No one paid attention to Cam, now used to his using humor to lighten serious moods.

“And that was just a few days,” Albert said. “Imagine how chaotic things were for them. I imagine by the time they had any plan of action, the virus had already made its way towards them. It was just self-preservation at that point.”

Cam shook his head and grabbed the bridge of his nose. “Damn. This is all just so unreal.” They all soaked in the reality of this statement. Then, “Do you think anywhere is left untouched?”

There was a long silence. Albert flipped a coin over his finger, and Ryan watched it, hypnotized.

“I don’t know,” Albert said somberly. “I can’t imagine there is.”

Ryan pursed his lips. “No. There has to be something left out there. Something more. It can’t possibly have taken everyone.”

Joe folded his hands, unfolded them to pick up another beer, and popped the can open. “I know that’s what you want to believe. You always do try to keep a positive mind, and that’s what I like about ya. But do you truly believe that?”

Ryan thought. “Ya. There’s something out there. I believe it.”

Joe nodded. “Like I said, that’s why I love ya.”

“The only question remaining then,” Albert said, “is are we going to survive long enough to see it. We still don’t know how the virus spreads.”

Ryan thought of Roe’s dead bodies, Marge’s dead bodies. In the ground, they had faced up at him, pale and lifeless, thin and without emotion: all of the things the dead should be, and nothing more. Albert had warned Ryan about taking Roe’s body with them when they left the school. He had been certain that everyone was infected and that all dead bodies would resurrect. But he had been wrong.

“You’re right about that much,” Ryan said. “We have no ideas. Not even I can be optimistic about that.”

Ryan could tell from the perplexed expressions cast down at the table, not each other, that everyone was thinking the same thing: Could this be stopped? Could they survive? It was easy to feel safe here, where they were excluded from the world, but were they really safe?

“We can live through this, guys,” Ryan said. “We’re survivors. All of us. And I think we can find happiness along the way.”

“I hope you’re right,” Molly replied.

Me too.
One thought remained:
I’m not ready to die.
Although he didn’t realize it, he was staring straight into Molly’s eyes as these words formed in his mind.

Over the next week the group continued to settle into their niche of this new world, and each member into their niche of the household. As Ryan watched the others fall into place, Cam taking care of Reginald, Albert cleaning the house and yard, Molly prepping the food and shopping, Joe setting traps and hunting and gathering food, Ryan wondered where it was that he best fit in. When he could think of nothing, he began to feel like dead weight. He heard voices telling him to run, to leave them now before the burden of his presence weighed them down.

He went on walks to clear his mind, to take in the beautiful sound and smell of nature with an appreciation only near death experiences could grant. It was in this way that he accidentally found his niche: as he looked over the hills over which a few weeks earlier they had fled from the preschool, in the very path their feet had trampled, proven by the flattened grass, two of the undead made haste towards Ryan.

Unarmed, and minutes from the house, Ryan lingered only a few seconds to confirm what he was seeing, not wanting to set a false alarm, and then turn and sped back to the cabin. Bent over, winded with fright, he relayed what he had seen. Weapons were dispersed, and the zombies quietly disposed of, but Ryan knew that they might not be so lucky the next time. He began setting up defenses. With little equipment, and even less knowledge of construction, he created a fence along the path, where he reasoned their smell would linger until a good rain. He used large logs, branches, and wild shrubbery, arranging it in a U-shape so that it could halt a few intruders and slow down a horde. He ripped bells from Christmas decorations and duck-taped them to the makeshift fence, so that the bells would ring when the fence was moved. He did not know if they could hear the bells from the house, but it couldn’t hurt. With the same decorations, he created a perimeter around the house, using glass ornaments and lights that would pop if intruders stepped on them. He placed fishing wire across the entrances and tied bells to them. Twice they rang as Molly tripped over them; the group rushed to attack only to laugh. He gathered planks of plywood and placed them below the windows, strategically placed hammers and nails and weapons throughout the house; began making sweeps three times daily for intruders, placing binoculars both behind and in front of the house. And every night he made sure the doors were locked.