Dredging Up Memories (11 page)

I closed my eyes. The SUV was a mausoleum, their gravesite. I wouldn’t be taking it. But I took the gun—every bullet mattered.

I shone the flashlight on the steering column, smiled when I saw the keys dangling there. Surely, there would be a key to the van on it.

I was right, but before I opened the van’s door, I turned the flashlight on it. There were no dead bodies inside. I unlocked the front door and put the key in the ignition. After a moment of uncertainty and trying to get the motor to roll over, the engine purred.

Are we going to be safe?
Humphrey asked.

“We’re getting there, Sweetheart,” I said and pulled Ox from its place. I set it between the two bucket seats up front. With Humphrey pulled free, the pack went to the floorboard in the driver’s seat. Humphrey went into the passenger’s seat. 

“Stay here.”

Okay.

I didn’t know how much time I had; the dead outside continued to beat on the door, and I imagined the weight of their bodies forcing the nails in the two by fours to work out of the wall or door jamb. Eventually, they would get inside.

The back hatch of the van came up with ease. I searched the garage, grabbed the shovels off the pegs. A hoe as well. Some of the toolboxes were too big to carry, but others would fit in the back of the van nicely. I picked up what I could, and what I couldn’t, I grabbed random tools out of. I took a plastic container that held a chainsaw in it. Who knew if I would ever need one of those?

Before getting in the van, I went back to the SUV. I hated doing it and still found it hard to believe that someone could kill their entire family, not give them a chance of surviving. I think they would have been okay for a while. At least until some stranger with a teddy bear ended up on their front porch bringing the dead along with him. I couldn’t imagine doing the same to my boy and wife. It was hard enough putting Lee down after he rose again, but to actually kill them to keep them from turning into the dead? I couldn’t fathom it. 

I pulled the back latch, freeing the tailgate. It was as I hoped. Cases of water, dried foods, and blankets were all stashed back there. Several flashlights and boxes with who knew what in them. With no real time to sort it out, I transferred the contents from one vehicle to the next then closed the SUV’s door.

From the upstairs came a loud
CRACK.
Not just one but several. Then came what I thought was the back door slamming against the wall. Another window broke, and more glass fell to the floor.

Hurry,
Humphrey cried. I could almost see her glass eyes filling with tears.

“I’m coming.”

I closed the back hatch of the van and got in the driver’s seat. For good measure, I buckled Humphrey in and did the same for myself. I shifted the vehicle into drive and looked over at the little bear.

“Hang on, kiddo. This could be a little scary.”

Easing off the brake, I let the car roll forward. There was no electricity, so we were going to have to go through the garage door but not like they did in the movies. No, we were going to go through slow, push the garage door out and up if we could.

The front of the van hit the door with a little more force than I wanted it to. The garage door lifted up a little. I bit down hard on my lip, my hands gripping tight to the steering wheel. A little gas and the van lurched forward. The door protested, but it went up.

Metal scraped on metal, and if I could hear it, so could they. By the time the front end of the van was free of the door, the dead were swarming. There were so many of them. Where did they all come from? Were they wandering from Charleston and Mt. Pleasant? If they were, then were they migrating in search of food? I didn’t find that thought to be a good thing.

So many bodies crushed against the van, their hands beating on the sides of the vehicle, on the glass, reaching for door handles. Through all the noise, I could hear Humphrey whimpering like a sick puppy.

“Close your eyes,” I said. “Close them, and keep them closed.”

I mashed the gas harder, rolling over the ones in front of us. The van jostled from side to side as the bodies broke and crumbled beneath the tires. The driver’s side mirror came off, and the antenna snapped free as the dead continued to grope for anything they could get hold of.

Again, I gave it some gas, this time smashing into more of the dead. They either bounced off the front of the van or disappeared beneath it. Sweat formed on my brow, and my knuckles must have been white. My muscles were tense, and the cacophony of sounds that came from outside the van was loud even with the windows all the way up.

Another rev of the engine and we lurched forward and out of the garage. I turned the van toward the road. I hadn’t realized in either of my journeys to that house that the driveway wound around to the back and that if I were going to reach the road, I would have to plow through the horde before me.

There were souls in the dead, people jailed in the husks that were once their bodies. I hated hitting them, running them over. If I didn’t kill them, then they would suffer the pain of broken bones and smashed insides, but I didn’t have a choice. I had to get out of there, and there was no chance I could do so if I took the time to try and keep from running any of them over.

Body after body fell away as I pressed the gas harder, picking up speed and making my way up the dirt road toward the black top that would lead me out of there. We hit the street faster than I intended and almost tipped over in the process.

What took an eternity by foot took only half a minute by vehicle. Sometimes, we forget things like distances and traveling times and how walking and running were far different than speeding along in a car. As I raced up the road, leaving most of the dead behind me, I remembered the difference.

I hit the interstate entrance ramp and slowed before coming to a complete stop near my old pickup. I had little time. Surely, all the rotters weren’t at that house. Some of them lingered. I had passed a few of them on the way.

What are you doing?
Humphrey yelled—yes, she yelled at me.

“Guns and gas. I’ll be right back.”

In another time and another place, “I’ll be right back,” usually meant just that. But in this world, that same statement might be the last thing you hear from someone. Sure, we think we can make it to and from somewhere, but things aren’t the same as they used to be. There’s no store down on the corner where you know the owner and you can get a cold soda and a bag of chips and a tank of gas and be on your merry way. No, a simple ten-foot run from one place to another could get you killed.

I took a deep breath to calm my nerves, hopped out of the van, and ran the short distance to my truck. The guns were still there. So was the water and the gas tanks—thankfully, I had capped those. I grabbed as many of the weapons as I could, ran back, and slung open the side door. The gas came next. A couple of cans were lost causes, but I managed to secure six of them before the dead started down the hill.

Come on,
Humphrey yelled.

I pulled out my pistol, took aim, and split the center of the first one’s head. It collapsed, and the one behind it tripped over its body and fell as well. The water came next. By then, there were a handful of corpses stumbling down the hill and one coming from up the road. I took aim at an older woman with tangled, gray hair. She dropped to the ground.

Hurry!

I could hear the panic in Humphrey’s voice. I could
feel
it in my chest. The food remained, and I had none in the van. I hurried to grab busted cartons from off the ground and ran back to the van. I didn’t care if I dented the cans or damaged the inside of the vehicle. I tossed what food I could grab in and slid the door closed.

Rounding the van, I stopped. There were three of the dead near the driver’s door. I put a bullet in the first one’s head, took aim, and pulled the trigger only to hear
CLICK
. It wasn’t my pistol. It was the one belonging to the man whose house I just came from.

There was no time to reach for the other pistol. I swung the gun down as hard as I could on the forehead of the corpse closest to me. Its skull gave a resounding pop, and he dropped.

It was the other one…the other one that almost got me. He was a thin, frail-looking person with drooping eyes, his mouth full of yellowed teeth and his bottom lip completely missing. His hands managed to reach my shirt, and his fingers tried to grip the cloth, to pull me toward him.

Fear—true, unadulterated fear—is like a jolt of electricity. There have been times since all this began that I have felt that fear, but on this day, at that moment, I had felt nothing like it. I saw my death in front of me again, this time not by a sickness but by the hands of a rotter. The world slowed again. It grayed, and the sounds of the dead moaning and my heartbeat and Humphrey’s—yes, even when life was so precariously close to ending horribly, I heard a stuffed child’s toy’s voice—screams became muffled remnants. The adrenaline and drive to survive kicked in. I pushed him with both hands. It was all I could think to do. The gun came out from my waistband, and I put a bullet in his head.

The world came back in real speed, the colors no longer bled out. I turned, pulled the trigger twice, taking down the two women closest to me. I slammed the side door closed. Around the vehicle I went, squeezing off one more shot before getting in. I slammed the door, locked it, and shifted into drive. Dirt and pebbles from the side of the road shot up from the right back tire, and the vehicle swerved.

It was a few miles before I stopped again, not bothering to pull off the road. Something had been humming in my brain since rushing to get back into the van, a sound that seemed to follow us as we fled Summerville.

As I sat in the middle of I-26 heading away from Charleston, it dawned on me. The sound was someone crying. I looked at Humphrey, who just looked ahead, her eyes staring at the dashboard.

She wasn’t crying. Not that I could hear.

No, it wasn't the stuffed teddy bear weeping at all. It was me…

Eleven Weeks After It All Started…

It was a sunny morning. The trees were a green so lush it looked like they could have been computer generated. But they weren’t. They circled the open field I parked in the night before. I had made my way to the little field in Columbia the previous day.

I was still tired.

I still hurt. The pills only dulled the pain. Things were a little fuzzy in my head, as if everything was falling apart in my mind, just as it had in the world.

But I was alive, and the need to press on was stronger than ever before. I guess almost dying will do that to a person—give them a stronger resolve. In this world we live in now, almost dying could be considered an everyday occurrence. Searching for food, gas, a safe place to stay for a night or two—or a couple weeks—are now the ways of survival. Gone are the days of reaching into the refrigerator for a beer or going to McDonald’s for one of their I-can’t-believe-it’s-not-soybean cheeseburgers or finding a hotel where they still leave a light on for you.

There are no luxuries. Only live or die, and if you die, you better hope it’s because of a bullet to the head and not from being bitten by something resembling a person but not quite.

That field was a familiar place, and nothing feels more like home these days than a little familiarity.

It sat off Interstate 20. I had detoured from 26 just to find some rest. I crossed over I-20 in Columbia and headed there. It sat behind a huge church, and at the time the world died, it was being turned into a sports complex. The entrance was a dirt and rock path with a mobile home to the right and a playground and eating area to the left.

I thought about the mobile home, about possibly finding a bed to sleep in, but decided against it. If I wanted, I could sleep in the back of the snazzy new van I had. There was plenty of space to lie down once I moved the supplies around or took out that middle seat. Maybe one of these days, I’ll find me a small mattress to put down in there—a luxury I longed for.

I drove down the dirt road and around the fence that separated it from the playground. The parking area was nothing more than dirt and grass, and there were a couple porta-potties sitting side by side. The field was lavishly green.

I parked in the center of it and got out. All around the field, the trees stood like ancient sentries over a holy land. They formed a U shape with the church directly behind the fields and an apartment complex in the opposite corner. The playground and exits sat up the hill I had come from. And along that hill just beyond the fields were steps that led up to the playground.

How many times had Bobby run up those steps after a game, whooping and hollering and having a blast?

I got out of the truck and took a deep breath. The world smelled clean. There was no smoke, no pollution, and nothing even close to the scent of decay. Just the crisp smell of nature. And maybe that’s what this was. Nature doing what nature does and giving herself a bath to clean things up. Maybe she was spring-cleaning by getting rid of humans. I don’t know, but I could have stood there the remainder of my life and been content if I didn’t have a family to find.

There wasn’t a rotter in sight.

Before the sunset, I had stood in the middle of Field 2. Bobby played flag football on that field when he was five. It was only a six-week season, but he disliked it from the first practice.

“I want to play baseball again, Daddy,” he said before his second practice.

“Maybe in the spring, but for now, you said you wanted to play flag football, so you are.”

“I don’t like it.”

“Too bad. If you start something, you finish it. You started this, so you’re not quitting. Understand?”

He shook his head and cried all the way to practice that day.

I stood there, where he had played—begrudgingly—and I missed him terribly. My heart cracked, and my breath hitched. I thought about when I was sick, how I wanted to give up and put a bullet through the roof of my mouth and felt shame. What if he was still alive? What if he and his mom were in Table Rock waiting for me? My heart cracked a little more.

I could see him chasing the kid with the ball, trying to get that flag, his fingers extended but not quite able to reach it. And I think that’s why he hated it so much. He wasn’t quite able to run as fast as the other boys, or catch that football the way they could, or get that flag so easily. Unlike baseball, football didn’t come easy to him. And he didn’t like all the contact. More than a few times, he got knocked down, and he didn’t care much for that. I reckon he got that from his mother.

That night, I dreamed of little dead boys chasing each other, but instead of flags, they were trying to grab the arm that one of the other dead boys carried. That boy was Bobby, and every few steps, he took another bite out of the flesh of what could only be another little boy’s arm, never slowing so the other rotters could catch him.

And when morning came, I was tired.

I drove back up the small hill, stopped between the trailer and the playground. I don’t know why I didn’t look to the playground first, but I didn’t. I went straight for the trailer. Grass was grown up around it, and there was a car parked on the side, an older model that had seen better days. Much like the rest of the world.

The steps were nothing more than a few cinderblocks stacked together. I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked softly and listened. I heard nothing, knocked again and waited. After hearing nothing again, I put my shoulder into the door. There was a jolt of pain in my arm, but it pushed in easy enough. I raised my pistol and stepped inside.

My heart hammered again, and my mouth became dry. My shoulder throbbed, and I thought of those pain pills sitting in the console of the van. I checked the first room. No rotters. Instead, there was a man sitting on the couch, one side of his head blown out and splattered against the wall beside him. I checked his gun—three bullets remained. I’m not ashamed to say I took it with me.

The kitchen held nothing other than a couple of butter knives and mostly spoiled food.

Down the hall were two bedrooms. The first one held two little girls lying in their beds, their heads covered by blankets, red patches bloomed like bloodied flowers. It became more and more clear to me that many parents couldn’t handle the thought of one of their children turning into one of those monsters, and instead of trying to fight for their lives, they just ended them.

I looked around the room and found a box full of dolls. Next to the box was a basket of doll clothes. I think I smiled a little. I picked up the basket and made my way out of the room.

In the next room was a woman. Like the girls, there was a bloodied blanket covering her head. At that moment, I wondered just how hard it was for the man in that front room, or any of the fathers, to make a decision to kill instead of be killed. How bad did they feel before finally ending their own lives? They probably cried and maybe even had second thoughts about it but went through with it anyway. Why? In their eyes, there was no other way out.

I left the trailer with a box of baby doll clothes and one gun with three rounds in it. I closed the door behind me. I thought about all those houses in my hometown, the ones I had placed Xes on after searching them for any living people. There would be no X on this one.

I started for the van but stopped. The playground caught my eye. It wasn’t the faded out slide or the rusted monkey bars and ladders. It was what sat beyond that: the eating area, completely covered. Several picnic tables sat beneath it. Sitting at one of those tables were two people.

I set the basket down and approached the play set. I crouched down and peeked over the side of the slide. I wiped my mouth with one hand and held my breath as I stood.

A boy and a girl, no older than their late teens, sat staring at one another. They were as dead as any other rotter I had encountered, but they didn’t turn to look at me. They didn’t get up and give chase. They didn’t seem to smell me or hear me. They didn’t seem to care. They only stared forward, like lovers do.

I cocked my gun, held my breath. If they stood to come after me, I would put them down.

I took one step forward then another.

The boy turned to me. His face was sunken in and gray/green. His hair was matted down as if he had crawled out of mud. But he didn’t have any blood clinging to his face. As far as I could see, there was no blood on his clothes at all. The girl lifted her head. Her eyes were maybe green at one time, and her hair had been red. Now, it was a dirty rust color. Like the boy, there was no blood on her face or her blouse.

I took aim with the pistol.

One move.

One twitch to stand and I would drop them where they sat.

The boy turned back to the girl. The girl turned back to the boy. Here I stood, a potential fresh meal, and neither of them made to stand and come after me. They only stared at each other…like lovers.

I gave a nod, lowered the pistol, and took the few steps backward toward the basket of doll clothes. I picked it up, made my way to the van, and slid the side door open. I set the basket inside and went around to the driver’s side.

Inside the van, I sat there and watched the two teens. They hadn’t budged since I first saw them. Somehow, they controlled their hunger, their impulse for flesh, that carnal part of their mind that said humans were food, and it didn’t matter that they were living creatures.

We pulled away and onto the dirt road, leaving the lovers behind. Maybe one day, they would lose the battle with their decaying minds, but not then. On that day, they were lovers who only had eyes for each other. And who was I to take that away from them?

“Hey Humphrey,” I said.

Yes?

“I got you something.”

What?
She sounded excited—the first time I heard excitement in her voice since finding her.

“New clothes.”

She didn’t say anything, but I think she smiled.