Dredging Up Memories (3 page)

Seven Weeks and Two Days After It All Started…

“Sometimes, life kicks you in the teeth.” It was one of Pop’s sayings. It was how he referred to dealing with everything, good or bad. Either it kicked you in the teeth or it picked roses for you, and even then, those roses held thorns. “It’s how you respond that makes you who you are.” It was also one of the last things Pop said before…

I can only shake my head and close my eyes and pray there was a better place on the other side of this mess.

It had been a little under two months since folks started dying and rising, but Pop’s words still rang loud in my ears. By then, the sweeps had led me through most of Sipping Creek. I don’t know how many hundreds of people I killed.

Killed? That’s laughable. If things were normal, I would have probably never been able to take aim at another human being. But things were far from normal—still are. The only place left to sweep was the street I had lived on. I reckon you could say my world ended on that street—at least the world I knew, the one I had lived in, had a family in. 

I drove the short distance to where home had once been, having not seen a living person since…since too long. More and more, Jeanette and Bobby were on my mind, and more and more, I wondered if they made it to the cabin or if they were now walking among the dead.

Why was I still there? Why was I still sweeping our little town? Why did it matter anymore? If anything, Pop is why. Leland is why. Davey Blaylock is why. Every single person I ever knew was why I was still there. The dead were dangerous. They may have been our friends and neighbors and family at one time, but once they changed, once death had hold of them and turned that key in their brain that made them rise again, they were no longer people. They were monsters. But deep down inside, I still thought of them as people with souls and feelings and probably just as scared of me with a gun as I was of them. 

Kill or be killed. Isn’t that the famous saying? Kill or be killed? Yeah, that’s the way it is now. But the living are losing the war. There are only a few of us left. Maybe even just me. I don’t know. What I did know—do know—is there are so many more rotters, and wiping them out seems to get harder and harder each day. 

I think of Jeanette and Bobby and hope they are still among the living. Why did I send them away? Why didn’t I go with them? Why didn’t all of us just stick together? In my nightmares, I see them shambling along a street, their faces slack, eyes staring off into nowhere, mouth open. Blood is on their clothes and skin. I pushed the thoughts away, refusing to think of them as decaying corpses.

At the corner of Elaine Street, I stopped the truck and stared at the carnage left behind. Somewhere along that street, I was going to run into neighbors, folks closer than most of the dead I had encountered, and I would have to put a bullet in their brain to end their misery. It was on that day as I sat in my truck, the motor idling, that I wondered if the dead
knew
they were dead; if they could feel and think. If I was careful, I could find out, but one mistake, no matter how small, and I would know the answers a little more intimately than I wanted. 

I slid out of my seat, shouldered my pack, and looked down at Humphrey. “Hey, buddy, you keep an eye on the truck, okay?” He didn’t answer, only stared straight ahead at the dashboard he was too small to see over. I would have to remedy that if he was going to continue to tag along. I checked my guns, slid the machete into its sheath, and strapped it to my back. 

It was as if the Heavens knew I wouldn’t be able to handle putting the folks in my own neighborhood down. The eight houses along the right side held none of the undead—none of the living as well. There were no bodies anywhere. Sure, there was some blood, and most of the houses had been ransacked, windows smashed and doors kicked in. Like most of Sipping Creek—most of the world I guessed—people had left in a panic, taking only what they could carry and leaving memories behind. I crossed the street and made it four houses in the direction of my truck. 

I stopped there.

The gray trim looked the same, accenting the red brick structure. The grass had turned gray in some places, brown in others. The garden that lined the brick fence on the left side of the yard had wilted, the stems of elephant ears lying on the ground, withered and black. The front door was closed. Around the back of the house was much as I remembered. A swing set, a playhouse, an old Fairlane under a dark blue tarp, its engine in various states of repair in the garage off to the right. 

Bobby’s toys lay strewn about the yard, left where he had last played with them, forever forgotten. I went back to the front, looked down the street, then in the other direction. Nothing. No one. Just a soft wind whistling on a dead street to keep me company. I walked to the next house—the Baxters’—bypassing going inside mine. I remembered telling Max what was happening, asking them to go with Jake and my family up to Table Rock, that the mountains might be safer than the small towns or the big cities. Inside told me all I needed to know. There were bodies—four of them—but it didn’t look like the dead had gotten hold of them. The boys—both in their early teens—lay in their beds, sheets pulled over their heads. The brown stain where their heads were relayed the story. I found Sarah in Max’s bedroom; she, like her sons, still lay in bed, the sheet pulled over her head. 

On the couch in the den sat the body of Max Baxter, one of my longtime friends from high school. The pistol lay on the floor at his feet. The bullet had entered under his chin and left a crater in the top of his head. The ceiling above and the wall behind him were spattered with dried masses of brain matter, hair, and blood. One hand clutched tight to a piece of paper. It took a minute, but I managed to pull it free. Two words were scrawled in black marker; two words that showed the desperation of the situation:
I'm sorry…

“Yeah, me too,” I said and dropped the paper to the floor. Pop would have said Max’s response was that of a coward’s. Me, I’m not so sure I agree. Maybe it was the only way he could protect them. Maybe he saw them in his head as the rotting dead, the same as I saw my family in my nightmares, and hated the very thought and did what he thought was best. I don’t know. 

Wrapped in sheets, I pulled their bodies into the front yard. Before all was said and done, I would need to bury them.

There was nothing in the final three houses, their owners having fled like many others. That left my house—the only one of sixteen in the neighborhood without a bright red X on its door. I won’t lie and say it was a piece of cake. I won’t say I walked right in and checked the place out and got out of there, X in place, the past behind me without a struggle at all. No, I stood in my front yard for the longest time, terrified to go inside. Not because I thought I would find someone—I knew I wouldn’t—but because of the memories stepping inside would bring back. Just standing in the yard was bad enough, but going inside…going inside meant facing the almost certainty that I would never see my family again and that I was truly alone in this world gone insane. 

My legs shook as I took the steps and stood in front of the door. Funny to think about it now—I even laughed a little then—the door was locked. From my wallet, I produced a key, slid it in the knob, and turned it until I heard that familiar click. The door opened, and I fought back the urge to run. Though we had left in a rush, the house was not a mess like so many others. Sure, there were a few things out of place, but all in all, the house looked as if someone still lived there. 

I stumbled through the living room and down the hall, my legs not wanting to work, my mind screaming for me to just go away, to never come back unless I want my heart broken all over again. The kitchen held a couple of beer cans—the ones Leland and I had emptied the night the dead came to town. The bedrooms were mostly neat, the only thing really not right being the beds were not made. Bobby’s room was the typical boy’s room: not really a mess but not really clean either, kind of an organized chaos. I could hear his laughter, see him playing with cars and trucks and Legos and marbles…but he wasn’t there. It was all a trick of the mind, memories surfacing, waving hello, and dipping back under the blackening waters of life. I closed his door, went back up the hall, and stopped short of the front door. The attic door was in the ceiling in the center of the hallway. I pulled the drop chord and lowered the stairs. 

It was dark and dusty, but the lights from the ventilation on each side of the house made it easy to spot the blue and gray car seat sitting next to a bag of old winter clothes. I reached for it and then stopped. A sound came from the corner of the attic. It wasn’t much. Just a little rustling, like a squirrel had gotten in there somehow. I waited, holding my breath, focusing on the corner. If it wasn’t a squirrel, then maybe someone had managed to get into the house and hidden up there. In more certain times, that would have been an irrational thought. But the times weren’t so certain, and sometimes, rationale goes right out the window. 

I slipped the pistol from my waistband and held it out in front of me.

“Who’s there?”

The rustling came again. It sounded like it was by several bags of Bobby’s old stuffed animals. Maybe the big, white rabbit with the bowtie that I won for him at the state fair in Columbia when he was only two.

“Come on out now.”

My mind told me it was just a small animal.
A squirrel, Walker. That’s all, old boy.

I was in full squat mode, duck walking across the dusty attic floor. I was only a few feet from the white trash bags. I could make out the lumps of stuffed animals all crammed together, a head here, the length of a leg there. Was that a snout trying to push through the plastic? I moved the bag. A rat darted from behind it and across the room.

I screamed and fell back. It wasn’t my most graceful moment. I took aim and fired the pistol. A piece of wood splintered in the floor, but I missed the rodent. I saw its tail slither behind some boxes. 

A few months earlier, Jeanette would have been on me about getting some traps or some D-con or call an exterminator for crying out loud, and I would have told her I could handle it, Babe. And I would have tried to catch that rat. That was then.

Instead of pursuing the vermin, I duck walked backwards to the dropdown door. I grabbed the car seat, looked it over. No rat goodies left behind. 

I took the seat and made my way down the steps, closing the attic door behind me and hoping I had trapped the rat inside. I doubted it. It had gotten up there somehow; it would find its way out as well. Outside, I locked the door and placed an X on it. Sipping Creek was done. All the undead that I could find were dead again, and all except for the Baxters had been given the proper burial they deserved. 

At the truck, I moved Humphrey, strapped the car seat in, and then stuck him in his new chair—one high enough to see out the windows just in case he got bored of the trip. “Hang tight, buddy,” I said. 

My imagination spoke for him.

Sure thing, Mr. Walker,
it said.

Before leaving, I buried the Baxters and placed a marker over the grave. It wasn’t much—a cinderblock with their last name spray painted on it. The sun would be setting soon, and I hoped to find higher ground before it did, somewhere I could park the truck and get some sleep. 

I drove along, Humphrey quiet, the world rolling beneath the wheels. The sun was beginning to sink in the horizon. Another hour or so, and it would be dark again. 

Then I saw the woman crossing Grover’s Field just outside of town. By the way she lurched, I knew she was one of the dead. 

Sleep would have to wait. 

I pulled the truck to a stop, staying in the road. I got out, leveled my rifle at her, and then lowered it. She was an older lady, her hair gray, the sags along her chin and arms normal for a living woman, not for a body rotting away like the dead were supposed to. Her face and arms held scratches on them. The front of her shirt and pants were red, and she wore only one shoe—a light blue slip-on. 

“Stay here, Humphrey,” I said, stepped to the front of the truck, and set the rifle on the hood. I pulled out one of the pistols—a do-nothing .22 caliber thing—and took aim at her. 

She shambled into the road, almost fell along the shoulder. She stopped, not more than thirty yards from where I stood. Her head rose as if she were smelling the air.
The dead can’t smell,
I thought. Then she turned toward me, her milky eyes catching mine. The expression on her face changed from one of slack-jawed boredom to maniacally hungry. A moan escaped her, and she lifted one arm toward me as if she were pointing. Her bumbling gait became more of a panicked hurry as she approached me.

I leveled my pistol toward one shoulder and squeezed the trigger. Her arm jerked backward, and the groan that came from her…it sounded as if she were hurt, but it didn’t stop her from advancing on me. I squeezed off a second shot. One of her outstretched fingers snapped off. She moaned louder. I set the pistol on the truck’s hood, picked up my rifle, and aimed it at one knee. She was less than ten yards away when I pulled the trigger. Her knee disappeared, sending her to the ground. The moan, the groan…the scream…it filled my ears. I still hear it to this day.

“I’m sorry,” I said, my heart aching for the pain I had inflicted on her. Somehow, she managed to get onto her back. Black blood oozed from where her knee had once been. My stomach rolled over, and my body tingled with sadness. I drew a little closer to her as she struggled to stand, reminding me of a turtle on its shell, doomed to die in that position. Through her insatiable hunger and those milky eyes, I saw her pleading with me to…to do what? Feed her? No. I didn’t think so. I saw in those pained eyes the desire to be dead—completely dead—and free of existence as a walking corpse. It reminded me of the way Jeanette’s brows would teepee over her eyes and her bottom lip would poke out slightly when she wanted something she thought I would say “no” to. This was different though. This woman didn’t want a fancy meal or flowers or a trip to wherever. She wanted a release. I couldn’t begin to imagine the feeling of being trapped in a decaying body, completely unable to control what I was doing, unable to tell someone I was in there and I was still alive, that I could still feel and smell, and the hunger…