Frail (3 page)

I’m still waiting.

TWO

F
ive days, since I left Lepingville. I counted. Six. Maybe seven. Everything was all blurred, that first day or two, like a drawing half-wiped from a chalkboard; my ears buzzed softly and I couldn’t quite see straight, didn’t really register where I was going. I stopped sometimes, sat down, pushed sticks of jerky or handfuls of nuts down my throat, pissed in ditches, found an empty tollbooth on U.S. 30 and slept in there dreamlessly with my weight against the door. I remembered to bring food. Water. Searched for more. I lost half a day sleeping in that tollbooth so split the difference, call it six.

I can’t afford to sleep half the day. I chart and graph all my time now, so much walking, resting, walking, picking through abandoned homes and broken tollbooths and cleared-out underground shelters, eyes before me for thieves and rapists, ears behind me for any soft-footed thing hunting fresh meat, always locating my exits
first
. I have to plan where I’ll sleep every night, somewhere small enough to defend or big enough to hide in. Exits first. I never checked like this, before.

There’s never anyone. Maybe there’s nobody else left.

Movie theaters are good. Sleeping in theaters settles me down for some reason, soft torn-up seats, carpet and concrete flooring lousy with streaks of grease and blood, dried pop puddles, ground-in popcorn kernels, rodent droppings. Signs of life. If everyone else hadn’t got to the concessions stand before me and smashed it to get to the popcorn, the glugs of fluorescent buttery grease and nacho cheese, every last Skittle in the candy display, I might’ve just stayed in that Cineplex out near Morewood. Forever.

I was actually doing okay, sort of, before yesterday. That’s the thing.

Warmer now. Good. It felt like it must be March, late March, the wind still slapped me full in the face but its knife-edge was going blunt. Days longer. Snow piles reduced to limp Styrofoam shavings. Relative barometric pressure and humidity of—I could figure out what month it was, counting back to September using Kristin’s pregnancy, except I think the baby came early anyway. All of a sudden, she was in labor. No warning.

Every night, before I sleep, I take inventory, the few things I brought with me that I really don’t want to lose. My sewing kit, not those useless store miniatures but my own bag with needles,
big
thread spools, scissors. Sunglasses. Aspirin. Hunting knife. Lighters, a whole collection: metal, plastic, monogrammed, filigreed, engraved, embossed, painted with pinup girls and cartoon characters and company logos and skulls and rainbows and pot plants and flowers. Kristin’s, this one, purple with forsythia sprays. She gave it to me before she died. Mine had a picture on it, a girl playing guitar with long red hair streaming over the strings. I lost it last fall when they broke into our house, all the sick folks looking for food. Sewing kit. Already mentioned that. I forgot.

Pocket atlas. This one has all my scribbled notes, places Dave went hunting and said later to avoid, landmarks to look out for. My cell phone. My last birthday present ever, from my mother, before she left. Defunct, of course, but they weren’t getting it, not after they got my lighter. I keep it in my front jeans pocket with her old LCS ID, her driver’s license, security clearance card, everything with her name and photograph. A record she really was here.

I think I’m going crazy. Taking inventory, reminding myself where I’ve been and what I have, it doesn’t help because last night I saw something that wasn’t really there. I was on Caldwell Road, that long stretch snaking through the industrial park outside Briceland, and I stopped to rest, squeezing my eyes shut against the fading afternoon sun; I opened them again, and I saw staring back at me a pair of disembodied eyes. Rheumy, sickly yellow pinpoints, smudged and faded like gaslights coated in soap, gazing steadily from the air, the sky, from nowhere. Dog’s eyes.

I slid to my feet, ready to run, but there was no dog there. Except there was. There in the air, a ghost, a chimera. I turned my back on it and the eyes were there again, following me past the little steel mill, the auto body shop, over the harmonicacluster of railroad tracks. Afternoon became evening and when I lay down in the remains of an antique shop the deep gray night took shape around the eyes floating in it, scrabbling into outlines of a single cocked ear, a thick solid neck, a ridge of hair bristle-straight all down a phantom spine. Hard, sharp teeth, bared against me. Swift strong legs, ready to spring.

There aren’t as many stray dogs out there as you’d think: They were some of the first casualties, when everyone was going hungry. I’m not afraid. I can’t walk around afraid of everything. But this was different. It was like how when I was young I was afraid to look in the bathroom mirror at night, scared the face staring back wouldn’t be mine at all but something distorted, grinning, a melting predatory mouth about to swallow up the room’s darkness, and me. I turned my head to the shop wall, I closed my eyes and halfway toward sleep I
felt
it, there beneath my hand, the fleeting sensation of hunched-up muscle beneath rough, ungroomed fur. It’s not guarding me. It’s not guarding anything. It’s lying in wait, so I can’t get away.

It’s not there. I
know
it’s not. And I thought it’d go away, I thought my brain was just worn out and inventing its own cheap thrills, but today those eyes are still watching, waiting, melting right into the sunlight, magnifying to make a Panopticon of the air. Judging. Waiting. There’s nowhere for me to go where they’re not.

Then I blink, and shake my head, and they vanish.

Somebody needs to tell me I’m not crazy. But it’s like I said, there’s nobody left.

 

 

Taking inventory, that’s not helping. Or looking at my mother’s badges and cards. The only thing distracting me from that damned dog is my tribunals, when I think hard on everyone dead or lost and organize their fates as I see fit. I need to keep my mind occupied, and if I can pretend sorting out the whole endless mess of living and dying is my job, I feel calmer and I can sleep. So court’s always in session, day and night.

This is what I remember, the evidence the tribunal considers:

My uncle John, at my aunt’s funeral. Kate died in less than a week, breathing in guttural gasps until her throat swelled permanently shut, and at the reception John stood hunched over the funeral buffet, glassy-eyed, bloated with illness, and ate so fast that the egg salad oozed from one side of his mouth even as the teeth on the other side tore at chunks of ham. Stares of shock. Then others, fingers twitching, shoved the gapers aside to get at more ham, potato salad, handfuls of tortellini dripping sauce scooped straight from the steam tray into waiting, scalded palms.

Jenny Waldman from my English class, sitting at her desk blue-tinged and shivering, unable to keep her hands from the full grocery bag of lunch at her feet. Drippings of peanut butter smearing her copy of
The Sound and the Fury
. Cheese slices piled in teetering, gelatinous wedges on a half-loaf’s worth of bread. She gorged and shivered right in front of us and nobody knew what to do and then, still chewing, she started to cry, got sick everywhere. When Mr. Lowry dragged her to the nurse three other kids fought over the vomit-smeared bag, cramming what they could get in their mouths and then rocking back and forth, trembling, hands clutched into greasy fists.

Grocery store riots. An ashen-faced man lying in a pile of shattered display glass, blood welling up from beneath him like rainwater permeating a basement. The sick with puffy, softened skin and loosening nails sitting in the aisles, emptying cereal boxes and diving into the sugary sawdust piles, wrenching out teeth trying to gnaw frozen meat. We the supposed healthy ones shoving, pushing, screaming for a spare can of green beans, a crushed coffee cake, anything, anything at all. One of them grabbed me and I kicked him in the head so hard something crunched and gave way, I didn’t look down, I was hungry too. There was something dried on my shoe, I saw later, blood and something else. He was dying anyway. It’s not my fault.

The woman in the street, gnawing on something charred in the shape of a hand. Cats, dogs, anything small and snareable, disappearing. That last day, just before I left for good, when I—

Enough. Tonight’s verdict: innocent, forgiven, all of you. No matter what. You were sick, and hungry. Innocent. Except the pet killers, you can go to hell. Now let
me
go to sleep. I need to sleep.

I’ll reach Leyton tomorrow. A rich town, a lucky town, they got the plague early and died quick. The shelters will have food. That’ll distract me. You see things when you’re hungry. Everything will be better, in Leyton.

 

 

My first bona fide first-stage town! Let’s have a party. Most folks here died in the initial phases like my aunt, suffocating in a bruising diphtheria before the monstrous hunger hit them and emptied every last shelf of food. The beautiful turn-of-last-century brick homes were hardly touched, only a few gas-explosion craters here and there, and all those pretty parks, and a
forest
smack in the center of town. Vanderhoek Woods. A tiny Franciscan monastery right next door, signs advertising TRIDENTINE and POLISH MASSES. Pilgrims welcomed. Fancy. I wonder if they got into fights with the Ukrainian Catholic Church across the street, like rival high schools at homecoming. There were still infirmary cots set up in both of them, long rows. The smell hit you coming and going.

Lepingville, we were second-stage. Very secondary.

The things that took the zombies’ places don’t like it here, they like the beach. The shoreline. Which makes sense because the shoreline was always dangerous, off limits to everyone but the thanatological scientists; Dave, he used to insist the sickness, the exes—ex-humans, ex-zombies—it all had to do with the shoreline itself, with the sands. Fairy tales, if you ask me, just like the old stories about how a meteor hitting the Great Lakes basin started waking the dead in the first place. But listening to him rant helped pass the time.

Pale, hard blue sky this morning. I’d slept in a grotto in the monastery yard and woke up sweating, and to peel off all the malodorous layers of fleece and flannel was a luxury you can’t imagine; just airing out my feet, letting them soak up a warm, steady breeze, made me close my eyes with how good it felt. They stank, of course, just like every other part of me, and itched and burned incessantly between the toes but I let myself imagine sunlight really was the best disinfectant before I pulled my socks back on—turned inside out for the illusion of changing them—and grabbed for my mother’s charcoal jacket. Time to get what I came for.

If she were here now, my mother, she’d be ashamed of how bad I smelled, from a yard away, like a homeless person. I
was
a homeless person. But that’d been my choice. I kept going, following the grimy yellow signs with the DESIGNATED SHELTER logo. I didn’t need a home when I had safe houses.

They call them safe
houses
but they were actually built underground, like big tornado cellars; every town above a certain size had to have at least one, government-subsidized. Lots of private ones too, in a town this rich, but they were a dodgier bet: Builders cut corners and the walls cracked, seepage got in, ventilation systems didn’t work right and you went to sleep feeling all cozy inhaling pure carbon monoxide. A family of six, once, over in Taltree. You’d hear stories. The manhole-cover entrance was rusty and hard to turn but that was a promising sign, other hands hadn’t touched it in a good while. After an eternity of sweating and swearing I got it moving, felt the hinge creak and give way, climbed down the metal ladder, sawed my socked toes furiously back and forth against the ladder railing; scratching made it worse but sometimes I couldn’t stand it.

I don’t like basements. I don’t like windowless spaces underground. They scare me. Making this quick. If I could find enough bottled water I’d have a sponge bath, outside.

Almost no clothing. Disappointingly thin blankets. Very little bottled water. A whole lot of vodka. Vodka and buckets of pancake mix. Whoever supply-stocked this place was insane.

Dave wouldn’t like it, that I’m still foraging instead of hunting. While he was still strong enough he tried to show me how to build snares, use a rifle, field dress a carcass into meat. A new dawn, a new day. No whining. Adapt or die, Dave said.

Dave died. Diabetes. We foraged everywhere, Ms. Acosta and I, houses, safe houses, drugstores, pharmacies, hospitals but insulin doesn’t work right if it’s too cold, too old, and there were all these different types, fast-acting, slow-acting, we couldn’t measure it right, and we had Kristin to worry about too with her pregnancy and banging her head bloody on the floor for her dead husband, her dead daughter, her missing son. So Dave lay there gasping for breath, vomiting, heart thudding beneath our hands; he slipped away with breath stinking of fruit gone bad, apples and pears soft and brown and nauseously poison-sweet. We pretended he was sleeping.

Dave Myszak, janitor. Alicia Acosta, school administrator. Kristin Wilson, medical transcriptionist. Baby Boy or Girl Wilson, not yet born. Amy Holliday, nothing. The entire surviving human population of Lepingville, Indiana. And now, just me. Be proud of me, Dave, wherever you are. I’m adapting.

Canned pears, a whole shelf full. I took the can opener. Those are like gold.

Portable lighters. Very good. More D batteries. Excellent. Bandage scissors. Band-Aids. Q-Tips. Dental floss. Tissues. Tampons. Athlete’s foot powder. Aspirin. My backpack bulged, it was a supermarket sweep. I was about to strip my shoes right back off and powder my itching feet when I heard a scratching sound from the long, angular corridor connecting the safe house rooms, then rustling like something scuttling to a nest. Rodents. A stray cat, gone feral. But how could it get down here? Maybe it got trapped. Maybe it needed help.