Last Woman (12 page)

George gobbled his soup, and I could see it on Dodge’s face, that he was waiting to pounce on the boy with questions. The only thing he had volunteered was that he and his family
had only just moved to the area from Georgia, and that he was really hungry.

Darie was so cute, just watching his brother with pride. Barely touching his lunch he was so excited. I had to keep
reminding him to eat.

“Oh, yeah, fruit snacks.” After slurping the last of his broth, George grabbed the pack of snacks.

Down came Dodge’s hand, stopping him. “Talk first.”

“Oh, my God, Dodge,” I said with such offense. “He’s not our prisoner.”

George’s mouth puckered. “Why do you pick on me?”

“I’m not picking on you,” Dodge defended.

“Then you don’t like me.”

“Why would you say that?”

“You left me behind.”

“She left you too.” Dodge pointed at me.

I gasped. “I wasn’t driving.”

“She wasn’t driving.”

After a grumble, Dodge handed the snacks back to George. “How old are you?”

“Nine and a half.”

Eyebrow cocked, Dodge leaned into him examining him. “You sure you aren’t a forty year old man in there? You have the name for it.”

“Quit picking on me.”

“You’re picking on him.” I said.

“I am not. He doesn’t talk like a kid and he has a grown up name.”

“That’s because my mom and dad didn’t want us boys having weird names, they wanted our names grown up for when we get old like you,” He said to Dodge.

I smiled.

“Mommy,” Darie lowered his head.

“Now see, you made him cry.” George scooted closer to his brother. “Mommy had to go away to that place I told you about. We’re special because we get to start a new world.”

I laid my hand on George’s back. “I’m very sorry about your mom.”

“And Dad,” George said, picking now at his snacks instead of gobbling. “I know I said no one is home, but I’d like to go back there and get pictures. Darie’s so young; I want him to remember how pretty our mom was.”

“Maybe even get a few of your things?” I suggested.

“What happened?” Dodge asked. “Can you tell us?”

George shifted his eyes from me to Dodge. “You don’t know what happened?”

“I do. Sort of,” Dodge said. “I was getting supplies, some medicine. And a riot broke out. You know what that is right, a big fight. I wasn’t fighting, but the police grabbed me and put me in jail with a lot of other people. I never saw how things ended.”

“What about you?” George asked me.

“It’s scary what happened to me. I had a sort of accident before the flu started. I was in the hospital. I heard them say I had caught the flu. But I got confused, see, because I woke up in a big pile of …” I paused and cleared my throat. “Garbage.”

“Bodies,” George said. “You mean bodies. I can take it. I know. So, you too?”

I shook my head. “Me too? Is that where you were?”

“No. I never got sick. But Darie was tossed out. I found him though, I found my brother. ‘Cause I knew. I knew.”

“How?” Dodge asked. “We just want to know how you boys survived. What happened in this area?”

George sipped his water, reached across the table for the small truck and handed it to Darie to occupy him. “My dad got sick first. Real sick. Like he came home from work and I heard my mom say he was fevered.”

Dodge asked. “Do you know if this was before or after they shut down the city?”

“I think it was before because my dad worked in this city. I don’t know. I do know it was on the news all the time and that they closed the schools.”

I turned to Dodge. “Do you remember when they closed
the schools?”

“Yeah, that was about the time I got arrested,” Dodge answered.

“My mom wouldn’t let us near our dad,” George told us. “She shut him in the room and said for us to keep away. He was sick. Darie didn’t understand but I did. The day my dad died, was the day before they closed the city because I remember my mom crying. The next day she got sick and so did Darie. I don’t know how she knew but they opened a help place by the Walmart.”

“Near where we found you?” I asked.

George nodded. “We all went. She could barely drive, she was so sick. We had to leave the car and walk. She was more sick than Darie, but he was crying. We got there, and there were so many people but my mom and Darie both got seen by some doctor. I stayed with them. They had them in different tents though. They made me help.”

“What do you mean
‘made you’ help?” Dodge questioned.

“I wasn't sick
so I had to get water for the sick people, carry blankets, and run messages. I didn’t want to leave my mom but they made me.”

“Oh, honey.” I placed my hand on his cheek. “I am so sorry you had to see all that.”

“Everyone was dying. It seemed like every time I turned around they were taking out more bodies and bringing more in. When my mom died, I just sat with Darie. He wasn’t good; he was in that deep sleep. All the sick people got in this deep sleep. Some moaned, some didn’t.”

I asked, “How did Darie end up being put with other dead people?”

“I shouldn’t have left him. I shouldn’t have. They asked me to run and tell the major guy that they had more bodies but I couldn’t find the major. I couldn’t. I looked. I think he died or was sick. When I got back, they had taken Darie out, and said he was dead. I told them he wasn’t, he just looked it but they didn’t listen.”

He paused in his story to take another drink.

“I ran off and I cried. I didn’t know what to do. Where do I go? I didn’t even see that many people walking around anymore. It was scary and then I saw it. I was sitting in the parking lot and I watched someone shake in a body bag. They shifted, and struggled fighting to get free. A soldier went over and opened the body bag and the man sat up and the soldier shot him.”

My gasp was loud.

“I thought it was zombie,” George said. “Even the soldier said it. That night they shot another. They all said it. Zombies. It scared me And so I decided to run home, and that’s when I saw another person get up from a pile. I started to scream and he was old. Older than you guys. He reached out his hand and said … ‘Help me’.”

“That’s when you knew he wasn’t dead?” Dodge asked.

George nodded. “Yep. I watch movies. Never saw a zombie talk, so I ran back to the help place. There were only a couple soldiers left and I told them about the man. They went to him, but I heard a shot. I think they shot him too. I slept in the Walmart and the next morning, no one was around. At least walking. That’s when it hit me. What if Darie wasn’t dead? I didn’t think he was, I told them that. So I just started calling out his name over and over.”

Darie peered up from his toy. “He saved me. I was stuck. I called him.”

“And I heard him. Boy was I happy,” George said. “But I ran with Darie and hid him in the back of that Walmart. I didn’t want anyone to shoot him.”

Dodge questioned. “Did you see anyone else get up after Darie?”

George shook his head. “I didn’t see anyone get up, but I did see a teenager. He walked in another direction, said he had to find his mom.”

Dodge’s hand went to his mouth and slid down. “They shot people. They thought it was the ridiculous notion of
The Walking Dead.”

“I did, too,” I said. “When I woke up.”

“Me, too.” George added. “There could be more people. Like Darie they only looked dead.”

‘He’s right,” I said. “There could be more. Your gut instinct to find survivors may be right on.”

“You know and I know, if they were in a plastic bag, they suffocated.” Dodge said sadly.

“They ran out,” George stated. “At least where I was. They were putting kids and small people in sheets,
and saving the bags for bigger people.”

“Must have been everywhere,” I added. “I wasn’t in a bag. Of course, I’m probably considered small now. I wasn’t before the kids died.”

George looked at me. “I’m sorry.”

“Thank you,” I touched him. “They died before all this, in an accident.”

George turned to Dodge. “How about you? Did you have kids?”

Dodge nodded. “Yeah, I did. They were sick. That’s who I was getting medication for.”

“Did you see them die?” George asked.

“I was in jail.”

“Then you have to go check,” George said. “They may wake up. You have to find where they put them. They may not have had that other thing.”

“What other thing?” I asked.

“The blood. My mom had it but Darie didn’t. That’s how I knew. All the people I saw that died, were bleeding from their ears and nose but Darie didn’t. The teenager didn’t have blood and neither did the old man.”

“I didn’t.” I said. All of the sudden, it hit me. Dodge went to his house to bury his kids and they weren’t there. Filled with excitement, I turned to suggest that to
Dodge that maybe his kids woke up after the deep sleep, but I didn’t. I stopped. Even putting that notion in his mind was cruel. The last thing I wanted to do was send Dodge on a chase for heartache.

“Did they have it?” George asked Dodge. “Did you see the blood?”

“I …. They were gone.”

George inhaled loudly. “Oh, then you have to go look. You have to. You have to just check like I did. If they woke up they’re scared.”

“Dodge.” I whispered. In my heart and in my mind, I felt he needed to go. It was his choice, though.

“I’ll go with you if you want. I can help you think like a kid, think of places they went. And
I can yell real loud like I did for Darie.”

Dodge laid his hand on top of George’s head. “I’d like that. Let’s head out while it’s still daylight.”

I watched George explain to Darie that he’d be back and kissed his brother before he left with Dodge.

Dodge wasn’t enthused; I guess it was a defense mechanism. Saving himself the possibility of being crushed again. I could tell that Dodge wasn’t holding high hopes that his kids were alive, but he wasn’t giving up hope either.

I expected no less from Dodge.

It was the hardest part of George’s story to swallow, yet the easiest, for some reason, to rationalize. It made sense in a sick demented way.

For decades modern movie making portrayed them as monster
s that could exist. A world that could turn on a dime. No one really saw them for what they were. I always believed, as scary as they were, they were actually a metaphor for the human race. The walking dead, the undead, zombies.

Mere shells of human being, moving on instincts. Killing without thought, striving to keep going despite there being no reason at
the time, and impossible to stop.

The industry recycled the brainchild of a genius independent filmmaker, and society eventually thrived on it. It was at one time such an
infatuation that people literally planned for an apocalypse of the undead.

They waited for a world besieged by a mystery illness, only to have it produce beings that rose from the dead.

And here it was, it happened, only those who rose, were never really dead to begin with. They were killed instantly. Handed a chance at life, only to have it taken away either by suffocation in a plastic body bag or a bullet in their head. Mistaken for dead all because of a pop culture phenomenon that told us it was possible that decaying flesh, a non-living organism without blood, circulation, heartbeat or breath, could stand up and devour another being.

It was sad. What a pathetic situation and I fell into that trap as well. How many times did I wait, look over my shoulder and wait for the carnivorous creatures to get me.

They never did.

How many would have live
d?

Would I have truly awoken to a dead world, had someone taken the time to see what an eight year old boy saw? Something so minor yet obvious. If a child saw the difference between onset of one ill and another then why didn’t the experts.

They didn’t care. It was the big one and they were overrun.

Though I hardly believe it was fifty-fifty. I distinctively remember seeing blood on both Wilkes and Stevens. Since it wasn’t a whole slew of people sitting up at once, maybe it was ten percent. Still ten percent who recovered and those like Dodge and George was a hell of a lot more people than were around right now.

It was a dead, empty world. No matter how many people were out there.

I heard them because the world was so dead.

At one point, sitting on the deck, Darie at my feet building with tiny blocks, I heard the car horn beep. Darie looked up. Like me, maybe he was hoping it was other people. Then he heard Dodge’s big booming voice, along with George.

“Brad! Lucy! Brad! Lucy! Are you there?”

“Brad!"

“Lucy!”

Honk. Honk.

I don’t know how far away from us they were, they sounded distant, and they faded, moving on, searching further.

But they were searching. Listening to them call out with passion and desperation; I prayed that I’d hear a single child’s voice respond. Maybe someone call out, “Daddy.”

I didn’t. I just heard them
call out and then they moved on.

If diligence for their efforts garnished a reward, then a hundred children would run out and answer their call. In a quiet world, the smallest of sound travels and so does silence.

That was their response.

Silence.

With the warm weather and the stench of bodies not too bad, I stayed on the deck for a while with Darie. Listening for life and hoping a resolution would come for Dodge. Because without ever seeing his children’s bodies, Dodge really would never know.