LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series (51 page)

My mother died seven years ago. I can’t help thinking about her too as I reattach the radiator’s hose, now shortened but still operable, and turn my focus to tightening its clamps. She had died of cancer, but she never really was the same after my father died. She was sort of hollow and vacant, waiting for death to claim her as well. We lived in the same city, but I still rarely ever got around to seeing her. There just wasn’t any reason to. I would go to her house and sit there with her in silence while she stared at the TV, never actually seeing anything. I think the day that the doctors informed her that she had cancer was the best day of her life. It was her ticket home. I understand that, having lost Tiffany.

Scott and I had argued for hours about her decision to refuse treatment. The doctors had discussed other alternatives for her, but Scott wouldn’t hear of it. He wanted his mother to survive as long as she could, which went to show how detached he was at the end of her life. He lived in Denver and never saw her. He never got to see the vacant, lost expression in her eyes as she waited for death to take her. I sided with her because I knew she had loved my dad, and that she wanted to go home to him. I knew better than anyone, and Scott accused me of projecting my own suicidal desires onto our mother. Maybe he was right, but I understood completely. At her funeral, Scott and his wife chewed me out one last time, calling me a terrible son and an even worse brother. They said that they never wanted to see me again and I understood. I completely understood.

I am the son of a woman who knew that surrender was sometimes the greatest reward, and a man who believed in fighting to the very end. I often wondered what the world would be like if their places had been switched. I’m sure that my father would have continued fighting the good fight and living life in a way that my mother would be proud of him. But maybe I’m wrong. Maybe there’s a price for everything and when the reward doesn’t fit the cost, it kills something inside of all of us. Maybe my father would have given up. Maybe he would have been like me and wanted a quick death. When Tiffany had died, my first instinct was that they had been wrong, that it wasn’t her time to go. But in the end, when I drove back home and walked into that empty house, my newer, deeper instinct was to go up to the closet, pull out my gun from the top shelf, and put one in my head.

Clearly, I am my father’s son. I am the one who fights on. I don’t know what happened to Scott or his waspy wife, but they’re probably still out there, fighting stubbornly and stupidly for survival because that’s what we do. That’s what we are. Even with the death of Lindsay, I move on, I keep pushing until I find my girls. I won’t stop until I find them. I will rip out a dozen bullets before I surrender to death. The reason I keep surviving is because I refuse any other option. I refuse death. No, I am death. What I refuse is failure.

With the hose reattached, I fill the radiator with water. I walk around to the driver side door, climbing in painfully, I sit down in the seat and look out the window at the propped up hood and close my eyes, saying a silent, wordless prayer to whatever deity is out there, mocking my every move. I hope that this works. As I turn the ignition, the truck’s starter whines but the engine remains silent, humming and trying to turn but doesn’t work. Pumping the gas I turn the key again, and with a loud shudder the truck roars to life and I let it idle for a moment, sweat running down my face and a wide grin across my lips. I’m alive still and I’m still mobile.

Climbing out of the truck, I walk around and look at the radiator, it’s only leaking slightly and it should do the trick. Reentering the trailer, I load up my supplies, leaving Lindsay’s pack behind and combining both of them into mine. I sling the pack over my shoulder and stuff the bullet that had almost killed me in my pocket. I might as well keep it as a souvenir for all the hard work it made me go through. Tossing the pack into the passenger seat, I put the truck in reverse and pull away from the trailer park. It’s time to find the girls.

Pulling the truck to the side of the road, I notice that the temperature gauge is rising again. I’m not happy with that. It’s not supposed to be rising that quickly. I’m halfway there, and if I need to fill the radiator again, so be it. I hope that’s all it is. My hand is shaking and as I push open the hood, I realize that I’m weaker than I originally thought. I need to eat something. I need to regain my strength, and a few pints of blood would probably do the trick also. I pull a gallon of water out of the back and set it next to the truck. I’m not opening the radiator until the engine cools down a bit. I’m not burning half of my face off before I get to the girls. I don’t need another few days of recovering from third degree burns.

Sitting down on the road, I look over at Lindsay and see that she’s doing way better than me. I let out a sigh and put my hand to the wound on my side and wonder if it really is infected. Maybe I should have cleaned the spoon a little better. She tosses a pebble out into the road as we both look at the dead grove of skeletal trees and the dead Ferrari parked on the opposite side of the road. It’s been covered in mud and dust, not nearly as pretty as it used to be, but I’d still take one.

“Well, this sucks ass.” I let out a long sigh.

“So near and yet so far away,” she says to me, brushing her hair out of her face. She turns and looks at me for a moment. “You didn’t take your sunglasses with you when you left that woman’s house.”

“I think it was the cannibal’s house,” I correct her.

“Who gives a fuck?” She shakes her head. “You need to take care of your eyes, Charlie. They’re going to boil out of your head if you’re not careful.”

“I have bigger concerns to deal with right now,” I say, frustrated by her nagging. “If you haven’t noticed, I think I’m dying.”

“We’ve all been dying,” she says very mystically to me. What the fuck is she, some sort of Zen master now? No, that’s not the Lindsay I know. “Stop being such a pussy,” she snaps at me. That’s more like it. That’s the girl that traveled halfway across the country with me.

“What’s it like being dead?” I ask her as she stands up and walk out into the road, giving me another look at her ass as she walks. She knows how she affects men. She’s probably known since middle school. Women like her are lucky to have that sort of secret weapon. Men like me, we’re not so lucky. She turns and looks at me with that celestial smile that could put a man in his grave if he stared too long.

“Not too bad,” she shrugs. “You’ve killed a lot of people, Charlie. Do you think that you’re going to just get away with all of that? All the lives that have been lost, just so you can hug your little girls again? Do you think the big guy upstairs is going to just let you walk away from that?”

“God and I aren’t on speaking terms,” I tell her. “Besides, not sure I hold the same beliefs as you do.”

“I’m an atheist, if you remember correctly,” she points out.

“Congratulations,” I tell her. I’m not so confident that I can be an atheist. Even in a philosophy based on doubting in the existence of any god, I have too much doubt to adhere to it. I want to be like her. I want to have the confidence to simply declare to the world that God isn’t dead. God never was. God was just a fairy tale that we’ve been whispering to one another for so long that we forgot to remember that it’s just a story. No. I live in a world of random chaos and madness. I live in that tunnel Alice fell down to get to Wonderland. “God isn’t real,” I confess to her.

“You don’t believe that, Charlie,” she shakes her head condescendingly at me. “At the end of the day, we all believe that there’s something up there. We just give our gods fancier, more scientific names. We like order. We like fate. We like things that give us hope, even in their disparaging, depressing truths. Because in the end, even an indifferent, absent god is better than no god. We can blame an absentee god figure for all our worries. But if we’re all right and God never existed, then we are all alone. So I’ll take a cold and merciless god over no god, because if God isn’t there, Charlie, then we’re seriously fucked. Well, you are at least.”

She’s right. I know that she’s right. I’ve been wandering the wasteland for what feels like a lifetime, struggling with God and his lack of presence. Since the day I spoke to the doctor next to my wife, holding her hand as he uttered the words “lymph nodes” and we both knew that the end was in sight, I have been at war with God. Why would God dare to exist in a world as cold and evil as this? How can he be justifying all of this? The world died for me a long time before the grass withered and the leaves fell for the final autumn. All those people that threw back their heads and jutted their arms into the air defiantly and cursed God for killing everything they loved, they were just playing catch up. I’ve been at this game for a long time and here at the end, I want an answer, but being one of God’s creations doesn’t entitle us to answers. God never promised answers. The universe never told us that we’d get the explanations that we always wanted, because in the end, we are dust before the cosmic workings of an infinite, eternal presence.

“You’re not real,” I tell Lindsay the cold truth. As much as I want her to be real, she isn’t.

“I know,” she answers.

“You’re just my mind playing tricks on me,” I tell her. “You’re just the result of exhaustion and a serious medical condition. You’re just my mind taking advantage of me.”

“Maybe now I am, but I wasn’t, once upon a time,” she says to me, turning and dropping down to one knee in front of me. “Once upon a time, you kissed me, Charlie. You kissed me and you told me that you loved me, but it wasn’t the kind of love that I wanted. In the end, I suppose that it didn’t matter. It was what I needed to hear. You never talked about Tiffany. How was I supposed to understand how infatuated you are with your dead wife? You could have just explained it to me. You’re kind of a dick.”

“Kind of,” I smile.

“Okay, a fucking huge one,” she laughs at me. “You’re dying, Charlie.”

“I know,” I answer with a weak nod.

“You put up a decent fight, though,” she says to me, putting her hand on my shoulder. “I’ll give you that much. You did a hell of a lot better than I did.”

“I did wrong by you,” I confess to her. “I should have made you go.”

“I wouldn’t have,” she tells me. “You killed a lot of people, Charlie. But I don’t think you did it because you loved me. I don’t think you did it because you were my friend either and you felt some need to avenge me. I think you did it because someone took something from you. I think you’re a fucking selfish bastard. I think you’ve always been a selfish bastard.”

“Probably,” I nod to her. “But they’re dead because they killed you. Two sides of the same coin.”

“To you,” she answers coldly. “God didn’t let Moses into the Promised Land either, Charlie. God marched him right up to the border of Jerusalem and let him get a good, long, hard look at it before he took Moses away. Eighty years of fighting for the Promised Land and God just ripped him away before he could taste his sweet, sweet victory. How does it feel right now, Moses? You feel like God’s taking away your Promised Land?”

“Kind of.” I hate her. I don’t know what she is, but she’s nothing but a bitch right now.

“Remember that Jewish kid in your Survey of Global Religions class?” she asks me.

I nod.

“Remember when he told the Professor that Moses couldn’t get into the Promised Land because he had sinned too much?” Lindsay says. “Fuck, now that I think about it. A lot of those Bible people got their shit taken away just before they got to the good part. Have you sinned too much, Charlie? Is there too much blood on your hands—oops, I mean, hand—to let you into your Promised Land?”

“Go to hell,” I snarl at her.

“I’m probably already there, Charlie,” she says, leaning in to give me a kiss. I try to resist it, to push her away, but I’m too weak and there’s a part of me that wants to taste her lips, to feel her tongue again against my own. She stops just millimeters away from my lips and whispers to me. “I’ll save you a seat, Charlie.”

My whole body twitches and my eyes peel open. I am leaning against the tire of the truck with my legs sticking out in the road. I don’t remember falling asleep, but as I look around for Lindsay, I realize that there’s no one there, and there never was. My hand is laying in something cold and I look over to see that it’s sitting in a pool of vomit. I feel a chill running down my spine as I look at the vomit. It’s pink and brown from the meatball marinara that I had for breakfast or dinner, or whatever, earlier, but it’s laced with ribbons of dark scarlet and my entire mouth tastes of blood. At the center of the puddle of vomit sits a pool of blood, like a pink and red eye staring up at the pale blue sky.

Pushing myself up, I can begin to feel myself panicking. I’m dying. Either from the bullet or from the emergency surgery that I had to perform on myself, I’m bleeding internally. Not only am I bleeding internally, but it’s in my stomach, which frightens me even more. I doubt that they’ll have a medical professional with them, but all I can think about is that I need to get to the girls. I need to get to them and I need to tell them that I love them. I need to hug them one last time. I am not a Moses. I am not going to let God take me before I get to my Promised Land. I’m not going to push back the veil and see once and for all, what is after death.

I hope that it’s nothingness. I hope that there is no afterlife, no hell or heaven. I want to cease to exist, to be released from the chains of emotions or suffering. I sure don’t believe in rebirth or reincarnation. If that were the case, then there would be a hell of a lot more people and animals wandering around the earth. Right now, I figure I’m one of the few remaining humans smart enough to beg for death. No, there has to be an afterlife elsewhere or nothing at all. I want nothingness. I want life to be nothing more than a series of random, chaotic events. I don’t want to suffer anymore and I don’t want to endure all of this. I want to be free, forever.

Taking off my shirt, I grimace against the pain before unscrewing the cap and listening to the loud hiss as steam jets out all around my hands. I must not have been out long. I jump at the sound, but I keep twisting until the cap is off. The water hisses as I pour it into the radiator, but I keep pouring it until I’m confident that it’ll get me the rest of the way. Screwing the cap back on, I drop the gallon of water without realizing it. It just slips from my fingers and crashes against the road, spilling out its remnants while I watch helplessly. I’m losing my grip on everything. Pulling down the hood, I walk around the truck and climb into the cab, looking out the window for a moment and seeing Tiffany on the road.

She’s standing in her yellow and white summer dress that she used to wear in college with her hair being tossed softly in the breeze. She looks at me with her arctic blue eyes, the kind of color and intensity that made me always think of glaciers when I first saw her. She smiles sweetly, without showing her teeth. She stands there in her pumps, one leg tucked back behind the other like she’s a pageant participant. She always stood like that and I had been so captivated by her unimaginable grace and posture. She carried herself with such distinguished regality that I couldn’t help myself looking at her. When I close my eyes and I drift off into death, it’s her that I want to see. I know that she’s in heaven, waiting for me. If heaven is real and I’m wrong, then I know that I’ll be with her. But if Lindsay is right, I know that I’ll be stuck in hell for eternity, away from my angelic love. God, I miss her. She holds out her slender, left hand, her engagement and wedding rings sparkling in the sunlight. I no longer have my wedding ring. I’ve lost it with everything else. I don’t even have the hand to put it on.

“Not yet, baby.” I turn the keys in the ignition.

I drive as quickly as I can. This turns into a reckless cluster fuck as I smash into cars I’m trying to avoid and take out mailboxes, light posts, and even fences. Everything is blurry and wavy. When I look over to the passenger seat, I see Tiffany sitting there. The smile on her face scares me. I know that she’s calling to me. No, I don’t know that! She’s not real, damn it! She’s just my imagination torturing me here at the end. Looking back at the road, I swerve, trying to avoid another car.

That’s when I see someone. I slow the truck to a stop and stare out the window at them. They’re wearing dark clothes that weren’t originally that way, it’s the weather that’s turned them dark. I count three of them. They’re standing in the middle of the road next to a minivan that has a flat tire and I can’t help but feel like I’ve been here before. I blink and try to clear out the haze and the blurry vision. I try to make sense of what I’m looking at. Are they real or am I just imagining them too?

I remember the last time I saw this. It felt like ages ago and it had been the most horrifying moment of my life, but in hindsight, it was just a blip on the radar. I remember kneeling over her in the middle of the road, sobbing while I looked at her body. She had been the first person I killed, but she was just the tip of the iceberg. So many more had died in the wake of my first kill, and the second came only minutes afterwards when I found the boy dead in the road. I look out the window at the three waving at me, talking to each other, but their words are lost over the roar of the engine. I try to remember why I stopped for them.

Why should I care? I’m Moses and I’m on my way to the Promised Land. God is trying to rob me of my final reward and these assholes are trying the same trick that I’ve experienced a hundred times before. The one that had stood out in the front pulls down a bandana from over his face and I see the short beard that he’s been taking care of. He looks at the others and shouts something before taking a step toward me. I watch him walking. He’s well fed and not injured. Everything about this is setting off red lights.