The Reawakening (The Living Dead Trilogy, Book 1) (25 page)

“Did you see what happened, Rick? Gunner turned into one of those beasts without contracting the virus.”

“Yes, I made note of that,” he said, staring intently at the laptop on his bench.

“It didn’t occur to me before, but the same thing happened at the parking lot Dar and I were in, the one next to the general store. The guy I shot turned into one of those creatures. I thought it might be on account of some crows pecking at him, but he’d already died.”

“Look at this, Thom.”

I went over to the laptop and stared at it. A bunch of squiggly lines appeared on the screen. I had no idea what I was looking at.

“Look at the hyperactivity of the brain pattern in the last hour. The alpha wave pattern is ridiculous. A thousand cycles a second. That’s crazy.”

“Is that good?”

“A normal, engaged human registers alpha waves of about 40 per second. This activity is telling us something important.”

“What’s it telling us?”

“This is revolutionary, Thom. Just as this creature’s brain can control its own body, I believe it also has the ability to jump-start the brain of a person who has just died. How long the person has to be dead is another question, but I would imagine that the DNA gets jolted back to life before starting in on the rapid phase of its evolutionary transition. It’s like a call to arms.”

“Christ! Do you realize what that means? We’ll be up against an entire army of the dead, and they’ll grow exponentially. They’ll rise out of every graveyard in New England.”

“In the world, unless I can figure out a way to short circuit their brain activity by jamming the wavelength they’re using to communicate on. The channel could be right under our noses, or they could be communicating on some other dimension. And if that’s the case, then we’re screwed.”

“Why do they all claim to be seeking the chosen ones? Do you still think that’s a coincidence?”

“The chosen ones could be you or I, or anyone with a human brain. Or it could just be nonsensical talk caused by the random, rapid firing of the brain cells.”

“Not if they’re all saying it.”

“There’s so much more we need to learn about the process.”

“So how are we going to explain Gunner’s disappearance to the others?”

“I hadn’t thought about that.” He sat up. “His kids, especially, will need to be looked after.”

“He’d been under a lot of stress lately. Let’s say we woke up and discovered that he was gone, that he must have decided to pack it all in.”

“Who’ll take care of the kids?”

“I don’t know,” I said, walking towards the door. “Kate’s been stepping up with Emily and Amber. Looks like we might all have to pitch in.”

I peered up and noticed that it was nearly three in the morning. Suddenly I felt exhausted and more tired than I’ve ever felt in my life.

“We’ll figure out a schedule tomorrow,” I said, “but for now I’m going to sleep on the couch in case his kids wake up.”

“Thanks, Thom. I was completely wrong about you.”

“Look, don’t be laying this patronizing bullshit on me, Rick. It’s all about surviving now, and that’s it.”

“I didn’t think you could hack it. I thought you were weak. Well, you’ve proven me wrong.”

“Fuck you,” I said, turning to leave.

I checked in on the children, who were sleeping soundly. Tomorrow would be a difficult day for them now that both of their parents were gone. I collapsed on the couch and closed my eyes. The logs inside the fireplace smoldered and crackled, exuding warmth and security. I got up and tossed another log on the pile just before passing out from sheer exhaustion.

Chapter 17

T
HE MELT-OFF CONTINUED UNABATED.
N
OT ONLY
had the snow melted, but so had our waistlines. Rick had begun rationing the food, and it was making us all miserable and agitated. I was hungry constantly. I chewed gum, drank water, and even took up smoking cigarettes in order to appease my intense hunger pains, all to no avail. Needless to say, I was no longer a vegetarian.

Aside from a few days of light snow, the temperatures remained in the fifties. With the exception of that one major assault, the dead kept a low profile. There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to their behavior, walking in and out of the driveway at will. Their appearance at the farm became more sporadic and random as the days passed, and more often than not they would merely wander aimlessly around the grounds. Dar and Thorn made it a sport to stand outside and pick them off. They had shooting contests, seeing who could be more accurate with the rifle, and invariably Dar won. They would aim for the mouth or between the eyes or maybe a perfect shot in the teeth. The fuckers would jerk their heads back and gray brain matter would spray onto the dwindling patches of snow. Then Dar and Thorn would laugh hysterically, exchanging high fives.

The creatures seemed more agitated with each passing day. Maybe I was imagining it, but they seemed to become more limber and agile, moving at a quicker pace. Their forms covered the localized animal spectrum: foxes, skunks, dogs, raccoons and even one with porcupine quills. There were a few with wings, though the adult ones were too heavy to fly. Of course, more of them resembled the human form, indicating to me that this bizarre contagion was spreading quickly by other methods.

Surprisingly, the house ran much smoother with Gunner gone. At first, the children had a difficult time adjusting to their father’s absence, but after a few days had passed under Kate’s care, they started to adjust to the new reality. The kids had already developed a strong bond with Kate, despite the fact that she kept an emotional distance from them, refusing to fully embrace them as their surrogate mother. And after what she’d told me about her past, I could understand why.

With Dar giving me pointers, I worked on becoming a better shot. After a month of shooting under her tutelage, I was soon able to put a bullet squarely between their eyes from twenty feet away. At the end of each day, Rick would plow whatever dead fuckers littered the driveway and push them into a pile roughly fifty yards from the house. The giant pile of melting snow at the end of the driveway had turned into a mound of slushy, rotting carcasses. Some days I would watch through the windows to see if any cars passed along the road. In all the days that I’d been watching, I counted less than a dozen vehicles. Of course, none of them stopped. They typically sped down the two-lane road like a bat out of hell.

The piles of rotting corpses stacked along the muddy meadow began to disintegrate and congeal into one gelatinous heap of decomposition. The stench of their unwholesome flesh filled the country air and was certainly the worst odor I have ever experienced.

Deep down, we all knew that another attack was coming and that this one would be fiercer and more prolonged than the last. As much as I didn’t want to believe it, I was sure Rick was correct when he stated that these things possessed some rudimentary telepathic powers. What triggered their mass gatherings was a mystery. Rick studied astrological charts and moon phases, and analyzed the brainwaves on his laptop. He left no leaf unturned in his quest to uncover the answers to this puzzle. And while he was looking for clues to their behavior, his computer ran non-stop trying to match the disparate chains of DNA, attempting to identify if there were any matches with these creatures.

Things between Kate and I had changed since I misspoke about Kate’s painful past. A strain opened up between us, and our friendship suffered. We continued to talk, but our conversations were not as organic as they’d once been. We focused mostly on the day at hand and the tasks that needed to be done. When it was her turn, she cared for the children with the alacrity of a professional nanny, competent but emotionally distant.

With the thawing came the local wildlife. They appeared restless and unpredictable, and their odd behaviors continued unabated. The birds zigzagged in the sky in bizarre formations. Foxes and wild dogs attacked each other in broad daylight. Raccoons staggered around in circles for hours on end. Deer appeared and seemed confused and agitated. Coyotes howled outside our door. Even the squirrels appeared sick and wasted, dashing up and down tree trunks at warp speed. All of nature seemed out of whack.

The wildlife did not fear us and made no attempt to flee when we approached. Some bared their fangs and charged, in which case they were shot dead, and then shot again once they reawakened. Dar thought it funny when their brains regenerated. The fact that she’d come to enjoy killing God’s creatures disturbed me, but in the back of my mind, I knew that the rules of engagement had changed and that from this point on the rules would be different. It was even possible that her new set of skills would be highly desirable in this new world order.

My mind began to play tricks on me. Apart from the cosmetic enhancements, I noticed that Dar’s body began to change. Where before her skin had been pale and blemished, her features puffy from antidepressants and a bad diet, she was now positively radiant with energy and strength. The remnants of her troubled past melted away. A slight paunch developed around her belly and seemed to grow with each passing day. At first I chalked it up to the amount of food she’d been consuming; the girl ate like a horse. But when we began to ration out the food, I noticed that her stomach continued to swell. The musculature of her arms and legs had developed significantly. Though I fought the truth, it soon became apparent to me that she was pregnant. This revelation left me stunned, but I didn’t chastise her for such carelessness. This crisis had caused her to grow up too quickly, and the severe isolation we were forced to endure had caused her relationship with Thorn to blossom. Under the circumstances, I found it normal for her to turn to him for companionship and love. Carrying the seed of my grandson in her belly, she would now have to learn how to care for her child and raise it in these troubled times.

By the time we had entered the bloom of spring, I’d filled three notebooks with my writings. Initially, when I realized we would be here for a while, I thought I might be able to write a novel during the winter months. But instead I ended up with something entirely different: impressions, dreams, passages of horrific nightmares, fantasy, gritty reality, and anything else that came to mind. Sometimes fiction blurred the line with reality, creating long passages of rambling, discursive narrative about the demons out beyond that threatened our existence. I frequently mentioned my brother’s journal, promising that it contained some of the most important discoveries known to man. I didn’t go back and reread my journal, happy to continue on in this creative vein, biding time until we could return to society as law-abiding citizens. The three notebooks comprised a chronological narrative of the horrific events we’d witnessed, and I hoped someday they might provide an expansive history of this troubled period in American history.

I wrote at all times of the day. It kept my mind off the dead as well as the hunger pains ravishing my brain and belly. My mind constantly brewed with ideas, stimulated by everything that had happened. There were days when I would sit at the dining room table and write for hours on end. More often than not, I had no idea what I’d just written. I seemed to be in a trance when I wrote. Where before I concocted charts and long, detailed plot summaries, I now wrote from the hip. Sometimes the smallest instance of beauty would set me off into a frenzy of narrative. It was usually something brutish and horrific that would propel me into a self-contained world of fantastical storytelling. I didn’t know when I would stop, so I just kept writing. It helped me deal with the terrible consequences of this crisis. It kept my mind off the dead loitering out on the driveway, waiting to consume us.

Somewhere in the middle of the third journal, I began to write about the unborn child. The child represented the future and carried forth the seed of my progenitors. I wrote incessantly about what this child meant to the future. This grandchild of mine, I prophesied, would be prepared to deal with the new order. I felt proud and protective of the child, though I wondered how well I would come to know it.

I despised the creatures outside and hoped they would soon be blighted from this earth. Rick, however, viewed them with the same care and observation that a medical examiner might study a cadaver. They aroused his scientific curiosity like nothing else did. He appeared to have aged considerably in the last few months, having spent most of his days and nights down in the basement, running tests and poring over the data. His energy ran low, and his attention span became shortened because of the long hours. He kept detailed notes documenting every step in the scientific process, explaining his methodology and hypothesis, and whether his experiments met certain scientific criteria. I knew this because he would fill me in from time to time about his research.

Communication with the outside world had for the most part been cut off, but every once in a while, he would receive a weak signal from one of his contacts around the world. It didn’t happen often, but when it did, he appeared buoyant and happy, and he would relay to me what he’d been informed of. And Rick had important contacts in the U.S. government and around the globe. Most of the frequencies he surfed garbled with static, and in a state of paranoia, he came to believe that the creatures’ brains were responsible for jamming the airwaves. Because we could not communicate with the outside world, we felt isolated up here in the hills of Maine, set adrift and protected by geography and climate. This feeling of isolation was both restrictive and liberating, and that wide emotional spectrum propelled my creative bursts.