Wasting Away (10 page)

There
I stood, smeared in dirt, nude, and panting. I hefted the club over my head and
waited for them to come.

One
after the other they fell. Cracks echoed through the trees along with muffled
snaps as I swung at them. The hazy blur of decay tore through. I lost my reason
as I beat at them, pummeling them with all I had.

 As
the final body fell, I dry heaved. The muscles tightened in my stomach and my
face went hot. I panted, gazing through watery eyes, watching the cold morning
air release from my mouth. Bits of fallout clung to my beard. I dropped the
branch to my side and fell to my knees.

It
was so quiet. I felt lost among the scattered bodies, alone in the fleeting
hate. I could see the wind move through the branches above me, but there wasn’t
a single sound. I stood and looked down at myself; saw the dirt that was encrusted
on my body. I saw what I was in the filtered light. I was desperate. I was
cold.  I was hopelessly alone. 

Slowly,
I straggled back to the water, back to where they had first surrounded me. I
let my body sink into the cold creek and watched as the dirt loosened and
drifted from my skin. I let the rushing water take away the tension and leave
me like the filth that had gone before it. In that moment of peace, I imagined
ridding the world of the disgust that had befallen it. I played with the idea
of destroying every corpse that wandered my way. I laughed proudly as I thought
of these things.

“Had
you lost yourself?” Mary asked. “Had the things you saw finally been too much
for you?”

“In
a way, yes,” I said. “But in another way, I felt free. It was as if by
confronting them, I had gained something. I had faced my fears and won. I had
become something new.”

“Liberated,”
she clarified.

“Very
much so,” I agreed.

It
was then that I realized what I had to do, why I had been retracing my steps. I
was heading home. Guilt had been gnawing at me for so long that it had been
impossible to see it until that point. I didn’t want to just remedy the world
of the dead. There was one body, in particular, that I was obligated to. I was
going back for my wife.

Among
them for so long, a few weeks at the most, but it felt like forever, I had been
getting myself ready. I couldn’t leave her like that. I couldn’t let myself
move on until I knew she had truly passed. Her face haunted my nightmares. Her
screams plagued my waking hours. She was all that I could think about.

“Life
is all how you look at it,” Mary said. “Maybe that’s all you needed to push you
forward, to push you into making a decision.”

“That’s
exactly what it was,” I said. “I had been riddled with guilt for so long that I
was projecting it on my wife rather than on myself. I know it sounds sick, but
I needed to lay her to rest. I needed to know that she was truly gone. I owed
it to myself just as much as I owed it to her.”

“I
think it’s romantic.”

I
laughed. “In a way, I suppose it was.”

“I’ve
always been amazed at what love will make us do. We search most of our lives
for that one person who compliments us in every way and once we find them, we
can’t let them go.”

“My
wife and I had our arguments,” I said. “We had our ups and downs like everyone
else. But when it came down to it, I loved her with everything I had. At the
end of the day, we had each other. That’s where the guilt came from. It
festered inside until I couldn’t ignore it anymore. It grew in volume like a
screaming child until I paid it the attention it deserved.”

A
look of realization struck her face. “Is that what you’ve been trying to get at
all this time?” she asked. “We owe it to each other to save ourselves from this
death?”

I
nodded. “How can we allow someone to fall victim to this without at least
trying to save them from it? Isn’t it our responsibility to save someone when
they can’t save themselves? And I’m not speaking from a religious perspective
either; I’m talking about granting people some dignity, giving them rest when
they can’t bring themselves to sleep.”

“When
you kill them, that’s what you’re doing, isn’t it? You’re helping them on their
way. You’re allowing them rest.”

 “It
wasn’t that way at first,” I said. “In the beginning, it was all about survival.
I killed them before they tried to kill me. That was all. But now, I have
realized there’s a greater good to be done. The dead deserve respect. They
deserve to pass into whatever lies beyond. They
deserve
dignity.”

I
followed the river for days, sleeping in the trees when I felt safe enough,
tending to the welts and stretching away the pain that had become just another
part of life.

I
found a sewer entrance along a canal. The metal gate was locked, but I had
enough room to wedge myself through the bars. I remember the darkness most of
all. The dank smell was like an afterthought to the cold blackness. I struggled
to find my way, squishing through muck that sent up the nastiest smells. I
could feel it seeping into my shoes and traveling up the calf of my leg.

I
can only imagine wading through shit to be worse. For all I knew, that was
exactly what it was. I tried to think of something else while I wandered. I
imagined soft clouds and long rows of pillow-top mattresses, even though my
nose refused to believe.

Most
of the time, I thought of my wife. I wondered if I could really do it, if I
could take away what remained of her. I decided that I would have to, that this
was what I had been searching for since the beginning.

I
came out of the sewers through a manhole. I was filthy and covered in waste.
What I noticed immediately was that the dead didn’t pay attention to me. Not
even in the slightest. Covered in God knows what, I was like a leper to the hordes
of walking dead that filled every corner of the city. I had come up in the
middle of downtown.

Whether
it covered my scent or the dead were simply repulsed by human waste, I didn’t
know. I was just happy that they weren’t drawn to me. I had been running for so
long that when they finally let me be, I didn’t know what to do.

“So
you’ve walked with the dead?” Mary asked with a hint of sarcasm in her voice.

“Not
with
them,” I said, “
near
them.”

As
wonderful as it was to not watch my back, the stench was incredible, and I knew
I had to eventually wash the stuff off. The fear of infection was greater than
my need to be undetected.

“I
can imagine it wouldn’t be much fun walking around smelling like that,” she
said, tightening her face in disgust.

I
smiled. “No it wasn’t.”

I
walked to the ocean. Maybe four or five miles from where I popped my head out
of the sewers, I could hear the waves, the deep, rushing roar of the ocean
breaking. I could even smell the salt over the shit that covered me.

Far
down the beach, I saw a woman emerge from an overflow pipe. She was the tiniest
dot on the horizon, stumbling along in the sand. I could tell she wasn’t one of
them. The way she walked, the fluidity of her movements, she was alive.

I
quickly waded into the water when I heard gunfire. Stray pops sounded out along
one of the streets as the woman struggled along the beach toward a stairway
that led up to the boardwalk. There was an old man and a young girl, firing
shots at the corpses.

And
that’s when I noticed the dead.

Bodies
were working their way out of the current, emerging from the waves. Black and
slick, they gurgled and moaned as they came from the sea. At that moment, I
realized how closely they resembled me. We could have been one and the same.

And
then the fires erupted.

All
along the board walk, bodies ignited – the hideous black ones along with
fresher corpses meandered along, completely unaware that they were slowly being
devoured by flame. Several eruptions later, half the beach was on fire. Walking
torches blinded by the skin that melted across their eyes. Lapping fire
cleansed the foul things, burning them to husks. It was almost beautiful until
I realized the group of survivors had gone.

I
might have screamed, but I’m not sure.

They
were gone as quickly as they had come. As I washed the filth from my eyes, all
that remained was the burning mob of creatures, cackling through scorched
mouths. The flaming bonfire of the dead ignited others that got too close. One
after the other until it was nothing more than a raging, moving mass of flame.

I
could have cried. My heart was deflated. But then I saw the new wave of corpses
coming from the ocean.

A
rush rose through me and I scraped off the last bit of sewage from my face. As
the dead neared, I looked to the shoreline at the houses along the beach and I
ran. Once I hit the boardwalk, I kept going. I felt possessed by fear as I
watched more of them straggle from between the buildings. They were everywhere.

“Did
you go back into the sewers?” she asked.

“No,”
I replied. “But I should have. If there had been time to pull the manhole
before they were on me, I probably would have.

The
dead swarm. They come out of places you wouldn’t think they could. Beneath
cars, from behind shrubs, seemingly out of the cracks in the cement. They are
ruthless and unfaltering. They’ll never stop until they have you.”

“What
you’re saying doesn’t make me want to go out there with you,” she said, flatly.

“But
that’s the point, isn’t it?”

She
looked at me questioningly.

“No
matter how many there are, no matter how close they get, you have to keep
running. Any given place is only as safe as the weakest lock, the faultiest
door.”

“You’re
saying that no matter where we go, we’ll have to keep running?” she asked. “You
need a better sales pitch.”

I
laughed. “Yeah, I suppose I do. But it’s better than starving to death.”

She
nodded; a hint of shame crossed her face when she looked away.

“I’m
sorry,” I said. “I didn’t mean …”

“No,
you’re right.” She looked up at me. “But it’s over, isn’t it?”

“In
a way,” I said.

“
In
a way?
” she repeated. “Look around you. Just from what I’ve seen through
that window, I can see that. Why can’t you?”

I
let out a sigh. “There have been many times when I thought about quitting.
Really, it’s pointless to keep running from them. I know that. But somewhere
inside me, I keep thinking that this will end some day. I keep believing that
I’ll wake up from this and have my old life back. My wife will be next to me in
bed and she’ll wake up too and we can get on with our lives.”

“But
that’s not going to happen,” she said. “The most we can hope for are moments
like these, moments when we find someone else and tell our stories while we
wait to die - because that’s eventually what’s going to happen. One day, those
things out there are going to get the best of us. They’re going to corner us
and they’re going to finish us off. You said it, yourself; a place is only as
safe as its weakest lock.”

“I
did
say that, didn’t I?”

She
nodded.

I
laughed through a sigh. “I have to believe in something, no matter how out of
touch it sounds, I have to believe that things will change. Out there, as long
as you don’t get yourself cornered, you can run forever.”

“Is
that what you do, you run when you’re outside, among them?”

“Actually,
I jog,” I said with a smile.

“What
if I can’t keep up with you?” Her face became suddenly serious.

“Then
I’ll wait.”

“But,
for how long?” she asked.

“As
long as it takes,” I replied.

She
wound her finger around the top of the can and looked back at me. “You don’t
seem like the kind of guy who waits for anything,” she said. “You’re the kind
of person who is either running or getting ready to run. What’s to say that you
won’t run from me?”

“I
wouldn’t leave you,” I said.

Her
expression changed suddenly. “Like you wouldn’t leave your wife?”

“That’s
not fair,” I said. “I didn’t have a choice.”

“It
is
fair,” she said flatly. “It’s fair to me and my
life. I want
to know that you’re not going to take off when it gets rough out there. I want
to know that you’ll protect me, no matter what.”

“Listen,
Mary. There are no guarantees.” I placed my hands on my knees and leaned
forward. “What I’m offering you is a means of escape, a way out. I can’t
predict any more than you what will happen once we’re out there. All I can
offer is that I’ll do my best, no matter what happens.”