Wasting Away (16 page)

Seeing
that tiny little gas station out in the middle of nowhere, I thought of
Constance again. I thought about how she had escaped the same sort of place and
lost everything in the process.

With
a new found purpose, I walked around the building and found a ladder access to
the roof next to a dumpster. With all the walking, I hadn’t noticed, but my
feet were bleeding in my shoes. I had walked so much that blisters had formed
on my feet. As the realization set in, I began to feel the pain. Along with all
the other pain in my body, I must have blocked it out.

There
were only a few of them around. They are always somewhere, just a little ways
in the distance. I kept quiet as I scaled the dumpster and leaned out along the
building, inching my hands along the block, reaching for the first wrung of the
ladder. My fingers slipped around the bar and I swung my body out. Hand over
hand I climbed, ignoring the pain in my arms.

 It
wasn’t long before I was at the roof, staring down at the access panel. Of
course, it was locked. They always are. I snapped the top of the main vent and
glared down at shining, galvanized steel. A few feet down at an elbow, the vent
made a sharp turn, extending farther into the building.

I
slid down, face first to make the first bend.

I
saw the first vent ahead only a few feet, and scaled over it. Once I was on the
far side, I kicked it in and lowered myself through the gap. I was in an office.
A single chair rolled half way out from behind a cheap desk. Filing cabinets
lined one of the walls. There was a framed poster on the wall that said
something about teamwork and reaching your goals. It made me laugh. I had seen
the same poster when I was starting out as a box-boy at a grocery store. They
could have plastered the same poster across the four corners of the world and
it wouldn’t have made any difference to a low paying, dead end job. I actually
wondered if anyone had ever been inspired by such a thing.

I
left the manager’s office and looked out into the store. In the back, long
shelves lined the wall, stocked with liquor and drink mixes. The refrigerator
cases were packed with beer, soda and water. What was funny was the first thing
I went for was the case above the cash register. I looked through the boxes
until I found my brand and snagged a pack of cigarettes. I packed the box on
the palm of my hand a couple of times and then thought better of it as I
checked through the front windows to see if the dead had noticed the sound.  They
were still shambling along as usual. I opened the box and took a disposable
lighter from a display on the counter.

That
first drag, it was as if it had been waiting for me all along. It was so sweet
that I checked the box to make sure it was real. I hadn’t smoked in eight
years. I gave it up when my wife and I decided we wanted to try to have a baby.
I stared at the cigarette as I thought about it. Suddenly, lung cancer didn’t
seem so bad.

I
opened a tin after I had finished my smoke and ate the tuna with my fingers.
When I was a kid, I remembered going camping with a few of my friends from
school. We caught fish at the nearby lake and cooked them over an open fire.
The taste was unlike anything I’d ever had. Maybe it was the work involved,
catching the fish. Maybe it was the open fire. All I know is that it was
exactly like the tuna I scrounged. It was possibly the greatest meal I’ve ever
had. I washed it down with a warm
Coke
and leaned against the inside of the counter and had another cigarette. This
one wasn’t as sweet as the first, but it still tasted pretty damn good.

It
was the first time since the dead had awakened that I was able to really look at
things, take in the mess that life had become. I cleaned my feet with peroxide
and applied some
Neosporin
and wrapped them in strips of bandages. Once they were clean, they hurt even
more. It was like I had washed away whatever it was that was keeping the pain
at bay. I sat down on the floor, my legs outstretched before me, and I thought
about what I was going to do.

In
so many ways, all of our wishes had been granted, at least for those who had
made it through. No more taxes, no car payments or rent. Many of life’s
stresses had vanished, but at what cost? It begged the question: what the hell
was it all for in the first place?

There in that gas station, I felt
safe. The dead were sparse. I only saw them once in a while when they shambled
past the window. I kept to the back of the building where it was too dark for
them to see me and only came out for food or smokes. It wasn’t perfect, but it
was a hell of a lot better than being out there.

“So
you locked yourself in again,” she said.

“Yes.”
I nodded. “Yes I did.”

“At
least you know what kind of fear it is that keeps me
here
.”

“The
kind of fear that says everything about
them
is wrong,” I replied. “It’s
the kind of fear that makes you think they’re supernatural, beyond our scope of
reason.”

She
nodded in agreement.

“They’re
not beyond death,” I said. “They’re not bereft of true death. They’re just
waiting for us to help them along.”

“Those
are brave words,” she replied.

“Well,
there isn’t much left other than bravery and stupidity.”

“So
you’re saying it’s like the old west.” She gazed up at the ceiling and thought
for a moment. “You eat, sleep, and run from the wild.”

“Yeah,
in a way, it’s true, but not everything is constant. Sometimes eating and
sleeping become negotiable.”

Mary
edged a smile from the corner of her mouth. “So running is an absolute.”

“It’s
a type of change, and that’s the only real absolute in life.”

“Gandhi
said the same thing.”

“Yeah,
I stole it from him.”

She
laughed. “I don’t think he would mind.”

“Probably
not,” I said. “But he also went on to say that we have to be the change we want
to see in life. Just like what we were talking about earlier.”

“What
did you do to initiate change?”

“I
decided to help people when I encountered them,” I said. “Instead of looking
the other way, I wanted to become a catalyst for change.”

“Is
that what you’re trying to do for me?”

I
nodded. “You’re my first.”

For
weeks, everything was the same. I woke up and ate. I smoked cigarettes. One
time, I even got drunk. And that’s when it hit me. If anything was going to
change, I had to be the spark that lit the fire. If I didn’t do it, who would?

Progress
starts with a single voice.

 I
know, it sounds like a lofty idea, but if I began the war, maybe others would
follow. Maybe this would end in my lifetime and I could watch the sun set over
the horizon, free from fear, free from the wandering dead.

Don’t
get me wrong, I would have stayed there, but I knew the food would eventually
run out, and I had my special quest. In time, I would make a mistake (one noise
too many) and the dead would find me hiding like a coward.

I
found a knapsack in the manager’s office and started planning my escape. I
packed essentials. Some water, a few lighters, some tools from the maintenance
room, whatever I thought I would need. I kept the pistol on the counter and
flipped through the rounds every so often. It was a type of meditation to me,
like counting prayer beads and making atonement for digressions. That’s what
kept me focused, thumbing through the rounds every time I felt weak.

One
morning I awoke and shuffled through the store, still half asleep. I gazed
through the windows and found that there were only a few bodies out there. I
shoved some more food in the pack and tucked the pistol into my waistband. On
my way out through the back door, I grabbed a rusty crowbar from inside an
unfinished portion of wall, seated in between a couple of studs. It looked like
it had been there, waiting for me since back when the building was constructed.
I thought of it as my stroke of luck. Some carpenter in the days of old placed
it there and forgot about it just so I could find it. I know it sounds crazy,
and I’m pretty sure that’s not how it went, but it made me feel like I was
destined to insight the change I had been talking about. It felt like somewhere
out there, something was guiding me. And with the first swing of the bar,
destiny was to be had.

Little
did I know; that first swing would happen so soon.

I
breathed slowly when I saw them. I was trying to calm myself, trying to
rationalize that there were only a few. I kept telling myself that I could
handle them, that there weren’t very many. It took everything I had not to run
back inside and bolt the door.

The
bag landed with a thud next to me. The sound was muffled and dark as my heart
beat out a steady rhythm. Everything became quiet, muted through the blood
rushing into my ears. I could see the dead, their bodies releasing rot. I could
hear them moaning over the thumping of my heart. I held the crowbar at my side,
and as one of them lurched forward, I swung upward.

All
the sounds I had missed came rushing in. Deafening howls split through the
alley as the hook end of the bar tore through the creature’s jaw. Its head
whipped backwards and a clotted mess of stench rushed from the wound. It fell
to the ground in a heap and I came down with the bar again, using the rear,
blunt end of the hook. It shivered and twitched, and finally was no more.

Three
more came from around the corner into the alley. Weak, stumbling things and
they were so close. The fear was still with me and it told me to run. It told
me to turn on my heels, to get away from them.

One
of the bodies reached out, a pathetic thing in stained rags. She had been an
old woman at the end of her life, and then that life was stolen away. She
wasn’t bloody, she didn’t have the same look as the others; that mindless
stare, that empty gaze. When I looked at her, she pleaded with me. Under those
white eyes there was something left and it asked me to make it all go away.

It
was the first time I shed a tear for the dead. They weren’t the monsters of
nightmare; they were the husks of life. They were poor, straining things taken
in by this new curiosity. No one deserved that. Not a single one of them.

I
held the bar above my head and waited until she was close enough and I took her
down with one swing. I made it count - I made sure there wouldn’t be a
struggle.

“And
this is what you want for me?” Mary asked. “You want to take me out there and
see these things?” Her stare glazed over and a tear revealed itself out of the
corner of her eye.

“I
wouldn’t wish that for anyone,” I said. “She could have been my own
grandmother. She could have been that little old lady at the end of the street,
feeding cookies to the neighborhood kids. But what I really saw was myself. I
saw that life was more fragile than I could have ever imagined. I saw that I
could just as easily be on the other side of a weapon destined to cure the
death that wouldn’t stop.”

“How
many of them have you had to kill?”

“I
don’t know,” I replied.

“That
many?” she asked.

“More
than I dare to count.”

She
wiped her eyes and glanced out the window again. “When I first saw this
happening, I didn’t want to believe it. I chose to turn my eyes away. I would
rather have died than to look at those things. Everything about them is
blasphemous. Not in a religious way, but in a way that goes against nature,
itself.”

“Is
that why you’ve stayed hidden for so long?” I asked.

“In
part,” she said. “In another way, it was the fear that I could be like them one
day, wandering the world in a lifeless haze. Do you think there’s anything left
of what they were?”

“I
don’t know, but I’ve never seen any one of them look at me the way that old
woman did.”

“Maybe
you’re just not paying attention anymore.”

 “That
could be,” I said. “To be honest, I wouldn’t want to see that again. It was
like there was a little bit of her left, and that’s much more terrifying than
living.”

“And
now you know why I’ve stayed here. I’ve watched them, not when they kill, but
when they wander aimlessly. I’ve seen them stare at the sky like they’re full
of wonderment. I have watched them touch one another, almost lovingly. It’s not
all the time, but I have caught it out of the corner of my eye when I’m looking
away. It’s like seeing a ghost.”

“A
few weeks back when this was all fresh, I saw one of them stuck inside of a
building. The way it moaned was so sad. It had this rattle in its voice - a
lamb crying for its mother. I watched several of them beat at the glass in
front of the building until they broke through. The corpse inside wavered and
stared at the others, and finally stepped through. Maybe it was just the way I
saw it, maybe something inside of me wanted to see it happen that way. Maybe it
was just a dream shrouded in my own morality. I don’t know.”