When the Dead (3 page)

Ben had
been waiting for his girlfriend since yesterday. She lived a few cities away
and he’d asked her to stay with him. He waited to hear the front door buzzer
all day. He heard it a lot but when he answered the phone to see if it was Anna
it was someone else. Today, all he heard was growling.

He waited without hearing from her the entire day. The sirens grew
further and further apart. How many ambulances were still capable of
responding? How many paramedics now needed medical help themselves? Ben
imagined a lone ambulance racing from incident to incident; brave medics
fighting to save lives and to stay alive themselves but eventually even that
siren stopped wailing.

He hoped Anna made it safely to him. He had insisted that she come. She
had made him promise that everything would be fine. He had.

Molly
Mathay was out of the program. She’d completed it and was eating healthily for
almost six months. But she was still on probation in a sense. A mentor would
come by once a week to check on her. Now things were getting more difficult
than she’d ever imagined they could. The treatment center staff hadn’t trained
her how to handle apocalyptic situations and she knew that her mentor wouldn’t
be able to come by with the plague that was spreading.

            She
was alone with it and the thought of losing easy access to food made her
anxious. Her anxiety made her more food obsessed. She started to binge and
purge again to cope.

            Her
apartment wasn’t stockpiled with food; she wasn’t allowed to shop for more than
one normal week at a time. She wanted to ask for help but she barely knew
anyone in the building. She’d spent a small amount of time with Rob Pace and
his son but that was an awkward situation for other reasons.

It would be difficult if not impossible in the new world to find either
enough support or food to settle the urge.

Markus
was left with his mind, filled with endless questions, all of the second day. He
sat around and browsed the internet to try to distract his busy brain. The
infection was everywhere though and he couldn’t escape it. YouTube had
terrifying first-hand accounts:

A father’s hands trembled as he recorded his wife eating their son in the
backyard. Two minutes passed by and his wife started to come straight at the
sliding glass door for him. The double-paned glass protected him and she could
only paw at the slider, desperate for her next meal. The video ended with a
tribute to the consumed child: “R.I.P. Elijah.” Comments showed that viewers
were touched by the heartache, others disgusted that the man posted such a
violent video detailing the death of his child.

A video shot from a high window showing a street in Everett full of
bodies. Someone with a sniper rifle across the street was taking out the
infected as they wandered into the area. Markus watched the video until the end
where he saw that the shooter didn’t discriminate between infected and
uninfected people. Trigger Happy was the video’s name. A comment listed the
street address of the shooter and a warning: “Don’t travel this street unless
you want to die.” Comments included minute markers in the video for viewers’
favorite kills, mostly the headshots.

One of the last videos Markus watched was of two teenage boys, both
around 15 years old, looking for the infected and then messing around with
them. Pouring soda on them, taunting them to chase after one of the boys,
tripping them, etc . . . It was kind of funny to him - almost like a prank show
he’d seen on MTV- until the taller boy recognizes his mom in a nearby group of
infected and the recording ends. Comments listed request after request for more
“episodes” of “They’ve Got No Brains!” (Which Markus thought was a clever title
they’d given the video). Many offered suggestions for content.

Twitter too had been infected. It was full of sad stories, told in
snippets. Never before had 140 characters or less been so depressing, so full
of the woes of a nation and world.

Markus didn’t feel so lonely and he felt much better off when he read
what others were tweeting.

@ncallaway: My dad's got a fever and his feet are
numb. I looked it up on WebM.D. and it says he might have lupus. Anyone dealt
with anything like that?

@Jen_is_Twenty:
I went to class yesterday but half the kids stayed home. I wonder if anyone
will come back. Should I even go in tomorrow?

@heismine43:
stay away from the hospitals. My husband contracted the infection at one and
never came home. It was a madhouse.

@lordLover2010:
Jesus will come for me and my fellow Christians. Fear the rapture, praise the
Lord! Your time is now, you sinners, burn in hell!

@margareet:
I have a few extra swords and weapons if anybody
needs them. I'm in McMahon Hall at the University. Safest place I know. Stay
safe friends.

@haro_kitei:
Trapped in my room because my sister is trying to kill me. I don’t know what to
do. Can any of you guys send help? I can pay you.

How could anyone help? No one even knew where she lived, what her house
looked like, who her sister was. And pretty soon, no one would care.

Twitter was full of tweets with the simple words:
the infection is
here
. With a search for ‘#infection’ one could track its spread and if you
really paid attention, you could tell when someone was exposed to it. They
would tweet less and less, perhaps more desperately. Some would say their
goodbyes and most would say their “fuck yous”. They’d end up typing gibberish
as their hands went numb and then they’d disappear. The last tweet gathering
digital dust as time continued without them.

The
phone lines cut in and out on the third day or
maybe
, Ben thought,
they
were just flooded with calls
. Ben had tried to reach emergency services off
and on all day but he either got a busy tone or nothing.

Anna had made it to him in the late afternoon but she’d been attacked
along the way and had a wound on her leg. She needed help but due to the spotty
phone connection and his anguish at seeing her hurt, he wasn’t able to help her
very well. He had her on the bed in the second bedroom of his place with the injured
leg elevated and he kept trying to feed her but she was getting sicker and
sicker.

 A knock on his door pulled him from her side. He was surprised to see
that it was Isobel, the neighbor from down the hall, because she was only an
acquaintance.

“Hey,” Isobel said, looking lonely and hoping for an invite inside.

“Hi, Isobel. How are you holding up?” Ben asked her. He kept the door
mostly closed. There was some blood in the entry from Anna’s leg that he didn’t
want to explain to Isobel. Besides, Anna was a jealous person who’d get the
wrong idea if she knew another woman was at his door looking for company. The blood
loss and shock would only have made her more temperamental. Ben was about to
give Isobel a gun and tell her to go back to her apartment when Anna stumbled
into the living room.

“Who -” Anna mumbled.

Ben rushed to her as she collapsed. Isobel opened the door enough to see
the blood on the floor.

“What’s wrong with her?” She asked.

“Stay there! Don’t come in! I’ll be right back.” Ben picked Anna up and
carried her back to the bedroom. When he returned he gave Isobel a handgun.

“What happened to her Ben? Is she infected?”

“I don’t know yet. She’s not well, that’s for sure. Stay safe Isobel.
Don’t come back here.”

He closed the door on her.

Anna was dying in front of his eyes. Ben had heard news reports of how
bad the hospitals were and even though Northwest was just up the road, it would
have been a death sentence for him. If he wasn’t injured on the way, there were
bound to be hundreds of wounded on the hospital grounds, all seeking similar
aid. Casualties there would be high. Ben decided that Anna would fare much
better with his one on one attention in the secure environment of Willow Brook.

The topic of people-eating people is never very appetizing and the stress
of taking care of Anna had kept Ben unaware of his growling stomach. He had
some toast and juice. The television was the only distraction that Ben had from
Anna’s moaning. That evening it confirmed to him that the infection was
contagious. Bite wounds were fatal and the disease could be spread through
saliva and other bodily fluids.

“Fuck,”
he said aloud as a thought occurred to him,
I have to
find out if she was bitten.

Isobel
hadn’t heard a single gunshot all morning long. She’d sadly become used to the
*pops* here and there. The silence gave her the nerve to finally take some more
glimpses outside.

Her apartment looked out onto a street usually busy with vehicles but now
there was only a slow parade of dead people wandering with no determined
direction. All they do is shuffle unless provoked and yet that is enough to
instill in each of the uninfected the fear that this is actually the end of the
world.
They would take my life if I let them,
Isobel reminds herself,
and
that makes them very dangerous.

*Pop*  *Pop*Pop*Pop* *Pop*

Finally someone alive is trying to keep living!
Isobel felt a
little less alone but she got worried when she realized how close the shots
sounded.

In Jeff’s
defense he hadn’t been thinking straight from the excess amounts of cough
medicine and the infection spreading through the city. His wife, Sheila, was a
controlling woman that he’d grown to despise. With the turn of world events she
had become increasingly hard to deal with. Louder and crazier by the day which
made her dog, a standard poodle named Bianca, crazier and louder too.

            On
the fourth day, Sheila lost it. Jeff had fallen asleep on the couch again and
his wife woke him up by screaming and throwing the car keys at his face.

            “We
need some more FUCKING dog food Jeff. I told you to buy extra when you went
shopping. What the FUCK is wrong with you?” Her words echoed in his ears along
with the sound of the canned goods she was pulling from the cupboards in her
desperate search for canine nutrition. Jeff tried to answer calmly but the dog
had started to bark.

“You know what Sheila? NOTHING is wrong with me! The only issue I see
with myself at this moment in time is that I am still putting up with YOU and
that fucking dog!”

            This
took Sheila’s anger to another level. She looked for the nearest can and
chucked it at her husband’s head. He ducked and sensing she was out for blood
he knew it was time to end this. He was much larger than her in stature and
probably stronger but she was always so much stronger emotionally, mentally. He
ran straight at her and lunged, his hands connecting with her neck. Jeff
squeezed for all he was worth, knowing if she survived the choking she would
kill him instead. He was stronger than her and he was proving it; defeating her
and ending her cruel words.

            He
wasn’t proud of it, but he did the same to the dog. It wouldn’t listen to him
and besides, they were out of dog food.

He had dumped the bodies off the deck and sat down to read. Something
he’d been unable to do in the noise of his former life; with the presence of
his former wife. Gunshots had been fired across the hall while he was finishing
a chapter but he was so relaxed for the first time in years, he didn’t care at
all.

Rob had
a difficult time raising his son on his own. His wife had died four years ago
in a car accident and Gabe, then only three, had survived. It was a miracle for
sure but one that pained Rob every time he looked at Gabe, watching him grow
older without a mother; wondering if he was doing enough on his own.

            Now
that something bigger was happening, bigger than what to cook for dinner each
night, bigger than the pressure of teaching his son how to know right from
wrong, bigger than untied shoelaces, it all seemed a bit more manageable.

            Unfortunately,
now it looked to his seven-year-old like monsters were real. For the last three
nights Gabe had been waiting in fear that one of them would come out from under
the bed.

            The
morning presented more terror. Gabe was trailing crumbs around the apartment
from his breakfast pop tart as Rob had coffee and eggs. He almost dropped his
cup when he heard a gun being fired inside the building. Rob went to the front
door and watched through the peephole. He saw Ben, the stocky man that lived to
the left down the hall, walk past his door and further down the hall towards
Isobel’s place. He hadn’t stopped at all and he had blood all over him. Rob was
pretty sure he saw a gun. Instinct to protect his child kicked in and Rob locked
the deadbolt, moved a chair in front of the door and went to check on Gabe.

            He
returned to the dining area and his heart sank at what he found. Gabe had left
his chair and sunken under the table. But he wasn’t crying or cowering, he was
playing with action figures, making gunshot sounds.

            “What
are you playing champ?” Rob was curious how the gunshots had inspired his
child.

            “Zombies
and Indians! They use-ta be cowboys but something happened. Then the Indians
stole the guns and now they are winning.” The boy stopped playing and came out
from under the table. He looked up at his dad and the worried look on his face.
“We are gonna win if they get in, right? We just need one of the other Indian’s
guns.”

            “I
don’t know if we can trust the other Indians yet. The one with the gun that we
heard already has war paint on. Let’s finish eating.”

The two ate the rest of their now slightly-cooled meal. Rob reflected on
his child’s coping mechanism. He wasn’t sure if it was healthy or not and he
had no one to ask for advice. What would his wife had said? Would she ban the
word ‘zombie’ or encourage Gabe to play to his heart’s content and discourage
Rob from micromanaging their child? Rob decided he would just have to let Gabe
do his own thing.