The Dead & Dying

My eyes started stinging and I could feel tears welling up. My vision blurred and I felt like throwing up right then and there.

But I had to do it, right? There was no way I’d survive in this new world if I still thought of these things as children.

Maybe I sniffled. Or perhaps she’d caught the scent of my fear or simply knew, somehow, that she wasn’t alone. Whatever the reason, she turned slowly to face me.

Without another thought, my finger pulled the trigger of the gun.

At the same instant, her eyes widened as she opened her mouth.

“Mister, I…. ”

And then she was falling to the ground, a small hole in her perfect little forehead as the sound of my shot echoed through the forest.

Mister, I….

I tried to tell myself that I hadn’t really heard it, that it had simply been my imagination kicked into overdrive by fear and adrenaline.

Mister, I….

That small voice sounding as if she’d just awoken from a dream and didn’t know where she was. That soft, sweet voice that would now never talk again.

It’s too easy to pull a trigger. It should be harder. Even in this fucked up reality.

And that’s what they never showed you in the movies or told you about in the books. That’s the little secret they kept tucked away far from the eyes of common folk: heroes aren’t perfect. Heroes make mistakes. And those mistakes can sometimes take the life of an innocent, of someone they should have been safeguarding through the turmoil and strife.

And, somehow, you have to find a way to live with yourself. Even when those mistakes repeat themselves again and again.

CHAPTER FOURTEEN: JOSIE

We ended up staying in that old farmhouse for nearly a week. During daylight hours, we stayed inside and tried to remain as quiet as possible. Doc had an old deck of cards he carried with him and we’d spend hours sitting around the kitchen table, playing rummy, and whispering stories back and forth.

Slowly I began to piece their histories together: how Doc and Carl had met in a burned out grocery store and almost shot one-another, each initially thinking the other was a freshie; how Sadie and Watchmaker (whose real name turned out to be Tobias) had watched their children grow up and then have children of their own. How they had lived for the past half century in the same house, collecting a lifetime’s worth of memories and laughter within those walls. Even when Tobias first began to lose his sight and found it more and more difficult to work on the intricate cogs and gears from which his nickname stemmed, they still had each other and that had been enough. They told me how they’d stood in their front yard while yellow and blue flames licked at the night sky like hungry tongues of hell; how Watchmaker could feel the heat on his face and hear the crackling and popping but see only flickering shades of light and shadow. How they’d held each other and cried softly as all of their pictures and keepsakes had been devoured by the insatiable inferno.

The fire, of course, had attracted the attention of every freshy and rotter within miles. In a world that now only knew the darkness of night, a world where the Milky Way could finally be seen over the crumbling skylines of Los Angeles and New York, this blaze was a beacon.

They came lurching and staggering and running across the twenty-some acres of property; like waves of putrefied flesh, the carcasses rolled across the landscape from all sides. Before the roof had even collapsed, Sadie and Watchmaker had found themselves surrounded: an island of life amid a roiling sea of decay. But the raging fire had also drawn the attention of others….

They hadn’t really known why they’d been drawn to the blaze: they knew that the area would surely be swarming with the undead and any supplies that may have existed would already have been reduced to nothing more than cinder and ash.

“Hell,” Carl had joked during the telling of the story, “I just reckoned someone was having themselves a barbecue, that’s all.”

Whatever the reason, by the time they’d arrived Sadie and Watchmaker had holed up in a little storage shed in the backyard. The heat from the burning house had seeped into the corrugated walls and they could hear flesh sizzle like frying bacon as the zombies outside pounded and grabbed at the metal walls.

“It was like being trapped in an oven.” Watchmaker had said. “But I figured it was worlds better than what laid outside those doors.”

At this point, Doc had taken over the story and Carl began to look like a kid who had been called to the front of the class to recite Jabberwocky. His face was slightly flushed and he found any excuse to look away from the group as he rearranged the cards in his hand again and again.

“We knew there had to be something alive in that shed.” Doc said. “Otherwise those damn things wouldn’t have wanted in so badly. Only question was, how the hell do you get them out?”

Luckily for Sadie and Watchmaker, though, Carl had some kind of plan.

“No matter what happens,” Doc had continued, donning a pretty accurate imitation of his friend, “you get those people outta there. Don’t you worry ’bout me. And I couldn’t argue with him. He wasn’t having it.”

So Carl started yelling at the top of his lungs, his voice cutting through the banging of fists on metal and the roar of the blaze while Doc crouched in the shadows. No one could remember exactly what he was saying, but his words drew the attention of the zombies away from the shed.

“I remember thinking that he was a dead man.” Doc said. “I saw all those things turning to face him, saw the freshies lunge forward, pushing rotters out of their way. Didn’t think there was anyway a single person could survive that kind of attention.”

“And he didn’t even know us.” Sadie cut in. Her voice quivered as she spoke and I could see her eyes glistening as if a tear were about to roll across her wrinkled cheeks at any moment. “He could’ve met his maker out there. For perfect strangers.”

Carl squirmed in his chair and seemed to study a framed sampler on the wall that had the words They may be crazy, but they’re still my family stitched into the fabric.

“Hell, I was thinkin’ there might be some sorta lonely, supermodel in that shed. If I knew it was just your wrinkled old asses, woulda been a different story.”

Carl winked and we all laughed, but I found myself wondering why he did that: anytime someone said even the smallest thing about him, anything that showed him in a positive light, he was so quick to turn it into some kind of joke. He would make a quip and, while everyone else was distracted by laughter, a shadow would pass across his face; it was the same infinite sadness I’d seen before. An expression of sorrow and regret that somehow made me just want to take him in my arms and whisper Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be alright.

Anyhow once Carl had the full attention of the crowd of zombies, he took off running; being the single-minded creatures they are the undead followed, forgetting the people in the shed as quickly as children distracted by a newer and flashier toy. And he made sure he kept their attention, too, continuing to yell and whoop as he disappeared behind the burning house.

As soon as Doc thought it was safe, he slipped out from his hiding place and scurried over to the shed.

“We heard this man whispering,” Watchmaker said, “telling us to stay quiet, that they were gonna get us out of there.”

And they could hear gunshots echoing through the night. So many shots, they said, that at the time they’d assumed a small militia had come to their rescue.

“Never dreamed it was just one man makin’ all that racket.”

“Hey,” Carl said, “ I thought if I popped enough of them I was gonna win a kewpie doll. No one told me there weren’t any prizes involved.”