The Dead & Dying

smile was genuine, could feel it radiating with the heat of a thousand suns from deep within my soul.

“But, sweetie, I’ve got to get it right in my head first.”

“But I can help, I can …”

“You do help.” he said. “More than you’ll ever know.”

For a minute we stood there, simply looking into each other’s eyes, and that bleak and comfortless wasteland of snow just seemed to melt away. The freshies, the rotters, the refugees who picked through cruel relics of a world that no longer was: none of that mattered. Just this man, his hands, his eyes, his voice and breath….

“When we get to that little church,” he finally said, “assuming it’s still standing that is, we’ll sit a spell on the pews. And I’ll tell you all of it. Each and every detail.”

Carl’s eyes shimmered, but he made no move to blink away the tears forming there; he didn’t look away or fidget or give any indication that he felt even the least bit threatened by this display of emotion. He held my gaze and made a promise without uttering a word.

And then, seeming as if he were moving in slow motion, Carl leaned forward; our lips touched in a brief, sweet kiss. It was the type of kiss I had always thought existed only in movies. The kind that reaches into the very core of your being and finds a small, warm spot to call home. Then we collapsed into one another’s arms, each of us holding the other as if we could somehow anchor ourselves to this particular place. This specific time. And cherish it for infinity.

Maybe it was the lingering effects of that kiss. Or perhaps it was simply that after days of cloudy skies that looked as if they were wrapped in dirty cotton, the sun was finally shining again. Whatever the cause almost two days later, Carl and I were romping through the fields like excited children.

We’d spent the better part of an hour playing in the snow: making angels in the drifts, lobbing loosely packed balls at one another as we darted to and fro, our laughter seeming surreal in the quiet of the Illinois winter. At one point, Carl even constructed what he referred to as a snow rotter: it was basically your typical snowman but was missing one eye and the branch that served as its left arm had been purposefully mangled. As a finishing touch, he’d punched in the side of the face that lacked an eye, giving the giant snowball a caved-in look.

The entire time I’d been with him, I’d never seen him so happy and carefree. That haunted expression had temporarily vanished, giving way to eyes that sparkled and a smile that touched every inch of his face with its warmth and light. For a while, we were able to forget the death and destructions that lay out there; we could pretend that the world had simply continued on like it always had, that we would be returning to our jobs and bills, perhaps taking in a movie or snuggling on the couch as we listened to a Leonard Cohen CD by candlelight.

And maybe this made us reckless. In fact, I’m sure it did. Why else would we would have begun an impromptu game of tag that had us running through the drifts like a wolf and hare in some nature documentary? Under any other circumstances we would have known better; we would have thought of consequences, of survival. But on this particular day, all of that seemed so far away. So distant and somehow, as strange as it may sound, unimportant.

By the time we’d both been it several times, we were panting and out of breath. We stood there with our hands on our thighs, grinning at one another like a couple of happy idiots, not concerned with the film of sweat that had formed beneath all those clothes.

“Ya know,” Carl gasped, “when we get to that little church, I think I’d like to…. ”

His voice trailed off and he fidgeted before me. He seemed slightly uncomfortable, as if his clothes had suddenly become two sized too small, and I couldn’t tell if he was blushing or if the redness in his cheeks was just from exertion and the chill of the air.

“Like to what?” I teased. “Repent all your worldly sins? Finally confess that there’s something out there bigger than …”

“I think I’d like to marry you.”

There were only a handful of times in my short life when I can honestly say that I was speechless. But this was one of them.

“Now, you don’t have to give me an answer right away.” he stammered. “You can think on it a spell. But I’ve never felt as right as I do when I’m with you. Never felt as whole.”

“Yes.” I whispered as a grin crept across my face. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”

I threw myself into his arms and we kissed, slow and deeply. It was crazy: here we were, in a world where we didn’t know where our next meal would come from, where the cities and institutions of civilization had crumbled into ruin, where the dead walked the earth. And I had just been proposed to.

“Come on.” I urged as I pulled his coat. “Let’s get moving. I want to get to that church as quick as we can.”

Within fifteen minutes of walking, however, a coldness had seeped into my body like none I’d ever experienced. I glanced over at Carl and saw that his teeth were chattering as well, his lips light blue, and that he was hugging himself as tightly as he’d embraced me after the proposal.

When he spoke, his words were stuttered and punctuated with the loud clacking of molars hitting against one another.

“S-sweat d-dr-drying. C-c-cooling b-body temperatures.”

I felt like there was an arctic tundra somewhere within my torso, somewhere so deep that no amount of clothing could ever thaw the glaciers that were forming there. Their cold radiated outward, causing chills to creep along my flesh as my body trembled.

“N-need shelter.”

Every step I took seemed to require more energy than the last and my arms had begun to feel like they were being pricked by millions of tiny thorns.

“R-reckon it was pretty s-st-stupid to r-run… around l-like that.”

It was weird, but I’d never felt so tired in my whole life. Almost as if every ounce of energy had suddenly been sapped from body, crystallized on the freezing surface of my skin, and then shattered into microscopic shards. I wanted nothing more than to just lay down in the snow for a little bit, maybe to take a little nap. I was positive it would be warmer down there in the drifts, that after a little sleep I’d be able to trudge onward. Nothing in the world had ever sounded better.

“H-hang in there, sw-sweetie. S-see? There’s a b-barn up a-ahead. Hang in th-there.”

The barn he referred to looked so far away, so distant, that I couldn’t imagine having the energy to pull my exhausted body all that way. I’d started to yawn and my legs felt as if they had been tied down with weights.

“Just let me sleep.” I whispered. “Just for a few minutes, baby. Sleep… .”

Carl wrapped his arm around me, hooked it under my arm pit, and pulled upward to keep me from slumping to the ground.

“D-Damn it, girl, we’re almost th-there. It’s not as far… as it l-looks. You just keep r-right on walking. You can d-do it, Josie.”

With Carl’s constant stream of encouragement the red structure in the distance gradually grew larger. Before long we were able to make out a little white house near it that had previously blended in with the snow.

“Almost there.”

One wall of the house had been almost entirely obliterated: the jagged hole was like a dark mouth grinning at the barren landscape. Just within the darkness, I could make out the tail end of a truck that had apparently smashed its way into the structure.

Now that we were closer, I actually began to believe the little pep talk that had been a constant prattle from Carl’s mouth. I really could do it….  I thought of the hay that was surely piled up in the barn, how warm and toasty it would be when I burrowed my way into it, how I would finally be able to rest.

“C-can you walk on your own?” Carl asked.

His voice was low and grave and I nodded my reply as I followed his line of sight. There were footprints in the snow, leading up to the little door on the side of the barn. He released me from his arm and drew the little pistol from his waistband, flicking the safety off with his thumb.

Rotters? Or other refugees like ourselves simply looking for shelter? Impossible to tell from simple tracks. But what we did know was that these footprints were relatively fresh. Maybe an hour old at the most.

The sound of our own feet crunching in the snow suddenly seemed like the pounding of a kettle drum. With nothing more than a glance, we’d both slipped into what Doc had always called survival