A crowd of people had gathered outside of the maintenance room. The murmur of concern felt tangible to Keith.
Ern was slipping into unconsciousness. The old man looked extremely tired and blinked slowly. Then it happened. He closed his eyes and wouldn’t open them again — no matter what Shelley or Joe did.
Keith felt half-conscious himself. It all felt surreal.
“Stay with me, Ern!”
Keith could hear the panic in Shelley’s voice as she spoke to the old man. Joe looked stricken as he pinched Ern’s cheeks.
They struggled, trying to wake Ern up for several more minutes.
Claire and Sarah crept into the room and stood near Nancy, who had backed away from the scene. The old woman looked ready to collapse and swayed threateningly on her feet, which prompted the ladies to get her to sit down.
Keith watched with an odd sense of detachment as Ern continued to decline, his condition worsening by the minute. When he heard Shelley say that Ern had stopped breathing, Keith closed his eyes.
He opened them to frantic activity around the inert body. Shelley and Joe had started applying CPR. Joe was performing chest compressions while Shelley knelt at Ern’s head, leaning in to apply rescue breaths.
It was all to no avail. Less than a minute later, Ern’s heart had stopped. Shelley had already turned on the defibrillator and quickly pulled Ern’s shirt open to attach the pads. Keith watched as the buttons popped off and bounced along the floor.
He turned away then. Keith reasoned that he couldn’t stand his own helplessness. The truth was that he just didn’t want to see Ern die.
Keith went straight to his room and strapped on his belt. His trusty hammers swung from their holsters as he walked up the stairs. He needed to get out. A sharp wail from downstairs chased him out of the front door.
At first, he figured that he just needed some fresh air. But then he walked towards the gate. There was a zombie nearby. It saw him and moved along the fence towards the gate, occasionally reaching out a claw-like hand towards Keith.
It was a pathetic creature. Its gait was stiff, much like a lot of the zombies Keith had seen the last few days. Its skin looked leathery and dry — its features desiccated.
Keith opened the gate and swiftly walked out, closing it securely behind him. He stood in the cleared area of the road, surrounded by the rotting corpses of zombies. The smell was overwhelming, making Keith gag. The noise he made as he heaved seemed to spur the creature on, and it doubled its efforts to reach him.
It reached a hurdle of corpses instead and promptly fell forward onto the pavement, about ten feet from where Keith stood. It had extended an arm just as it fell; the arm snapped with a sharp crack.
Keith could have stepped in at that moment and used a hammer to finish the creature off. But for some reason he held his ground. The zombie took several moments to get back on its feet. It seemed completely unaware of its broken arm as it lurched towards Keith.
Keith watched it closely as it approached. The eyes were blackened and shrivelled within the sockets. Its mouth still hung open, and Keith could see that its tongue had also dried up and withered. A dark gray shape in a black maw.
It lunged in close now with unholy determination, and Keith caught it with his hands. They struggled for a moment as if in a macabre dance before Keith spun away and used his momentum to launch the zombie away from him. The zombie went down again. It caught the same arm on the edge of the sidewalk with a sickening crunch. This time, the white glint of bones peaked through its gray skin.
Keith lowered his head and stared straight at the ground at his feet. “What am I doing?” he softly asked himself. The sound of his voice spurred the zombie on to get to its feet.
Keith shook his head as he scrutinized the approaching zombie.
“This is wrong,” he said simply and reached for a hammer.
Chapter 59
The Ren
They buried Ern in the fading light that evening. Nancy wanted it done fast. “Ern wouldn’t want a big fuss,” she said. He was laid to rest only a few feet from Craig’s grave. Somebody had fashioned a cross for Ern, so now three crosses stood side by side.
She was putting up a brave front, but everybody could see that Nancy was struggling to keep it together. She had drawn away from others and into herself more and more as the day moved along. By the time of the funeral, she hardly interacted with anybody. She shook off touches as if they burned her, and barely responded to questions or comments.
The burial itself was a disjointed event. Nobody was prepared to take the lead, so Joe stepped up and said a few words. He finished by asking others to say some things about Ern. People looked around and at each other uncomfortably, until Bill, of all people, spoke up. The former national guard took a step forward so that he was standing close to the edge of Ern’s grave.
“He was nice. A good man,” he said, the twang in his voice audible to all. “I remember that first day. We were evacuating folks with the bus. Everybody was scared. But Ern, he decided that he was going to help. He tried to talk to people. Settle them down. Make them feel more comfortable ... He’s been like that the whole time. Trying to help the group.” He stopped talking for a second as he considered his words. “I guess I just want to thank him for that.”
That said, Bill turned and stepped back into the crowd. At least
