Worse Than Dying
By Brett Van Valkenburg
Copyright © 2020 by Brett Van Valkenburg
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“A hungry man is not a free man.”
-Adlai E. Stevenson
I
The violence began like a storm in springtime—a drip here, a drop there, and then suddenly a torrential downpour. Within a week, everyone in Barrel County was either holed-up or dead—to some degree. Most of the Barnes family belonged to the former category, barricaded inside their home on the outskirts of a small town in upstate New York.
“I'm going to do a sweep. Will you come?” Noah Barnes asked his father.
Charlie didn't answer. He sat in a beat-up leather recliner staring at their blank TV, his fingertips raking back and forth over the cracks in the armrests. His hair seemed twice as gray as it did only a month ago, and his beard had exploded.
Noah sighed and walked into the kitchen.
His father hadn’t ventured outside in over a week—not since one of those things had surprised Charlie from the shadows of their toolshed. His heart nearly stopped when she came staggering towards him, a stick jabbed in her left eye, blood-caked hands groping for food.
Charlie had been handling the outbreak with relative poise until that moment, but the sight of her mutilated, yet familiar face pushed him over the edge. He shut down—stood there waiting for her necrotic fingers to pull the meat from his bones. It was as if he were willingly offering himself as a sacrifice. And maybe he was.
As she grasped Charlie’s shirt collar and opened her mouth wide, Noah appeared from around the corner of the house. He rushed up behind the woman and brought his machete down on the back of her head, killing her a second time. She slumped against Charlie’s shoulder before falling face-first onto the grass.
Charlie stood there, pale and near-catatonic, his breath entering his lungs in short, rapid gasps.
They’d seen dozens of these things by now—of every demographic and degree of disfigurement. What about this woman had has father so shaken up? Noah wondered.
He took Charlie by the shoulders and shook him. “Dad. Dad!”
As he tried to rouse him from his trance, the woman’s dress caught Noah’s eye. The floral print looked familiar, like something he’d seen in a photograph a long time ago.
Noah knelt next to the body. Twigs and leaves stuck in her brown hair. A medial laceration tunneled beneath the blood-soaked cuff of her white cardigan. And there was a similar cut on the other wrist. Noah slipped his hands beneath her torso. He was about to turn her over to see what had Charlie so spooked, but he pulled his hands away. He already knew.
Neither Charlie nor Noah had spoken of it since. In fact, Charlie didn’t speak again for days, and even then, it was only to mutter a word or two. The sparse communications coming out of his mouth seemed to correlate with food going in, as his already-thin body diminished to a near wireframe.
“Can I go with you?” asked Noah’s little sister, Abigail.
“Sorry, darling, but it's too dangerous,” he said as he looped a machete sheath around his belt.
“But how come you get to go and I don’t?”
“Because I have to. Believe me, if I could stay in here with you, I would.” Noah looked at his father out of the corner of his eye and said, “but someone has to keep us safe.” The subtle dig elicited zero reaction from Charlie.
Abigail’s face soured. “Hmph.”.
“Don't pout, Abby,” he said patting her curly brown hair. “If everything’s quiet, I'll take you out for a walk after lunch.”
“Fine,” she drawled and then clomped away.
His brow furrowed. I’ll take you out for a walk, he thought. It was bad enough he hadn’t the patience to carry on with her bootleg homeschooling after their mother died, but now he was starting to regard her well-being as if she were an old dog he’d grown tired of. There was just too much to do around the house. It wasn’t fair—to anyone.
A Regal 700 rifle leaned against the refrigerator. Noah picked it up and slung it over his shoulder. He rarely used the gun, but he always carried it with him just in case.
Some people might have thought that Noah’s family was lucky. His father spent over twenty years working for the local firearm manufacturer, Regal Arms, which gave him access to steep discounts on all kinds of long guns. A pathological bargain-hunter, Charlie unconsciously became a gun collector simply because the deals were too good to pass up. His collection became so bloated that he had to hide some of his more extravagant purchases from Barbara. One such covert, prized purchase was Charlie’s bulky Regal Sedona rifle.
“What’s this gun for?” Noah had asked Charlie, examining a four-inch tracer round that fit the gun’s caliber. It was the largest cartridge he’d ever seen.
Charlie inserted a swab into the rifle’s bore. “Big game—elk or bear.”
“Seen any elk around here lately?”
His father smiled. “Not lately.”
“Then why buy it?”
Charlie paused. “Why not?”
“And what did mom say about it?”
Charlie leaned in close and, in a hushed tone, said, “What your mother doesn’t know won’t hurt me.”
Noah chuckled. He had put a finger to his lips and winked.
But anyone who assumed that a massive stockpile of munitions was vastly advantageous would have been wrong. At the beginning
