“Sor-ry.”
“This is Alvin.”
“Hello there, little lady,” Alvin smiled. “What's your name?”
“Abigail,” she beamed.
“That’s a pretty name. A pretty name for a pretty little girl.”
“Thanks!” She said with a toothy smile.
“Hey. Volume.” Noah spoke as if he were shocked she didn’t listen the first time. He turned to Alvin. “We speak quietly inside. When we're outdoors we barely say anything, and if we do it's in a whisper.” He pointed outside. “Those things like noise.”
Alvin nodded. “I'll be sure to follow the rules,” he whispered and gave a wink to Abby.
She giggled.
“You can wash up in the bathroom upstairs. I’ll fix up the guest room for you at the end of the hall.”
“You have hot water?”
“Yup.”
“This place is amazing.”
“For now. It won’t last.”
“Did you get bit?” said Abigail.
“Bit? No, but I would have if it weren't for your brother.”
“He saved daddy too,” she said proudly. Then her demeanor downshifted. “But he couldn’t save mommy.”
Noah looked at her sternly and shook his head. Abby stopped talking.
“Speaking of,” said Noah, changing the subject, “where did you come from?”
“Well,” Alvin stopped himself. “Abigail, why don't you go play while your brother and I talk?”
Abigail frowned and clomped into the living room.
“Heh. Cute kid. Reminds me of my own sister.” When she was out of earshot Alvin continued. “I’ve been the gate operator for Lock 17 on the Barge Canal for the last five years. It's a government job—great benefits—decent pay.”
“Was,” Noah corrected him.
“What?”
“That life is over, man.”
“Oh, right,” he looked down, pausing briefly, and then explained the events that led him there.
Alvin had been sitting in the control cabin when a twenty-foot yacht drifted into the lock and slammed into the lower gate. He called to the ship on his bullhorn, but no one responded. Something was wrong. He opened the filling valve and waited for the yacht to rise.
After it buoyed, Alvin hopped aboard and began exploring the ship’s deck. It was quiet—empty. When he reached the stern, he spotted a thick trail of blood leading below deck.
“Hello?” he called into the darkened cabin. “Is someone hurt?”
Footsteps sounded, slow and heavy. A chill swept over Alvin, freezing his lungs. The hazy-eyed, bloodied face of an elderly man passed into what little light reached down below. His skin was sallow, and he stunk like roadkill, but Alvin had yet to encounter the living dead, so he didn’t know what to make of the man.
He shambled toward Alvin, arms outstretched, his jaw gently rising and falling. As Alvin backed away, he had tried to reason with him.
“But that didn’t work. He just kept comin' toward me, and moanin'. God, those moans…,” Alvin said, rubbing his temples, “enough to strip the varnish off a deck. And then his old lady came out behind him. Aside from the man’s bloody face, he looked alright. But her,” he shuddered. “She was all messed up. Her tits were—just—gone. I mean, like, picked clean. You could see her ribs and everything, man.”
Alvin had run to the bow, climbed over the pulpit, and dropped onto the catwalk that ran along the lock’s top gate. The dead couple followed. The woman climbed over the handrail, but she fell off the ship and buckled over the catwalk railing like a towel hung out to dry. The old man leaned over the pulpit and swiped at Alvin’s head. While trying to avoid his grasp, Alvin lost his balance and fell over the rail into the canal. He rolled beneath the muddy water, bobbing to the surface just in time to see the woman fall in after him. Frantically, Alvin paddled downstream, desperate to get as far away from the couple as possible.
The river bent, depositing Alvin onto a sandbar. He coughed and wheezed as he crawled ashore before flopping onto his back at the water’s edge. The river gently lapped at his feet while he tried to catch his breath. He could have laid there for an hour—if it weren’t for the screams.
Alvin crawled up the muddy incline toward a small fishing skiff that lay overturned at the crest of the riverbank. Slowly, he peeked over the skiff. He was in a trailer park.
One of the trailers was engulfed in flames, and its blaze was starting to spread to the trailer next to it. The park's residents didn’t seem concerned. Instead, they chased each other in and out of the doublewides, tackling anyone who couldn’t get away. As Alvin looked over the carnage with utter incomprehension, he heard the rhythmic swishing of water behind him. He turned slowly, somehow already aware of what he'd find.
The old woman from the boat had gotten hung up on the same sandbar as Alvin, and her interest in him hadn’t waned in the slightest. As she shambled towards him with water draining through her ribs in fine crimson rivulets, Alvin experienced a total paradigm shift. It was the same shift that everyone who encountered the living dead had gone through: the realization that no person could survive such horrific wounds for more than a few seconds, let alone continue to function unimpeded. These things were no longer human!
Whether or not a person survived their first encounter usually depended on how quickly they accepted this new paradigm, or, as in Alvin’s case, just dumb luck. Either way, the odds were not favorable.
Alvin crawled over the skiff and staggered toward the nearest trailer. Two more dead noticed him and began hobbling in his direction. He tried the door, but it was locked. Circling the trailer, he came across a collection of junk stacked against the rear of the home. Alvin pulled a broken lawn chair from the junk pile. He opened the chair and set it beneath a
