Season of Rot

choice, but better than nothing; he imagined it would hurt like hell to have it smashed into your nose.

He went to call out again, but suddenly Luke came tearing at him from the rear of the house. The old man didn’t make a sound, but his eyes were wide open, his face split into a snarl. He hurtled forward in a desperate rage, and Jeremy barely dodged him, dropping the ashtray in the process.

Luke crashed into the TV stand and went down onto his hands and knees. His muscles tensed, as if he were going to lunge to his feet and attack again, so Jeremy kicked him in the stomach, knocking the wind out of him and throwing him onto his back. Jeremy dropped on the old man, pinned his withered arms over his head. “Luke, please, it’s me! Jeremy!”

Luke raised his head and snapped his teeth like a mad dog, incredibly strong somehow. Jeremy, forced to let go, rolled away from the old man, but not quickly enough—fingernails raked a long gash in his arm beneath the sleeve of his Rush T-shirt. Jeremy gritted his teeth, and then Luke was on him again.

Before he even realized what he was doing, Jeremy snatched up the ashtray from the floor and brought it down on Luke’s skull, crunching bone. Luke went limp and fell over.

Feeling sick, his whole body shaking with adrenaline and disgust, Jeremy dropped the ashtray; blood and gray hair had stuck to the glass. There was no doubt that the old man was dead. His scalp was caved-in and bleeding.

Tears welled up in Jeremy’s eyes as he unconsciously rubbed the wound on his arm. He fell onto the couch and sat there, staring at the dead television set in a daze.

6

Hours later, Jeremy placed an empty beer bottle on the TV table. The beer had been warm but good. You could always count on old Luke to stock his fridge with the essentials.

Thinking of Luke caused Jeremy to lean over and vomit on the floor in front of the couch. It was the same place Luke’s body had lain not long ago, before Jeremy dragged him into the bedroom and covered him with a bed sheet. The image of blood soaking through the thin white cloth made Jeremy retch again.

He rocked back and forth on the couch, replaying everything in his mind. Luke hadn’t been himself. He had been more like an animal. Jeremy wondered if any part of the old Luke had been left inside. He doubted it, and he tried to convince himself that he’d done what he needed in order to survive. It had been kill or be killed, simple as that. But still, it didn’t feel that way.

He cursed himself for being so weak.

Whatever had happened the night before was worse than a simple power outage; he realized that now. The light hadn’t been just a dream. Something was terribly fucked up with the world—and he should have been doing something about it. The day was half gone and he still hadn’t tried Luke’s truck. By now he could have been in town, hunting for help and maybe finding out what had happened last night. Yet he sat there, stealing a dead friend’s beer. Because what if the folks in town were like Luke? What would he do?

He had no idea, but he did know he couldn’t stay here, and there seemed no point in going home. There was nothing there for him.

After a brief search, he found the keys to the truck hanging in the kitchen, but before he started towards town he needed to do one more thing.

Holding a dishcloth from a kitchen drawer, he walked to the bedroom and looked at the corpse snuggled inside the sheet. Inwardly, he said a final goodbye to the old man as he built up the courage to step around him and open the connecting door to the storage room. Half a dozen rifles hung on a rack on the far wall of the room, and a glass case below them contained Luke’s collection of handguns. Not all of them were real—some were just replicas—but they had been Luke’s only real passion in life, aside from sitting on his porch, drinking and smoking.

Jeremy wrapped his hand in the dishcloth and smashed open the locked case. He inspected each gun carefully until he found one that was both real and loaded. It was an old-style .38, which he tucked into the back of his pants before lowering a .30-06 from the rifle rack. Although he didn’t know where Luke kept the ammunition for the handguns, Jeremy knew where he stored the ammo for the rifles and he stopped to load the weapon and dump the leftovers into his pocket.

Outside, he slid into the cab of the ancient, beat-up vehicle and turned the ignition. The engine rolled over on the first try and roared to life.

Jeremy glanced at Luke’s house one last time, then left a cloud of dust in his wake as he sped off into the distance.

7

Amy pinched her arm so hard she bled. Wake up! she thought. Oh please, God—wake up! The last few hours were a blur of death and running, but apparently this wasn’t a dream because it persisted.

She sat in the back of a van with her legs curled up beneath her. Across from her sat a boy of no more than twelve; Jake or Jack or something like that—she couldn’t remember.

In the driver’s seat, a man named Dan drove, his eyes fixed on the road ahead. His black hair was streaked with gray, though otherwise he appeared to be in his late twenties or early thirties.

The van jolted as it hit something in the street. Amy hoped it was a pothole, nothing else.

Sitting next to Dan, the woman, Katherine, held a 12-gauge shotgun in her lap, watching Amy and the boy intently. No one spoke.

There had been another man with them earlier who had gone crazy. Without hesitation, Katherine had splattered his head all over the wall, and she’d made Dan stop so she could kick the body outside. Amy could still smell the blood, and she had no doubt whatsoever that Katherine would kill all of them in an instant if she had to.

All day, they had driven south through the city in search of a safe place to get help, in search of others who didn’t have what Dan called the “sickness.” The van was both a blessing and a curse. It gave them the means to outrun any problems they encountered, but it also drew problems to them: the sound of the engine attracted the crazies. Already Katherine and Dan had been forced to fight them off half a dozen times. The noise also attracted the unwanted attention of other survivors, the kind willing to kill for the working vehicle. Thank God they had met up with that type only once and had been able to flee without a real fight.

Amy didn’t really know where Dan was taking them. She hoped he knew. But after all she had suffered and seen, she wondered if there was such a thing as a safe place anymore.

Her stomach growled. There was food in abandoned establishments and stores throughout the city; the trouble lay in stopping to get it. They had learned that fact quickly and the hard way. The diseased were good at hiding and they seemed to be everywhere.

Amy fished around in her jacket pockets and retrieved half of a candy bar she’d looted the one time they had stopped earlier that day. The boy watched her hungrily but said nothing. She broke off a large chunk and offered it to him. He snatched it from her and sat back, chewing it and smacking his lips. Katherine watched but showed no signs of caring. She must be hungry too, Amy thought, but she doesn’t show it like we do.

“We’ll be there soon,” Dan muttered, more to himself than to his passengers. “We’ll get help. You’ll see. Everything will be fine.”

Amy hoped he was right. She knew that Dan was on the verge of a breakdown and wasn’t at all lucid, but nonetheless she hoped.