(Book 2)What Remains (5 page)

Jumping down with a thud, she cleared the
cushioned platform and the flashlight beam scurried off accompanied
by an array of giggles. Now I had to complete the unpleasant task
of getting out of bed. Even though I was getting better, this chore
remained a difficult one.

I let out a heavy sigh then followed my
dismounting routine. Soon I found myself both standing and hungry.
A family meal was something that sounded so good I’d probably kill
for it. This brought on a genuine laugh. It was disturbingly funny
because I
did
kill for it.

Focusing on the dinner event made for a much
better way to occupy my attention. I was struck by the overall
eeriness of the house once I entered the hallway. The other rooms
were black as pitch. This kind of darkness was disheartening. The
only time I’d been exposed to something like this was years ago
when I went spelunking. That was what our sweet home had
essentially become – a cave. We’d shut it off so tightly that we’d
put subterranean caverns to shame.

All activity in the house was concentrated in
the attic. Light that beamed down from the void in the ceiling
broke the imaginatively taunting absence of light. Before I knew it
I was up the ladder and delighted by the scene before me.

A circle of votive candles burned brightly as a
halo. My dear family sat atop a blanket, each with a cardboard box.
The boxes were covered in place mats so that they could be used as
impromptu tables. A single vacant setting had an inviting pillow
placed behind it. Sarah saw my delighted expression and smiled.
“Come join us, sleepy head,” she said in a soothing tone.

Calise immediately jumped up with excitement. “I
set your table, Daddy! Isn’t it pretty?” Sarah quickly motioned for
her to quell her volume. Embarrassed, Calise sank her head down
into her shoulders. All the while she never severed eye contact
with me.

Breaking from the heart-melting gaze of the
brown-eyed beauty, I looked down at the fabric-covered box. It was
set with a plastic plate I had bought years ago for the kids. The
plate was blue with a picture of the matching M&M candy
character. I realized then that all the plates were from the
M&M set. Maddox sat behind the yellow M&M. Sarah sat behind
the green M&M; because as the kids knew, Mommy always got the
green M&M. Calise bobbed up and down behind the red M&M
plate.

Correspondingly colored plastic cups sat with
every setting. Inside each was what looked like apple juice. Each
place setting had a fork and a knife carefully aligned to complete
the scene. Centered in the whole thing was another box topped with
a covered serving tray.

Then I noticed that my setting was different.
Placed slightly askew on my blue plate were three silk flowers. The
color was so similar that I didn’t spot them with my initial
survey. Tears threatened to tease my vision again.

Calise wouldn’t allow her five-year-old patience
level to be tested any longer. “Well, Daddy? Aren’t they pretty?”
Her wavy hair bounced around her shoulders while she awaited my
approval.

I looked at Sarah. She had a matching tear that
escaped the corner of her eye. “Calise insisted on doing something
special for your first dinner back with us. She spent most of the
afternoon going through my craft box to find the flowers. Then she
did a wonderful job setting up our dinner tables.” Calise got even
more excited hearing that her mother recognized a busy day’s worth
of effort.

“They are almost as pretty as you, baby girl.” I
said while wiping the salty stream of tears from my stubbled cheek.
“Come here and give me a big kiss.”

She had leaped over towards me before the
sentence was even finished. About three feet from me she stopped,
placed her hands down and behind her back, then stepped calmly up
to me with her chin up and lips puckered. I bent down and gave the
little angel a big kiss on the lips.

Calise flinched, pulling away while giggling.
“Daddy!” she said like I’d embarrassed her. “Your beard tickles! I
think you need to shave.”

“What for? I don’t think I’ll need to go back
into work anytime soon. Now enough stalling! I’m so hungry I might
just eat you up.” I said back in a silly, scary voice.

Maddox laughed quietly with Sarah. Calise turned
into a bouncing blur of pink and was quickly seated behind her
plate. Sarah leaned over to reveal the dinner. “I hope hot dogs
sound good to you,” she said while exposing a platter of a dozen
beef franks.

“Sounds delicious!” I underestimated the
distance and plopped painfully down on the pillow, quickly
recovered, and scooted to the plate. “Are they still good?”

“No, I thought I’d wait until now to try and
give you food poisoning.” She made a raspberry sound and both kids
giggled. “We froze them before the power went out. As long as we’re
quick when opening the chest freezer things shouldn’t thaw for a
couple more days. The buns are about to go bad, though, so we’ve
got to eat them.”

“How did you cook them?”

Maddox chimed in. “We boiled them outside.”

“Outside?”

Maddox was about to explain when Sarah cut him
off. “We can talk about that later. For now let’s just have a nice
dinner.”

Calise had already chomped up half of the hot
dogs on her plate. The ravenous appetite of a five year old and an
eight year old is rivaled only by the undead. I smiled and took a
sip of the diluted apple juice.

We all ate in an uncharacteristic silence.
Normally, Sarah and I had to remind the kids to talk less and eat
more. This time we just sat relishing the combination of sustenance
and company. Outside I heard the clatter of distant gunfire. No one
else reacted. Either I’m the only one who had heard it, or I had
become such a regular sound that they didn’t react.

I tried not to think about what the gunfire
meant. Somewhere there was a human being fighting for their life
while necessarily desecrating the fallen life of another. Could
their children be watching them as they fired that gun? How long
before mine would see me fight the dead? The new world was far too
overwhelming to be removed from my thought process. I couldn’t even
enjoy a meal with my loved ones without succumbing to anxiety of
inevitabilities.

Maddox inhaled all three hot dogs, then dabbed
the ketchup off his mouth. “Do you know what tomorrow is,
Daddy?”

I thought for a second about what it might be.
During my recovery period I’d lost all track of the days. “No,
Monkey, what is tomorrow?”

“It’s Thanksgiving, duh!” he snorted.

Sarah immediately smacked him in the arm with a
rolled up napkin. “Don’t talk to your father that way. He’s been
through a lot to get here. It’s not his fault he didn’t know what
day it was.”

His head dropped shamefully. “Sorry, Daddy…”

“It’s okay... I really didn’t know. I suppose
we’ll have to make a bigger dinner for tomorrow night then won’t
we?” The shame washed away from Maddox as soon as I said it.

Calise eagerly raised her hand. Her little wrist
twisted around and all five fingers danced. The mini pink beauty
acted like she was in school and wanted to be called upon. “Yes,
baby girl?”

“Can I help make it? Mommy said last year I was
too little but now I’m big,” she said with a mixture of hesitance
and pride.

We all chuckled. Sarah said, “Yes, honey, you
can help,” prompting a gleaming smile from Calise.

I nodded my head in approval. “Good. Tomorrow
we’ll have a nice Thanksgiving dinner. I’d like to see the zom… eh…
the monsters take that from us!”

Sarah gave me a justifiable scolding-wife-styled
look. She and I had briefly discussed not saying the word ‘zombie’
in front of Calise. She was too young to worry more than she
absolutely had to. I almost slipped and said it. However, referring
to the infected ‘monsters’ was equally fitting.

“I think tomorrow I’ll try to make it outside
too. It’ll make me feel better about you guys doing it if I can see
its safe with my own eyes.” Sarah began to gather a protest to my
saying it. “And yes, sweetheart, I am feeling up to it.”

Everyone looked happy. It was a nice change to
see because the world was anything but happy. I hoped to God that
there were other families out there still able to plan their
Thanksgiving dinners.

I decided to stay upstairs for the night. The
high I’d gotten from an illusion of normalcy made me feel like I
was up to the task.

Sarah went downstairs and got more drugs. She
also pulled some of the blankets from our bed hoping to make me
more comfortable. When she returned she quietly eased the ladder to
the upright position, which isolated us completely. If the dead
were to break down the barriers while we slept, they would have
been rewarded with an empty house. Everyone nestled in for the
night.

The attic was chilly. It wasn’t ever an area
that was built for occupancy, however, the modifications done in my
absence compensated for that somewhat. Collapsing the stairs also
created a bubble of body-heated air throughout our pseudo-second
floor. The four of us huddled up there combined with a few
carefully burned candles raised the ambient temperature by easily
twenty degrees. Regardless of the changes, our breath was still
slightly visible in the pre-winter air.

Maddox and Calise were both sound asleep. They
look like plump, happy grubs in their thermal sleeping bags. Sarah
prepped our double sized bag for the two of us. I saw her doing
this and must have advertised my thoughts through my worried
expression.

She looked at me with playful yet serious eyes.
“I don't care how you smell or where you hurt. If you don’t crawl
into this sleeping bag with me then I’m going to be cold. And as
you well know, when I’m cold I get angry. If I get angry and cold
then you’ll be better off outside with the monsters.”

I reached my aching arm out and placed my finger
over her lip to shush the playful threats. “I was just going to ask
you to go easy on the spooning. You know, Hun, we’re going to have
to leave here sooner or later. When we do, I have to be as close to
normal as possible. If my ribs don’t heal right because you
insisted on spooning then it could end up getting me bitten. That’s
right, your vicious cuddling could actually kill me.”

“You’re an ass. Now hurry up, I’m getting cold,”
she said with a devilish smile. It didn’t take any more motivation
for me to get nestled up to my beloved. Not long before being so
cozy with my loved ones I was huddled between railroad ties atop a
bridge above a river that seethed with the dead. Those palpably
nightmarish memories permeated my subconscious. While I lay there
with my wife those memories they faded from feeling peace for the
first time since before the world ended. Evidently, it was easy to
overlook the scars of hell when heaven cradled you. Finally,
everyone and everything I held dear was within a few feet of
me.

Something stirred me from a hellacious dream.
Every time I closed my eyes I was punished for what had already
happened. I’d begun to think that dreams existed for two purposes:
to give you hope for what might be and to punish you for what had
already been. I spent hours in bed trying to focus on happy times
of the past so that any final waking thoughts might leach into my
dreams. However, anxiety over what was to come for all of us made
the effort a futile one.

Hope can be one of the most powerful forces
imaginable. As potent as it may be, it was also the biggest victim
that came from the shattering of death’s finality. Beyond the
millions of lives lost and lasting threat to mankind, the most
tragic toll was the extinction of hope. Any living soul that had
the luxury of thought could not consider even the most
insignificant aspect of life without the infected coming into play.
We may survive encounters with those afflicted by the Reaper virus,
but their impact was one of profound pollution. Now the living were
cursed with no hope for a return to real life.

There was a constant pressure around my waist.
Sarah nestled into my side and gripped me like a life preserver. A
few feet away Maddox and Calise were both in their separate
sleeping bags under a thick comforter. The reasons I must force
myself to hope again were all around me. I couldn’t let them see
how worried I actually was.

My thought process was interrupted by a sound
outside. It must have been the same sound that had pulled me away
from my nightmare. I tried to ease my way out of Sarah’s
constriction. She mumbled something in her sleep and squeezed
tighter.

The wince I let out partially woke her. “Where
are you going?” she asked.

Her death grip loosened enough for me to sit up.
I whispered, “I heard something outside. I’m going to go to the
peephole and see if I can get a look.”

“Don’t, baby.” Sarah shivered when I sat up.
Puncturing her warm air cocoon brought her out of her sleepy state
just enough to look irritated by my stubbornness. “There’s no way
they can get to us up here. Just go back to sleep and whatever it
is will leave… they always do.”

She was implying that this wasn’t a random
disturbance. I was angry now. A few weeks ago I would have
countered a late night intruder around our yard by turning on the
flood lights, calling the police, and going to the door without
enough clothing while holding something menacing. Now I was huddled
in the attic of our home feeling helpless. I wouldn’t be able to
rest again until I knew what was out there.

“My muscles are starting to ache from not
stretching them. I’m just going to loosen up and peek out. Stay
bundled, sweetheart – I’ll be back in your bubble before you know
it.”

I made it into the chilled air before she could
muster another protest. Standing up was easier than I anticipated.
I felt confident that I had been healing well, because rising this
way would have been impossible a couple of days before. The kids
were blissfully knocked out. I tiptoed around them and made my way
to the improvised blockade.