The Dead Circle (33 page)

The water splashes up and out, showering droplets in all directions. Sarah doesn’t see the drop that hits her right arm. But she feels it.

*

Chris only allows himself to lie down for the length of a single breath to celebrate his victory before he scrambles to his feet to go help Sarah. He can hear the alarm screaming below him and has almost reached the trapdoor when it abruptly ceases. He pauses for a second waiting for the next scream. It doesn’t come. His heart leaps.

“She did it. Yes!! Sarah! You did it! We did it!”

He charges down the trapdoor and into the office. He feels like his feet are barely touching the ground as he rounds the corner out of the office and onto the balcony. He slides down the ladder into the main library still shouting to Sarah and laughing with relief.

*

One hundred bodies pushing at the library walls are joined by two hundred more. With the entire perimeter of the building completely covered with the dead, those who can’t reach it directly start climbing each other and pushing on the zombies in front of them. They are creating second, third and fourth rows of bodies all pushing together.

*

When Chris reaches the top of the rope ladder leading down into the kitchen, he falls to his knees looking down for Sarah.

“Sarah! You did it! I turned off the sprinklers! We’re-”

Chris is not prepared for what he sees.

Sarah is standing in the kitchen looking back up at him. She is completely naked.

Sarah faces him, still, almost frozen. Her arms lay limply at her side. A slow trickle of blood leaks out of her right hand creating an expanding cluster of red droplets on the floor. She is only lit by the incessant strobe lights, but he can see that her face is completely expressionless.

All of the sound drops out of Chris’ head. He can’t hear the pounding on the walls. He can’t hear Charlie’s meowed protests of all of the commotion. He can’t even hear his own words. “Oh my God.”

Sarah stares back at him, fighting hard against the growing blackness in her head. She fights to speak. She fights for consciousness. Using the last of her desperate determination, she wills her mouth to move.

“Chris…”

The plywood barricades at the front door and windows start to shudder and buckle. But Chris hears only Sarah.

“Sarah!!!”

Her eyes seem to be losing focus and she looks unstable on her legs. He can see how hard she is fighting to stay in her body, but she’s losing the battle.

The last word he hears comes out as a choked mumble, but Chris understands it.

“…love.”

It is at this moment that the barricades fail. All of the wooden barriers blocking the doors and the windows simultaneously explode inward. In an instant Sarah disappears in an avalanche of zombies and a cloud of splinters and pieces of plywood.

Chris screams with an agony he did not think was possible.

“Nooooooooo!!”

He falls back on his heels, his hands dropping lifelessly to the floor beside him.
She’s gone.
All of his hopes and dreams, plans and ambitions drain out of him. His very will to live is evaporating like mist.

“There are all sorts of dangers all around us… They can all hurt you. Kill you even. What happened today was that you did something stupid... Whatever happens after that is your fault...”

Chris watches with little interest as dust, glass and bits of plywood fly through their hallway and into the kitchen. He rather detachedly notes the feeling of simulated slow motion created by the strobes continuing to flash.

With the last shred of self preservation he feels, perhaps only because it was Sarah’s last request, he pulls the rope ladder up just as the first wave of the dead crash through the wooden detritus littering what used to be
their
home.

He drops the end of the ladder at his side and watches as dozens of Fred and Gingers flood into the hallway where the stairs had been. They are trapped down there, unable to climb up to where Chris sits motionless.

He tries to push all thought out of his mind, but his father’s voice keeps interjecting.
“You didn’t have an accident, you fucked up! So now you’re paying the price. That’s how the world works kid. Darwin was right…”

A moment passes. Perhaps ten minutes, perhaps only seconds.  Chris has lost all sense of the passage of time. The first few layers of zombies have been crushed up against the wall like victims of a soccer riot. Under all of the intense pressure, the Fred and Gingers literally start to break apart. They’re being smashed together and compressed while they continue desperately clawing at the wall. They have become incredibly dry and brittle. Limbs crack and snap like dry twigs underfoot. The body parts filter down to the floor. An arm here, a leg there, a skull or two fall to the dusty hardwood, creating a terrible pile of dried flesh and bone. Each Fred or Ginger that breaks apart is replaced by another, each standing a few inches higher than the last.

Chris remains frozen. As he watches, he absentmindedly thinks of the fable of the mouse that falls into a bucket of cream. Using exceptional determination, the mouse keeps swimming for so long he churns the cream into butter and is able to climb out of the bucket to safety. Chris lets out a dry giggle. He wonders if he is going insane.

Wave after wave of zombies crash into the wall below his feet. They continue slamming into the hallway and each other, cracking apart and falling to the floor. The mound rises just a bit higher with each body. Within an hour they have begun to form a makeshift ramp of themselves. Chris has not moved. He’s not sure why he would move.
To what purpose?
He wonders why he’s ever done anything.

The first hand to reach the top of the stairs brushes his shoe and attempts to grab hold of his foot. It used to be a female hand. It’s the hand that belonged to a hardworking owner of a struggling craft ice cream shop.

The hand on his shoe breaks Chris out of his dissociative state and he stands up slowly. He wills his eyes to come into focus and looks down at the horrifying sight below him. Normal sound slowly returns and he can hear the horrible thrusting, crunching, cracking, scraping sounds of all of the Fred and Gingers trying to get at him.

He realizes he has nowhere to go but up. This had always been Sarah’s plan, to keep retreating higher and higher. They might be able to climb over each other in the narrow space of the hallway, but they would never be able to do it in the expanse of the library.

But the plan was always to retreat
together
. Sarah’s body is down there somewhere in the mosh pit of zombies on the ground floor. She is probably being trampled into something unrecognizable.
Of course Sarah is no longer Sarah. She is one of them now.
He doesn’t want to think about it, but now that he is awake and in the world again, it’s all he can think about. He is using
their
survival plan alone. The guilt eats at his insides like some sort of ravenous creature.

Still, he climbs the ladder up onto the library’s balcony, breaks it off the railing and tosses it back down as what used to be Shirley climbs over the lip of the stairs and reaches the main library level.

He looks around for Charlie despite himself.

“Jesus. Why am I looking for a fucking cat?!”

Chris hates himself for trying to rescue an animal when he has already failed his wife, but a new voice in his head, perhaps Sarah’s, whispers ‘
because you can still care. Because you can still love…’

Charlie is nowhere to be found. Chris knows that he won’t be found unless he wants to be, and he’s probably dead anyway.

“Fuck it.”

Chris goes through the passageway into the garage. Maybe if they are focusing on the front of the library, he can escape out that way. He runs to the open side and looks down. His plans are immediately dashed. The street is wall-to-wall flesh. He can’t even see the pavement through the maze of Fred and Gingers. It’s like Mardi Gras for zombies.

Knowing escape is completely impossible, he returns to the balcony of the library and watches as a hundred zombies claw around the room attempting to get up. The dead work their way around the space trampling all of their, now his, possessions. The TV falls with a crash. The space heaters are flattened. All the pictures of their wedding and their road trips across the country get knocked off the walls and ground into the floor. More and more charge into the room. They’re blindly clawing at the walls and each other.

Chris winces when one of the piano legs gets kicked out. The Steinway crashes to the floor with a horrifying jangle. The noise only seems to increase the intensity of the zombie’s thrashing. More and more attempt to pack themselves into the library.

Time passes. Chris doesn’t know how long he sits there, nor does he care.

The Fred and Gingers continue roiling around, but they can’t get up to the second level. They can’t climb the walls and—because their furniture was in the center of the room, away from the balcony—climbing the couch, piano, or the table was useless too. They climb each other, but are not organized enough to reach the balcony twelve feet above their heads. The doorway up from the kitchen has become clogged with bodies. The attack has reached a stalemate.

Chris sits silently watching as his life literally crumbles around him.

“The world is just math. All of our hopes and dreams and feelings all boil down to making the right calculations. Do the math right and you’ll never fail. If you do fail it’s because you didn’t think through the consequences and you got what you deserved… There is no such thing as a victim.”

He does not cry. He is too sad to cry, too sad to feel. He is numb. More time passes. Hours. Eventually, despite his pain, or perhaps because of it, he falls asleep, clinging to a picture of Sarah.

*

A hand closes on his arm. Chris jolts awake. He’s confused.

What’s going on? Why am I on the floor? Oh no. Please no...
Then more practical thoughts barge their way into his consciousness.
Did they get in through the garage? The roof? Where?

He twists his arm back and opens his eyes. He is face to face with a child. Or what used to be a child.

Somewhere behind the cold white eyes and the dry cracked skin caked in blood and grime used to live a boy who cracked himself up inventing the word ‘boobucopia.’ A nice boy who cared about football, comic books and Karen Tyson’s bra strap, not necessarily in that order. A boy who knew what it felt like to feel threatened, cornered and trapped. But he somehow never turned that feeling into a desire to threaten anybody else. Now, the boy who used to be called Kevin no longer cares about such things. He is just hungry.

For a moment Chris just stares back at the creature Kevin has become. He marvels at the fact that the small body could have survived this long in the horde.
How has he not trampled? He must be tough, or lucky. Lucky… right.

Coming to his senses, Chris frantically kicks at the child zombie and it falls back down to the floor below. He realizes that the boy had somehow climbed one of the double-length curtains up to the balcony. He dashes around the perimeter of the room yanking them up.

There are still hundreds of bodies down there, but some seem to have been trampled and some have expired on their own. In the corner of the room, a Ginger that appears to have sagged down and died is spontaneously crumbling to dust.

With the curtains removed, Chris see a bit better. The light in the library has that grainy grey quality of the first break of dawn. Something about the idea that the sun will rise, that there will be another day, cracks a dam in his head.
If there is going to be a tomorrow, than this is real.
What happened to Sarah is real. She’s really gone. Gone forever.
Chris knows that he will have to face the dawn without her, alone.

The tears finally come and he sobs until he is truly exhausted. Until he is truly empty.

After an hour, he runs out of tears. He’s just thirsty.

I need some water. Water…oh…
After a split second of being distracted by practical thinking, everything comes flooding back.
Oh right… water killed Sarah.

Chris remembers hearing someone describe grief as a process of forgetting and remembering over and over until the new reality becomes a permanent part of you, like a scar.
Who said that? Who cares?

He expects to cry some more, but nothing comes out. Eventually, he stands up and walks into the office. He forces himself to pick up a bottle of water and sit down at his desk. When he tries to twist the cap open, his hands are shaking so much he drops it. Water pours out, creating an expanding puddle on the hardwood.

“Fuck!” He falls to his hands and knees, instinctually reaching for the bottle, but stops.
Why bother?

Chris sits down on the floor behind his desk. From his seated position, he reaches into the drawer and removes the gun he promised Sarah he had thrown away. He leans his back against the desk and looks at the weapon while the rest of the water spills out.

“But… but it wasn’t my fault.”

“Not your fault!? There’s no such fucking thing. You’re not a cripple or a moron… There is no such thing as a victim. Take your medicine like a man.”

He raises the gun to his temple. On second thought he puts the barrel in his mouth, aiming the gun slightly up like he has seen in the movies. He closes his eyes and takes a deep breath.

“Mrrrow?”

Chris opens his eyes. He does not remove the gun from his mouth nor does he take his finger off the trigger. Charlie is standing in the doorway leading back into the library. Chris wonders where he has been all this time.
In some secret hiding place that only cats know about?

He tries to say “Go away” but the sound is muffled by the gun in his mouth. It sounds like “Gooo waaaa” to him. It’s a silly noise. He is surprised when he can’t contain a giggle.