The Dead & Dying: A Zombie Novel (19 page)

And I knew that Mr. Carl was lucky this time. 'Cause if it hadn't been for my Mommy I really woulda done it and I wouldn't have felt bad or nothin'. But instead, I really did go to sleep and all night long I dreamed that Mommy was bringin' me hot dogs and pie and meatloaf and all kinds of good stuff. Only every time I'd get ready to take a bite Mr. Carl would show up outta nowhere and snatch it outta my hands.

Even my dreams weren't fair and I remember thinking in them 'bout how I wanted to be one of them black birds. At least they weren't bein' starved to death by a killer. At least they could fly away from all of this. But if I was a bird I would peck out his eyes and poop on his head.

I really would, too.

I can't wait for him to die.

I hate him.

CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE: CARL

I knew the kid was hungry. Hell, my own stomach felt like it was turning inward and devouring itself amid rumbles and waves of nausea. So I figured it had to have been ten times worse for the boy. He'd come from a world of coco flavored cereal in the morning. Perhaps a snack between a soup and sandwich lunch and a full spread at dinnertime. The worst hunger he'd probably ever felt was waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of the cookie jar on the kitchen counter.

But things weren't really looking good, ya know? I kept hoping that some poor son of a bitch might wander into town; that the zombies would go after him like flies on shit, giving us enough time to slip unnoticed into the woods. But the hours kept dragging along, day turned to night and then to day again. I rationed out the tuna as best as I could, aiming for a subtle balance between taking the edge off the cravings and making these few cans last as long as possible. Hell, I didn't know how long we'd be holed up in that there church with those rotting bastards pounding away at the door. So I did what I thought was best. But even then, the food was gone before we even had a chance to really feel it in our bellies.

To try and help pass the time, I started reading out loud from a bible I'd found up by the pulpit. Began with “In the beginning” and just keep right on going until my throat was so dry I sounded like a sickly creek frog.

But I started thinking as I read that maybe all this had happened before. If you took the stories I was reading as history enshrouded in religious superstition, it was all too easy to start seeing the similarities.

The world, after all, had been our Eden. All of our needs had been taken care of. Everything we could ever want was right there in our garden and life was actually pretty damn easy. But then some old guy in the sky got pissed: we were cast out into the wilderness, forced to fight like animals just to secure the basics of survival. And who knows? Maybe the reason 'ole Cain bashed in his brother's skull is that Abel had come down with the slack-jawed vacant expression of a rotter. And if little brother got a tasty little chunk of flesh during the exchange then that would sure as hell explain why the first “murderer” was condemned to wander the earth and not able to be killed by those who crossed his path wouldn't it?

I kept these thoughts to myself though. Jason had hardly said a word since I first found him in the church and I reckon he was probably still grieving for his mother. Which was understandable. Last thing he needed was for some old fart to lay some heavy shit on him. So I just let him be and kept right on reading until I physically couldn't talk any more.

And the hours just kept dragging on. Day turned to night and then to day again. And it didn't take long before I had this panicked thought whispering in the back of my mind:
you're both going to starve to death. You're never getting out of this here church....

I tried to tell myself not to listen to that voice, that I would think of something. But it’s hard to lie to yourself when your stomach feels like a shriveled walnut and your piss is as dark as wine from dehydration. It's hard to have a positive mental attitude when all you can think about is how good some fried green tomatoes or a nice oven baked chicken would taste. Or when you actually start wondering how to go about filtering your own urine so your tongue doesn't feel all scratchy and swollen.

Of course, it probably didn't help matters any that I wasn't sleeping worth a damn either. I'd lay there in the darkness, watching the boy sleep and think about how badly I'd fucked everything up. His mother was dead, we were slowly wasting away to nothing, and there was a crowd of rotters hammering away at the door. Rotters who were bound to find a way in if given enough time. And to make matters worse, I suspected that the child was beginning to crack under the strain.

Most of the day he'd sit there in his Power Rangers t-shirt, just glaring at me with eyes that almost seemed to burn with hatred. At first I thought that maybe I was just seeing that because it was how I actually felt about myself. What Doc would later tell me was called
projection
. But when he started getting really weird on me, I started wondering if there was more to it than that. If the boy had simply snapped.

See, he'd gotten to the point that whenever I'd ask him a question he wouldn't answer with words. No, he'd sit there with that cold, even stare of his and wait for a few seconds to pass, forcing me to ask the question again. And then, as naturally as if he were saying hello, he'd caw like a raven in this voice that seemed too thick and raspy for such a tiny throat.

The first time he did it, I thought maybe he was playing some kind of a game that I didn't understand. So I asked him again if he needed me to loosen the leg brace I'd made him for a bit. And the boy cawed again. Louder this time with his eyes and nostrils flaring as the sound crossed his lips. It was downright creepy and caused the little hairs on my arms to bristle just like they do right before a lightning storm.

The kid must of cawed at me for two, three days. Hard to say really, cause time had a way of getting fuzzy in that church. After about half a day of it, it'd spooked me so bad that I just stopped talking to the boy. But he kept right on doing it, anytime I would walk by or look in his direction.

It finally got so bad that he was making that crow-sound every few minutes and I felt my muscles kind of tense. I wanted to storm over to where he was sitting and give him the backside of my hand across the face, to shake him until his teeth rattled, to do anything to get him to stop making that god awful noise.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

I clenched my teeth together so tightly I could taste blood oozing from around my gums, balled my hands into fists over and over again, and paced around the church like a man on death row waiting on the Governor's call.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

His voice caused my eardrums to feel like they were lined with broken glass and his eyes followed me no matter where I went.

Caw.

I couldn't take it anymore. If he kept it up I was gonna start hitting him and once I started I didn't think I'd be able to stop again. I just wanted him to shut the hell up, to use his damn words for Christ's sake, to be a normal little boy and not some fucking basket case that I'd created through my own failures.

Caw. Caw.

I ran over to the little ladder that led up into the bell tower and started climbing my way up the rungs. I was so damn weak from hunger and exhaustion that it felt like I had a fifty pound weight attached to either ankle, but I had to get away, to just steal a few minutes of peace and fucking quiet.

When I made it to the top, he finally stopped and all I could hear was the wind rustling through the trees and the pounding of the rotters below. I closed my eyes and felt the warmth of the sun on my face, smelled the scent of pine from the forest mingling with the stench of decaying flesh; if not for the stabbing pains of hunger shooting through my gut, I could have almost imagined I was back home, sitting on my porch with a cold beer at my feet and a fridge full of food.

And then I started to cry. It was like there had been something bottled up so tightly inside me that it finally came spewing out. I cried for the little girl in the forest who'd somehow wandered away from the interstate and was lost and scared and needing an adult so badly. I cried for Monica, for the way she'd kept reminding her son that she loved him when she knew the end was near. Even for little Jason, driven to the brink of insanity all because one man was frigging cocky enough to think he could ride in and save the day.

I don't know how long I sat there with my knees pulled up to my chest, but eventually the tears kinda dried up and I was left feeling as hollow inside as those chocolate bunnies I used to give my niece for Easter. I opened my eyes and watched the tree branches sway in the wind. And I began to think.

Those branches kind of hung over the far side of the church roof. True, the angle of the roof was something fierce and looked like it would be easy as hell to just slide right off if you weren't careful. But I could take the rope off the bell maybe. Lay myself flat and kinda shimmy over to the trees. Then if I could tie one end of the rope to a branch and one end to that there bell tower....  If I could do that, then maybe Jason could hang onto my back like a baby chimp. The rope would make sure we didn't fall. And once we'd made it to the trees we could just go from branch to branch until we were a good piece into the forest.

Yeah, I thought it just might work. After all, the zombies were all clustered around the front door. As long as the boy didn't start that crow shit, they'd never know we were even up there. They'd still be hammering away at the door and never even realize we were eating berries and roots and drinking cool water from a mountain stream.

For the first time in days I felt excited and hopeful. It was crazy, but it really could work. And even if we did slide off that roof and fell to our deaths, at least it would be quick. Not like the slow torture we'd been suffering through since the tuna ran out.

I felt like dancing or jumping up and down, clapping my hands and giggling like a damn idiot. In fact, it took about every ounce of willpower I had to keep from doing so. After all, with his bum leg the boy would pretty much be dead weight. I had to save my strength. Maybe catch a few hours of shut eye and then we could make our big escape under cover of darkness.

I shimmied down the ladder much more easily than I had scaled it and when I got to the bottom, I saw that Jason had drug himself over to the body of the freshy I'd shot on that first day. I shoulda gotten rid of it, but to be quite honest I didn't really want to touch the damn thing. And whatever brings those fuckers back to life seems to slow the decaying process a little, so it had really started smelling too bad yet.

“Hey buddy,” I called out, “we're getting out of here. I've got a plan and by this time tomorrow our bellies are going to be full and we won't ever have to set foot in a church again.”

If he heard me, he didn't give any indication. Not even so much as glancing back over his shoulder at me. What the hell was he doing anyway?

I'd crossed about half the distance and thought maybe he hadn't heard me.

“Jason, you hear? We're getting out of here and . . .”

This time the boy did turn around and there was something clenched between his teeth. Something that looked like a pink piece of rubber. Only it had these dark streaks on it that looked like they'd been flung there with a paintbrush.

He pulled with one hand and tore a long strand away and then slowly began to chew. I noticed the dark streaks were on his lips and chin, that his hand was covered in this goo and that it looked as if something had ripped the corpse's lips away all the way down to its chin.

The boy swallowed and looked at me with those dark eyes of his. Licking his lips, he made a single sound:

Caw.

CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX: JOSIE

The air within the barn was like cold hands against my thighs and I felt revulsion twist my guts into a concrete pretzel. This couldn't be happening: we had simply wanted a place to come in out of the cold, a shelter where we could be warm, where we could rest....  we had fought out way through hordes of rotting flesh, had buried one of our own in an unmarked snow bank outside some bullshit little town, had lost everything we had ever loved or cared about. Everything except each other. And now these two greasy assholes were just going to waltz right in and steal everything away from us? These two low-life degenerate sons of bitches with their stupid fucking leers?

My jeans were around my knees now and Jerry had bent my legs as he pulled so savagely that the burn of friction cut through the blurry haze that had become my world. For a moment the barn was thrown into sharp focus: the sunlight filtering through the gaps in the walls, the little pieces of hay and dust that drifted through the shafts of light, the smell of old manure, the floor cold and gritty against my bare legs. I saw the redhead lifting Carl's head by the hair, saw the knife and that obnoxious grin on his twisted, evil face.

Anger exploded within me with more force than Nagasaki and Hiroshima combined. It felt as if every muscle in my body had simultaneously released all the frustration, all the wrath and bitterness that had been stored within its cells since this whole fucked up apocalypse had begun. How dare they try to steal the only person I fucking gave a damn about when everything else in my sorry excuse for an existence had been ripped away from my clutches and trampled in the dirt! How fucking
dare
they!

I yelled or screamed or growled or something. I can't even say if there were even any words. All I knew was that my vocal chords felt raw and torn as this primeval sound erupted from my lungs and my legs had begun kicking with more force than I'd ever guessed I had.

My foot slammed into Jerry's nose and I could feel as well as hear the sharp snap as blood began to gush from his nostrils. But still I kept kicking, inching my way toward him with my feet flailing in the air, connecting again and again with the soft flesh of his face. More blood from a lip split open like an overripe tomato, but still kicking, still yelling, still unleashing the full force of my rage. I wanted to stomp him into a bloody pulp, to see his brains squish through crushed eye sockets, to hear him cry and scream for mercy, to feel his skull crush beneath the fury of my feet.