“Is that what this world has come to? We’re all turning into monsters? Your sick neighbours knock on your door and you leave them to the wolves? We’re not your enemies here. I have children – I’m just looking for a little sympathy.”
“I can’t help you.”
“What about giving us some cots and we’ll stay in your shed?”
The girl just stood there. She looked down at her feet and then back up again.
“How long do you need to stay for?”
“One night should be enough. We just need a safe place to sleep and then we’ll be on our way again.”
“Well, as long as you’re telling me the truth, I might be able to do something. If you’re lying about having kids with you or anything else, I will shoot you.”
“Thank you for being so understanding.”
“I guess you’re lucky. My mother says I always used to like bringing home stray cats. But that doesn’t mean that I’m not going to watch you like a hawk. If you try anything, I will use this. But go get your kids. I’ll consider letting you stay the night – one night.”
Jess went back to the spot where he told the boys to stay. He circled the trees, twice. They weren’t there.
There was a noise behind him and he nearly jumped before readying the pitchfork in his hands once more.
Dustin was standing before the door of the barn, holding it still with one hand and peering in with the other. He walked towards him, restraining himself from full-on shouting like he wanted to. He knew that those things were still out there somewhere and they responded to noise.
He turned just as Michael was coming out. He grabbed Dustin by the shoulders.
“What were you doing?”
Michael was beside them now, holding a hammer and a wooden beam in his hand.
“We wanted to help you,” he said. “We saw you come out of the barn and thought there might be more weapons inside.”
“You two need to listen to me next time! When I say don’t move, I mean it! I came back and you were both gone. Do you know what I was thinking?”
“Sorry dad, we just got a little worried.”
“Okay listen, there’s people in the house. They're going to help us out. We might be able to stay the night. Let’s do our best to convince them that we’re good people, okay?”
The boys nodded, understanding.
“Now go, get your butts in gear.”
A light breeze was pushing the leaves past them on the ground. The evening sky had turned purple as if in warning to get inside.
Jess put his arms at his son’s backs and pushed them forward, urging them to break into a light run. He opened the door first and stepped inside, motioning for the boys to follow his lead.
“Hello? I found them. We’re back.”
The girl again stepped out into the hallway from some unseen entrance. The remnants of the sun shone through a window behind her, making her hair look like it was on fire. She had a gun – a pistol – in her hand, and although it wasn’t pointed anywhere but the ground below her, it was still menacing enough to cause Jess to take a step backwards.
“You can leave those weapons by the door,” the girl said. “If you really are just looking for a place to stay for the night, then you won’t need them.”
Jess turned and put his pitchfork down and motioned for his sons to do the same with the items they were carrying.
The girl asked them to follow her and she led the way through two hallways. They passed what was clearly a kitchen at some point but all the windows were boarded up with black paint or charcoaled wood. From the outside it made the house appear dark within, just like at Roscoe’s barn.
They reached a room that had several candles burning. There was a fireplace here, framed in a fake brick arch. Family photographs were sitting on the upper ledge of the fireplace. Smiling faces on a boat and other celebratory gatherings squared between smooth black borders.
The girl’s orange hair was not much different in shade or in clear sun. She held one hand out to signify the chairs that Jess and his sons could sit in while she held the gun still in the other.
The boys sat on a cream-coloured sofa while Jess took up a leather chair that was about as comfortable as anything he had ever sat in before. The girl stood before the unlit fireplace, pacing.
“These are my sons,” Jess said. “Dustin and Michael.”
The girl made eye contact with Michael for a little longer than Jess felt comfortable with.
Are the people upstairs going to come down?"
“I’m Gwen. I live here with my mother. Nobody else is upstairs, but I'm sure you understand why I had to lie. She has advanced MS so she doesn’t get around very well.”
“MS?” Dustin said. “Microsoft?”
“Multiple Sclerosis,” Jess said.
“You can look it up if civilization survives. It’s just me and her right now. My father went out about two days ago to get help. I’m sure he’ll be back soon.”
“Do you have enough to eat?” Jess said.
The girl just stared at him for a moment. She hadn’t let go of the gun yet.
“We’re not looking to take your food,” Jess clarified. “Just wondering how you’re managing.”
“We don’t eat a lot,” Gwen said. “We’ve been rationing since power first went out so we’re in decent shape. I can probably make us all a small meal. It won’t be Christmas dinner or anything, but it’ll be something in our bellies at least.”
Gwen was true to her word. The gun never left her side but she did at least put it down to make the meal. They had a naturally-cooled freezer in the basement of the house where they stored items like meat and vegetables, to make them last. She made fried chicken, mashed potatoes and dilled carrots. Jess doubted that the boys had ever had a better meal in their lives. They certainly ate like it was McDonalds after a two-hour football practice.
Things seemed to settle down after the dinner. Gwen pulled out dry cookies from a package that seemed like some bizarre artefact from their previous lives. She was able to boil water over what looked like a camping stove and made coffee and hot chocolate, which went over well with all of them. Jess forgot how good freshly brewed coffee could be.
“So how have you managed to last so long here?” Jess said. “It’s not like you’re well hidden or anything. You have endless fields on all sides but one. You must have had other survivors or other things banging on your door before we showed up.”
Gwen hesitated for only the briefest of moments but Jess noticed it. The girl dipped her cookie in her hot chocolate and took a nibble, speaking with her mouth open.
“We were raided once in the beginning. A bunch of people in a van looking to stock up on their supplies I guess. They took a lot of our food and most of the knives. They were in and out so fast that they missed a lot, including mother and me. We were hiding in a closet when they came.”
“So you closed up the house by yourself?” Michael said.
Another hesitation.
“My father helped me. People do it all the time during epidemics. You see people boarding up their houses in Florida during hurricane season every single year. They don’t do it because they’re afraid of the hurricane. They do it because they’re afraid of human intruders.”
“It was a good idea,” Michael said. “It looks like it’s worked pretty well so far.”
“Except that you forgot to lock the door.”
“I had recently returned from the shed myself. I had my hands full, so I guess I did forget to lock it.”
“We all need to start being more careful,” Jess said. “How is your mother, can I talk to her?”
It was a blank stare aimed back.
“My mother is very sick. She needs privacy and she needs quiet. That’s why I have to ask the three of you to sleep on the ground floor tonight. I have cots for all of you, so it shouldn’t be overly uncomfortable. It’s just that mother frequently wakes up in the middle of the night in pain. I’ve had to ration her medication as well, so she’s not coping as well as she would, if things were normal.”
Gwen was right on one account. The cots were as good as any bed after their long day. They had metal-tubed legs that served as suspension legs for the canopy-style beds. Jess and the boys set up their beds in one of the front rooms that had few windows requiring wooden covering and there were several escape outlets available too, should they need it.
Michael continued to fidget with his smartcard, and seemed to be rotating between radio stations, trying intently to get a signal with anything worth listening to. There was a station that playing music.
Must be pre-recorded digital tapes
, Michael said.
When a second U2 song came on, Michael went back to scrolling through the dial. The sound of radio static was actually a pretty horrible sound, reminding him of metal being scratched together, something that Jess said he used to hear in his sleep. The tear of subway wheels grinding against steel tracks in dark tunnels was something that made some of the transit staff wear ear plugs. Many years ago Jess said he couldn’t do it because he’d be blocking out all the other sounds too – like alarms activated by passengers with emergencies. So he continued to round the arches of the subway route at full speed, as metal tore against metal in a sound that seemed to penetrate one’s spine.
Jess was about to ask Michael to turn it down when the signal stabilized and a voice came through, rather clear.
“If anyone’s listening to this communication, we’re transmitting...
The signal disintegrated again to the screeching static and hard as Michael tried to get it back again, it just didn’t happen.
As usual, Jess had difficulty getting to sleep. He must have spent at least an hour or two staring at the ceiling and forcing his eyes closed. Focusing his mind to create a tunnel of shapes and colours in his mind’s eye blocked everything else out so that he could finally dose off.
Dustin woke in the middle of the night, calling for his father like he had done when he was a toddler. With the candles blown out hours earlier, the darkness of the room had blinded them.
“I have to go to the bathroom.”
Jess couldn’t recall seeing a bathroom on the main floor. He did a quick walk-through but couldn’t find one. Dustin was moving quickly from foot-to-foot, indicating that the issue needed to be resolved quickly.
He took the boy by his wrist and led him up the staircase to the second floor. It was just as dark up here as it was in the rest of the house. They turned down the left hallway and tried the first door.
It was the wrong door. The windows weren’t boarded at this level and it was clear that someone was stretched out on a bed and writhing in pain.
Jess pointed his flashlight at the bed. An old woman in a pink nightgown was chained to the posts. The skin of her face seemed to be rotting away from the bone. Her eyes were nearly fully white, as if stacked with layer after layer of cataracts.
The old woman seemed able to focus on their sounds and sat up as far as she could with her mouth open. A horrible moan escaped her dry and parched lips.
Dustin wet his pants.
“What’s going on here?” Gwen asked.
She had the gun in her hands again.
“Take it easy,” Jess said. “We were just looking for a bathroom.”
“Well you found the wrong fucking room, didn’t you?
I told you
. I warned you that my mother was sick!”
Jess looked again at the woman in the bed. It was clear that there was nothing human about her. Nothing but the shape of a woman with the countenance of an animal in its place.
“Why is she tied up?” Michael had joined them.
“Because,” Gwen hesitated, “she doesn’t know what she’s doing. She might hurt somebody, or herself.”
“She’s a zombie,” Dustin said.
“A what?” Gwen said.
“You must have come across them by now,” Jess said. “All this time up here and you haven’t seen any?”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
Gwen carefully pulled a sheet up above her mother’s waist and ignored the snapping movements that the woman’s jaw was making.
“A man was here a few days ago. He tried to break into the house. Mother tried to keep him away and they struggled. The guy was so desperate that he was trying to claw through a broken window. He cut up his arms really good and bit my mom’s arm when she tried to push him back out. He ended up cutting his neck open in the struggle. I guess he bled to death.”
“He just died?”
“His neck was cut in half. I dragged his body into a wheelbarrow and took it down to the river. Mother’s never been the same since. She got really sick; I thought she was in a coma. Then suddenly she snapped out of it, but she’s been angry and doesn’t make any sense. I think it must be trauma.”
Jess tried to convince her to put the gun down with comforting words and gestures. It took some time but Gwen consented to letting them go to use the bathroom. They met downstairs several minutes later and Gwen put the gun down on the ledge of the fireplace but did not venture far from it.