Book of the Dead (21 page)

He cursed himself for seven kinds of fool and peered through the darkness, searching for movement. He saw nothing.

He waited, listening again. Again he heard nothing further. He wondered if this new silence were a ploy, an attempt to catch him off his guard. An attempt to lure him back to the tree. Back to the backpack that he could not leave without.

He told himself that the dead were not so canny, then immediately reminded himself that there were others.

He waited what seemed a very long time, clutching the notebook to his chest, before he finally made his way, slowly and cautiously, back up the slope. He was standing beside his backpack, just beginning to breathe again, when his heart was stopped by the sound of an owl in a nearby tree.

Then there was silence.

Darkness had made his previous words invisible to him. He was grateful for that kindness. He knew them by heart and had neither the need nor the desire to be reminded of them.

I AM NOT CRYING

He didn’t need light. He knew that he could write by feel. If only words would come to him. Something other than the primal scream. Something to retain his interest and attention. Something to keep him awake.

He set the notebook and pen aside and got his first-aid kit out of his backpack. He wet a piece of cotton with some alcohol, then pulled his shirt away to clean the scratch on his shoulder. He rubbed hard, causing a warm, raw, stinging sensation to spring up. The scratch did not seem to be infected.

“Does not
seem
to be,” he murmured.

“Not yet.”

He rubbed harder, moving his lips in silent prayer, uncertain to whom the prayer was addressed. His mind drifted back then. Re-envisioned the scene. The origin of this particular concern.

*  *  *

The early afternoon had been hot and humid. Brilliant. Satanically sunny. His head had throbbed, pounded, screeched, and screamed with a headache whose magnitude he would have deemed neither possible nor survivable even a day earlier. He was staggering along the shoulder of a highway weakened by hunger, thirst, weariness and pain. He was wishing that his backpack really was as heavy as it felt, that it held more than it did of both food and water.

On the back of his pack hung a cardboard sign, with letters ten inches high. The sign proclaimed no destination, but rather a state of being.

ALIVE, was all it said. He hoped that it would give passing motorists pause. Particularly those with guns. It had seemed a good idea when he had first conceived it two weeks before, but on this golden afternoon he was no longer certain of the sign’s veracity. His headache was distorting everything: sight, sound, thought and feeling.

“Do they know that they are dead?” he had wondered.

“How do they know?”

He stumbled and shambled gracelessly along the shoulder of the road thinking, “I have seen enough to know that this is how they move. Is this how they feel? How they perceive things?”

His eyes were rigid, his face contorted in an agonized squint. He was blinded by sunlight and by pain. Dizzy and weak, all of his senses were drowned by the excruciating immediacy violating his temples, his scalp, his retinas and the base of his skull.

A sign loomed before him. He stopped walking and tried to focus on it. Tried to attempt to divine its meaning.

It bore a name. The name of a town, he was certain, though he could not place it.

He felt, vaguely, that this should mean something to him and sat down abruptly upon the gravel of the shoulder, determined to wait out enlightenment. He knew immediately that he should have left the road. Should have accepted the modest concealment that the weeds and wildflowers would have offered him. But he could not bring himself to rise.

“A town,” he thought, “probably small, but a town nonetheless.

“There will be a concentration of them. That’s it! That’s the meaning. A concentration of them. I have to skirt the town. Don’t draw too close. Don’t let them sense me.”

But he had continued to feel that some part of the sign’s message was still lost to him, that there was something yet he should be thinking about. So he remained seated, continued swimming in place through his pain.

Suddenly a car sped by, racing toward the town. At first it had merely startled him, but a moment later the incident disturbed him far more profoundly. The car had approached from behind him. Despite its considerable noise he had been wholly unaware of it until it had been virtually on top of him. His headache had completely obliterated his senses.

“That’s the message,” he staggered to his feet.

“Need something to stop it, bring me back. Can’t skirt the town, gotta go in.”

He knew that the townies would sense him. Would converge on him as soon as they did. Would devour him and turn him into one of them, if they got the chance. But walking the highway half-blind, half-deaf and three-quarters senseless was not a viable option.

Once in town a sense of exultation began to filter through the mass of pain he had become. Finally engaged in a definite activity with an immediately foreseeable conclusion, adrenalin had kicked into his blood, juicing him high. When he had marked the first of his slow and clumsy pursuers, it was a thrill of confidence in competition that raced through him, rather than a sense of deadly fear.

“I
know
I am not one of them,” he had shouted, “They do not feel like
this
!”

Though his pain had not diminished, his mind and senses had grown more acute, his limbs incredibly agile. He found it easy to outsmart and outdistance the townies.

When he spotted the drug store’s smashed plate-glass door, he darted through it without breaking stride. Inside, he moved rapidly up one aisle and down the next, his head pivoting, his eyes searching. His hand was reaching for the box of analgesics within the same second that his eyes had found them. In the space of another second he had turned to retrace his steps and make his exit.

Then he heard the sound of something shuffling through the broken glass at the front of the store.

“Don’t panic,” he told himself quickly.

“Get that thing away from the door first.”

He moved to the center aisle to gain an unobstructed view of the entrance.

The thing he saw shambling toward him had once been a slender, elderly man. Now its face was a bloated blue-green mask, as soft and swollen as the face of a drowning victim. Even at a distance its stench was stultifying to Dawson’s adrenalin-enhanced sense of smell. It wore a fishing vest, dark green trousers, and hiking boots, all of which were caked with dried gore. As was its mouth, its cheeks, chin and neck.

Dawson thought that he could beat the ghoul to the door by simply moving swiftly to one of the vacant aisles and making a run for it. But he wanted to be certain, and he knew that his chances would improve if he held his own ground just a little longer, letting the thing draw nearer to him.

He looked around quickly for something to use as a weapon. Instead his eye was caught by a stack of brightly colored spiral notebooks. On an impulse wholly un-governed by thought he stooped and picked one up.

When he stood again, he saw that the broken door framed yet another of the ghouls, this one a portly woman in a once-white waitress uniform.

Now his panic rose. How many would there be? Enough to trap him in the store? Enough to track him in the aisles?

He permitted the first to draw closer than he had originally intended, to insure that the second, too, would pursue him down the center aisle.

When he thought that she was far enough from the door, he made his move. He spun to his right, took two strides, hooked a quick left, and went racing down the far aisle.

In spite of his haste his eyes managed to register, and his brain to comprehend, the existence of a display of writing instruments hanging on the wall to his right. It shouldn’t have made any difference to him, but before he could stop it, his right hand was reaching out, making a quick stab at a package of pens.

The package caught on its metal hanger and would not come free. So he committed the most foolish act of his life. He skidded to a halt and made a second lunge for the pens. They remained just out of reach.

“Idiot!” he screamed. But he took one more step back and freed them from the rack.

His mind was a chaos of imprecations and death visions, but when he made it to the end of the aisle, he saw nothing in the doorway and bolted through it.

The hand that clamped down on his shoulder and arrested his movement was the vise of death itself.

The face that the hand belonged to had, not long since, been that of a teenager. Now it was blistered by acne turned to rot. It was the face of leprosy, far advanced. The neck of the thing was half eaten away. Maggots writhed in that hellish wound.

Dawson screamed and drove his feet against the ground with bruising force. His shirt tore, and he felt a burning streak of pain trace a line across his shoulder.

He had freed himself, in spite of his idiocy.

[3]

I am well concealed. The night is quiet. I am safe for the moment.

Safe?

For the moment. They are incapable of stealth. I think.

The others, the random violent gangs of those yet living, seem to refuse stealth. They are always making noise. Perhaps it is obsessional. An attempt to scare off death. To scare off their awareness of what has happened to this world. A way of converting everything into one big perpetual Saturday-night bar brawl.

Am I any different? Trying to write as if the world knew, or cared, that I was still going on? As if it might ever be read by anyone? Am I really trying to confront this, sort it out? Or am I merely trying to avoid the issue in my own way? Making my own kind of noise? My own banging of pots and pans against the eclipse?

Does it really matter?

He sighed then and leaned his head back against the rough bark of the tree. He closed his eyes and heaved a deep, shuddering breath.

He had forced his hand to write, his mind to concentrate upon the act, to avoid remembering the afternoon and, in some way, to justify the awful risks he had taken. But the writing was a failure. Instead of stifling thought it had brought the questions back to haunt him again. The same questions that had run through his mind repeatedly and incessantly over the course of the past two weeks.

Where am I now?

How far have I to go?

How long have I to live?

What are my chances?

What are my options?

Will the living ever have the world again?

Does it really matter?

Any of it?

Questions that were so familiar that their presence had very little power to irritate him any further. He had long since lost faith in the existence of answers, and that had rendered the questions impotent. They were not enough, even, to keep him awake.

He came awake abruptly, feeling hands upon his arms and legs. Hands upon his shoulders and his chest. Hands pulling him in all directions at once.

He screamed and hands came up to cover his mouth, stifling the sound. He bit these hands and was shocked as the pain raced up his arm and spine to electrify his brain.

The hands on his mouth were his own. They were real. The others had been phantoms. Creatures invented by his own stress and incaution.

He shuddered as he sat up. His eyes darted rapidly about, trying to pierce the surrounding darkness.

There were no further sounds.

He was alone.

I AM NOT ALONE!!

Blessedly alone.

I have a goal.

In the past keeping a journal had helped Dawson to sort things out. Had helped him to get through trying times with some portion of his sanity intact. Had provided him with a constructive escape from the immediacy of his various dilemmas. Had helped him to cope. Now those times were long ago and a world away. Coping had become a new thing. He was no longer balancing an awkward relationship, a career decision, financial concerns or the unexpected death of a close friend. Now writing was a way to avoid sleep. Avoiding sleep was a way to avoid death. A way to avoid the hands that would, the next time certainly, find him vulnerable.

The line that he had just scrawled at the top of the new page had seemed a good beginning, but he had no idea what should follow it.

Finally he decided to trace it back. To try to go back to the moments at which he had made his decision, had chosen his goal. Back to the time when the idea of the goal seemed one of hope, rather than desperation.

    
Time was, when I—and I was not alone in this—took for granted that the cataclysm, the great world crash course in catastrophe and death, would be nuclear annihilation. That it would be unannounced and just sudden enough to eliminate any possible thought of escape. That there would, really, be no time in which to make choices. Or, perhaps, that two choices would remain for those lucky souls who had survived the initial blast:

1) Grab your ass and run, until you can run no further.

2) Hunker down on that selfsame ass and pretend at bravery, pretend at some last vestige of defiance by making it clear that they no longer had the power to make you run.

Of course neither choice would make much difference. At best it is the choice of the Christian facing the lion: flee, only to be chased, caught, and eaten; or refuse to flee, robbing the spectators only of the chase. A question more of stance and personality than of principle or wisdom. The bloody outcome the same, in either case.

Not a good situation, surely, but at least that much would have been clear from the start. There would be no room for self-delusion. There is something reassuring about a situation in which all choices are equal, even if they are all equally bad. One is absolved of any personal responsibility.