Authors: Jeremy Laszlo
“Some tattoo shop,” she answers.
I suppose that makes sense. The chair fits and the light hanging over me is probably attached to an even bigger light for them to see what they’re doing. I try to see the woman, but she’s smart. She keeps her distance, just out of sight. “Why did you take my hand?” I ask, trying to picture my hand somewhere, lying in the dust, waiting for some creature to feed upon it.
“Sorry, honey, but it was a goner,” she answers with a sympathetic tone in her voice. “If I’d left it on, you would have certainly died. Luckily I stopped the bleeding and got rid of it before anything could happen. Infections are the biggest killers these days.” She sighs and keeps doing whatever she’s doing. It sounds like she’s rummaging through stuff, stacking things. “I swear I’ve seen more people dead from infections lately than starvation. But you’re doing just fine. That’s two you owe me.”
“What?” I grunt.
“I’ve saved your ass twice now, honey.” She stops working and chuckles. “Dear Lord, you have no idea, do you?” She pushes the LED light out of my eyes and stands in the darkness. The sudden, drastic change in lighting is hard to adjust to at first, but slowly, I begin to see distant light bring form to the black void of her face. I don’t recognize her. In fact, I’ve never seen this woman before. I don’t take in any of her features, I’m just looking for familiarity. I’m looking for a glimpse from my past, but there’s nothing. I stare at her with a ravenous gaze. I want to know her, truly, but there’s nothing. I shake my head. “I saved your ass in Bellbrook, genius,” she says.
Suddenly, I can see her. I hadn’t seen her face in the darkness of that horrifying night, but surely I was assuredly here and walking among the living by her hand alone. I look at her and stare with a wonderstruck fascination. Truly, whatever god still exists high above this dead world has an obsession with my survival. I look at her now with fresh eyes, but she moves away. I try to follow her, but I’m just left with my memory. The thin woman atop the roof of the building next to the mechanic shop where I’d been trapped by the clawing, ravenous flesh-eaters. She had killed a handful of them with perfect shots that had opened a way for me to escape. I had never thanked her. I had never even said the words to her. In fact, I had written her off as just fine, and yet, here she was, saving me again.
“How did you find me?” I stammer.
“You know how many people I’ve seen that aren’t hunting survivors or eating pieces of each other?” she asks with a sharp, cunning voice. “I see some dumbass getting himself cornered by a bunch of freaks and I save his ass, after all, who knows how many of us are still left out there? Instead of running and not saying a thing, you stop and nod to me. Gratitude. Can you fucking believe that? In this hellhole. Someone has the decency to give me a nod. No one does that.” She continued stacking things. “So, I figured I’d see where you set up camp, see if you were a normal enough guy. But, I wasn’t the only one who saw you. I saw them tracking you south. So I started tracking them.”
The hunters. Cal and Denny. They had followed me out of Bellbrook and I’d gotten the better of them. I had left Denny tied to a tree trunk.
“I killed the one you left to die,” she informs me.
“Denny,” I mutter.
“Yeah,” she answers. “Didn’t get that out of him. Just that you’d continued south. So I followed you until I found you in that alleyway. I have to admit, I feel pretty guilty.”
“About what?” I ask her.
“Not making it in time to save your hand,” she says.
“No,” I answer. “I still would have fallen for it.”
“Yeah, well, the bastard was well stocked,” she answers. “So cherish the little things, right, honey?”
“Charlie,” I say. “My name’s Charlie.”
“Lindsay,” she answers.
She cuts me free and lets me slowly rise. My ribs still hurt, but I don’t dare look at the damage. If they are still in pain, then I have no doubt in my mind that they are broken. When the jabs of agony punch through my side, I stop and wait to regain my strength. I sit there, frozen while Lindsay works. I take a sharp breath, holding it in and waiting for the pain to ebb back into my bones. I feel like a shell of a man. Everything is pain. I try to move my left arm, but the bone underneath my bicep is killing me and my stump is raw. Oh God, stump. I can’t believe how quickly it comes to mind. I look at the white bandage—what used to be white. No it’s just the color of rust and crimson. It’s the color of blood.
The moment I pull myself completely forward, I see the bow. It’s a blue and black compound bow, the kind hunters use to bring down elk. I know next to nothing about bow hunting, but from what I can tell, it’s well maintained and it’s very expensive looking. I remember with vivid recollection the accuracy with which Lindsay wielded that weapon. She had put an arrow directly through the head of a moving target just inches from my own. Every shot she had made was lethal, in that courtyard. If it hadn’t been for her and that bow, I would be dead right now.
“So what’s the story?” Lindsay calls as she steps behind the curtain and out of view. I want to follow her. I want to see who it is I’m talking to. I still have no idea who she is or what she even looks like. All I remember is the figure on the nocturnal rooftop, staring down at me. I sit on the chair, trying to regain my calm from the pain in my ribs before I answer. God, I hurt so much.
“Same as everyone else’s,” I answer.
“Nice try,” Lindsay calls back beyond the curtain.
To be honest, I’m not interested in sharing with her. My mind is in a civil war as to what I truly think about her. On the one hand, I’m grateful that I’m alive and all of that is wrapped up in her willingness to do the right thing in a world where right and wrong no longer matter. Even though she took my hand, I understand now. It had to be done. But on the other hand, there was Lexi and Val. Just because Lindsay didn’t eat people, didn’t mean she was the kind of person I wanted around me or to trust with my task. I’m not out to save the world. I’m out to reunite with my daughters, and I’m very doubtful that Lindsay is interested in walking to Florida with me. Jason’s fiancée hadn’t been, so why would she? No one cares but me. After all, she just may want to rob me before sending me out on my way.
“Really? You’re going to keep quiet?” Lindsay accuses, her tone is not amused.
“I was a professor,” I answer finally.
“What?” She laughs. I feel slightly insulted. “Let me guess, physics? Chemistry?”
“No,” I answer meekly. “Literature.”
“Really?” she calls back. “Shit, you weren’t at OSU were you?”
“No,” I smile. “The University of Michigan.”
“Good,” her voice is full of relief. “I dropped out after three semesters. I was afraid you might have been one of my professors.”
“I headed north when the riots reached the campus,” I continue, feeling the familiar slip into memory. “I was making my way to my car when I heard the first gunshots, and the screams. People were running everywhere, trying to kill each other. I don’t know why. They just all came to the same conclusion.”
“Too many fucking people,” Lindsay adds.
“Pretty much,” I nod. “My father had a cabin near Lake Huron. I set up camp out there. I was a survivalist aficionado before all of this, so it was well stocked. I was one of those people who fantasized about all this happening. So, I had everything ready and waiting when it finally did come, not that I was ever really expecting it to happen.”
“Sounds like you had a pretty sweet set up.” Lindsay is eating something. I can hear it in her voice and my stomach constricts. “Why’d you leave?”
“Needed to head south,” I answer.
“Why?” she presses.
“To see if anyone was still alive,” I answer quietly.
The curtain is pulled back and I realize that she’s doing this with her foot. She’s seated on a spinning chair eating something out of a can with a spoon, chewing as she looks at me with suspicious eyes. For the first time, I’m seeing Lindsay for what she truly is. My eyes do not waste a second, they run over her body, from the top of her head to the soles of her boots, I consume every last detail I can pick up from this woman.
I would call her neither beautiful nor ugly. She does not retain the elegant luminance that Jason’s fiancée had carried with her, but she is nowhere in the realm of off-putting. She has long black hair that’s straight. I immediately assume that she has a Hispanic background, the way that it is so pitch black that it almost has a midnight blue feel to it. Her face is round, but her chin is pointy. Her eyes are of the shape that reminds me of a cat’s eyes, but they’re too close together, almost giving her a beady-eyed look that I am put off by. Her nose seems slightly larger than it should be, but overall her face still retains a measure of allure to it. I worked on a campus, I know an attractive woman when I see one. In fact, beautiful twenty-somethings have become as lovely to me as works of art, or architecture. They’re beautiful, but I’m not going to have sex with them. It is how many professors have to come to terms with their students if they want to keep their reputation or jobs. Men her age would call her a butterface. When I was in college, we would have called her a girl-next-door, but we were kinder back then, I guess. But men still would have been chasing her. Because her body, as far as I can tell, is spectacularly maintained.
She is wearing a long army jacket over a black tank top that is tight on her and covered with dirt smears and dust marks. The jacket is peppered with blood specks, no doubt from me, and the sleeves are rolled up. She has tattoos on both of her forearms and is wearing black riding gloves. On her left arm is a leather wrap, no doubt to keep the bowstring from skinning her arm. She’s wearing jeans that are so tight that it seems sinful just to look at her, and they have holes in them. I don’t understand why she’s still wearing them. Clothing is not something scarce in this world. I could walk into any number of clothing stores and find plenty of pants laying around. Why hadn’t she done that? She’s wearing work boots that make me wonder where she got them, because I’m fairly certain that they are men’s. Overall, I try to avoid looking at her enormous breasts or ogling her body any more than I already have. She looks at me and smiles. She does have a charming smile. I’ll give her that.
What I take away from her is that she took care of her body when the world was still normal, that being said, she was on her own. If she was on her own, there had to be a reason for that and I immediately want to find out where she put my machete.
“What about you?” I ask her. “How old are you?”
“Twenty four,” she answers with a mischievous grin.
Twenty four? God, she’s so close to the girls’ ages. She is five years older than Lexi and six years older than Val. I try to wrap my head around such a young woman out in the world like the one that has taken my hand and my humanity. I look at her across the room as she spoons some cold soup into her mouth as she watches me with those cat eyes. She is beautiful, I suppose. She is no Tiffany, that much is for sure.
That is when it truly strikes me that I am talking with someone. It has been ages since I talked with someone else. Words. Words are strange as they drifted through the air like arrows, pinning me with all sorts of sensational emotions. It is like sitting in the light of the world that had been burned away long ago. I remember when people did this on a regular basis. I remember speaking with strangers, getting to know them, having a go at small talk. These were things as beautiful as art to me now. I am afraid for it to end. I am afraid for the long silence to return. That is the true power of loneliness. One can wrap oneself in it, adapt to it, and forge oneself a world of silence and vacancy; but one life shatters all of that. Once solitude and isolation has been shattered, it is so hard to piece it back together.
“I want to know,” I encourage her.
“Know what?” she teases.
“Your story,” I answer.
“After the riveting one you’ve given me?” She lifts an eyebrow as she chews her food thoughtfully. I don’t mind the silence. I grip to everything I have. The moment that she’s gone, I know that it will just be me in this world. Me and the horrors. I’m willing to do what’s needed to keep someone else in this world with me. I’m tired of being alone. “Fine,” she grumbles, before putting the can of soup aside.
“I was living in Columbus,” she starts, not meeting my gaze. “My parents still thought I was going to college. I told them I was taking it slow. You know? Telling them that I wanted to pay my way through so that I didn’t have any debt when I graduated. They thought I was being financially smart. I was really just drinking and partying away the years. I don’t regret a damn thing either. Those were some good times. Hell, you worked at a college, you know what it’s like.”
“Sure,” I shrug.
“Anyway, I was working at a gym during the day,” she continues. “At night, I worked at a club, trying to get a little savings while I cut out a little piece of the world for myself. I wanted to travel. Me and my roommates, we were going to save up and travel Europe for a year when we turned twenty five. It was going to be our last big hurrah. I’m not stupid. I knew that everything I was doing was heading for a pretty sucky life if I didn’t get things in order. But hey, I wasn’t pregnant or hooked on meth, so I figured I was doing well enough. Anyway, when all this started, I wasn’t paying attention. I tried not to talk politics and when you work at a gym and a club, current events rarely come up.
“I remember a lot of Midwesterners showing up. They had a refugee camp set up outside of Columbus. It was a sort of halfway home for those needing to relocate and who didn’t have families elsewhere they could go stay with. It was at Pickerington. Anyways, there were a lot of bad sorts there. The political kind. Eventually, they got the idea that they were going to take Columbus by force. So they smuggled guns in and started making homemade bombs and stuff. It was right around when the rioting was starting inside the city. People were mad about the government issuing food. People were all worried about communism and starving to death. Jesus, it was just about knowing the right people. I never once went hungry.”
Of course
, I think to myself, it was different for those who didn’t have a great body and a passable face. The poor, the ugly, the under-appreciated, and the downtrodden were inevitably remembering the decline of Columbus a little differently. But I keep silent. I listen to her the way I used to listen and focus on movies.
“When Pickerington rose up, they started killing the National Guard that ran the camp.” She retells the events without any true emotion. It was almost as if she was completely cut off and detached from the events, like a gecko’s tail in the desert sun. “The Guard put up a fight, but in the end, the refugees were too many. Far too many. They attacked Columbus with everything they had. Anyone with a gun or a baseball bat took to the streets, but everyone became everyone’s enemy. There were no more social contracts or rules to keep us in line. Killing became the fun of the year. My roommates and I knew a bunch of guys from the club and the gym. We formed our own little pact to stick together at the club, to form an army of our own.
“We waited out the initial fighting. A guy from Nebraska named Peterson took control of the city from the mayor and the police. After days of killing, he set up his own dominion with the refugees calling the shots. They went from door to door, street by street, taking anything that could be eaten, and dragging it back to city hall. The feds demanded that he step down, but Peterson knew what we were all too stupid to see. He saw that the whole fucking world was going belly up in a matter of days. That’s when I started paying attention to the news.
Atlanta, New Orleans, New York City, and Boston had all gone to hell already. Columbus was part of what they called the Second Wave of cities that were overthrown and falling into lawlessness. There was no army coming, no help. We were on our own and you can bet people didn’t like that. Hopelessness makes animals and killers of all men. Peterson was killed just a week after he took city hall. It was one of his own loyal followers that put a bullet through his head. They all started murdering each other then. Columbus turned into one big ass warzone. I watched a lot of my friends die trying to hold onto the club and what food and weapons we had. Girls I’d worked with, girls I’d lived with, guys I’d kissed and fucked. It was intense.
A guy I knew, a bartender at the club—Ricky—he gave me his bow and told me to kill anyone that came through the hole those fucks blew in the wall.” She nodded to the bow on the table near me. “First man I ever killed took an arrow in the lung. Josh bashed his face in with a bat, but I’m taking credit for the kill. I got two other pricks before they finally gave up on the club and headed toward OSU where a shit ton of college kids were putting up one hell of a fight.”
“How many did you lose?” I ask, drawn in by the tale.
“Pretty much everyone,” she shrugs. “I tried calling my parents, but the cell towers were long gone. I thought about going to them, but the others weren’t too interested in that. When your life is on the line, girls don’t mean shit to guys. Andrew said that I was a liability. He said someone would try to get them just to rape me and Kelci. I told him not to be an asshole, but everyone started agreeing with him. Apparently because they had big ass muscles that meant they were better off than two fit chicks who killed their fair share of those pricks. So one morning, Kelci and I woke up alone. They’d taken everything and headed west. So Kelci and I decided to follow.”