“Did you top off the tank?” Chef asked.
“We did,” Doc answered.
“I need to go two more places,” Chef said. “I’ll walk, if you all don’t want to come.”
There was a brief silence.
“Well, obviously that isn’t going to happen,” Doc said. “We’ll all go, but we need to make smart choices about whatever this is. Do you hear what I’m saying, David?”
Chef said, “Get in.”
***
We went deeper into the town weaving through wrecks, fallen trees, and debris. We stopped in front of a two-story house. He looked at the collapsed doors and broken windows. Everyone waited as the truck idled.
Chef said, “Do you want to circle the block for 90 seconds?”
“They aren’t behind us this time,” Doc said. “At least not close.”
“Fire a shot, if there’s trouble,” Chef said. “I’ll come running.”
“Same to you,” Short said.
Chef grabbed up the rifle he had placed between the seats next to his camera case. He stepped out and walked inside while we waited with the engine running.
“Or scream if someone is eating you,” Doc said after Chef was out of sight.
That made me angry.
Short Order snapped. “Stop, Doc, you’re the one that wants to be careful of bad Juju.”
“This is no good,” Doc grumbled.
“It isn’t hurting anything,” Short Order said.
“You think he’s going to find anything positive in there?” Doc asked. “We are supposed to be moving on and finding a new place to live. If we wanted to live with ghosts, we could have stayed at the Complex.”
We waited.
There were two gunshots inside the house. Doc jumped up and grabbed a rifle. Short Order pulled a pistol from his side. They both got out and started running toward the porch.
Chef came out with the rifle over his shoulder and his head down. I knew from his story what two shots could mean. From what he told me, I had an idea who might have been waiting in the house. I found myself agreeing with Doc again. This was no good.
Chef looked up.
Doc said, “Are you okay? Are you bit?”
“Sorry about that. Everything is fine,” Chef said. “It wasn’t anyone I knew.”
They got back in the truck and we drove. Chef dropped a locket and a ring in a side pocket of the camera bag. He slid two framed photographs into another part of the bag.
“You said a couple places?” Doc asked.
Chef said, “Yes, I did.”
We continued down the road and turned up another street. There were several men gathered around the body of a deer in one of the yards. A couple looked up as we rolled by the feast. They had blood smeared down their chins. One started crawling after us revealing legs that were mangled below the knees. The others continued eating as we drove away.
Chef circled back up the same few streets more than once.
Doc said, “Chef, it’s not good to keep backtracking like this. Tell us what we’re looking for so we can help find whatever-”
“Here,” Chef said.
We turned up over the curb and across an open field. We weaved between trees and then around a series of stone planters. We rounded another patch of woods and then into the back yard of a lone brick building with vines growing up the open walls. We stopped facing one of the openings.
“What is this?” Short Order asked.
Chef answered, “Believe it or not, this doesn’t look much different than last time I was here.”
“What are we looking for now?” Doc asked. “Cameras, lockets, or a widescreen T.V.?”
I thought about a T.V. on the floor of a house with bullet holes in the screen. There was a birthday party waiting for Jenny Trasker in the kitchen where Doc opened the presents and there were bodies in duct tape waiting in the bedrooms where Doc opened their heads.
What was in the houses that Chef went in by himself? I wondered.
Chef said, “Maybe bodies.”
My heart started to race. For a second, I was actually afraid he could read my thoughts.
Doc stepped out with a rifle and binoculars instead of his aluminum shaft. The rest of us followed.
Doc mumbled, “Hopefully not our bodies.”
We walked down a concrete slope where the building rested on its crumbling foundation. A set of rusted, iron U bars provided a ladder to the roof. Doc shouldered the rifle and looped the strap of the binoculars over his head. He started to climb. The bars creaked and groaned against the cracked brick, but they held under his weight.
Doc said, “Finish your business while I keep watch. If I whistle or shoot or fart loudly, then it’s time to go. This place is in a blind corner on low ground. Only idiots would stay here.”
Doc finished climbing.
Chef whispered, “I couldn’t agree more.”
We went inside.
The floor was littered with fallen stone and lit by massive holes in the ceiling accentuated by strands of vine waving in the breeze. The roof crackled with each step Doc took above us and dust sprinkled down around us. I kept waiting for the whole thing to fall in on top of us.
I had no idea what was coming.
David began pushing sections of brick around with his feet and hands. He lifted sheets of frayed plastic and tossed them aside. He kicked a couple cans by accident and one on purpose.
“What are we looking for, David?” Short Order asked.
I stepped up on a pile of cinderblock and nearly fell on the twisted rebar sticking out. I looked down and then back at the others. I held up my hand.
Chef said, “This was a bad idea the first time I came here. Nothing has changed in ten years.”
I started waving my arms.
Short Order said, “No harm is done, Chef. We can go when you’re ready.”
Chef asked, “What is it, Mutt?”
I pointed down at the pile of cinderblock. They walked over and stared.
“There they are,” Chef said.
The skeletons had been stripped clean. The weapons around them were decayed and broken apart. The barrel of a shotgun could still be seen beside them. Their clothes were shredded and rotted away. The bones were separated and broken. The bodies were piled together and only the two skulls and two torn pairs of pants indicated that there were two bodies there.
“How do you know this is who you are looking for?” Short Order asked quietly.
Chef reached down and lifted a tarnished buckle from a broken piece of belt. It had a flying eagle with an American flag in its beak etched into its green surface. He dropped it back into the pile.
“Who were they?” Short asked.
Chef said, “Better men than me.”
There was a long silence punctuated by dust sprinkling down from the roof where Doc was standing.
Short Order said, “You don’t have to talk about it, but if we’re here, a part of you must want to.”
Chef cleared his throat. “After I failed to rescue anyone in my family, I ended up jammed up in traffic somewhere. Several of us ran. I don’t even remember which way we came from. Most didn’t make it. These two and I ended up here. They had supplies and weapons. I had a cell phone with no charge. We stayed one night and then another. The dead found us before we knew they were here. Like Doc said, this is a hiding place for idiots. They had hold of me as I was trying to climb away outside. One of the guys was trying to pull me up. I couldn’t get loose, so he jumped down with me. He knocked them and shot them away. We ran. The other started screaming for help in here. The guy that saved me thought he had already gotten away. He told me to come back and help him save his friend. I watched him go. I ran away. I could still hear them screaming.”
There was silence.
Short Order said, “There was nothing you could have-”
“Don’t,” Chef interrupted.
Short Order said, “If you had come back, you would have just-”
“I said, don’t,” Chef repeated.
We stood in silence looking down at their skulls.
Chef finally said, “It looks like they did themselves in before they turned. There’s not a single other body here. We weren’t shooting them in the head then. None of us paid attention to zombie movies before all this. We really thought they were sick and not dead. I have trouble believing the three of us were that massively stupid, but here we all are back in the same spot again.”
There was a long silence. For a moment, I wasn’t sure if he was talking about himself and the two skeletons being massively stupid or him and the two of us standing there looking at the skeletons.
Chef said, “He blasted out the back of his skull from under his chin. That’s why the face is all that’s left. The other fired into his temple on the right side. See, small hole on the right, big exit on the left.”
We all knew this from past observation, but we didn’t say so.
“I want to bury them,” Chef said. “No funeral or words, but just bury them … what’s left of them.”
“I’ll get the shovels,” Short said. “You guys can use some of this plastic to wrap up the … to wrap them up.”
Chef and I began looking for a big enough sheet of the yellowing plastic.
Doc outside called, “What’s the deal, Shaw?”
Short explained briefly about the burial.
Chef ignored them and asked, “Would you believe me, if I said I didn’t remember their names?”
I didn’t indicate my belief either way as I held up another piece of plastic. Chef shook his head.
He said, “I’m going to catch Short at the truck. We’ll need to get something to move the bones from there. Run if there is trouble or if you hear Doc call.”
I knew what it was like to forget. I knew what it was like to run away when other people died. I felt very sorry for Chef. I didn’t have the first clue where to look for my house and I didn’t know how they were finding these places. Maybe it was easier because they were older.
After he left, I found a larger piece of plastic. I set it beside the bones and began sliding them with my feet. The buckle fell and I picked it up to drop it on the plastic. I reached down and pulled the rotten jeans over.
There was something in the pocket. I reached in and pulled it out with two fingers. There was a clip that was too blackened to make out the design. The money held in it was intact. I pulled it out and dropped the wadded bills on the pile of bones. There was something hard that fell out of the clip with the bills.
I fished through the paper and lifted the hard rectangle of plastic. I imagined it jammed down the skull’s throat covered in blackened tissue. This one had been protected by the bills. It was a driver’s license from a few states over. He must have been visiting when the zombie’s rose. He was smiling in his picture. His name was Dexter Caleb Lyons. I held on to it thinking Chef would want to remember his name.
I went ahead and searched through the pocket of the khakis that were torn and stained around the crotch. I found a set of car keys that I dropped on to the plastic after I looked for a name, but didn’t find one.
In the other pocket, I found a wallet. There was money and pictures. I found a license from this state in one of the slots. The man had been black with a shaved head. I looked at the picture and then down at the skull that was only a face. I didn’t know what I expected to see.
I looked at the name and saw David Marcus Sharp. I looked at the skull again and back at the license. It took me a while to think. At first I thought it was funny that two people would have the same name and end up in the same place. Then, I thought about how odd it was that Chef wouldn’t remember that the guy who saved him had the same name as him.
I started remembering walking through the cemetery. I could see the names Brown, Porter, Sharp, Trasker, Lynnard, and Baker on the stones. I thought about seeing the names on the marriage license and Doc talking to the tied-up body with the identification jammed in its throat. He had called the body John. He had asked when the body had coughed up the card.
I looked down at the license in my hand and read David Marcus Sharp again. I looked into the empty sockets of David Sharp’s exploded skull.
I heard Chef and Short talking as they walked down the concrete slope. I stuck the cards into my pocket and began gathering up the items on the plastic. I jammed the bills, keys, wallet, and clip into random pockets in the pants. Then, I roughly swept the bones off the ground on to the plastic.
I stood up and took a step back as they walked back into the building with shovels and a blanket. I had stepped into the light of one of the holes in the ceiling. A shadow crossed over my face. I looked up and saw Doc looking down at me.
I remembered taking the card out of the bound body’s throat in Doc’s secret hideout. I wondered how much Doc had seen and if he was thinking about finding the card dislodged on his second visit as I hid inside his secret world.
I couldn’t look away from him scowling down at me. Eventually, he turned and walked out of sight.
We carried the bones on the plastic out to the field at the top of the concrete. Neither Chef nor Short thought to check the pockets. We dug a shallow hole, lowered them in, and swept the dirt back on top of them.
Doc climbed down and walked over once we were done.
Chef said, “I’m done.”
Doc said, “Let’s go find a place to eat and sleep. We’re not staying here.”
None of us argued and we drove away.
***
We slowed down as we passed the broken remains of a service station. Three bodies were tearing apart the bones of an animal by the joints as they chewed away the meat. One of the zombies had a sword stabbed through the center of its chest and out its back. He reached around the hilt hanging in front of him as he ate.
“Something new under the sun,” Doc noted. “Wouldn’t you like to know the story of how that samurai sword ended up there?”
“Deer is popular among the dead these days,” Short Order added.
“That’s not a deer,” Chef said.
“How can you tell?” Doc asked.
Chef pointed and said, “Deer don’t wear leather jackets or jeans.”
“I’ll be damned,” Doc said as he stood up and leaned over my shoulder to look.
I felt acutely uncomfortable with him breathing on me. I actually felt afraid that he was going to bite me and tear a sliver of flesh right off my cheek. I was looking at the monsters devouring the remains of a human being outside the truck window, but my mind was focused on the man standing at me ear.