I passed the zombie being eaten by the pine tree. The solar light sticking out of its mouth was flickering on in the shadows of the forest.
Back at the house, I used the table cloth tied between chairs to filter the water through several times. I pulled the cover off the oven hood to create an open hole. I found matches and managed to get one to light. The only paper I could find was from a large, family Bible in the living room near where the woman killed herself. I made sure not to read any of the names as I burned the pages with handwriting on them.
By the time I got to Exodus, I had managed to light the broken pieces of furniture in a broad pan on the stove. I set the large pot of filtered, pond water directly in the fire. By the book of Numbers, I had the water boiling. Smoke was hazing up the kitchen, but I managed to keep from burning the house down around us. By the time I burned the minor prophets, I took the water off the stove using oven mitts. The pot was scorched black and purple along the bottom and sides. I grunted as the weight tested my bad wrist. I poured the water into other pots to cool and used the little bit at the bottom to put out the fire. Soot sloshed out of the pan and stained the stove. I didn’t bother to clean it.
The mud on my clothes had dried, but I didn’t bother to deal with that either.
I went upstairs to check on Doc. I stepped over the body of the husband and went to the guestroom. I pushed the door open slowly to find the room was empty. I heard something behind me. I turned slowly and looked at the closed bathroom door. The husband’s feet were bunched up where the door had pushed them away when it closed. There was another long moan from the bathroom. I drew the gun and walked slowly toward the door.
***
As I stepped over Doc’s boots and the husband’s legs, I lifted the gun and listened. Something shifted on the other side. I heard a thump that made me shiver. I pushed open the door. The smell struck me unprepared and made my eyes water. Doc was bent over and covered in sweat. His pants were down to his knees and he was clutching his stomach.
He looked up at me and said, “Don’t shoot, Mutt, I think I got food poisoning from those preserves.”
I pulled the door back shut as his bowels cut loose in the tub. That could be it, but I had eaten the same thing and I wasn’t having the same problem.
I walked back into the bedroom to wait. I heard the thumping start again. I looked out the window, but saw nothing. I walked out in the hall and heard Doc moving around in the bathroom. He was moaning and grumbling. He bumped one of the cabinet doors under the sink. Once he went back in the guestroom and collapsed on the bed, I didn’t hear it anymore.
After the water cooled, I poured some into another container with a lid from the cabinets. I shook it up to get oxygen and flavor back into it. Then, I brought it to Doc. He quizzed me on where I had gotten it and how I had treated it. I nodded and shook my head enough to convince him and he drank. He didn’t seem to notice the dry mud up and down my clothes.
He lay back with his arm over his eyes. I sat in the floor and drank from a different container. I considered eating the preserves some more, but decided against it.
Doc said, “Mutt, what did you find out about Chef that day back at his building with those two bodies?”
I just sat in the floor cradling the gun. I wasn’t sure if he was really talking to me or starting to hallucinate. I could see a dark stain forming slowly through his sock. It was slightly yellow around the edges.
He lifted his hand off his face and looked at me blinking.
He said, “Come on, Mutt, entertain a possibly dying man’s last wish.”
I just stared at him. He huffed and covered his face again.
“Suit yourself,” he mumbled.
After a moment, I reached in my pocket and pulled out a card. It was the one from the locker that said, Collin Trasker. I looked up expecting him to be staring at me. His eyes were uncovered, but he was staring at the ceiling. I crammed it back in my pocket. I dug out the two licenses and stared at them.
Doc asked, “What do you have there, Mutt?”
I leaned forward and handed them to Doc. He stared at them for quite a while. I wasn’t sure he could see them in the growing darkness. He looked at me and then back at the cards.
Doc said, “This isn’t that uncommon, Mutt. People took different names to start new lives after their old lives were taken. I wouldn’t stress about it. Did you ever show David … I mean, Chef … did you ever show him these?”
He looked at me. I shook my head and he went back to looking at the licenses.
He asked, “Did you find out who he really is?”
I thought about the business card in my pocket with Davis Holland on it. I considered getting it out, but I wasn’t sure I could feel the difference between it and the Collin Trasker card. Doc looked at me and I shook my head. He looked away again. He finally slid the licenses into his own shirt pocket. He sat up on the bed slowly making it creak. I gripped the butt of the .45 until my thumb hurt.
He said, “I wouldn’t worry about it even if we find out he’s still alive. He’s still Chef. His mother just called him something different than we thought.”
Doc stood up and I slid my thumb up on the hammer of the revolver.
He said, “I’m having another possum related emergency. If I’m not back to eat you in a few minutes, go on without me, Mutt … if that’s your real name.”
He laughed as he left, but was groaning again before he got into the bathroom.
I must have fallen asleep while he was in there.
I woke up to the sound of thumping. I sat up quickly and listened. There was no sound. My stomach was churning with fear. Doc was snoring on the bed. My stomach was still churning and pain stabbed down through my body.
I stood up and stumbled out into the hall. The smell from the bathroom nearly made me fall down the stairs as I stepped over the body in the dark. I went through the master bedroom and fouled the last clean tub left in the house.
As I sat there growing in confidence that Doc was right about the preserves and was going to make it through the night, I started feeling through my pockets. I had left the gun and that made me afraid for reasons I couldn’t explain.
I found the two cards still in my pockets and another piece of wadded paper. I couldn’t see any of them. I unfolded the paper and stared at it blindly in the darkness. It took me a moment to remember it was a newspaper article from the mystery trunk at the mystery house.
Doc called from the hall, “You okay, Mutt?”
I crammed everything back into my pocket, but didn’t answer. My body betrayed me again into the tub.
Doc answered, “I’ll take that as a no from personal experience, brother.”
We were back and forth from our room to our tubs through the night. As light barely broke through the windows, we started picking up and sorting through what we wanted to carry. The house smelled like smoke and sickness and we wanted out of it.
“We made it through the night, Mutt,” Doc said. “Congratulations to us. We just wish we were dead.”
There was a thump on the front door. We froze and stared at each other. There was another. After a long pause, there was a third.
Doc whispered, “What is that?”
I thought I knew, but I didn’t want to believe it. He stood up and looked out the side window.
He said, “Oh, hell, we have to go now.”
I stood up and looked out the front. A few bodies were wandering slowly to the front from the side yards. There was another thump on the front door. I tried to look down under the window, but I couldn’t see.
I looked back up as one of them turned around to face the house. His black shirt was matted to his body. He looked up at me in the window. He lifted his split hand to his lips and licked it with his white tongue.
Doc called behind me as he grabbed the ax from beside the door of the guestroom.
He shouted, “Mutt, now! We have to get out before they surround the house.”
Glass shattered in the kitchen and the door cracked as it pulled away from the frame for the last time.
Chapter 7: The Week We Pushed the Limits of Shelf Life
We burst out the front door between thumps as the ones in back were knocking over the chairs I had used to hold up the muddy table cloth to filter the water. I didn’t look back, but I heard the deck collapse outside under the weight of more trying to come in the back, kitchen door.
Outside, they had already reached the front. He was waiting for us. We ran out with what weapons we had.
We went down the front, concrete steps. The bottom step had broken away from the other two and it was more of a jump than a step. Doc jumped as the boy at the bottom was standing back up from the grass. Doc caught him across the chin with an elbow knocking him away a couple feet.
The boy absorbed the shot across his face and kept his feet. Brackish water poured out of a hole under his chin and down the front of his dark shirt that was already soaked. As Doc ran on, the boy’s arm wheeled around and let fly. The hard-packed baseball clunked off of Doc’s head as he was swinging his ax at the tall zombie in front of him in the yard.
Doc bellowed. “Oh, holy hell.”
His swing came down wide and hacked into Slappy’s neck at the crumpled collar of his silk shirt. Slappy reached for Doc with his split claw as the zombie toppled from the thrust. Two fingers from one half of his alien hand hooked the handle of the ax as he fell. Doc staggered the other way and twisted the ax out in a half circle. As Slappy hit the ground, the ax head rotated out of his wounded neck and Doc pulled the handle free of his precarious, two-fingered grip.
Doc stumbled on down the unkempt lawn toward the sidewalk holding the back of his head with one hand. Slappy rolled over on his stomach. His head lolled wildly in a circle and listed to the side as he crawled after Doc staring at the back of his calves. One human hand dug into the Earth and pulled forward. One alien claw gripped the clumps of grass in two separated spots and pulled the body forward. The white tongue licked out and down tasting the air. Slappy made no reaction to the blades of grass slicing across the dead skin of his tongue as his body pulled relentlessly forward.
The boy turned to me as I pressed the .45’s barrel into his dented forehead for the second time in two days. His clothes squished as he pressed forward into the gun fearlessly.
“Don’t waste the shot,” Doc hollered. “Come on, Mutt. Move!”
I stared into the uneven eyes. I screwed up my chance to free him. He had a mother, a bed, and a house before he became this. He might have even lived in this quiet circle of a neighborhood before he was bitten. Maybe he tried to save his mother instead of running away like I had. Maybe there was no one from a place like the Complex to find him and he had lasted as long as he could at our age alone in the world.
The first intruders from the house stumbled out the front door. I pulled the gun away from the boy’s head and ran. Slappy reached for my leg with his writhing claw as I ran through his peripheral vision. I ran wide to avoid his long, silky arm. As I looked back, I saw the zombies from the house fall on the bottom step with a jarring impact on top of each other. They recovered much faster than their friends who fell off the bridge the previous day. The boy wasn’t chasing me. He reached down and picked up his ball from the weeds in the flower box by the front walk.
Doc wretched the ax free from a body lying still on the sidewalk by his feet as I ran up beside him. We escaped down the long stretch of the walk directly in front of the white house as the zombies took up the pursuit again. More emerged from the other side yard of the blue house just ahead of us.
We ran as they reached out for us just out of their grasp. As I ducked past their fingers and continued running up the sidewalk, goose feathers floated up from the sleeve of one that just missed me.
We were still paying for the shot fired at that bird.
As we jumped over the skeleton lying headfirst under the riding lawnmower, the front door of the mower’s house cracked open. The doorknob fell off as it swung in and a veined woman in a filthy, pink housecoat stumbled out to greet us. She had on one black, moldy slipper. Her bare foot was missing all the toes. She celebrated her freedom by stamping down her stairs to follow us. Whoever had used her mower had left her behind to become this.
I held the gun up at her as we went. She sneered at me and moaned a high-pitched scolding as she clawed the air between us.
Doc huffed. “No, save it.”
I dropped my gun hand and we kept running.
A green hose looped out in our path over a grassy mudslide that had consumed part of the sidewalk. We ran wide around it toward the clutter of Styrofoam and wrappers painted to the curb and gutter. A rusted chainsaw rested in the nest of the coiled hose. On the other side, a severed head lay staring blankly past us at the sky. As we passed through its field of vision, it blinked twice and began biting silently.
There was a bleached skeleton in the tall grass near the driveway. It was scoured with teeth marks over the clean bones. The broken cord from the chainsaw was still clutched in its boney fingers.
More bodies drifted out from the houses and yards on both sides of us and just ahead of us. We needed to move faster if we wanted to reach the front of the neighborhood. A battered man in swimming trunks bounced himself against his chain link fence as we passed. He held up the skeleton of a small dog by its collar and shook it at us.
Another staggered out of his open garage across the street with a note pinned to the front of his shirt. His head lolled to one side on his broken neck where an orange, extension cord was tied tightly around the pinched flesh. He made it about three steps out on the driveway before the cord pulled taut and jerked him back off his feet. He stumbled backward and fell on his back as the metal supports of the garage door rattled on the ceiling inside on the other end of the extension cord.
The others closed in on us more successfully.
We moved out into the street to squeeze between the closing gauntlet of the dead from both rows of houses. We moved through as they met in the street behind us and around us. The mass behind us was growing and the swell of their ranks was closing in on our backs.