“Think there’s anyone in there?” Greg asked.
“If there is, I hope they’re friendly,” Ken replied. The tone of his voice said that he wasn’t expecting much. “With the luck we’ve been having I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to shoot us through the door.”
Nancy hushed him with a glare in the rear view window as she pulled into the long driveway. The place looked warm and that was all that mattered to her at the moment.
Ken was twitchy as they poured out of the car, but they didn’t hear so much as a leave rustle anywhere nearby. Nancy stepped up the chipped red steps to a thick white door, took a deep breath, gulped, and knocked.
No answer. She knocked again, louder this time, and called out, “Is anyone in there! We’re survivors looking for a place to stay the night!” Still no answer. Greg walked to the edge of the step and peered in the living room window. “I don’t see anything,” he announced. “Is the door even locked?”
Nancy turned the handle and found that it actually wasn’t locked, but it was barred. Greg handed her the baby and the two men stepped forward to put their weight into it. There was the scraping sound of something heavy sliding across the floor. They huffed and heaved, and after about ten minutes they managed to move the door far enough for them to squeeze into the porch and see that it was an enormous bookcase blocking the path. Nancy saw that the door had no lock and imagined what it must be like to live where you didn’t worry about locking the doors...unless there was a zombie outbreak, of course.
“Do you smell that?” Greg asked, crinkling his nose.
Ken took a deep sniff and scrunched his face in dislike. “What
is
that?”
They retrieved the supplies that Greg had managed to drag with him in the escape and slid the bookcase back into place before turning to wander the house, searching for the source of the strange stench. It reminded Nancy of something, but she couldn’t quite put her nose on it. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to find out what it was.
“I think it’s coming from the basement,” Ken whispered. Nancy opened her mouth to ask him why he was whispering, but decided against it. They didn’t know what they were about to walk into, after all.
The basement stairs were long and narrow, and may have been extremely difficult to traverse, had there not been a light shining at the bottom of them. They filed down single-file, Ken in the lead and Nancy in the rear with the baby. Ken paused at the bottom, took a deep breath that caused him to crinkle his nose again and gag a little, and then leaped around the corner. Greg followed right at his heels. Both their faces turned white immediately.
“What? What is it?” Nancy whispered. The men didn’t answer; they were shell-shocked, staring with all the color drained from their cheeks. Nancy’s morbid curiosity got the best of her. She pushed past the men and almost dropped Sarah in her shock.
It was a family. A mother and father, a grandmother, and four children ranging from what looked to be about 6 to about 18. All but the father had been restrained. The grandmother was latched to her wheelchair with belts, the children tied together in a macabre bundle around a load-bearing beam, and the mother - who was in a pile on the floor - had her arms and legs wrapped tight with fishing twine. They were all dead, shot clean through the head. All but the father. He was slouched by a workbench, a hunting rifle at his side and his head blown apart from his jaw to the top of his skull. It was obvious how the situation had played out. All of the bodies were beginning to decay. It looked like they’d been sitting stagnant here for at least a few days.
Greg recovered from his shock just fast enough to run up the stairs with his hand over his mouth. Ken eventually tore his eyes away, saw the look on Nancy’s face, and began leading her back to the upper level. Sarah gurgled into Nancy’s chest, unaware of the horror they’d just discovered.
Ken sat Nancy down on the plush sofa in the living room and left to find Greg. The younger man had run to the kitchen sink and was hanging over it, heaving. As Nancy sat there in shock, trying not to play out the scene in her head, her eyes fell upon a sheaf of papers laying upon the fire hearth. She placed the baby amongst a pile of throw pillows and walked over to pick up the papers.
To You Whom Have Come to My Home
, it read:
I am sorry for what I have done. I am not a strong man, and this is a harsh new world. Know that I tried to wait it out. I thought that if we could hold out here long enough it would blow over or someone would come save us, or, I don’t know.
I have gone for supplies this day, as we were running low. I left my oldest son to protect the family and I drove into town and raided old man Cullen’s grocery store. During my raid old man Cullen himself came at me from his office, dripping blood from every inch of his body and clawing for my face. I shot him through the head and he dropped, but something changed in me at that moment. I realized that this isn’t just going to blow over. No one is coming to save us.
I came home. I greeted my family. I tried to push the thoughts from my head, but I just couldn’t. This is our world now, and I don’t want my family to have to suffer in it any longer. I love them too much to let them go through this hell we’ve been thrown into.
I have them tied up in the basement right now. My wife is screaming mercy and the children are weeping. My mother cries silently. She knows from the look on my face that my mind is made up. I will make sure to shoot them all through the head so that they do not come back. I wouldn’t wish that existence on my worst enemy. It will be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I believe it is the last thing I will be able to do for them. I only pray that the good lord sees fit to take me to heaven along with them, but I will understand if I have to go to hell in order to save my family.
I am so sorry. Please understand that.
- John Jeremy MacAskill
Ken moved like a ghost behind Nancy. He read the confession letter over her shoulder and then reached to gently remove it from her shaking hands. She turned and buried her face in his chest, weeping openly for the world and what had happened to it.
“How?” she sobbed. “How could anyone do such a thing to the people they love the most?”
Ken patted her on the back, empathetic. He sighed. “Some people can’t handle a disaster as well as others, Nancy. Some people snap and do strange or awful things. I’m sure that, in his heart, he thought he was doing right by his family.”
“Well that’s bullshit,” Greg’s voice came from the doorway. He stumbled in, his face still green, and threw himself on the couch next to Sarah. He offered his hand to her and she grabbed his fingers to play. “Anyone who would think
that
was ‘doing right’ deserves to rot in hell.”
Nancy nodded, flinging tears on Ken’s chest. He opened his mouth to argue, to tell them that they shouldn’t say such things because you never knew what might change your outlook on life, but he couldn’t find it in him. With a heavy heart he led Nancy back to the couch where she snuggled up on the other side of the baby. There he left her to set about the house, using whatever he could find to block up the windows and doors.
Chapter Thirteen
Nancy spent the next two days mostly moping around the house. It was a large farmhouse with half a dozen bedrooms, so there was no lack of places that she could hide out with Sarah when she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She wandered mostly through the children’s rooms, examining their belongings and trying to get a feel for what kind of people they might have turned out to be. The youngest girl’s room was filled with toy ponies and drawings of her riding a horse through the sunset. Nancy imagined that she may have become a world famous rider. The eldest boy’s room was home to a very nice acoustic guitar and a shelf full of school books, most of them on the topics of biology and anatomy. Nancy fancied herself that he was studying to become a surgeon one day.
The parents’ room, however, was the biggest shock. At first Nancy didn’t bother with that room, but after fully examining every other room in the house she decided she’d like to know what kind of person the mother had been. What she wasn’t expecting was to find a small nursery set up in the corner off to one side of the bed. A few folded receiving blankets and fuzzy teddy bears lay waiting on the tiny mattress of a beautiful oak crib. A pair of knitting needles with a tiny, half-finished sweater hanging off of them lay on top. A small day planner lay on the bedside table. Nancy picked this up and flipped through the pages of dates and appointments, taking note of one in particular which had been circled in pink marker and had the words “Due Date” scrawled across it. Nancy quickly counted backward in her head and determined with a lump in her throat that the woman who had been hog-tied, thrown in her own basement, and shot clean through the head by her own husband, had been almost four months pregnant at the time.
Sarah wiggled and fussed in Nancy’s arms and made a noise to indicate that she wanted down. Nancy placed the planner back where it had been. She lowered Sarah into the little crib, handed her one of the teddy bears, and grieved for the little unborn child who would never get to use these things.
Ken and Greg, in the meantime, risked venturing outside in order to remove the dead family from the basement. Greg argued against it at first, until Ken pointed out that they’d already been decomposing for quite a while and eventually the house would be full of lovely gasses that couldn’t possibly be safe for any of them to be breathing in. They hauled them out into the backyard and stacked them in a pile. Fighting all the while with their gag reflexes, they used some fire-starter they’d found in the house to set the family ablaze. Greg insisted on separating the father’s body from the rest, as his own personal “fuck you” to the man who’d murdered his entire family. Ken talked him out of it by pointing out that they might need the fire-starter and shouldn’t waste it by making two separate fires. Nancy watched everything from the kitchen window by pulling back the thick blanket Ken had draped over it. She felt that she needed to watch for herself as the bodies were being returned to the earth.
The one thing that they could thank the murderous father for was that he had gathered a decent amount of supplies before losing his mind. He’d stocked up on fuel to run the small generator in the basement, and in the kitchen they found milk, eggs, and bread, along with jugs of clean water, cereals, cans of soup and fruit, and even some vegetables that were just barely keeping. Nancy used these right away, whipping up a stir-fry with some noodles that she found in the cupboard. Even with her limited cooking skills it was the best thing any of them had eaten in quite a while; even the baby seemed to enjoy gnawing on a few of the cooked veggies.
“That was delicious, Nancy,” Greg praised her after they’d eaten.
Ken nodded his enthusiasm. “It really was.”
Nancy smiled, but she could see through the looks on their faces. “I know, I know, it needs meat, right?” she guessed.
The men looked at their feet.
“It really was delicious,” Ken insisted. “I guess we’ve just been starved for some good protein for a while.”
“I understand completely,” Nancy told them. Her own stomach was begging for some kind of cooked animal, which seemed almost weird and morbid under the circumstances. “But I searched the entire house and couldn’t find any meat or chicken or anything.”
“That just doesn’t seem likely,” Greg said with a frown. He got up from the table and started rummaging through the kitchen. “Wasn’t there a deep-freezer in the basement?” he asked while peering into the empty freezer compartment of the fridge.
“There is,” Nancy assured him, “but all that’s in it is frozen veggies and some ice cream.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Ken exclaimed suddenly. Nancy and Greg blinked at him. The baby dropped her carrot chunk and shot him a lippy look. “The
barn
,” he groaned in explanation. “We’re on a goddamn farm!”
Snatching up a cleaver from the kitchen, Ken shoved his way through the barricades on the main door. A quick glance across the lawn later and he made a mad dash for the tall red barn. Nancy and Greg waited by the door with bated breath. When he hadn’t returned after five minutes they began to panic. They were just thinking of going after him when he emerged from the large barn with a dead chicken in his free hand.
“There are cows, chickens, and sheep,” he told them when he’d squeezed back through the door and replaced the barricades. “A few have died from malnutrition, but quite a few are hanging on so I gave them some feed and water to try and perk them up.” He held up the chicken, which Nancy examined with some level of disgust. Its feathers were falling out. “I think this one just died recently,” Ken explained. “If we skin and cook it now we might be able to save the meat instead of cooking another one.”
“How will we know if the meat is still good?” Greg asked. He was looking at the dead creature with hesitance and a bit of a pallor in his cheeks.
“We’ll know,” Nancy told him, though she was hesitant herself. “Bad poultry gives off a sour smell.”
“So...” Ken asked nonchalantly, “who, uh, wants to skin it?”
Greg and Nancy answered his question with looks of incredulity.
In the end they performed the task together, since none of them by themselves had any idea what to do. Ken hacked the creature’s head and legs off with the cleaver, creating quite a mess and eliciting gags from everyone. Greg made a comment about how, after all they’d seen, you wouldn’t think that a little chicken blood would cause such a reaction. Nancy’s glare cut the end of his sentence off.
Sarah watched with interest from a highchair as Nancy held the bird over the kitchen sink and the men plucked out the feathers one by one. By the time it was devoid of plumage Nancy began to feel a little more comfortable with the task. It was beginning to look like any fresh chicken bought from the supermarket. That was, until she realized that the heart, stomach, liver, and other assorted innards weren’t going to be neatly confined to a little package to do with what you wished.
“I don’t think I could ever do this all the time,” she moaned as Greg held out a garbage bag for her to throw the guts into. “It’s goddamned nasty.”
“All the heads you’ve been stabbing and
this
is nasty?” Ken scoffed in a playful voice. Nancy stuck out her tongue at him.
The bird had less meat on it than it might have due to not being fed for quite a while, but once it got roasting in the oven and started giving off that delicious scent, all that mattered was that there was something on the creature worth eating. Nancy let it slow-roast all day. When it was getting close to done she began chopping up some potatoes that were still good, and whipped up a stove-top stuffing from a cookbook she’d found in the bookcase. As she found herself humming a tune that she couldn’t quite remember the words to, it occurred to her very suddenly that she was enjoying herself. She peeked into the living room where Greg was making a giggling Sarah walk across Ken’s face and she couldn’t help but smile. She realized that she wouldn’t mind living like this, just the four of them together, sharing the responsibilities, being a family.
But soon she found herself frowning again. This couldn’t last forever, she reminded herself with a heavy stomach. They had a barn full of animals, sure, but what about the other essentials that they didn’t have easy access to? Eventually they’d have to go searching, and that was a risk. Not to mention, if this situation continued to last they’d eventually run out of fuel, and by extension, electricity. None of them were survivalists in the natural sense. They had no skill for lasting the winter without all the amenities they’d come to rely on. And, of course, there was always the concern of the zombies finding them again and either trapping them in the house or forcing them to flee.
Nancy sighed to herself as she watched the men entertaining the squealing child. With a heavy heart she returned to the kitchen, lamenting for the family life that would never be.
A week passed. With the threat of impending doom fluttering around in the back of her mind all the time, Nancy found it difficult to enjoy the quiet time she was having with her ‘family’. She tried to keep herself busy playing at being the mother of the group, taking care of the baby, cleaning up after the men, and doing most of the cooking. The men, armed with two hunting rifles and a shotgun that they’d found on the gun rack in the basement, trekked out to the barn to feed the animals and choose the ones to go to the slaughter. Greg came back from one trip to kill a cow looking extremely nauseous. He loudly expressed his relief that one cow would feed them for a good while because he wasn’t looking forward to ever doing that again. In the end Ken was left to cut up the beast himself, lending Nancy to the task of teasing Greg for his constitution.
“I can’t tell which parts are what,” Ken announced when he finally traipsed into the kitchen with armfuls of zip-lock bags. “But in any case, it’s beef and there’s a lot of it.”
“Give it here,” Nancy instructed, and she couldn’t help the way her mouth began to water at the sight of the meat. Loath though she’d been at the idea of slaughtering a cow, she’d been craving some real, well-cooked red meat for weeks and already had a delicious-sounding rub from one of the cookbooks prepared on the kitchen counter. She snatched one of the bags out of Ken’s arms, almost sending him into a hilarious spill with the rest of the meat, and set to work immediately. Greg laughed from the kitchen table, where he was feeding some mashed peas to Sarah. She was getting more of it on her than in her, so he left her to her own devices with the bowl and got up to help Ken drag the meat down to the deep freeze.
Nancy smiled a little over the kitchen counter, then frowned almost at once. More and more she found herself wanting to feel relaxed, safe, and comfortable here in this farmhouse. They’d seen no activity for a week, after all, and they had no one to worry about but each other. But whether it was paranoia or just good sense, she couldn’t help but feel that all of this would be coming to an end at any second. There was simply no way, she thought, that they were going to be allowed to continue on, happy and together.
Her fears were confirmed shortly after dinner the following night.
She was sitting in the armchair in the living room, playing peek-a-boo with Sarah while the men lounged on the sofa in appreciation of two nights worth of fine meals. Ken had stoked a small fire in the hearth, not because it was particularly cold, but because it felt so cozy. They were all comfortable in clothes they’d taken from the various closets in the house - Nancy had even found some new jumpers in the nursery that fit Sarah. They were very sedated from the food and were possibly even on the cusp of drifting into a nice, mid-evening nap together, when something from outside caused all of their ears to perk up.
Dread in his voice, Greg was the first to ask, “Do you hear that?”
Nancy ground her teeth together as she listened. It was a weird noise, a din really, that was getting louder as they began to recognize it. Ken’s face went hard with a mixture of frustration and fear as he ran to the kitchen window, closely followed by Greg, and then Nancy with the baby held close to her chest. From here they could distinguish the sound - or rather, the mixture of sounds - much better. It was the combined bleating, mooing, and clucking of dozens of terrified farm animals. The question was what had suddenly terrified them so?
Ken peeled back the blanket across the window just enough for them to peek out. What they saw was not a hoard of zombies, but it was enough to send their hearts racing.
A young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, dressed in a pretty pink party dress, her blond hair in pigtails tied with white ribbons. She was standing precariously on the peaked roof of the barn, and she was staring at the roof of the farmhouse.
“Ken?” Greg whispered nervously. “Is...is there even a way to get up onto the top of that barn?”
Ken’s reply was a simple gulp and the subconscious way his face began to pale.
“What is she looking at?” Nancy posed.
They watched her stare for several moments before realization dawned on Nancy like a slap in the face. She shoved Sarah into Greg’s arms and took off running for the living room, chiding herself, wondering if there were any stupider people left on the planet. Greg and Ken followed and found her furiously trying to snuff out the fire in the hearth. “The smoke!” she groaned, smothering the flames with a throw blanket from the sofa. “She sees the smoke coming out of the chimney!”