The Dead & Dying: A Zombie Novel (17 page)

Old habits die hard and I had to chew on my bottom lip to keep from launching into a lecture about litter and how we're the custodians of this planet. But we weren't. Not anymore. Trash carelessly tossed aside were the least of our worries now.

“Not far from where I grew up. A little town called Brighton. Probably all grown over by now.”

He was still fumbling through his pockets as he spoke, but I got the impression it was just a ruse. That he knew his hands would turn up empty but welcomed the distraction anyway.

“Can't believe I've got no more smokes. Doesn't that just beat the devil?”

“What's in Brighton, Carl?”

I tried to ask the question as innocently as possible, as if I were simply making conversation to pass the time. But I had this feeling that whatever laid in that little town among the hills and valleys of the Mountain State would be the key that would unlock the secrets of Carl's sadness.

He sighed and his voice dropped to no more than a whisper. I had to strain to hear him through the earmuffs he'd liberated from a freshy two days earlier, but it was important to me to catch every word.

“There's this little church I want to go to.”

I laughed and shook my head in an attempt to keep the conversation light, to keep it flowing.

“You? Going to church? If you've found God, Carl, there's plenty of churches around here. It
is
part of the Bible belt you know.”

He smiled, but it wasn't the same one which caused my heart to flutter with hope and chased the cold out of my chest. This was a sad, knowing smile that never really touched his eyes.

“It's a little more complicated than that, sweetie.”

“So tell me. Lord knows, we've got nothing but time.”

Carl stopped, turned to face me, and took both of my hands in his; his eyes locked onto mine, his gaze steady and unfaltering.

“It took the end of the world for me to find someone who made me realize it wasn't such a bad place after all. And I want to tell you everything. And I mean
everything
.”

Carl gave my hands a little squeeze and pulled me to him; he was now so close I could feel the warmth of his breath and see my own reflection in his tired eyes. And the woman I saw there was smiling: a soft, serene smile that would have looked more at home on a painting of the Virgin Mary than that odd, angular face. But I knew the smile was genuine, could feel it radiating with the heat of a thousand suns from deep within my soul.

“But, sweetie, I've got to get it right in my head first.”

“But I can help, I can . . .”

“You do help.” he said. “More than you'll ever know.”

For a minute we stood there, simply looking into each other's eyes, and that bleak and comfortless wasteland of snow just seemed to melt away. The freshies, the rotters, the refugees who picked through cruel relics of a world that no longer was: none of that mattered. Just this man, his hands, his eyes, his voice and breath....

“When we get to that little church,” he finally said, “assuming it's still standing that is, we'll sit a spell on the pews. And I'll tell you all of it. Each and every detail.”

Carl's eyes shimmered, but he made no move to blink away the tears forming there; he didn't look away or fidget or give any indication that he felt even the least bit threatened by this display of emotion. He held my gaze and made a promise without uttering a word.

And then, seeming as if he were moving in slow motion, Carl leaned forward; our lips touched in a brief, sweet kiss. It was the type of kiss I had always thought existed only in movies. The kind that reaches into the very core of your being and finds a small, warm spot to call home. Then we collapsed into one another's arms, each of us holding the other as if we could somehow anchor ourselves to this particular place. This specific time. And cherish it for infinity.

Maybe it was the lingering effects of that kiss. Or perhaps it was simply that after days of cloudy skies that looked as if they were wrapped in dirty cotton, the sun was finally shining again. Whatever the cause almost two days later, Carl and I were romping through the fields like excited children.

We'd spent the better part of an hour playing in the snow: making angels in the drifts, lobbing loosely packed balls at one another as we darted to and fro, our laughter seeming surreal in the quiet of the Illinois winter. At one point, Carl even constructed what he referred to as a
snow rotter
: it was basically your typical snowman but was missing one eye and the branch that served as its left arm had been purposefully mangled. As a finishing touch, he'd punched in the side of the face that lacked an eye, giving the giant snowball a caved-in look.

The entire time I'd been with him, I'd never seen him so happy and carefree. That haunted expression had temporarily vanished, giving way to eyes that sparkled and a smile that touched every inch of his face with its warmth and light. For a while, we were able to forget the death and destructions that lay out there; we could pretend that the world had simply continued on like it always had, that we would be returning to our jobs and bills, perhaps taking in a movie or snuggling on the couch as we listened to a Leonard Cohen CD by candlelight.

And maybe this made us reckless. In fact, I'm sure it did. Why else would we would have begun an impromptu game of tag that had us running through the drifts like a wolf and hare in some nature documentary? Under any other circumstances we would have known better; we would have thought of consequences, of survival. But on this particular day, all of that seemed so far away. So distant and somehow, as strange as it may sound, unimportant.

By the time we'd both been
it
several times, we were panting and out of breath. We stood there with our hands on our thighs, grinning at one another like a couple of happy idiots, not concerned with the film of sweat that had formed beneath all those clothes.

“Ya know,” Carl gasped, “when we get to that little church, I think I'd like to.... ”

His voice trailed off and he fidgeted before me. He seemed slightly uncomfortable, as if his clothes had suddenly become two sized too small, and I couldn't tell if he was blushing or if the redness in his cheeks was just from exertion and the chill of the air.

“Like to what?” I teased. “Repent all your worldly sins? Finally confess that there's something out there bigger than . . .”

“I think I'd like to marry you.”

There were only a handful of times in my short life when I can honestly say that I was speechless. But this was one of them.

“Now, you don't have to give me an answer right away.” he stammered. “You can think on it a spell. But I've never felt as right as I do when I'm with you. Never felt as whole.”

“Yes.” I whispered as a grin crept across my face. “Yes, yes, a thousand times yes.”

I threw myself into his arms and we kissed, slow and deeply. It was crazy: here we were, in a world where we didn't know where our next meal would come from, where the cities and institutions of civilization had crumbled into ruin, where the dead walked the earth. And I had just been proposed to.

“Come on.” I urged as I pulled his coat. “Let's get moving. I want to get to that church as quick as we can.”

Within fifteen minutes of walking, however, a coldness had seeped into my body like none I'd ever experienced. I glanced over at Carl and saw that his teeth were chattering as well, his lips light blue, and that he was hugging himself as tightly as he'd embraced me after the proposal.

When he spoke, his words were stuttered and punctuated with the loud clacking of molars hitting against one another.

“S-sweat d-dr-drying. C-c-cooling b-body temperatures.”

I felt like there was an arctic tundra somewhere within my torso, somewhere so deep that no amount of clothing could ever thaw the glaciers that were forming there. Their cold radiated outward, causing chills to creep along my flesh as my body trembled.

“N-need shelter.”

Every step I took seemed to require more energy than the last and my arms had begun to feel like they were being pricked by millions of tiny thorns.

“R-reckon it was pretty s-st-stupid to r-run... around l-like that.”

It was weird, but I'd never felt so tired in my whole life. Almost as if every ounce of energy had suddenly been sapped from body, crystallized on the freezing surface of my skin, and then shattered into microscopic shards. I wanted nothing more than to just lay down in the snow for a little bit, maybe to take a little nap. I was positive it would be warmer down there in the drifts, that after a little sleep I'd be able to trudge onward. Nothing in the world had ever sounded better.

“H-hang in there, sw-sweetie. S-see? There's a b-barn up a-ahead. Hang in th-there.”

The barn he referred to looked so far away, so distant, that I couldn't imagine having the energy to pull my exhausted body all that way. I'd started to yawn and my legs felt as if they had been tied down with weights.

“Just let me sleep.” I whispered. “Just for a few minutes, baby. Sleep... .”

Carl wrapped his arm around me, hooked it under my arm pit, and pulled upward to keep me from slumping to the ground.

“D-Damn it, girl, we're almost th-there. It's not as far... as it l-looks. You just keep r-right on walking. You can d-do it, Josie.”

With Carl's constant stream of encouragement the red structure in the distance gradually grew larger. Before long we were able to make out a little white house near it that had previously blended in with the snow.

“Almost there.”

One wall of the house had been almost entirely obliterated: the jagged hole was like a dark mouth grinning at the barren landscape. Just within the darkness, I could make out the tail end of a truck that had apparently smashed its way into the structure.

Now that we were closer, I actually began to believe the little pep talk that had been a constant prattle from Carl's mouth. I really
could
do it....  I thought of the hay that was surely piled up in the barn, how warm and toasty it would be when I burrowed my way into it, how I would finally be able to rest.

“C-can you walk on your own?” Carl asked.

His voice was low and grave and I nodded my reply as I followed his line of sight. There were footprints in the snow, leading up to the little door on the side of the barn. He released me from his arm and drew the little pistol from his waistband, flicking the safety off with his thumb.

Rotters? Or other refugees like ourselves simply looking for shelter? Impossible to tell from simple tracks. But what we did know was that these footprints were relatively fresh. Maybe an hour old at the most.

The sound of our own feet crunching in the snow suddenly seemed like the pounding of a kettle drum. With nothing more than a glance, we'd both slipped into what Doc had always called
survival mode.
Our steps were slow and deliberate, our movements limited to just the basic necessities. Sounds seemed sharper now, the biting tang of dried sweat wafting from our bodies all that more pungent: all of our senses had kicked into overdrive and the iciness of my skin seemed less important as adrenaline coursed through my veins like liquid fire.

I was holding a baseball bat and had it raised beside my head, ready to swing at a moment's notice.

Close enough to the barn now that we could hear a shuffling sound from inside. Feet against floorboards. We listened for a moment, then Carl looked at me and held up one hand as if he were giving the peace sign.

I nodded. Definitely no more than two in there. Any more and the noise would've been less furtive.

Carl glanced toward the side of the door, communicating with his eyes, and I slid into position beside it.

Lowering the bat, I touched the knob with one hand so lightly that there wasn't even the slightest rattle. Carl had dropped to one knee directly in front of the door and had his pistol leveled in front of him.

He stared straight ahead as we listened to the sounds from within. Finally, he nodded. Nothing more really than just a dip of the chin.

I flung the door open and immediately raised the bat in one fluid motion, ready for anything that might come charging through the entrance.

Instead, we heard voices from within, quickly followed by the unmistakable sound of shotguns being shucked.

“What the fuck?”

Carl quickly stood, raising his palms in front of him to show he meant no harm.

“Human.” he called out. “Humans here. Don't shoot!”

He walked slowly through the doorway, keeping his hands raised as if he were a prisoner and I fell into line behind him.

“We don't mean no harm. We just need a place to rest for a spell. To get warm. Then we'll be moving on.”

Our original assessment had been correct: there were two men in the barn, both pointing shotguns in our direction. They seemed skittish, which was understandable as we had just burst into their refuge.

There was a large stump that someone had drug into the barn, probably to use as a seat or table, and Carl slowly began to lower his pistol toward it, making sure to keep his palms facing the frightened men.

“Look, I'm puttin' down my weapon, see? We ain't looking for trouble, guys. It's just me and the lady. A couple hours and we'll be out of your hair. We just need to rest.”

Something about the men made me nervous and I wasn't sure what. They looked like any other survivors we'd encountered: shabby clothes ripped and stained with fluids you didn't want to ponder for too long, hair a stringy tangled mess, faces lean from hunger and roughened by exposure to the elements. But there was this feeling that I couldn't shake: a queasy nervousness as if I had just encountered some entirely new life form, perhaps a human-rotter hybrid.

I wanted to tell Carl to tuck the gun back into his pants instead of placing it on the stump, to tell him to keep it close at hand. But, at the same time, I felt slightly silly. So far, these men had given me no reason to distrust them. In fact, they looked just as frightened as I probably had when Carl and Doc first found me back in that silo.

“See, fellas. I'm not armed. Name's Carl. This here's Josie. We don't want no trouble.”