Upstairs, Chuck’s old-style doorbell clanged and the beasts stopped howling to listen, their heads cocked askew like puzzled dogs. As the front door’s draft stopper vooped across the carpet above, they sprung up the stairs, tripping over each other to get to the source of the noise and kill it dead. They howled again upon spotting their prey and bounded onto the sales floor before a shotgun blasted—then a barrel rack and another blast—along with a horrendous crashing as bodies had blown back into a glass display case; the noise luring more revenants from outside to be summarily dispatched on the store’s front stoop. Once the carnage ended, the brave shooter stood on the porch with a boot resting on top of a pile of dead bad guys while striking a superhero pose. At least, that’s what I imagined happened, hearing the battle above from my hidey hole in the basement.
I kept my grip on the fridge even as the silence grew around me, waiting for the shooter’s next move. Would they investigate further or did they have priorities elsewhere? After all, this was just a comic book shop, not a gun store or a pharmacy. Unless the person had some kind of superhero fetish, Chuck’s didn’t amount to much more than shelter. But until whoever it was made a move, I’d be sitting on the basement floor with numb legs like a Pompeii statue, frozen with fear. Polite society was on the ropes and I wasn’t about to head upstairs as though greeting a neighbor looking to borrow a cup of bullets. There could have been an upturned busker’s hat on the floor full of money right in front of me and I wouldn’t have moved an inch toward it. I never had much money so it wasn’t a big deal to me to find some, or even lose any. My entire life had been run with razor-thin margins and money was just a component. And if things worsened, money would be worth more as paper than as currency.
An eternity crawled by while the shadowy images on the edges of my vision turned white and moved front and center, more or less blinding me. I put my head down and squeezed my eyelids shut, hoping to dispel the illusions with brute force, but opening them again did nothing. I was a blind, sitting duck. Then finally, some movement as footsteps thumped toward the basement door, pausing before coming down the abused stairs in careful, measured steps…the shooter was not going the way I’d hoped.
My fingers grew swollen like sausages while they gripped the grate. Clinging to the last vestiges of any spirituality inside my polluted soul, I prayed to no one in particular to get me out of this jam, in the same way I’d gotten out of all the other jams before…by the skin of my teeth. I prayed for the shooter to take a cursory glance at the basement, find nothing of interest except Chuck and an oddly placed fridge that was hiding absolutely nothing behind it, and then walk back up the blood-coated steps and leave.
Even though my vision was a pulsing, blinding white, I kept my eyes looking through the crack like I had laser beam sight. My body aching in protest from the statuesque position I’d been holding, I surrendered and shifted my weight slightly, which moved the fridge slightly, and the crack I was using to see closed tight against the wood frame. Now close enough to hear the shooter’s breathing, I dared not make another move.
Then I heard: “Chuck? Neil? Chuck, is that you?” Then a frustrated, whispered “God dammit.”
That was no stranger. I released the grate from my swollen fingers and pushed the fridge aside with my numb legs. “Sam!”
Sam wore a tan tactical vest and cargo pants with pockets stuffed with every kind of supply needed and unneeded including, knowing him, a Family Pack of Juicy Fruit gum. He was also wearing the only ball cap I ever saw him in…trucker style with an Old Glory patch proudly placed front and center. Whenever the hat began to fray, he ordered a new one. I knew this because he always complained about the six long weeks of shipping from China and the way his dark blond hair grew—in patches like crabgrass—he would not allow himself to be seen in public without a hat.
Sam turned towards me and raised his rifle until his eyes softened with recognition and a familiar grin appeared.
I threw my hands up in dramatic fashion like a burglar caught red-handed, before putting them down in resistance. “Nah, you know what? Go ahead and shoot. I’m not sure I can handle all this craziness. And I can’t see shit right now.”
“You’re not gonna believe how glad I was seeing your ride parked at the curb. I haven’t heard from anyone. Have you?”
I shook my head. Besides the two of us (and Chuck, RIP), there were two more in our pack who ran the streets since sixth-grade summer school, after my brother and I moved to the area. We didn’t adjust well to our new surroundings, which were always tenuous. Sticks, nicknamed for his rail-thin figure, despite an appetite that not even a king-size candy bar could conquer, was my older brother by one year, as he always liked to remind me. Travis was Sticks’ roommate and they lived in a crumbling house a town over. If they’d also received Sam’s text, they’d come if they could. But the unfortunate reality was that they likely ran into difficulty heading north, against the tide of evacuees heading south, and with revenants flooding through the area from all directions. Under poor conditions, a ten-mile trip could take much longer than the 15-20 minutes we were accustomed to, if someone could make it at all.
None of us were close with our families, and that’s how we bonded. We were loose in the neighborhood during family holidays and naturally gravitated toward each other. Our parents didn’t pass down much to their children other than anger, avoidance, and substance abuse…spindly branches on the family tree of dysfunction. We were the village idiots in our Rust Belt resort town surviving with the other townies only by the good graces of a local corporation that hired workers way more skilled and educated than we were to contribute to the eroded economy. It was always Us and Them. The Honor Society kids who met in the library while we smoked pot behind the dumpster. Graduating from college while we bought drugs to sell for rent money, only to consume most of them instead. Abiding by the law while we didn’t worry about laws unless we were caught breaking them. In the same way criminals and clowns associate by circumstance, we were a healthy mix of both.
I was fortunate for Sam’s friendship, and especially fortunate to have him with me now. He’d be my best chance of survival when things got hairy, though I knew I didn’t have much to offer in return…and my condition was degrading faster than I could realize what the problem was.
“What’s wrong with you?” he asked. “You said you can’t see?”
I thought about how to make it sound like I wasn’t having serious problems before I spoke. “I’m having side effects to some medication. It’s screwing with my vision but seems to get worse with stress.”
“Wouldn’t surprise me a bit. These are stressful times.”
“So what do you know about all this?” I asked. “What’s going on out there?”
“Well, from the chatter on the ham bands, it’s not good. But then, you probably could figure that out for yourself by now. The official word is to stay put until they order evacuations, which is the only thing we see on our cell phones, but people are bucking the program and moving anyway, with or without the Feds. Hell, people were squawking earlier like our troops were the first to get hit and it spread like wildfire from there, after they activated to start the evac program.”
“Hit with what? Disease? A virus?”
Sam shrugged. “I don’t know, but if you’ve got a conspiracy theory, it’s probably out there already, being believed by someone who should know better. Most of it is just a buncha noise from a mob of armchair know-it-alls. Chaos agents.” He leaned his shotgun against the concrete wall. “But there are still a few sure things out there.”
“Like what? Humanity’s on the verge of extinction?”
“Pfft. You and your fifty-cent words…let’s just say that there are now two types of people: dead and undead. And it’s best to avoid them both.”
“Anything else?”
“People who get attacked…if they die, some get back up. Pretty common knowledge by now.”
“Seen it with my own eyes…right on the steps before you got here and took ‘em out. I wasn’t sure what I was looking at, at first. You can tell someone’s dead…you can feel it…then the person gets up but the feeling is still there. Thankfully, you showed up because I was pretty sure I was a goner.”
“They’re slow and weak in the sun because they decay faster that way. They seem to understand that, too. So they tend to stay in the shade during the day…when they’re not pursuing someone. Photo-something or other, from the sunlight…”
“Photosynthesis?”
“Not photosynthesis. Something else. But even though they are faster and more active at night, they’re pretty loud and you can hear ‘em comin’ from way off. Even in the dark. Still creepy, though. And if they see ya, they howl like the aliens in that body-snatcher movie.”
“Any weaknesses you know of?”
“Well, they seem to go down pretty easily, for the most part. They are dead, after all, and that process doesn’t seem to stop just because they’re up and running around.”
“That doesn’t sound scientific.”
“I don’t know whether science is even relevant to these things.” He looked at the shelter and stepped past me closer to the entrance. “All this stuff wasn’t here the last time I was with Chuck.”
I turned to follow him. “Maybe he was in the middle of moving it from next door. How long do you think we should wait here for Sticks and Travis?”
Sam checked his watch. “If they’re not here by tomorrow morning, we should look for ‘em. It’s only 30 minutes by car, so they have plenty of time to get here. I did it on a rusty Schwinn bike once and it only took a couple of hours.”
“They have a lot more to worry about than just travel time,” I said.
“Then if they’re being chased, they should get here faster. Right?” He looked at the shelter entrance, brow furrowed. “You think this cheap setup is going to work? I can see why you pulled that fridge over here.”
“If we make a barricade, it should be enough for one night. We can take turns on watch.”
“Not sure if I can trust you with watching shit,” he said with a side eye, smiling. Sam pushed on the refrigerator and it rocked on the uneven floor. “You had the right idea with this thing, though it’s not steady. We should also block off the upstairs door to the basement. That’d help. Right now, anyone can just walk in here. And it’s wide open upstairs.”
As if to prove himself, we moved upstairs to the wreckage of the sales floor. Exposed to the elements, comic book pages fluttered in the breeze. There was so much broken glass from the window and display cases, our footsteps crunched as though we were on hard-packed snow after a winter rain. Sam checked under the wooden counters near the register while I explored the small back room, peering behind a curtain at storage shelves inside a narrow pantry. I grabbed a sturdy hammer lying on one shelf and then moved to the half-bathroom, a narrow space with a toilet and sink. I caught my reflection in the cabinet mirror before watching myself open the door with an index finger on the corner, finding a few loose Band-aids and a bottle of aspirin, its label faded with age. A few tablets rattled when I shook the bottle.
“Find a big score?” Sam asked, standing at the doorway.
Caught off guard by his presence but not his tone, I returned the bottle and closed the cabinet door. “I’m clean, Sam. I’m in recovery.”
He scoffed. “Since when?”
I held my breath. I already knew how my answer was going to sound. “Since whatever-the-fuck-this-is began,” I said, waving my hand in the air to encapsulate our existence.
“A couple of days?” I could almost hear his eyes rolling. “Congratulations, you brave soldier.”
His lack of faith was expected. We’d met just as I began experimenting with chemicals and in the decade since, he knew my cycles of disaster and recovery full well, only to reach a step on a ladder it hurt too much to be on. Then the days would climb on top of each other like heavy bricks and the load would push me back down to asking college kids with dreads or junkies waking from the nod if they knew where I could score. While cleaning up, or detoxing, as the kids call it these days, the Aggrodol took the edge off, though it introduced other weird effects. One effect in particular was similar to the phenomenon known as ASMR, or Autonomous sensory meridian response, which is an endorphin rush that comes with stimulus such as whispering, or droning noises. For example, every time someone ran a vacuum, I almost had an orgasm. The sound was a pair of antacid tablets and my brain was a glass of water. Plop plop, fizz fizz. And something similar was happening to many people taking Aggrodol, so they recalled it and left people to deal with the withdrawal effects, as some Big Cheese somewhere believed that if we were feeling good from it and they didn’t know exactly why, then it must be causing harm. Back to the drawing board for everyone: labs, pharm cos, and patients.
I opened a small cabinet above the toilet, only to find a stack of musty Hustler magazines, glossy but greasy from many sweaty hands. “This time it’s different,” I said, flipping through one casually like it was a dictionary. “They put me on this anxiety med…this Aggrodol…that ended up recalled because the side effects were so bad. That’s on top of being as addictive as whatever people were using before. And now I’m going through hell trying to get off something new that offers my brain no enjoyment whatsoever. No dopamine kick, no serotonin smile. Like taking a pill just to feel like you’re stuck in traffic, but not in a hurry. And when I heard about the side effects, I thought to myself, ‘How bad could they be?’ I’m battered but I’m also resilient. But they were right. The side effects are ridiculous.”
“What are they? The sight thing?”
“Yeah, and more. Hallucinations. Shadows, squiggly lines…and white-outs when I’m in a panic, apparently.”
Sam eyed me warily. “You’re hallucinating right now?”
“It’s only been debilitating once…right when you got here…and it does seem to get worse as the day goes on, but I can see OK right now. For the most part.”
He raised an index finger and made a circle in the air. “You know the undead running around are real, right?”
“I’m not even going to dignify that with an answer.”
“Can you fire a weapon?”
“Could I ever? Even so, I can’t guarantee that I’d hit anything.”
“It’s not like I never invited you to the range. You always had other things going on.”
“Yeah, I’m an addict. We’ve already covered that. Now are we gonna bicker like an old married couple or are we going to get through this alive? I’m not Rambo but I’m a warm body who’s not trying to kill you and I made it this far without winding up walking around dead. Good enough for now?”
Screams erupted down the street as the sky darkened, followed by the pop pop pop of weapons with a higher-caliber ferocity that suggested maybe a military presence, or possibly ragtag, well-armed locals making another stand in the neighborhood. If the rumors of the virus being of military origin were true, the latter was more likely.
While the fighting raged outside, we put the finishing touches on the shelter entrance using the softer glow of a headlamp’s red light to prevent too much exposure through the basement’s glazed windows, moving sandbags and debris around to serve as more bluff than barrier until we felt satisfied two men with shotguns could defend the place for a few minutes. We took inventory of the items in the shelter, then cut the list down to what would fit into a couple of 50L backpacks and a large dark gray athletic bag worn over the shoulder with a long vinyl strap, meant to carry bulky sporting goods like football shoulder pads. But we soon learned that it could carry a lot of smaller shit, as well. Eventually, the fighting outside subsided and we were able to breathe a little more easily. Even doze off from time to time. It was a brief respite, but not enough. If my brother didn’t make it to Chuck’s we would be traveling to find him, and that caused a whole new level of anxiety.
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