We woke in the early dawn, my body sore from the prior day’s forced activity, to which I was unaccustomed. There was also the narrow cot that barely held my body off the ground, as my body took turns shivering and sweating through the night…another unwelcome side effect of Aggrodol withdrawal. I was seeing shit, I was hearing shit, and I was feeling like shit. I heard bells ringing, watched shadows floating in broad daylight, and washes of white in the darkness. My smooth brain was going haywire and I didn’t know when it was going to stop.
I forced myself to my feet to stretch while Sam, awake for some time already, rummaged through our newfound supplies like a bargain hunter at a yard sale.
“I’m going to load up the van,” I said.
He nodded, elbow-deep into a box of dried meal pouches that hadn’t been unpacked, foam peanuts falling to the ground like a fleeting snowfall. “Take one of the shotguns-”
“-Leave the cannoli?”
“Hardy-har. Always with the jokes. We can go up there together if you want. But from now on, you should arm yourself if you’re outside.”
“I already have two of ‘em.”
He scoffed, not appreciating my humor. “There’s a time and a place for screwing around. This ain’t it.”
“Relax,” I told him. “Some people use their sense of humor to relieve stress.” I picked up a large sack of food and a power supply the size of a car battery. With the bag swinging on my shoulder, I climbed the stairs, stopping at the top to catch my breath.
“You gonna make it up there without dying?” Sam asked.
“I think so. Might need a nap now, though.” I pulled off the wood planks barricading the door, nails falling to the ground with metallic clinks.
“Be careful up there,” said Sam. “If you have to run, drop what you got and we can get it later.”
I opened the basement door and the yellow morning sunshine hit me in the face as it peeked between the trees across the street, my vision washing into white as though I was staring down a snowy landscape. I heard nothing but birdsong and shuffled into the gaping storefront, as though exiting a hermitage. Any attacking revenants coming at me would at least block the sun, giving me a reflexive chance at defending myself against a silhouette.
Broken glass and comic books underfoot, I poked my head through the gaping front window and checked the street, my heart sinking as I discovered an ugly scene: The fighting last night had been even closer than I’d thought, with my vehicle a primary point of cover for those in the street…some dead, some dead again. Bodies splayed around my van like discarded mannequins, bullet holes spreading across its grill and hood in brutal ellipses. A muddy combo of fluids pooled on the street under the engine. Conflict had devolved from people vs. revenants to people vs. people, stubbornly fighting and dying next to each other, while eager undead hunted them both. The sight repulsed me…but not enough to turn away. And I don’t know what that said about me.
I returned to the basement and told Sam what had happened on the street above while we had been securing the shelter the night before. For me personally, losing the van was a sad turn of events, even in light of the insanity going on around us. “Rusty” had been such a prominent part of our lives and of course, I’d come to depend on it to keep some consistency in my life, even though everything that could go wrong with a vehicle commonly applied to mine: airless suspension, fluids that leaked like tree sap, and an alignment that pulled toward the closest repair shop. I’d ridden waves of fumes like a surfer all the way to gas stations and parked close enough to a campfire to melt the headlamp cover, but the van had never failed to get us where we needed to go…it just operated on its own time. And in dark times, I always thought that if I had a vehicle, I wasn’t so bad off. If I was evicted, I could at least sleep in it. So seeing Rusty at its final resting place, punctured with a smattering of bullet holes, was a little like discovering a friend had died in cold blood.
“Did you see Chuck’s truck still out there?” Sam asked.
“I think so. It was around the corner.”
“We should take a look. Chuck’s not gonna use it anymore.” He gestured to Chuck’s body, lying where we’d covered him with a tarp the night before while deciding if we had time to bury him. We’d decided we didn’t. Again, I don’t know what that says about us.
“Grab his keys and we’ll get moving,” Sam said.
My mind drew a blueprint of the shop. “Where did he keep ‘em? Any idea?”
“Check his pockets.”
I shuddered. “I was afraid you’d say that.”
I moved to Chuck’s side, relieved that some dead were remaining dead, especially those I knew. I knelt by his side as though I was paying my respects and then reached into his pockets like I was trying to pick something out of a toilet with my fingertips. Chuck’s body shifted with the disturbance and I had a slight heart attack, bracing myself for his lurch for my throat, but he allowed me to lean in against the stiffness of his decay until my fingers fished around and found cold keys deep in a pants pocket. I pulled them out and cupped them in my palm, muting their metallic jingle. I was proud of myself for persevering, though I didn’t care to linger.
“Mission accomplished! Let’s load up!”
***
Soon, we were on the road in Chuck’s pickup, listening to the same song Chuck was listening to the last time he’d driven it. It was about as much of a tribute as we’d bothered to provide to our late friend, but under the circumstances, maybe we were too stunned to process a loss so close to home…or it had been numbed by the weight of countless traumatic events that had before it. One thing was for sure: None of us were big fans of his bland music taste, which increasingly gravitated to what I’d call “nursery school pop music,” following the birth of his daughter. Simple melodies, harmless lyrics. But except for the automated stations, the radio was silent, and it was like he was still in the truck with us, controlling the music, as usual. “Pilot picks,” he’d say. And no one else ever picked because if he was around, he was always behind the wheel.
Sam maneuvered the truck around bodies, abandoned vehicles, and large debris left in the road…or, in one area, a flaming grease bin that had rolled into the right lane from a Chinese restaurant that was burning uncontrollably nearby. There were no fire trucks on the scene and I wondered if I was being naïve to expect there would be. Some expectations were hard to break.
“That bin will burn forever,” Sam said, veering the truck sharply to the left. I could feel the heat from the flames through my open window as we passed it. “Even in the rain, I bet. Like a pile of burning tires. Or that underground coal mine in Pennsylvania…burning for a generation now. Can’t even live there. A travesty of the American dream.”
“American dream? Dreams only happen when you’re sleeping.”
The neighborhoods were quiet like Sunday morning and, I assumed, for the most part, empty. A few homes had been fortified by prepared citizens and fortuitous larcenists, but when someone was trying to keep a low profile, advertising home defense was not the way to be left alone. Strong defense meant there was something within those walls worth defending. And bars on windows only went so far to keep a Molotov from breaching one’s domain like dragon’s breath. A lawless but organized group of thugs could clear a home of defenders in five minutes. Staying in a populated area meant eventual run-ins with others and those encounters could go either way, truce or tragedy. With a fifty-fifty split, it was worth more to head to woods or mountains for a little breathing room from others.
We turned onto the two-lane highway leading to the next town, a ten-mile stretch of state road through wetlands following along the river, becoming a scenic route after they built the interstate in the 1950s. Before that, it was a trail used by settlers and trappers and before that, indigenous tribes. The path of least resistance was always well-traveled. But what was usually an uneventful route was now cluttered with debris on both sides of the road as people shed their belongings along the way. I scanned the shoulder ahead, knowing that Sticks and Travis would take this route to Chuck’s, but the road was eerily empty of people—alive, dead, or undead—serving some relief that any threat was beyond that moment.
Through the morning fog, we saw a brutal battle unfolding across the river. Revenants swarmed a house on the far shore that sat on top of a boathouse. People inside were sticking guns out of window and revenants were climbing the brick walls before slipping off and landing back to earth…some using others like steps to climb higher than they could alone, like ants on a dropped piece of candy. One of the undead was punching the home’s front door with both fists like clubs, leaving round patterns of black blood on the white metal. Left with only rage instead of reason, they would eschew self-preservation and destroy themselves just to get closer to their prey. It didn’t make much sense to me, but then, I wasn’t dead…yet.
I glanced over at Sam. “We can’t hit them from here, can we? Is there anything we can do?”
“With our shotguns? We could only bounce pellets off a duck’s ass in the middle of the river from here.”
Sam maintained high speed as the scene passed. We continued in silence, admitting to ourselves that there wasn’t much we could do to help anyone…and barely ourselves. We couldn’t risk our hides every time we happened upon a swarm of undead…we’d never get anywhere. This was one of the harder lessons to learn at the dusk of civilization, especially for those who naturally gravitated to supporting roles…the helpers running into a mess rather than from it. That didn’t mean we’d run away from everything like cowards, but we had to be selective when distributing the risks we needed to take, a list which seemed to grow longer the more time passed. We were hurtling into a future more unknown and uncertain than we could ever prepare for.
***
We entered a rusting industrial zone on the outskirts of the next town, with idled auto plants and long-abandoned businesses nearby…diners and dive bars where factory workers could cash paychecks and gulp down a couple of beers before returning to the production line after lunch. The vast parking lots were empty, the buildings shuttered and dark, gloomy even in the morning light. Rusty fences surrounding cracked concrete.
The industrial zone gave way to homes abandoned during the last economic downturn, once owned by the working class, who then became working poor once the house was returned to the bank in foreclosure. Faded “For Sale” signs hung crookedly from cracked windows. Front doors and garages opened wide like mouths screaming silent warnings, spilling emptiness into front yards of patchy grass and blown trash. They razed some homes, reclaiming the lot from squatters and dealers, leaving large empty swaths of weedy grass between the houses that remained. Years of municipal paralysis had coalesced into natural reclamation, creating urban greenery where foxes—and even coyotes—roamed. We saw nothing but small herds of deer raising their heads to stare at us from the fields like nosy neighbors. Urbanized, they only darted off when it was clear an encounter was impending. Otherwise, they’d stand and watch your every movement. No revenant could catch one of those, though I knew that wouldn’t stop them from trying. They chased after everything that moved, as though just the sight of motion was offensive to the core.
Soon, we were in my brother’s familiar neighborhood. “I don’t see anyone around,” I said. “They weren’t on the road, either. They’re probably long gone.”
“Where would they go?”
“Maybe they didn’t get your text. Maybe they evacuated and are way south, waiting in line somewhere for a chance to use a phone to call us.”
“Our phones are bricks. And there is no evacuation that I can see,” Sam said. “Just people running for their lives.”
“Why wouldn’t they contact us if they could?”
“You just said it. Maybe they didn’t get my text. They locked down the entire telecommunications grid. Do you know smoke signals? Maybe we could reach ‘em that way.”
“Even if I did, how could anyone tell the difference with all the other fires right now?”
We slowed the truck and turned onto their street, Sam keeping our speed just above my comfort level. Moving too slowly was for sitting ducks who weren’t expecting an ambush. Their house, a post-war cottage-style, appeared on the left side of the block. The front door stood wide open like the abandoned homes we’d passed in the neighborhood near the old factory. Odds and ends spilled from the doorway onto the crooked wooden porch: a broken kitchen chair next to a broken end table, a flat-screen TV was propped vertically against the chipped paint of the porch railing, a large gouge punching the monitor. It looked as though the home had expelled its contents during a violent bender.
“Looks like it’s been looted,” I said.
“Not looted. More like a big fight.”
“Maybe they left a note.”
Sam slowed the truck so he could turn and mock me. “’Maybe they left a note.’ You sayin’ you wanna go in there?”
“It’s the last place we know they’d been, right?”
Sam shrugged. “I guess.”
“Plus, if they left a note, it would be somewhere conspicuous…like on the front door.”
We passed the house and Sam turned the truck around in a neighboring driveway. I kept the shotgun close as we passed a second time, searching for any clues of my brother’s whereabouts from the safety of the truck.
Sam pressed the brake and the truck lurched to a stop. “Hang on…I think I saw something.”
Our eyes peered into the dark interior of the home from the street, beyond the cracked cement and broken debris on the porch…and into the gaping maw of the threshold and shadowy entryway. Now that we were still, even my pitiful eyes saw moving shadows writhing inside…some on the floor, some shuffling into walls and corners. Aimless, like toys with dying batteries.
I didn’t trust myself. “Are there revenants in there?”
“It’s stuffed with those things.”
My heart sank. “Do you think they made it out of there?” I paused. “Or you think they’re still in there?”
From the street, we looked for any recognition of the shadowy figures we could see from our vantage point. A familiar face…clothes we’d seen before. Whether Sticks or Travis had turned into revenants or whether they were still missing, neither deduction brought relief.
“Why would so many of them be in there?” I asked. “God, I hope they’re not in there, but what are the chances? It’s where they fucking lived.”
“Do you still want to stop?”
“No, I don’t want to stop. I want to know.”
“Me, too, bud.”
Near the left corner of the front doorway, we watched a revenant on the floor, moving closer to the front porch, its skin sooty and gray. It had once been a woman, but its lower half was bent and twisted, crippled by a car or some other heavy trauma. Its skinny arms were splayed to the sides like a crab as it used them to propel forward right up to the doorway, where it peered in our direction with dead, milky eyes.
“We’ve been spotted,” said Sam, putting the truck into gear. The house began shedding revenants like a bleeding wound. “We have a couple of seconds to hang back and see if we can recognize any of ‘em as they’re coming out, but then I’m flooring it. Make sure to get a good look.”
As our speed increased away from the scene, my eyes bounced from revenant to revenant as I searched the pursuing crowd. A cheerleader. A mail carrier. A cop. Non-descript civilians, faces twisted with the horrors of blood lust.
“I don’t see either of them,” I said, not disguising the disappointment in my tone of voice. “Let’s go.”
We sped off, forced to continue without answers, and knowing little more than we did when we left Chuck’s that morning.
“You never answered my question,” I said. “They made it out of there, don’t you think? I didn’t see them come out.” Staring straight at the road ahead, the bill of his trucker’s cap flapping up and down with his nodding head, he gripped the wheel as though reassuring himself that he was still driving. “Absolutely.” Then his head shook from side to side. “No question about it. They’re tough guys. We’re tough guys.” He looked at me. “You’re a tough guy. And don’t you forget it. They’re out there somewhere…probably closer than we think…and we’re gonna find them.”
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