Welcome!
My latest book, Order of the Dead: After
the Zombie War, is out! Below is a good portion
of the text! The formatting didn’t keep, but the substance is there. The full version is available on Amazon, and this is my Amazon author page.
Best,
Guy
Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War
Description:
We were the strongest, the bravest, the luckiest. You had to be all
three to be among the few who remained. But even after surviving for all
these years after the zombie apocalypse, the fight still wasn't over.
Maybe it would never be over. The zombies were still there, out there,
but not just the zombies now. Now there were worse enemies. And it was
our time to make the final stand, to fight for what little was left of
the world, and to leave to our children a world free of an evil more
terrible than the zombies. We were going to win, had to win, or die
trying.
Order of the Dead: After the Zombie War
Copyright © 2015 by Guy James.
All
rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted
in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including
photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval
system, without permission in writing from the author.
The
characters and events portrayed in this book are fictitious. Any
similarity to real persons, living or dead, is coincidental and not
intended by the author.
PART ONE
Survivors
“The
virus runs its fingers over us, grinning at the bloody trail it leaves
behind. It speaks through our mouths, pushing pointless gusts of air
through a leather bellows with torn lips. Yearning, it delights in the
movements of our flesh and bone as it breaks us, over and again, in its
relentless push through the world, toward the Equilibrium.”
Brother Mardu, Order of the Dead.
1
It
crossed the tree line, trampling a cluster of fairy ring mushrooms and
leaving the branches of a holly bush shuddering in its wake. When it was
just barely inside the clearing, it stopped, still out of reach of the
spotlights. There it tilted its head skyward, seeming at the same time
to lean into the night, as if it were drawing the power of the moon’s
sallow gaze into itself by drinking of the ashen glow.
It
did this the way you might put a hand against a wall to regain your
strength or find courage, and this was when it would have taken a breath
to steel itself, were it still a breathing thing, which, of course, it
no longer was.
Instead, what the prideful
moonbeams lit up was a creature foul and sagging, not alive but still
moving in spite of the laws of nature—well, the old laws, anyway. The
night was brave and just-hatched, and it knew better than to take
account of the past or its rules. The dark had its own way of doing
things, and it was keeping score now.
The spell of stillness broke, and the zombie set off on a clumsy lope toward New Crozet.
Senna
Phillips, Rosemary Preston, and Alan Rice were inside the perimeter,
watching. They were standing on a well-flattened patch of ground that
Senna and Alan’s boots knew well, but which Rosemary had never visited
before.
Alan’s face was sun-swept, rugged,
and, at the present moment, emotionless. The Voltaire II was heavy in
his hands, its shoulder strap, which should have borne most of the
weight, hanging slack at his side. The weapon was the revamped model of
the Voltaire I, the great numero uno of Voltaires, which had been
state-of-the-art nine years ago, back when the fine artists had all
turned in their trowels for good.
A gust of
wind caught Senna’s hair, shifting the long strands about her face, but
she gave no sign of noticing. She appeared to be entirely within her
element, so self-possessed and calm that even the metallic luster the
moon gave her hair seemed like something she’d arranged. Poised inches
from her sidearm, her right hand was starting to feel that familiar,
tugging itch.
Senna was New Crozet’s best
spotter, a master at predicting the break, the critical point when a
zombie moved from a state of dormancy to rampage. Few others in the
world, and no one in town, could match her skill. She had a gift, and
that was why she, and some of those fortunate enough to have been around
her, had survived.
Breathing slowly through
her nose, she regarded the thing outside the perimeter coolly. It was
getting closer to New Crozet’s fence, and nearer to breaking.
And that’s what we’re here for, she thought.
Alan
was a cleaner, a former foot soldier of the reclamation efforts that
had come after the zombie apocalypse, and some thought that he was the
best at what he did, but he believed that ‘longest-lived’ was the more
fitting term for it.
He didn’t think there
was that much to killing and burning zombies other than being careful
about your routine, and, above all else, having the benefit of a
talented spotter like Senna. What he did, he knew, was nothing like
spotting.
If you asked him, he’d tell you that he’d been lucky more times than any man deserved.
You take what you get, he thought, and you keep on fighting.
Out
of the corner of his eye, Alan saw Rosemary’s ponytail trembling, and,
as he firmed up his resolve—they were doing the right thing by having
the girl here…it had to be done—he briefly took one hand out from under
the Voltaire II’s chassis and pushed his black-framed glasses back up to
the top of his nose.
The tension in Alan’s
body was growing by the moment: his stomach muscles were starting to
contract, and his mouth was becoming uncomfortably dry. Though he’d been
with the reclamation crews, the rec-crews, for years, the fear had
never gone away, and, he was sure, it never would.
2
Rosemary was nine years old, and, unlike the
adults at either side of her, she was visibly nervous, chewing on her
lip, shifting from foot to foot, and pulling at the loose strings of her
jacket sleeve with the fingers of her left hand.
The
girl looked up at the night sky, where thick, wispy clouds were floating
dreamily, as out of place on the world’s rim as she felt now, trying to
stand with purpose so close to the fence.
The moon
yellowed at her as she stared at it, offering up a jaundiced grin, as if
it knew the punch line to it all, and thought the joke to be not only
funny, but maddeningly so. Having found no comfort in the sky, Rosemary
lowered her gaze and looked through the window in the fence.
Following
her eyes with its wan, smirking stare, the moon watched the creature
stumble closer, stirring up dust and rocks and clods of dirt, uncovering
damp soil and setting the worms that had been crawling there to search
for shelter deeper in the earth.
Rosemary looked over
at Alan, and in his face she saw none of what she herself was feeling.
All she could see was the light of an intense focus, what looked to her
like an almost-otherworldly determination.
But, under
the surface, the pit of Alan’s belly was filled with concern for Senna
and Rosemary. The feeling was a gnawing discomfort that lived in the
background of his being, like a tunneling animal, and now it was popping
its anxious head out of its hole, and in its dirt-clotted paws it was
holding a bow-tied gift of dread.
Senna wasn’t Alan’s
wife, and Rosemary wasn’t his daughter, but they might as well have
been. They were like his family now—no, they were his family now because
they were all he had left, and he was all they had left. He would die
for either; would endure the cruelest torture to spare their lives.
As
he looked at Senna, a familiar longing passed through him, a need to
never be apart from her, to touch her and hold her and kiss her scars
and listen to her talk about anything in that high, melodious voice of
hers. Lust colored the feeling a light shade of red, like a crayon
dabbing its essence in between shapely lines and want reached him even
now, folding the depth of feeling he had for her into it, and then the
physical desire was overturned and subsumed in the fullness of his
affection for his everything, his world, his Senna.
She
turned and looked at him, appearing to have read his mind, and she
probably had, because she was good at that, or at least at seeming to do
so. Her eyes accepted his love and want, and returned her own, and her
gaze glimmered with a stubborn will to live and love and keep on living,
even in a world they didn’t control anymore, a world that was limited
to an area inside a fence.
Not a cage, she thought, a home.
The
corners of her lips twitched upward, the movement nearly imperceptible,
but Alan saw it, or felt it, or something, he wasn’t sure. She turned
back to the gate.
Behind the townspeople, the Blue
Ridge Mountains stood looming over all of New Crozet, framing the town
within great, undulating curves of the muted shades of autumn. Opposite
the mountains, the clearing of dirt beyond the gate was glowing under
the spotlights, and a twenty yard stretch of road could be seen leading
into the forest until it disappeared, swallowed by the tree line and the
shadows of wooded limbs that minded the toll there. The forest interior
was obscured fully in night, the moon’s forays out from cloud cover
unable to reach past the darkled canopies of turning leaves.
An
orchestra of unseen insects was now in the third act of its musical
backdrop, and Alan wasn’t sure whether complete silence would have been
more or less unnerving than the melody, whose eeriness the critters had
perfected over millennia. Practice makes perfect, and when you have ages
for it, the practice doesn’t have to be perfect, just ongoing.
The
drone, a mélange made up of the scrapes of insect limbs and punctuated
by staccato wing beats, had fallen off noticeably in the moments before
the zombie materialized out of the forest’s gloom, and since then, the
insect song had recovered most, though not all, of its previous volume,
and was now playing on in muted fashion.
Rosemary’s
eyes ran over the pockmarked surface of the concrete slab in front of
her. It was one of many blocks that made up the bottom third of the
eighteen foot high fence encircling New Crozet. The concrete was there
to keep out the smallest zombie animals, which would have been able to
squeeze through the chain link that protruded from the concrete’s top
like an overgrown hedge, lousy with rust.
The girl’s
asthma said a greeting to her then, as she was staring at the fence and
trying to grapple with what she was about to do. She drew the air in,
but it wouldn’t connect properly, and when she tried again, it still
didn’t get to where it was supposed to go.
It was
probably fear squeezing her chest, and she knew that, so she tried to
calm herself by focusing on the imperfections in the cement seal between
the concrete blocks in front of her, on the cracks and rough spots and
flecks of dirt. She found a large crack, gazed at it, then shut her eyes
tight, watching the image’s afterglow burn in her mind’s eye.
It
was closing in on a minute since her last breath had connected, and she
could feel the choking, panic tears building behind her eyes, but she
couldn’t let them out, wouldn’t, because that would just make it worse.
With
her eyes still closed, trying to apply all of her focus to the image of
the crack, a jagged, stretched-out, not-quite rectangle, she tried to
breathe in again. This time, thankfully, the air filled the far reaches
of her lungs with relief, and the tension that had been building up in
her slowly-suffocating body loosened its hold.
She
opened her eyes, being careful to look only at the fence, and not at
Senna or Alan, not wanting to look at them, or more precisely, not
wanting them to see her looking, because they might see the horror
written on her face.
The noises coming from the
clearing grew louder, and she realized that in her terror-fueled
asthmatic gasps, the sounds of dirt being scraped and kicked up, the
hollow, lung-rattling moans, the feral bleats, they’d all been drowned
out, but even so, the relative quiet hadn’t been enough to pretend that
this was a bad dream that would unravel upon waking.
She
balled up her left hand, the one that wasn’t holding the gun, the one
that had been fidgeting and crawling about her body like a spider,
looking for loose strings to pick at, into a fist, and that helped her
get some control over her shaking.
Alan glanced at
Rosemary and saw that she was staring at the concrete. She looked
anxious, but she was holding the pistol, identical to Senna’s though out
of its holster, in a determined grip, the barrel pointing downward.
Before
the concrete, the whole fence had been made of chain link, and that had
proven to be bad for business. Mice, rats, voles, squirrels, chipmunks,
and small birds, all of the zombie persuasion, as luck had it, had
wriggled into New Crozet on occasion, and, because not all of these
could be found and killed in time, some had made their way into New
Crozet homes, ensuring the town population’s steady decline.
It
was fortunate—thank goodness for small miracles—that the virus made its
victims into automatons, brainless robots, which staggered and crawled,
putrefying as they went, with most of their prior coordination gone.
Had the birds held onto their ability to fly after infection, the
concrete would have been useless, and all but the underground
settlements would have been lost.
After the concrete
was finished, the population stabilized, and the people who’d been
guarding the fence were freed up for other tasks, and then New Crozet
had prospered, in a post-apocalyptic,
trapped-in-a-confined-space-until-you-die sort of way.
Locked up for all these years, Alan thought. If that’s prosperity…
He
looked at Rosemary again, and this time he frowned because she looked
extremely tense, more so than the other children usually did at this
point, and on seeing that, a weight of sadness alighted on his
shoulders, making the Voltaire II feel instantly heavier. He turned away
from the girl, straightened, and tried to force the guilt from his
mind.
A fear nagged at him then, as he stared blankly
at the ground between Senna and Rosemary’s feet and the fence: what if a
zombie burrowed under and got in?
The concrete was
buried to a depth of three feet, but that didn’t seem enough when he
obsessed over it—no depth did—and although he’d never seen any zombies
burrow, the virus could mutate again, and who knew what the next viral
iteration would bring? A digging trait, or some return of dexterity,
weren’t out of the question.
Alan was sure that if there was another mutation, it would be the last, the end, regardless of what changes it brought.
Though
he never spoke about this with the other townspeople, he suspected that
they shared his feelings on the subject. The virus had grown stronger
with time, and it was poised to take everything, to take all of them. It
was simply a matter of when.
He shook his head.
It’s no good to think this way, he thought. Least of all now.
3
Rosemary, Senna, and Alan were in the narrow alley that
began in the westernmost corner of the outer gate and extended away from
the town, like a peninsula of fence reaching for the forest. At the
farthest point in the alley, at a height of five feet, was a
semi-circular window made of multiple panes of transparent, bulletproof
plastic.
Like a porthole into the territory of the zombies, this window gave the townspeople a complete view of New Crozet’s entrance.
The
alley had in it another, smaller window, rectangular and made for
communicating with the drivers of visiting vehicles, which were few and
far between, and, normally, restricted to market days. The window was
small and high enough that, even when opened, no zombies could get
through.
The plastic pane of this window was
removable, unlike the curved pane of the viewing window at the alley’s
edge and now, the pane was gone, because Alan had removed it earlier,
and Senna and Rosemary were positioned in front of the opening. The air
in the frame seemed to be threatening, as if it had the power to suck
them all through and out of New Crozet’s safety, and was simply waiting
for the right moment to do so.
Senna stiffened, and Alan, noting her change in manner, gritted his teeth and tightened his grip on the Voltaire II.
The break.
There
came the first snap, and then the second, and then more in rapid
succession that sounded like cannon fire in the night, and, suddenly,
the zombie was moving at a blinding clip, its rotten body hurtling
toward the fence, heading for the curved window at the end of the alley,
not the open one.
They always do this, Alan thought
dismally. There was a cold logic in their behaviors, hardwired in them
by the virus, and they never deviated from the program. Even the
mistakes they made, if they could be called that, were all the same.
It
slammed headfirst into the plastic pane, further breaking the bones of
its face and head, adding to the disfigurement given to it by years of
injury and rot.
Rosemary jumped backward and failed to
stifle a gasp. The children were taught from a young age to be quiet,
and to stay away from the fence to begin with, but to risk no more than a
whisper if the fence was in sight. Now that didn’t matter so much,
seeing as how they’d called this zombie here themselves.
The
girl’s gun hitched upward, remaining precariously in her grip, and for a
moment it looked like she might lose her balance and fall, but Senna
caught her by the shoulders and got her steady.
Alan
exhaled. He wasn’t worried for his own safety, he’d been in far too many
encounters with the zombies for that, and closer ones than this, but
Rosemary had never done anything like this before, and though Senna was
more experienced than he was, seeing her so close to a zombie again
unnerved him.
It was a safe exercise, at least to the
extent they could make it one, but it was still dangerous because if
nothing else, the virus had proven that, under its influence, the state
of the world could be entirely unpredictable.
The
zombie staggered backward from the semi-circle of plastic, reversed
course, and slammed its head into the plastic again. Then it stumbled
back once more, its gait more bent now, more damaged.
Backing
away from the perimeter, it threw its head about wildly, as if trying
to pick up a scent not with the stump that was left of its nose but with
the sides of its face. The virus, it seemed, was looking for another
way in.
Alan took this opportunity to move in and crept to the viewing window, ducked, and looked through it, scanning the forest.
His
eyes searched for the tree line, and after a few moments of gazing at
the darkness past the ground lit up by the spotlights, fixed on it.
There, at the tree line, tendrils of shadow were creeping toward the
town, venturing toward the spotlights and struggling to find a way into
the illuminated clearing.
He stared, and as he did, a puzzled expression bloomed on his face. Something wasn’t right.
A
new movement caught his eye and he looked away from the trees to face
the zombie directly. It was turning, the wild tossing of its head
slowing, as it edged in the direction of the other window, the one that
Alan had opened earlier, then it took off in a shambling run.
“It’s coming,” Alan whispered, turning toward Senna and Rosemary and positioning himself closer to them. “Get ready.”
Behind
Alan , a piece of sparsely-haired zombie flesh left stuck to the
window’s rounded plastic seemed to glare at his back, as if daring him
to return. Within the spectrum of viral gore, it was unremarkable, a
souvenir of the zombie’s collision with the window, and a minor one at
that. It would dry in the sun and fall off eventually, a poisonous
jerky.
He moved so that he was behind Senna and
Rosemary, who were standing in front of the window, waiting. He adjusted
his hands under the Voltaire II and studied Rosemary, who appeared
calmer now, more attuned to Senna’s wavelength, which was good.
Then
the putrid odor that belonged so completely to the zombies reached them
and hugged them tight with its foulness, entering their nostrils and
nipping at their skin, coming uninvited and as it pleased, passing over
welcome mats and dirtying the rug.
Rosemary’s breath
caught, and she began to feel a spell of lightheadedness coming on as
the good air was being pushed away from her, displaced by floating
particles of rot, and the far reaches of her lungs began to close up in
protest again.
The virus very much wanted those lungs
for itself, faulty though they were, and the girl in whom they resided,
and, if it got its way, it would have them, and her, and the rest of the
holdouts who’d squirreled themselves away in the self-imposed captivity
of places like New Crozet.
4
Above New Crozet’s outer gate, Corks clicked off his rifle
safety and then scratched absently at a frayed spot on his pant leg.
Like Alan, Senna, and Rosemary below him, he was wearing old and
practical clothing that was threadbare in places and worn with no eye to
matching pieces or catching the latest fashion trends, although the
tattered and ill-fitting look was certainly in these days, and they all
had that down to a T.
His full name was Corbet X.
Noire, but he preferred not be reminded of his former life. The name his
parents had given him would get him to thinking about his father, who,
even though the ‘X’ in Corks’s name stood for Xavier, had liked to joke
that it was pronounced ‘Javier.’ And that would only serve to remind him
of his father, who’d died long before his time—thank God he isn’t alive
to see any of this—and of the short-lived father-son relationships in
the Noire line. The fathers in his ancestry always seemed to die too
young, leaving their sons as children in the world, but he’d broken with
that tradition, or rather, the virus had done it, by taking Corks’s son
from him.
When his father had died, Corks had been
left a boy with too many questions, questions that he’d wanted to ask
his father, but no longer could, and didn’t have the heart to bring up
with his mother. The outbreak had made him realize that he’d also had
things to say to his son that he hadn’t raised in time, and now never
would. There was a lesson in that, he knew—ask it while you can, say it
while you can, ask them what they think and tell them you love
them…while you can.
Corbet Xavier-pronounced-Javier
Noire looked down at Senna, Alan, and Rosemary, and at the approaching
zombie, whose stench of death was being carried to him on the shifting
breeze.
It was trying to get in and give that smell to
New Crozet, and fulfill Corks’s worst nightmare, which he thought on
much and now, there it was again, right on time, that familiar scene
coalescing in his mind from the circling vapors of memory and dread,
which always found him in moments such as this, and he’d learned with
time, resistance was futile.
Superimposed on his
vision, he saw the townspeople as pictures of decay, going about their
business of aimless, walking death, trapped inside the New Crozet
perimeter, dormant in an enclosure that lacked prey. Moments later, his
son, Remy, stumbled out from behind the little church where the town
meetings were held and with painful slowness he joined the New Crozet
zombie horde, and together, they advanced on the town center, drawing
closer to the market.
Remy’s full name was Remy Y.
Noire, and the middle initial stood for Yoren, the name of Remy’s
grandfather on his mother’s side. Corks had joked with him that he had a
family duty to give his own son a middle name that began with ‘z,’ to
keep the family tradition of alphabetically progressing middle names
alive. It could’ve been Zane or Zed or Zarul or Zanuda or Zax or
countless others, the possibilities had been happily endless, and it had
been for Remy to decide, anyway.
Joking with Remy
about middle names had made Corks feel like he was somehow connecting
with his own father, understanding the man more and getting to know him
in a way he’d never had the chance to do in life.
Remy
never had a son, and, though Corks suspected there was something left
of Remy somewhere, it wasn’t really him anymore, no, it was…just the
virus.
The scene in his head kept developing, like a
strip of photographic film taking a chilling, chemical bath, and Corks
saw that in the tangle of zombie limbs, Remy wasn’t a man in the prime
of his life as he’d been before the outbreak, but a mindless, physical
ruin showing break upon break…upon break.
New Crozet
is purgatory, Corks’s mind sang to him in the mocking lilt that it had
perfected over the last decade. It’s the ultimate punishment for those
unworthy even of hell.
That means you, Corks. You. You
must’ve done some seriously rank shit to earn your comeuppance, and
you’re livin’ it up now, oh yes you are.
Focus, he
told himself. Focus on the present, on your job. You have a duty to New
Crozet, to your people, to the people who are left.
Shutting
his eyes he managed to pull the curtain shut on the vision of an undead
New Crozet, and the torturous performance of his synapses was forced
into an intermission.
There was a mental sigh of
relief…which was cut short when a dragging foot poked out from under the
curtain, and then a human shape pressed into the corded burgundy fabric
above the foot, and he knew it was only a matter of time until the
zombies fought their clumsy way past the shutter for Act Two.
He
opened his eyes and looked down. These were his people, and he was
charged with taking care of them, and he’d be damned—more so, completely
so—if he failed now. Straightening to his full height, just shy of six
feet, he thrust his chest forward and sucked in his nonexistent gut,
catching a stronger whiff of the rot in the air.
In
the days soon after the outbreak, he’d been unable to keep from gagging
when the stench that was wafting up to the tower was around him, but
now, his stomach held its ground easily.
He aimed,
knowing that this was where it could get dicey, and centered the
zombie’s head in his rifle sight. He’d been out in the field with Senna
and Alan many times in the past, and in spite of this exercise’s
relative safety…well, that was just it, it was only relative. And if
something went wrong, well…
Corks glanced at the two
locked gates behind the people at the fence, catching a glimpse of the
town, where a scatter of dim lights was emanating from the shadowy
silhouettes of houses. Even with the zombie closing in, the town looked
peaceful, unworried, in a quiet and well-earned repose.
Separating
Alan, Senna, and Rosemary from New Crozet’s interior and faint, hopeful
illumination, were two inner gates, which were locked, and if the
approaching zombie or any of its kind found a way through the outer
gate, then Senna, Rosemary, and Alan would have nowhere to flee.
The
inner gates wouldn’t be opened for them, and if not for them, certainly
not for any other New Crozet citizen in their place. They’d be forced
to deal with the threat themselves, walled in by gates on a narrow strip
of ground, with only the help of Corks from his watchtower.
The
three gates could only be opened in sequence, and no two could ever be
opened at the same time. Well, technically they could be, but that
wasn’t allowed under any circumstances, and this rule, that only one
gate be opened at any given time, was the strictest one New Crozet had,
and anyone discovered breaking it would be expelled, a punishment that
meant certain death.
You could survive outside the
perimeter for some length of time, especially if you were skilled at
spotting, but, even then, the virus’s progress could only be delayed.
The
zombies, even while dormant, always crept closer to you. They were
blind and drawn only to noise, but the virus sharpened their sense of
hearing so that even the faintest sound was enough to attract them, and
the noise you’d make, as an uninfected human, was the best of all, a
sensory delicacy that the virus needed to stuff into its hungrily gaping
mouth and suck all the juices from.
Of course, the
sounds made by your helpless movements were just an appetizer, and the
main course was your flesh, and, if the virus was lucky enough for you
to be a child, a little boy or girl who’d made it for so long after the
outbreak; the special du jour would be your fear, your anguish, your
suffering, as it dawned on you that you’d been bitten and were turning,
graduating from the zombie boot camp with flying colors.
That…that
fear, that knowing anguish, was the most delectable of spices on the
virus’s tongue, and of increasing rarity these days, what with so few
people left.
The real clincher was that even if you
were good enough to spot the zombies, the virus’s legions of feelers,
coming, your instinct—that built-in, human instinct—was to run, and if
you did, you’d make noise, and the faster you tried to get away, the
louder you’d get, and the faster the zombies would come, slipping by
degrees out of dormancy until…
The break.
And after that, after they were broken, there was little hope left.
If
you were like most people, you’d run when you saw the diseased
viciousness closing in behind you, and if you hadn’t been a sprinter
before the outbreak, you’d learn quick, or not, and that would take care
of itself, because the zombies were blazing fast after they broke, like
flashes of death running after you while your lungs burned and your
muscles cried out for air and your heart for mercy. But the virus’s
kind, they didn’t need air, ’cause they don’t need no stinking fuel, no,
they want only one thing, and it’s the same thing they run on, too, a
mastery of perpetual motion if there ever was one.
All they want, all they need, and wantonly at that, is to put the virus in you, so it can eat you alive.
5
Senna allowed herself a backward glance, reassuring herself
that Alan was still behind her, and, had she needed it, that would’ve
helped brace her for what was about to happen, but she didn’t need it,
because this was routine and safe, for the most part. They were inside
the perimeter, and though something could always go wrong, the elements
that could be controlled here, were.
Past Alan, she
could see that the town was quiet, encapsulated in a semi-darkness made
of night, moonlight, moonlit reflections, and the dim, wandering
emissions of lamps from a few of the houses.
The
lights were low because it was late, but also because electricity was
carefully rationed to avoid overloading the transmission lines. An
overload might require Senna, Alan, and some of the other experienced
townspeople to risk their lives traveling outside the perimeter for
repairs.
A person could be kicked out for wasting
power, but it had never been done, even with drunks like Larry Knapp who
frequently passed out with their lights on. He was the town’s expert
imbiber, after all, and New Crozet looked after its own, such as they
were.
People didn’t use that much power anymore
anyway, hardly running ACs in the summer or using appliances, as if
electricity had gone out of style over the years. Maybe it was because
turning the machines on brought the past to life, reminding them all of
what was lost for good and it was better not to stir up those feelings,
better to sweat it out in the heat of summer without the latest soap
opera on the tube than to dredge up idle sharp things.
The
zombie had now closed most of the distance to the open window, in front
of which the three townspeople were standing. Given the state of its
body, its bones, it was a wonder the thing didn’t fall over—you had to
give it to the virus sometimes.
Rosemary edged closer
to Senna, and Alan took in the movement with his peripheral vision, but
his gaze remained fixed on the open frame.
Up in the
tower, Corks said, “Here it comes,” letting the words spill out just
under his breath. “Hell on earth.” He set his jaw, firmed up his grip on
the rifle, and braced himself.
Opting to skip any
further introductions, the zombie thrust its misshapen head through the
open window, scraping off a scraggly, decay-chewed ear in the frame. The
loss of the ear was like a small dead Lego popping off of a larger Lego
structure, said larger structure being just as lifeless as the
earpiece—no bleeding, hardly any wound, no harm no foul.
Its
mouth was working furiously, snapping at the air with the four teeth it
had managed to keep unclaimed by the elements, chipped and blackened
though they were, each separated from the others by pockets of gum so
decayed that the collapsed tooth sockets weren’t visible.
An
eye was missing, its empty socket fringed with tattered eyelid remains,
and the eye that was left was bulging out of its hole, looking like it
had been caught on something and pulled out partway.
Then
the zombie opened its mouth wide enough to unhinge its deformed jaws,
and its rot-blackened nub of tongue lolled out to the limit, reaching
for the girl with the virus’s desperation.
“Now,” Senna said. “Squeeze the trigger, just like we practiced.”
Raising
the gun, Rosemary tried to keep the weapon upright and aimed at the
intruding, rotten head, which now appeared to be stuck in the window,
but her fingers were rubbery and numb and she felt as if the gun might
tumble out of her hands.
She’d known what she was
going to have to do at the fence before they’d come there, had been
preparing herself for it mentally, practicing each step in her mind, but
now, in spite of all that, she found that she was more afraid than
she’d ever been in her life. Children were kept away from the perimeter
so she’d never seen a zombie up close and the sight was more horrible
than she’d imagined.
She wanted to turn and run,
wanted to get away more than anything else in the world, but she
wouldn’t because Senna and Alan were there, and she wasn’t going to be
weak in front of them, and as much as the tears wanted to come—they were
already there, ready and waiting behind her eyes—she wouldn’t allow it,
she wouldn’t surrender to fear.
Senna stepped forward
and steadied Rosemary’s hands just as the girl’s own resolve was
strengthening, as if she’d known what was going through Rosemary’s head
and when to step in for that final push. Probably, she did know, in the
same way she knew when a dormant zombie was about to break.
“Do it now,” Senna said firmly.
Rosemary
obeyed. Holding the gun steady with both hands, she squeezed the
trigger, and the gun coughed, emitting a pathetic noise from its sound
suppressor. Though it would have preferred more fanfare, the bullet flew
regardless.
6
The first silenced shot put a hole in the zombie’s nose, to
the right of center, the bullet forging a dark pathway into putrefying
flesh.
There was a short pause, like a stutter, as the
zombie’s head jerked backward, and then it was straining to get through
the window once more.
Choking back a whimper, Rosemary squeezed the trigger again.
The
second bullet found the empty eye socket and there was another pause in
the zombie’s movements, but this time, there was no restart.
The zombie went limp, its head sagging over the window frame, which kept it hanging in place like an accidental gallows.
The
girl took a breath, and it felt like the first one she’d had in a long
while. Eyes wide and realizing her entire body was shaking, she looked
at the gun in her hands with wonder, and then turned and stared up at
Senna, whose hand touched down on her shoulder and gave a brief squeeze.
Then Rosemary turned and looked at Alan, who nodded, trying to make the gesture supportive.
After
failing to force a smile onto her face, Rosemary looked away, her gaze
drawn uncomfortably to the corpse that was hanging partway through the
fence. Senna took the gun from her and put it away, and Rosemary was
glad to be rid of the thing.
Alan was pleased, and he
was so pleased in fact, that he almost smiled, and if the circumstances
had been rosier, he might have, because he was happy that Rosemary had
fired again after the first shot hadn’t worked, and that she’d done so
on her own. Getting the children used to the zombies enough so they
could do more than freeze up, so they could take action and fight and
get out of harm’s way, was the first step. As Alan and Senna knew well,
being frozen by fear did not a survivor make.
Alan
went to the limply hanging head, and its stench reached for him, the
familiar notes it played on his olfactory nerves recalling scenes from
his past, images that he normally suppressed.
Now it
was the Voltaire II flamethrower’s turn to work. He hefted it, swung it
backward and then swiftly forward, connecting its muzzle with the
sagging and disfigured jaws that had sought them all so doggedly moments
earlier.
The strike with the thrower was a trained
behavior, engrained in him through years of service on the rec-crews,
with Senna, and with many others, most of whom were now gone, and not to
settlements like New Crozet. Hitting a zombie corpse with a different
part of the Voltaire II, one that wouldn’t later be cleaned by the
fire’s heat, risked contaminating the weapon and returning to town with a
piece of poisoned flesh hanging stuck to the Voltaire II’s chassis.
He
hit it again, and one more time, and knocked the grotesque beast back
through the fence and out of the town, where it fell on the bare dirt
and kicked up a meager cloud of dust around its lifeless body.
From
his post in the watchtower, Corks thought the corpse, lit up as it was
in the spotlights, made an image that was infernal enough to decorate
the cavernous hallways of hell. He hadn’t been religious before the
apocalypse, but now that demons had crawled rotten from the nether and
occupied the space of the living, faith seemed an appropriate response.
And better late than never.
Alan climbed a ladder to
the platform that had been sitting, parked in its space against the
outer gate, waiting for them to be done with the first part of their
work. He went to the edge, aimed the Voltaire II, and fired.
Flames
leapt from the flamethrower’s muzzle and spilled eagerly through the
chain link, engulfing the corpse and window as Alan swept the Voltaire
II from side to side, the stringy muscles of his arms and upper back
drawing taut under the strain.
Beads of sweat grew on
his face and glimmered in the firelight, which illuminated his brown
hair, giving it a reddish tinge. When he was satisfied that enough of
the zombie had caught, he let go of the trigger and gestured for
Rosemary to join him up on the platform, though it made him near sick to
do it.
Was there shame in making a child look at this? Maybe, but what choice did they have?
She
had to see it, to be desensitized, gradually, and that was why he’d
climbed the ladder and ignited the zombie without her, because she
didn’t need to see the full extent of it, not yet.
She’d
probably seen more than enough through the fence tonight, but maybe
not, and if she saw all of it before the fire could drown it out, there
could be questions that were better left for another time.
Why did they look like that? What did the virus do to their bodies, to their bones, to make them look that way?
Yes,
it was better to talk about all of that later, after she’d had a chance
to digest this fine morsel of experience. It was a wonder there were
children at all, and ones who’d grown up in settlements without ever
seeing…without ever knowing…
There would be questions
either way, he knew, about what she’d heard, what she’d smelled, what
she’d done and why. But that would come in the future, when she was no
longer too scared to ask them, and that would buy them all some time,
for a while, anyway.
Rosemary climbed the ladder and
got up on the platform next to Alan. Without being prompted to look, she
craned her neck toward the flames while keeping her feet away from the
platform’s edge.
The corpse let out a series of pops, spitting embers at the fence, like a poorly-timed salute of moldered fireworks.
Frowning,
Alan looked at the tree line once more. There was no movement there
other than that of the shadows, which were creeping back and forth as
their conductor, the moon, floated in and out of cloud cover.
He
looked behind him, making sure Senna was still there, then up at the
watchtower, where Corks was, glancing between them and the forest.
Something wasn’t right. But that was a matter to bring up later.
Alan turned back to Rosemary.
“You did fine tonight,” he said.
He
wanted to ask her if she was alright, and tell her that she’d been
brave, but it was better not to weaken the girl’s resolve with talk like
that. She could do better than she had tonight, and she should. She
would need to be far better if, God-forbid, she was ever outside, or if
the perimeter was breached.
7
“The virus is in
the soft matter,” Alan said, “in the skin, meat, organs, and bone marrow
and it doesn’t go away when we kill them. It stays there and if we eat
the meat or if we have an open wound that comes in contact with the
meat, the virus gets in us, and we become like them. That’s why we burn
them, and we keep burning them until we can see that the bones are
charred and all the soft matter, everything that can have blood or
liquid in it, is gone.”
Rosemary was looking from
Alan’s face to the burning corpse, doing an admirable job of keeping her
trembling down to a minimum and entranced by the image that his glasses
were reflecting, that of a burning carcass shooting sparks from its
grizzled remains.
“Do you understand, Rosemary?” he asked.
She nodded.
“Good.”
He
noticed movement in the periphery, turned to track it, and his eyes
found the tree line, but he could still see only the shifting of the
shadows there. Apparently, musical chairs in the autumn moonlight was a
game they didn’t tire of. He turned around and watched as Senna moved to
the window at the far end of the alley and looked through it. After a
moment she turned to him and gave a brief, puzzled expression, and he
nodded. She’d seen it too.
“All the meat has to be burned away,” he said, turning back to Rosemary and reiterating the point.
The
creature’s hide, now a burning patchwork of matted fur and ulcerated
flesh, was beginning to show the sinew and bone beneath it. The fire was
working its way into the muscle meat, and thin smoke trails rose up
into the night air when the flames pressed into a moist spot.
He
wondered how there could be any moisture left in the zombies after all
these years, but it was no more unlikely than a virus that killed its
hosts and animated their bodies after death.
Probably from soaking up the rain, he thought.
A gust of wind snatched up the smoke, lifting it to the platform, and the heavy odor of rotten meat burning made him grimace.
Trying
to avoid the smoke with no eye to what was behind her, Rosemary stepped
backward and though the ball of her foot was met by the wood of the
platform, her heel found only air. She screamed as she began to fall and
immediately clapped her hands over her mouth, so much stronger was her
training to stay quiet at the fence than her instinct to grab hold of
something to stop her fall.
His jaw clenched, Corks
saw Alan catch hold of Rosemary’s elbow with one hand, and pull her back
onto the platform effortlessly as smoke from the corpse billowed around
them.
Alan was only slightly taller than average and
wiry, but years of carrying the Voltaire II and his survival gear had
made him stronger than his size suggested. Even if Rosemary had been a
full grown man, he would have had no trouble.
“Be
careful,” he whispered. “No matter how bad the smell may get, no matter
how unpleasant the situation you find yourself in, you always have to
stay focused. It’s better to hide in the most disgusting hole than to
show yourself to the virus because you’re uncomfortable.”
“I understand,” Rosemary said, stammering. “I’m sorry.”
“Now
look,” he said, pointing through the chain link at the zombie. “Do you
see how the bones are turning brown and opening up in places?”
Rosemary nodded, stifling a cough. Unabated, the smoke was continuing to surround them.
Senna
looked on, her face wearing an expression of familiar distaste. She and
Alan both knew the girl had asthma, and they were trying to be as quick
about it as possible, but these points were vital, and had to be made
crystal clear.
“That’s a good sign,” Alan said. “It
means that the fire is getting in them and purging the virus from the
deepest parts of the body.”
Rosemary wheezed, and Alan knew he had to cut it short.
“It’s
hot enough now to burn all the way through without us watching,” he
said. “Alright. That’s enough for tonight. You can climb down now.”
The wind shifted, directing the acrid smoke to the tree line and then westward along it.
Rosemary
began to climb down from the platform on unsteady legs. Senna stood
behind her in case she stumbled, but she managed to climb all the way
down without help. Alan descended the ladder after her.
Senna
put an arm around the girl and they backed away from the gate. When
they were aligned with the sentry’s tower, Senna signaled to Corks, who
nodded and began to open the gates gladly, relieved that the exercise
was over.
Alan stayed behind for a few moments,
looking through the window while the middle gate was opened, watching
the flames eat away the zombie’s carcass. The putrid meat had
disintegrated quickly, and with it now gone, the bones were winking at
him, seeming to want to discuss something. That was all in his head, he
knew, but he sometimes got that way when he watched them burn.
The bones, he thought. God, the bones. What the virus did to them, seeing it could drill madness straight into your brain.
The break. The fucking break, over and over and over until they looked like this.
8
Alan
turned away from the flames, and, after closing the window in the
fence, caught up with Rosemary and Senna, who were already through the
middle gate and waiting for him to catch up. Senna still had her arm
around Rosemary’s shoulders, and the girl was trembling. When Alan was
beside them, the middle gate closed and the next one opened, allowing
them all to slip into New Crozet proper, where they belonged.
Rosemary
was walking warily, taking small, hesitant steps, as if she suspected
the ground might give way under her feet. There was a wheeze here and
there, but her breathing was under control.
“What was that?” she asked, with only a slight tremor in her voice. “What animal?”
“A deer,” Senna said.
“A
deer,” Rosemary repeated thoughtfully. She was trying to drown the
strain of what she’d just done in rational thought, understand and have
everything explained so it wasn’t so frightening anymore, and perhaps
less ugly.
She’d been too scared to look very closely
at the zombie, or rather, to really see what was there, and that was for
the best, at least for now.
She asked, “Did you ever
eat a deer, a healthy one I mean, before the virus?” The children had
heard of meat-eating from the adults, and knew it was something from the
past.
Senna nodded. “Yes.”
Rosemary considered this. “Did you eat all of it, all the parts?”
Senna
thought she understood the question, because children born during or
after the apocalypse, who’d never eaten meat, didn’t have much of a
concept of what parts of an animal were eaten. “Only some of the meat,”
Senna said, then shrugged, thought about telling Rosemary that pretty
much all animal parts had been eaten or put to some commercial use, but
said nothing.
“Was it good?” Rosemary asked.
Alan
was walking behind them, curious about what Senna was going to say
because he thought she was a lot better with children; he always seemed
to say the wrong thing.
Raising his right shoulder as he listened, he tried without success to work the crick out of his upper back.
The
Voltaire II flamethrower he was carrying was a light model as far as
throwers went, but he felt the strain in between his shoulder blades all
the same, and the muscle pain always came with a sharp, poking feeling
at the base of his spine. Now, as always, it was the inside of his right
shoulder blade that was giving him the most trouble, reminding him of
the toll the Voltaire II had taken on his body in the three years he’d
carried it after the outbreak.
Ignore the ache was the
name of the game, and he played it a lot. He certainly didn’t feel
young anymore, not in any sense of the word.
Senna
frowned and shook her head. “Not at all. Bitter and tough. Not a bit of
fat on it, barely worth the effort of hunting and eating. I don’t miss
it.”
Pursing her lips, she glanced back at Alan, and
he nodded, understanding that answering with a lie was the right thing
to do, and he knew he would’ve screwed that up. She had an empathy that
he couldn’t manage, and which he wasn’t sure he understood in the first
place.
That’s the problem, Alan thought, I’m too
honest. But shouldn’t they know? Maybe not yet. Digestible bits, here
and there, one at a time. There had been more than enough to chew on
tonight.
Alan remembered meat well, and dreamt of it
often. Apple smoked bacon shone through as the one he missed the most,
but he’d take anything these days: burnt and stringy chicken, an old
egg, blue mold-infested cheese, anything with some animal protein.
Some
survivors lost their minds over it, killing and eating the zombie
animals and knowing full well that the tainted meat would infect them
with the virus. It hadn’t happened in New Crozet for almost five years,
but before then, one to two meat-eaters a year had been the name of the
game.
We’re due for another one, Alan thought grimly. Past due.
The
Voltaire II was radiating a good deal of heat outward, still purring,
baby, rolling waves of hot air out through the slits in her heatproof
chassis. This feeling of warmth was familiar to Alan, who was holding
the Voltaire II at a practiced distance from his body by her insulated
bits.
The heat had once been uncomfortable, but not
anymore. He’d burned thousands of zombie corpses, and the cooling
flamethrower recalled the feeling of walking away from the infernos,
intact, more or less unscathed—though far from untouched mentally—and,
most importantly, uninfected.
“What about when the others say they miss meat?” Rosemary asked. “Were the other meats better?”
“No,”
Senna said, wishing the adults would stop bringing it up with the kids.
What the hell was the point of that anyway? “They just say that because
they miss the option of eating it.”
Rosemary frowned. “What do you mean?”
“Sometimes,
when something isn’t around anymore, we miss the possibility of having
it, even if we don’t like it that much. Grass is greener sort of thing.”
Rosemary looked thoughtful. “Oh.” She had the
ability, usually reserved to children, to switch gears rapidly, and now
that she was focused on the meat eating question, the traumatic
experience she’d just gone through felt dulled. Being easily distracted
could be a real asset at times.
“Come on,” Senna said, putting an encouraging hand on Rosemary’s shoulder, “let’s get you inside where it’s warm.”
It was past ten, and a fresh autumn chill had entered the air.
“Okay,”
Rosemary said, looking somber, but no longer distraught. She’d done
what she was supposed to do, and it had been horrible, but, with Senna
and Alan’s help, she’d been able to will herself through it. Rosemary
hoped that she would never have to do it again, but if she did, she
would be more prepared for it than she’d been an hour earlier.
From
his post in the sentry’s tower, Corks had nervously watched the trio of
townspeople pass through the middle gate, then he’d closed the gate
behind them and opened the last one in the sequence, and after that he
felt a brief upsurge of calm because Rosemary and Senna and Alan would
return to their homes unharmed.
There were holly
bushes at either side of the innermost gate, planted there by Amanda
Fortelberry and Betty Jane Oswalt, two of New Crozet’s founding
stalwarts, with the aid of some of the younger folk, of course. The
bushes’ glossy, pointy leaves were drawing luminescence from the
moonlight, giving the bushes a faint aura of silver, and when Rosemary,
Senna, and Alan had passed through this last gate, Corks saw Rosemary
and Alan, who were walking to either side of Senna, pick up some of the
holly luster.
Corks rubbed his eyes, and now that
Senna, Alan, and Rosemary were well inside, he shut the inner gate and
watched them walk away until their forms began to merge with the shadows
cast by New Crozet’s dimly-glowing lights. Then he turned back to the
town’s entrance and flipped the heavy switch that controlled the
spotlights.
The big lights blinked off their beams
with only a flicker or two of delay, seeming to say to the seasoned
watchman: there’s still a long shift ahead of you and we’re sorry about
that, but we’re done so goodnight. He nodded, used to it as he was, and
watched the afterglow of the spotlights hang in the air like a wicked
half-grin until it was vacuumed up by the advancing dark.
9
The
deer’s burning corpse was casting a shallow, shifting light on the path
into the woods. As the fire receded, the darkening skeleton winked up
at New Crozet’s gate and elevated watchman, the bones sizzling and
gasping almost invitingly when untapped treasure troves of marrow or
gristle, or likely both, were licked up by the fire’s diminishing
tongue.
The flames wanted more, were asking for more,
but there was hardly anything left. The bones that were now being
crisped had formed the framework of a living animal once, with ample
meat and not an indecent amount of fat for burning, but that was more
than a decade ago, before the end of the world.
Corks
watched the changing pattern of light play in the clearing, his trained
eyes searching the ground for other zombies, but none appeared. He’d
expected them to come a while ago, and now, as they kept on not showing
themselves, his agitation grew. Squinting at the fire, he knew that
Alan’s flare and the charging deer’s noise should have been more than
enough to attract others, and the fire’s crackling should have been
enough, too.
What did it mean? Where were the other
zombies? Market day was still two days away, so it was too early for the
traders’ caravans to be attracting the forest zombies.
Corks
thought that Alan and Senna had been surprised by the lack of zombies
too, but he was too far up in the watchtower to tell for sure. He’d been
the night sentry on many nights when children were brought to the outer
gate for this exercise, and he couldn’t remember a single time when
Alan’s flare had brought only one zombie from the forest.
Definitely
too early for the traders to be getting close, Corks thought. Where are
the animals? The zombies, he corrected himself.
The
more he thought about it, the more it bothered him. Why hadn’t Alan and
Senna made more of a fuss? He hadn’t seen any discussion take place, but
that didn’t necessarily mean anything, either, because Alan and Senna
had been focused on Rosemary.
It wasn’t that he wanted
more to come, of course. It was bad enough that Rosemary had to deal
with any at all. At her age, she should have been excited about
Halloween coming up in just a few days, putting up ghoulish decorations
with her family and thinking about the costume she’d wear and all the
candy she’d get to eat.
Did she even know that it was
October, or what year it was? For that matter, did Senna and Alan know?
Sometimes Corks thought he was the only one who still tracked time on a
calendar. And was that a strange thing to do now, rather than just live
by the sun and seasons?
Shaking his head, he wished
that Rosemary wouldn’t have to see any more than what she’d just seen,
or to do any more than what she’d just done. But it was necessary, and
she would likely be required to kill again in order to survive, in an
uncontrolled environment much more dangerous than the practice field to
which she’d been brought tonight. Childhood had to be cut short for her
to survive, or at least to stand a better chance.
It
was something the children had to experience, something they had to see
with their own eyes and do with their own hands. Their small fingers had
to be the ones pulling the triggers, because that was what it took to
really understand the world beyond the fence, and that it and the
zombies living there were real, and always trying to get in. If his own
son had had such training, Corks knew, he might still have been alive.
His
thoughts turned back to the scant response to Alan’s flare, and he
decided he might bring it up at the town hall meeting the next day. He
told himself that it was nothing, a meaningless coincidence, but trying
to dismiss it, unusual as it was, made him even more uncomfortable.
Might
as well get settled into unease now, he thought. There was a long shift
ahead of him to dwell on what he hadn’t seen. The thermos of chicory
coffee caught his eye and he picked it up. Unscrewing the top to let the
earthy smell of the fake coffee reach him, he began to pace.
10
Aside
from the crackling of the zombie deer, the night was sounding only with
the rhythmic chirp and wing beats of insects. The watchtower’s dim
light was attracting moths, mosquitoes, and their many winged friends,
some of whom were unsettlingly large. But Corks was used to that, for
the most part.
A moth flitted and fluttered around the
glow of the light as he watched. Would the insects be next? The virus
had already taken all the other animals, and if it jumped to insects,
how could the town be protected then?
Even if insects
lost their ability to fly following infection, as the birds had, they’d
likely keep their ability to climb. And even though their climbing would
become clumsy, they’d probably make it up the concrete and through the
chain link after a few practice go’s, and then that would be all she
wrote.
The coffee’s smell was wafting up at him, but it gave him no comfort.
That
won’t happen, he told himself. It’s been too long since the last
mutation already, so there won’t be any more. The insects can’t get it,
because they’re too different. They can’t.
It was
difficult to rely on that sort of logic, because a great variety of
animals had succumbed to infection. After humans, the virus had jumped
to other mammals, and then to birds, and then to fish. Corks couldn’t be
sure that insects and fish were more different than mammals and birds.
Maybe insects were just as different from mammals as fish were.
Perhaps
all that was worth knowing was that the virus was smarter than the
world and all of its creatures, and where it had found ways of entering
new species, it would do so once more.
Briefly, he
felt gripped by a panic-fueled urge to exterminate all the damned bugs
and insects in the world. His breathing became more rapid and uneven.
This was when it always became hard to control.
“I’m
watching over the town, over New Crozet, my town,” Corks said as calmly
as he could between gasps for air. “I have to keep it together. I can
keep it together. I do keep it together. Everything’s under control.
Everything’s okay. It’ll be another uneventful night, and New Crozet
will go on another day. We’ll go on.”
Hardening his
resolve, he stood up straighter and reminded himself of the job he had
to do, and that he was going to do it extremely well. He wouldn’t allow
himself anything less.
As the wings beat frantically
around him, he took a tepid sip from his thermos, and then another,
before screwing it up again and putting it back in its place under his
chair. He often fell victim to anxiety attacks when he was in the
watchtower, but rarely this early in the night. They usually began just
before his shift ended, when his time at his post was running out.
The
anxiety came to him on most of his shifts at that time, just before
first light. The attacks were characterized by an overwhelming feeling
that the world was out of control, and that he couldn’t control
anything, not even the smallest of details around him, but that he had
to try. As the end of his shift drew nearer, this mania would
metastasize progressively, causing him to close his eyes for set
intervals, reopen them briefly and then close them again, the sight of
the reality that surrounded him too much to bear.
On
this night, the anxiety took a different turn. Rather than shutting his
eyes for counts of five or ten or fifteen as he was prone to do, he
found himself staring at the dirt road toward the forest, unblinking and
unable to shift his attention away. He felt that the image of the road
was burning itself into his mind, carving its dust and gravel into the
soft matter of his brain to create an indelible impression there,
crisscrossing the folds.
Corks tried to look away but couldn’t even turn his neck.
Beads
of sweat formed at the fringes of his receding hairline and ran down
his brow, collecting over his eyebrows in preparation for the next leap.
Moments later he was hyperventilating, and a sheen of sweat was draping
his forehead, then sweat was soaking through his shirt at the armpits
and lower back. Although the pressure to wipe his face was great, his
arm seemed to be made of lead.
The unmistakable buzz
of a mosquito nestled in his ears, and then another, and another, until
the movement of the bloodsuckers’ wings was all he could hear. A swarm
was surrounding him, attracted by the delicious scent of his sweat,
which was seeping out of him in profuse fashion. There was bug spray in
the tower with him, just a foot away, and he should have reapplied it,
except he couldn’t reach for it, or, for that matter, move at all.
The
winged party-crashers closed in and landed and sunk anchors in his skin
where the blood was closest to the surface. These were the best
tethering points, if you asked them.
They couldn’t get
at his ankles, which were covered with socks and pants, and there were
some darned good spots there, but they had easy access to his face and
neck and wrists, with which they’d have to make do. There was more than
enough hitching space, so they docked to him and slaked their thirst
while their winged bodies were caressed by the gentle stirring of the
unseasonably chill night air.
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