William Rose - The Dead & Dying

And then we were falling, toppling, road maps and empty soda cans tumbling like weightless astronauts through the compartment. After a few seconds, my entire body felt a jolt like it had never known. Pain flared through every joint in my body simultaneously and I tasted blood, warm and salty, as I inadvertently bit through my lip. Everything still rolling now, but punctuated with bangs and crashes that whipped my head back and forth, pain shooting through my neck and shoulders.

We ended up upside down and I sat there for a moment, blinking and trying to make sense of exactly what had just happened, wondering where that high pitched ringing that was suddenly in my ears was coming from.

“Move!”

Doc had already slid free of his seatbelt and was scurrying through the twisted remains of the driver’s side window, kicking free the little clumps of safety glass that still remained. Though it hurt like hell to even breathe, I somehow found the strength to follow him and was soon crawling across grass and staggering to my feet. Doc had already regained his balance and had turned to look back toward the way we’d come, one hand pressed tightly against his side as if he were hugging himself with a single arm.

I turned to look as well. The rotters on the bridge, in their single minded pursuit of the living, had done the same thing as the zombie on the overpass. We watched them falling and toppling through the air, a seemingly endless waterfall of decaying flesh as they spilled over the side; their bodies hit the ground with dull thuds, the snapping of bones so loud that it was almost like the constant crackling of a fire hidden somewhere in their midst.

Doc slowly shook his head as if he were looking upon a mystery of nature.

“Crazy fuckin’ zombies… ”

I felt like an idiot standing there, grinning at my friend as wave after wave plummeted toward the ground: but the sun was warm, the birds in the forest behind us were chirping, and we were alive, by God, we were alive !

“New rule, Doc.” I said as I spat blood from my busted mouth. “Number twenty-two: Stay the hell out of the cities.”

Doc started to laugh then and I soon joined in, slapping him on the back as we began trying to salvage what supplies we could from the fallen remains of our once-proud chariot: I thought again how the sun was warm, the birds in the forest were chirping, and we were alive… if only for another day.

It was only later, as we limped through the woods with our supplies jangling and clanking in the “backpacks” we’d fashioned from a piece of tarp and bits of cord from the car’s trunk that my mind turned to the past. Maybe it was the way the sunlight dappled through the canopy of leaves overhead, the way the shadows danced over the forest floor as the wind rustled through the branches; or perhaps it was the smell of honeysuckle and pine mixed with that old vegetation smell that’s almost like mildew but not quite.

Whatever the cause, I grew quiet as we trekked through the wilderness. At one point in my life, I probably would have been appreciating the beauty of the leaves that had just begun turning into the brilliant yellows and oranges of fall. I would have found a sort of solace in the gurgling of the streams we leaped across and the way the squirrels scampered up the sides of trees in an almost corkscrew pattern.

As it was, though, my thoughts and emotions were as jumbled and twisted as that wreck of a car we’d left in our wake.

I was tired; so tired that I just wanted to lay down on the forest floor and sleep for a thousand years. A dreamless sleep, preferably, where the faces of those I had known and loved, or even those I had simply met in passing, didn’t haunt me with visions of a past that could never be recovered. And yet I kept walking, kept putting one foot in front of the other for reasons I myself couldn’t begin to understand.

After what must have been nearly forty minutes, I cleared my throat and glanced over at my companion. But it was only a quick look. I knew I would never be able to hold his gaze while I told the story I was about to share.

“Doc,” I finally said, “I ever tell you about the time I shot a kid?”

I had read about people looking down the barrel of a gun: how time seems to slow down and they look back over the course of their lives, flashing back to childhood or perhaps a wedding or the birth of a child; sometimes they even notice the smallest details of the weapon pointed at them, from the darkness of the bore to the smudged fingerprint on the barrel. In real life, however, it wasn’t like that at all.

In fact, it was all over so fast that I only had enough time to throw my hands up as if believed I were Wonder Woman and my bracelets could deflect the bullet. At the same time, there was a sharp crack and a puff of smoke rose like magic from the pistol.

There was no time to think a final thought, no time to beg for mercy; there was only the blast of the gun immediately followed by something that almost sounded like a gnat whizzing by my head.

My muscles had tensed in expectation of the shot and for a moment I couldn’t understand why the burst of pain never came. My hands scrambled over my body, desperately searching for the blood I was sure had to be oozing from the wound but coming up clean time and time again.

Doc let out a long whoop and threw both of his hands straight into the air, bouncing on the tips of his toes as a smile spread across his face.

“Son of a bitch, Carl… one shot! Who da man? You da man!”

Carl brushed past me and I turned in bewilderment, feeling like a person who’d walked into a theater halfway through the movie. A thousand thoughts raced through my head and I felt as though my entire body sighed as the certainty that I had not been shot took hold.

Carl had made his way to the side of the silo and I tried to remember if the body had been lying there before. Didn’t Doc say they had killed two of those things? Or had he said a few ?

The corpse was lying on its back and I could see blood seeping into the snow, radiating out from its head like a crimson halo. It was dressed in a ratty, blue bathrobe with a single bunny slipper adorning one foot; the other was bare and I could see black, swollen splotches on the toes and ankle.

“Freshie.” Carl called back, his voice sounding distant and muffled by the blanket of snow surrounding us. “Ain’t been dead more than a week I reckon. Maybe two seein’ as how cold it’s been.”

He crouched and began rummaging through the creature’s pockets.

“If there’s any more around here,” Doc shouted back, “that gunshot is going to bring them running. We need to get going.”

“Hot damn! Nearly full pack of smokes here. Lighter too.”

Carl pocketed the cigarettes and undid the loose knot in the robe’s belt. Then he rolled the thing onto its side and slipped one of the beefy arms out of the sleeve.

Doc squinted in the glare of the sun and scanned the horizon.

“Come on, Carl. We gotta get a move on!”

Carl came running back, his boots crunching through the icy crust, and the robe cradled in his arms like a baby; the fallen zombie was left naked and face down…. For a moment I almost felt sorry for the thing. It had once been someone’s son, perhaps a husband and father. It had worried about the same things we all used to: bills, the cost of gasoline, terrorism. Now the last shred of dignity had been stripped from its body and it found true death in the same manner it had originally came into the world: cold, naked, and alone.

Maybe Carl saw something in my eyes as he passed. Or perhaps he instinctively knew what I was thinking.

“There were bits of flesh still stuck in its teeth.” he said. “And I guaran-fucking-tee it wasn’t chicken.”