William Rose - The Dead & Dying

But then I heard Mommy’s voice in my head and she was sayin’ no baby, it’s wrong, don’t do it baby. Which made me real confused ’cause I figured she would want me to get back at him for killing her but the voice just kept right on sayin’ please don’t do it, please don’t .

And I knew that Mr. Carl was lucky this time. ’Cause if it hadn’t been for my Mommy I really woulda done it and I wouldn’t have felt bad or nothin’. But instead, I really did go to sleep and all night long I dreamed that Mommy was bringin’ me hot dogs and pie and meatloaf and all kinds of good stuff. Only every time I’d get ready to take a bite Mr. Carl would show up outta nowhere and snatch it outta my hands.

Even my dreams weren’t fair and I remember thinking in them ’bout how I wanted to be one of them black birds. At least they weren’t bein’ starved to death by a killer. At least they could fly away from all of this. But if I was a bird I would peck out his eyes and poop on his head.

I really would, too.

I can’t wait for him to die.

I hate him.

I knew the kid was hungry. Hell, my own stomach felt like it was turning inward and devouring itself amid rumbles and waves of nausea. So I figured it had to have been ten times worse for the boy. He’d come from a world of coco flavored cereal in the morning. Perhaps a snack between a soup and sandwich lunch and a full spread at dinnertime. The worst hunger he’d probably ever felt was waking up in the middle of the night with thoughts of the cookie jar on the kitchen counter.

But things weren’t really looking good, ya know? I kept hoping that some poor son of a bitch might wander into town; that the zombies would go after him like flies on shit, giving us enough time to slip unnoticed into the woods. But the hours kept dragging along, day turned to night and then to day again. I rationed out the tuna as best as I could, aiming for a subtle balance between taking the edge off the cravings and making these few cans last as long as possible. Hell, I didn’t know how long we’d be holed up in that there church with those rotting bastards pounding away at the door. So I did what I thought was best. But even then, the food was gone before we even had a chance to really feel it in our bellies.

To try and help pass the time, I started reading out loud from a bible I’d found up by the pulpit. Began with “In the beginning” and just keep right on going until my throat was so dry I sounded like a sickly creek frog.

But I started thinking as I read that maybe all this had happened before. If you took the stories I was reading as history enshrouded in religious superstition, it was all too easy to start seeing the similarities.

The world, after all, had been our Eden. All of our needs had been taken care of. Everything we could ever want was right there in our garden and life was actually pretty damn easy. But then some old guy in the sky got pissed: we were cast out into the wilderness, forced to fight like animals just to secure the basics of survival. And who knows? Maybe the reason ’ole Cain bashed in his brother’s skull is that Abel had come down with the slack-jawed vacant expression of a rotter. And if little brother got a tasty little chunk of flesh during the exchange then that would sure as hell explain why the first “murderer” was condemned to wander the earth and not able to be killed by those who crossed his path wouldn’t it?

I kept these thoughts to myself though. Jason had hardly said a word since I first found him in the church and I reckon he was probably still grieving for his mother. Which was understandable. Last thing he needed was for some old fart to lay some heavy shit on him. So I just let him be and kept right on reading until I physically couldn’t talk any more.

And the hours just kept dragging on. Day turned to night and then to day again. And it didn’t take long before I had this panicked thought whispering in the back of my mind: you’re both going to starve to death. You’re never getting out of this here church….

I tried to tell myself not to listen to that voice, that I would think of something. But it’s hard to lie to yourself when your stomach feels like a shriveled walnut and your piss is as dark as wine from dehydration. It’s hard to have a positive mental attitude when all you can think about is how good some fried green tomatoes or a nice oven baked chicken would taste. Or when you actually start wondering how to go about filtering your own urine so your tongue doesn’t feel all scratchy and swollen.

Of course, it probably didn’t help matters any that I wasn’t sleeping worth a damn either. I’d lay there in the darkness, watching the boy sleep and think about how badly I’d fucked everything up. His mother was dead, we were slowly wasting away to nothing, and there was a crowd of rotters hammering away at the door. Rotters who were bound to find a way in if given enough time. And to make matters worse, I suspected that the child was beginning to crack under the strain.

Most of the day he’d sit there in his Power Rangers t-shirt, just glaring at me with eyes that almost seemed to burn with hatred. At first I thought that maybe I was just seeing that because it was how I actually felt about myself. What Doc would later tell me was called projection . But when he started getting really weird on me, I started wondering if there was more to it than that. If the boy had simply snapped.

See, he’d gotten to the point that whenever I’d ask him a question he wouldn’t answer with words. No, he’d sit there with that cold, even stare of his and wait for a few seconds to pass, forcing me to ask the question again. And then, as naturally as if he were saying hello, he’d caw like a raven in this voice that seemed too thick and raspy for such a tiny throat.

The first time he did it, I thought maybe he was playing some kind of a game that I didn’t understand. So I asked him again if he needed me to loosen the leg brace I’d made him for a bit. And the boy cawed again. Louder this time with his eyes and nostrils flaring as the sound crossed his lips. It was downright creepy and caused the little hairs on my arms to bristle just like they do right before a lightning storm.

The kid must of cawed at me for two, three days. Hard to say really, cause time had a way of getting fuzzy in that church. After about half a day of it, it’d spooked me so bad that I just stopped talking to the boy. But he kept right on doing it, anytime I would walk by or look in his direction.

It finally got so bad that he was making that crow-sound every few minutes and I felt my muscles kind of tense. I wanted to storm over to where he was sitting and give him the backside of my hand across the face, to shake him until his teeth rattled, to do anything to get him to stop making that god awful noise.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

I clenched my teeth together so tightly I could taste blood oozing from around my gums, balled my hands into fists over and over again, and paced around the church like a man on death row waiting on the Governor’s call.

Caw. Caw. Caw.

His voice caused my eardrums to feel like they were lined with broken glass and his eyes followed me no matter where I went.

Caw.

I couldn’t take it anymore. If he kept it up I was gonna start hitting him and once I started I didn’t think I’d be able to stop again. I just wanted him to shut the hell up, to use his damn words for Christ’s sake, to be a normal little boy and not some fucking basket case that I’d created through my own failures.

Caw. Caw.

I ran over to the little ladder that led up into the bell tower and started climbing my way up the rungs. I was so damn weak from hunger and exhaustion that it felt like I had a fifty pound weight attached to either ankle, but I had to get away, to just steal a few minutes of peace and fucking quiet.