William Rose - The Dead & Dying

The freshy that had leaped from the overpass in the throes of homicidal zeal looked as if it had been attacked with sledgehammers. Jagged shards of bone poked through just about every part of its body; both legs were splayed out in angles never meant for the human form to experience and the left side of its face looked as if it had caved in. But, even so, it was wiggling its way across the asphalt, inching closer and closer to the side of the car.

“Crazy fuckin’ zombies …”

I lit the cigarette and took a long, slow drag. The smoke scratched my throat and tasted like oven-baked shit, but I would be damned if I was going to die without one final puff.

But I didn’t die; not then, not there. As I swung the tire iron and squinted into the brightness of the doorway, a deep voice echoed through the silo.

“Whoa, missy, easy there. We’re alive… we’re living!”

The figure looming before me was still nothing more than a blurry silhouette but as I tried to blink the stinging away I began to realize that it was holding both hands in front of it, palms outward. For a moment I thought of a mime in the beginning stages of a Trapped In A Box routine and my mind rapidly filled in the details: black and white striped shirt, a bowler hat, face painted as white as the gloves he held up before him. And I began to laugh.

In fact, I began to laugh so hard that the tire iron thumped to the ground as I hugged my stomach with both arms. Tears leaked from the corners of my eyes and I tried to speak but every sound that began to pass through my lips seemed to become the most hysterical thing I’d ever heard.

At some point, I dropped to my knees and what had started as a laugh had somehow morphed into crying; at that moment, kneeling inside an abandoned silo in the middle of snow-blanketed fields that stretched as far as they eye could see, it really hit me: everything was gone.

Everything I had ever loved, everything that had comprised the brush strokes in my portrait of reality… a wave of mutilation had crashed down upon it all, leaving nothing but ruined reminders and artifacts amid the flotsam of rotting flesh. The world had changed in every conceivable way and there was no going back now.

Through a shimmering veil of tears, I saw the silhouette rush forward. He dropped to his knees beside me and gently pulled my face into the hollow of his shoulder; the jacket he wore was scratchy and smelled like stale sweat with an undercurrent of decay, perhaps from the splotches of blood that had dried dark against the khaki colored material. But he was alive, he was warm, he was like me….

He spoke in soft tones as his hand stroked my hair, whispering in a way that reminded me of my mother as she sat day after day in the hospital, watching my father waste away. Despite all the empirical evidence to the contrary, everything was going to be okay, it would all work out in the end: we just had to be strong and believe.

Later, I would learn that the man’s name was Doc. The group he was traveling with had noticed a couple of zombies, what they called rotters , stumbling along outside the silo, their hands running over the smooth metal as if searching for a way in.

“We figured if they were that interested in what was inside, it had to be survivors.”

There were four people in their group, so dispatching the rotters wasn’t too difficult for them: it only took a few blows to the head with an ax while the others created a diversion.

By the time Doc led me out of the silo, my eyes had adjusted to the glare of sunlight on snow. Two people were standing off to the side, bundled so tightly in layers of clothing that it was impossible to tell if they were men or women and they appeared to be talking. Another man, however, was squatting next to one of the bodies that had fallen. If he smelled the stench wafting from the blackened flesh of the corpse, he gave no sign; he simply continued to plunge his hands into the pockets of the rotter, turning them out onto the ground.

“What’s he doing?” I whispered to Doc.

The man looked up at me and I was struck by what I saw in his eyes. I had always read about people who have a haunted look to them and had always thought I understood. But mere words can never do justice to something that so thoroughly penetrates the soul. It was almost as time and space had no meaning in those brown irises: he was an old man with a lifetime of sorrow and regret; he was a young boy coping with his first experience with death; he was every age in between… every pang, every ounce of remorse and pain, all trapped behind those eyes.

“What’s it look like I’m doing? I’m goin’ through its pockets.”

His voice held no malice, but reflected what I had seen in his eyes. It was as if the landscape of his soul was as desolate and barren as the post-apocalypse prairie.

“I can see that. Why?”

“Very few people,” Doc said, “die with empty pockets. Never can tell what you might find in there.”

The other man had pulled a wallet out of the corpse’s hip pocket and thumbed through its contents. He fanned out a wad of cash before tossing the billfold to the side.

“Believe it or not,” he said, “there’s people out there who still think this is worth something. More than you’d reckon.”

“That’s Carl, by the way.” Doc said with a grin. “He’s mostly harmless. As long as you’ve got a pulse that is.”

Doc nodded toward the two androgynous bundles of cloth across from us.

“Over there. That’s Sadie and Watchmaker.”

“He’s blind, ya know.” Carl chimed in as he stood. “I reckon he was so hard up for a shot of hooch he chugged some rubbin’ alcohol. He’s a bit of an old soak, if’n ya know what I mean.”

From somewhere beneath the sweaters and scarves, a voice as coarse and scratchy as the fibers croaked.

“I’m blind not deaf, you asshole.”

Doc laughed, releasing a plume of breath into the air; for the first time in God knows how long, I began to feel something I thought would never again grace my spirit. If there was laughter still in the world, then surely there could also be hope.

I found myself grinning and, even though I have always had a difficult time fitting in with other people, wanting to join in with the good natured banter of this group.

“It’s okay.” I called out with a smile. “You may be an old soak but at least you’re not a grave robber.”

The words had barely passed my lips when Carl pulled a pistol from his waistband with the speed of an Old West gunslinger. He leveled it in front of him, advanced toward me with quick steps, his face devoid of any emotion what-so-ever.

In the time it took for a snowflake to melt on the tip of a warm tongue, I had went from having an almost family-like feeling for this group of travelers to looking down into the dark barrel of a gun.

“Look,” I stammered as I scrambled backward, “it was just a joke, you know. I was just…. ”

But Carl was still advancing, if anything his pace quickening to almost a run. My stomach felt as if I had just dropped eighty feet on a roller coaster and the words dried up.

I could only look on in horror as I saw him pull back the hammer with the tip of his thumb and heard that little click that can never be confused with any other sound in the world.

I got that feeling again. The one like I’m in two places at the same time and everything seems all confusing and stuff. I’m still with a bunch of blurry people, but somehow I still feel so lonely. Almost like I don’t even realize they’re there or anything.

And it hurts, it really hurts, like every inch of my body has done been skinned up and bruised but much worse than I ever got from just fallin’ off my bike. At the same time, I’m glad that I’m there and also here all at the same time. Somehow, I know that if I wasn’t here in this little room then the pain would be so much worse, so bad that I probably wouldn’t even be able to cry ’cause I’d be afraid that the tears would hurt as they ran down my face.