Ben Bedard - The World Without Crows

There was a crash then and a gurgling scream. Sergio and Lucia sprang back and were halfway down the street when three zombies came out of the house.

Behind him, he could hear Lucia, Sergio, and Birdie, running, but Eric did not move.

He pulled out his pistol.

The first Zombie had lost an arm, and it walked in strange lunges. Its face was black, and there were holes where his nostrils once were. There was still a few tufts of bright red hair on his head. Eric leveled his .22 and fired. The Zombie stumbled, fell to its knees, snarling like a wolf. Eric fired two more times, both in the head. The holes in its skull spewed forth a black bile as if the contents had been under pressure. Then the cracked Zombie fell forward onto the lawn.

The other two lurched around the body. Eric shot once at a jawless Zombie in overalls before his pistol clicked empty. Turning, he ran down the road, following Lucia and Sergio and Birdie. While he ran, he flipped open his pistol and began reloading. When he reloaded, he turned and aimed. The next shot took the jawless Zombie in the chest, and it halted to spit up gobs of red and black from his mouth. The other came in something like a run. It was once an old woman and its face was wrinkled and black, like an olive. The cavities that were once eyes wriggled with white worms. Eric fired three times, and one of the shots caught her in an empty eye socket. She fell to the ground not more than six feet from him. The last one was still vomiting up its innards when Eric walked toward it, shooting. He shot it three times in the crown of the head before it feel forward. More black bile poured from its skull in spurting streams. The smell of the bile hit him like a hammer. It was like chemical warfare. Eric dropped to his knees and retched up his stomach on a lawn.

When he recovered, he was looking at three pair of legs standing beside him. The little legs next to him, he noticed, had pink socks.

“Let’s get out of here,” Sergio said in a shaky voice as Lucia helped him up.

“No,” Eric said firmly. “I’m going in the house.”

Inside the gothic house, there was graffiti on the wall in thick black paint:

Fuck the Minutemen! Minutemen are Massholes! Green Mountain Boys!

There was other graffiti. Names. Numbers. Dates. Inscrutable drawings. It was all painted messily over a floral wallpaper in the main room. The words dripped the same color as the black bile that had gushed from the Zombie’s skull.

In the back of the house, in the kitchen, they found a stainless steel door, still locked. Eric smashed the lock with a cast iron skillet. Inside was an untouched larder.

The walk-in was putrescent. They cupped their hand around nose and mouth as they passed through. Boxes once filled with lettuce and tomato now dripped a dark fluid. The floor was slippery with it. In the back, however, were three wire shelves filled with cans. Beans, corn, beets, peas, carrots, spinach, pickles, cranberry sauce, creamed corn, all of it untouched. While Eric filled their bags, he heard Sergio outside cry out.

“Flour!” he said. “And rice!” Then came a flood of Spanish as Lucia joined him.

When they left the house, their bags were bursting with food. So much that it was difficult to walk.

No one complained.

That night they feasted.

They mixed beans with corn. They ate spoonfuls of cranberry sauce, which tasted as sweet as candy. They slurped up cans of spinach and crunched into pickles pinched free from their salty, green brine. Mixing flour with their drinking water, Lucia fried the batter over the fire, and they had something like bread, which they dunked into cans of creamed corn happily. Their appetite was enormous.

Afterward, they sat content in front of the flickering flames.

Eric stayed up late, watching the fire and cleaning his gun. Birdie slept with her head next to him, the light from the fire warm and gentle across her body.

He could not understand what he felt. It was not entirely good. He listened to his own breathing, low and even. Nothing could touch them.

They entered Aitken State Forest the next day, moving north. All day they plunged through the forest. Weeks of walking had made their strides long and deep. They devoured the hilly terrain, stopping only to drink water and eat a hurried meal. Eric had never felt so close to the island. It no longer seemed a dream, but was real now, attainable.

They hiked to the foot of Bald Mountain and stopped to make camp when Sergio heard it.

“Listen,” he said, holding out his hands. They heard nothing. When Lucia said something in Spanish, he shook his head. There was only quiet around them, but Eric drew out his pistol. He had a feeling. He pictured the Land Rover crashing through the forest.

Then he heard it. Distant. Up the mountain somewhere. A chugging, puffing engine.

After quick conferral, the four of them crept slowly up the side of the mountain, following the sound. Around a bend, they saw a wooden shack, under green maple trees. Once it might have been a sugar shack, used for boiling down maple sap into syrup. Now the hole that once vented out the steam was covered with bright blue tarpaulin. Chugging outside was a small, single piston generator. An orange drop cord connected it to the shack like an umbilical cord. They stood transfixed by the oddity of it. Eric hardly had time to pull out his pistol before the old man came out the door.

He was carrying a metal pan of water when he walked out the door. Seeing the .22 pointed at him, he dropped the pan to the ground.

They stared at each other to the beat of the chugging engine.

“I was digging a new hole for the generator,” the old man explained. “The old one was filling with water. I didn’t figure having it outside just two or three days would do no harm. Go figure, heh?” He looked at them and smiled. Most of his teeth were missing, and those left were brown. “Just goes to show you,” he said, wagging a wrinkled finger at Birdie, “wherever you find luck, you find bad luck.” Birdie just stared at the old man.

They were standing outside the shack. After the first few moments of shock, Eric had lowered his gun. The old man was bent and mostly bald, except for a few spider silk strands of gray hair. Perhaps to make up for this, he had grown a long silver beard that was discolored yellow around his mouth. His face was round and drooped with age, but his eyes glinted and shined. His nose was slightly crooked and had several large bristles of hair poking from it.

He introduced himself as Remember, and when they looked at him incredulously, he laughed, a deep, carefree rumble, and assured them the name had a long and illustrious history in Vermont. “I’m practically tradition,” he said. “But I’m not, Tradition’s my sister!” He laughed at what seemed a very old joke. He ended his laughter with a loud cough and then spit loudly on the ground.

Remember told them his history, which, like all personal histories now, it seemed, began with the outbreak. About the time they stared fire bombing Houston, he had a feeling it was all going to get worse. (“Just a feeling”, he said, “a prem-O-nition.”) He remembered his father taking him to this old shack when he was young to watch the syrup being stirred in great aluminum tables. He decided to stay there until the epidemic stopped. Of course it never did. Now, he only went back to towns to get supplies. “It ain’t bad,” he told them. “I’ve always lived alone anyhow.”

Now, as a show of faith, they handed him a can of creamed corn and he eyed it with hungry eyes. “I can make a chowder with this,” he said hungrily. He looked up at them with flashing, greedy eyes. “I got Buster and Lady Boomer to help me out with milk.” He pushed a thumb over his shoulder and they saw the two goats. The goats were fenced in with chicken wire stapled to trees. Both goats looked at the new group with staring indifference. “Now,” said Remember, “I got something to show you all.” He winked at them and waved them toward the shack. He walked back and turned toward them. “Come on,” he said, waving encouragingly. “You’re going to like this.” He vanished inside the house.