Timothy Long - Beyond the Barriers

“I remember the first ones we ran into, during the whole zombie thing. It was bad enough that we had to put up with these groaning, moaning bastards with no brains that wandered around like lost kids. Alone, they weren’t that scary. I mean, you could see them coming a mile away and put a bullet in their skulls. It was around the third week that we felt like we were getting a handle on them. Masses were rounded up and taken away in trucks while we watched. The fence was just going up, and people were still running around town. Some were even going home at night.”

“Weird. I can’t picture the end of the world like that.”

“It wasn’t really the end. I mean, it isn’t now either. It’s like a bump in the road. Do you believe in evolution?”

That was a funny question. I was not a liberal, yet I couldn’t say that I was a religious man either. I needed explanations for stuff; I needed to see things to believe in them. The idea that there was some god sitting above me constantly judging my actions and planning to roast my ass in hell if I screwed up didn’t make sense. Then again, neither did the dead walking around.

“I think so. People have been changing for thousands of years, getting taller, losing their need for wisdom teeth, stuff like that.”

“And the ghouls are the natural offshoots of the zombies. The virus that reanimated the dead and created the mindless things, well, it affected the living in strange ways. It made them like a half-zombie hybrid.”

“What started it all?” I had never asked that question. Never really had anyone to ask it of.

“No one is really sure. Lots of theories but no answers. Some said it was a swine flu vaccine that went wrong, some said it was terrorists. Some said it was a comet strike stirring up weird stuff in the air. Space spores or something. We spent that whole first week listening to the news channels, talking, theorizing, but we never heard a real cause.”

“Someone has to know.”

“Maybe it is a form of evolution—a shifting bacterial infection that found a way to get rid of us. AIDS didn’t work; the black plague tried it; Ebola was a huge success. Maybe all those antibiotic-resistant monsters got together and figured out a way to kick our ass.”

“I like your ass right where it is.” I pushed myself against her as the rain came down harder than before. It rolled down the side of the house and splashed on the ground, making an ocean of noise.

Lightning lit the sky, and a glance out the window showed tall skeletons in the form of the trees surrounding the cabin. The air felt like it was charged. All those ions bouncing around from the flashes of light in the sky made my hair stand on end. Or maybe it was her shifting against me, under the covers, in that tiny bed.

“Is that right?”

I pushed the mess of hair off her forehead and kissed it gently. She offered me a smile in return. Those hard lines around her eyes softened for a moment, and I felt a genuine sense of affection.

“What did you do before?” I asked. We didn’t really talk about who we’d been before the incident. I think it was a byproduct of our current situation. I believe that, on some level, we were avoiding the ‘before’ because we wanted to concentrate on the now and not on our old lives. Those were long gone.

“I was a teacher. Social studies was my specialty, but I also taught girls’ volleyball.”

“Makes sense. You fight like a teacher.”

She laughed at that, and I smiled at her in the dark.

“I used to study a lot of martial arts. I took some kaji-kempo, and then some other stuff so I could work on my aggression issues. I had …”

I let it hang. I could hear her breathing in the dark, and she stiffened slightly against me.

“You don’t have to tell me.”

“It’s okay. I was hurt once by a man, and I swore that would never happen again, so I learned how to take care of myself.”

I stiffened under the blanket, my body going rock hard as tension primed me for violence. How dare a man lay a hand on a woman in anger. He’d better hope to hell he was long gone from her life in this new world.

“I’m sorry,” I offered lamely. I found I couldn’t let the tension go.

“It was a long time ago, and I usually don’t talk about it.”

“I’m sorry.” I took a couple of breaths to calm down.

“Anyway, I studied and I never feared a person again. Well, until I saw those ghouls and how much damage they can take before they go down.”

“Evolution again?”

“Something like that. They feel pain, and they fall if you shoot them in the head, but a wound just pisses them off. Some are smarter than others, and some are in control. The ones that came at us at the barricade were driven by one of the smart ones. You may think I’m crazy, but we had a theory that the smart ones used some sort of mind control.”

“You’re kidding, right?”

“They seem to be able to put the ghouls into some sort of hypnotic state. They whip them into a frenzy, and they go crazy for blood. Did you see how they attacked us?”

She was right; they didn’t act like the zombies at all. Of course, I only had a few days’ worth of experience with the things, while she’d had months. I suppose a form of hypnosis wasn’t that much of a stretch. Look how far it got Hitler.

We chatted for a while longer, and she shifted under the blankets against me but didn’t seem interested in lovemaking. I was just happy to have her with me, so I didn’t press it. Her body was warm against mine, a feeling completely alien to everything I’d known for the last few months. I wrapped my arm around her and, sometime in the night, found solitude in sleep.

Morning came in with the same overcast gray. I struggled up to a sitting position and noticed she had put on a shirt sometime during the night. Katherine slept soundly while I rose and donned shorts and a tank top. The night may have been cold and rainy, but the day was already heating up. My watch was in the kitchen, and I was surprised to see it was after nine. When I was at the compound, we usually woke around seven, but at the cabin I was used to sleeping in—an indulgence I hadn’t allowed myself in years.

I dug out some coffee we’d scrounged from the convenience store and built up a fire in the stove. Water boiled, while I used my old method of suspending the grounds in a wrapped-up paper towel and letting it sit for a while. The water passed through my crude filter as it cooked, and within fifteen minutes, I had a fresh pot of Folgers. I grabbed a box of cereal, Lucky Charms, popped it open and sat down to enjoy breakfast.

She came out of the bedroom a half hour later and joined me. Her long legs hung out of the shirt, and she curled one under her body as she sat down. I felt a rush for her—a burst of emotion I could not readily identify. It was a combination of giddiness and warmth, and I wished I could put the feeling into words.

She smiled when I brought her a cup of coffee.

“Cream or sugar?”

“Neither. I’m used to drinking it black. We had a whole section of coffee saved up during the setup phase at the Walmart, and it was almost as closely guarded as the guns.”

“Priorities and all ...”

I was still getting used to drinking coffee again, having been without it for a few months. I got a quick caffeine buzz today because the brew was dark and very strong. I expected her to turn her nose up at the stuff and tell me it was too thick, but she took a sip, and then another without comment.

She mixed some of the powdered milk with water from a pitcher on the counter and poured it in a bowl with the cereal I was eating. I watched her move around the kitchen looking for things, and I pointed out where I stored items. If I expected her to comment on my placement, I was in for a surprise, because she accepted what I had done and went along without a word.