Joseph Love - Kill Town, USA

“I’m going to need the rifle,” I said.

“Please just give me time. Please.”

“I need the rifle.”

Her face was dark red. I could tell she was trying not to beg, not to plead for her life. I took the rifle from her lap. Audrey slouched. In no hurry, I removed the boxes of ammunition from the pack and reloaded the Winchester.

Click. Slide. Click.

Our stalkers went down in twos and threes. I made a game of getting them in clusters. Audrey sank away from me. Ashamed. A slow and steady procession of our limping, bleeding followers slipped through the barn doors.

Click. Slide. Click.

I was the hand of God.

The enlightenment.

My voice was the thunder.

It cracked the barn.

Opened the Earth.

Showed them Hell.

It was their only redemption, having their brains sprayed across the trampled dirt.

There were forty bodies laid out. Audrey cowered. I knew she was waiting to be next.

“Get the pack,” I told her. “Unless you want to run out of bullets and die up here.”

My leg was worse than useless. It was nothing. And it hurt like Hell. I climbed down the ladder. Audrey followed, fumbling with the pack. She was shaking and I couldn’t tell whether it was nerves or—or.

Reckless.

We sloshed through the gray matter. I slipped at the threshold and landed on my hip. My mangled leg jammed against the well pump. The cotton wrapping and splint came loose, a hot flash burned in my face. Audrey began to rewrap the splint.

“Don’t touch it!” I snarled. “Not with your arm like that.”

“If it’s torn, I’ll have to re-stitch it,” she said.

“Hell you will. I’ll do it.”

“What’s your problem?”

I stared up at the ceiling. At the gray clouds. The swirls of snow flew into the barn. “Just don’t touch it,” I said. “Just don’t.”

“Fine. Will you please get up so we can go?”

“Give me a minute. One damn minute.”

“I’m trying to help.”

My head pulsed. It was hard to breathe. “You could have stayed in the loft. That would have helped.”

She covered her arm with the opposite hand. “A lot of things could have happened.”

“I’m sorry I stepped in a goddamn bear trap. I’m sorry you wandered off and got bit.” My head hit the dirt.

“I could have taken you to the compound. They would have taken you, and I would have been fine.”

“I could have shot you in the face the second you showed me that bite.” I sat up and tightly re-wrapped the splint. I struggled to my feet and dragged the Winchester behind me.

Audrey was silent but followed behind, weaving through the mess of bodies. It was a relief not to carry the pack, but I could barely walk because of the nothing leg. And those soulless animals hadn’t disappeared. They appeared on fencerows and tree lines, five or six together, and began their slow, deliberate march toward us. Occasionally, I’d look back at Audrey, the pack mounted awkwardly on her shoulders, her arms crossed.

I realized being shunned was worse than death for her. She couldn’t tell her body to shut up. And I couldn’t make the infection go away. I stopped. I raised the rifle and waited for Audrey to catch up. She approached slowly.

“This is the best time,” I said.

“Don’t make me beg for my life.”

“Just come here and take the rifle.”

“Take it?”

I handed it to her. “You should practice.”

Slowly, she took the Winchester from my hands. I pointed at a nearby pile of stones where a group of eight closed in on us.

I stood behind her, my arms cradling hers. “The safety,” I pushed the button over, slid my index finger on top of hers. “Squeeze, don’t pull.”

She felt the hand of God.

The thunder echoed across the plain.

Two bodies fell in the mud.

Click. Slide. Click.

The casing flew into the dead grass.

Her body jarred with each shot, pressing into mine. I resented the wound on her arm. I hid the lust I’d felt since first looking at her picture. I pushed it out of my head.

“I wish I could take it away,” I told her as we continued across the field.

“Me, too.”

I shouldered the rifle and dropped my hand. It brushed hers and I grabbed it.

We walked across forgotten farmland, hopelessly looking for the main house. But there were only hills. Gray, bare hills with monsters dotting their tops.

On the farthest hill, I spotted a red building. “We’re going up that way,” I said. But she already knew it. There was nowhere else to go.

The red building was a newer barn with a collapsed grain silo behind it. The silo was in the middle of being sectioned. The cut-off saw was still plugged in. It was left in a hurry. A thermos sat open on a tool chest, a frozen foam cup next to it. Everything was covered in a slight layer of snow.

There was a gravel road next to the barn, and across the road a yard and a white house. The house looked like a good shelter. Nicer than the one-person tent.

“Do you think they left anything behind?”

I shook my head. “There’s no telling. But the garage is untouched.”

The front door was wide open. Snow dusted the foyer and the first few stairs. Abandoned in a hurry. Little was touched in the foyer, two drawers in a curio cabinet were open and empty. The bathroom neat and tidy, toiletries gone. Perfume bottles were aligned squarely against the backsplash. Clear, amber, one like obsidian. The bedrooms were stripped of photographs, their nails and hangers still buried in the walls. Dressers were opened and cleared out. Closets, too. On a girl’s dresser, a math textbook was open to the Pythagorean theorem.

The kitchen was the last room we explored because that was where we kept all hope. It was the most barren of all the rooms. Drawers and cabinets opened, the refrigerator empty save for a pitcher of tea and some mustard and ketchup. The pantry was a little better. Half a bag of rice and some small boxes of raisins, cake mixes and cans of frosting, soy sauce, a can of refried beans. Then, Audrey laughed, holding up a box of instant macaroni and cheese and several packages of oriental noodles. Reaching far back on a shelf behind the water heater, she pulled out a plastic-wrapped sausage.

“Major Meat Holiday Pork Log,” she read the label aloud.

“How old is that?”

She searched the package but couldn’t find a date. I checked for myself. It was the old logo. Before re-branding three years ago.

“It’s still good,” I said.

“How’s that for some shit?”

I tore open the sausage with my teeth. “What do you mean?”

“Major Meat got us into this shit, and now they’re saving us.”

The propane tank was still full, and I cooked dinner on the kitchen stove. We melted more snow to cook our macaroni. I didn’t bother straining it, just added the cheese and half the sausage log torn into small pieces.

We ate in the formal dining room, the pack resting on the marble-top buffet. We used Occupied Japan dishware and generations-old silverware. Things the family couldn’t take. Things they’d never see again.

Neither of us could eat very much. The cold. The exhaustion. The dread of another day in the Unknown. All of it curbed our appetites.

We left the dishes on the table and the chairs pulled out. After pushing the couch in front of the fireplace, we sat in the living room. A pile of logs collected dust in an open cabinet. I dropped to the floor to keep the weight off my leg and leaned into the fireplace. I started the kindling and slowly fed logs into it. Audrey and I sat together on the couch, her legs tucked between mine and our heads together. The logs popped and tiny embers soared up the flue.

“I will stay in this house,” she said.