Dead Men (and Women) Walking (2 page)

We saw humanity and we
remembered that we had each other. Only each other.

Tenants of our building left
daily, never to return. They asked us to accompany them, implored
us that logic should dictate our decision because there was
strength in numbers and at a time such as this numbers were all any
of us could possibly cling to. But we ignored their insistent
pleas. We were terrified of what we saw and knew with certainty
only that we wanted to remain together. And so when the screaming
of dying people spread inside the apartment complex itself several
days into the chaos, we packed our meager belongings inside our
battered old Pinto. We fled to the country outside of the city,
where we figured the thing might not yet have spread. Where maybe
two people could remain free, and at least convince themselves that
the rest of the world was not falling completely to
pieces.

We’re hunters and gatherers
now.

We have been for months,
scrounging anything from wild berries in the woods to potatoes from
abandoned farmers’ gardens. The outlying confectionaries and food
marts have all been ransacked by other fleeing survivors and so we
no longer visit any of them. We rooted in garbage dumps in the
early weeks, before everything had become rotten and spoiled. But
now these dumps are only breeding grounds for black flies and
writhing maggots.

We don’t eat well at all.
Our stomachs are always in knots, hunger pangs and the kneading of
fear inside us. I wonder how many times we’ve each thrown up green-
and red-spotted phlegm onto the straw here, those feeble dinners of
berries and grass blades disagreeing with our city-bred bellies and
away they went.

But we agree on our
situation and the ways to deal with its severity: All human contact
is bad contact, whether with the living or the others. We’ve seen
what results from each, and we want now only what we’ve always
wanted: peace and seclusion in our own little bubble-world. To that
end, we’ve tried and succeeded so far.

Nights we spend trading
turns at guard while the other sleeps fitfully in the straw of the
loft near the barn’s ceiling. We carry either the shovel or the axe
or one of the long butcher knives we found inside the farm house.
I’ll stay awake and alert at the edge of the loft’s floor, peering
into the darkness below. I’ll check my watch by filtered moon glow
or star shine and wake Maria only when I know fatigue threatens to
overtake me and endanger us both. She wakes fearfully and with a
start each time, and so I’ve taken to cupping my hand gently across
her mouth while I whisper softly into her ear each time, as
soothingly as I can muster; that it’s only me, and that
everything’s okay. She takes her turn and wakes me long past the
time her shift is over, and the cycle begins again. We draw the
ladder up with us every night and sleep with it hidden from
view.

Daytime is hunting time for
us, and we never let the other venture out alone. The thought of it
disgusts, horrifies. Two of us is all we’ve known for so long and
now…

Now.

Now it’s us versus the human
race, or what it’s come to. So we creep from our dark barn space
with squinting eyes like the Adam and Eve of some new race of moles
and face the dawn-light of each new day together as we’ve always
been. We carry our rusty weapons at the ready, knowing we’ll use
them if we have to, as we have on several occasions in the past
already. Every journey outside of our barn carries a risk of a pale
cadaver stealing forth from a copse of trees or careening out from
behind a shed wall. As hard a blow as can be delivered, straight to
the head: This is the way we’ve learned to deal with them, and our
disgust at the grisly work has lessened considerably if not
altogether left us.

Maria carries the large
leather satchel we found in the barn, along with my old gym bag. We
stuff these as full of berries as we can, and anything else that is
at all edible, certain flowers whose names we don’t know but which
we’ve learned to differentiate from their non-edible companions;
and the occasional mushroom heads, the brown- and grey-topped ones
rather than the spotted heads because vomiting and shitting
violently throughout the night after a dinner of those vile fungi
is a sure way to draw those wandering the country at night. We’ve
neglected to try for live game so far. The rabbits we’ve seen are
too fleet, and although the thought of meat awakens insatiable
craving in us both, we shrink away from thoughts of killing the
animals. They’re so cute, Maria has commented several times already
while following their twitching-eared progress hopping gingerly
from one patch of grass to another. How could we?

I smile at the humanity in
her. The noble humanity which we both know we should have abandoned
long ago but which still lingers on inside us. One day, though, I
know we’ll find the means, because we’ve come so far already,
cleaving skulls in two with shovel blows and ruining chalky faces
with axe swings.

It’s an ordinary afternoon
like so many others of the past few months. The skies are silent,
devoid of birds or airplanes. No vestiges of human flight have been
marked there for weeks in vapor trails ghosting amid the clouds.
Only sky…sky everywhere like some past version of the world when
the Earth was young. We creep furtively into the thicket, skulking
low to the ground, eyes everywhere at once.

I point them out to Maria
before she sees them. We stop a moment, gazing through our cover of
thorn-barbed shrubs.

There are three of them,
wandering aimlessly across the expanse of the glade. Their features
are ashen and their eyes dead. What keeps you going? I wonder to
myself, knowing that Maria wonders it then, too, but keeps it to
herself as well. We’ve discussed this a thousand times, in whispers
in our loft haven. It’s the question which haunts, and never
leaves. One of them is naked from the waist down, a woman wearing a
faded red wound in the centre of her forehead. A bullet’s entry
mark, or the grisly remnants of an axe blow, or some other
signature of contact with the other side of humanity. We watch them
shuffle along listlessly, bypassing us in our secret vantage. One
of them moans before the group is out range of our ears, and the
sound quivers us in our skins as it always does. I look to Maria,
hating whenever something unpleasant harries her, and can tell by
the grimace she wears that her skin is crawling and she wishes only
to hurry on our way and return to the safety of our
hideaway.

I nod silently, and we
whisper on our way once more. We glide through a patch of twisted
briars and get spooked at the sudden appearance of a squirrel which
darts out from the base of a nearby tree and watches us a moment
before dashing away to another more robust trunk. We travel for
several minutes longer than we’re used to, our daily explorations
elongate in proportion to the food sources we borrow from and
deplete so regularly. We’re both all nerves and big doe eyes as we
make our way further into the woods. The trees become taller the
further we go, the enormity of their black bulks towering over us
on all sides and making us feel our insect size in the topsy-turvy
world.

At last we discover a small
skeleton of a bush with a smattering of blue berries. Many look
inedible, small shriveled specimens pockmarked with tiny dark
splotches, as if gone bad in the air. Those which look at all
healthy we drop into the satchel, and prepare to move on. It’s then
we hear the scream.

It comes from nearby, just
through the tangle of trees towards the east. We eye each other
determinedly, tightening our grips on our weapons. We slip behind
the most rotund tree trunk in our vicinity and wait tensely. A
moment passes and then the scrambling sounds of harried flight
reach our straining ears. We peer around the trunk and see the boy.
He’s running wildly, his arms all akimbo as his legs pump him
desperately on his way. We follow his backwards glance and see it:
jawless, its grey shirt blackened with old blood, the thing
shambles after the boy. Its hands reach for his fleeing back as its
feet shuffle it speedily along over the uneven ground. Some of them
are like this, more animated than their companions, relentless in
their frenzied hunger.

I wince as the boy’s ankle
tangles in the protruding tree roots and careens him forcibly to
the earth. The thing would be upon him too quickly.

It must be that old vestige
of lingering humanity which throws me towards the monstrosity. I
run silently because silence is the best weapon any of us have in
these times. The shovel is raised over my head. I hear the light
sound of Maria padding behind, following me reflexively.

It’s done in a moment and
the thing helps me out: Raising its ghastly face from where it
leans over the boy, it’s an easy target for my quickly descending
shovel. It smashes into its forehead, splitting skin and cracking
through bone, sending the horror toppling backwards. Once on its
back, it’s an easy secondary blow which caves in the remainder of
its skull and silences whatever madness buzzes in its
brain.

Maria and I stand stock
still, straining our ears intently. No sound issues from the
surrounding foliage. When the boy tries to address us, we silence
him with the terror in our eyes. He watches us fearfully, shaking
all over. Still nothing stirs, and eventually we allow ourselves to
move again. We pad beneath the cover of an overhanging sweep of
branches, bringing the boy with us. It’s then that we see the
congealing red on his wrist and the new eyes in his sickly
face.

He’s been bitten already, my
frozen mind tells me, but the revelation comes too late for either
of us to stop his wide champing mouth as he sinks his teeth into
Maria’s cheek. The boy’s head is split neatly in two with the
shovel in my hands and his flapping arms stop their frenetic
movements once the second blow finds his exposed skull. I tell
Maria with my eyes to look away as I do what I have to, and pummel
the corpse over and over again with smashes from my shovel. The
meaty sound of my work carries no echo on the still air, a dull
sound as flat as the look in the eyes of this new breed of
humankind.

When I’m finished, I turn
and look around me. There is no movement anywhere. There are no
rabbits hopping and no squirrels scampering. No birds sound their
songs from the branches overhead and no fiends come lumbering
through the dense thicket. I turn to Maria kneeling sweaty and
terror-eyed on the grass and my vision of her blurs as the first
tears well into my eyes.

I kneel down with her, and
we cry together.

Some time later we discern a
distant howling through the woods and instinctively raise our
weapons. I look to her crimson-smeared wet cheek and shake my head
in fury or helplessness. I want to curse the world and scream until
my voice is lost in these towering reaches of trees and sky and
far-away moaning like ghosts haunted by their own sad
fates.

But I only take her hand in
mine, as I’ve done countless times in the past, and lead us back
the way we’d come. She stops me, though, with her curiously
lingering backward glance to the inert form of the ruined boy on
the grass. I follow her stare and see it: The boy’s hand encircles
it, and it takes a moment to extricate his fingers from its hard
shiny surface.

An apple. Plump and red like
blood, and he’d been hiding it inside his hand as he fled the
horror loping on his heels. His fingers hadn’t relinquished their
mad grip on the fruit even while I’d rained death down on him with
my shovel.

We look to one another and
then through the trees in the direction from which the boy had
come. Slowly, we move forward, silently, too, as if it matters to
us still, these covert movements when our world has just collapsed
about us.

Minutes later we find the
orchard. It remains a piece of ordered tidiness in the world,
secluded among the fields and bushes dotting this country
landscape. The rows of neatly-manicured trees with their perfectly
round tops like big emerald balloons stretch on into the distance.
Each carries a colorful bounty of fruit in its green folds. I see
them but think only of beads of blood rather than their promise of
sustenance the way I would have considered them before, if only
we’d happened on this place in some other way. If only today’s hunt
hadn’t ended the day as the blackest I’ve ever known.

She reminds me the instant
we’ve returned to the barn with our hoard of apples bursting the
lining of our bags: Our pact.

If one of us
goes.

She doesn’t finish it,
leaves the promise silent and hanging over us like a
pall.

I try to reassure her. Our
bond has endured, I tell her, hearing the awkward lie in my voice
as I know she hears it, too. We watch each other but the determined
pleading in her eyes is too much for me now. I turn away and hate
my shame when I collapse into the corner of our loft and sob like a
child. I can feel Maria’s eyes touching me all over and it burns me
more, knowing she has to see me this way. We’ve always been open
with one another but now is a time for lying, and I wish that I
could act for her now and force an act of bravado. As if I knew
what to do and as if I still believed in any hope of tomorrow for
the two of us. She doesn’t come to me now, the way she would have
any other time. Maybe she’s scared of my reaction: What if her
touch on my shoulders is cold and all her old familiar warmth has
left her? What if the sound that leaves my mouth is a scream as her
breath on my neck chills me like it never has?