Dredging Up Memories (14 page)

In the Before, I would have been called a ruthless murderer, killing for the heck of it, maybe pissed off and on a shooting spree. In the Now, I was a beaten down survivor who had had enough.

The bodies formed an odd circle around me. The smell of decay and gunpowder hung heavy in the air. Flies buzzed about madly. Sweat spilled down my face, and that adrenaline rush that comes with the change in emotions humans often experience coursed through my body. I pulled the trigger on a little boy, not caring whose son he had been at one time, not caring if he played baseball like my Bobby had, not caring if there was a soul in there crying and afraid. I didn’t care at all. The dead had taken everything from me. They were the enemy. They no longer deserved my pity or respect after their second deaths.

Grandpa staggered toward me, one arm raised, a single crooked finger extended as if pointing at me and telling me to stop. Whatever, Grandpa. I walked back to the van, letting the old man follow me. Here’s the bait. Come and get it.

I opened Humphrey’s door, grabbed the bat. It felt right, like it belonged in my hands. I think I smiled as I turned around.

Two steps forward, arms back, shoulder up, elbow even with my chin, I swung for the fences and connected. There was a loud pop, and Grandpa’s head snapped to the side. He spun on his heels and fell to the ground.

I almost threw my hands up in the air and tossed the bat aside like a baseball player who had just hit a game-winning homerun. Instead, I looked around the parking lot, saw no more rotters, and calmly walked back to the van. Once inside, I locked the door and pulled Humphrey from the back and set her back in her seat.

We were silent for several minutes.

Are they all gone?

“Yup.”

Dead?

“As a doorknob.”

Are we leaving?

“Probably—I want to have a look around first.”

Okay.

Again, we were quiet. Again, she broke the silence.

You spoke first.

“What?”

We were playing the quiet game. You spoke first.

“What? When. I don’t remember speaking first. You did.”

You asked if I was okay—you lose.

I laughed long and hard. When I was done, there were tears in my eyes and a cramp in my stomach, and my jaw muscles hurt. I settled down, chuckled once or twice, then stopped laughing altogether.

“I guess you’re right. You want to hit me?”

No,
she responded.
I’ll save it for later.

I gave her a sly look then put the van in gear. “You do that.”

Eleven Weeks, Four Days, and Seventeen Hours After It All Started…

The town was smaller than I originally thought. A couple of stores lined the streets, and a police station that could have been mistaken for an outhouse seemed to divide them. There were no street lights and no meters along the curbs in front of the few businesses along Main Street. There was an ice cream parlor—yes, parlor, not shop—that proudly proclaimed, “The best root beer floats in town.” I couldn't help but think,
Not anymore.
The biggest building was the department store I had just left. There wasn’t a whole lot in the store itself, mostly empty shelves and bare display mannequins. 

We drove along, Humphrey and I, my head like a swivel and on the lookout for anything on two legs. The small town was as dead as any other we had come across. There was no need to forage from the other buildings. If the department store was any indication, then the rest of the town had been picked over.

A little further down the road, Main Street gave way to a dirt road. In the rearview mirror, I saw a rotter shamble from behind a building. I started to park the truck, maybe hop out for a moment and bash its skull in, maybe take some more batting practice. My shoulder would be mad at me when I was done, but at least I could exact another measure of revenge for all I had lost. I shrugged—I would be coming back that way, and I would make sure and get him. I didn’t think it would be too hard to recognize him. His light blue shirt was stained in the front, his jeans muddied, and he was missing one arm.

Then I saw the church. It stood another two hundred or so yards away. It looked small, maybe large enough to house fifty people on a good day. It was brick with several windows. There were cars in front of it, as if the entire town was meeting for Sunday services. I doubted that was the case, but the cars would have gas in them and maybe some other supplies as well.

I drove to the front of the church, circled around it, looking for a place close enough to park. Most of the vehicles were placed near enough to the building that someone could run between them and the church with little room to spare. This struck me as odd, as if they thought this out before parking, as if maybe the whole town really was inside. There was a tree not too far from the church, a tall oak, its leaves rustling softly with the breeze blowing in from wherever. Summer was fading, and fall was on its heels. Soon, winter would set in, and heat would be another necessity. Food. Water. Shelter. Weapons. Heat. It would be nice to find some people, but that wasn’t really a necessity.

I parked beneath the tree, the front facing back the way I came. In the distance, I saw a handful of rotters. I wasn’t sure if any of them was the one-armed dead man I saw a few minutes earlier, but I was positive getting out of the van without a weapon wasn’t a good idea. I checked a couple of pistols, emptied a half a box of bullets into one pocket and then got out of the van.

Walker?

“I won’t be long, Humphrey. I’m just going to check some of the cars, maybe look around inside the church. No need to waste an opportunity to search for supplies.”

But the rotters.

I glanced down the dirt road. There were at least six of them now, and they were still a good two hundred yards away, about the same distance I was when I saw the church. Enough time, I thought, to do a quick search, maybe siphon some gas.

Up close, the church was bigger than I thought. Instead of fifty people, it probably could have held twice that number and still have room to spare. The brick structure was solid, and the windows had been boarded up. Halfway across the lawn, I stopped and cocked my head to one side.

“Impossible.”

A few more steps and what I thought was just in my head turned out to be real. I heard a voice, loud enough to be shouting but not screaming. I followed the sound, hoping… You understand that, right? Hope, hoping, hopeful—that maybe that voice was real and not imagined, that maybe I had finally found other survivors. My skin prickled in excitement.

I stopped at the front stoop, which was nothing more than a slight step up onto a wooden platform. That voice was so much louder now. I could only imagine what it would sound like if there were nothing between it and me. The double doors awaited me. I didn’t think they would open, but I turned the knob—a once painted black, now peeling piece of round metal—and heard it click. I pushed the door open and waited.

The voice was a baritone. Its owner must have had strong lungs to bellow the way he did.

There was another set of double doors, no knobs attached, just the swinging type. I stepped into the church, onto its plush, red carpet. There were tables to either side of the door with pamphlets and circulars and bulletins on them. I picked up one of the programs and read the date. September 5—Sunday. The message was to be given by the Reverend William White. The title?
And Judgment Shall Be Upon Us.

My brothers and I were raised in the church, raised to believe in God and Heaven and Hell and to do the right thing. We were raised that sin was bad, but we were boys, and well, boys will be boys. My life was never sin-free before the dead got up. And I can’t say I have sinned less since. Sin is sin no matter whether it’s telling a little white lie to your momma when you took a dollar from her change purse or killing a man trying to eat you.

I stood inside that church, itching to go further in, but I wasn’t too sure I wanted to hear the message being preached. What I did want—what I needed more than anything at that moment—was to see other people. Living people. Without a doubt, I knew they would be in that sanctuary.

From beyond the double doors, the voice began praying. I could hear him giving praise and thanks and asking for the deliverance from their sins.

“Oh touch their souls, touch their hearts. Forgive us all for the sins we’ve committed.” The words came out,
Oh-wa, touch they-ah souls, touch they-ah hearts-ah. Forgive-ah us all for-ah the-ah sins we’ve-ah committed.
He was a typical back woods preacher-man.

There was a small chorus of amens and a pause—in the movies, it would have been great for effect. It worked well then also. The preacher—the Reverend William White—began his message softly, or I imagine it was soft for him since his voice came loud and clear through the door, his southern drawl accentuating each word.

“Today, we read from the book of Ezekiel, chapter five, verse nine. And the good book says: ‘Therefore in your midst, fathers will eat their children, and children will eat their fathers. I will inflict punishment on you and will scatter all your survivors to the winds.’

“And from verse twelve of the same chapter: ‘A third of your people will die of the plague or perish by famine; a third will fall by the sword outside your walls; and a third I will scatter to the winds and pursue with drawn sword.’ Can I get an amen?”

That small chorus of amens came again, a couple of males, a couple of females—probably not more than fifteen people in all if that.

“People, I say we are in the midst of the Great Cleansing. Children devour their fathers. Fathers devour their children. The great prophet, Ezekiel, spoke of these things thousands of years ago, and now, his visions have come to pass. The world and all of its evildoers have suffered the wrath of—”

I pushed the door open and stepped into the sanctuary. Pews sat to either side of a center aisle, the carpet as red as the one in the foyer. The windows that were boarded on the outside held brilliant stained glass images on the inside: angels and crosses, the mother Mary. Candles sat in sconces along the walls, and candelabras sat near the pulpit and alter.

The Reverend William White was a short man with flaming red hair threatening to turn gray in the near future. He held a Bible above his head, his arm seemingly frozen in air. His mouth hung open, and his head was tilted to one side. The parishioners turned and faced me. There weren’t fifteen or so like I thought. There were only eight of them, and they were all adults, most of them pushing fifty with only one younger man that looked like he was on the downhill side of life. His face was the color of gray ash, and his eyes were set in rimmed-red sockets. I knew the condition. The guy had a fever and was dying. If they didn’t know how a bite from one of the dead led to the infected becoming one also, they were going to find out soon enough.

At that moment, we all stared at each other: me in disbelief at seeing nine living, breathing people and them probably a little in shock as well. I had survived this long with little human contact, but right then, I felt the cogs of my brain reverse a little. I had been slowly losing my sanity, each minute ticking away and bringing me that much closer to the brink of madness. But seeing people—
people!—
pulled me from that edge just a little.

White broke the stalemate. “Well, what do we have here? A visitor to our humble church?” He lowered his arm, the Bible still clutched in his hand.

“Hello,” I said. It sounded lame, but it was all I could think to say. I took a step forward.

“Nope, son. You stay right there.”

I listened but kept my hands to my sides and out of my pockets. There was a sudden change in the atmosphere, a tension. I wasn’t welcome there, and the joy of seeing people quickly vanished and was replaced by an apprehension that I could be in more danger in there with the living than I ever was outside with the dead.

William White walked toward me with a limp. As he approached, I could see his face was damp with sweat and that there was a splotch of red on his pants just below his right knee.

“I didn’t mean to interrupt the service—I heard your voice, and it’s been so long since I’ve seen any survivors and—”

White stopped about twenty feet away from me and shoved his hands into the front pockets of his gray slacks.

”Survivors?” he asked. “Is that what you think we are?” He laughed, turned to his congregation of eight. “He thinks we’re survivors. Are we survivors?”

His flock shook their collective heads. A few of them murmured “no” and “nope” and “we’re the Chosen.”

“The Chosen?” I asked, suddenly wishing I had never drove away from the highway. What was I thinking? That I would find friendly people? That I would find a place to lay my head without the worries of a rotting corpse attacking me in the middle of the night? Maybe so. What did I get? The Jim Jones Chosen Ones Convention.

“Ah, yes, the Chosen,” White said with a crooked smile. “It’s the end times, son. The end times. And Israel has the face of the prophets set against it and—”

“This isn’t Israel.”

White’s mouth hung open again, then it snapped shut. He took a deep breath, and that smile reappeared. “It’s a metaphor. You see, Ezekiel was told to set his face against Israel and that they would not be spared the wrath of—”

“I know the story, Reverend. I was raised in the church.”

“Ah, so you’re one of the Chosen as well, then?”

I shrugged at that. “I don’t know about being chosen for anything. I think I’ve been a little lucky. That’s about it.”

“There is no such thing as luck, only fate.”

“Fate?” I nodded, pursed my lips. “So all them dead people out there walking around, that was their fate? What about all the people the dead killed? Was it their fate to be eaten alive? Is that what that is? Fate?”

White’s eyes narrowed. His jaw clenched. “If you read your Bible, son, then you would understand that this was prophesied. Children will eat their fathers, and fathers will eat their children. It’s right here in the good book.” He waved the Bible at me.

“The dead—those people who died of the sickness—came down with the plague just as it was promised, and they died from it. Those who were devoured by the dead were killed by the sword that is vengeance. And those of us who were scattered to the ends of the Earth are the Chosen.”

“Where does it say anything about the Chosen in the Bible?”

“In Revelations, it states that 144,000 will be sealed, will be chosen.”

I shook my head. I had found living people, and they were all nuts. I looked past White to the few people behind him, most of which had stood up and began to make their way toward us. They didn’t hold the same conviction in their faces as White did. I wasn’t too sure they all believed they were chosen for anything except maybe to die and rise again but not in rapture.

“You know, I think me coming here was a mistake. I think I’ll just…ummm…show myself to the door.”

“You will do no such thing—you are here, which means you’ve been sent to us. You are ours now.”

Ours now? What type of church was this?

“With all due respect, preacher-man, I don’t belong to anyone, least of all you.”

He slid his hand behind his back and then pulled it back out. In it was a knife. The blade looked sharp, as if it had never been used.

“You stand where you are, and don’t you dare try to leave.”

“You’re going to lose this fight, Reverend,” I said and drew one of my guns from the back of my pants. “Now, I’m walking out this door, and I’m just going to pretend I never came across you folks. Got it?”

White took a step forward, his teeth exposed, his brows pushed down over his eyelids.

I lifted the gun, the safety off, and placed a finger on the trigger. “If you are one of the Chosen, then you might want to go ahead and back away. I’m trying to end this peacefully, but if you come at me, I will put a bullet right between your eyes. And believe me, over the last few months, I’ve had a lot of target practice.”