Dredging Up Memories (16 page)

I stood, took a few steps away from him, and then stopped. I looked back. I could smell smoke, and I could hear the dead inside the church, moaning and groaning, maybe in pain from the flames that engulfed them. I felt no pity for them or for White, who, if his body and head didn’t burn completely, would become one of them. It dawned on me then that maybe he was right. Maybe he was one of the Chosen but not in the way he thought. Maybe he was one of the skeletons in that desert valley that Ezekiel spoke to. Maybe he was sent to devour.

“Please,” the old man said again.

“You know how this is going to end, don’t you?” I asked.

He nodded.

I pulled the trigger.

Then I ran.

The gunshot attracted attention, but I had more than enough space to reach the van before they could get to me. I didn’t waste any of it. I was in the van with the doors locked, the windows up, and the engine rolled over. I put the van in gear and then shoved it back into park.

Shuffling along was that first rotter I had seen on my way up to the church. I remembered the light blue shirt, the missing arm. He hobbled toward the van. I floored it. The front tires spun at first then found traction. I yelled as I ran into him. He bounced off the van, his head striking the windshield and cracking the glass near the hood. A smear of blood was left behind where he had struck. He landed several feet away. I mashed the gas, circled around and back toward him, this time making sure to steer the van over his body. There was a slight bump then a second one as the front wheels then the back ones went over the corpse. I looked in the rearview mirror to see the crumpled remains of the armless corpse.

I drove back down the hill and along Main Street. If the dead had come from there, they were gone for the time being. I could see the black, billowing smoke from the church in my rearview mirror. We were almost through the town and hopefully heading back toward the highway when Humphrey spoke. I wasn’t sure I heard correctly, and I asked her to repeat herself.

What were they like?

“You mean the people back there?”

Yes.

I wasn’t sure how to answer the question. They were loons, and that was putting it nicely. Instead, I said, “They were searching souls misled by a deceptive voice.”

We reached the highway sooner than I expected. Turns out we weren’t so lost after all.

I thought about it as we drove along. What if they were right? I didn’t believe they were. I think they didn’t believe either. More than that, I thought of the four people that I had a hand in killing and knew that Hell awaited just as it had since I put the first rotter down.

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

Life is all about choices. Every choice you make, every decision, alters the direction of life. It changes which road you follow. If a person makes one decision, it takes him this way. If he makes a different decision, it takes him a different way. Growing up, that was one of the things Pop drilled into our heads.

If you make the wrong decisions in life, it will lead you down a dark and difficult path.

There were times when we boys thought Pop was blowing smoke, just talking to hear himself talk. We never said as much—we just thought it. The thing is, he was right.

I sat at the edge of the highway at the top of the hill overlooking the small town we had left behind. Humphrey was safely strapped into her car seat, the windows cracked enough to let the cool air in, and the doors were locked. I could see the smoke coming from the old church. I thought about the Chosen ones that died there minutes earlier, the old man with the hair in his ears and missing two fingers thanks to one of their own rising up from the dead and biting them off. His eyes held that haunted look in them that so many people have when close to death. There was fear there—real fear. Not that contrived fear that our minds conjure up when we think things are worse than they really are.

I had a boss, a cool guy named Kyle, who said “they’re killing me” a lot. He was taking over for my old boss, who had a run-in with colon cancer and called it quits before his surgery. I was apprehensive about things. He was making changes—too many of them as far as all the workers were concerned.

”Hank, what are you afraid of?” he asked me one day, just out of the blue.

At first, I said nothing. Then I responded as honestly as I knew how. “Losing my job.”

“You’re not going to lose your job. None of you are. I’m not here to kick you out. I’m here to make you better.”

“I hear what you’re saying, but that really doesn’t change the uneasiness everyone is feeling right now.”

He nodded, pursed his lips, and then smiled. “Do you know what that is?”

“What?”

“That’s fear: False Evidence Appearing Real.”

I repeated the words back to him. “How do you figure?”

“Simple. You think you’re going to lose your job. Has anyone told you that was going to happen?”

“No.”

“Then why would you think it?”

“I don’t know—it’s just the way things feel right now.”

“So your perception is that you and your co-workers are going to lose your jobs. It’s not true. I’d be a fool to get rid of you guys—I don’t know anything about the system here. I’d be cutting my own throat if I got rid of any of you. Your perception is false evidence appearing real.”

I never forgot that conversation. I wonder what happened to him—if he made it out of the city or if they really did kill him.

I shook my head. Everyone I knew and loved were gone: family, friends, acquaintances. It was now only me and a stuffed female bear who bore a male’s name.

As I sat there, the van’s engine idling and the fresh memory of that old man’s eyes pleading with me, saying what his brain wanted but what his mouth couldn’t vocalize.

Kill me, please.

He knew what he would become if he died. He knew the dead were in and around the church and that it was only a matter of time before they caught up to him. He slumped against the church wall when I shot him, his bloodied hand dropping into his lap, his mouth popping open. His head hit brick and bounced forward before settling on one shoulder.

All of that could have been avoided. If I had stayed away from that church. If I had just made my way out of the town instead of playing “in search of,” then the dead wouldn’t have followed me to the dinner table. Maybe they would still be alive. Maybe not. The young man died while I was there, and those people seemed oblivious to the truth. Surely some of them would have died if not all of them, all while Reverend William White prayed his prayers and refused to believe that deliverance was in the shape of a door that led to the back of the church.

Still, my decision brought the dead to their front step. My decisions cost White and at least three of his congregation their lives. My decision ended old Hairy Ears’ days on this Earth.

Decisions. I thought of all of those as I sat in that van watching the smoke rise higher into the sky.

Then I thought of other choices I had made. One stood out among them all: telling Jeanette to take Bobby and go to the cabin, go to safety. The more I thought about it, the more I realized we would have been safer if we had just stayed put. We could have boarded up the house, fortified it enough to wait it out. There were windows on all four sides of the upstairs. It would have been easy enough for me to pick them off as they neared the house. We had a basement straight out of the eighteen hundreds with a door in the floor that I don’t think any walking corpse would have been able to lift even if they tried.

We would have been safe.

I knew that. In hindsight, I knew it when everything was going down, but the natural reaction was to flee, find higher ground, and wait it out as if we were caught in a flood. It was a decision born of panic. It was the wrong decision.

And my family died because of it.

I put the van in gear, pulled all the way onto the highway.

Where are we going?
Humphrey asked.

“Home.”

Home?

“Yeah. We should have never left there.”

It was a long drive, one that was spent in reflection, like so many other times. Every once in a while, I would see some of the dead shambling along, mostly one or two at a time, but there was an occasion where there were four in an old wheat field off 385. I stopped each time. The single ones, I took out with a bat. The group of four was three bullets then the bat—no use wasting ammo on a one-on-one situation.

I could have kept on, not stopped, let the dead continue on, but I didn’t. I chose to stop, to end their existence. No need for them to catch sight or sound of the van and then turn to follow. I had made that mistake in that small town earlier. It wasn’t happening again. If I saw a rotter and I could safely take it down, I did so.

My world had suddenly become a game of “what if?” What if I didn’t stop? Could those rotters find another survivor and kill them? What if there were kids involved? Though I would have never known, in the back of my mind, I would have been wondering, “what if?” There was no time for “what if.” “What if” could get other people killed.

I saw the sign for
Sipping Creek, South Carolina, POPULATION: 700+ AND GROWING
.

My mind fixed on the sign, whispered in my ear,
Time to change that number.

I passed through that great, invisible border that separates one town from another and continued on. The small neighborhoods took shape, most of them the way the living left them when they fled that proverbial flood. There was
some change
by way of my gun and shovel and the graves where the dead had been buried after being put down.

I slowed as I approached the street my family had lived on in better times. My stomach was all nerves and my palms sweaty. I wasn’t so sure I was ready to face the reality of living in that house without my family. A left turn followed, and I crept along the road. It was quiet, almost peaceful. The doors still held the red, spray-painted Xes on them. I backed into my yard, pulled the van right up to the porch steps, and turned it off.

Where are we?
Humphrey asked.

“We’re home.”

My home?

It hadn’t occurred to me that Humphrey had once lived with another family. Sure, I remembered where I had gotten her, but the thought that she wasn’t home didn’t cross my mind. She had a girl who probably loved her at one time. That girl lived in a different house, a different
home
. For a moment, I thought to crank the van up and make my way back to that house. I remembered it well enough: a U-shaped cul-de-sac, the picture of the little girl and her parents, Humphrey held in her arms. There had been no fences around the yards in that area. I shook my head—a little harder to fortify, I thought.

“No, not your home, Humphrey. Mine—or at least what used to be mine.”

Humphrey didn’t move, didn’t make a small grunting sound when I picked her up and slipped her in the pack, zipping it up around her. She didn’t say anything when I put the pack on my shoulders. The pain in the one arm stretched down into my shoulder blade, making me aware it was still injured even though it was back in place. I reached into the console, grabbed a couple of pain pills, and popped them in my mouth, chewing them instead of swallowing them whole. They left behind a nasty, chalky residue in my teeth and tongue.

“Come on,” I said and grabbed a pistol.

The front door greeted me with thousands of memories. My knees grew weak, and I almost fell to the ground at the base of the porch.

Walker, are you okay?

“Yes,” I lied.

To lie is to make a decision not to tell the truth. It was often a bad decision, a habit I seemed to have gotten good at. Not lying but bad choices. I would make a few more of those in the coming weeks and months of trying to survive in the dead world, not the least of which was turning the knob to open the door and finding it locked.

Then I remembered. I had locked the door the last time I left just before placing the big, red X on it. I thought I would never go back, but there I stood on the same familiar porch in that same familiar town. A knot formed in my stomach. Reaching in my pocket, I pulled out a set of keys. They weren’t mine. No, they had never belonged to me, not even then—they belonged to a family who killed themselves about a hundred miles from Sipping Creek. My keys were still in the ignition of my overturned truck. I was in too much of a hurry to grab them when I wrecked and then again when I went back to retrieve my guns and some supplies with the dead closing in on me.

“This isn’t a good idea,” I said.

Then we should leave,
Humphrey whispered.

I had a chance to turn around, to get out of there. I had a chance to make a decision to escape the demons that were inside that house. What did I do? Yeah, I went down the steps, rounded the side yard, and went into the back yard and right to my shop. I tried not to pay attention to the toys on the ground or the parts to the old car I had been working on or the playhouse I had built when Bobby was still barely crawling.

The door was closed but not locked. I pushed it open, not taking for granted the shop would be empty. The sun flushed part of the darkness inside away. Dust mites danced in its rays. There were cobwebs hanging from the ceiling, the worktables, and shelves. It looked like spiders had taken up residency. I pushed away some of the webs and stepped inside. Humphrey let out an unhappy squelch.

“You okay back there?”

I hate spiders.

“Yeah, me too.”

Really?

“Yeah.” Another lie. “They’re good at hiding, and you run into their webs and do that weird ‘oh crap, I just ran into a spider web’ dance.”

Humphrey giggled.

A coffee can sat on the third shelf of a tin unit near the door. I grabbed it. It wasn’t as dusty as I thought it would be, and the top came off easy enough. The key sat in the bottom of it. I looked at it for a long while, plucked it from the can, and turned it over in my fingers.

Then I was standing at the front door, the key in the hole, the tumbler clicking loudly, the front door open. Those same rays that shone in the shop now shone into my house, making it look older than it was. I stepped inside, closed the door behind me.

Back in the old world, that would have been a great feeling. Coming home after a hard day of work, kicking off the boots just inside the door, letting my feet air out. A cold beer and maybe a football game—yeah, being that it was early September, football season would have just started.

I slid the pack off, set it on the light blue recliner that I used to sit in every night. I used to read Bobby stories right there, his little body tucked under my arm. He loved
The Monster at the End of This Book
, and I did a great Grover impression and pretended to try to keep him from turning the pages. He would laugh until there were tears in his eyes and he could barely breathe.

Yeah, it was a bad idea returning home.

I stumbled over to the couch. I plopped down and sat back, my hands went between my knees. I don’t know if I cried or if I just sat there staring into the bleakness of nothing, but eventually, I snapped out of it, and the sun was coming up. Yes, coming up. But somewhere in between, I believe the sun had set and risen a time or two more.

“We need to leave,” I said and stood. My legs were tired. Maybe I had slept instead of just sitting there, letting time pass me by. I took the few steps to the recliner, grabbed the pack, and opened the front door.

Outside, the air was crisp. There was a slight breeze, and the sky was still somewhat gray as the sun continued its ascent. Before I reached the van, I saw her. She was one of Jeanette’s best friends. Her hair was brown and brittle. Once upon a time, she had beautiful hazel eyes the shapes of almonds. From the looks of the wounds on her arms, neck, and the gaping hole in her shirt, I gathered she had survived the sickness only to succumb to the dead and then become one herself. She stumbled along the road, looking like she was sleep walking. Maybe she was.