Loose Ends: A Zombie Novel (31 page)

“Okay, this kid has quite an ego,” Doc said, “and a lot of paint.”

***

I rounded the wall and walked behind them to see what they were looking at on the side of the building. There was a picture of a man with an angular face and long, curly hair looking up at the sky or up at the message above his cartoonish head. The message above it read, "The people of Shy are free indeed. Free Soil forever!"

I walked up closer to the wall to see the smaller writing and carvings. Most of it was initials or numbers that didn’t mean anything to me. Other pictures and symbols were washed or faded out. Other messages were legible, but still didn’t make sense. Rezzers will die like zombies, Riders will pay in blood, Shy Porter lives, Shy uses the Mad Hatter’s skull for a piss pot, Ask the Mad Hatter, and vertically up the corner of the building was written, Shy will return to Free Soil.

Around another side of the building between broken windows, the long-haired character was standing in a robe with a sash. He was holding a machete or a sword in one hand and a smiling, severed head with a puffy, top hat in the other. Above the robed man’s head was one word in block letters, NEXT!

“That’s a different take on the savior,” Chef said.

Doc said, “Maybe that’s what happens when you mix Jesus, Alice, and the zombies.”

We walked around to the barren doorway and looked inside.

Shaw said, “Not much chance that we’re going to find cigarettes in here.”

As soon as we stepped inside, rats scattered around the empty floor. They scuttled to the corners and slinked along the walls under rocks and broken pieces of the building placed in small piles along the edges. There was more graffiti inside. Most of it was drawings including women’s bodies without heads, hands with hearts or nails in the middle, top hats, and skulls with bloody, bullet holes. There were names written in swirling script. I could see Chloe, Star, Lola, Chyrece, Tamara, and Lydia.

I went to Chloe’s stack of stones. There was a photograph in a broken frame, but the face had been either burnt out or chewed away from the photo. There was a necklace. There was a piece of cloth over one side of the top stone. The pattern was blackened out with filth and it was definitely chewed. There were beads. I started to pick them up, but when I touched them, my hand was coated by a greasy film that I couldn’t wipe off my fingers.

One of the rats stood up on Star’s stack of stones and sniffed the air. He stood on his hind legs and bobbed his head at me like he was offering the objects to me or he was daring me to take them. Star’s picture was in an open locket under the black rat. His foot and splayed toes covered most of her face.

Doc said, “If there is a Wonderland, this must be the shit hole you fall through to get there.”

Shaw cleared his throat, “Let’s just go. I feel like we’re about to piss off a witch that’s going to kill us in the woods.”

“Juju, Shaw!” Doc moaned.

There were melted candles on some of the stones closer to the corners. I couldn’t see all the names, but the ones I could see were all women. It seemed lots of people had lost their mothers and sisters.  Lots of people had let the monsters have them. Maybe this was the secret thing zombies did when they dragged the bodies away. We had just never walked far enough into the woods to see it.

This is where they took your sister when you let them have her and erased her face from your mind, I thought.

I stood back up facing out the window. I saw the boy staring at me from the kudzu. I gasped and choked on my own spit. The others were walking out the doorway. I reached for Shaw’s arm, but missed. I looked back and the face was gone. The rat squeaked up at me and waved his claw in the air to tell me to go or to tell me to sit down and wait for the others to come.

I left.

As we walked along the trail between the kudzu and the trees, the wind was blowing and the leaves on the vines were whipping back and forth along our path. We slept in the woods farther along away from the gas station shrine. I was exhausted, but didn’t sleep at all.

While I was sitting up for my watch, I saw shapes moving through the trees. They would stop and just wait with one shadow standing on top of another staring at me. They would linger for impossible amounts of time just through the trees. I wished for the zombies to come and drive the shadows away from me. I would look away and look back to try to kill the illusion, but they were still there waiting for me. They would move again a few feet one way or the other and then they would stop for another stretch.

I heard whispers when the wind would die down. Usually, they would tell me to go, but I was trapped in the dark trees. I was trapped with these strangers I called friends. I was trapped outside with men who kept mystery houses full of bodies and bones. The shadows were closing in on me.

When my shift was over, I didn’t lie down and I didn’t sleep. The shapes were waiting for me to look away from them.

The next morning we shuffled on through the woods. We came out near a collapsed barn and some abandoned irrigation equipment. The buckling roof of the barn had a bull’s-eye target painted and declared, If you can see this, Shy, piss on it.

We moved on from the barn and came to the back of a billboard being eaten by vines on both support poles. Between the spread of vines, the message read, Keep going. You are DEEP in Shy Territory. Get Out!!!

I couldn’t have been happier to try. We walked along the dirt trail under the board between the overgrown posts. As we walked away, we turned and read the front. It was some sort of ad, but the paper had been torn and corroded away. There was a long message painted over it.

It read, Shyland Free Soil Territory: You are not welcome here. We will beat, torture, rape, and kill any and all intruders, scavengers, raiders, slavers, Rezzers, Riders, bandits, fugitives, or walkers, both living or undead. Go away.

“What do you suppose a Rezzer is?” Doc asked.

Chef answered, “Maybe we can ask between the raping and the killing. Let’s just keep going.”

We did.

We followed a trail that led under some high tension power lines. We occasionally had to step over or through wire fence. The hills dipped down into deep valleys and over steep ridges. The thick posts of the silent lines were rusted all around.

Doc, Chef, and Short didn’t even look up at the massive structures as we traveled under them. They ignored them the way we walked past soda cans or rusted cars. I had read and seen pictures of the pyramids and of Stone Hinge. I looked up at these monoliths in an endless row and I thought about them as the relics of some great, tragic civilization.

They rose up like giant crosses used to punish monstrous criminals that had multiple tentacles to nail in place. They were empty, silent, and powerless. The monsters and criminals had won; civilization had lost.

  We continued under the monster crosses as the woods opened up on one side. There were rows of sagging houses for chickens. The doors hung open to the empty spaces. Bats crawled out on the grills of the vent fans. They flew out in the daylight with diseased, white noses. I thought about the zombies coming out eating the dying birds through their feathers back at the Complex farms when we left.

One day those houses will probably look deflated and wet like these, I thought.

Shaw stopped and turned to look. He was ignoring the massive, metal crosses over his head, but he was captivated by bats in a chicken house.

There was a silo in the distance. There was a faded cross with a crown of thorns tossed over the top drawn on the silo. Jesus Saves was written over it. This farm hadn’t converted to the mysterious faith of Shy yet.

There were several small sheds still partially standing around the property. The fields were lush with thorns and tree-sized privet bushes. My skin itched under partially healed stings from the last bushes I plunged through running for my life.

At a greater distance was a broad oak with exposed roots. A family plot of low tombstones gathered around the base of the tree in its deep shade. The old graves appeared undisturbed and blessedly unexcavated from the inside out like some newer gravesites were.

Shaw walked up to the black wire between the furrow of the power line easement and the abandoned property. He leaned over and held on to the sharp wire cutting through the brittle plastic covering.

“What do you see, Short?” Chef asked.

Shaw didn’t say anything.

Doc asked, “Trouble? Company?”

Shaw finally answered, “I know where we are.”

There was another long pause as we all stood around. One of the bats lost its grip on the slippery grating of the chicken house fan. It fell to its back in the thorns and stayed there.

Chef asked, “Is that good or bad?”

“I don’t know,” Shaw answered. “There is a farmhouse around these fields. It’s secluded. I don’t know what’s happened with it since I left it.”

“Do you want to go?” Doc asked.

Shaw didn’t answer yes or no. He did grab a post and climbed over the fence. We mistook that for a “yes” and followed him.

***

As we walked down the hill toward the clusters of thorns, I checked to be sure my sleeves were all the way down. My shirt was still ripped at the seams of both shoulders were the raiders had pulled them open looking for something that wasn’t there.

We rounded the edge of the property. After a few feet, the stiff roof of a smokehouse came into view and then the bowing roof of a farm house. We came out on a square of land with tall grass and a few oak trees that still grew large and full as they were ignoring the apocalypse around them.

Doc said, “Not to press, Short, but what are we up against here? Are there relatives still walking in the cellar or bones we need to bury?”

Shaw said, “Nothing like that.”

We came around the smokehouse into view of the back of the home. A rat peeked out of a gap in the boards of the smoker to see what our business was. The windows of the main house were dark and boarded. There were boards still clinging across the back door. The screen between the boards and the peeling wood of the door was hanging loose draping across the boards. I recognized this as well. Somebody was trying to keep something out or keep something inside. Boards over the second floor windows were either a waste of time or there was something inside that the former owners didn’t want coming out.

I looked back at the rat. I didn’t know what our business was here.

We followed Shaw around the side. The siding had collapse under the plywood between floors. Large holes opened into the living space. There was a wood-burning stove and piles of broken furniture. One chair leaned against the wall inside. The upholstery was ripped away and most of the stuffing was pulled out by something that seemed to need a large nest. There were uneven stairs that led up from the back of the front doorway. The boards there were broken inward from the outside and the door was leaning against the wall on the floor with the hinges and parts of the wall still attached. Something terrible wanted in or a massive creature clawed its way outside. I didn’t like either prospect.

We went through the front over the creaking porch instead of the wide open side. There was something moving in the crawlspace underneath us. It was scurrying as dust and bits of wood flaked off under our weight. It could have been something slithering after the things that scurry. I hoped it was rats and snakes.

Shaw went in and stood at the stairs that seemed loose and unprepared for anyone to walk them.

Chef asked, “Do you want us to wait outside?”

Shaw said, “No, we might as well plan to stay here unless there is some reason to be outside again.”

I could think of several. Chef and Doc exchanged looks and then walked in after Shaw. I was exhausted from not getting sleep in the open dark, but I followed them inside without confidence or pleasure.

We stood on the uneven, weathered boards in the exposed foyer. The yellow, striped wall-paper was peeling off every wall in crisp shreds. There was either a massive ant hill or a termite column that was projected up and out of an opening in the floor near the corner of the living room by the opening in the wall. Like everything else in the house, it was hard, abandoned, and dead.

Chef asked, “What’s the story here, Shaw?”

Shaw took a deep breath and looked down at the foot of the stairs. Doc cleared his throat, but Short Order began talking. He knelt down and put his hand on the bottom step as he spoke.

He said, “I’m not sure how long after everything started, but I ended up here moving west to get away from the towns. It was a month maybe. Everything started at different times in different places. I can’t remember when it went from watching it on T.V. to running from it in the streets.”

Part of the termite mound crumbled away. I looked over, but nothing was there. The dust floated up in the air from the missing side of the house. I watched as Shaw continued to talk. Nothing came out of the mound or the hole in the floor.

He said, “Carrie was here alone and had lost her family. She was afraid to go out to the storehouses for more food. She was more than half crazy. I was desperate for a place to hide and I played up on how much she needed me when I brought food a few hundred feet from a couple of the sheds. We used a rope ladder out one of the front, top floor windows. I buried the bodies of her family members. She … well, I took advantage, I guess, but who says ‘no’ to the lady of the house when she offers?”

“I never did,” Doc said, “but I usually ended up in trouble because of it.”

The ceiling creaked. The noise traveled slowly across the boards above our head. We hadn’t searched the house. I watched the top of the stairs and ceiling as the noise wandered through the upstairs rooms.

Shaw continued, “One night after an argument over nothing, she got hold of my gun and I woke up with it in my mouth. She was screaming at me to leave and that I never loved her. We ended up struggling over it and I hurt her. I hit her. She went away crying. I hid the gun, but she found it again.”

Something creaked and scraped upstairs. It could have been a wall or a rat. I thought it was a doorframe. I watched the stairs.