Revenence: Dead Silence, A Zombie Novel
Read Revenence: Dead Silence, A Zombie Novel Online
Authors: M.E. Betts
Revenence: Dead Silence
PART I: THE BEGINNING OF THE END
Shari Crawford sat in a side booth, gazing out the window at the storm clouds. They were coming in from the south, and fast.
Northbound, just like me
. She finished the last of her grilled chicken salad, still chewing as she stood up with her tray. She took one last sip of iced tea and crossed the room to the garbage bin. Glancing at the TV in the corner, she slid the contents neatly into the receptable and placed the tray on top. The blonde pundit on the screen looked like a caricature as she hawkishly asserted, "I'm just saying, in light of all that's happened, I don't think people of Middle Eastern descent have any business in our country's politics, citizens or not. Somebody had to say it, so there, I said it!" Her eyes gleamed with unauthentic indignance, and her voice was many decibals louder than what it needed to be...she was, in fact, screeching. Shari rolled her eyes. Nearly every establishment she went into these days, whether it was the salon, the doctor's office, a restaurant...there was always some lunatic on the screen shouting at her. What ever happened to impartial, objective news?
Equal and non-biased, my ass,
she thought bitterly.
She escaped into the restroom, where she couldn't hear the bile spewing from the woman's mouth. She would empty her bladder, wash her hands, and get back on the road, hopefully beating the worst part of the coming storm.
I might know what was going on with this storm, if they were playing a weather channel or something, and not that witch's hate speech
, she thought as she finished drying her hands. She gazed into the mirror, ruffling her very curly black hair. She was a woman of twenty-seven, half Indian and half white...Anglo-Saxxon, to be exact. Her paternal ancestors were early colonial settlers, some of the first to venture westward into southern Illinois. Her name came from her mother's side. People were forever pronouncing her name "Sherry", much to her annoyance, rather than the proper pronounciation...Shari, which rhymed with "starry" or "safari". With her large, dark eyes and smooth, olive-toned skin, one might not guess she was half-white. The Indian in her shone through, and she looked very similar to what her mother did at her age. Her mother and father were both quintessential hippies back then. It was a time when a young, white man like her father wanted to date a young Hindu woman based on principle alone. Now they were more like quintessential yuppies, though not entirely sold-out. Her mom still taught art classes, and her father was a psychology professor at the local college. Shari had them to thank for her love of the arts and literature, and also her impeccable taste in music. While she liked some of the music of her own generation, her MP3 player (like a lot of her peers) was mostly filled with sixties and seventies classics. She felt there was no dismissing the quality of much of the music from back then, whether one agreed with that generation's actions and mentality or not. She suspected that countless successive generations would agree with her, and she wouldn't be surprised if a time traveler came and told her that five-hundred years from now, people were still listening to
Abbey Road
and
Dark Side of the Moon.
As she left the restroom and headed for the exit, the blonde was saying, "...And I just don't understand why he won't release his birth certificate! Just release the frigggin' thing already!" as some of the corpulent diners stared mouth-breathing at the screen, nodding slowly in agreement. She suspected some people would believe anything a pundit tells them.
She glared at them in disgust on her way out.
Zombies
, she thought resentfully.
Well, whatever,
she thought, glaring resentfully at the weather.
Grandma's not going anywhere.
Every year on April 22nd she made the two-hour trip from Kentucky to southern Illinois to leave a bouquet of spring flowers on the grave of Beatrice Crawford, her paternal grandmother. Since grandma's birthday fell on a Saturday this year, the Saturday before Easter Sunday, she figured she'd spend the night at her parents' house after she got done at the cemetery. They lived nearby, and she would be spending the holiday with them anyway. The flowers came out of her own yard...irises, daffodils, and some lilac. Her grandma had taught her how to tend a garden, how to propagate and care for the bulbs and shrubs. Now, as a grown woman, she made the trip every year to share with her dearly departed grandma the fruits of all she had learned. She looked at the bouquet in the backseat, a rainbow of yellows, whites, purples, and reds. All the colors gleamed vividly in contrast to the overcast sky and landscape. They were thrown together haphazardly and bound with a piece of red ribbon, and now they sat lovingly nestled between a stack of books from work and the duffel bag full of various odds and ends she'd need for the weekend she would be spending at her parents' house.
She took out her phone, dialing her mom to break the news that she might not make it in time for dinner. Her mother picked up on the third ring.
"Hey mom, it's me," Shari said, looking out the passenger side window as the rain beat down on it, coming down at an angle. "There's a storm out here, I had to pull over. I'll probably be a little late."
"Where are you?" came her mother's voice on the other end.
"Still in Kentucky, about 15 miles or so from the border."
"You're still in Kentucky? I thought you'd have been here already." She sounded reproachful.
"Yeah, well, I was running late," Shari said, trying not to speak through gritted teeth.
Mom, you're so predictable,
she thought.
I knew you'd give me grief
. "I didn't leave the house as early as I should've."
"Well, if you had, you'd have missed that storm altogether."
"I know, mother."
"Did you sleep in again?"
"Not really," Shari said, a defensive note creeping into her voice. "I woke up around eight-thirty, showered, drank a cup of coffee, and got on the road."
"Oh. Well, dinner's on the table, you know."
"I'm sorry. Don't bother waiting for me."
"No, no, it's fine. I'm sure the weather won't hold you up too much longer. Besides, your dad's not here yet, either. I was expecting him over an hour ago, and he's not answering his cell."
"You know how dad is. He probably turned his phone off before class and forgot to turn it back on."
"Yeah, maybe. Still doesn't explain him being so late, though." She sighed irritably.
Man, if mom and dad are having marital problems again,
Shari thought,
then I don't even want to know.
"I don't know, mom. Maybe he had errands to run."
"I just don't like it when he worries me, that's all. At least you called. After I was expecting you, granted, but you called."
Beep-beep
. Shari's phone was about to die.
"And on that note, I'll talk to you la--"
"Hey!" her mother interrupted on cue. She was always evading Shari's attempts to get off the phone with her. "Did you see the news?"
"No, they had some pundit on at the rest stop earlier, but I wouldn't call it news. And you know I only listen to music in the car, not news. But mom, I should let you go. My phone's--"
"There was something going on in Chicago. I was watching channel 9, and they were saying--"
Beep, beep, beeeep.
"Phone's dead," Shari said quietly to herself. "Talk to you later, mom."
Psychology & the East
, the title read. She settled back in her seat and cracked open the book, smelling the sweet aroma of glue and mustiness that came from decades of sitting neglected for the most part on a remote shelf in the library. The pages were still so straight and crisp, not dog-eared like a library book that old can be, like it would be if it were a romance novel, or a gardening or cookbook. She guessed rural Kentuckians didn't often get around to reading about an old Swiss psycologists' views on Eastern philosophy.
She was about twelve pages in, reading about how the modern western psyche was both advanced, and yet primitive in its own special way. It reminded her of something she read earlier in an online comments board while she drank her coffee.
I_eat_libtards_for_breakfast
from Green Bay was making the assertion that "only us white eurapeon americans no how to run there country and econemy", and
proud2be_a_kinook
from Manitoba made the astute observation that there were still plenty of cavemen living in modern, white eurocentric culture, and that the racists deserved to live in caves throwing their feces at eachother. Although it made her chuckle, she rarely wanted to actually interact with any of them, fearing they all, both right and left, generally missed the point. Still, she often lingered, voyeur-like, in those comment boards, witnessing the perpetuallly heated debate over politics, social issues, celebrity bullshit, science, and a host of topics that most people had no real knowledge of, yet felt compelled and, indeed, entitled to offer their wisdom on. These comment boards and chat rooms and forums reminded her of what some people said hell would be like...a sea of people trying at all times to yell at the top of their lungs, not for discussion's sake, but simply for the sake of being heard... infantile, never pondering whether or not they truly had anything of importance to say. They think they're on their own island and must shout ever more loudly to be heard by somebody on the next island...yet they never realize they're not on an island at all, but rather submerged in a sea of other people, each one yelling just as hopelessly as the next. The tragic part is they're so involved in their internal world that they'll never realize all those fellow human beings are right beside them the whole time, a sea of blind and deaf people so dense, they're pressed and crowded together, but still convinced they're all alone. These thoughts of despair made her feel helpless and drowsy. She closed her eyes and before she knew it, she was dozing and dreaming. Odd dreams, something about man-eating fish...