Swarm (Dead Ends) (21 page)

I found the gun just as it latched onto my foot and began pulling itself towards me. My neck burned. Raising the gun was almost too much. My first shot severed its arm from the hand latched onto my boot. With only one arm left to maneuver, its speed was greatly diminished. I painfully leveled the gun once more, turning the upper third of its head into a mist of blood and bone. Not exactly where I was aiming but it dropped to the ground in a heap, ceasing all movement. I put one more in between its eyes at point blank range just to be safe. Maybe that should be my new motto:
two in the head so you know they’re dead
. I collapsed back to the floor, my head resting on a pillow of Lay’s potato chips, sour cream and onion I think. My body felt numb and a bout of dizziness set in as the adrenaline subsided. I wanted to get up to check on Red but I just needed to not move for a few minutes. I knew enough to know that he was dead anyway.

After a few minutes of Zen-like stillness, I propped myself up on my elbows and surveyed the scene, shaking my head. Leave it to me to stumble down the damn snack aisle and get blood and zombie guts all over the best high-energy food in the store. It would take a while but before I left, I would make sure to pick through every box to find each and every candy bar and snack that didn’t have any Z-guts on it. That van had a shitload of storage space and I planned on using every last inch of it. I managed to get myself up and over to the medicine aisle where I ripped open a bottle of Advil and popped a handful into my mouth, washing it down with an ice cold bottle of chocolate milk. I savored every drink knowing how much of a delicacy it might become in the coming days and weeks. With each drink though, I looked towards the bathroom, in no real hurry to get there. The man was dead either way. We all are. It didn’t really matter. I figured I may as well enjoy the little things because the big things, the things that used to define us? They’re gone. And they will probably never return. Sure, we can still see them, the buildings and parks we created. But if they’re barren? If they’re quarantined like some bad Sci-Fi movie, do they really even exist at all? So the little things, they’re no longer little. They’re simply the only things that keep us going, that remind us of the society we grew to know. A society swiftly crumbling with each passing day in which these nightmarish creatures are allowed to exist within it.

I was going to have to kill Red. Not someone else. Me. I will kill a man that was as much a part of my life as any other ancillary person on the outskirts of my social circle. To me, Red always meant happiness because his store was the last stop before Ocean Shores, before my salvation from the stresses of the world I had created for myself. Now, death had managed to claim one more thing I held dear. Living this way, I couldn’t help but wonder how long it would take for things like this to have no effect on me. I can already feel the compassion and empathy draining from my body, being slowly replaced by the things that would now insure my survival: indifference, self-reliance, and perhaps even hatred. Now I wondered if the tradeoff was worth it. If becoming less human was simply the price to pay for being able to stay human at all. I threw the milk carton down in disgust as I tried to shake off the philosophical bullshit that I had allowed to cloud my mind. I checked the pistol to make sure I had bullets left and forced myself to walk to the bathroom.

Red lay on the floor amongst a swath of blood thinned out with toilet water. His eyes searched for something in the ceiling as his hands grasped at the chunks of porcelain littering the floor. Blood flowed from his neck at a steady pace, the holes in his neck big enough that they seemed to be sucking in air at the same time they were purging blood. He tried to turn towards me but before he could make eye contact, I put a bullet into his skull. More blood flowed and his head tilted just slightly, forcing his lifeless eyes to look up at me. His purposeful old-man squint finally relaxed, revealing a kindness that he always seemed to work so hard to keep hidden from the world.

Chapter 19

I sat calmly behind the counter reloading the pistol, scanning the bloodied landscape that used to be Red’s store. The stench from the fat meat pile in blood-streaked overalls already seemed to be peeling the paint off the walls. I would think it would usually take several days for a dead body to smell like that but who knows how long ago he actually turned. The thought of one of those T.V. medical examiners trying to ascertain time of death gave me a dark chuckle. I could imagine Woody from “Psych” or Ducky from “N.C.I.S.” examining the putrid remains, opening up the stomach to find fingers and hair, bones and internal organs. I glanced at the TV remote and a part of me just wanted to detach from all of this, to turn the tube on and find some “Cold Case” marathon to zone out to. I picked up the remote, figuring it wouldn’t hurt to see if maybe I could find a channel that worked. He had satellite after all and unless the zombies came from space, I should be able to find at least one channel that still worked. I found the channel guide and switched it to CNN. The sudden burst of sound made my heart jump. The channel came in perfectly. A reporter was on scene in Kuala Lumpur, reporting from a windswept rooftop as the camera panned down into the streets to reveal a scene eerily similar to the one I had seen in Seattle. Whatever this was, it wasn’t just confined to the United States.

Humans had been involuntarily turned into savages. Consuming everything that moved. Blood-drenched streets. A mass undead riot. The reporter stopped talking at one point, either to let the scene speak for itself or because she didn’t know what else to say that would adequately explain what she was seeing and how she felt about it. There’s only so many times you can use the words “horror” and “death” in one newscast before their meaning gets skewed and their immediacy loses its momentum. Many of us become immune to the shock of violence and death all too quickly. An easy accomplishment given that we’re surrounded by it constantly. We’re reminded of its existence either for the sake of ratings or the need to sell us a product that might protect us from those very horrors. Maybe it was a good thing, keeping our distance from that aspect of our existence, to exempt ourselves in a way from caring too deeply about it. It was a defense mechanism that allowed us to go about our day unencumbered by the world’s problems; a distinct advantage of living in the Western World. Now it was that same desensitization that might prove to be our downfall. We’re so accustomed to ignoring the uncomfortable side of life that when something truly catastrophic happens, we spend precious time mired in a state of disbelief:
This doesn’t happen to us! We’re Americans dammit!
Minutes, hours, even days wasted because we refused to submit to the fact that we’re no more special than any other corner of the world; that our problems are no more important than anyone else’s.

I know that if I were at work the day the shit hit the fan, I’d probably be dead already. Taking unintelligible calls, enduring mindless chatter with other spiritless co-workers, succumbing to the numbness of the 9-5 Drone-dom. I wouldn’t have believed the news reports either. I would have stayed comfortably in that bubble that allowed me to get through my shit life without freaking out and going postal the first time a boss talked to me about my TPS reports. Instead, I didn’t have a chance not to believe. I had to kill or be killed and that made it pretty easy to believe anything after that. I didn’t need any news program to convince me of anything. In a way, I guess I was lucky.

The more I thought about my life, the more I realized I wasn’t missing much. Excessive caffeine consumption just to get through the day, habitual marijuana use just to get through the night, and when that didn’t work, reality shows and sitcoms that made me dumber simply for having watched them. A life filled with
consuming
things in an effort to make the time pass more quickly. I was blessed with life and I had made a conscious decision to waste it, all the while trying my hardest not to care about that decision. It’s fucked up to think about but in the last few days, days devoid of media and entertainment saturation and full of survival of the fittest-type battles, I had never felt more alive. Maybe hitting the reset button wasn’t such a bad thing. Maybe we’d finally hit that tipping point that made something like this inevitable anyway. Maybe all of the world leaders who are still alive are pinching the bridges of their noses with their thumb and forefinger whispering “It was only a matter of time.” If the news reports were true, this isn’t some virus that got out of a lab somewhere. This was a calculated terrorist attack. And maybe I’m losing my grip on reality a little bit, but I kind of get where the terrorists are coming from.

I watched the scrolling news on the bottom of the screen, telling people to stay in their homes, boil their water, and stay calm and quiet. I rolled my eyes and laughed slightly, moving my neck from side to side, waiting for the Advil to kick in. There they go again, telling people to ignore what was happening, to keep their distance from it but at the same time covering the horror from multiple camera angles with intention of keeping fear alive for sake of ratings. I just wanted to shout at everyone watching and tell them to get out and see it all for themselves. It’s often said that seeing is believing but seeing it on television creates a disconnect that doesn’t quite drive the point home. Experiencing it for yourself and allowing your survival instinct to rear its life-saving head is the only way to know for sure. Seeing may be believing. But experiencing is
knowing
. The distance between the two is immeasurable.

The video feeds switched to multiple locations; Sydney, Toronto, Hong Kong. It was all the same. The undead soldiering on amongst the rubble created in a fruitless attempt to stop them. The accelerated decay of society as we have come to recognize it. And fame-hungry reporters on the fringes of the death and destruction, covering the end of the world either out of a sense of duty or the slim chance that the world may survive and they’ll become media heroes for their “brave” and “selfless” coverage of it all. I switched the channels hoping desperately for some SpongeBob or even some old Tom & Jerry cartoons to cleanse the palate. While most stations were off the air, others seemed to loaf along, airing the same reruns on the same schedule, end of the world be damned. Tired of flipping the channels, I finally settled on an old episode of Full House, the one where DJ gets obsessed with losing weight, a 1980’s harbinger of things to come. Entertainment with a heartfelt message; a relic of a simpler time before irony and aggressive self-promotion ruled the airwaves. I’d always been of the opinion that the downfall of society began accelerating rapidly after the ending of ABC’s TGIF lineup of Full House, Family Matters, Perfect Strangers, Just the Ten of Us, Step by Step and all of the other great family programs that gave kids a reason to stay home on a Friday night and have dinner with their family. It was the last great run of true feel-good programming before the “look at me” sensationalism of the 2000’s grabbed hold of us and never let go.

I looked around the store at all of the food, at the security of the iron door, the access to a working toilet. All I would need to do is clear the bodies out, mop up a little bit, and use every available can of Lysol spray and this could end up being a nice little shelter. I could stay quiet to keep the dead at bay but I’d still have to worry about other survivors, looters maybe, looking for some extra supplies. Maybe I could put a blood-stained sign up outside that read “Caution: Roaming Dead Inside.” That would be enough to keep most people away. And the ones that proceeded anyway? Well, Red’s shotgun had proven itself in small quarters. I’d just have to get all of the blood off of it. I know I couldn’t stay here long-term but even a night or two indoors, watching 80’s reruns would be enough to recharge my batteries and allow me to figure out what to do next.

I leaned against the counter as the slow music began on the TV, announcing the beginning of the “family moment” that Full House was so good at.
It could work
, I thought to myself. I pulled out a half-empty bottle of Johnnie Walker Blue that I had spotted when Red was looking for the revolver. He may have been a crotchety old man but when it came to booze he had impeccable taste. A smile reluctantly took root on my face, the muscles that formed it almost caught off-guard by their sudden popularity. A few of them seemed to misfire, contracting in odd spasm-like motions as they familiarized themselves with movement once again. I could get drunk, eat an entire bag of potato chips, pass out on the cot I had spotted in the back room as Nick at Nite or Adult Swim lulled me to sleep, perhaps allowing me to pretend for a night that everything was alright. It was a damn good plan. I smiled again and opened the bottle of scotch.

In the middle of a man-size swig of hooch, the power flickered slightly, sagged in one last gasp and finally went out for good.

“Fuuuuuck me” I whispered to myself, slamming the bottle down on the counter. I looked towards what was left of the corpse with overalls. “What’s that they say about plans and God laughing?” I laughed as the booze quickly reached my head. “You know what I’m talkin’ about right?” I briefly wondered what size I’d be in a white strait-jacket. Maybe one of those head-to-toe numbers that would make me look like a felonious mummy. A mental institution doesn’t sound half bad right now. Free pills and pudding. Bars to protect me from the undead. White walls devoid of blood. Conditioned air that didn’t smell like rot and ruin. And maybe even a fun little electric shock every Wednesday just to keep me in line, just to remind me how lucky I was. Instead I’m stuck here talking to corpses, attempting to locate my sanity at the bottom of a $200 bottle of scotch. It’s down there somewhere, I’m sure of it. Heaven help me if it isn’t.

A few more swigs brought with them a heady clarity as the alcoholic buzz seemed to awaken my brain cells. They fired on all cylinders, unaware of the fact that they would soon die off as that ephemeral buzz faded into block-headed inebriation. I needed to leave if I wanted to survive. I needed to load the van with supplies I would actually need. Not just things I wanted or things I could consume but things I could perhaps use as trade for something I needed. Cigarettes, pain medication, tampons, toothbrushes and toothpaste, can openers, coffee, medical supplies, candy bars. In the right circles, these things would be worth much more than firearms and ammunition. We could live without central air, cable TV, and cell phones. But try to take away our vices? Our simple modern world conveniences? We’d probably kill each other off before the meat grinders got their turn.