The Dark Knight (Apocalypse Weird 2) (11 page)

The afternoon rode across the sky
inside the west-facing windows, turning everything in the house still and warm
and heavy.  It was an old house, by Southern California standards, built and
decorated circa 1975.  It settled with occasional ticks and groans just like
the living dead that wandered the yards and streets just beyond its walls.

“It looks like they went to Africa on vacation,” said
Heather after finding a contact list and a note in the kitchen for someone
named Angela.  “Must suck to be them right about now,” she finished.  “Whoever
they are.”

Later she returned to the living room and sat sideways on a
low backed couch as she peered through gauzy curtains at the slow parade
outside.  Cory sat on the bright green carpet, cross legged, rocking back and
forth, humming to himself.

“There’s the old guy from the house with the roses near the
front entrance.”  She gave a low silent whistle.  Then she murmured, “He looks
rough.”

Later.

“Mrs. Harms is missing an arm.”

And...

“Kevin Watts.  What a jerk.  Serves him right.  Let him
stand there in the middle of the street all day with his mouth hanging open
like an idiot.”

Other commentaries on friends and neighbors were noted
throughout the rest of the day.  Heather’s tone lost its innate stunned
monotone and eventually shifted into bitter sarcasm.  Everyone she’d ever known
was...

And then she saw her Dad.

He came out of the Callahan’s house.  He just stumbled out
an open door that had seemed like a blank space in the house.  Or a wound.  He
stumbled out of the darkness that had been there, inside the Callahan’s all day
long.  He stood in full daylight on a neat rectangle of lawn like some
just-awakened drunk, near a forgotten basketball that must have lain where it
was forgotten since it all began.  He stood there as his daughter watched him
from behind gauzy curtains.  His gray face, his hands covered in black gore,
his business shirt untucked and rust stained.  His neck ravaged.  Missing
mostly.  He just stood there even when Heather let the curtains fall back into
place and hide him, as they should have.  Like she was hiding from him.  Like
she’d done this before.  Watched him, not wanting to be seen by him.  The
resumption of a game that had started long ago when she was just a girl of
three, and had lost all meaning in the long collection of days since maturity. 
The rules had been changed when no one was looking.  Maybe she didn’t really
want to be seen by him anymore in the way he’d always seen her as a little
girl.  But, maybe it was still some sort of game.  Even now.  Only on a
professional level.  No longer Daddy and Little Daughter.  Now it was Parent
and Teenage Woman.  Hide and seek. 

Find me.

Survivor and Zombie.

Something like that.

 “All that’s over now,” she whispered and moved the curtain
aside once again to watch him.  There he was.  His mouth began to open.  As
though he were silently moaning.  But she couldn’t hear what he was saying, or
groaning, not this far away.

He was gone now.  That wasn’t him out there, she told
herself.  Isn’t him.  He’s gone now.  Forever.

She knew that.  She knew it right there.  Forever.  Could
see it with her own eyes even though no one had explained the specifics of the
plague to her.  They didn’t need to, now.  She just knew that whoever was
driving that thing on the lawn across the street wasn’t her dad.

She got up and went to the gilded little bar cart in the
family room.  She selected a bottle at random and poured it into a gold rimmed
tumbler with etched starbursts.  She looked at it for a long moment and then
drank.

“Ewww!”  Then she choked out a, “Horrible.”  Then drank
again.  She went to the fridge, found a soda and poured some of it into the
tumbler and added more liquor.  She stood in the day-bright yellow kitchen. 
Standing there drinking.  Listening to the absolute nothing life now promised.

“We’re next,” she said with a sigh.  She could hear Cory
moaning to himself softly in the other room.  She selected a kitchen knife from
the block and walked into the family room and stood in front of a painting of a
lithe, willowy woman with a big floppy sunhat standing in some sort of indoor
garden.  With a slow, determined motion she slashed the painting from top left
to bottom right.

“This is not art,” she mumbled and drank a bit more, only
barely making a face this time as though she were some old pro who merely
winced at the slow poison every time it went down.  “Not at all.”

Next she cut the other painting.  Same vein.  Same fate.

Then she drove the knife harder than she’d meant to into the
couch.  Still, it felt good.  So she did it again and again until the other
pieces of furniture cried out for fresh cuts.

She drank and cut things.  Smashed a few plates but knew
that noise was somehow not good in light of current events.  She thought about
going upstairs to see what there was to destroy.  She passed Cory still sitting
cross-legged and rocking.

“You okay?” she asked not expecting an answer.

None was given and Cory did not make eye contact.

She checked the window.  Her dad was still out there.  The
sun was starting to drop into the west.  Everything was fading to smoky
orange.  Somewhere fires still burned.

“Doesn’t really matter if you are, kid,” she said to Cory as
she continued to watch the street.  “Because none of us are ever going to be
okay, ever again.”

She turned back to Cory and watched for the impact her bile
missile should’ve made.  When the crater didn’t appear, she moved on.

What’s death, she thought.  What’s there to be afraid of
about death? 

She remembered her grandpa dying.  Grandpa Jack.  One day he
was there and the next he was gone.  She’d asked her Dad where he’d gone and
her dad had taken off the wire rimmed glasses she loved to try on and told her
Grandpa Jack was “asleep forever now, honey”.  Later, when she’d delved further
into the nature of death, sleep was a nice way, she’d found out, of saying
death is really just nothingness.  “When you die, you’re nothing,” her dad had
finally told her.

She thought of him out there on the curb now.  Gray and
drooling.  Covered in someone else’s blood.

Whose?

Drinking and thinking about her Dad’s cheap explanation of
death made her suddenly angry.  Why couldn’t there be something after death? 
Why did it just have to be nothing?

She filled the tumbler once again and felt the room spin. 
She burped and felt better.

I don’t want to end up like them, she thought and noticed
she was crying.

Why couldn’t there have been a Heaven?

She remembered feeling angry and resentful at her Dad when
he’d explained to her that he had no power over death.  That death just was. 
“Don’t you love me enough to try and beat death?” she’d thought then.  To come
and get me no matter where I’m at?  She thought now.  That’s what she’d wanted
to say to him.

“Don’t you love me enough for there to be no such thing as
death?”

She started to cry and then said, “C’mon, we’re leaving!”
and threw the tumbler into a tinted mirrored wall with gold flecks.  It
exploded and she dragged Cory to his feet, grunting.  But what she really meant
was, “C’mon, let’s go outside and die now.”

She picked up the knife from the last piece of furniture
she’d done to death and opened the front door, Cory trotting after her as she
crossed the lawn screaming at her Daddy on the other side of the street.

“Don’t you love me enough!?”

She charged the zombie who was once “Daddy” with the knife
held out in front of her.

He stumbled to meet her for a final hug.

Other heads, mouths drooling and agape, turned at the rage. 
There were maybe ten or twenty undead on the street that burning orange late
afternoon.

All along, Cory had been thinking. 

He was still clutching the bag of medicine in one hand.  He
knew he needed to go home.  But where home was seemed unclear to him.  He was
hoping the girl would take him there.  So, like a good boy, he waited patiently
for his turn to come.  Daddy had taught him that sometimes he must wait
patiently.  Cory had needed to learn this skill because of all the babysitters
he’d ever had.  Not all of them had been as kind as Mrs. Sheinman.  And because
of the money, Cory’s dad couldn’t always be as choosy as he would’ve liked to
be.

 Daddy?  Tonight he would need to look at the moon and see
if Daddy had used the Bat Signal.  If Commissioner Gordon needed Cory, Batman,
to come and help Daddy.

This was always the case when Colin needed to work the night
shift.  If Cory ever got worried, all he needed to do was check the moon, and
if Daddy was in any kind of trouble, Cory would see the Bat Signal and then
Cory could come and help Daddy.  As Batman of course.  Because Batman can help
people.  That was the deal Sergeant Colin Morris had made with his son.

So on some nights when Cory awoke, scared and confused, at
Mrs. Scheinman’s house or some other new sitter, if he was worried about Daddy
and the Joker or Mr. Freeze or even the Scarecrow who was the worst of all,
then all he needed to do was check the moon.  No Bat Signal meant everything
was “good to go” as Daddy always liked to say.  Then Cory could go back to
sleep and of course the next morning there would be pancakes because Daddy
always made pancakes after a night shift.

Cory followed Heather out into the fading afternoon.

There were strangers everywhere and they frightened Cory as
they lurched toward him.

“I’m Batman,” he said to himself.  “I am the night...”

Heather charged her father, screaming unintelligible bloody
murder, the knife raised high over her shoulder now.  The stranger, arms out,
stumbled toward her.  His teeth were grinding back and forth.  There was a loud
rumble coming from somewhere nearby.

She swiped and sank the knife into the stranger’s chest. 
The force of her blow made him stumble, dropping him to his knees.  Then, as
Cory watched, the girl stood over the stranger screaming at him, and crying.

Then the stranger reached out and grabbed onto her legs.

Heather recoiled in horror, screaming louder.  Backing away,
falling down.

Cory knew Batman was supposed to save people from
strangers.  Especially strangers who wanted to “play”.

“I’m Batman,” he reminded himself.

A snarling woman, eyes gray and milky, track suit
blood-stained and dirty, lunged from a nearby curb at Heather.  Heather,
screaming, drove her foot into her once-father’s face.

The snarling track-suited woman reached for Heather’s
exposed neck and Cory drove his massive industrial gloved fist down into the
woman’s, the stranger’s, heart-shaped gray face.  He heard the woman’s neck
snap as she crumpled to the ground.

The woman lay on the ground gurgling, not moving, her eyes
rolling wildly and even maliciously at Cory.  He had broken her neck, and even
though she was undead, she would never move again.

Another stranger, arms flopping wildly at his sides came
loping at them and Cory connected with his left hook the way Daddy had taught
him to “play” when the big kids wanted to play too rough.  The zombie didn’t
even try to dodge or duck or even roll with the devastating left hook.  It
merely rag-dolled away from the blow, its bell permanently rung, even on some
undead level.

The sound of a distant engine, revving at high speed,
squealing tires echoing off the low canyon walls of the housing tract of the
future circa 1974, came at them from some indeterminate and everywhere at once
direction.

 Cory grabbed Heather and flung her away from the stranger
with the broken nose who was writhing and clutching at her as specks of gray
spittle and bloody foam flew from his snarling mouth.  Cory dragged Heather
back onto the lawn and away from the strangers closing in all about them.

A teenage boy in a leather jacket, long greasy hair, dirty
jeans and no shoes came stumbling onto the sidewalk.  His lower jaw was missing. 
Cory socked him in the stomach, bending the wasteoid loner zombie in two,
doubling him over as he emitted a papery, “Ummphhh”.  Cory backed away as a
screaming Heather cowered behind him, feeling the azaleas that grew alongside
the house at her back.

A brand new Dodge Charger, dealer plates and everything,
slammed into the eight zombies still crossing the middle of the street heading
toward Heather and Cory.  It even power-braked into a slide to catch as many as
possible.  Bodies thumped against the windshield and went flying everywhere,
landing on lawns and out in the middle of the street.

Oblivious to the interruption, a zombie closed in on Cory,
and Cory let him have it right in the face.  A place his Daddy had told Cory
never to punch.  But he did and he caved in the zombie’s nose, driving it right
back into its brain.  The zombie flopped to the ground, suddenly dead again,
forever.

Cory felt tired.

Teenage boys, tall, rangy, cigarettes erupting from their
thin, hard mouths, sprung from the bloody, gore-spattered, brand new
high-performance muscle car.  Shotguns and pistols began to go off at sudden
concussive intervals as blue gun smoke mixed with the bloody red light of the
last of that day.  Zombies crossing the street to meet them in hand to hand
combat went down in hails of gunfire.  Zombies stumbling from perfect tract
homes as though just coming out to water the lawns in the early evening heat
were blown back into the stucco walls and garages with accompanying blood
spatter.  One hulking teen produced an aluminum baseball bat and began driving
it down onto the pulpy skulls of prone zombies in the street, grunting with
each effort-filled strike.  Whooping in triumph as he raised it again and again
into the bloody sunset above his potato-shaped head.