Dead Soil: A Zombie Series (17 page)

XII.

Gretchen drove Charlie’s beat up, old Toyota Corolla away from the city of Chicago with her fingers intertwined to rest in Charlie’s lap. Tall buildings and gridlock traffic gave way to expansive, open highway. Small, run down houses transformed into larger, modern suburban homes once they crossed the state line into Indiana. Charlie looked eagerly out the window at the fenced in backyards and open fields of nothing but green grass.

“I still can’t believe I’m finally going to meet your parents,” she said as she gripped Gretchen’s hand in both of hers and held it to her chest. “What’d they say when you told them?”

Gretchen looked in the rearview mirror, then each of the side mirrors, then the rearview mirror again. “Uh, they said they couldn’t wait to meet you.”

Charlie squealed with glee and squeezed Gretchen’s hand harder. “I’m so freaking excited!”

“Look, there’s something I should tell you, but I don’t want you to get mad, OK? You can’t get mad.”

Charlie relaxed her grip on her girlfriend’s hand to let it rest in her lap again as her face fell into an apprehensive frown. “Oh, God. What is it now?”

“No big deal or anything. It’s just…my parents…they don’t exactly know that you’re…” Gretchen worked laboriously to spit out the last part, a pained grimace on her face. “…a girl.” She bit her bottom lip and waited for the inevitable outburst.

Charlie threw Gretchen’s hand back into her own lap. “Are you serious?” she screeched as she tossed her arms up in the air to let them fall with a slap against her thigh. “What the hell, Gretch?”

Gretchen shrugged her shoulders up until her neck disappeared. “I’m sorry. I told them I was dating a Charlie and we were coming home together, so I didn’t exactly lie or anything. I just let them come to their own conclusions.”

When Charlie didn’t yell, scream, or curse her out, Gretchen let her shoulders relax cautiously and looked at her through the corner of one of her eyes.

Charlie didn’t say anything. Her head was turned to glare out the window at the scenery passing by. There was a black and white cow grazing in the grass. She wanted to smile about it, but couldn’t bring herself to.

“Say something,” Gretchen prodded in a docile voice.

“What do you want me to say? There’s nothing we can do now. Let’s just get there and get this over with.”

Gretchen let out an exhale of relief. She’d been expecting more of a scene. Charlie could be so dramatic sometimes, which was the one of the many things about her that bothered Gretchen, about girls in general.

Unable to stand the silence, she turned up the radio. Fall Out Boy blared through the three working speakers and it reminded her of high school when her life started to spiral out of control. A reminiscent smile pulled at the corners of her pink glossy lips, but she did her best to contain it for Charlie’s sake.

“We’ll talk about this when we get home,” Charlie said through her teeth at the window.

Gretchen rolled her eyes. She knew it’d been too easy.

Gretchen pulled into her parents’ driveway and turned off the car. The house looked the same as it always had, even when her grandmother was the one who owned it decades ago, with its slightly off white, dingy wood siding and tall grass that hadn’t been mowed in months. The two story house loomed over her like a monster from one of her nightmares. She hadn’t set foot inside since she left over ten years ago. Charlie had some masterful powers of persuasion. Gretchen’s throat was dry and it made it hard for her to swallow her dread.

“Are we going in or what?” Charlie asked with sting. She looked over and saw Gretchen’s pale face, hands gripped to the steering wheel so tightly her knuckles were white. The tides changed inside her. Charlie’s voice normalized to its comforting, girlish nature. “Baby, it’s going to be OK. Don’t worry so much.”

The car grew hot as it baked in the summer sun. Gretchen pushed up the half sleeves of her light blue t-shirt. Every inch of her arms, from the wrist up, were covered in colorful tattoos, some brand-new and vibrant while others were faded from the harsh years.

“Come on,” Charlie said as she rested a reassuring hand on Gretchen’s arm.

Gretchen released the breath she’d been holding and pried her fingers from the steering wheel.

They got out of the Toyota and walked up the driveway. The gravel crunched under Gretchen’s black leather boots while Charlie moved in silence thanks to her tiny frame and delicate flats.

Charlie looked up and watched the breeze from Lake Michigan blow through the leaves of the trees with a soothing rustle. She’d never been out in the country before, but as she took a deep breath of the fresh air and let the heat from the sun warm her face, she thought maybe when she married Gretchen they would settle down somewhere like that. Maybe even return to Chesterton and work on rebuilding some sort of relationship between her and her family. Hope filled her warm heart.

They stood in front of the large oak door in heavy silence. Neither made a move to announce themselves. After a long minute dragged by, Gretchen raised her hand to knock, but stopped. Her entire face scrunched together as her eyebrows pulled inward and her nose crinkled. She extended a single finger and pushed it against the door, which creaked open a tiny crack. She looked at Charlie, her face still contorted, and then back at the door. Something wasn’t right.

She took a step forward to go in, but was stopped by Charlie’s wiry arm.

“Don’t. What if someone’s in there?”

Gretchen nodded. It wasn’t normal for her parents to leave their house unlocked, even when they were home. They were close enough to the city to see crime spill over into their middle-class suburbia. Gary, a crowded town that gave birth to the Jackson Five, but had also once held the title of murder capital of the United States, was only a straight shot down highway twelve, the highway Gretchen’s parents’ lived off of.

“Stay behind me,” Charlie whispered as she pushed against the door. With every inch it opened the hinges gave a ghostly groan.

Gretchen remained in the light of the doorway. She bit down on her lip until she drew a small drop of bright red blood.

Charlie inched inside. She craned her neck to look around the corners of the entryway. The house was dark, the blinds still closed from the evening before. There was a wafting scent of dead animal carcass as the breeze from the open windows charged around the room.

Gretchen wrinkled her nose again and wondered if something had died in their backyard. It wouldn’t have been the first time, just one of the perks of living in the middle of a wooded state park.

Charlie looked over her shoulder and waved her hands for Gretchen to follow. “Seems empty.” But Charlie stopped immediately when she saw Gretchen’s face drained of all its color.

“Mom?”

Charlie turned around just in time to see a set of rust-colored teeth clamp down onto her shoulder and tear through the skin. She let out a piercing scream as she reached her free arm out to Gretchen for help.

Gretchen stood fixed in the doorway as her mother dragged her girlfriend down to the wood floor. She begged her trembling legs to move, for her body to do anything besides stand there, but they wouldn’t. 

The fifty-four year old fresh corpse was dressed in a floral patterned, summer nightgown. The short sleeves displayed a battle field of bite marks and scratches with black blood smeared on her grey, mottled skin. There was a jagged gash along her jaw line as if someone had dug their nails in and dragged them across with ferocity. The leathered skin hung loosely from the bones, discolored and wrinkled.

Gretchen couldn’t take her eyes off the thing that used to be her mother. A loud bang came from the dining room as the door swung open and hit the wall. Her brain screamed for her to look, but she couldn’t take her eyes away from the massacre in front of her. Her girlfriend was still alive as her dead mother bore her decaying hands down into Charlie’s soft gut and ripped out her entrails. The sound of blood bubbling up in her throat was soft, but rang in Gretchen’s ears like a siren telling her to run.

Footsteps pounded on the hard floor and echoed throughout the old house. Gretchen moved only her eyes to look. Standing tall on the other side of the couch was her dad. A dark reddish-brown ooze dripped from his mouth over the jean overalls he only wore when he did yard work. His dead, vacant eyes stared her down. Teeth bared, he swayed where he stood as he groaned.

Tears slid down Gretchen’s cheeks. “Dad?” she whispered.

The soft exhale of that single word was all it took to turn the focus from Charlie, who lie dead on the floor with her eyes wide and her jaw wretched open in an eternal scream, to Gretchen. She shook fiercely in the open doorway as the dead forms of her parents gazed at her with milky eyes. Her mother struggled to raise up from the ground as her dad lumbered over. Both groaned with the desperation for her flesh.

Gretchen viewed Charlie for the last time. She didn’t want to leave her there, but she was out of options. Her girlfriend was gone and she would be too if she attempted to drag her body with her. She still heard Charlie’s sweet voice in her ears, saw the gleam in her elfish eyes as she smiled, felt the touch of her fingers as they wrapped around her leg…

Gretchen let out a sharp cry. Her mother’s corpse had grabbed onto her leg and was pulling itself closer, using Gretchen to raise itself up.

The primal instinct for survival finally kicked in. Gretchen danced her legs around as she tried to shake off her mom’s dead, forceful hands. She screamed wildly. She hoped someone would hear and come to help, but there was no one around. She drove her free foot into her mother’s already mangled jaw. There was a loud snap as it jutted to the side. It hung loose and unhinged like a broken cabinet door.

“You’re not my mother!” Gretchen screamed over and over again as she kicked out with everything she had in her.

Her mother’s face cracked, broke, and finally caved in on itself after a relentless beating.

“You’re not my mother!”

The grip on Gretchen’s leg released as the cold hands fell to the floor, her father’s lifeless body still trying to maneuver its way around the furniture to get to her.

Gretchen ran for the car just as her dad made it to the doorway. She fumbled her way inside and slammed the door behind her.

Instead of pursuing, the large, overall-clad corpse turned around and kneeled over Charlie’s mangled body. It lowered its face to devour what little was left of her.

Gretchen put the car in reverse and slammed the gas pedal down to the floor. The tires kicked up a cloud of gravel and dust as she sped down the driveway and back to the two lane highway.

She sobbed uncontrollably as she gripped the steering wheel. Her arms shook violently. She screamed as the images of Charlie’s bloody, horrified face tormented her, a single hand reaching out for help. Why didn’t she help her?

Gretchen wiped at her face, but the tears were falling too fast. Unable to see, she ran off the road at the first turn and drove head on into a tree.

XIII.

Gretchen walked aimlessly as Charlie’s face clouded her mind. Her feet dragged along as she wandered with Gale’s large knife held limply in one hand, a flashlight in the other. Charlie was gone and it was all her fault. She didn’t think she could ever forgive herself for being such a coward that day.

A twig snapped and brought her back to the dark woods that surrounded her. Sweat dripped down the back of her neck as her hairs stood up on end. What was she thinking going off by herself? She wasn’t ready to take on any decomposing, vicious zombies one on one. She’d made that clear back at her parents’ house.

Anita watched Gretchen from high up in a tree, crouched on one of the thick braches while she held on to another above her head. For a moment she considered going down to reveal herself once more to another human being, but couldn’t. She’d been watching them for days and knew the shoulder-length, blonde-haired woman who walked alone in the dark wasn’t really alone, but part of a group Anita wanted nothing to do with. “Gretchen,” she whispered, just wanting to say something, anything, to someone else in the world.

Gretchen stopped in her tracks and whirled around in a circle. Her eyes narrowed as she tried to see through the darkness. She didn’t want to shine her light out into the trees in case there were dead walking nearby. She kept it pointed at the ground. It made it impossible for her to see the person just twenty feet above her head. “Hello?” Gretchen whispered into the black void.

No one answered.

“Not funny, guys,” she whined. She turned to go back to camp, but her body slammed into something hard and cold. A soft wheezing filled her ears.

A female with patchy, dirty blonde hair, red gaping holes where her eyes used to be, and loose strips of meat that hung from her cheeks grabbed onto Gretchen with strong hands.

Gretchen couldn’t contain the scream that escaped her lips as she tried to break free from the grip of the monstrous thing’s long fingers. Jagged teeth bit the air just inches from her nose. She had to break free. She had to get out of there and get back to the group. She couldn’t die there alone.