Dredging Up Memories (29 page)

I did a double take. Her hair was long and brown. Her eyes were brown as well. She was tall, and there was something vaguely familiar about her. I stopped and watched them walk away.

“Hank, come on,” Hetch said. “Besides, that gal is obviously taken.”

I ignored him. “Excuse me, ma’am,” I said and took a few awkward steps toward them.

They all looked back at me. Though I couldn’t see the man’s eyes, I knew there was suspicion in them. He stepped in front of the woman—on instinct, I’m sure.

The woman put her hand on his arm. They exchanged looks before he moved out of the way and let her approach me.

“Can I help you?”

I hesitated. It was her. It had to be her.

“Can I ask you something? I promise I’ll let you go on your way, but just let me ask you one question.”

She looked back at her man. He stood there, hands in his pockets. He looked like he could pound me pretty quickly if he felt like it. He shrugged and then nodded.

“What do you want to ask me?”

My throat felt very dry. I licked my lips, but that didn’t wet them the way I had hoped.

“Your name. Is it Cate?”

Her face said everything. Her mouth hung slightly open, and she cocked her head to the side just a little. “How did you know my name?” Her voice was like honey from the comb, sweet and smooth.

“I saw a picture of you—a wedding picture. It was in this house. A trailer. I took up shelter there for a few days. Your picture comforted me.”

Again, her face spoke volumes. Her brows creased down, and her eyes thinned. I wasn’t sure if she were angry or confused or what.

“My picture comforted you?”

“Yeah. I know it sounds crazy, but I was alone and talking to your picture…ummm…you know what? Never mind. I sound crazy. I know I do. But you saved my life. And I’m so happy you didn’t end up like most of the world.”

There was a long silence between us. Then Cate leaned forward and put her arms around me. “You’re welcome.” She let go and stepped back.

I nodded, a little shakily, before turning around and letting them go about their lives. My face was hot, and my heart felt good. It was like seeing an old friend you had lost contact with over the years.

The cafeteria was large, and there were maybe fifteen people there. Fifteen? Just a month ago, I thought I would never see that many people again in my life—all total. Now, it was a reality, and adding the three of us into that made eighteen. Eighteen people in one room. Unfathomable. And they were all sane.

They led me past the lunch tables and to the serving kitchen. There were four people in there, three men and a woman, all with nets on their heads and gloves on their hands. One of the men, a tall fellow with a gaunt face and glasses, stepped up to the counter.

“What’ll you have, mister?”

I looked to Jake and Hetch.

“Try the chicken noodle—it’s great,” Jake said. “Just like Mom used to make.”

Just like Mom used to make.

“That sounds good.”

And it was. Though it didn’t taste as good as Mom used to make, it still tasted better than anything I had in months. I ate the soup, drank down every last bit of the broth.

“That was great.”

“Why don’t we go find Bobby,” Jake said.

“Yeah. I’d love that.”

We stood from the table. I took my bowl back to the kitchen, handed it to another one of the workers—he wasn’t much bigger than the guy who had served me, but he had a warm, engaging smile.

“Thank you,” I said.

He obliged with a, “You’re welcome.”

My stomach rumbled but not from hunger. It cramped, and I let out a small grimace.

”What’s wrong, Hank?” Jake asked.

“My stomach’s not used to food, I guess—at least not good food.”

He left it at that, satisfied with my answer.

We were more than halfway back the way we came when we passed a door to the right. Inside sat an old man, his hair as white as the snow outside, his skin like brown leather. He sat on the floor, his legs crossed, hands on his knees. He rocked back and forth and hummed.

“Imeko?”

I stepped into the room, repeated his name.

He stopped humming and looked in my direction. His eyes were two coal embers peeking out from layers of eyelids and age.

“Walking man,” he said to me.

I didn’t understand what he meant. If he had said, “Walker, man,” I would have gotten it. But I wasn’t even sure he remembered me. He looked more fragile than when I had left him.

“Imeko. It’s me. Hank.”

“I am aware.”

“Where’s Alaya? Where’s your family?”

“Dead. All dead.”

“How?”

Imeko looked beyond me to Hetch and Jake in the doorway.

“Give us a minute,” I said.

Jake nodded and pulled the door closed.

“Imeko, how did your family die?”

“I killed them.”

“
You
killed them?”

“I killed them. If the dead didn’t get them, I did. It was all I could do.”

“What about Alaya? You wouldn’t have killed your granddaughter. You went through too much to save her.”

His hand shot out and grabbed my wrist. His grip was firmer than I thought it would be.

“Especially Alaya. She…she was not right…” he tapped his forehead. “In here.”

He released my wrist and then looked away.

“She was not the same.”

With that, he stood, though it was a great effort for him. I tried to help him, but he pushed my hand away. Imeko walked an old man’s walk to the bed against the wall. I hadn’t noticed until then, but Humphrey sat on the bed, her bunny pajamas still on, the blood from Alaya’s wound dried and ground into the white material. He picked Humphrey up and held her out to me.

I took her with no hesitation. She didn’t speak to me at all. Not even when I spoke to her.

“It’s been a while, Humphrey. It’s good to see you.”

When she said nothing, I looked back to Imeko. There were tears in his eyes.

“Why did you keep the teddy bear?” I asked.

“To give back to you. Now, you be gone. Be gone from this place.”

“I don’t plan on leaving. Not for a long time.”

Imeko rounded the bed. He pointed at me and spoke angrily. “You leave this place. You…you’re not right in the head. You leave, and never come back. For your own sake.”

“Imeko, I just arrived.”

His face was fierce, his eyes like hot coals. “I’ve been given a vision from the gods. They said the walking man must go. If he stays, many will die. You are the walking man, and you must go. You belong out there, out with the dead souls.”

I backed away and shook my head. “I don’t know what happened to you, but you’ve lost your rocks, Imeko.”

“Leave me be. Leave us all be,” he said and went back to the middle of the room where he sat back down, crossed his legs, and began to rock forward then back, forward then back, humming as he did so.

A minute passed before I turned and left the room. I gave one last look back to Imeko, and sadness filled my heart.

“What was that all about?” Jake asked.

“Nothing important. He’s lost everything, including his mind.” We walked down the hall together, me with Humphrey in one hand, determined to forget Imeko and desperate to see my son. We rounded the corner to see a group of kids standing in the hall. One of them had blond hair that could use a good cutting. He was talking to a couple of others, mostly girls.

“Bobby?” I called, my voice quaking.

He turned. He looked so much like Jeanette. It was as if she chewed him up and spat him out. The blue eyes were hers. The blond hair also. He had my chin, but that was about it.

It may have been just me, but I thought I could feel Jeanette in that hall with us. I could almost picture her leaning against one of the cinderblock walls, her head tilted, her arms crossed over her breasts. She was smiling, and there were tears in her eyes.

Then he noticed me—
who
I was. And as the world slowed down again and he began to run for me, I heard him yell…

“Daddy!”

~Hank Walker

Date Unknown

Dear Faithful Readers,

If you wouldn’t mind staying with me for a little while longer. I’d like to tell you a tale (but not of a fateful trip). If you don’t get that reference, then you’re probably too young to remember
Gilligan’s Island
. If that’s the case, it’s okay.

A few years ago, back at the end of 2009, I was part of an online writers’ group. In that group, we discussed various points of writing and the merits of the rules that go with it as well as publishing successes and their counterparts: the unsuccessful attempts. One thing this group was good about was challenging each other. We would throw out prompts to help with creativity. We often held contests that lasted several months and dwindled the participants from around twenty to one lone writer—the champion. It was like a writer’s Survivor challenge. It was no small feat to go deep in the competition, but it was even tougher to win it.

When not competing against each other, we often threw out random things to discuss. One day, the topic turned to zombies. Remember, this was the end of 2009.
The Walking Dead
comic books had only been around a few years at this point, and the television series was still almost a year away.

“It’s an overdone subgenre,” many of my fellow writers said. “It’s cliché, and there is nothing new out there.”

One person even said, “There is only so much you can do with a zombie story.” I can’t remember exactly how I got involved in the conversation. At the time, I wasn’t really interested in zombies. Sure, I had seen my fair share of movies and read a couple of books (David Moody’s
Autumn
series had been my favorite), but I had no interest in
writing
a zombie story. What I was interested in was character development, and at that time, my writing was going through a significant change, one that would eventually create the voice and feel of my stories today.

A suggestion was made and then a challenge issue. Surely, I couldn’t write a story based on human character and emotions. Surely, the story had to be zombie-driven. Everyone would get eaten, and mankind would go out in loud screams and deafening moans. The group knew I was all about challenges. Surely, I wouldn’t let a challenge go without at least giving it a try.

Christmas came and went, and on January 20
th
of 2010, I sat down and wrote this line:
The rifle was light, unlike Pop's shotgun.
I stared at it for quite some time, trying to figure out why that line was so important. Then I said, “Screw it. I’m just writing one scene.” Those seven words turned into just under 2400, and the story of Hank Walker was born. But that’s not where this story ends. Oh no. This is where it began. You see, originally, Hank’s tale was called,
My Brothers and I,
and I had no intentions of writing beyond that one story, that one scene. That’s what I thought. Some of my writer friends thought the story was okay, and a couple of them liked it. One of them—a wise man by the name of Eric, who totally hated zombies and was one hard critic to please—said he thought it was cool, but he didn’t like the title.

“What’s wrong with it?” I asked.

“I didn’t see any brothers. Where’re his brothers?”

He had a point. If I was going to call it
My Brothers and I
, then it needed to have Hank’s brothers in it. Remember, at this point, I had no intentions of continuing on with this storyline. I just wanted to prove I could write something somewhat emotional and have zombies in it as well. I thought I had succeeded, especially with this particular line close to the end of the original piece:
The children, they're always the hardest to kill.

Then a curious thing happened. Out of nowhere, the title came to me, three words that sent my brain into hyper drive with thoughts of a bigger story.
Dredging Up Memories
. I thought on those words hard. As a writer, I tell stories about people. All of these stories are memories, whether mine or the characters’. And by telling their stories, I dredge up their memories time and time again. All writers do this whether they realize it or not. We tell stories of memories.

Though he seemed to stay on my mind, I didn’t write anything else about Hank for a while. That changed when I found a website dedicated to stories about the zombie genre.  The website,
Tales of the Zombie Wars
, had a lot of cool stories on it. I wondered if I could get
Dredging Up Memories
published there. I subbed it, not really expecting much. Then on April 9
th
, 2010, it appeared on TOWWZ. I couldn’t believe it. I must have gone to the site a dozen times in the first two or three days. Why? Because people could post comments about it. As much as I wanted to see good comments, I really thought it would receive more negative than positive.

Then I saw this comment:
I like the story very much. It really finds the balance between having a John Wayne who shoots at everything without mercy and a total coward who starts crying for anything as a main character. I’m only somewhat missing a closing to the story. Wouldn’t surprise (or disappoint) me to see this story continue…

It was followed by another one
: A great lead in— One thing I really like about this piece is how you portray a guy trying to deal with the insanity of his situation. You portray him, his thought process, in such a realistic, connectable manner—the details are killer, such as the Spiderman T-shirt and his thoughts about his 6th grade teacher. Most of all, I think you do a fantastic job of relaying his doubts—are they really ‘dead’ in the old sense? Does little Tommy still feel pain in that state? So well delivered; really looking forward to where this goes!

I was hooked. Yeah, there would be more to this story. And there was. Plenty more. Though the story is clearly a zombie story, I tried to layer it with a simple question: What if the souls were trapped inside the bodies of the biters? This would make the story less about surviving the z-pocalypse and more about having mercy on the people trapped in the rotting corpses shambling around the world. And what if one of those souls was in the dead body of a loved one? If it were you, could you pull the trigger and end the existence of someone you love even if you knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that it would be what they wanted if they could speak? I honestly don’t know if I could do it. It would almost be better to find out the loved ones had died and someone else helped them find rest, or peace, or true death than to have to do the deed myself.

If you live in the South Carolina area, you may recognize a few of the places mentioned here. Table Rock, Sommerville, Blackville, Columbia, Batesburg, Saluda, Newberry, and a few other places are all real. I did take a few liberties with scenery, but some of those places are as authentic as they come. Like Healing Springs. The legend about the location is just as I wrote it. The way it looks is just as I wrote it. The healing abilities of the water? Well, I don’t know if they can cure the bite of the undead, but I do know it was the perfect solution to the nastiness that is the zombie bite. Obviously, there are a few settings that are completely made up though they are based on real places.

Like many of my stories,
Dredging Up Memories
has a lot of me in it. However, only one character is patterned after someone I know. That person would be Jake, Hank’s baby brother. He was influenced by my own baby brother, Andy. You see, I truly believe that in the situations that Jake was put in, Andy would know what to do even if he was scared and unsure of how to go about it, or even if he could actually go through with it, but in the end, he would. He just would. This is Andy. He’s a good ol’ boy who does right by folks. If push came to shove, Andy would do right by those who were dead and needed to be released. He would also persevere where so many others would just give in and take the out a bullet provides. Sounds crazy, I know, but sometimes, you just feel something so strongly it has to be true.

If you’ve come this far, I want to say thank you for sticking with me into the darkest hours of the night. Thank you for reading about Hank Walker and the heartache he goes through. This may be the end of
Dredging Up Memories
, but it’s not the end of Hank Walker’s saga. There is more. Hank has blank spaces in his memory that need filling in. Being drunk for weeks at a time will do that to you. Those blank spaces need to be explored. I’ve already started looking into them, and what I’ve discovered is Hank doesn’t recall those events for good reasons—some things your mind hides away in the depths of your soul because you simply can’t handle the truth of those things. For Hank, death may be better than the truth. Ahh, but that story is for another time.

Again, I thank you for reading
Dredging Up Memories
. I hope you enjoyed Hank’s story. Until we meet again, be kind to one another.

A.J.