Fire Birds (10 page)

She nodded, “Sure. Get me some.”

I opened the cabinet under the sink then dug around in the first aid bag. I handed her two of the caplets, and she downed them with a swallow of warm beer.

“So you’re a beer drinker now?” I said.

“Yeah,” she said, dryly. “I’m a regular lush.”

I went over to window and looked out toward the road. There was a lone zombie female stumbling around near the mailbox.

“Thanks for going,” she said. “I’m sorry for all the trouble with Grant. He’s really nice, but sometimes he’s impulsive and–“

“We’ll work things out,” I said.

“I’ll talk with him about the whole boyfriend/girlfriend thing,” she said. “It’s just habit with him.”

“It’s more than habit,” I said.

“I’ll talk to him.”

I nodded and turned back to the window. “Well, I expect the crowd to start showing up tonight or tomorrow,” I said. “We’ll be under siege for several days. We’ll all have plenty of time to talk until they leave. There’ll be plenty of things to keep us busy too. Maybe, now that I have some extra hands, I can finally keep that garden clean.”

“I’m amazed you’ve done as much as you have.”

Christine walked in with Julio’s clothes. She stopped and looked back and forth between me and Sara.

“Do you have somewhere I can pitch these?” she said, holding out the clothes to me, but looking at Sara.

“I have a burn barrel behind one of the barns,” I said. “Just throw them out the back door for now.”

“Okay,” she said. “Sara, Grant needs that water.”

Sara nodded as if she was being awakened from a trance, stood, took another swallow of beer, and removed the pot from the stove with oven mitts.

“Turn the stove off for me,” she said over her shoulder as the two of them went to the bedroom.

I turned the knob to kill the gas. The big propane tank next to the house was getting low. I had been checking the gauge every week, and it had gotten down to 10% the last time I’d looked. It wouldn’t last much longer. All of the things that made life easy were slowly going away.

I walked up to the doorway of the bedroom. “Do you need anything?” I asked. “Do you need help or would I be in the way?”

“Probably in the way,” Grant said, as he wiped off his hands. “Sara can help me. You and Christine can wait outside.”

“Why Sara?” Christine said. “She doesn’t know any more about first aid than I do. I’m staying in here with Julio.”

Grant sighed, “Whatever.”

Sara and I went outside. It was hot in the house, and I wanted to check the cistern and the perimeter fences. She was quiet and distant.

“You okay?” I said as we went out the back door.

She nodded and picked up Julio’s bloody clothes that were in a pile next to the back steps.

“No big deal.”

“Want to talk about it?”

She shrugged, “I’m going to put these in the burn barrel.”

I stopped at the cistern between the barns. I wanted to show her what I had set up. She and I had procured the tank from Founder’s Farm and Hardware store a few months before, and we’d had many discussions about the different ways we could set it up. I lingered there until she came back from behind the barn.

“Is this the same tank?” she said.

“Yeah,” I grinned, proudly. “What do you think? I rigged up these gutters so that all the rain from the barns’ roofs would empty into it.”

“Nice.”

“Yeah.”

“I thought you were going to bury it,” she said. “How will you keep the water from freezing in the winter?”

“Too much work for just me,” I said. “I tried to berm it on the north side, but I don’t know if that will make any difference. Maybe now that all of you are here, we can bury one...maybe an above-ground bury–pile dirt on it. We’ll still have to use gravity to get the water out.”

“I thought you were almost empty,” she said. “There’s still a lot of water in here. It’s almost full.”

“That’s from the rain last night,” I said. “These roofs will catch something like half a gallon per square foot for every inch of rain that falls. Together the two roofs are over three thousand square feet...so around fifteen hundred gallons per inch of rain.”

“I had no idea,” she said, obviously impressed.

“Yeah,” I said. “Neither did I at first. I read about it. I just pour a jug or two of bleach into it every couple of weeks or so. But just to be safe, I boil the stuff I’m going to drink.”

“Grant has a chart for how much bleach to add to the water for drinking,” she said.

“So he says,” I said.

We were both quiet for a moment.

“Do you think Julio is in good hands?” I said.

She shrugged, “As good as we have. Grant’s had some med school for his degree.”

“Did he finish?” I asked.

“No,” she said. “He was still in school. He was there on a basketball scholarship and was only going to do doing the chiropractor thing as a backup.”

I didn’t reply to that, because everything I could think to say would have sounded bad.

“Come on,” I said finally. “Let’s go check the fences.”

We walked the perimeter of the property to make sure the fences were secure. When we returned to the house half an hour later, Julio was dead.

The four of us stood around the bed, looking down at Julio’s lifeless body. Christine sobbed softly, both hands over her mouth. There was a heavy tension in the room. No one spoke. It felt like if a single word were spoken, it would be the spark that would ignite an explosion of emotion. I finally broke the silence with a whisper.

“We need to get him out of the house.”

Sara and Grant looked at me, then at Christine. I expected her to erupt, but she was surprisingly calm.

“We’ll bury him,” she said. “He was Catholic. He would want a Christian burial.”

“He’ll turn,” I said. “You know that.”

She glowered at me, “He’s stronger than that. He’s stronger than you.”

Sara went over to her and put her arm around her.

“He’ll turn,” I said, pulling my 9mm. “We need to get him out of the house and make sure the brain is destroyed.”

Christine pulled a snub-nosed revolver and pointed it at me.

“Fuck you,” she said. “We’re burying him.”

Sara gently pushed Christine’s arm down so that the gun was pointed at the floor.

“We don’t have time for a funeral,” I replied. “He’ll turn soon. We need to get him on the other side of the fence before that happens.”

“He drank all that whisky,” Christine said.

“I don’t know if that even matters once a person is gone,” I replied. “We need to take precautions.”

“I’ll do it,” Grant said softly. “I’ll bury him.”

He stepped forward and wrapped the bed’s quilt over Julio’s body.

“Grab the quilt by his feet,” he said to me. “Help me carry him out.”

The two of us lifted the wrapped corpse off the bed as if we were carrying a rolled carpet. Christine stayed in the bedroom, but Sara walked ahead of us and held the back door open.

“Tell Christine we’ll let her know when we’re ready,” Grant said to Sara.

Once we were outside, Sara went back to be with Christine.

“What happened?” I said.

“I don’t know,” Grant replied. “One minute he was talking to me, and then it was like he went to sleep. I couldn’t get him to come out of it. Christine hates me.”

“She’s upset,” I said. “It wasn’t your fault. You did what you could.”

He didn’t say anything to that. He just swallowed hard, trying to hold back tears.

“Let’s put him down,” I said. “I need to rest.”

We set the body down in the driveway between the house and barns.

“Do you have a shovel?” he asked, wiping the sweat from his forehead.

“There are several in the front stall in the barn on the left,” I said.

He walked away. I turned and looked out toward the road. There were four zombies out by the gate. They were arriving. There were probably others gathering at different spots around the perimeter fence. We weren’t going to be able to dig a hole on the outside of the fence without getting bothered. When Grant returned with two spades, I pointed to the road.

“We can’t bury him on the property,” I said. “And it isn’t safe to be on the other side of the fence right now.”

“Why can’t we bury him here?”

“What if he turns?” I said.

“He’ll be buried.”

“Yeah, but–“

“Dude, he’s not going to dig himself out.”

“You don’t know that,” I said. “We need to shoot him or burn him before.”

Grant shook his head, “Christine would freak. It’s my fault he died, and I’m not going to desecrate his body.”

“We can’t make exceptions for our friends.”

“He drank enough liquor to kill the virus.”

I sighed, “Give me a shovel. Let’s go dig a hole.”

Even with the rain from the night before, the heavy clay soil was still very hard once we dug down farther than a foot. We dug in silence near the back pasture, but still in the yard. Grant was afraid the horse would step in the disturbed soil and break a leg, so we stayed out of the pasture. It took every bit of an hour to dig a hole that was waist deep and big enough to accommodate the body. We were both dripping wet from sweat, and streaked with dirt and mud. I sat on the edge of the grave to rest.

“It’s not deep enough,” I said. “But to get it deeper, we’d need a backhoe.”

“Do you have any lime?” he said. “That’ll help with the smell.”

“I have a bag of lime in the barn, but I want to save it for the garden,” I said. “The whole world smells like a dead body anyway. I just want to be sure he’s deep enough that he can’t get out.”

The horse that was left on the property wandered in and came within a hundred feet from us. It stopped grazing and stared at us, ears perked. Grant whistled for it, but the horse kept its distance.

“This is deep enough,” Grant said, turning his attention back to the grave. “Let’s go ahead and lower him into the hole so Christine doesn’t have to see.”

Even though I’d seen the deaths of hundreds of people the past few months, some of them friends, Julio’s funeral was the first I had attended since before Canton B. I didn’t know Julio, but I listened to the kind words spoken by Sara, Grant, and Christine over his grave, and got to know him a little through their descriptions. Of course, the things they had to say were skewed by grief. Even bad men, when eulogized by their friends, are portrayed as saints. The especially bad ones might be described as “less than perfect,” but that’s about as close as they are willing to come to the truth.

Any possible exaggerations and omissions concerning Julio’s life didn’t matter to me. Honestly, I didn’t care at all; I was apathetic. I’d experienced the deaths of too many people I had loved for me to give a damn about the life of someone I didn’t know.

Christine spoke last. She described Julio’s acts of heroism during the past few weeks. She talked about how he was “tough with a tender side.” She said she had loved him, and maybe she had. When she was finished talking, she knelt, scooped up a handful of dirt and tossed it into the shallow grave onto the bloodstained quilt. Then she and Sara walked back to the house.

I sighed, knowing my tired body would regret the thing I was about to offer, but feeling like it was the right thing to do.

“You can go on with them,” I said to Grant. “I’ll fill in the grave. I know he was your friend, so–”

“Thanks, bro, but I need to do this.”

I nodded and picked up my spade. I had so many reasons to dislike Grant–some of them justified and some of them invented and nurtured by me. I had always had some contempt for the jock/frat boy/dudebro types, but this jackass was so damned likeable. If he had not had a physical relationship with Sara, I might have made an exception in these desperate times and been his friend. As it was, my jealousy just wouldn’t allow it. I was already starting to tolerate him way too much, and I just wasn’t comfortable with that.

We all took turns in the little RV shower that afternoon. Christine didn’t feel like eating or even being around anyone, so she carried a bottle upstairs to Sara’s bedroom and stayed. Sara, Grant, and I had a quiet and tense dinner of salad and fried Spam and squash in the kitchen while an army of snarling zombies gathered around the property outside. The noise of their lowing could be easily heard in the house.

Sara picked at her food and was visibly startled when a particularly loud or shrill howl would rise above the other noise. Finally, she put her fork next to her plate, downed her glass of wine and stood.

“I’m going to go check on Christine,” she said. “You two can have my food. I’m not hungry.”

“You okay, babe?” Grant said.

She paused. I thought she would say something, but instead, she just left the room.