Odium II: The Dead Saga (10 page)

“You know that pretty much everyone is dead, right?” I say slowly, just to make sure they understand everything I’m saying. We didn’t draw straws, but somehow I ended up drawing the damn short straw—the grand prize: getting to make these kids well aware of the current state of the world.

Dean shakes his head. “No, they
’re not. They’re just hiding. These sick people, they scared everyone away.” His face has paled to match his girlfriend’s, and I have the urge to shake the poor sap.

“
Dean,” I start, but then don’t know how to break it to him, so I change my line of questioning. “Have you been here all this time? On your own?”

Dean shakes his head. “No, Anne
’s been here with me too. We’ve been securing the place, cleaning, storing food. The mailman stopped coming.” He scratches his head, looking lost for a minute. “He was always on time—9:15 a.m., sharp.” Anne prods him and he looks down at her startled. “Oh, sorry. Yeah, well, TV went off, and no one seemed to be bringing any more food to the supermarkets, so we decided to gather everything we could, store it, and ration it all until everything went back to normal. The hardest part was getting the sick out of town.” He looks away sadly. “There was another one of us, but he got sick, too, so we had to put him outside of town.”

“I
’m confused. You put the sick outside town?” I ask, pinching the bridge of my nose as I spoon another mouthful of the spinach in. Hungry or not, this stuff tastes like crap. Alek isn’t faring too much better with the mushrooms, though, so at least I have that small satisfaction.

“Come on, we
’ll show you.” Anne smiles and gestures for us to follow.

I put down my can, all too eager to quit eating for the minute, and one by one we follow Dean and Anne out
side. They head off to the end of the street with us trailing behind them. The sun is shining down on us, the snow glistening up, giving an almost ethereal look to everything. At least it’s stopped snowing now. If we set off soon, we could still get to the army barracks before nightfall. I look around us, enjoying the peace and quiet, barring the chirp of small birds in the trees. If there’s food here, maybe we could stay—at least until the rest of town gets back. I almost snigger. What are the chances of that happening?

At the end of the street
we take a right and head down another snow-covered street lined with white picket fences, and then take a left at the end. We pass tons of cars, covered head to toe—um…wheel—in blankets, and several stores with their shutters down, as if closed for the evening. Dean looks back and sees our stares.

“We closed them all up
, to protect everyone’s things inside. Insurance premiums will be at an all-time high when everything gets going again, and everyone is going to be rioting. At least our town won’t have anything to worry about.” He smiles again and I choke back a laugh.

He can
’t be serious?

“I wasn
’t sure what to do about the cars.” He scratches his head. “I remember watching this program once about cars rusting, and decided to cover them all. Every day we try and get around to start a couple of the cars—the ones we can find the keys for, anyway—you know, to keep the engines turning over.” He pouts. “Honestly, I’m not sure it’ll do any good, but I tried, right?” He absently brushes snow off the top of a car.

I don
’t know whether to think that this kid has lost it or is a genius. He’s thought of everything and yet doesn’t seem to have a clue what the hell’s going on. How is that possible? I glance at Mikey with a raised eyebrow and mouth
‘Is he for real?’
He shrugs, looking as confused as me before putting a hand on my arm and stopping me. I don’t argue with him as I hear what’s made him get the heebie-jeebies all of a sudden. In fact, now I have them.

A chorus of moans catches in the wind and blows
around us like the putrid breath of the dead. It sounds like there’s a lot of them. More than a lot—hundreds, possibly?
Oh God, please not hundreds.

I grab Emily
’s arm and we dart across the road, Mikey and Alek closely following, and press our backs to the side of the closed up ice cream parlor, complete with pastel pink shutters with painted-on ice cream cones and everything. Mikey and Alek are beside us too, knives drawn, ready to fight to the death. Another chorus of moans drifts toward us, and I feel the tremble that runs through Emily because it runs through me too.

I look up to the sky as soft snowflakes begin to fall again, and can
’t help but think what rotten luck we’re having today. I close my eyes briefly, trying to calculate the distance the deaders are from us. I open my eyes back up and cast a glance at Dean and Anne, who are still standing in the middle of the road, looking highly amused.

“What are you all doing?” Dean shouts across to us.

“Get out of the road, there’s deaders somewhere,” Mikey shout-whispers to them.

Anne smirks
and elbows Dean. “Come with us,” she says. “It’s fine, honestly.”

The wind picks
up, whipping loose strands of hair into my eyes and making them water. I rub at them, confusion and a little bit of fear mixing in with my watery eyes.

“Are you crying?” Emily whispers.

“No, I am not crying,” I huff. “I’m getting pissed off with their games, if you want to know.”

“You
and me both,” Mikey says and starts to follow after our unlikely boy scout.

I trail after him,
keeping my own knife drawn and ready and feeling Emily close behind me. Alek stays to the rear—I presume to keep lookout behind us. If I’m honest, I don’t think it would matter. By the sound of the amount of deaders nearby, if they manage to sneak up behind us, we’re goners for sure. There would be no escaping the wrath or teeth of this many deaders trying to eat us.

I
’m still working on my pessimism scale, gimme a break
.

We turn the final corner and find ourselves in the
center of the town. In the middle is a large bandstand, little seats and stands for music sheets still in place. The whole place is creepy, I decide, and I do not want to stay here anymore. Another growl of deader love whistles up into the wind, making me cringe.

“Seriously
, where the hell are you taking us?” I snap. A chill is running down my spine, and I can’t shake it. Maybe it’s a draft from the oncoming storm that’s caught the bottom of my jacket. Or maybe it’s the fact that the storm means we’re going to be stuck here with these freaks and a bunch of deaders, and that’s what’s really bothering me.

Dean actually looks a little perturbed by my outburst. “Look, lady, it
’s just at the end of town. It’s not something I can explain.”

“It really isn
’t,” Anne agrees softly.

“No, it really is. I want answers now.” I scowl.

“All will be revealed.” He smiles and does a weird hand movement, which I’m guessing is supposed to be an attempt at a magician impersonation. He sees my scowl and drops the act. “Fine. The sick people can’t hurt us. Trust me.”

“
Trust you? Why would I? I don’t know you.”

He looks down
to his shoes sadly. “No, you don’t, but we came to you, we brought you food. I don’t mean to freak you out, and I’m sorry if that’s what I’m doing, I just want you to come and see. Maybe then you can help us.”

“Help?” Mikey asks.

“Yes, help. You’ll see.” With that he smiles widely again, turns tail, and keeps on walking, with my group following behind. As we reach the edge of town, the growling that I’m all too familiar with gets louder until it’s an almost deafening roar of white noise. We turn one last corner and there it is—or rather, there they are: deaders. Hundreds of them.

Next to a massive hydro plant t
hey stand, like an army of the undead, being held back by a heavy metal barrier which surrounds the entire place. It’s leaning forward in places, and it doesn’t look like long before it will collapse. They growl and push and shove each other, not caring when one of their comrades falls to the ground and gets trampled into the soft, ripe earth. Dean and Anne keep walking, but my little happy foursome has stopped dead in its tracks. Emily cowers behind me—why, I have no idea, since she has her big-ass boyfriend now. Mikey is standing slightly ahead of me, looking like a real tough guy brute, though he pulled off the look better when he had a shaved head and no beard. I would snigger but I’m kinda terrified. Dean looks back to us.

“It
’s okay, they won’t come any closer.” He smiles, looking proud of himself. “I do need your help, though. There’s more today than normal, I’m guessing they smelled or heard you all banging around in town.” He frowns with a tut.

“Is he saying I smell?” I look sideways at Mikey. “Did you just say I smell?” I shout to Dean
and scowl.

“What? Well, yeah, we all do.” He shrugs.

“I do not!” I start to move forward, the eyes of hundreds of hungry undead watching my every movement. The closer I get to them, the more riled up they seem to be. And the stench—sweet Jesus, they stink so bad. I feel even more offended that he had the nerve to say I smelled when standing next to these deaders. That’s just fucking rude.

We come within
arm’s reach of the deaders, most of us gagging and spitting out bile. It’s not only the smell, though that’s horrendous—kind of like rotten month-old raw toilet sewage mixed in with shitty baby diapers and left in the sun too long. It’s the sight of them too. The years have not been good to them, wherever they’ve come from.

Dried out flesh hangs in ribbons from
their puckered faces, rotten eyeballs dangling from graying sockets. Bloated stomachs are stretched far beyond normal limits, and I wonder why they haven’t exploded or somehow released the gasses they contain. Then I realize that it more than likely isn’t gasses inside them anymore, but flesh, skin, bones, people. Human fucking bodies are inside these walking nightmares. A deader moves, stretching its arms out to us, and as I look, I can see fingers and feet pressing on the stretched skin from the inside of it. It’s when I can see the shape of an arm, though; that does it for me. Why an arm out of everything else, I don’t know, but it’s an arm—particularly the elbow joint that is most visible—and it’s that that makes my head spin.

I turn and heave
, wanting to purge my stomach of its contents, but my stomach stubbornly refuses to let go. With every new retch I get a new image of each person that these things must have eaten: a mother, a father, a child, a daughter. My knees go weak and I clutch onto Mikey for support.

I should be used to this. I thought I was used to this, but I guess you can never get used to this sort of hell. Every time
I think I’ve seen it all—thought it all—a fresh new horror is shown to me. I’m not scared, I’m horrified. These were people once, and inside them are people. Fuck, why have I never considered what happens once they eat? Why has it never dawned on me that they don’t shit and piss, that they hold onto their meals for all eternity—or at least until it rots away inside them.

Holy hell, they
’re like those little Russian dolls—a body within a body. Or should I say a rotting corpse within a rotting corpse?

Dean is still smiling like the cat that got the mouse, the cream, and maybe even a side order of catnip. Even little scaredy cat Anne is smiling, though she doesn’t look happy about how close they are to the deaders and backs up a little.

“It
’s okay, they won’t come any closer,” Dean says again. Yet even as he says it, and I see it for myself, I have trouble believing it.

“How is this possible?” I whisper, still staring at the bloated corpses. I take a few steps
forward, but Mikey’s hand clutches my forearm.

“Don
’t,” he says without looking at me.

Dean walks
toward us, his head held high and his chest puffed out, obviously feeling pleased with himself for freaking us all out. “I told you, they…won’t…come…any…closer.” He emphasizes each word, making me want to slap some sense into him.

“But how?” I ask
, finally dragging my eyes away from the dead and looking at him. “Why? I don’t understand.”

“Anne told you, I
’m a whiz with electronics. This town was swarming with the sick people at one point, and Anne and I were hiding out in my grandpa’s basement. We had practically run out of food, it was getting colder . . . I didn’t know what we were going to do. It seemed like we were going to either starve or freeze. But then one day there was a huge bang—the hydro plant had exploded after a bad storm. You couldn’t get near the place without getting electrocuted or burned. Believe me, we tried. We were worried that it would burn down the whole town, but then the fire died out and the strangest thing happened: all the sick started heading for the plant and away from town. I eventually figured out why—well, sort of. I worked out that the frequency of the live current being emitted from the damaged plant was attracting them somehow. So I worked out a better system to keep the frequency going—we didn’t want the hydro plant to just stop one day and the town end up flooded with the sick again—and voila.”

“Is that possible?” I look at Mikey and then to Alek. “I mean, that can
’t be possible, can it?”

They swap strange looks before Alek speaks. “Well no, technically it shouldn
’t be possible, but then there’s fucking walking corpses over there and that ain’t possible either.” He shrugs.

“Of course it
’s possible,” Dean shouts, his face flushing red. “I made it possible—well, sort of—and I’ve maintained it and made it more efficient. The evidence is right before your eyes.” He continues to shout, riling the deaders up as he gestures angrily toward them.

“Listen, with respect, we
’re not going to take the word of someone who believes that those,” I point toward the smelly deaders, “are just sick, and that everyone who ran away from here however long ago it was is going to come back here one day like nothing has happened, all cheery because their insurance premiums aren’t going up. Get a grip,” I bite out.

“You know
, lady, you can be a real bitch,” little mousey pants pipes up, her blonde hair blowing around her face. The steam seems to go out of her as fast as it went in and she goes a crimson color after her little outburst.

I laugh. “Please. T
ell me something I haven’t heard before.”

Emily nods, her mouth quirking up as she does.

The deaders are freaking me out with all their gross staring and protruding bellies, exposed bone and rotting flesh. I shudder as a fresh breeze wafts their scent toward us all.

Emily tugs on my elbow. “Can we go now? I don
’t like the way they’re staring at me.”

“Yeah, let
’s go. Mikey, Alek, you coming?” I back up a couple of steps, not wanting to turn my back on the deaders for a second. I don’t care what Dean and his little mouse say, I don’t trust anything but a bullet to the brain to stop the dead.

“Wait, I thought you said you
’d help us?” Dean hurries forward, worry tainting his voice.

“We never said anything, buddy.” Mikey turns to walk away. “And the fact that there are over a hundred d
ead standing at your back gates means that we’re going to be getting the hell out of here. Right now.”

“But you said…” Dean splutters.

“Again, with the ‘you said’ business. We didn’t say shit, and there’s nothing you can do about it.” I finally turn my back on the gruesome scene and walk away, but curiosity gets the better of me. “What is it you wanted us to do, anyway?” I say over my shoulder.

“We need you to help us cull the herd.”

I frown, still walking. I glance at Mikey, who’s looking more and more pissed off by the conversation with every passing second. “Did he say cull the herd?” I turn around. “Did you just say cull the herd?” I look at Dean, seeing a boy in front of me, not a man. And Anne, she’s just a kid too, a frightened one. How the hell have they survived this long by themselves? Oh yeah, the whole hydro-plant-attracting-the-deaders-and-keeping-them-out-of-town bullshit.

Dean catches up to us. “Yes.” He reaches for Anne
’s hand as she comes beside him. “We need your help.” For the first time since we met him, I see real fear in his eyes.

“You were trying to ge
t us to leave a few minutes ago,” Emily says with a raise of her eyebrow. I get the warm fuzzies at my trademark look on her face. My girl’s learning.

“
And we want you to…just not quite yet.” Dean drags a hand down his face. “Look, I’m trying to protect us both and this town. Whatever it takes.” He takes a deep breath. “And it takes a lot. We could really use your help. The group of sick is getting bigger and bigger. They’re surrounding the hydro plant, crowding it. We’ve so far managed to keep them to a minimum and only kill them when we really have to—I don’t want to get into too much trouble with the police when everything calms down. Most of the time we can attract them and get them to follow us. We lead them away from the town, and they seem pretty stupid, forgetting about us once they don’t see us. But it’s not been working so well recently, and I need to get them away from there now and build some better defenses for it. Otherwise they’re going to crush the power supply and then. . .” His words die off.

He doesn
’t need to say the next line, we all get it: the deaders will come and the deaders will kill, the deaders will destroy, blah blah blah. That’s what always happens.

“But you said that it was dangerous, that the deaders were being electrocuted.” I
grimace at the thought of deep-fried deader, the smell of their burnt flesh filling my nostrils.

“No, I
managed to contain the current.”

“Clever,
” I say.

He shrugs. “
I’m good at this stuff. I was graduating early because I was so ahead of my time, but I’m one guy, and I’ve never done anything on this scale before. My real worry is that if the herd keeps on building like it is, they are going to knock down the fence surrounding the plant and possibly disrupt or destroy whatever it is that created that frequency in the first place.” He looks behind him. “And then…” Again, he doesn’t need to finish the sentence; it’s obvious what will happen.

I glan
ce at the herd of deaders. “Fine. But let’s talk more back at the house, I don’t want to look at these guys anymore. They’re freaking me out.”

“So you
’ll help us?” Dean smiles, the fear vanishing from his face.

Mikey looks at me, a frown etched across his face. He rubs a hand across the bac
k of his neck, looking unhappy—grumpy even. “Well, I want to know more about it before I agree to anything. But I agree with Nina, let’s get back to the house and you can talk us through your plan.”

We all turn and begin
to walk back the way we came. Fresh snow has begun to cover our tracks already, and with it fresh worry about getting the hell out of here anytime soon. Sure, there are worse places to be stuck, but one look at the angry mob behind us tells me this is a horror story waiting to happen.

*

“How much food do you guys have?” Emily asks between mouthfuls of corn chowder.

“We pretty much got everything and stored it all. It took a long time, but
we had nothing better to do, so . . .” Anne shrugs. “I wanted everything to be nice for when my mom came back. She doesn’t know that it’s safe now. She doesn’t even know that I’m still alive.” Anne wipes at her eyes.

“How did you both get left behind?” I ask as tactfully as I can.
But we all know there’s no nice way to ask ‘so, you were forgotten, huh?’

Anne looks into her food as she talks.
“When the sick attacked, I was at school. The teachers decided to evacuate everyone and get us all to the town hall—that’s pretty much standard for an emergency. I got onto one of the school buses. It was crammed way past the point of dangerous. The driver lost control and our bus crashed. When I came to everyone was gone—or dead.” Dean pulls her into his arms. “I couldn’t believe it—friends, cousins, my teacher, all . . . gone in some way or other. I climbed out of the wreckage and headed for the town hall.” She looks up at Dean with a shy smile. “On the way I met Dean. We went to school together. He was in the year above me. He hadn’t gotten on a bus—instead he stupidly wanted to go home and find his mom, but he couldn’t get near the place. There were sick everywhere. When he found me, I was cornered by some of them. He came in all guns blazing and…”

“He had a gun?” Emily asks.

“Well, no, but I had a baseball bat,” Dean chuckles. “I put a couple out of their misery and then dragged Anne to safety. We wanted to get home, but the whole town had gone crazy. I managed to get us to my grandpa’s house, but he was gone, there was blood everywhere. I didn’t know what else to do, so we went down into the basement, barricaded the doors, and stayed put until it went quiet. My gramps was a real nut-job, always believing in that end of days crap, so we had enough to survive for a while.”

“How long were you down there?” I ask.

Dean and Anne look at each other sadly; something crosses between them, but I can’t say what. “Couple of weeks, maybe a month…or two.”

Emily gasps. E
ven Alek turns from the window to look at us.

“It was lon
ger than that,” Anne says, still looking at Dean.

Silence encompasses the room, a thick and heady tension of what we have all had to do to survive this long.

We slowly continue eating, the sounds of forks in cans and chewing our only accompaniment for a long while. I’ve learned the hard way that’s it’s best to keep my opinionated trap shut in situations like this.

“They
’ll come back soon,” Anne whispers.

I look up from my empty food can with a deep sigh. Looking at these two, I know that they are clinging
onto hope the best they can, but can they really believe that the people of this town will magically come back? For all they know, the deaders—sorry, the sick—out there are what’s left of their town. I decide that it’s not my place to break any hearts today. Let them believe, hope, if that’s what keeps them going, keeps them fighting. Look how well they are doing. They’ve fared much better than most of the world. A question is still niggling at me, though, a thought I can’t quite grasp onto yet, but I know it will come. Something still doesn’t sit right about this place.

Later that day, Dean m
oves us into a different house—one where we can use the beds, but more importantly the fireplace, while we stay in town. Apparently it was up on the market after the old couple that used to live there moved away. Morally, Dean is okay with us staying in it as long as we don’t make too much of a mess, since it wasn’t anyone’s home anymore. It still seems kinda stupid to me, but since he isn’t trying to make us sleep on the streets, I guess it doesn’t really matter.

As the night draws in, Dean and Anne make their way back home, leaving my little group to contemplate the next day
’s events and get some shuteye. Emily heads up to bed pretty much right away, exhausted from the day’s antics. Alek stays up with Mikey and me, sipping on a bottle of homemade wine that Dean brought us. It tastes like crap, but it gives my brain a nice fuzzy feeling to it; and that, combined with the crackling coming from the fireplace, is all it takes to send me to sleep.