The October Light of August (13 page)

Well, crap. What to do? Neither of the dead seemed to know I was there, or they didn't care. I stood with the familiar feeling of indecision smothering me until I noticed a couple of the dead from Division Street wandering in towards me. I lifted my spear above my head and brought it down hard on the arm-gnawing ghoul. With a grunt, it fell into the sand and then tried to push itself up. It was a woman, probably in her mid-fifties. I let her get up, then pushed her down again onto her back and drove the sharp wedge of metal deep into an eye socket with a satisfying crunch, and it was done. The dead man gorging on the woman's guts was still oblivious to me. I poked him with the blade, then slammed it across his back.

Nothing.
God damn it
.

I grabbed him by the ankles, and dragged him backwards several feet. That finally got his attention as his hands clawed in the sand. He tried to rise, and I pushed him over onto his back with the sod-cutter. He seemed to have better reflexes than the woman had, and he was harder to keep down. Finally I drove my spear through his waist and deep into the sand. He was a skinny guy, no shirt and blue jeans. Blood and sand clung to the wispy mustache and beard smeared across his face. Not yet having a hammer, I got my Wrist-Rocket out and shot a heavy bearing into his skull, then after twisting and shaking the spear loose from his abdomen, I drove it into his eye for good measure. The dead moving in on me still had fifty or so yards to reach me, so I wasn't concerned with them yet.

The woman in the swing was now still. I was going to grab her by the legs and haul her off it, but noticed that was where the older dead woman had been feasting, and there was no way in hell I was touching her there. I tried to drive the blade of the spear into her eye socket, but I had no leverage and only made the poor girl spin around as the blade mauled her face. Finally, I grabbed her wrists and yanked her off the swing, very nervous that she would turn - and then try to bite me. She didn't, though, and I was able to punch the spear into her brain.

With more of the dead closing in I decided that was a good enough start as a fearless zombie-hunter, and picked up my backpack and headed west into the neighborhood. It dawned on me I hadn't felt sick to my stomach at all during that encounter. I didn't know if I should feel pleased with myself or disgusted.

I spent weeks just roaming around. If I heard a car engine I would try and hide immediately – often by simply dropping into brush and out of sight. Mostly I tried to roam by night. Not a lot of vehicles were out after dark. The dead roamed all the time, so I figured I was cutting the danger in half that way. I tried to use the night vision goggles sparingly – you might be surprised what you can see by moonlight or starlight (man, the stars are amazing these days, aren't they?). Often it was easier to spot which house was occupied by night – I could see slivers of candlelight around windows sometimes, and I would leave those houses be. More telling would be the dead clustered around these houses of course, and it was during this time I finally saw evidence of them actually trying to turn doorknobs.

I had assumed before that they were just pawing at them or rattling them by bumping up against them, but I could see the dead grasp the knob and
twist
. That startled me – we had been assured that the dead were empty of mind, that nothing of who the person had been in life was left in the wandering corpse it now was. I suppose a lot of things were told to us to make us feel better, and to not give us false hope a loved one might be cured. And really, that makes sense. I think most people's inclination was to be creeped out, and to want to make sure the infected stayed dead - be it grandpa, mommy or a seven year-old daughter in pigtails. But there would always be someone not wanting to face reality, or be able to finish off someone he or she cherished. And I guess I'm not one to judge, seeing I let Pink roam at will.

As my notions of what the dead actually
are
were being challenged, my faith in humanity as a whole was being tested. Where were the people that would flock to disaster areas to help out? The people that would donate to some child's cancer fund, or some third-world groups that were always in need? Where was the
good
in people? Was it something we were only able to muster up a day out of the year when we served the homeless dinner on Thanksgiving? Was it only capable of being generated when we knew the worst was over in a disaster, and couldn't be maintained for the long haul – or maybe only while others were watching? Without the world stage of the media, did we not care, then? Or was it that we were instructed to isolate ourselves from each other? Was too much time given to us to think only of ourselves first? If not given the chance to react and defend each other as a community, did that breed an “us and them” mentality?

Or were we all, in truth, just the thoughtless jerk behind the wheel of a car, the selfish clod who trampled others on Black Friday?  Did  we
all
laugh at other people's misfortune? Was humanity now collectively laughing at its own demise? Treating the end of the world as if it was a preteen skateboarder smashing his teeth in during a stupid stunt on YouTube? Was that really us? Or did the good ones just leave town? 

I have no doubt there were individual acts of heroism. I also feel somewhere people banded together to try and maintain order and protect each other. The odds would have to give us that, wouldn't they? The poor bastards had to be doomed, though.
I
certainly felt doomed, and I had no desire to try and hook up with anyone else. I worked with the assumption that I was on borrowed time. I wasn't the only loner out there. While I would hole up during the day, sometimes I was able to witness someone with his guard down get bit, or get shot in the back of the head – or in the knees, then hands and stomach and finally in the face. I saw a guy tied up and repeatedly shot with arrows for target practice.

Sorry - I promised not to list atrocities, didn't I?

During the daytime, there seemed to be an almost ceaseless background noise of bullets, screams and engines. That makes it sound like a never-ending battle and of course it was far from that. But I swear, the pop, pop, pop of gunfire got to the point where it was as comforting as the sound of driftwood crackling in a campfire. It was the sudden burst of engines that I dreaded, with the inevitable mindless screaming and yelling. I guess I should be thankful someone was making so much noise that it attracted the dead – who were so intent on heading in the direction of the noisemakers that they would pass right by without a glance sometimes, abandoning their quests to find the treasures behind locked doors.

The nights could be eerily quiet. For so much mayhem in the day, when it grew dark I think the old superstitions and fears of the night returned to even the chaos-generators among us. I imagine they wore themselves out and huddled together somewhere – I had the notion that they stayed along Division Street in defensible locations. I avoided it as much as possible, of course. But I had a strange itch to walk it all the way down to the river. Curiosity, I suppose. It was largely a straight shot of several miles, and it was an irresistible notion to grab a bike and ride it all the way in to downtown. Skid to a stop with a little flourish. Ta-da!

While the living settled down at night, the dead kept roaming. On the whole they were pretty quiet. Involuntary grunts or groans, sure - and some would do it constantly. Those that did also seemed to have other weird twitches and quirks. I saw an elderly man who held his fists close to his chest with his thumbs pushing back and forth as if trying to polish his forefingers, all the while humming tunelessly. Some clacked their teeth occasionally - anticipating a meal for all I knew. But for the most part they were quiet. Arms and heads hanging loose, and always moving. An obstacle would make them pause for a moment – especially ones that seemed freshly dead – but they didn't stay motionless for long, or hide waiting for meals to come to them. They would hang out on a porch or around a house, but as far as I could tell you could outlast them. They may have been more patient than someone wanting to introduce you to Jesus or a kid selling magazines so he could go to DC, but they would eventually move on. So you could hear them shuffling along in the dark. Animals had a stealthy, purposeful sound to their footfalls. The dead just...moved.

That didn't mean you didn't have to be cautious when exploring homes or garages, of course – they could come out of nowhere sometimes. I'm not sure how good their depth perception is, but they seem capable of avoiding tumbles from high places unless they were eager to get a meal.

I was scouting a huge metal garage near Post Street one evening – the thing was big enough for an RV. It's automatic door had been pried up and off its track, so I guessed it had been looted already. Still, you never knew what might be left behind. I peeked in with my night vision goggles and looked around. There was crap scattered all over – busted open boxes, mostly clothes, some books and kids toys. A work bench ran along the back, and I found a ball-peen hammer that would wind up being one of my weapons of choice. As I tucked the hammer into the webbing of my backpack, a dead guy dropped from above and landed with a crunch at my feet.

I jumped about a foot in the air and came down on one of his hands, which then twisted and grabbed at my ankle. I gave an involuntary yell and fell down, all the while kicking at the dead guy's hand, propelling myself backwards. My back pushed up against a support post of the work bench giving me no further room to retreat. The dead guy seemed to have trouble getting up – something wasn't working right. In the glowing-green world of night vision it was hard to tell what was wrong with him. His head twisted oddly, and it looked like his jaw hung loose and dislocated. The fall had broken him. But he was giving it a go anyways, and began to pull himself towards me. I had left my spear...somewhere. That was a life lesson in itself: never
not
know where your weapons are.

I scrambled to get at my backpack, snatched the hammer I had just tucked in there and rolled to my feet. I immediately jumped wildly over the dead guy, his sluggish nervous system not realizing I was behind him. As he crawled towards the work bench, I brought the hammer down hard on the back of his head, and that was that. Still, I gave him several more whacks for good measure. As I stood there, shaking and panting and waiting for my heart to crawl back out of my throat, I began to wonder if it was going to become commonplace for the dead to drop out of the sky at me. I tipped my head up and spied a rectangle of plywood in the rafters above. I took off the goggles and grabbed a flashlight from the backpack and shone the beam upward. Fifteen feet up was a kind of loft space suspended from the rafters, about ten feet wide, and running from one side of the garage to the other.

Huh. I swept the light around and could see no staircase or ladder reaching up to it. How in the
hell
...?

After mulling it over, the obvious answer was the guy died up there after getting infected. When it seemed likely no more of the dead would come hurtling down at me, I began to try and figure out a way to get up there. Looking around the garage I could see no ladders lying about, or any rope. A metal storage rack had been tipped over near a standard door on the east side of the building. It looked to be about eight feet tall. I didn't relish the idea of dragging the pile of metal across the concrete slab of the garage, but there seemed to be no alternative. I stood it up with a minimum of a crash, waited for several minutes to see if any dead came poking around and was about to start hauling the structure across the floor when I spotted some of the clothes strewn about. I grabbed some pants and shirts and wrapped them the best I could on each leg of the rack. I discovered some plastic line for a weed-whacker and used it to tie the clothes into place. It would have to do.

While I was convinced the noise I made hauling the storage rack was loud enough to call all the dead within fifty miles and wake those already in the grave, the clothing did a decent enough job of muffling the screech of metal on concrete. I fine tuned its position under the loft and then started to climb the rack, stopped, found my spear by the big garage door. I put it on the top shelf with my backpack, then climbed up to join it. Stretching up, I could easily push the head of the spear over the edge of the loft and then gave it a shove and heard it skitter away across the plywood. I was satisfied to hear it stop and not slip over the other side and clatter back down to the floor.

Now then. I took a deep breath and let it out in a long sigh, cursed myself for being a fucking moron and jumped. My hands slapped on the edge of the platform and held. I made a desperate grab for a support beam, locked my wrist around it and pulled myself up with all my strength. I was able hook a leg up and on to the loft, wrapped my other arm around the beam, and at last pulled myself onto the platform.

Holy crap. I had made it. With the hindrance of night vision goggles, no less. I lay there curled up on my side, letting strength ease back into my muscles and giggled quietly into the dust of the loft. Perhaps fortune
did
favor the foolish...

I eventually sat up, pulled the flashlight from a pocket, and lit up my surroundings. Several rolls of pink insulation were stacked on each other, forming a U-shaped kind of structure. I had to crouch over and crab-walked around a line of insulation rolls to the inside of the barrier. I couldn't help thinking of a fort made from sofa cushions. Inside the U were cans of soda and bottled water, various canned goods and power bars – man after my own heart, it seemed. A combination flashlight and radio, the hand crank kind, rested on a pile of magazines. There were packages of toilet paper and a first aid kit and some clothing - male
and
female, some feminine hygiene products, and that about wrapped it up. Huh. So was there a couple up here originally? Or was the guy a weirdo? No weapons that I could find.