What We Left Behind (2 page)

I think the word is “subsistence.” Apparently, that’s what we’re trying to avoid by banding together in a community. We’re all supposed to contribute and make life a little better, but life will never be the same as it once was. And fanciful dreams destroy the soul. I shouldn’t think like this. I want too much. Want drives people crazy, makes them do stupid things. I should be content, but I’m not. I want more.

There’s a fire burning where the explosion occurred. I can’t hear any gunfire, but I can imagine a distant crack floating on the breeze. Whoever’s out there, I hope they’re winning. It’s only then I realize no one has replied to my comment about going back. I felt sure David would say something, but we’re all silent. We can all see how impossible it is, but that doesn’t stop the heart from longing, I guess.

Finally, David says, “Maybe it’s a prepper,” ignoring my point just as I’d ignored his comment about joining the marauders. It’s nothing personal. I understand that. You’ve got to have thick skin in the zombie apocalypse. Can’t be crying because someone was insensitive. There are too many tears shed for the dead without crying over the living.

There are preppers out there. Although “preppers” is probably the wrong term these days. Once they were prepared. Now they’re just survivors like us. They’re supposed to be better off than we are, but most of them are sad, lonely, paranoid hermits. Having a stockpile of baked beans and enough bullets to hold off a zombie horde sounds good in theory, but when you treat survivors and zombies alike, I think you’ve missed the point. Life is about more than survival. Sometimes we hear from the preppers when they want to trade, but mostly they shun us as though we’re infected with something worse than Zee.

“I hope he makes it,” I say. Everyone knows what I mean, and yet there are assumptions in just those few words. “He”—He alone. Anything else is inconceivable. Not even the marauders would dare go downtown. At first, we thought there was strength in numbers. There is, but only for Zee. And why “he”? I guess I can’t imagine a woman taking on Zee alone. And as for “makes it.” Well, that’s a euphemism. I hope he makes it where? No one makes it in the end. We all die. The best anyone down there can hope for is to take Zee with him and avoid becoming a traitor to humanity.

Unconsciously, I play with the soft leather pouch hanging around my neck. We all have one, and they all contain the same thing—the last bullet. No one goes anywhere without a handgun tucked into the small of their back with a full clip or six rounds chambered. Not that I’ve ever shot a zombie. I’ve only ever fired a handgun twice. Ammo is too precious.

Handguns are weapons of last resort. Most survivors have a few extra clips stashed on them somewhere, but everyone has the pouch. There’s an understanding. You don’t fall to Zee. You have one last bullet so you can do one last thing for humanity. And I wonder about him. I wonder how long his ammo will last. I wonder if he’s reaching for his pouch. I wonder if there’s one last lonely shot resounding through the night.

“Do you know what I hate?” Steve asks. Steve’s a bit of a wallflower, in a nice kind of way. He’s not arrogant or egotistical, which is refreshing. I think Steve should be more assertive, so to hear him pipe up with such an evocative word as “hate” immediately grabs my attention. This is the kind of Steve I want to see more of.

“What?” I ask, genuinely curious about what could provoke such an emotive word from quiet, gentle Steve.

“Zombie movies.”

“Yeah, me too,” says David.

“I never saw any,” I reply.

I was eight when the outbreak occurred. I’ve spent half my life on the run. We were all just snotty-nosed kids when the first Zee stumbled into Mount Sinai Hospital in New York. No one took him seriously. Oh, the police took Zee seriously enough, but not as a zombie. They thought they were taking down a meth head on a rampage. I still remember the news footage showing five officers standing over his writhing body. Taser wires extended from his chest. When it became clear he couldn’t be subdued, one of the officers unloaded a full clip into him, but by that time he’d already bitten four of them. Another officer struck him in the throat with yet another Taser shot and that must have fried his brain stem as he finally went still.

Even now, we don’t talk of zombies as dying. They’re already dead. Nine grams of hot lead through the cerebral cortex simply formalizes the funeral arrangement. Even a fallen, immobile zombie is dangerous. One nick, a tiny paper cut, a popped zit for us teens, and some careless Zee juice is just as bad as a bite from the most rabid runner out there.

“Like never?” Jane asks. “You never saw a zombie movie?”

“Never,” I reply. “I was a little girl. My dad wouldn’t let me watch stuff like that.”

“Well,” David says. “You got to see the real thing up close soon enough.”

“I wish I hadn’t,” I answer. “I’d much rather they stayed on the screen in some dumb movie.”

“They were dumb movies,” Steve says. He’s relaxing a little. It’s nice to see the real Steve. “They got so much wrong.”

“Like what?” I ask.

“Well, for starters, movies make head shots look easy.”

“Have you?” David asks, and he sits forward. He’s as curious as I am. I don’t think any of us have ever shot a zombie. David’s been out on patrol with his dad, but I don’t think he’s shot at Zee. Most of the time we use baseball bats or crowbars. Bullets attract zombies from miles around.

We’ve all seen zombies, of course, but since we joined the commune it’s only been through a chain-link fence. Occasionally, a couple of the guards will bring one in on poles. They’ll lasso Zee with loops of rope tied to the end of ten-foot wooden poles to keep him at bay. It takes two or three guards to control a runner, but using the poles they can keep him subdued. The crazy thing is why they do it. They bring them to school and shoot them in front of the kids. And here I was thinking school was supposed to be a return to some kind of normalcy. Apparently, head shots are supposed to desensitize us. Most of the girls puke. I did. I still do.

“My dad has shot them,” Steve replies. “My real dad.”

His real dad is one of the undead. This is the first time any of us have heard Steve talk about his past. Normally, he shrugs when asked about how he ended up so far south and says its no big deal. Seeing your family eaten by zombies is kind of a big deal. Being hunted by your own family when they reanimate is kinda even bigger.

“We all had guns,” he says. “Even my younger sister, Missy. She had a .22 handgun. You’ve got to be lucky with a .22.”

Nobody says anything. We’re hanging on Steve’s every word, knowing Missy wasn’t lucky enough with her .22.

“I had a 9mm Beretta.”

“Cool,” David says. Jane slaps his leg softly, wanting him to be quiet. We all want Steve to talk. Talking is good. Talking is cathartic, as Ms. J says in class, meaning the process itself is healing, although I’m not sure that’s our motivation. We want to hear all the gruesome details, regardless. I’m intensely curious. My dad and I have been here since the commune began. We had it better than most. I want to hear about what it’s like out there on the run from Zee.

“First time I got close to one of them was in one of the camps.”

Them. Everyone has a different term for zombies. I call them Zee because that’s the term my mother used before she turned, speaking about the whole horde as though it was just one individual. Ms. J says that’s synecdoche—a figure of speech putting a part for the whole—but that makes my head spin. Grammar has no place in the zombie apocalypse, although Ms. J would disagree. She says we have to preserve knowledge for the future.

Steve uses “them” and “they” a lot, which I think personifies Zee a little too much. It’s as though he can’t let go of the fact they were once human. If Steve’s choice of labeling them speaks of his past, then what does Zee say about mine? That I too haven’t let go of the past? We all left someone behind, and that’s not easy to accept.

I’ve heard Jane refer to zombies as monsters and ghouls. No prizes for guessing she’s scared of the dark.

David keeps things impersonal with the classic term “zombie.” Sometimes he uses Zee, in homage to me. I guess he thinks it sounds cool, but most of the time he’s quite detached about the apocalypse. I think this speaks of his acceptance of all that happened as though the loss of civilization is somehow okay or was to be expected. I simply cannot think of our lives now as normal. We lost normal a long time ago. David’s dad slips into calling them targets and contacts, which is a military thing, I guess. My dad refers to them as creatures, which is perhaps the creepiest notion of all. It’s as though he sees them on par with us.

“During the early years,” Steve continues, “We were part of the civvies camped with the National Guard. The soldiers kept us pretty isolated. We never saw much of them.”

Them—zombies. Not them—National Guard.

I can relate to what Steve is describing. Early on in the war, it looked like we were winning. There was a time when Zee was almost eradicated. There were so many people with guns in the US. It was open season on zombies. There were no holds barred. For a while, capping Zee was a national sport.

After the initial outbreak, humanity kicked ass, but Zee won the war of attrition. That’s the thing about zombies. You only need one to spoil the party.

For the best part of two years, we thought life was returning to normal. I spent my twelfth birthday boating on a beautiful lake just outside of Kansas City, eating fresh strawberries and sunbathing on the polished wooden bow. There was talk of the government re-forming, not that that meant much to me, and then the second wave came. They say one of the soldiers at the South American choke point became infected, and from there the outbreak began anew. Dad showed me photographs of the front lines in Guatemala. What was left of the US army tried to keep the undead bottled up in South America. They had several lines of defense spanning hundreds of miles in depth. The trenches in Nicaragua looked like they were straight out of World War I, but before too long, the few remaining US forces were fighting a war on both sides. Each loss we suffered only added to the army of the undead. There was only ever going to be one winner—Zee.

“A runner got loose in the middle of the night,” Steve says and my heart beats a little faster. “The National Guard turned their guns on the refugees. A stampeding crowd is hardly any different from a horde of zombies, so they opened fire, only that caused their ranks to swell.”

Their—zombies.

A shiver runs down my spine.

Zombies animate quickest in response to a quick death. Watch a slow lingering death, and the living have a few hours, maybe a day before the corpse turns, but fall off scaffolding and the transformation can be complete within a minute. Get bitten real bad and you’ve got an hour, tops.

“So stupid,” I mutter, not wanting to distract Steve but unable to let that response pass.

“Yeah, like I say,” Steve continues. “Zombie movies. I think they made the outbreak worse. Everyone was so damn scared they’d shoot at shadows, and so the poor sap running from them suddenly finds himself joining the ranks of the undead.”

“Go on,” Jane says softly, leaning forward on the rock. Darkness has fallen. Stars shine down on Earth as they have for billions of years, bathing us in their soft light.

“Head shot,” David says, reminding Steve to keep the story on course.

“Yeah, head shots,” Steve replies. His voice sounds distant. He’s caught between two worlds, reliving the moment all those years ago while trying to be here with us. “I woke up to see tiny holes tearing through our tent. I went to get up when my dad slapped me across the chest, forcing me back into my sleeping bag. Dozens of holes appeared in the nylon. Swish, swish, swish. I could hear gunfire, but it sounded as though it was a long way off. Whoosh. There was a soft whistle, no, not a whistle, a whisper as each bullet tore through our tent.”

I’m leaning so far forward I’m in danger of slipping off the rock. It’s only six or seven feet to the brush below, but I can’t help myself. I have to hear every word. The further Steve goes into his dark past, the softer his voice becomes. We’re all leaning in, not wanting to miss any detail.

“I could hear them.”

Them—Zee.

“They were growling. I could smell them. We hadn’t seen any of them in months, and now they were right on top of us.”

I know what he means about the smell. One of the first things that happens when someone turns is they eliminate. They poo, they pee, they puke. They stink.

“I wanted to run, but my dad’s hand kept me pinned on my back. ‘Shhh,’ he whispered as another round whizzed by just inches from my head. My mother was counting. ‘One, two, three’—whoosh. ‘One, two, three, four, five’—whoosh. Dad whispered to my sister and me, saying, ‘On one, you run, but you run for no more than five yards and then you drop. Got it?’ I nodded. Thinking about it now, I don’t know that he could see me nodding in the darkness, but I’m sure my eyes were as big as saucers . . . One.”

Steve pauses. I hold my breath. I feel as though I am lying beside him on that fateful night. I desperately want him and his family to make it, even though I know they don’t. I hope it wasn’t there in the camp that they turned. It sounds silly, as we all know they joined the undead and hunted him, but I want them to survive this night. At that point, they’re human to me, not monsters. That’s the hardest thing about the zombie apocalypse—depersonalizing a zombie isn’t as easy as it seems, especially if they’re someone you love.

In the soft light, I look deep into his eyes, but Steve doesn’t see me. He’s looking past me, staring back through time, reliving that moment.

“I barely made it out of the tent when my dad yelled, ‘Drop!’ I didn’t want to, but my foot got caught, tangled in the loose flap of the tent, and I went down anyway. Whoosh. ‘Go!’ my mother yelled, and we were up again and running. Dad was in front. I wasn’t counting. My heart was beating too fast. He’d drop and I’d drop behind him.”

David says, “Automated sentry sweeping the area, huh? You must have been on the flank.”