What We Left Behind (8 page)

Steve rests his hand on my knee, wanting to get my attention and point out the second zombie, but I just about jump out of my skin.

Without realizing it, I’ve drawn my gun. My sweaty hands grip the pistol for dear life. I’m about to pull back on the hammer when David whispers.

“No noise. It’ll bring them in from miles around.”

The zombie on the track is close enough that his wounds are obvious. He’s lost an arm at the elbow. His clothing is torn. A few wisps of hair cling to his head, but he couldn’t have been more than twenty when he turned. His skin is a sickly green. His lips have rotted away, revealing yellow teeth.

Zee stumbles on back into the forest, walking in roughly the same direction as the first zombie.

“We’re good,” David whispers. “No need to panic.”

Really? Tell that to my bladder.

David sniffs the air, saying, “Can you smell that?”

Smell? Smell is the last thing on my mind, but he’s right, I can smell the rotten flesh hanging from the zombie.

“Moving from downwind to upwind,” David whispers. “We can smell him. He can’t smell us. He probably caught a hint of our scent, but he’s moving on the wrong angle. From here, our scent will grow weaker.”

Already, the zombie has staggered off the path.

We stay crouched in the grass beside the track for the best part of five minutes. I don’t like crouching as it’s uncomfortable and it’s hard to see through the grass. There could be other zombies out there and we wouldn’t know it until they were right on top of us.

“Why are we waiting?” I ask. I’m shaking. I can’t crouch like this for too long. I slip the pack off my back and sit on it, resting my thighs.

David replies, “I don’t know if they caught a whiff of our scent or if it was just dumb blind bad luck that brought them across our path. By sitting tight, we give them the chance to show their hand. If they circle back, we take them out, but we’ve got to use baseball bats and machetes, no guns. No noise and there’s no horde.”

Take them out. I feel stupid. I am so grossly unprepared for life outside the commune fence.

Steve hands me some beef jerky, saying, “You want some breakfast?”

Breakfast? I want to scream at him. We were just on the breakfast menu for a couple of zombies and he’s hungry? Get a grip, Haze, I scold myself.

Steve seems a little confused. He can’t read my inner turmoil. I guess I’m not giving too much off in terms of body language, so he keeps holding the strip of dried meat out to me. I smile politely, say, “Thanks,” and take the jerky from him while reminding myself not to be a jerk.

Jane’s facing backwards, watching the approach from the rear.

David takes a swig of water and offers his canteen around. We all have a few sips, and finally we’re on the move again. It can’t be much more than seven or eight in the morning and already I’m exhausted.

It’s going to be a long day.

I never thought I’d enjoy the sound of birds singing in the trees so much, but it turns out they’re the best form of early warning we have. Although zombies pose no threat to birds, they somehow sense things aren’t right when they’re around and will fall silent.

Occasionally, they’ll make a racket when a zombie strays close to a nest. Either way, they help us avoid another five or six zombies as we make our way down to the suburbs on the outskirts of the city.

Each time David stops, we crouch, peering through the foliage looking for Zee. Most of the time, I don’t see anything other than tree trunks and the leaves of low-lying shrubs. Steve seems better at picking them out than I am. We haven’t seen any runners. Fresh zombies are rare, but I’m aware that they’re the worst. From the stories I’ve heard, you have little or no time to react.

The few zombies I see through the trees blend into the forest. They’re grubby, muddy, and their skin has a sickly green tinge. It’s not the spring green I associate with growth, though, it’s more like grass wilting under a hot summer sun.

“If we get into a fight,” David says, and then he stops himself and starts again. “When we get into a fight. Drop your pack. Your backpack is a lifeline to help you survive for a few days out here, but in a fight with Zee, you’re interested in surviving for seconds, minutes, not days. Drop anything that won’t help you for the next sixty seconds, and fight like hell.”

I swallow the lump in my throat.

“Remember. It’s all about speed. Zee doesn’t want to kill you, he wants to infect you. He needs help. If he can slow you down so others can join, he wins. You want to disable him as quickly as possible. You don’t need to kill him. Knock him over, kick him down a hill, anything to buy yourself some time.”

“Kick, push, punch,” I say.

“That’s the spirit,” David replies as we walk on.

We come to a rise and I can see the outskirts of the city opening out before us.

I don’t know the name of the city. I’m not a good judge of numbers, so I have no way of estimating how many people once lived here. I imagine it was hundreds of thousands, not millions. Small town, small number of zombies? I hope that assumption holds true. Although, thinking about it, even though it’s not New York or Atlanta, there’s nothing small about hundreds of thousands of zombies. Really, any number beyond zero is one zombie too many.

The track takes us back into the forest and we lose sight of the city.

With the sun high above us, it’s easy to relax and forget about Zee, just as we would in the commune.

“If you could have one thing back, what would it be?” Jane asks. She’s not looking at anyone in particular, just throwing her question out there as we walk along. “What do you miss from all we left behind?”

“Oh, that’s easy,” Steve replies. “Hamburgers and french fries.”

I laugh, but I must admit, just the mention of junk food has me salivating.

“And a Coke,” David says. “Frozen Coke.”

“On a day like this?” Jane asks. Even with the warmth of the noonday sun on our faces, there’s a chill in the air. The season is changing.

“Even on a day like this,” David replies.

“What about you?” I ask Jane, thinking if she raised the question, there must be something burning in the back of her mind.

“I dunno,” she says rather absentmindedly. “Everything, I guess.”

We’re getting glimpses of suburbia through the trees. It’s easy to forget there’s ever been an apocalypse until we round a corner and see the corpse of a fallen zombie lying on the track. Not exactly what you’d expect to see on your average pre-apocalypse nature walk.

The corpse is old, but still repulsive. I guess it reminds me that life is fleeting. There’s a bullet hole almost exactly in the center of the skull. Most of the skin is gone, leaving a collection of bones and the odd patch of leathery skin clinging to a few ribs.

“Male?” Steve asks. “Female?”

No one answers. Straggly hair clings to patches of the scalp, having thinned as the corpse has weathered over the years. Most of the clothes have rotted away. The corpse looks like it has been here from the beginning.

“Death is such a bummer,” Jane notes. I love that about Jane. She has a way of wrapping up the complexities of life in the simplest of comments.

“So sad,” I say.

I spot a purse in the bushes. It’s not much bigger than a wallet, and has long spaghetti straps that have broken as they’ve rotted. I pick up the purse. It’s filthy, but I have to look inside. I’m curious to see if there’s a photo. “Poor girl. I bet she was nice when she was alive.”

“She was a failure as a zombie,” Steve notes. “Got shot through the head on day one.”

“That’s hardly her fault,” Jane says.

“Are zombies even at fault for what they do?” I ask. “I mean, she wouldn’t have wanted to end up as a zombie, or to end up shot like this, rotting on the side of a trail. Makes me shudder at how life ruins our best intentions.”

“I wonder where he shot her from,” David says, looking around at the terrain.

I ask, “Who says it was a him that pulled the trigger?”

David just laughs.

“What? Girls can’t shoot?” I ask.

David grins and is silent, but I catch him swapping a glance with Jane. There’s some unspoken banter going on, and I suspect he’s seen Jane’s marksmanship, or lack thereof, and is silently ribbing her. The look on her face seems to dare him to bring it up, and I’m intrigued by the playfulness between them. They’re madly in love.

I clean off the zombie’s driver’s license with a bit of spit and look at the picture before handing it to Steve.

“She looks pretty,” I say.

Deanne Oreallis was no more than twenty-five, judging by her photograph. She had red hair and pale skin. A small smattering of freckles line her cheeks, making her look cute. It feels insane to realize her sweet, innocent face was transformed into the zombie corpse before me.

Steve hands Deanne’s driver’s license to Jane, who says, “Huh,” as she hands it on to David.

“Such a shame, isn’t it?” I say. “So much has been lost. Such a waste.”

“I wonder if he knew her,” Steve says. “The shooter, I mean.”

“Probably not,” David replies. He crouches down and gently places the driver’s license on the grass behind her skull as though it’s a gravestone. In a way, I guess it is now, although it will probably wash away with the first rains.

As he stands up, David says, “Rest in peace, Deanne.”

We walk on along the trail in silence for a while. No one seems to want to talk about Deanne, but I think what we did was important. All too often, we see zombies as the enemy of humanity, and they are, but once they were just like us. They were human. They had feelings, friends, heartaches. No one chooses to be a zombie. And no one ever mourns the loss of a zombie. Somehow, I feel a little more human having stopped to consider a life lost, and yet even a name and a photograph isn’t enough to do her life justice. At least someone paused to think of her as more than just another monster.

“Peanut butter,” David says after about ten minutes. “I miss peanut butter.”

“Me too,” Steve says, and with that Deanne is forgotten.

I know what Steve and David are doing. Thinking about death is no way to live. I don’t think they intend to discard the memory of Deanne. It’s just that life moves on.

“What about you?” Steve asks, turning to me.

“Shouldn’t we be keeping our eyes peeled for zombies?” I reply.

“Come on,” Jane says.

“Okay,” I say, stalling for a moment and not wanting to embarrass myself by saying something dumb. I speak rapidly, firing off words, wanting to get through them as quickly as possible in case someone thinks I’m being stupid. “Music. Boy bands. Kick-ass girls singing about love. Hip-hop and modern rock.”

Jane says, “Wouldn’t it be great to have a dance?”

Steve blurts out, “I play guitar.” As the word “guitar” passes from his lips, he seems to withdraw, almost as if he said too much or uttered something taboo.

“Really?” I ask, turning toward him, glad the focus is off me.

“We have got to find a guitar,” Jane says.

“Absolutely,” David adds.

Both David and Jane are enthusiastic. I think I know what Steve’s thinking. I suspect he’s thinking, “Oh, dear God, now I have to actually play in front of these guys—what if I suck?” I take his arm and say, “I would love to hear you play guitar.”

Steve doesn’t answer. He smiles sheepishly, which makes me wonder if he’s a better guitar player than he thinks he is.

I say, “I wonder if we could set up some kind of dance when we get back? The music might have to be acoustic with some upturned tins for drums, but it would be a lot of fun.”

“You know what all those dance songs are really about, right?” Jane asks.

“Ah, no,” I reply.

“Sex.”

“Get out of here,” I shriek.

“They are!” Jane insists.

David and Steve are conspicuously quiet.

“Tell her, Steve.”

Steve waves Jane away, shaking his head but grinning from ear to ear. He clearly doesn’t want to be dragged into this discussion.

David laughs.

“You can’t openly sing songs about sex,” Jane says, “so people sing about dancing instead. Dancing becomes a substitute for sex. Think about it.
Gonna make you sweat. My hips don
’t lie. Dance the night away
.”

“Oh, yeah,” I reply sarcastically. “Like
Mashed Potato?
”

Jane skips ahead on the path, shaking her ass and rotating her hips, singing, “
You
’ve got squash that mashed potato. Let me see your butt wobble.
”

I can’t help but laugh.

“God help us if you ever turn into a zombie,” I say as Jane approaches the edge of a clearing. “You’ll dance around like something from
Thriller
.”

I expect Jane to turn back, laughing, but she stops on the track. She has her hand out behind her, beckoning for us to be quiet.

I freeze.

My blood runs cold.

The hair on the back of my neck stands on end.

No one moves.

None of us can see what Jane is looking at, but there’s no doubt about the danger we’re in. The birds have fallen silent. A rotten stench hangs in the air. Slowly, Jane reaches for the handgun holstered on her hip.

I blink, and in that fraction of a second as a veil of darkness flickers across my eyes, the zombie attacks. A ragged mess of skin and bones flies at Jane, knocking her off her feet.

Jane crashes into the bushes with a zombie clambering over her. Torn shreds of clothing flap around as Zee pins Jane to the ground. The skin around the zombie’s mouth has receded with age, revealing dark teeth snapping at her.

I stand there stunned.

I can’t run.

I can’t fight.

Time unfolds in slow motion.

I can’t do anything but watch helplessly as the zombie bites at Jane’s neck. Its motley skin and putrid flesh stink. Flies buzz around the filthy creature.

Jane screams, struggling to free herself from beneath Zee.

She has her arms up by her face trying to protect herself, but the zombie is vicious, easily overpowering her. Bony hands tear at her clothes. Teeth chomp, biting at her arms. Deep red blood stains the grass.