DISEASE: A Zombie Novel (18 page)

It’s nearly ten minutes before Alex feels safe to move again. The ghoul is gone, but there could be others, there are always others. Alex reminds himself that Danny will be waiting for him.

***

It isn’t long before Alex reaches the clearing where he last saw Danny. Trotting triumphantly in, he’s sure he’ll see the tall blond man waiting for his return, grumpy and annoyed, but his hopes are dashed.

Alone.

The muddy ground is torn up.

Alone.

Thick blood mixes with pools of rain.

Alone.

The cawing, cheeping, chittering, buzzing, roaring, screeching, of the birds overhead drive thin shards of glass through Alex’s brain. He cups his hands over his ears, trying to block them out. His head jerks. The world is too bright, too loud. Sunlight scalds his eyes, glinting off glass. There is something, partially hidden in the leaves.

Danny’s watch.

Alex stoops over and scoops it up. He stares at it lying limply in his hand, its face cracked, no longer ticking and panic begins to wells in his breast.

Alone.

His head jerks again. He clamps his hand around the broken timepiece and he wanders in the clearing, walking in circles, disconnected, staring, as if Danny will materialize before his eyes if he looks hard enough. He tugs anxiously at his hair with sap covered fingers.

Alone.

Alex trips over something.

Laying in the mud, forgotten and lonely, is that shining talisman of life, Casey’s bat. Old and splintered, stained with dirt and blood, it nearly glows against the grey of the world.

Alex lifts the bat from the ground, enraptured, shock slowly receding from his face. He imagines he can feel Casey standing nearby, lending her strength, and Danny nodding his approval, beckoning him to follow the new path beaten through the forest.

Alex wraps his fingers powerfully around the neck of the bat and lets it rest against his shoulder, feeling its weight. He looks small holding it, malnourished, sodden with dirt and mud, but his jaw is set hard, determined, and is mind focuses sharply with a new directive.

FIND DANNY.

***

Lot still stands among the plants in her poor man’s atrium, the late afternoon sun speckling her face. Next to her, Opie drones on about some trade route they’ve been trying to establish. He’s like dog with a bone. Can’t he just close his mouth for a few minutes?

Lot’s arm aches frightfully, but the pain is only secondary to the utter frustration building inside of her. The team she sent out after Danny should have been back by now and the thought of that traitor getting away is intolerable. He must pay for his crimes.

Darkness clouds out Opie’s words. What if Danny does get away? He’ll have gotten the best of her. She imagines his smug face laughing at her. Oh, how she would love to rip out his tongue and then feed it to him, piece by bloody piece. She wonders if she could get away with such an obviously cruel punishment.

No, probably not. The peons in this community need to think everything is their idea, they are weak. Lot has to maintain decorum, especially in matters like this, or risk losing her hold. Still, the idea of jamming a pair of rusty pliers into Danny’s screaming mouth and tearing his tongue out from the root is pleasurable. Very pleasurable.

“Lot,” Opie’s annoying voice demands attention. “Look.”

He hands her a pair of binoculars. Lot follows Opie’s outstretched finger. Several stories below, the survivors of the search party are dragging themselves from the forest’s edge.

Supported by Dennis, Jamal slowly stumbles, a knife protruding from his chest, blood leaking ominously from his mouth. More importantly, Thick Marge trudges grimly ahead and in front of her, prodded forward at knifepoint, staggers Danny.

Lot smiles, gripping the binoculars tightly. “Grand.” Excitement courses through her veins. She watches Danny stagger forward, his swollen, colorless face bobbing in and out of view. His dark, bruised, eyes and blood-covered hair are stains in the sun-bleached field. Her hand trembles, jubilation taking hold.

Lot swings the binoculars over the rest of the group, searching for the boy. Her heart beats heavily, anger mixing with triumph as she realizes he’s not there. Danny will indeed suffer for this. She lowers the binoculars and turns to Opie.

“Leave me.”

Opie licks his lizard lips and scurries out, the door banging shut behind him. She is alone and lifts the binoculars to her eyes again. Guards from inside the hotel are running to join the search party, defending them from the creatures that again wander the field.

Her eyes fall on Danny once more. He looks like death, miserable and downcast, and it’s delicious. Lot breathes heavily, the blood in her veins burning. Overwhelming need dizzies her mind. She drops the binoculars to the floor and falls against a wall. Her good hand touches her cheeks then paws at her breasts lightly before falling to trace her wanton thighs. She hikes her skirt up in the front and touches her blazing skin, panting as her fondling fingers find their mark.

Her mind turns to Danny in his wretched condition, her plans for him pushing her further into ecstasy. She thinks of him screaming, begging, and it fills the very fiber of her being. She moans softly and closes her eyes, giving herself to the uncontrolled waves of bliss that wash over her.

There’s little point in considering the risks. Being alone in the woods is dangerous even without the threat of man-eating creatures. The only thing that matters right now is the need to repair order. With Casey gone and Danny missing, chaos will reign.

It’s this single-minded need for things to be as they were that drives Alex forward. Without a place to safely moor his ship, he’ll soon find himself adrift, lost at sea, unable to reach the world around him. Danny is supposed to be that pier to which Alex can tether his boat, just like Casey before him.

But none of this penetrates Alex’s upper-mind as he weaves and dodges through the forest. All he knows is he feels a connection with Danny, much as he did with Casey. It’s a connection he can’t allow to be severed, even if it means his life. Not after he lost Casey—not after what Lot did to her.

Alex quickly follows the path left by the search party, easily seeing their footprints on the muddy forest floor. He slows his pace as he approaches an area where he can see bodies through the trees. Their smell is quick to assault his nose and he the hear insects gathered for a late afternoon meal as he cautiously steps closer.

Wading through the carnage, Alex sees bodies everywhere, fresh and rotten alike, left unmolested in their death struggle. Blood coats the ground and chunks of flesh and innards, seething with flies, litter the earth.

He’s un-phased. If the bodies aren’t moving, they’re no threat. He steps over a corpse, his bright blue eyes scanning.

Danny?

His heart pounds.

Danny?

He searches. Nearby a squirrel gnaws on an acorn. Gnaw. Gnaw. Gnaw. It grinds into Alex’s brain as he scrutinizes faces on bodies. Only an unraveling string holds back the dark curtain of aloneness that threatens to smother him.

Danny isn’t here. With that in mind Alex’s anxiety is temporarily mollified.

A high-pitched squealing startles him from his thoughts. He twists around, Casey’s bat at the ready, but there is nothing. No cadaverous ghoul pitching itself at him, no danger.

The only thing out of the ordinary is the squirrel. It writhes in place on the ground, screaming, as if possessed by a fit of religious fervor, speaking in tongues.

Alex moves closer to the grey mass of convulsing fur, fascinated. It tumbles slightly out of the weeds revealing a creature’s head, its teeth set into the squirrel’s side. A tiny, clawed foot rips valiantly at the head’s swollen eyes and the rodent clamps its teeth time and again on the soft tissue of the creature’s unflinching face. The squirrel wails, but the head is unforgiving.

Bits of acorn speck the small animal’s lips as a death shudder overtakes it. Finally, it goes limp and Alex steps a little closer. The head whips its eyes toward him, releasing the mangled body of the squirrel and snaps its jaws at the boy.

Alex sneaks a little closer, recognizing the face. Its teeth click like a windup chatterbox. Yes, this man was there when Casey was killed. “Executed,” Danny’s word reverberates in his mind. The head had been standing right there. Had watched the whole thing. Had done nothing.

Alex toes the head with his shoe and it rolls away, teeth still snapping. He kneels down in the mud, placing the bat next to him, but within easy reach, and pulls off his knapsack. He sets it before him and with a heavy air of ritual, he unzips the bag, peering inside.

Alex’s lightly caress each object inside his knapsack with his fingers. The bag of marbles had been a birthday present. Not the last one before the dead rose from their graves, but just an old favorite. The glossy balls with streaks of colored glass inside them are easy to get lost in. He can stare at them for hours, imagining each marble as a tiny world; the entire sack a pocket-sized universe.

His parents had always encouraged him to remove the marbles from the bag. To take them outside; to play with them. They’d hoped that a toy like this would help Alex to socialize with the other kids in the neighborhood, but they never did understand. Besides, the neighbor kids were into videogames.

Alex slides his fingers over a matchbook with one match. His mother’s. She had smoked, but quit when she was pregnant, they said. Still, she went back soon after each of her sons were born. She tried to hide it from the kids, but Alex knew because she always smelled liked cigarettes. Her clothes, her hair, her skin—perfume and cigarettes. Alex grew accustomed to that smell and had looked forward to its predictableness.

Late one night, while claiming his prize from the trash, Alex heard his parents talking about him, concerned. They didn’t know what to do, or who to talk to. The doctors were no help (they never were). She’d been crying.

When his mother came out of his parent’s bedroom, she spotted him, but didn’t know he’d been listening. She smiled at him and he wondered why she would smile if she were “overwhelmed” and “scared”? She rubbed his head and poured him a glass of water to take back to bed.

Now, every time he holds the matchbook it comforts him. Reminds him that his mother smiled for him, even when she had no reason to.

The pages of
Robinson Crusoe
bend under his palm. His older brother’s. Lyle would read it to him, for hours sometimes. It was what they did together, every night, like clockwork, until Alex allowed him stop. They had finished the book seven times.

He fondles the cold glass of the aftershave bottle. His father’s. His mother gave it to his father on Alex’s behalf as a Father’s Day gift. Even though he knew Alex hadn’t actually picked it, his father wore it proudly.

The family had been without running water or electricity for almost a week when the newscaster on the crank radio announced emergency centers where the community could go. They urged people to be aware and to only travel during the day.

The next morning they packed and left the house. Alex had grabbed the bottle of aftershave because he was sure that his father would need to shave at their destination.

The bottle reminds him to always try a little harder. It was something his father asked of him regularly. “Try a little harder to pay attention, Alex. Try a little harder to think of other people, Alex. Try a little harder.”

Finally, Alex clenches his had around the old, threadbare t-shirt lying rumpled at the bottom of his knapsack. He’d been wearing this shirt when Casey found him. She could have left him where he was, two other people did, but they weren’t like her.

She had always wondered out loud how he had survived, set adrift with no connection to reality. She never imagined it was her that brought him back to shore. She fed him, bathed him, clothed him. She protected him and sacrificed for him. His own mother would have been proud to know Casey was there with her boy.

Alex pulls the t-shirt from his knapsack and then hesitates. He looks at the Arnold-head, its lips drawn back, its teeth exposing an infectious sneer. He needs the t-shirt, but he needs Danny more. Without Danny, Casey will disappear.

Try a little harder.

Alex wads the t-shirt into a ball and grabs a stick from the dirt. He positions the head with his feet, holding it like a snake filled soccer ball. The head’s jaws open and close, snapping viciously. Open. Close. Open. Close. Open—

Alex drops the wadded shirt into Arnold’s mouth and uses the stick to jam it back as far as it will go. He crams in until the head’s jaws are locked open with fabric.

Proud of himself, Alex lifts the head by its hair. It hangs limply, eyes rolling comically and jaw muscles trying ineffectually to work out the t-shirt. Bite marks and deep scratches from the squirrel scathe the head’s darkly tanned cheeks. Alex smiles widely into its face.

***

Screams drift down the dark corridor leading to the makeshift infirmary-morgue. Inside, Jamal tries to sit up, Julie shoves him back down. “Stop moving!” She pulls a lantern closer. Dennis’ knife is buried up to its hilt in Jamal’s chest.

Her steady hand slices away shirt with scissors. There is very little blood. Hannah, the undertaker, stands next to the nurse, hovering over her only son, beside herself with fear.

“Mom! I don’t want to die!” Jamal thrashes on the table. “Please, Mom!” His words gurgle in this throat and bubbles of blood burst over his lips.

“Stop talking,” Julie snaps. Blood is filling Jamal’s lungs and the more he moves, the more he talks, the more quickly he will drown. Hannah holds her son’s hand and cries.

Julie scrutinizes her medical supplies. A pile of bandages, a few shiny instruments, nothing that will save this kid from dying. He needs a hospital, he needs a surgeon. He tries to sit up again.

“Stop moving. You’re making it worse, Jamal!”

“Oh my God! I don’t want to die. Please! Don’t let me die!”

“Stop yelling!” Julie shouts.

Hannah’s face is misshapen with grief as she looks at Julie. “Do something! Please! You have to help him!”

***

Darius, a young guard with a unibrow nervously pops open the padlock that secures a walk-in cooler. He’s seen Lot, spoken to her a few times even, but he’s never been alone with her. Although she’s much smaller than him, he feels like she takes up the entire room. His hand shakes nervously as he lays the key in her outstretched palm.

“Leave me now,” she says.

His eyes search Lot’s face. How can he leave
her
alone with such a dangerous criminal? Lot places her hand lightly on his arm and he tries not to tremble.

“It’s okay, Darius. I’ll be fine.”

The calmness and confidence in her voice is enough to ease his worries. Who is he to second-guess her? He nods in a way he hopes suggests strength, and then leaves his leader standing alone in the chrome-plated hotel kitchen.

The light from Lot’s candle glints off of every surface not covered in dust and the hinges on the cooler door squeal as she pulls it open. She holds her candle up high, illuminating the small space within. Slumped against the back wall, arms still tightly bound behind his back, is Danny. His shirt, saturated with blood, clings to him.

He squints against the flickering light and blinks slowly, face drawn thin with pain. Dark black circles ring his eyes, standing out against anemic skin. Lot has seen this death mask before. She is simultaneously delighted and worried by how terrible he looks. She can’t allow him to die before he can be punished.

“I’m sorry for the accommodations, but we’re not really set up for inmates, as you know.”

Danny stares into the void, as if he can’t hear. Lot steps nearer, favoring her slinged arm, and crouches down beside to him. She places her candle nearby. He rolls his dulled eyes toward her and she can taste the defeat dripping off him. “I’ve been told you were shot, Danny. What happened to you?”

A thick storm of fury crosses his face and excitement jolts through Lot. It’s the spark she’s looking for. She wants him to go down fighting.

“You happened to me,” he spits.

“Oh God,” Lot flicks her wrist. “You’re so dramatic, you always have been. I gave you my best years, I took care of you when no one else wanted you.”

“I had someone. You killed him.”

“This conversation is tiresome. Do you want to know the truth? Do you Daniel? Your father took his own life.”

“Liar!” Danny hisses.

Lot’s heart flutters in her chest with titillation.

“It’s true. He was weak, scared of suffering.”

“No! He would never leave me!”

“He did. Do you want to know how he did it?”

“NO!”

Lot’s face flushes. Seeing Danny squirm helplessly is such a thrill. It’s so easy to grind salt into ancient, festering wounds, instant gratification. Shooting fish in a barrel, she thinks, is underrated.

“If he were alive today how do you think he’d feel about what you’ve done? Murdered a child in a jealous rage. You just couldn’t help yourself, could you? You had to destroy such a sweet, innocent life to get back at me.”

Lot slides in a little closer to Danny. He glares at her, shaking with a bitter rage so consuming that it nears madness.

“You just couldn’t handle my affections turned to someone else, could you?” Lot reaches out a hand and lightly strokes his hair away from his forehead. It’s filthy with forest muck and blood. As her fingers glide across his skin and he overpowers the need to shudder, refusing to show weakness.

“You obsessed about me day and night, Danny. You seduced me, bent me to your will, and ultimately murdered a little boy because of your sickness, because of your disease.”

“I was only seven,” Danny’s voice cracks. It’s barely a whisper. The anger is still there, but there is something evil lurking in the crevices: guilt.

Lot touches his cheek and he closes his eyes, stomach turning, head spinning. Lot’s smooth, measured voice overrides his thoughts. “I only ever did what you wanted, my boy. I never did anything you didn’t like.”

“I was only seven.”

“Yes, to begin with. And as you grew older you wanted even more.”

“No,” Danny screws his eyes shut, trying to block her out.

“I only tried to make you happy, to give you what you asked for.”

“You’re twisting it.”

“Am I?” Lot brings her face close to his. He shrinks back into the corner, tears escaping his closed eyes. She strokes her hand gently across his chest and he turns his face away, but has nowhere to hide. He is tiny and powerless, a frightened child once again, victim to Lot’s whims.

Her hand drops to his inner thigh and his skin crawls under her caress, yet still he wants her. It makes him want to rip her touch from his body and burn the flesh. He presses his back against the wall, trapped and unable to escape.

Lot pushes in closer. She could dine on the heady mixture of anger, fear, and self-loathing coming from Danny. Blood swirls through her body and the giddy feeling of total control, total power, wraps her spine in warmth.

She tenderly puts her lips to his ear. “You’ve been a bad boy, Danny. I’m very upset that you took my new toy away from me.”

Danny can’t fight the black hole of emotion that swallows him, swallows his thoughts, devours his body, engulfs his entire soul. He slams the back of his head into the wall of the cooler, sending bright flashes of light careening through his vision. “SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT UP! SHUT YOUR FUCKING MOUTH! I CAN’T LISTEN TO YOU ANYMORE!”