The Haunted Country Page 10

  We see the flash of the muzzle, the man’s sudden jerk as debris flies out from his skull, before we hear the report.

  Another round of hoots explode into the night, and all the men raise their guns like cowboys in old cartoons and begin firing into the sky. One of the men then grabs the woman by her dirty-blond hair and drags her away from the mess, deeper into the shadows. She screams as he punches her in the face, then kicks her in the stomach.

  Cindy can’t see what’s going on. She can barely see ten feet in front of her, but she knows something bad is happening. I cover her eyes anyway, and we back away from the scene as the woman’s screams turn to weeping.

  “Those fucking bastards,” Grant says. He’s watching through a pair of binoculars. “I know these guys,” he grunts so low I can barely hear. “I knew it was coming to this.”

  I don’t know if he’s talking about the rape, the skinning of human flesh, or both. It doesn’t matter as I look up at him. His eyes are hidden by the binoculars, but his lips press so tightly together that they wrinkle. I can hear his teeth grinding. I’ve never seen Grant truly angry before.

  Suddenly, he kneels before me.

  He hands me the binoculars and takes off his backpack. Loading his shirt with shells he takes the shotgun from my hands and replaces it with his .30 .06 rifle.

  “Have you shot one of these before?” he asks.

  “What do you think? No!”

  “That’s what I figured. I want you to lay on the ground here, you can go back for your sleeping bag if you don’t want to get your clothes wet. I’ll need a few minutes to position myself, anyway.”

  “What are you going to do?” I hate the way my voice cracks, but I can’t help it. I’m just as frightened as I was with the bandits.

  “I’m going to put an end to that bullshit going on down there,” he says. There’s something in his eyes this time. It’s something dark and vengeful. It’s something murderous, which frightens me even more.

  “Go get your sleeping bag. Then I want you to lie down at the top of this hill where you have a good view of the men below. I’m going to be to the right of them in that copse of trees. I want you to aim at the man skinning the dead guy. Exactly five minutes after I’ve gone. Can you do that?”

  “I … What if … What if I don’t hit him?” I try to swallow but there’s nothing there.

  “It don’t matter if you hit him or not, though it would be helpful. I only really need you for surprise and confusion” He looks again down at the scene below, his eyes filling with hate. “I only really need the distraction. Here’s my watch.”

  He takes it off his wrist and hands it too me.

  “Remember, five minutes! No less, no more.”

  And then he’s gone, the shadows of the valley swallowing him.

  chapter ten

  The five minutes tick by in slow motion. I lie on the sleeping bag, which is nowhere near as warm and inviting as before. Cindy’s grip on my arm no longer annoys or comforts. The only comfort is the ticking of Grant’s watch. It reminds me of the clock I used to have on my bedside table, an old alarm clock originally made in the sixties that miraculously still worked. I used to need that soft tick tick tick to help me drift off into never-never land. I’ve grown used to not having it since the zombies, but hearing it now is comforting. It’s probably psychological because my stomach still has butterflies with razor-edged wings. Those wings flap and tear my insides apart. But I’m focused. Or I hope that I am.

  I switch from measuring time to measuring the distance before me and back again. One minute ticks away. I glance through the rifle’s scope. I focus it on the man doing the skinning. The skinner has a thick beard that reaches his chest. Flecks of blood and chunks of skin and meat are tangled within it. He works methodically, without emotion, his face impassive as though he were skinning a rabbit or gutting a fish. He moves to the legs and buttocks. He cuts one large strip vertically down the leg, then holsters the knife. With one hand on each side of the incision at the thigh, near the crotch—which has already been removed—he yanks and pulls. I flinch, my mind playing tricks on me. I thought I could hear it tearing.

  Three minutes.

  I measure distance, and the bearded man is still yanking on the skin, pulling it down, down, down to the foot, then slicing it off at the ankle. The skin is like a large, fleshy blanket that the skinner tosses into the snow at his side and begins working on the second leg.

  A glance around the camp shows water coolers, some of them closed with bloody handprints on their tops. These men must be hunters for a larger community. These freshly dead victims. The unfortunates who came across the valley where they had taken camp.

  It’s a wonder they didn’t try to take us.

  Four minutes.

  I realize that I haven’t heard the woman’s screams in some time. She’s now in one of the tents, alone and silent, cradling her stomach where one of the cannibals kicked her. It seems they are keeping her alive. I have no questions as to why.

  My stomach flutters with emotions I had never felt before.

  The question remains, could I kill someone? Put a bullet in their chest or head? I have shot my share of zombies, but they’re different; they are no longer human.

  The men below may deserve bullets, but I’m not sure if I’m the person to do it.

  I look at the clock. Five minutes have come and gone.

  Through the scope, the skinner has moved on to the hanging man’s arms. Through the crosshairs, I aim for his chest. I inhale and squeeze the trigger.

  The rifle bucks painfully against my shoulder and Cindy clamps up beside me, letting out a small cry. The image through the scope shakes so that all I see is a violent blur. I look up and aim it back at the skinner, but just as I focus back on him, pulling the reload spring, the sound of gunfire erupts into the night. Pop pop pop. The skinner sits against the tree trunk where he had been doing his grim work. He grips his stomach. The shirt beneath his opened hunter’s jacket is now black and wet, his pale face holding a grimace of pain.

  More bullets rip into his chest. His body jerks one last violent time and he falls onto his side, moving no more.

  Was that first shot from me? Nausea and a sick sense of satisfaction both bloom at the thought. I look around the camp and see more bodies on the ground, the snow around their still bodies slowly turning red.

  There’s Grant. He stands beside the tent where the woman’s lying. The man who beat her is hunched on the other side. The woman is now cradling her knees.

  Grant sneaks around the tent, his knees locked. He comes up behind the cannibal and entwines in his fingers into the man’s long, greasy hair. No longer holding the gun he shot everyone with, Grant has his knife up against the man’s throat. He says something into the man’s ear. I can’t read the words, but I’m sure that they’re not friendly. Suddenly I want to be down there with him and then am glad that I’m not as Grant’s blade slices deep into the man’s throat.

  The man falls, clutching at his throat. “Holy shit,” I whisper as Grant grabs the man’s head, and then quickly plants his knee into his stomach, holding him down. In the firelight there is nothing to hide. Grant cuts off the cannibal’s pants and grubby underwear, grabs the man’s dick, his balls, and with the knife he slowly begins to saw.

  The cannibal dies before he’s finished cutting, but still he sticks his prize into the dead man’s mouth before putting a bullet between the man’s eyes. A message? It doesn’t matter. This image will haunt my dreams for the rest of my life.

  The world spins. I look away and turn my head. The vomit sprays from my mouth, my last meal melting and steaming into the snow.

  “I know seeing that upset you,” Grant says. It’s an hour or so later. We sit around our own campfire, which blazes high in hopes to make the woman Grant had rescued stop shivering. Grant said that she’s probably in shock and needs to be left alone right now, but he also said that someone should keep an eye on her.

  Since he
redressed her and carried her up, she has just sat there, staring into the fire with her knees drawn up to her chest. She rocks back and forth, her blue eyes red-rimmed and lids hanging half-mast. Her blond hair has dark roots. I don’t think that she’s blinked in the last ten minutes.

  “It was fucked up, man!” I say. “I’m not saying that he didn’t deserve it, it’s just that … I …”

  Grant looks at me, his face serious and back to that bored, untouched expression.

  “Listen,” he says. “I know these people. They’re from a bigger group that’s very dangerous. They needed a little message to let them know that they aren’t invincible.”

  “It’s not just that,” I say. “I’ve seen some pretty bad things since all this started. But, what they were doing to those people … I … I can’t wrap my head around it.”

  Grant nods, ignores the tears forming in my eyes.

  He points to the woman.

  “It’s your watch,” Grant says. “Make sure that you keep an eye on her for the rest of the night. Make sure she’s okay and doesn’t try to steal our supplies.” He moves to his sleeping bag and climbs in.

  “Oh, and my advice to you is to not let the shit you saw and did tonight creep its way too deep inside you. You gotta let it go. What’s done is done.”

  Easy for him to say. I think of the man I shot. Holding his stomach and all pale in the face. It wasn’t me who killed him. Grant finished him off. But my bullet was big and deadly enough. He wouldn’t have made it.

  Grant zips the bag over his head. Within minutes his snores join the snaps and cracks of the fire.

  The night drags by, but I’m not half as tired as I thought I’d be. The woman remains by the fire, rocking back and forth. She doesn’t look at me or Cindy, just keeps her eyes on the fire.

  I want to talk to her, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea. The woman has even peeked Cindy’s curiosity. She watches her watching the fire, then laughs up at the sky and tugs on my arm.

  “’Arlie,” she says . “’oo’s ’at?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. As I look at the woman, rocking back and forth, back and forth, the words just slip from my mouth.

  “Hey, Miss? Are you hungry … or something?”

  The need to connect with her comes from someplace deep. I’m not sure if it’s greed or general compassion. Her eyes finally lift from the fire and find me. They are hard and full of pain and hate. They look tired.

  “I just lost everything I ever had,” she says. Her voice is rough, yet barely above a whisper. With her face free from her arms, the bruises along her lips are more visible in the fire light. Swollen to the size of fat, broken worms, her lips bleed a little when she speaks. Her eyes are black, too, and just now growing puffy. It looks like her right eye might swell to the point of sealing the lid completely. “So, no, I don’t want nothing. Nothing from you, anyway.”

  Her eyes slip back to the fire, and for one awful moment, I want to yell at her, tell her that Grant saved her sorry ass and he didn’t get so much as a ‘thank you’ from her, that perhaps we should have left her behind.

  I know I’m wrong, but the anger is there all the same. I gather Cindy and together we climb into the sleeping bag and I zip the mesh over our heads. It’s warm in here, cuddled with Cindy. She begins to snore and my mind continues to spin. I can’t stop thinking about the things I’d seen, the man getting skinned, the dead man on the ground who was probably next. Grant’s knife as it slid easily through the cannibal’s neck and the flaccid skin of his genitals.

  What had happened to the world? A year ago, before the zombies, you’d meet people on the street, people you didn’t know, and you’d smile and they’d smile right back.

  “How’s it going?”

  “Pretty good, sir. You?”

  “Aw, I can’t complain.”

  Now it’s killing and cannibalism. It’s chaos. All because the dead woke up hungry and shifted civilization. Is this violence is really necessary for survival? Wouldn’t it be easier and more productive if we could just work together?

  It makes sense to me. Then I think of my fear whenever we run into other people, or when we smell a campfire. The dread you feel when you see other people, because they might want your food. Even if you owned it before, they take it from you. It’s easier, lazier, to kill for it, I think. It is therefore easier and lazier to run the other way when you come across new people. As for myself, I’ve run into more bad people than good, but I am comforted by the thought of people like Grant, who didn’t want to take us into his care but did anyway. For Sylvia, whose life came to a horrible end. And, of course, to Merrick and Dale, who looked after us for those first few months.

  Despite the hope, the positive thoughts, I still can’t stop thinking about the bad. I can’t sleep. Slowly, I crawl out of bed, leaving Cindy sleeping. I zip it up over her head. She’s a sound sleeper and always has been, but I hope that she doesn’t freak out if she does wake up without me by her side.

  The woman is gone.

  Somehow, I knew that she would be.

  But I’m not worried.

  Not yet.

  I cross the street and walk up the hill and look down the valley, down where all the unspeakable things had happened earlier. The cannibals’ fire is still going. The woman is down there, sitting beside the dead man who was slated for a skinning. He was the one who was clinging close to her before taking a bullet to the head, before they beat her.

  Was that her husband? A brother? A good friend? I think about leaving her alone, then reconsider. What if that was me down there looking at Cindy’s corpse? I’d want somebody with me. It would feel so much worse thinking that you were alone in this cold place.

  I take my time so as not to startle her. When I get close to the fire she spins around, her one eye wide and afraid. Her right eye is swollen shut now, but both eyes relax when she sees that it’s only me.

  She is a lot younger than I had taken her for. More a girl than a woman. Maybe my age? A year or two older at the most.

  She looks back to the dead man. He was in his mid-forties, his blond hair starting to grey at the sides. His beard full of white patches.

  “He was my father,” The girl says, and I step closer to her, kneel down at her side, not caring that my legs are getting wet in the snow. “He was all I had left,” she continues. “The dead have already taken everything else. My mother and sisters, our house. When we came across these bastards,” she looks around at the men Grant had killed, “We thought they’d invite us to their fire for the night and that maybe we could do some trading. We never imagined…”

  She breaks off, the tears taking over. I sit here beside her, like an idiot. I never had many friends. I was always socially awkward and found myself the brunt of bullies jokes and pranks more often than not. Other than Tracy, the anorexic I sometimes had the pleasure of sitting beside in the odd class, I never really knew that many girls. They always just looked the other way, and I never knew what to say to them.

  The girl beside me now cups her hands over her face. Her body trembles as she weeps.

  “Maybe it’s not a good idea being here,” I say, and regret it.

  “What do you know?” She yells, her face an expression of the purest pain.

  The anger I felt at her earlier returns, but not as fierce.

  “I know that I lost my mother and father to the dead,” I say. “I know that all I have left is my sister who’s severely handicapped. If I lost her too I know I’d never get better sitting here and staring at her corpse.”

  The anger and pain release from her face, if only a little. She says, “I … I’m sorry, I just—”

  “You don’t have to explain,” I say. “We’ve all been through it. Some of us sooner than others, I guess.”

  Suddenly she’s in my arms. This time she trembles more violently.

  I just sit there and hold her. Let her bleed on me.

  A little later, we gather our things and head back.
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  chapter eleven

  I notice the sky turning a deep purple when we return. On the walk back, the girl and I remain silent. She said nothing further as she cried on my shoulder, and now the spot between my neck and shoulder where she buried her face is cold and wet. We still don’t know each other’s names, which I feel is difficult to understand completely. We have just shared what I took to be a very intimate moment, something usually only shared between close friends or family. Still we don’t know what to call each other.

  As she heads back to the sleeping bag Grant grabbed for her from the cannibals camp, I stop her by putting my hand on her shoulder.

  “My name’s Charlie,” I say. “People around here call me Arlie, though.” Her eyes are still wet, forming ice crystals at the ends of her eyelashes. Her cheeks are red from the cold, and I’m surprised at the little laugh she offers. I guess she understands the reasoning behind my telling her my name.

  “You can call me Eve,” she says, and then the laughter is gone as she disappears into her sleeping bag.

  I crawl back into mine, back into Cindy’s arms. She moans and groans as I wiggle my way in, but her arms quickly find their place around my body, and suddenly it’s not so cold.

  Hours pass, and I realize that I am sleeping when I feel Grant’s boot on my ass.

  “Thought I told you to keep watch,” he says, his voice hard but not angry. “And to take care of the girl?”

  As I unzip the sleeping bag, Eve says, “I’m fine now.”

  “Doesn’t matter,” Grant steps over Cindy and me, heading for our bag of goodies. “We coulda got ourselves eaten by a horde of zombies last night.”

  “If it was a horde coming for us,” Eve says, “there’s nothing he or you could’ve done.”

  Grant laughs, shakes his head. “That don’t matter, either! Coulda been just one or two.”