The Haunted Country Page 9

  If she is dead, is she perhaps the only zombie in the world who still refuses to eat?

  My eyelids are heavy and thinking is difficult. Cindy’s already asleep, her head resting on her arm on the other side of the kitchen table. Grant has moved to the living room, no doubt to the couch. We should be huddled together to fight the cold but it’s surprisingly not that bad in here. I think of fires and try to avoid thoughts of Hamburgers and french-fries as I drift off. I try to think of Tracy.

  I open my eyes, shivering violently and change my mind about it being warmer in the house. I’m so tired but I know that sleep is the last thing that I need right now. I need to be moving, get the blood flowing. It’s either that or death. Which I do consider. It would be an easy out, just go back to sleep once the shivering slowed long enough to let me, and drift off into oblivion.

  I stand up and jump around. I go over to Cindy and shake her until she wakes.

  It’s still dark outside and I don’t know how long I’ve been asleep, but I’ll bet that it hasn’t been that long. Cindy slowly moves from her spot on the kitchen table and looks up and around, her throat emitting an irritated sound. I sympathize. All I want is to sleep, too. But it’s too cold.

  I then move into the living room and find Grant shivering on the couch, curled up into a tight fetal ball. I grab his shoulder and before I can shake him awake, he has his hand on my forearm and he’s looking up at me, not with the calm that he usually wears, but of something violent and ready.

  I gasp and take a step back, as much as his grip will let me. He recognizes me and lets go. His hands move to rub at his eyes.

  “Don’t touch me when I’m sleeping,” he said. “It could end up bad for you.”

  “What the hell do you want me to do, then? Scream at your face until you open your eyes?”

  His glare is full of daggers and his voice, when he speaks, is sarcastic. “Yeah. But from a distance.”

  I put his manly toughness upon waking up into a file inside my head for future reference, but for now I ignore it. “Listen,” I say. “We either need to start a fire or get moving again. Otherwise, we’ll die.”

  The anger flees from his face and he sits up.

  “Jesus,” he says. “You’re right. This cold is a real seducer.” He laughs, then stands and slaps me on the shoulder. Although he appears to be in high spirits, I can tell by his sluggish movements that he’s feeling the same hunger pains, the same fatal cold that I am. “I believe you may have just saved our lives. Which makes us far from even, but it’s a nice change of pace.”

  I laugh and try to keep my thoughts to myself, but the words come out anyway.

  “Fuck you,” I say.

  chapter nine

  The next day the sun shines high up in the sky, but does little to warm the land below it. We walk, my limp even more pronounced now as the bruise to my hip is more stiff and sore than it was yesterday. The size and color of the bruise is a spectacular thing, a black and green and yellow painting stretching from the side of my ass cheek all the way down into my crotch I have a hop to my walk now that seems to come comes naturally. It helps to keep my body temperature up. The coat we found at the dilapidated house last night is almost too large for me, but I don’t care. I’m sweating beneath it, and for once the only thing that’s cold is my face.

  The cold has a smell to it that’s fresh, not filled with the stench of the undead. Another pleasant change. I don’t know where we are, but civilization this is not. I’m not sure if this is for better or worse. There’s no food to be found and it’s the coldest I remember it being in a long time. Yet, to be in populated areas, where we could shack up in a house filled with food and comfortable beds, we’d then have the undead to contend with.

  Death is a hunter. It’s always after you. At least it is in this new world.

  We have made it this far which we might not have if we hadn’t found our energy last night after lighting a fire in the fireplace. Grant was against it. He argued about it even after he had stacked the chopped wood we found outside into the hearth and was trying to light it with his lighter. Once the fire was lit, we just sat there and soaked in the heat. For how long, I don’t know. Cindy fell back asleep again, then Grant and I decided to hunt for more food.

  Whoever had looted the place didn’t bother to go down into the basement, where Grant and I found a storage room full of canned goods. We filled our backpacks with as much as we could carry and headed back upstairs.

  We let Cindy sleep and each ate a can of soup right from the can. This time, Grant didn’t have to eat it frozen. Hot soup had never tasted so good.

  It was a pleasant night after we started that fire. Amazing what warmth and food will do to you. I think that Grant no longer cared if the zombies found us or not. With Cindy spread out on the couch, facing the fireplace, Grant and me on the floor, the universe was once again a caring and good place. Grant dozed off before I did, and the last thing I remember is putting more wood on the fire to keep it going until morning.

  Zombies be damned. They could come and eat us if they wanted. We were comfortable and relaxed for the first time in a very long time.

  In the morning I had made an argument on staying at the house for a little while during our breakfast of pea soup and frozen bread. I said that we should stay at least until the food runs out, but Grant didn’t like it.

  “You can stay if you want, but I’m leaving,” he said.

  “Why? So you can just feel bad about it and then spy on us until we run into trouble again?”

  He glared at me, but I didn’t care. I wanted to stay. I didn’t want to go hungry or cold again and we had pretty much everything we needed right there in that house. All we had to do was clean up the bodies outside and find a way to cover the broken windows.

  “It’s not safe to stay here,” he had argued. “The undead will eventually find us, and we can’t trust anyone. They’ll eventually come.

  “Not all people are bad,” I said. “I mean, look at you. You might kill people like it’s nothing, but you came back for us.”

  Again he glared, but there was something deeper about this one, like maybe I had gone too far with the killing comment.

  “Killing people isn’t easy,” he said. “It’s just something that’s gotta be done sometimes if you’re expecting to live.”

  That was that. He turned around, hefted his backpack and walked out the door.

  I had thought about staying with Cindy, but thoughts of Dahmer and his basement haunted me. Perhaps I was no longer the naïve idiot I was then, back when we were travelling with Sylvia. I remembered what that sick bastard had done to her then. I thought of the bandits, shooting at us instead of knocking on the door and saying, “Hey, we need a dry place to stay. Do you mind?” Maybe Grant was right. Maybe you can’t trust people anymore. When the rules of civilization had died, perhaps morality and basic human decency had gone with it.

  I gathered our things, got Cindy going, and then caught up to Grant.

  We’ve been walking all morning without much of a break. I wish that I had found some pain killers, but I guess whatever gods that were looking over us last night couldn’t extend their generosity that far.

  But we have food and I have a winter coat. So for that, I am thankful.

  I grow worried again as the afternoon quickly becomes evening, with the sun setting and making it difficult to see. The good thing is that we’re no longer surrounded by forests. Grassy plains stretch out all around us with forested hills in the distance. Were these once farms fields? If so, where are their houses? They have to be somewhere, right?

  They’re not. We keep walking and find no driveways, no brick and mortar.

  We do smell something, though. In the deep cold, amongst our growling bellies and our own grunts and moans, there’s the smell of fire. Of cooking meat.

  I’m still hungry, despite the cans of beans and soup of last night and the pea soup for breakfast . Grant and I both stop, our noses in the air. We
look at each other, then check the landscape. In the fading light of day, there’s no trail of smoke leading up into the sky. Yet we can both smell it. Even more so, we can smell the meat that the fire is cooking.

  The smell reminds me of summertime and barbeques, the yeasty stench of beer on my mother’s and father’s breath, the meat sauce on their cheeks as they dig in with their teeth. Again, I feel hollow inside, as though I haven’t eaten anything substantial in months, which in hindsight—having only eaten soup—is actually true. But I’m also surprised. We can’t see the smoke, but the fire’s there. If this were a year ago, our bodies, well-nourished and not needing food like it does now, we would have walked on by it. We would not have noticed it until it was only meters away. A city block at the most.

  “Where the fuck is it?” Grant asks. “And what kind of meat is that they’re cooking?”

  “Sure smells good,” I say.

  Cindy laughs, her eyes fluttering at the sky.

  “I wouldn’t get too excited,” Grant continues. “I haven’t seen a dog or a cat in weeks, never mind wild life.”

  This doesn’t change how hungry I am, and I almost want to say, “So what?” But I catch myself. Is he suggesting that they might be cooking other people? It was a taboo before the apocalypse, now I’m not so sure. If I had ever grown to the point where I was last night, before the soups and beans and I was offered the opportunity, I’m not sure if I would look like mother and father did on those long ago barbeque days, like a zombie with blood on my cheeks instead of BBQ sauce as I dig in and eat without thinking about what it is.

  If the hunger gets to that level again, which it probably will, I cannot claim that I would sustain myself.

  “We’ll just have to ignore it,” Grant says. “Keep your stomach in check. Think that they’re cooking up some of your friends or something.”

  We walk on. Grant takes the front with Cindy at my side, holding onto my arm as she usually does. Back when we were kids she often rode around in a wheel chair. Her legs don’t work all that well and tend to spasm like her arms do, but she could still walk. After Merrick and Dale left us that last time, we went looking for them about a week after, leaving the wheel chair behind. I’m sure that Cindy would have preferred the chair to walking back then. I know that I certainly would lately. Does she miss it? When she walks by herself, without my help, her knees, which are locked, bend in towards each other and her feet drag heavily along the ground. Her arms hang at her front if her fingers don’t feel like dancing by her ears or forehead, the wrists and elbows bent to ninety-five degree angles. The elbows are locked that way, but the wrists aren’t. They just hang there that way.

  She has come a long way since that day when we left to go look for Dale and Merrick. Before it was a struggle to get her to walk on her own, which her doctor always forced us to do, to keep her legs strong.

  Soon we’ll have to stop walking. The sun is sinking and the shadows grow long. “When are we stopping for the night?” I ask. “I don’t think we’re going to find a house before it gets dark.”

  Grant nods his head, again sniffing the air.

  I don’t blame him. I can still smell it, too. It’s thicker in the air now, almost moist with the sweet smell of cooking meat. My mouth waters. Should we maybe just keep going? Or turn around and find a place where we can’t smell it anymore? I can’t bear smelling that all night. Or even a few minutes more.

  “We’re going to have to build a fire,” Grant says, but he doesn’t look happy about it. We stop at the side of the road. A clump of trees and bush about five yards away has Grant’s interest, and he unloosens the axe from the front of his backpack. Without further word, he heads into the field where the murky light soon eats his shadow. Cindy and I are left with the mysterious cooking meat smell and the chop chop chop of Grant’s axe.

  I untie the sawed-off double-barrel from my own backpack, make sure it’s loaded and double check the Colt. As I wait, I dream of venison, of cooked rabbit or squirrel, and I try to get cannibalism off my mind.

  Grant returns periodically with an armful of wood. It takes him an hour to gather as much as he thinks will do. When he’s done, it’s dark out, but there is a fire. While he worked, I set wood up and used his lighter to get a fire going. Now we arrange our sleeping bags around the fire and sit on them. Cindy laughs and claps her hands in the lazy way she does whenever she’s happy. We open cans of food and Grant produces a small pot. He cooks up a can of pea soup that we share, using frozen bread as scoops.

  It’s surprisingly filling, but still not nearly enough.

  When we’re done, Grant washes the pot in the snow.

  “Too bad we couldn’t carry this with us, too,” he says, meaning the wood.

  “I thought you were against fires,” I say.

  “I am. But if whoever’s out there has got one, then I don’t see why we don’t get one, too. And I doubt they’ll bother us considering they’re eating better than us. I’m not worried about the zombies, before you ask. We haven’t seen one in some time. They’re slower in this cold, and if they do attack, I’m certain we’ll know about it before any real harm comes to us.”

  He could be right. I no longer sleep as deeply as I did before. Seems every sound wakes me, whether it’s Cindy moaning or Grant farting.

  “We’ll have watches, just in case,” Grant says to me. “We’ll split them up between you and me. I’ll take first shift. I’ll get you up for the second.”

  Great, another sleepless night. I doubt that I’ll be able to stay awake for my shift, but I don’t bother telling him that. He’s right. I’m have to do whatever I can to stay awake.

  Cindy’s eyelids hang heavy. Walking all day has really wiped her out, and I worry about her legs cramping up, or Charlie-horses rousing her from sleep in a fit of pain. These things could happen to me, too, but Cindy’s legs have never walked so far in her entire life. It would not be a pleasant way for either of us to wake up.

  I should’ve looked for some muscle rub at the last house, but it never crossed my mind. Cindy stuffs a handful of snow into her mouth, swallows, and smiles at me. A laugh escapes her lips and she looks to the sky. I laugh, too. I can’t help it.

  I’ve never seen her so happy. Is it Grant’s presence? She usually doesn’t even look at him unless he’s talking to her, but her mood has changed incredibly since Grant yelled at her that day and explained why she needed to be quiet.

  Perhaps she’s forgotten about Mom and Dad, of Merrick and Dale, but I doubt this. What I think is that she feels safe again with Grant. God knows that I wasn’t exactly her best protector. Dahmer and his sick fetishes come to mind. If it wasn’t for Grant, he’d probably still be violating our dead orifices.

  The thought makes me shiver. Makes the meal I just ate want to return to spill out onto the snow. I wrap Cindy in my arms and guide her into the sleeping bag. Grant takes one of the thicker blocks of wood he’s chopped and sits on it, his pistol in his hand, the .30 .06 at his side. We say nothing to each other as I slip in beside Cindy and zip the cocoon so that it closes over our heads. Through the mesh, the fire-lit trees above us look dim, as though covered with a dark mist.

  Cindy cuddles into me, her head on my shoulder, and within seconds her breathing slows and grows louder. It’s warm in here, like being in a womb where you can stretch out your legs. My own eyelids grow heavy.

  I close my eyes.

  “Wake up, kid! We got a problem.”

  Something shakes my shoulders, and after a minute or two of confusion I realize that it’s Grant’s boot that he’s positioned beneath me and is lifting me up and down. Cindy moans. I squeeze reassuringly. I want to tell Grant to fuck off. That I’m done with dealing with this shit.

  I just want to sleep.

  “I said, get up!” He thrusts his foot deeper below me and nearly rolls me over onto Cindy.

  “For God’s sake, man!” I scream. Cindy is still moaning, not completely awake. I unzip the bag, and there’s Grant, sta
nding above me with his shotgun in his hands. His face is grave and pale and I can only imagine what’s going on. Then I hear gunshots followed by hoots and hollers of joy. The voices echo over the grassy fields. I know immediately where it’s coming from. It’s the other campers with the fire that smelled of summertime barbeques. I don’t know how I know this, I just do. Perhaps it’s in the look in Grant’s eyes.

  Within minutes, Cindy and I are on our feet, leaving our sleeping bags and fire behind as we follow Grant across the road and up a small hill. From the top, it leads to a deep valley. Below, there are more trees leading eventually into a forest. The moon is out for once, but it’s not full and the light offered is weak.

  The barbeque smells have been coming from the tree line here. Their fire, much higher than ours, reaches for the sky. It’s taller than the men walking around it. They drink from bottles I’m certain are one form of liquor or another. They carry guns. From here, I can’t tell if they’re shotguns or rifles, they’re just long and thin and dangerous looking.

  Three men stand with another lying down and unmoving, naked from what I can tell, a reddish mess around his head. One of the three standing men has another man, also naked, hoisted upside down from a tree branch. The snow below the hanging man is soaked in black-crimson. The man working on him cuts deep into his belly with a hunting knife and all the intestines and bowels splatter on the ground. The man then begins peeling away the skin from the torso and back, taking great heaving yanks of skin until only the muscle gleams within the firelight.

  A man and a woman kneel and hold each other near the fire. One of the two men not working on the hanging man walks over to the couple, raises a handgun to the flinching man’s head.