Our Dead Bodies [Anthology] Read online

  OUR DEAD BODIES

  JERRY WRIGHT

  The ax felt heavier in his hand than it did when he chopped wood every autumn for the winter. He knew the weight was emotional and not physical but there was still something contradictory about the ease with which it arced over his shoulder and closed the distance to the teenager’s head. She didn’t have a great deal of hair left, and he wondered briefly if that had anything to do with how effortlessly it seemed to cleave her skull. She crumpled to the ground in front of him. The ax didn’t travel with her but her body simply slid off in a sadly anticlimactic way. He had to sidestep because his grip had loosened and the ace head swung down and toward him.

  She was dead and—

  Could he call her that? If the unnaturalists were right, she died weeks or even months ago. Hell, if the unnaturalists were right, the immediate guilt and self-loathing that washed over him was inappropriate and wasted emotion. He felt it, though.

  She couldn’t have been older than fifteen when she was… alive? He didn’t quite buy the theory that the girl hadn’t been alive before the ace fell. If not death, then what? Trauma, yes. Resurrection, maybe. Some kind of resurrection unlike everything promised. There was no glorious new body, no virgins, no cavorting with the gods. There was only an ace that cleaved too easily and belied the significance of the end.

  He didn’t know if she lived before the ace fell or if she was dead. In any case, that part of her life in which she was rational couldn’t have lasted for more than fifteen years. Perhaps that part of her life ended months ago, perhaps as long as a year ago. Every part of her life was over now.

  He leaned against the ace, resting the head on the ground. He wanted to wipe the blade on the grass but he couldn’t come up with the energy, couldn’t come up with any energy at all. She wasn’t bleeding. That part of the whole mess was the most disturbing. . Somehow, the fact that blood didn’t seep from her and pool around her made everything seem hopeless along with violent. It made the loathing seem contradictory as well but that didn’t mitigate it at all. It seemed wrong, and he wished he could somehow make the death more visibly significant, less like killing a prop

  A sudden rustling in the trees to the left of the campsite startled him and the ace instantly came back up as he whirled toward the noise. Two men stepped forward.

  Men, alive in every sense.

  They held shotguns, and when they saw him, the guns lowered. “You got her for us, then,” one said amicably.

  He let the ace return to the ground and sighed. “You were hunting her?”

  “Yes,” the man replied. He was short, ruddy faced, and wearing camouflage he’d probably bought from an army surplus store years before everything went to hell. The companion was thin and mousey. Images of the old cartoon with the big bulldog and the tiny terrier leaping around it in sycophantic bliss came to mind and he resisted the urge to make a comment. “Good thing you knew how to take care of business. I guess we drove her this direction.” The man smiled and rolled his eyes. He shook his head and lifted his hands almost apologetically. “Her? Hell. It.” He stepped forward slightly and said, “Green. Donovan Green.” The man nodded to the other. “That’s Sean Arcineaux.”

  “Hal North. Lot of them out here?” Hal was true. North was not.

  “Not anymore. We patrol these parts for Spring Kettle. You from Spring Kettle?” Hal shook his head and Green continued. “Little town about eight miles down the road. About two-thousand survivors.” Survivors. The world was mostly survivors, and towns like Spring Kettle probably only had a dozen or so to address in the first place. Hal nodded anyway and hoped he seemed impressed, raising an eyebrow slightly.

  Green seemed happy. He seemed ecstatic. Hal wondered how many hours he’d prepared for the job with an energy drink in one hand and a video game console controller in the other. Green finally found his calling and Hal wondered if he were proud because it had only taken a tragedy of biblical proportions. He sighed again and nodded toward the girl’s body but Green asked, “Where you from?”

  “Dallas.” He wasn’t from Dallas. He knew, though, that Dallas had suffered more than any other city so that some neighborhoods lay in ruins. “Not sure where I’ll go next.”

  “Spring’s not a bad place.”

  “I’m going to head north. Got family in South Dakota.” Another lie. He expounded on it. “No idea if they’re still alive.”

  Green nodded. “Yeah. They ruined everything.” It wasn’t true. Humanity did. “You okay here? We only saw signs of this one but there could be more around.”

  “I’ll be okay. My car has a full tank. I think I’ll just pack up and head North.”

  “We’ll burn the body. Otherwise it’ll attract others.”

  Hal nodded. “I have some lighter fluid in the car.”

  “One day all of these fucking zombies will be dead,” Green said.

  Hal winced. He hated the word. Green’s expression changed and Hal shook his head and said, “They destroyed everything. Hope that day comes soon.”

  Green nodded. “And life can go back to normal.” Hal was pretty sure nothing on Earth would make Green unhappier. He didn’t answer but went to the back of his car, opened the trunk, and pulled out the bottle of fluid. He saw his shogun in there and picked it up, too, pumping a round into the chamber. He paused and closed his trunk just as Green cried out, “Jesus! Look out! There are two in your car!”

  Hal felt the familiar sickness crash over him as he brought the shotgun up and fired. Green’s head exploded in red mist. Arcineaux screamed but Hal’s second shot brought him down. Hal walked over to Green and looked down sadly on him. Most of his head was gone. This time, there was plenty of blood.

  He stared at Green’s body for a long time and wondered why he’d been more troubled after killing the teenager than now. He was still troubled but there was no guilt, no loathing. He turned around and opened the car door. “It’s okay, Honey,” he said. “You and Kaylee can come out now.”

  ***

  “We’ll leave them,” he said. “We just don’t have time.”

  He waited as she nodded, an excruciatingly slow process now though the comprehension showed in her eyes immediately. He’d spent the first months fighting the urge to finish sentences or otherwise hurry the conversation along.

  They weren’t rotting. Not yet. Maybe they wouldn’t. There were theories abounding about all of that. Of course, the unnaturalists wouldn’t hear about it. To them, they would rot because they were dead and their bodies were unnatural. Others, those who held to the virus theory no matter how many times it was debunked, portrayed it all as mind over matter, as the minds convinced the bodies they were dead. Others, primarily those who debunked the virus theory, claimed it was a mutated version of leprosy, and the rotting occurred at an accelerated rate simply because of the inability to feel pain and thus address small wounds. Somehow, the bacteria caused encephalitis in some and not in others, so some became violent and some didn’t.

  Hal thought that last theory the most likely but it didn’t account for the sudden outbreak in various geographical regions. The lack of pain was real, though. He’d seen Kaylee slice the palm of her hand on a jagged piece of metal, seen her keep playing with no indication she felt any pain at all. He’d scrubbed the wound and bound it and then taken a book on leprosy from the library, wistfully wishing the government, which undertook heroic efforts to keep certain institutions in place, would have done the same for libraries. Knowledge would certainly be lost in a generation unless the growing anarchy somehow slowed.

  The books stressed something called visual surveillance of extremities, VSE, as a means to prevent rot. Evidently, the key to living with leprosy was scanning your fi
ngers and toes constantly and by doing so catch any small cuts for treatment before they became infected. Of course, Kaylee and Lori couldn’t do it themselves. That meant he had to constantly survey their extremities. It was habit now, Hal guessed, as they removed themselves from the car and helped him pack up the campsite.

  They were still them.

  He saw it less and less lately but they were there beneath whatever dullness the condition brought. They were there behind the strange, pinkish pupils that revealed their condition to Green and Arcineaux. They were there, and so far outside of their eyes their bodies still seemed like them. He knew they were there. Mannerisms remained that proved it, the way Lori inclined her head and sighed when Kaylee frustrated her even if the phrase “Young lady, don’t make me ask again” had shortened to “Young lady, don’t” in a long, low sentence that took three times as long as the original. Kaylee still climbed in his lap to say, “Please, Daddy!” even if the journey took her a minute or two and the words were barely recognizable.

  The unnaturalists were winning.

  They were winning and it was open season on the infected, which Hal guessed made a lot of sense to some. The violent infected behaved just like the movies, not moving like the creatures with that weird shuffle but still killing and some even eating their victims. The unnaturalists were winning but there was no distinguishing between the violent infected and those who weren’t.

  Hal took the bodies of the two men and placed them with the teenage girl. She’d been violent, beyond hope. At least, she’d been beyond help. He took their weapons along with their ammunition and put it all in the trunk, returning with the lighter fluid and dousing their bodies. Between the two of them, Kaylee and Lori had managed to pull the tent’s spikes out of the ground. He sighed, squirted some lighter fluid on a twig, and lit it with his lighter. He dropped the makeshift match onto the bodies and, satisfied with the minor inferno that resulted, walked to help with the camp. He let them work on the tent and instead packed up the little stove and the mesh grill for the campfire. Those, too, he put in the trunk.

  He considered letting them finish the tent. Even though she couldn’t communicate it, he knew Lori felt bitterly disappointed when he had to help her with a simple task. He grew too worried about it, though, too concerned others would come for Green and Arcineaux. He walked to the tent and put his hand on Lori’s arm. “Honey. Let me do the tent. Can you and Kaylee throw sticks and branches on the bodies?” Lori nodded, her pink pupils seemed to dilate for a moment, and then she turned and walked to Kaylee. She moved slowly, more slowly than she had before. Still, it wasn’t at all like the lumbering monsters from the movies. He watched her for a moment.

  She was still beautiful.

  She was still beautiful and he hadn’t touched her for six months.

  He’d wanted to. Of course he’d wanted to. They’d been active, very active, prior to Hell descending to Earth or rising up on Earth or however the damned metaphor worked. They’d gone at it like rabbits for the first year of their marriage and still went at it for most of the pregnancy. Lori became aggressive only a few months after Kaylee was born, and they’d been rabbits again. Nine years they’d been rabbits. Now they didn’t do a thing, and he didn’t know if he was supposed to do something or if she would or if it hurt her or if she’d be hurt by it.

  He was pretty sure she wanted it. Even with all the changes, he could sometimes catch a wistful expression on her face, the one that replaced the almost placid kind of blankness that seemed to characterize their outward emotions if not their inward. He wondered if he should just do it. They would have no trouble finding an abandoned hotel on the road and there ought to be one with adjoining rooms. He could get Kaylee occupied and just do it. She felt unattractive to him plenty of times before all this. Perhaps that was the issue. Perhaps she thought he didn’t want her. He could sleep with her to reassure her.

  Yeah. Of course that could all be rationalization.

  When the car was packed, he used the rest of the lighter fluid to make sure the bodies and branches would keep burning. Despite all of the predictions, things weren’t too hard to come by. There had been some hoarding in the beginning but when people realized not enough of society had been destroyed to upend everything, the hoarding slowed down. Production had slowed for everything, stopped for most things. Really, though, that only meant there weren’t a lot of pre-packaged snack chips. Vegetables and meat were still plentiful, sold mostly from little stands rather than giant mega stores.

  Why did he do that? Why did he do everything he could to pretend the end of the world hadn’t come? Why did he do so much justification? Sure, everything got blown the fuck back to the Old West but hey, all the movies acted like we’d be back in the Stone Age. There wasn’t a lot of comfort with it but it helped him keep up the hatred for the people who would kill Kaylee and Lori, the people who walked around like road warriors in a world that, if anything, had plenty of gas and water left.

  “Medicine.” It took Lori almost ten seconds to say the word, and though he understood what she wanted he waited until she was finished and then nodded. He wondered if it made a difference to her, him not jumping ahead but waiting. He opened the bag in the trunk and pulled out three pills for each of them. Rifampicin was a leprosy drug. He’d taken it from an abandoned pharmacy. They didn’t have the other two drugs used to treat it but he knew they were all antibiotics. The other pills were just antibiotics. He had bottles full of different varieties that all ended with cyllin. If it all really did come down to bacteria, maybe it was helping.

  Lori swallowed the pills and then made Kaylee swallow hers. Hal closed the trunk. “We should get on the road now, Honey,” he said. She nodded and got Kaylee settled. It was inefficient. Hal could have strapped in her much faster but he believed Lori needed it. When she finished, Lori closed the car door and began her slow walk to the other side. “Would you like to ride up front? If we see a car, you’ll have to pretend you’re sleeping.”

  She smiled. At least, he thought she smiled. There definitely seemed to be at least a small upturn in the corners of her mouth. He intercepted her on the way to the door and pulled her to him, holding her tightly. He felt her arms tighten on him as well and had to fight back tears. He pulled back slightly and kissed her forehead. “I love you,” he whispered.

  He held her through the minute or so it took her to say that she loved him too.

  ***

  The road was lonely. It felt strange to know they would likely drive for hours without seeing another car even though humanity hadn’t become devastated into little pockets of survivors like all the films. People tended to stay close, though, tended to treat everywhere outside of their particular environment as wilderness. He glanced at the gas tank. They had a quarter tank, and the dashboard told him that was good for another hundred and seventeen miles. Gas wasn’t much of a problem. There were still gas stations working in the larger cities and still pipelines and refineries keeping it going. Demand had dropped dramatically, though, and he filled his tank far more often from an abandoned vehicle than at a pump.

  He glanced at Lori. She sat with her eyes closed and he wondered if she did that just to make sure her limited ability to react quickly wouldn’t lead to their discovery. She rarely slept anymore, perhaps an hour or two per night. He looked at the rear view mirror. Kaylee’s pink eyes stared forward. She noticed him looking and took an eternity to smile. He smiled back and scanned the horizon for a place to stop. Dusk, almost.

  The mountains had already given way to a long stretch of plains, the kind of Southwest stretch that meant tiny towns that abruptly changed the speed limit from seventy-five miles per hour to thirty-five. Most of those towns were empty now, citizens more comfortable in heavier pockets of population, citizens more comfortable with authorities killing the infected so they didn’t have to. As though the highway itself heard him, a sign came up, advertising Honey Blossom Rock as forty-two miles away. “Ready to stop for the night, Kaylee?”
he asked.

  It took a long time for her to get out a reply, and it took him a moment to realize she was asking him for ice cream when they got there. He hoped there was some left in one of the stores. He said, “We’ll see,” and then slowed because there was a semi-truck on the side of the road up ahead. It looked like it might be from the seventies and he thought that meant there was a chance for gas rather than diesel. He could take diesel, use it for lighting fires or something along those lines but it wouldn’t fuel the car. He pulled beside it and Lori wasn’t sleeping because her eyes opened when the car stopped. “I’m going to see if I can fill the tank,” he said.

  She managed to say, “Okay,” and this time it was difficult to hide his impatience because in this new world—Brave New World, he thought bitterly—stopping in an unfamiliar place was dangerous. He held back, though, and remained in his seat until she finished and then opened his door and stepped out. He grabbed the six foot length of rubber tubing he used for transferring fuel and started walking toward the tractor to find the gas tank. He tried but failed to keep from looking at the trailer itself with its art. A family sitting down to dinner. The paint was faded but he could see the bright and smiling face of the mother holding a roasted chicken, could see the indulgent father and the boy and girl looking hungry. Alford Meats. Making families smile since 1974.

  He wondered if there was food in the back of the truck but dismissed the idea. He couldn’t hear the refrigeration unit working, if the truck even had one. It was possible the truck had been abandoned here years ago anyway. The gas would be old but it would work. He made his way forward and found the tank. It was enormous, a hundred or maybe two hundred gallons in a long silverfish cylinder that seemed to be placed too close to the hitch. He found the cap and held his breath as he wiped grime from it. He sighed. Diesel fuel only. He dropped the hose onto the ground and stepped to the cab to see if anything else could be scavenged.