All Fall Down (7 page)

They caught two fish. She bashed their heads
on a rock, and Tommy watched while she cut out the fish's guts and
skinned them. He made a fire out of driftwood and dried bark. She
poked a stick through pieces of fish and held the stick over the
fire, and when she said the fish was done, they both ate.

Tommy hadn't really liked fish all that much
before everyone in the world got sick, but he supposed it tasted
okay. Jessie laughed when he asked if he had to watch out for fish
bones. She told him the bones were big enough he'd notice, and he
did.

That night was the first night in a long
time he didn't go to sleep hungry.

They slept on the beach on the dry sand near
a concrete wall a long way away from the water. Tommy kept a
blanket in his backpack along with an extra jacket and a rain
slicker. Jessie showed him how to use the slicker with pieces of
driftwood to make a little shelter against the wall. Tommy huddled
under the blanket, his shoes and socks back on his feet, wearing
his extra jacket. Jessie had her own blanket and jacket, but when
Tommy woke up in the morning, she had curled in next to him, a warm
little presence that felt odd but good at the same time.

The next day they fished in the morning and
then went exploring. Jessie said she'd been inside an abandoned
restaurant at the back of the bay, and it had all sorts of cool
things inside. She wanted to show him, she said, and she sounded
excited like he always used to when he had something cool to show
his mom.

Tommy didn't want to go inside the
restaurant. Leon always told him to stay outside unless he needed
to find food, and then go inside buildings only after he knew he
had a quick way back out. The longer the sick were sick, the slower
they moved. Leon said it was the newly sick they really had to
watch out for, and sick people always seemed to hide away inside
places like houses and barns and stores and restaurants. Tommy said
once that maybe the sick felt safer inside, but Leon said the sick
didn't have enough brains left to know what safe felt like.

They didn't need to go in the restaurant.
They had plenty to eat. Tommy was full, in fact, even though all
he'd eaten was fish and he wouldn't mind eating something else.
Pretty soon the blackberries on the bushes near the road would be
ripe, and blackberries were almost as sweet as candy. He thought he
could live on fish and blackberries for a long time, and he'd never
have to see sick people again unless one of them wandered on the
beach which probably wouldn't happen. Not anymore. Tommy hadn't
seek a sick person in a long time. That didn't mean there weren't
any more sick people left. He figured they were just better at
hiding, like he was better at staying away from them.

But Tommy didn't want Jessie to think he was
afraid of going inside the restaurant. It was starting to become
important what she thought of him. He liked her laugh and her dark
hair, and he wouldn't mind if she slept next to him every
night.

The restaurant had glass doors in the front.
They'd been locked at one time, but someone had thrown a big metal
garbage can through the glass on one side. Jessie said she'd
knocked out the rest of the glass on that side so she wouldn't hurt
herself, and Tommy hunched over so he could squeeze in the door
behind her and his backpack wouldn't get caught on the frame.

It smelled musty and sour in the restaurant,
but not like dead things lived inside like some of the places he'd
gone into with Leon. Places where the sick hid out, or places where
they'd killed other people who came to look for food.

"Are there any bodies in here?" Tommy asked,
and he hated that his voice sounded more like hers than his
own.

Jessie shook her head. "I guess everybody
left, or maybe they quit serving food before everybody got sick and
no one ever came back to work. All the food's gone. I looked back
in the kitchen and there's nothing there except salt and stuff like
that."

"So why are we here?"

She smiled at him. "'Cause of all this other
cool stuff."

They walked through a second set of doors
that had been propped open. Straight ahead, Tommy saw a bunch of
tables that looked like picnic tables with bench seats lined up in
a row next to tall windows. Anyone eating at those tables could
look out over the ocean. Tommy had been looking at the ocean for so
many days it wasn't a big deal anymore, but his mom used to love
coming to the beach just to stare at the water. As far as he could
remember, his parents had never taken him to eat in this
restaurant, but he bet his mom would have liked it no matter what
the food tasted like.

Off to the left was a darkened alcove filled
with what his dad would have called junk. Strings of beads and
little drinking glasses and erasers and pencils and notepads and
postcards and sunglasses and t-shirts were stacked on shelves and
display racks and strewn across the bare wooden floor.

Jessie took a pink t-shirt off the shelf and
handed it to him. The name of the restaurant was printed on the
front in neon green. "I think pink's your color," she said.

He dropped the shirt like it was poison.
"Thanks a lot," he said, but he smiled. She was smiling at him, and
even in the gloom of the restaurant, he could see how pink her
cheeks were. She was teasing him, and for some reason, he didn't
mind.

He found another shirt that was dark blue or
black, he couldn't tell. The shirt looked like it would fit him,
though, so he shoved it in his backpack along with a pair of
sunglasses. Jessie took a pair that looked like giant sunflowers
and propped them on her nose, and he laughed at her.

They were having so much fun, they didn't
hear the sick man until he was almost on them.

Tommy had picked up another pair of
sunglasses, this pair with glittery stars for frames, and put them
on his own nose. The sunglasses were too dark to wear inside, but
Tommy had no problem seeing the sudden look of terror that stole
Jessie's smile when she looked over his shoulder.

Tommy dropped to the floor and rolled toward
the front door. That was something else Leon had taught him. Don't
stop to think. Just drop and roll and then get to your feet and
run. The sick couldn't bend over to reach you, their bodies were
too stiff, and they couldn't outrun you if you were small and
fast.

No one had ever taught Jessie that
trick.

She stood rooted to the spot, her silly
sunflower sunglasses perched on her nose, and screamed as the man
reached for her. He'd been sick for so long that he looked like a
shambling skeleton. His skin was rotted and leathery, his eyes dark
and mean like hard little marbles. His hand looked like a claw
covered with jerky. His clothes were stained and dirty, and he
smelled like rotted food left in a refrigerator after the
electricity stopped working.

"Run!" Tommy screamed.

She didn't run, and Tommy realized she
couldn't. She seemed brave all by herself, but maybe she'd never
seen a sick person up close before. He didn't think anyone had been
that lucky.

Tommy didn't have a gun. Leon never had one
either. Leon had a bat, a big one, that he said was better because
it didn't make as much noise as guns so it didn't let any other
sick people know you were there, but Tommy hadn't taken the bat
after the sick man came out of the ocean and bit Leon. Tommy had
run, and he just kept on running until he couldn't hear Leon's
screams anymore except inside his head.

Tommy didn't have anything he could use for
a bat except for the display rack with all the postcards. It was
taller than he was, but it was the kind of rack that spun around a
center pole, and it had metal spokes to hold the cards. Tommy
didn't think it would be all that heavy.

He picked up the rack and used it like a
spear. He jabbed at the sick man with the base of the rack, yelling
at Jessie to run, screaming at the man to leave them alone, like
the sick could understand anything you said to them. The spokes of
the rack shuddered each time Tommy hit the sick man. Tommy kept
hitting him, over and over, until finally, Jessie snapped out of
her trance and she ran toward the front door.

Tommy dropped the rack and turned to follow
her, and that's when his feet slipped on the postcards strewn
around the floor.

He fell, and his chin hit the wooden floor
so hard his teeth hurt. "Wait!" he called out to Jessie, but she
didn't turn around. Tommy saw her scramble through the opening in
the front door and disappear down the boardwalk, and then he felt
the sick man pull on his backpack.

Pure terror shot through Tommy. He was going
to get bit! He couldn't roll and get away. He couldn't do any of
the things Leon had taught him. The sick man held on too tight to
the backpack. Tommy would have to turn and fight.

That's what Leon had done, and Leon had
lost.

If Leon couldn't fight them, how could
someone as small as Tommy?

Tommy tried to wriggle out of the straps.
His head ached and his teeth hurt, and it was hard for him to
think, hard for him to get his shoulders to do what he wanted. The
straps from his backpack dug into his shoulders, and he felt like
he was tied down just like his mom used to tie the legs of the
turkey she made for Thanksgiving dinner. Tommy didn't want to be
anyone's dinner.

Because he couldn't go forward, he finally
tried scooting backward just enough to loosen the straps, and then
he shrugged and squirmed, and the straps slid off his
shoulders.

The sick man made a guttural noise just like
a hungry animal. Why did he have to be hiding here? He'd ruined
everything! The sick ruined the entire world. The sick had taken
Tommy's parents and his friend Leon and made his new friend Jessie
run away.

In that instant, Tommy felt a rage like he'd
never felt in his entire life. Instead of rolling and running away,
he turned over on his back. The sick man was bent over him, mouth
open wide, dead rotted teeth jutting out of his jaw. Tommy brought
his knees up close to his chest and kicked the sick man right in
his dead mouth with as much force as he could muster.

The sick man's head snapped back, and Tommy
felt the man's jaw give way beneath Tommy's feet. He brought his
knees up close to his chest again, and this time when he kicked, he
hit the sick man in the knees. He heard the bone snap with a crack
just like a dry piece of driftwood.

Tommy didn't stay to watch the sick man fall
to the floor. He finally did what Leon had taught him. He rolled
and ran, hauling his backpack along with him by one strap, and he
never looked back.

The sick man didn't follow Tommy out of the
restaurant. Tommy ran down the long boardwalk that fronted the
restaurant, and he kept right on going when he hit the sand at the
end of the boardwalk. He ran along the shore line following
Jessie's footsteps until they disappeared into the ocean in front
of the log where he'd first spotted her. She was nowhere in sight,
but he knew she'd stopped there. She'd left her sunflower
sunglasses on top of the log along with a notepad and pencil she'd
taken from the restaurant. The fishing pole was propped up next to
the log.

Tommy called for her, but no one answered.
He kept calling for her until his voice went hoarse, and then he
sat down in the sand.

He wasn't afraid that the sick man would
come for him. The log where Jessie had left her stuff was a long
way from the restaurant, and the sick man would have to crawl now.
Tommy would be able to run away from him easy.

He stayed sitting in the sand next to the
log until the afternoon breeze blew the notepad off the log. The
wind made the sheets of notepaper flutter, and that's when he
realized she'd left him a note.

I'm sorry
, she wrote.
I can't
stay. I think I'm sick too, it's just taking me longer. I had fun
with you. I'm glad you learned how to fish.

She signed the note with X's and O's, which
made Tommy feel funny and sad and lonelier than he'd been since
Leon died.

He remembered how warm she'd felt when she
slept next to him, and how pink her cheeks had been. Leon said not
every sick person got sick real quick, and not every sick person
got sick because they'd been bit.

Jessie must have come here to die. Maybe she
used to come here with her parents, and they'd warned her not to
sit on the logs, back when it meant something different to be
careful. So Jessie came here and sat on a log and hoped the ocean
would take her, but it hadn't. Instead Tommy showed up, and she
must have forgotten she was sick because sick people were supposed
to tell you if they didn't look sick yet. That was a rule, Leon
said.

The first rule.

Sick people were supposed to tell you they
were sick. Because if they didn't, how were you supposed to
know?

How could he trust anyone he met ever again
if they didn't follow the first rule?

Tommy crawled up on the log and sat there
for a long time after that. He didn't know if he was hoping the
ocean took him. He just sat watching the waves, and once he thought
he saw a seal on the other side of the bay. That night he made a
fire out of driftwood and dry bark, and he ate some of the jerky
from the stash in his backpack. He took out the picture of his
parents he kept in the zipper pouch inside the backpack and stared
at it in the flickering light of the fire. Sometimes he couldn't
remember what his parents looked like without seeing their picture
first. He wished he had a picture of Jessie.

For a moment before he woke in the morning,
he thought he felt something warm snuggled up next to him in the
sand, but he was alone when he opened his eyes.

He folded up his rain slicker and his
blanket and stuffed them inside his backpack. He wouldn't stay here
again tonight, but the sky was a brilliant blue and sunlight
sparkled golden on the waves. Tommy took off his shoes and socks
and rolled up the legs of his jeans to his knees. He left his
backpack and his shoes and socks in the hollow next to Jessie's
log, picked up the fishing pole, and stuck a small piece of jerky
he'd softened in his mouth on the hook. He managed to fling the
hook out into the waves perfect the first time.