Allison Hewitt Is Trapped (38 page)

“Up!” he screams. “Up!”

In the back of my head, pounding like a deranged child on a xylophone, is an old stentorian thump, a pounding like a heartbeat commanding me to reach up. Before I know it, before I can stop it, the
Mary Poppins
song is drilling into my head, crashing around as if someone had taken the lyrics, pulled them apart, studded them with nails and leather and then put the song back together.

Let’s go fly a kite

Up to the highest height

It repeats, mercilessly, the rhythm of it getting faster, crazier, until I’m sure my heart will explode with the din of it. Julian is flailing, shouting, I can’t hear him, just the song, unhinged and tripping through my brain like a dizzy giant …

Screaming, aching, I reach for the bar and pull, shrieking through my teeth as I wrap my fingers around the bar and hoist myself, refusing to let go, refusing to allow the metal to slip out of my grip. This is it. Last chance. It’s up or down, alive or dead and that’s when I feel the hard bony hand wrapping around my right ankle …

I’m nearly there, the pain, the exhaustion forgotten for the moment as I put every last ounce of strength into raising myself up high enough to reach the next foothold. I feel pressure on my shoulder and look up to see Julian’s hand grabbing my shirt, pulling me, his other hand holding onto the ax, digging it into the side of the embankment for purchase like a climber’s pick. The zombie’s hand detaches at the wrist and I kick the fingers free. There’s a second where I’m almost dangling in the air, free, floating, and I watch the faces below, the empty, staring eyes and open mouths. So very many eyes …

The rebar holds us both, but I can feel it beginning to give way beneath our weight. Julian flattens himself against the embankment and I climb up, using his back and shoulder to get up and over, onto solid ground. I can see his chest heaving against the wall of mud, his eyelids fluttering with pain. I can’t imagine what his broken arm must feel like, his mangled leg.

“Give me your hand, I’ll get you up,” I say, holding out my hand. “Give me your hand!”

He’s fading. That last push to get me up cost him too much. His head rests against the embankment, his body limp, spent. I wave my hand in front of his face. He’s big and heavy but it will just take one effort, one monumental outpouring of strength and that, I know, is something I can do, something that’s waiting inside of me.

“Come on! Give me your hand!” I scream. He looks up, his eyes blinking rapidly to get the water out of his eyes. He’s ready to give up, I can see it. “Give me your fucking hand, Julian!”

Then his hand is in mine, his fingers wrapping around my wrist. I grab his wrist with both hands and lean back, squeezing my shoulder blades until they’re touching. But nothing happens. I pull again and again but he’s stuck fast. When I look over the edge I see it, the same zombie that had grabbed my leg has now grabbed Julian. Then there’s another zombie grabbing him, pulling. There are too many and all of them fighting against me, three and then four and then five hands wrapping around his legs. He’s shouting at me to pull harder and I try, I really do, but the rebar is slipping and both of us are going down.

“Allison,” he says and then his slick hand is gone, pulled free. He smiles and opens his mouth to say more but he’s already falling, sinking backward like a diver, arms wide, dropping into a churning pool. I scramble to get his hand but it’s out of reach and I can no longer distinguish his sandy hair and living flesh from the sea of arms and bodies. I watch, helpless, as the undead take him under.

My ax sticks into the embankment where Julian left it. I yank it free, standing. I go. I have to.

There’s the rain and the thunder, and the sound of death screaming at my feet, insisting that I yield too. Then there’s my breathing, deep and relieved and an echo of Julian’s laughter, a sound so unexpected, so welcome, that I can’t help but laugh too. For a moment it’s as if he’s there, collapsing next to me on his back, his hand on his chest as he laughs and laughs …

But he’s not there, he’s gone and I’m alone, cold and drenched. The sky is cobalt above me, the clouds spinning across the sky, racing toward some unknowable destination.

I walk along the top of the embankment to the bridge, looking down at the ghouls and their ravenous mouths and gaze at what might have been my fate. There’s deep scoring in the ground and what looks like blast marks. I scamper up onto the edge of the bridge where the concrete is three or four feet thick. I walk to the middle, looking back the way I came. There are so many of them. Poor souls. Poor, restless souls …

The rain is freezing, so much more noticeable now that we’re still, quiet. The way down is a sheer drop, and at the bottom of that drop lies a messy date with the horde of undead and somewhere—truly, peacefully dead I hope—is a friend. The ghouls groan and wheeze, stretched out in a seemingly endless carpet of black and gray. There’s a trail of pitch across the bridge where the fires raged but now there’s only a suggestion of those flames, the smell of char and smoke, the ghost of fire.

I can see the sedan on the other side of the bridge idling, waiting for me. I don’t want to go, not yet, but now that the fires are out there will be nothing to keep the undead from getting up the ramp and over to the other side. The horn honks. They’re waiting.

A sudden madness grips me and I lean forward over the bridge searching, searching for a sign of my friend. I half expect to see Julian climbing up the sheer face of the bridge, laughing and swearing, but I don’t. Of course I don’t.

“I could be there with you,” I say, standing up again.

Renny is laying on the horn, calling to me. But before I go, I turn back to the edge of the bridge and hold out the ax. I let it drop, tumbling edge over blade, into the seething crowd below.

“Thanks,” I say. “Now I have to go. Our friends are waiting.”

November 15, 2009—On Liberty

Almost two months ago I was pretty average. Two months ago, if you handed me an ax I would think about splitting logs or maybe hacking down a fallen tree limb. That’s not me, not anymore.

It isn’t Utopia. I probably don’t have to tell you that. It’s not paradise, not by a long shot. But I think I can say something now that I could never safely say before: it’s my home.

Sure, I thought the bookstore was pretty good and I thought the apartments above that would work too, and I really hoped the arena could be a permanent thing, but this—
this
—is a real home with real buildings, real privacy, real beds and people willing to create a community. I think that’s the difference. We’re of one mind here, not in some bizzarro hive-mind way, we just want the same things. We want stability, safety, the chance to rebuild something lasting.

There are walls here, tremendously thick walls that might have bothered me once, but I’m used to it. In this life, in this day, a home has walls. We do what we can to keep
them
out and to keep
us
safely in. There’s a moat about thirty yards away from the walls. When the moat gets too full we set it on fire. The walls are reinforced with wooden spikes but none of the undead ever manages to make it that far. The village really is more like a fort, a reinforced campground, but there’s no discriminating here and all of the living are welcome. If someone manages to make it to the gates then they deserve to come inside. That’s the rule.

We keep the barricades primed with fire, we keep our soldiers armed and vigilant and we try to do good things, small, good things that make a difference to someone. It’s easier to set a pit of zombies on fire when you know the next morning you’ll be teaching Spanish to little kids. The roads are mostly dirt and gravel and the buildings that were burned up are slowly being rebuilt. There’s a flag flying above the town center, a white background with a green infinity symbol. It means all are welcome and it means we will go on, go on forever.

We’ve started a school, the Clarke School. I proposed we call it the Julian Clarke School of Dastardly Snark but that was pretty unanimously shot down. Ted teaches biology and chemistry, Renny gives art classes and I do what I was going to school to do: I teach books.

It’s funny, my mom was always the better scholar. When I applied to grad school I had the eerie feeling that everyone knew me and that’s because they
did
. Well … they knew my mother. They were her colleagues; her admirers more like. She blazed a fucking trail through their dry, exclusive academia Club House and showed them that a woman could read a book and make up bullshit theories as well as they could. I wanted to do that too. I wanted to live in a world where men stuck up their noses at me and I took a hold of those noses and shoved them into my long, preposterously overresearched papers.

I never really got to do that. I never found those people, those snobs that hated me because I was a woman or because I wasn’t smart enough, witty enough, crass enough. And maybe they don’t exist now. Their place in the world has been snubbed out. What I did find is a bunch of little kids without a school, without books, without teachers.

And she’s not here, my mom, not yet. I look for her every day, of course, taking a moment or two out from teaching to go sit on the walls and watch and wait. I’m not giving up hope, not yet, not now when I know that incredible things can happen, that people will surprise you with their will to live.

What I do know about my mom, what I know for sure, is that she would be proud. I don’t know if you can think back, way back to when you didn’t know
Treasure Island
or
A Tale of Two Cities
or
The Three Musketeers
, but these kids are hearing the stories for the first time. I know it sounds dry but it isn’t. Those books weren’t in Fort Morgan—Liberty Village—when we got here. The library had been ransacked, destroyed, all but burned to cinders. And so two days ago I helmed a rescue mission of sorts. As far as I’m concerned, Stevenson, Dickens and Dumas were prisoners somewhere and it was my duty to help them. Now they’re safe, cherished, right where they belong: in the hands of children who thought their lives were over. You don’t know what misery is until you look at a six-year-old and realize that they’ve experienced greater tragedy in their short life than you will ever live to know.

But they smile. They smile now when we sit together in a circle in the gutted post office and take turns reading aloud. They look to me for guidance, for explanations.

“What does ‘sublime’ mean?” they ask. “What is ‘bespattered’?”

It’s not all good. It’s not all simple. There are, of course, difficulties. There are, of course, surprises and shocks. I thought that when I left that park I left behind a group of friends that I would never see again. But I was wrong. In fact, not only did Ned, Evan, Mikey, and Collin survive, they beat us here, the crazy bastards.

We didn’t run into them until the second day. The first day was, well, pretty much nothing but eating, sleeping and relaxing. They gave us chickens roasted over a fire and we ate like savages, tearing the charred meat off the bone, reveling in the hot juices running down our faces. I think I remember a moment then when Renny smiled and there were bits of char and chicken stuck in her teeth and I felt relieved, as if I had carried the four of us on my back all the way here. It isn’t true, of course. We all took our turns shouldering the burden. I didn’t tell her about the stuff in her teeth; she looked too contented and free.

Day two brought a whole truckful of surprises. When we finally woke (sometime around noon I think), there were guests waiting outside of our lodge. Lodge is a generous word, I guess, but the right one. The lodges aren’t big but they’re sturdy, made with the same technique pioneers used to build their frontier homes. Colorado is kind of ridiculous that way, but the fact that they’ve wholeheartedly embraced adversity with a rousing frontier spirit is remarkable, inspiring. Anyway, when we (Ted, Renny, and I) finally managed to drag our asses out of bed, we found Ned and his kids waiting outside. Evan was wearing his Pirate Wall-E costume, something Ned had helped him with several days after Halloween had come and gone. According to Ned, Evan wouldn’t take it off, not until “Allison got to see.”

After the shock of seeing them again, and the delight, I had the task of finding Collin. Ned told me of his presence and survival with his usual charm, reminding me with a clandestine wink to be strong and stand up for myself. Ted and Renny stared at him as if he was speaking in gibberish, but I knew exactly what he meant. So I left them to catch up and tell stories. There would be time, after all, to hear all about Evan’s Halloween and I wanted to know how they had come to find us here. Ned wouldn’t say, of course. He just said: “Ask Collin, it’s his fault.”

I found Collin helping with the new orphanage, a big building made of rough-hewn timbers in the northeast corner of the town. He was finally out of his black fatigues, wearing a faded gray T-shirt and jeans, looking darling and shabby and English. His gun lay a safe and close distance away, well-kept and leaning against a wall.

I brought him lemonade.

“Thanks,” he said. We walked a ways from the construction. The lemonade was lukewarm. We’re still working on how to make ice efficiently. He sipped the drink for a moment, watching me with his dark, serious eyes over the rim of the paper cup.

“I’m glad you made it,” Collin said. He wiped at the sweat building at his temples. “I knew you would.” There was a smile there I couldn’t quite place, a self-satisfaction that made me wonder.…

“Shit.”

“What?” he asked, and I could see his smile peeking out from behind the edges of the Dixie cup.

“C in C.
You’re
C in C.”

“Mystery solved,” he said, inclining his head as if to an old, respected colleague. “Well done, Holmes.”

“That’s … that’s how you knew to come here? You were reading the blog?”

“We stayed with a family in Rockford who were kind enough to let us use their computer,” he said. Of course, part of me expected him to withdraw, for that old, familiar remoteness to drag him away from me, but his face remained painfully open, eager even. The other part of me hoped against hope that there was something to fight for. He hadn’t changed physically, not at all. There was a new scratch on his cheek and a bit more gray at his temples, but otherwise he stood there, tall and erect, exactly as I remembered. But there was someone new looking at me, someone with an unfamiliar urgency, a voracious curiosity I had never seen before or had somehow managed to forget.