Dead Things (23 page)

He can’t call to mind Mel’s animal expression, her exposed canines, and her charge. Or her nails in his shoulder. Or his panicked grab for the butcher knife on the counter. Or the stabbing. Repeatedly in her chest and…belly. Or the cutting. Or Mel’s head loosening from her shoulders.

He can’t recall striking the match and burning the house, and the secrets it held, to the ground.

He spent the next three weeks holed up in his store’s basement, reading every comic about the Man of Steel front to back. When he finished, he watched
Star Wars
. Then he watched it again. And again. Over and over and over. When the battery in his laptop died, he used his portable DVD player. When those batteries failed, he used the batteries from the store’s gaming system. When those were spent, he pillaged the batteries from the fire alarm. And after those died, he was left to the machinations of his own mind.

But Burt did not like that place. No, he hated it. He wanted to be in another.

So he simply decided it would be so. It didn’t take much more than that decision and time. Time to build a complex alternative reality. A new home he could immerse himself into completely. Convincingly.

In this world, he was a lone Jedi, traveling the outskirts of the galaxy, saving maidens from the Imperial scourge. It was a dangerous assignment, one that prevented him from embracing the trappings of friends and family. It was too risky, too dangerous, to let people get close, especially to someone like him, Brom Sybal.

Brom Sybal? Yes, he had even invented a
Star Wars
name for himself and a back-story that involved—wait for it—being orphaned. When he emerged from the basement, his beard long and hair tied in a Padawan knot, he was no longer plain old Burt.

Brom didn’t survive long, however. It was one thing to pretend to be a Jedi in the darkness of a basement. It was another to pretend to be a Jedi in the light of day, without special powers, without a light saber or a starship. Brom couldn’t exist in this new world. But neither could the old Burt.

So a new Burt was born, a Burt devoid of recent history. A Burt whose adult years would be bridged by the lessons of fantasy.

And now Van challenges this lie. Van seeks to turn the foundations of this current iteration of Burt into rubble. Van threatens Burt’s very existence by exhuming the graves of…

No. Burt will not allow that to happen. He can’t bear to lose Mel again.

“Enough!” Burt screams again.

Van pays him no heed. “Take all of this, and couple it with Lucas’ penchant to borrow from others—he admittedly appropriated from Akira Kurosawa—”

“Don’t you ever shut up?!” Burt yells.

“—that proves,” Van continues, sternly, “Lucas may have found his influences not so ‘long ago,’ and in a place not so ‘far away.’”

Burt jumps up. He strides toward Van, fists clenched. “You obviously must not have had a daddy, because no one has taught you respect.”

Burt finally strikes a nerve.

“Don’t you dare talk about my father,” Van growls. He’s up, chest puffed out. His father is Roger Gerome. He’s a hero. He risks his life every day so that insignificant people like Burt can live. Who does Burt think leads the way into the wilderness, locating medicines, supplies, technologies, fuel, and even survivors? Who does he think braved the bay sharks and discovered the colony on South Padre, as well as other islands, spared from the chaos on the mainland? “Fuck you! You should be reading comic books about
real
heroes. Like my dad!”

Anne calls for help.

Burt goes for Van. “You spoiled little—”

He doesn’t finish his sentence. As he takes a stride towards Van, he feels an explosion in his stomach. He drops to his knees, gasping, to find Wright standing above him.

Van is emboldened by Wright’s intervention. “Yeah, take that, you—”

Wright, still facing Burt, drops low and delivers a blow to Van with her elbow. He goes down hard, holding his groin with a groan reminiscent of a falling tree.

Ian watches the horizon. It glimmers, backlit by the high and ample moon. Nothing but the profile of trees, their leafless branches groping like a witch’s skeletal fingers across the night sky.

Ian exhales heavily, a freeing release. Nothing but the contours of trees. He thinks they are safe…until the creatures shamble out like apparitions from the shadow forest’s columns.

They must flee again.

“I thought you said you lost them!” Van yells at Ian as they dash off.

Ian thought he had, yet it is Wright who answers for him. “No,” she defends. They arrived too quickly to have followed Ian. “They followed us.”

They find their way to the highway once more. The moon is low, and darkness once again masks their trail. Yet it hides their path forward, as well. Near daybreak, they slow to a walk. They are exhausted. As they lean on their knees, they discover they have stumbled into an immense clearing.

A giant cement structure stands before them, guarded by four turrets. Twenty-foot-high fencing and razor wire—and dozens of monsters—stand between them and the building.

It is a prison.

Wright sees someone on the ramparts, but she does not call for his attention. He already sees her, and he is already signaling to someone outside her view.

She knows they’re exhausted, knows they’re running on fumes. But they need to make their way to the gate, and they need to do it now.

Wright leads them single file. They start off at a brisk walk, but the creatures key on them promptly. The monsters leave the fence’s perimeter, setting a beeline for them. The protagonists make a dash for the gate.

Wright draws her firearm. She waits for the monsters to get close. She shoots when the first gets too near their flank. The thing takes a scalping shot to the top of its head. Anne screams, pulling Van close, as the dead thing falls. Its legs go out from underneath it. It writhes, but not in agony. Its motor cortex has been destroyed, and it no longer has control of its limbs.

The second stands directly in her way. Wright comes straight at it and fast, almost too fast. As her heart rate increases, her mind starts limiting the range and amount of information it can process. Her senses narrow. Her world slows. The sound dies down around her. Her vision goes dark at the sides.

Everything becomes crystal clear.

It takes her three shots to bring this monstrosity down. She sees each discharge: the bullet to the shoulder, the second to the cheek, the third striking the spinal cord just below the skull. It falls forward, its mandibles working furiously. She catches it at the chest with a forearm, just avoiding its broken teeth—sharp like a vampire’s—and shoves it away fiercely.

Another approaches from her right, and she puts two rounds into its chest. It slows, but the caliber is too small to drop it. It lunges at Burt, the last in line, and he avoids it with a shrill sob.

They are thirty feet from the gate when it opens. Four men in riot gear emerge, shotguns extended.
Police officers
, Wright thinks.

They signal them to enter and fan out. They fire at the creatures. Their weapons are devastating. Cartridges explode and go wide, spinning the things by the shoulder, mowing them down at the knees, tearing their heads from their torsos.

The group collapses in a pile in the courtyard, shaking and quivering, withered by starvation and fatigue. They hold each other, weeping as the gate closes behind them.

They are safe.

Chapter Twenty: History Lesson

Their rescuers are not police officers. They are prisoners, and they feed Wright and her team from the bounty of their garden. There are tomatoes, carrots, beans, and corn. And there’s more: chicken!

The survivors gorge themselves, or at least attempt to, each realizing in turn that their stomachs have shriveled, deprived of true sustenance for so long.

Afterward, they are shown to cells, rooms where they can sleep. And they do, long and hard.

When they awake, there is a fresh change of clothes for each, prisoner garb to wear while their clothes are washed. They are split up, the women shown one shower, the men another.

Once rested and bathed, they are asked to join the residents—they prefer to be called residents rather than inmates—in the gymnasium.

Wright notices there isn’t a single person dressed in a guard’s uniform. No police. Maybe they are wearing prison clothes too? Or maybe prisoners saved them?

The condition spread far and wide, touching every town in every county in every state in every nation of every continent with its dark and sickly finger.

“Chicago?” someone asks her.

“Gone,” Wright replies. Places like Chicago witnessed the worst of the plague’s ravages. Unlike southern towns, cities in the north had largely illegalized not just the mere possession but also the ownership of firearms. Only the police carried handguns. But Chicago’s police force of 13,000 could do little more than witness the carnage. Within two weeks of the plague’s emergence, the city was dead. Its great towers, its renowned museums, and its magnificent mile of shops were nothing more than catacombs for millions of ghouls.

The federal government, obviously, failed. It should not come as a surprise. After all, this is the same government that couldn’t stop a plane from hitting a tower, let alone two; couldn’t find a single terrorist in the middle east in an area no bigger than New Jersey; couldn’t determine whether an impoverished country had weapons of mass destruction; couldn’t prevent the financial collapse of the greatest economy in the world; and couldn’t do anything, really, that governments are supposed to do.

That’s what happens when leaders are chosen less for their intelligence and more for whether they’ll have a couple of beers (and maybe a shot of whiskey or two) with some good ol’ boys down at the local tap.

How odd then that these good ol’ boys, the very people who ensured federal failure and the deaths of 250 million through the ignorance of their votes, ultimately became the salvation of humanity. How odd that their conviction in an inalienable right to hunt with AK-47s, in a definition of marriage limited to a single man and woman, and in a single absolute Christ would turn the tide and ensure the continuation of the human species.

The tide turned in the Bible belt. It only makes sense. The south had everything in its favor. The residents were able to defend themselves (it is a land where guns outnumber people); steadily repopulate (it is a land where children marry and beget more children); fortify and expand their boundaries by ten or more miles each year (it is a land that exists to export God’s word); and begin a new civilization.

But Wright suspects they had something else, something she will keep to herself for now: an evolutionary advantage.

The human body has evolved a magnificent defensive array, an immune system built over millions of years. Natural selection—mutation, cellular diversification, and evolution—allowed the forebears to humanity to fight viruses, bacteria, and parasites in succession. Yet, as highly refined as the human body is, it cannot fight all infections. Some bugs are too fast. Others can go under cover. And sometimes the human immune system overreacts, using such force that it causes collateral damage, destroying the very cells it is assigned to protect. Avoidance, in the end, is the most effective method of controlling diseases.

Behavior plays a significant component in avoiding illness in all animals. Creatures big and small are driven by instinct to shun others who show signs of illness. Humans, though, can go it one better. Humans not only know to avoid others who are sick, but to steer clear of those who
might
be sick.

But here, too, the immuno-response can be excessive, triggered by a belief that people who are somehow different harbor diseases. The response can be so strong that it supplants all reason. Here, racism can wear the mask of patriotism. The Nazis linked the Jews to leprosy, typhus, cholera, and dysentery. Neo-Cons, the “new” breed of conservative, blamed the swine flu epidemic of 2009 on Mexican immigrants.

But this fear of others, Wright expects, helped the Bible belt. Their suspicions of outsiders served them well, limiting their exposure to strangers and the disease that might come with them. Xenophobia, strangely enough, may have helped save the human race.

As the United States fell away, in its vacuum rose a federation; not a federation of states, but a federation of churches. Christian leaders assumed the mantle of power, spreading the gospel that the plague was the harbinger of the final days of man. The holy compact grew to stretch across the middle south.

The church assumed authority of law enforcement and the judiciary. What was left of the city and state tribunals did not contest the move. How could they? So few of them remained intact at the beginning of the New Order. They needed the church.

Commerce—a barter system at first, but commerce still—grew steadily, subsidized by in part by scouting parties to the wild, scouting parties led by Roger Gerome. Employment comes easily to those who are citizens. The price for citizenship is conscription. Four years of border duty, or two years in Gerome’s service, will buy someone a substitute for the American dream. Most opt for border duty.