Dredging Up Memories (5 page)

Eight Weeks and Four Days After It All Started…

Dawn came, the sun casting its blinding rays on us. Nature’s alarm clock. My joints ached as they did every morning. Sleeping in the truck just wasn’t good on the body. I missed the comfort of a bed and sheets and a pillow. I missed the sound of a real alarm clock telling me to get out of bed, that yes, this was all a nightmare, and welcome back to reality. I missed the smell of brewing coffee and cooking on the griddle. I even missed the old job—what I would give to be able to go back to those days.

I glanced around our surroundings. Things were much the same as the night before. The world still spun, the sun still came up…time, however, no longer sped along at a breakneck pace. It had dropped down to extra slow motion, each second like minutes, each minute like hours. Survival and loneliness are wearisome bedfellows at best, and I had them both as companions.

“You awake, Humphrey?”

A yawn and a yes followed.

“Ready to head down there?”

Silence.

“Me neither.”

I cranked the truck up, and we pulled onto the road. I could have made it to the next town over, maybe even further if I really needed to, but I had no desires to push my luck. I drove slow, scanned the area for anyone, living or dead. There were a few areas of blood near the fifties style buildings. The skeletal remains of a person lay scattered about near the entrance of what was the town police station—a building no bigger than a convenience store. The door stood open, a bloody shoe a few feet from it. Not for the first time did I wonder what terror a victim went through, if the person were ripped apart or killed themselves before the dead got to them.

Up ahead, I could see the red car sitting at the parking light. My stomach quivered at the notion of who could be in it. I turned the truck around, pointed it back toward I-26.

“Stay here,” I said to Humphrey.

I stepped out, pistol in hand, slung the rifle over my shoulder. A handful of bullets later, and I eased away from the truck, the door closed, keys in the ignition. I’ve never quite gotten over the jitters; each day, it’s the same thing. Nerves on end. Quick breaths. Dry eyes from a lack of blinking. Knots in my stomach. Sweaty palms. Not quite like a first date but pretty close to speaking in public in only your underwear.

The blood on the sidewalk had dried, paled over time, becoming more of a washed red color. The shoe in the door of the police station was a Nike. A bone jutted from a blood-crusted sock. I peeked in through the door, not wanting to go in like a gangbuster and get myself killed. Shadows played along gray walls, making it difficult to see anything not directly in the sun’s light. My hand shook as I placed the palm down on the cool door and pushed it open. There were a couple of desks, papers and computers atop them, chairs nearby. A coat rack sat near the door, a gun rack on the far wall, steel bars keeping anyone from taking the weapons. A body lay in the center of the room, flies buzzing about—a cop, his gun still in hand. 

Against the wall closest to the door lay another body, a hole in its head. On the other side of the closest desk was a third person, a woman with jeans and a bloodied shirt. The top half of her head was missing. She was closest to the cop, probably the one who took him down. But he got the shot off, or maybe someone else did. 

I pushed the door open further, letting it hit softly against the wall. A hall led away from the central room. I inched past the corpses, checked the cop to make sure he was dead. He had put a bullet in his own head. I thought back to the Baxters, the way Max had mercifully killed his family before they could succumb to the death that surrounded them. Visions of what may have happened bounced through my head. The cop took out the first rotter, didn’t see the other one until it was too late and she had taken a chunk out of him somewhere. He wheeled, put a bullet through her brain, and slumped to the floor, blood pouring from a wound, his heart pounding, the truth running through his head. With tears in his eyes, he probably put the revolver to his head, said a quick prayer, and pulled the trigger. Maybe he had never been religious before and found it in that moment before taking his own life. I shook my head, took a deep breath, and moved down the hall.

The bathroom sat on the right, empty. A door separated the hall from the next room. I opened it slowly and peered in. Another desk sat near the center of the room, its chair pushed underneath it. Three jail cells lined the wall. The first two were empty. The third one held a man. He leaned against the bars, his back to me, shoulders slumped. I could see the body on the floor, pieces of meat still clinging to bone. 

“Hey,” I said, my voice barely a whisper. I coughed, repeated. The man pushed off the bars and turned. His head lulled on his shoulders. The front of his shirt was soaked in gore, his hands bony and bloody. He seemed to stare at me with his head down, as if he were looking through his forehead. A grunt escaped him. The skin on his face had sagged. I could see the bones of his eye sockets.

My heart sped up, my chest tightened. I lifted my pistol. 

He grunted again, smashed his head against the cell door. He didn’t lift his arms. Other than beating his head against the bars and grunting, he didn’t do much at all. But there was desperation in those simple actions.

I swallowed. “Listen, buddy,” I said, trying to reason with him if there was really any way to do that. “I know you’re in a bad way, but I’m going to take care of you, okay?”

Another grunt was followed by another head butt to the cell bars. Skin split on his forehead. A thick, yellowish-red liquid seeped from the wound.

“Calm down, okay? I’m not going to let you stay that way. I promise. I’m going to set you free. Just give me a couple of minutes, okay?”

He stopped. For several long seconds, we stared at each other, he the rotting, reanimated corpse and me, well, I was as alone as they came, an old, western cowboy without the horse, boots, and spurs or the cowboy hat. In those Old West days, that would have been the stare down before the draw, before the six shooters came off the hips and gunpowder filled the air in a black heaviness that stung the nostrils. There would be no duel on this day, just me with my guns and him safely behind bars.

I broke eye contact and hurried back up the hall. I could have put a bullet in the man’s head, but sound—any type, I learned—attracted the dead. No need firing the pistol before I gathered some valuable supplies.

I stopped in the main room. The gun case was held shut with a padlock. There were eight rifles and a couple of handguns as well as several boxes of ammo. I searched the desks for keys, found none. I turned to the cop, rolled him over, and searched his pockets. 

“Jackpot,” I whispered when I pulled out a ring with several keys attached. The fourth key produced an audible click that made me jump. With the gun case open, I unloaded the weapons, carrying as many as I could to the truck and going back for the rest. I wondered if the cop had thought about unlocking it before he died. If he had the foresight to think that, maybe he wouldn’t have much time to open the case when the dead were closing in on his tiny town.
The case was still locked,
my mind said.
What do you think?

After loading the last of the guns and ammunition in the truck, I went back inside and down the hall. The man had sagged against the cell door, his eyes facing the floor. That infected, yellowish-red blood seeped from the wound in his head and dribbled down the bars. 

“Hey,” I said from about ten feet away. “Are you still with me?”

He lifted his head slightly. His eyes were a filmed-over white. A fly landed on one of them, did a little dance, and took off again. My heart was like a tidal wave crashing along the shore, crushing blow after blow within my chest. He struck his head on the bars again, his mouth open. A low growl filled the room, like an angered whisper or a plea for help. 

I lifted my gun, finger on the trigger. “If you’re in there and can hear me, I hope you understand I’m not doing this because I’m mean or uncaring.”

He stopped beating his head against the cell door. I saw nothing in his eyes, nothing in the way he stood, mouth ajar, arms dangling at his sides.

I wiped my mouth with one hand and swallowed hard. “If you can hear me and you don’t want me to put a bullet in your brain, step backwards one step.”

I waited, hands shaking, lips and mouth dry. He didn’t move, not even a waver from side to side. 

“Okay.” I thought for a moment longer, daylight burning away outside, the hairs on my arms on end. “Okay. Listen up. If you can hear me, listen real carefully. I’m going to shoot you. I’m going to kill you…again. If you want me to do that, hit your head against that bar again.”

It was a reach. But I had to know. I had to know if my experiment before was accurate, if there really were souls trapped inside those bodies.

Time stood still. We stared at each other, this stranger and I, until he lifted his head away from the cell door and brought it hard against one bar. There was the audible noise as his forehead cracked. Again, he hit his head against the door. Two more times followed.

“Okay, okay,” I said. “You can stop now.”

And he did.

I nodded. “Thank you.”

His head snapped back with the sound of the gun. He fell backward, landing in a heap on the bones on the floor behind him. 

Confirmation.

“They’re in there,” I said. “They’re still in there.”

I turned and walked toward the hall then stopped in the doorway.  Standing between the door and me was another one. He shambled toward me, one arm held out, his jaw missing. I backed up and around the desk and waited for him to get inside the room. He was in bad shape, barely tottering and looking as if he could fall with his next step. He bumped the doorjamb, staggered sideways and through the opening. 

I pulled the trigger while his face was turned from me. He struck the wall and fell. I stood, torn from the recent revelations. These were people with lives, hopes, and dreams. Someone gave birth to them; someone loved them at one point. They probably loved others and had dreams, and who knew, maybe the guy in the cell had kids or a wife. Either way, two experiments had led me to believe something that should be fundamentally impossible: the dead had souls, and those souls were trapped in the husks of what used to be.

I previously thought I would go to Hell for killing the dead. Maybe that’s true. Or maybe I had to be the Grim Reaper and help these poor folks get to the afterlife…as painlessly as possible. Maybe surviving wasn’t all that was left to do. Maybe finding other survivors wasn’t all that was left to do. Maybe…maybe delivering the dead to…to where? Maybe ending their misery was the way to getting my soul back.

I stepped around the dead man and hurried down the hall, pistol in hand. I stopped at the cop. “Sorry, buddy, but I’m going to need that,” I said and bent down. It took a little work, but I took his gun and slid it in my waistband and beneath my shirt. It was cool on my back.

Outside the police station, I glanced both ways, made my way toward the red car at the light further down. My memories raced, searching through thousands of files before finding the right cabinet, the right moment in time. I hurried toward the car—a Chevy much like the one Leland had bought a couple of years earlier. I couldn’t see the tag from where I was nor if there was a bumper sticker on it that read,
Honk If I Made You Mad
, on the right-hand side. 

From between two buildings, a woman stumbled, her hair matted to the side of her bloodied face. I turned the pistol on her, my mind firmly on auto-pilot as I approached the car. One shot, one kill.

A few feet from the car, Lee’s voice echoed in my mind.

“How do you like her?” he asked as he ran a hand across the hood.

“It’s alright if you like that sort of thing.”

He shrugged. “I do.”

Jessica had loved that car. She had screamed for joy when Lee showed it to her, a birthday present that kept on giving right until the end of the world.

I circled around the front of it, part of me terrified to see the tag, to see the bumper sticker Lee had put on as a joke—one Jessica wasn’t too happy with, but she allowed it to stay to keep from scratching the paint while taking it off.

I thought of Lee as he and I and Davey Blaylock made our way from building to building, seeking supplies and survivors, putting bullets in anything that didn’t answer our calls. I thought of how Lee rounded a corner and the hands that grabbed his arm and the mouth that sank down on his bicep. I thought of the fear in his face as he pulled the trigger, taking off the top of the guy’s head, how he laughed when he realized who it was.

“Son-of-a…” he said with tears in his eyes. The laugh was involuntary—shock, maybe—and he let it out, a high-pitched sound that could have been a whine or scream or a little bit of both. “Was that Paul Marcum?” he asked.

I glanced at the body. No doubt. “Yeah, it was.”

“You’ve got to be kidding me,” he yelled and kicked Paul in the side several times. He lowered his gun, squeezed off two shots, and screamed at Paul like it was his fault the world had died. After several minutes, he calmed and then laughed again. This time, it was an eerie realization that was carried in it. He shook his head. “Well, ain’t this some crap?”