Early Thaw (5 page)

She ripped the backpack from his hands and slung it on her shoulder, storming out of the room without a word.

She could hear him scrambling to follow, hear the door slamming shut— what was the point of that, exactly?— hear the gears in his mind grind against one another as he tried to figure out what to say. She didn’t bother turning around.

After a few minutes of nothing, Leslie cobbled together enough courage to speak. “There’s an axe stuck into one of the trees out back. Saw it coming in. Might be more items back there, too.”

Then, when she didn’t say anything, “I’ll check it out.”

As the crunch of his footsteps faded from her ears, she pretended she was alone. Really alone. It was nicer than she’d expected. As her boots plunged mechanically through ice-streaked snow, she let the idea unravel like line from a spool. No more stuttered pleasantries to evade. No more preschool duty. An end to guilt and pity.

I could do it
, she thought. The idea made her smile.

Lost in her fantasy, she didn’t see him fall into the water; it was the reverberating boom of fracturing ice that made her turn. Later, she imagined it must’ve looked like something from a cartoon: one second, manchild, creeping along in all his spindly weirdness; the next, no manchild. She even thought there might be roadrunner-style puffs of air as he fell.

She knew things were serious, but she couldn’t help thinking how ridiculous he looked. His pasty face, bobbing up and down in the jagged hole he’d created, looked like something she’d tie on a fishing line. In the first few seconds, he just kind of floated there, gasping, spitting water, too dumbfounded to do anything but look stupid.

Her immediate reaction was to jog over to him. The creek bed was no more than 30 feet, and she covered the distance easily, but she knew better than to follow Leslie’s steps onto the ice. Both of them in the water would mean a shared expiration date, and that was just too Romeo and Juliettish for her comfort.

By the time she reached what she figured to be the edge of the creek, Leslie had awakened to the seriousness of his situation and was busy wailing like a newborn. He’d been fooled by the layer of snow covering the thin ice of the creek, had assumed what he was looking at was the bottom of an empty bed, not the frozen crust atop a stream. Stupid. She doubted the water had much depth, but Leslie obviously couldn’t touch: his doggie paddle was one of the most pathetic she’d seen since her days of high-school lifeguarding. Like his fingers, each limb seemed to move of its own volition, sucking him into the water as much as it pushed him afloat. Frigid water ran from his vein-webbed cheeks and nose, playing Plinko in the sparse stubble on his chin.

Val stood, glacial, a profound idea suddenly dislodging inside her brain. Until that moment, she’d always hazily imagined puppies and ducklings when she heard the word
helpless
. Now, she knew, she’d always think of these woods, this creek, and the little man slowly dying in front of her.

“Help! Toss me… toss me a rope or something!”

Then, between Leslie’s frantic splashes, something cracked. Something big. Not the ice— this noise, echoing in the still winter air, seemed to come from the pines lining the clearing. Val’s head shot up. Squinting in concentration, she tried to pick apart disparate pieces of auditory information, separate Leslie’s hysterical flailing from the intermittent clicks and pops entering her consciousness.

“Oh Jesus, Val, it’s…so cold!” rasped Leslie, working hard to melt the words in his frozen mouth.

“Quiet— I just heard something.”

“Just…just give me…your hand!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Leslie, maybe due to the onset of hypothermia, did just that. And in the relative quiet that followed, both heard the dry trickle of branches snapping in the woods beyond.

Then they saw it.

In addition to the seemingly endless hordes of shambling dead people came an occasional shambling dead animal— a moose, a fox, etc. In Val’s mind, these were the really creepy bastards, reminders of just how much Shit and how big a Fan. Creepy didn’t really describe the white-eyed thing that was advancing on Leslie from the pines, though. More like purely fucking terrifying.

The wolf—if it could still be called that—was lacking several necessary parts, but it was making good time dragging itself toward Leslie anyway; exposed ribs and a yard-long trail of intestine didn’t seem to slow it down much. Val figured the scorch marks on its head and legs were a parting gift from the cabin’s former occupant.

She aimed the rifle at a burnt spot below its ears and curled a finger around the trigger.

Horrified to the point of incoherency, the tiny boy-man started twisting and thrashing again, his weak little stick arms clawing, scraping the ice in vain. The round-rimmed glasses that had always seemed part of his face now hung at an angle, slapped with waves of water every time his head dunked below the surface.

Val felt her feet sliding backward on their own. The rifle sagged at first, then fell to her side. And suddenly she was wondering if she could get far enough away to mute the inevitable scream.

“Shoo…shoot it!” More plea than command. The vibrato in his voice indicated he was crying, though his crumpled forehead and wide butter eyes read as a sort of confused shock.

Something gurgled in the wolf’s throat as a wet growl worked itself loose. The fur on its face was matted and slicked with blood, and each of its eyes had clouded to a solid white. Smell, sound, or some other sense kept it focused on Leslie, though; when it lumbered to within a few feet of his thrashing, a snarl rippled its lips, revealing jagged, yellowed teeth. Saliva trailed from its gash of a mouth as it jawed the air in anticipatory nibbles.

No question now: Leslie was bawling, snot and tears streaming from his face. “Shoodid…shoodid,” he cried. Nerve damage, mucus, and a resigned acceptance combined to rob his words of alacrity.

She took a long stride away from the frail little figure bobbing in the water. Then another. She could feel the trees closing in behind her. It would be over very soon—was almost over already.

Something meaty fell from the wolf’s vivisected torso as the creature slid and skittered across the ice. Leslie was out of his mind. He’d abandoned words—either because they’d proven ineffectual or because his mouth could no longer form them—and was simply gasping now against the frigid water filling his throat.

And then he stopped. Stopped moving, stopped breathing—just stopped. He stared right at her and his hands disappeared. Then his shoulders. Then his head. The waves he’d made stretched and melted as the current rolled them away; the surface of the water became glassy and calm. For a few static seconds, even the wolf seemed confused.

In the quiet, in the stillness, was that
comfort
she felt?

And then he was crashing through the ice from below—three or four feet closer to the bank now—rocketing upwards and breaking a channel in the thin crust. Water poured from his upper body as he grasped for a pine root curving out over the creek.

Weakened by Leslie’s thrashing, the brittle ice below the wolf finally gave way. With a clumsy splash the creature was in the water, jerking and shuddering toward its rematerialized meal. Less buoyant now without a few internal organs, only its eyes and scalded scalp were visible above the waterline.

Leslie looked once at the milky eyes sliding towards him, exhaled loudly through his teeth, and, with resolve Val had never witnessed remaking his face in stone, began beating at the remaining crust with a fist. The ice splintered and broke, providing him with a narrow path to the bank. He flailed in the water with limbs that hardly worked until a frozen hand hooked around the root.

The wolf was an arm’s length behind and already gnashing. A cloud of oily, hairy chunks surrounded it in the water.

Leslie turned and met the thing face to face. A hand swiped blindly at the surface once, twice, until it rose again clutching a slender shard of ice. Shoving against the wooden anchor, he put all his force into driving the spline through the creature’s eye. With a squishy pop, the ball exploded. The thing’s skull trembled; its jaws broke the surface, snapping at air. Then the whole tortured, ravaged mess slumped in the water. The lifeless body floated a few feet and caught on the edge of the hole.

Leslie tugged at the root with the last ounce of energy still available to him and hefted his upper half from the water. He lay on the bank for a long time then, legs still partially submerged. And though he was barely breathing and shaking in violent spasms, she was pretty sure it was the wrong moment to try and help.

Later, as they huddled around the bonfire they’d made of the cabin and his fingers had warmed enough to work the buttons and zippers on a dry change of clothes, he asked the question she knew was coming:

“Why didn’t you shoot it?”

Her gaze wandered down to her lap, as if a convenient answer might be written there. “I guess I was just scared.”

His eyes didn’t leave her face—she could feel them without looking. “Yeah,” he murmured, his voice wavering, “but why? You’ve shot a lot. Hundreds of times. Animals and people.”

Her answer, she knew, was too rushed to sound genuine. “Something about it being a wolf, I don’t know. It just freaked me out.” She shot him a look that said
Do you really want to keep asking questions?

Leslie stared at her for an uncomfortably silent few seconds, his eyes slitted in skepticism.

The hike home was quiet.

***

With December’s pervasive freeze came a gift, this one better than the clothes or the .22 had been. She and Leslie had assumed they’d be popping dead people all through the winter— albeit at a much slower rate— and worried about the constant danger of maneuvering through snow. So they were pleasantly surprised when, exploring a commercial campground they figured would be well-stocked with living dead, they found themselves surrounded by mumbler popsicles— the latest indignity to befall the infected.

“It makes sense,” she said, then remembered the world was spilling over with living dead people. She felt instantly dumb.

They began the tedious task of postmodern morticians then— flaying, smashing, and otherwise deconstructing skulls with the rapidity and mindless precision of assembly-line workers. In the weeks that followed, for fun, they’d sometimes concoct elaborate, Goldbergian systems of destroying brains: sledding corpsciles into dumpsters, shot-putting ice chunks into skulls, thawing their heads with a blowtorch and going at ‘em with hammers and axes. It was a good time.

Even in the dead of winter, though, the threat level never fell much below orange. One time, while raiding a campground registration station they’d spent four days clearing a dead-person path to, she made the mistake of letting Leslie out of her sight while digging around for some matches and plastic lighters. She’d heard his screaming from inside the shack, knowing without really thinking about it that the pokey little puppy had gotten into something rotten. When she’d rounded the corner, though, she saw that Leslie—at least as much as she could tell from behind—didn’t seem to be in any danger. And the screaming wasn’t screaming, exactly—more like yelling. The guy had a high voice, so everything loud from his mouth sounded kinda horror-show, but the unbroken chain of expletives clanging through the air didn’t sound like the result of panic, but rather
anger
.

He was freaking.

Straddling two iced-over legs, he was alternating punches into the captive cadaver beneath him, his chichi ski gloves spattered with half-frozen gore. With each blow, little tremors shook the wooden walkway; even frozen solid, the mumbler’s legs made little shudders of recognition whenever a fist connected. The blowtorch had rolled a few feet away, though the tang of singed hair she smelled left no doubt that Leslie’d used it to “wake” his buddy. He’d obviously wanted a responsive target.

“Sonofafucking…” he screeched, his throat sucking in air, “motherbitchingass…assholecunt. I’ll…” The clumsy arcs he tore through the air drooped a bit as he dug for breath. “…fucking…fuckingkillyou…”

Poor little pup
, she thought.
Probably remembering some ugly little bastard kids back in Denver
. She imagined a cheap apartment downtown somewhere, all cockroaches and alimony payments.
Never even thought—he must be coming to terms with never seeing them again
. She geared herself up for the inevitable Lifetime moment: the you-can’t-bring-them-back, we-have-to-move-on bullshit; the tear-streaked face; the sure-to-be unbearable bear hug she’d have to give to reassure him that
yes,
everything would be OK
. Christ, would she have to change his diaper, too?

Hand out, seeking his shoulder, she began walking over to him. Rehearsing the comforting lines. Assembling words of wisdom. Lost in Mother Theresa role-play, Leslie’s fist nearly knocked her out of her reverie. And that was when she finally got a good look at the scene.

The thing beneath his knees was more silhouette than skull, a vaguely circular patch of hair, bone, and skin. In the months since TSHtF, she’d seen and done some fairly demented things, but the sight kicked a little bile into her throat, nonetheless.

“What the fuck?” she shouted, swallowing hard. “What are you doing?”

Leslie slumped like someone had cut his puppet string. “Oh, hi Val. Didn’t mean for you to hear all that.” He looked down at the red paste he’d made, little stick fingers crisscrossing innocently in his lap. “Thought I’d take it to the next level.”