This Dark Earth (9 page)

“Okay, let’s switch.” I turn sideways, my front toward the wall. I don’t understand why she doesn’t get out. She brushes past me, and the tips of her breasts trace lines on my back, burning more than my wounds. She sticks the bottle in my ribs, and it’s cold and jars me from my arousal. I soap up and rinse. It feels wonderful.

When I’m done and it’s obvious that the shower is over, I’m relieved but disappointed too. When will I have another shower like this? When will I have another shower?

I turn off the water. Sudden silence except for dripping. I can understand how blind folks’ hearing is heightened to compensate for lack of sight.

“We forgot towels.”

“There’s a closet. Behind where you sat when we got here.”

“I’ll get them. If we’re gonna be sittin’ here, no need to get the floor totally soaked. Stay there.”

I step out of the shower. I’m glad for the darkness and that she can’t see me, find the door, and blindly fumble my way through the closet. When I feel soft fluffy fabric, I grab and tug. Towels. I dry myself off and get Lucy a fresh one. She steps out and dries off too. I drop my towel to the floor and try to mop up the runoff, then wrap a new towel around my waist.

“We need a little light,” I say.

“Wait till I get this towel around me.”

I wait.

“Okay.”

I move to the sink and take the matches from the ledge. I light one.

Lucy, sitting cross-legged on the tile floor, hair frizzy from the shower, begins to look through her loot.

“Once the tub is empty, rinse it again and then fill it, please. If we get—”

“Trapped?”

“Yeah. If we’re trapped, we’ll need it.”

I sit down, facing her. We rummage through our bags.

I have the kerosene and the useless lantern. She has bottles of pills, ibuprofen, Pepcid Complete, expired amoxicillin, Lasix, Neosporin, and a bottle with five Cialis. I have a box of spaghetti. She has two shirts and a pair of pants that might be big enough for me. I have a cheap bottle of white wine; the twist-off cap is a blessing. She has very old tampons, circa 1983 it looks like. I have a can of Rotel brand tomatoes. She has a bottle of witch hazel. I have prunes. She has a jar of ancient Vaseline. I have a box of votive candles.

From what I can tell, the people of Granny-shambler’s house all share the traits of being old, liking spicy food, and getting constipated. Someone might be having sex, maybe poor Chuck T’s mother. I can’t imagine who the Cialis might be for.

It’s a toss-up if the candles are a bigger score than the shitty wine.

“Light a candle and turn around,” she says, voice pitched low. “I’m going to look at your burns.”

I do what she says, and I’m struck that it seems so natural for me to follow her lead. I always rankled when Angelyne bossed me around. But with Lucy . . . it’s different. Is it because she’s a doctor? Because she’s more beautiful? Or because she’s both?

I rotate myself, using my hands, but remain cross-legged.

She scoots the loot aside—not before twisting the cap off of the wine and taking a swig—then crawls forward. She hands me the bottle, and I drink.

“Wait.” She pops open a bottle of pills and puts four little brown ones into my hand. I can hear her rattle some into her own palm.

“Ibuprofen. Take them.”

I pop them in my mouth and wash them down with the wine. The wine makes my mouth pucker, too tart and too sweet all at once. But when it has gone down the pipe, my stomach burns a little more and my neck, my ears, and my arms burn a little less.

I hear the crackling of paper and realize she’s unwrapping a tampon. She squirts witch hazel on the tampon and begins to swab my neck with it. It stings. It hurts. More than you can imagine. I suck air through clenched teeth.

I don’t crack jokes about the tampon.

She chuckles.

I ask, “What?”

“Just this morning—was it this morning? it seems so long ago—I told myself I don’t do wet work.”

“Wet work?”

“Dealing with patients. Hands-on doctor stuff.”

“You can’t say that anymore.”

“No. I can’t.”

I wince. Whatever she’s doing back there really stings. When I have a moment, I ask, “What exactly is witch hazel?”

She stops wiping my burns. I look back and see she’s trying to read the label.

“You know . . .” she murmurs, “I have no idea. A plant maybe. I know it has lots of alcohol in it, and that’s why I’m putting it on your neck. To clean it.”

Her legs go to either side of mine. She starts working on my ears.

Her fingers feel cool on my skin, and I can smell the kiwi scent of her hair.

“Well, you’ll never grow another mullet.”

I stifle the laugh.

“We won’t suffocate, will we? You know, from the candle?” I ask, and my voice sounds loud in the small space. “Since we’ve taped everything up?” She’s a doctor and knows these things. Except about witch hazel.

“It’s either carbon monoxide poisoning or anoxia, using up all of the oxygen in an environment. I think we need to extinguish it at some point. It could kill us . . . maybe. But only if we’ve created an airtight seal, which I doubt. Cracks in the walls, gaps in the windows, spaces in the tiles . . . I don’t know. But sound travels through air. Radioactive particles travel through air. So we’re killing two birds with one stone by taping the windows. But we need light right now
for a few minutes. And I’ve got the corner of the window still untaped. I hope that’ll be enough. I haven’t heard anything downstairs.”

She falls silent. Maybe realizing she was talking, well, too much.

Lucy finishes my ears, takes out another tampon, squirts more witch hazel, and rubs the backs of my arms.

“Would you have really dumped me on the interstate?”

“Not just yes but hell yes. You’d convinced me the crazy virus existed. Why wouldn’t I think you had it too?”

She stops wiping my arms.

“I’m worried that everyone has it.”

Silence.

“But you didn’t. Dump me.”

“You were convincing. I’ve never—” I don’t know how to say it. “I’ve never met . . . never met someone like you. You’re . . . intense. And honest. And a little scary.”

I can’t see, but she might be blushing. She’s quiet for a long while.

I take another swig from the bottle and hand it back to her.

She takes a swallow and says, “Do you have any more cigarettes? We shouldn’t, but—”

“Yeah. The world is ending. Wait a sec.” I pull a rumpled flat pack out of my pocket. I ferret open the lining and inspect what’s left. Three cigarettes, butts smashed narrow. I draw one out. It’s bent halfway through.

“Put your finger on the rip and it’ll be just fine.”

I take out one for myself. She lights hers from the votive and then hands the candle to me. I spill translucent wax onto
my hand and it burns, but by now I’ve become used to the sensation. It’s been a long day. This morning, I woke up in the back of my cab in a parking lot, ready to drive another thousand miles.

The smoke fills the space and doesn’t dissipate. We look at each other and smoke, each of us lost in our own thoughts. I can’t help but notice her athletic legs, her long, willowy neck. She’s slim and delicate as steel and I feel awkward that I’m not. That I’m bulky and hairy and weak.

“Why do they call you Knock-Out?”

“Jim Nickerson. My name.”

“That doesn’t figure. You do look like a Knock-Out, though.”

I stay quiet for a minute.

“I got the name because I was so good looking when I was a teen. I modeled.” Her expression doesn’t change. “Really.”

“Fat chance.”

I snort. Her shoulders rise in alarm and I look around, as if that could help.

No sound from downstairs or outside. The light from Granny-shambler’s house has died, and the zombies have dispersed or died in the blaze and explosion.

“A middle-weight fighter in the navy. Won some fights. Don’t know how to shoot very well, but I’m handy in a bar.”

She squints her eyes at me.

“Give me your hands.”

I give her my paws. I didn’t realize it until my hands were in hers, but she is nut brown. I’m pasty white.

“You’ve got an old boxer’s break and heavy scar tissue on
your knuckles. That doesn’t mean you were a fighter, though. And you’ve already told me a lie once.”

I duck my head.

“Someday,” I say, “I’ll tell you.”

She nods and rubs her face.

“You don’t talk like a trucker.”

“I went to college for a while. Okay, junior college. I listen to a lot of audiobooks.” When she stays quiet, I feel compelled to go on. “Truckers aren’t idiots.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“No, it’s okay. I guess there are a lot of idiot truckers, come to think of it. But most of us are just folk trying to get by, to survive.”

She looks at me a long while with those big liquid blue eyes, and maybe something in her softens. She nods.

I take another swig, then stretch. I’m tired but wonder how we’re going to sleep.

There’s no way to stretch out unless we do it side by side, and suddenly, I’m so weary, I’m not even worried about asking permission.

I twist, smooth out the towels, and lie down, my leg pressing against hers, but my head at the other end of the narrow room.

It takes her a moment to force herself to get comfortable.

I’m asleep before I know it.

In the morning,
I’m sore and stiff. I wake almost not knowing where I am—almost. My neck feels like the skin of a
Thanksgiving turkey, golden brown and oozing fluid. Nuclear explosions are not my favorite.

Gray light filters through the window. Lifting the untaped flap, we look out onto a snowy morning. It’s June.

“Ash,” she says in a dead voice. “The easterly wind must’ve crapped out on us. This is not good.”

“Look, tracks.” Two lines of footsteps in the ash lawn wander off around the corner of the house. The tracks are long and messy. They look like the tracks of dead people. Someone—a couple of someones—shambling.

Lucy stands and shakes blood into her legs. She touches her toes. She looks older today than she did yesterday, but I imagine I do too. She hands me a shirt. I put my pants on under the towel. She’s already dressed in clothes she took from the other house.

“I want to check out the house now that we have light.”

I nod. “What about the ash?”

“It’s highly radioactive, and we don’t want to breathe it or get it on our skin.”

We slowly untape the door, and I heft my hammer. Lucy has kept track of the pistol, so we creep out of the bathroom and down the hall, opening doors slowly.

Bedrooms on the left and right. We inch down the stairs, pausing to listen. I’m in front with the hammer raised. I glance back at Lucy and she’s got both hands on the gun, one hand cradling the other, weapon pointed at the ceiling. A shooter’s grip.

“You look like a cop,” I whisper.

“Shhh.”

Something thumps and then slides.

Running in the dark from the other house, we never even looked around enough to know if another door was open.

At the bottom of the stairs, I inch around the end of the cheap-looking bannister and turn the corner into what I believe is the main hall. Kitchen to my left, unknown rooms to my right. Front door in a line before me.

The front door is open.

Brown stains are on the floor, leading toward the room to my right. Directly under the upstairs bathroom we slept in.

I peek at Lucy. She nods at me to go ahead. She takes a hand off the pistol, points at it and mouths “too loud,” and then points at my hammer.

I’m not real happy about what she’s saying; my knees are knocking and watery. But she squints at me and I’ll be goddamned if I’m going to have her think me a coward. Even though I am.

I turn the corner. The room is a dining room and lounge with a TV set and couch.

There’s two of them. One stands in the corner looking at the ceiling—where we’d been sleeping—and the other sprawls out on the floor. It’s shaking a little and missing a leg at the knee. The standing zombie is a scrawny young man in his twenties with baggy britches and dagger tattoos on his arms that probably look uglier on bluish-gray flesh than they did on live skin. But they’re really shitty. He should’ve gotten his money back.

He turns, senses me, and immediately lurches forward, arms reaching out.

Like Granny, he is pretty spry. Untracking eyes. Horrible
breath, like rotten pork. I swipe him with the hammer, and he lets out a gargling yelp that sounds way, way too loud in the purposeful quiet of the house. I’m fending with my left hand, stupidly, and the shambler grabs my wrist and brings my hand toward his mouth. I wonder if his teeth were this nasty before he died or if they’ve become black zombie-teeth overnight. I’m betting, in life, he didn’t brush.

Down South, we say “buck wild.” I go there, to Buckwildsville, with the hammer, beating the shambler’s head back and away from my hand. It doesn’t let go, which is bizarre. Normal folks, you give them a good whack, and they’re out cold or at least dropping everything. Not that I’ve ever actually given anyone a whack with a hammer. Scrappy-Doo here is my first. This guy hangs on with determination. He’s giving it 110 percent.

I rear back and put everything into the swing. The hammer-head pops the shambler directly on his crown and I feel this satisfying crunch, like a gigantic soft-boiled egg being cracked with a spoon, and the dead guy’s head takes on a new, flatter and looser shape, like a flesh-bag of broken glass. He falls on top of the floor creeper, who’d been crawling toward me. Missing a leg, the crawler looks like a giant, human-shaped charcoal briquette. If Egghead hadn’t dropped when he did, he’d probably be chewing on my calf right now.

I crack the crawler’s head too, and he stops moving. I rise up and Lucy is staring at me with big eyes, her pistol pointing at the zombie on the floor.

“God, I came so close to shooting that one.” She looks at the charred dead guy on the floor. Doubly dead.

“Thank God you didn’t. They’d probably be swarming us.” I smile at her. “Lemme go shut the front door.”

No one is on the lawn when I shut and lock the front door. There’s a small spill of ash on the stoop and a bit inside the house. Silly, but I hold my breath and try to avoid it.