Authors: Craig Dilouie
“Where are we going?”
“I’m taking you home, baby.”
He wonders if he is hallucinating. He feels like he could sleep for days. Just a few hours ago, he was standing on the bridge in the sunlight, screaming for his friends, as it exploded in a blinding white flash. The monster charged, a giant thing covered in flailing trunks, each bellowing its deafening foghorn call. He and Ray stood their ground among the piles of dead, emptying their guns at the thing until it fell through the bottom of the world.
“What’s wrong, baby?”
Then he is back at Camp Defiance, walking among the shanties with this beautiful creature he thought he’d never see again.
She asks him again if there is something wrong.
“I don’t know,” he says.
“You’re not hurt, are you?”
“I don’t think so.”
“I had to ask. You may not know this, but you’re, like, covered in blood.”
“Oh,” he says, touching his chest. His shirt feels stiff as cardboard. His entire body hurts, but he does not believe anything is broken. “I didn’t know.”
“You also smell like smoke and sour milk,” she laughs. “Come on.”
Erin leads him into the small shack and lights two candles, revealing a bucket of water and a stack of towels on a blanket.
“Take off your clothes,” she says.
“I don’t have anything,” he tells her. “You took it all already.”
“Do as I say, mister.”
He obeys, peeling off his grimy shirt and tossing it into the corner. Then his boots and socks and pants. None of it is salvageable. He is going to have to burn all of it, and find more. Last, he tosses his gun belt and pistol on top of the pile.
“Now lie down.”
He stretches out his long, gangly body on the blanket. Erin dips a sponge into the foamy bucket, wrings it out, and gently rubs him down. Pure bliss.
“Why did you come back?” he asks her. “You really hurt me.”
Todd arrived at the camp with a bag full of DC-powered electronic gear, hoping to use it as capital to set up a trading business. Erin marked him, seduced him and robbed him. Reeling from the blow, he sought out Sarge and Wendy and signed up for the mission to destroy the bridge.
“I’m sorry for what I did to you,” she says, blinking tears. “I didn’t know. What you did, going to that bridge. . . You’re an amazing boy. I really hoped you would make it back.”
“My friends are dead,” he says.
“Tell me about it.” She pulls her shirt up and over her head. “Tell me everything.”
♦
The Infected shriek down at him, kicking and clawing with faces twisted by rage. The shotgun roars and their bodies explode in a shower of blood and smoking entrails.
The deep voice booms: “Don’t you touch that boy!”
He opens his eyes. Paul, the old reverend, stands over him, chambering another round and firing again. The Infected squeal and crumple in a wave in front of the blast.
“
Don’t you touch that boy, I said!”
BOOM. Reload. BOOM. Bodies splash in piles onto the bloody roadway.
The boy looks up at the Reverend through a blur of hot tears. The man’s grizzled face looms large, frowning. He grips the boy’s hand in his own, his eyes burning with worry and love.
“
You’re all right now, son. I’ll get you out of here.”
A rumbling sound fills the air, the monster purring deep in its throat. The boy can feel it deep in his chest. The Reverend gasps, his eyes wide with sudden knowledge.
“
You all right, Rev?”
The Reverend smiles sadly.
“
God bless you, Kid—”
Paul lurches thirty feet into the air and into the chomping mouth.
Todd screams.
“I’ve got you, baby,” the girl says, hugging him from behind.
Todd sits naked on the floor of his shack, arms wrapped around his knees, screaming.
“It was just a dream,” Erin tells him. “Just a dream. You’re okay. See? Everything is fine.”
He stops, panting for breath. Tears and snot stream down his face. His skin is slick with sweat and Erin’s body feels like fire against his back. Sunlight streams through cracks in the walls, illuminating the dust. The small shack feels like an oven.
“What was your dream about?” she asks him.
“I was being saved,” he says hoarsely, barely recognizing his voice as his own. He wipes his face with the back of his hand.
“That sounds like a good dream.”
His face twitches. He notes the symptom.
“Not for the guy who saved me.”
Todd tries to stand and sits back down with a grimace. Every muscle in his body is stiff and sore. His lungs seize from the smoke he inhaled during the fighting on the bridge, and he coughs loud and hard into his fist, just trying to breathe. His throat feels like it has been burned raw from smoke and screaming.
“I’m glad I’m not alone,” he rasps, pulling on his glasses. The left lens is cracked.
“Oh baby, I’m right here,” Erin tells him, squeezing hard.
He did not mean her, but says nothing.
“I have to go see Anne.”
“Who’s that?”
“One of my friends who made it.”
Erin kisses the back of his neck. “Let’s stay in bed all day.”
“No, I have to go.”
“Come on, baby.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Then I’ll come with you.”
“Erin, please.”
She pushes away from him and pulls on her jeans. “Fuck it. I thought you liked me.”
“I do like you,” he says, watching her nudity disappear with longing.
If he had more energy, he would try to please her in some way, but he has none to spare. He stands, pulls on a clean pair of boxers, and buckles the gun belt around his waist.
“You’re going out like that?”
He drapes the blanket over his shoulders. “My clothes are contaminated with Infected blood. They shouldn’t even be in the camp. Put the ribbon on for me, okay?”
“I’ll wait for you,” she says, pinning it over his chest. “I’ll get us some lunch, okay?”
Todd smiles.
God, she’s beautiful
. “That sounds perfect, Erin.”
He steps outside and enters the mundane chaos of FEMAville. The air is so humid it is difficult to breathe. The smell of wood smoke sets off another coughing jag. Water glistens on the ground, evaporating in the sunlight. Hard rain came last night; he fell asleep to the sound of it drumming on the roof. His bare feet sink into soft, warm mud.
First stop, latrine, then the showers.
Paul flew through the air into the gaping mouth of the monster.
Todd gasps, his heart racing. The dream, so vivid.
He cannot figure one thing out. Why was Paul smiling?
“Coffee?” says a voice.
Todd is aware of everything. Dogs bark and military vehicles groan on the other side of the camp. A few boys play horseshoes, wagering cigarettes on the outcome, while a woman shouts at her children to be careful running. Someone chops firewood while someone else practices the harmonica. Two grinning men carry a large painting that Todd recognizes from the Andy Warhol Museum.
“You want some coffee, buddy?”
Todd focuses on the bearded man sitting on a plastic cooler, brewing a pot of coffee on a Coleman stove. His wife kneels on a tarp, filling plastic bottles from a rain collector.
“Sure, thanks.”
The man glances at his wife, who nods. “Want some sugar in it?”
“That’d be great.”
Todd accepts the mug of coffee and blows on it, savoring its aroma.
“You look like you’re going somewhere,” the man tells him. “You can bring the mug back later, all right?”
“Thank you,” he says again. The sweetened coffee is an incredible gift and this act of basic human kindness brings him close to tears.
The bearded man nods to Todd’s ribbon. “No need to thank me.”
“God bless you, boy,” the man’s wife says.
God bless you, Kid—
Todd takes a deep breath, gritting his teeth. His heart gallops in his chest. Is this what PTSD—post-traumatic stress disorder—is like? The older survivors of the epidemic always talked about its symptoms, but he was never able to relate.
Lying in the jaws of the beast, Paul stared into Todd’s eyes and smiled sadly.
Even in death, he smiled. Why?
Clouds drift in front of the sun, turning the world gray.
♦
At the market, the traders give him new clothes and boots, rainproof poncho, handful of bullets, toothbrush, two packs of sugarless gum, three condoms and a plastic baggie filled with coffee.
So this is what it’s like to be popular.
Clean and clothed and eating cold spaghetti and meatballs from a can with a plastic fork, he starts to feel whole again. He always wanted to be popular. It’s a strange feeling.
I wonder how fast it wears off.
He remembers something Erin told him last night:
We can make a life here.
The hero fights the monster and gets the girl and the treasure. Perfect story, right? He wonders if Prince Charming also screams in the dark during the happily ever after, dreaming about his fight with the Dragon.
His eyes wide with sudden knowledge—
Paul knew he was going to die. The monster’s long, revolting tongue, studded with slimy suckers, had already gripped the Reverend’s ankle.
And yet he smiled. In the air too. In the mouth of the beast.
Paul: the man who loved God but feared death. Who loved his enemies as he killed them. Who tried to reconcile the forgiving, loving God of the New Testament with the apparent return of the judgmental, violent God of the Old. Who could not live without his wife even though Sara would have wanted more than anything for him to go on living.
A fellow traveler of the thin line of survival, that limbo between living and dying. Torn between forces larger than himself, he gave himself to others, ultimately giving his life, and in doing so, welcomed death. With his wife now at last, either in heaven or oblivion; it did not matter which to him. Was this the peace the Reverend found? Could this be why he smiled? He had given up worrying whether he would ever see her again. All that mattered was they were together one way or the other. In the end, Paul welcomed his death.
Todd wonders if he will ever love anyone as strongly as that. He wonders if he could ever love Erin so much. Before the bridge, he would have said he already did. After the bridge, he does not know. He doesn’t know much of anything. All he can think about is the road.
He limps past dozens of shacks, each leaning on the next for support in the endless shantytown. People sit on lawn chairs watching over their children, cook, tend gardens, stack wood, stoke fires, hang laundry, gossip, trade. They fall silent as he passes. Chickens cluck in a series of pens, filling the air with the acrid smell of shit. Several men swear over a tractor coupled to a water tanker, both of which are stuck in the mud. A teenager pushes a wheelbarrow filled with plastic jugs, surrounded by smaller children splashing through puddles acting out the fight at the bridge, holding back the Infected onslaught while the engineers lay their charges.
“On me!” one of the kids cries. “Come on, we’ll make our stand here!”
Todd smiles at them, idly swatting a mosquito on his neck.
“Are you one of those people from the bridge?”
He turns and sees the teenager pushing the wheelbarrow, staring at him with something like awe. The kid is only younger than Todd by two years at most, filthy and dressed in rags. One of the many orphans of Infection.
“No,” Todd says. “You are.”
He unpins the ribbon, gives it to the surprised boy while the smaller children howl in disbelief, and walks into the compound adjacent to the gate, a hive of constant activity: salvage coming in, waste going out. A five-ton driven by men in bright yellow hazmat suits rolls through the gate, carrying corpses stacked in shiny black body bags. A squad of tired National Guard in olive green rainproof ponchos watches the truck leave, smoking and yawning and rubbing their eyes. Workers unload salvaged goods from a white pickup scarred with hundreds of tiny scratches made by fingernails and jewelry. Men fill out paperwork and hand over receipts. A large American flag hangs wetly from an overhead wire. This land is still the USA.
He finds the bus parked between a Brinks armored car and a pickup truck with a cobwebbed windshield. Dressed in greasy gray coveralls, Anne bends over the engine, talking to a mechanic. Another man paints camouflage colors over the bright yellow skin. A woman scrubs the V-shaped snowplow mounted on the grill, a retrofit enabling the bus to slam into human beings and toss them broken into the nearest ditch. Todd notes the metal plates welded over the windows, creating slits useful as firing ports.