Waiting to Die (Book 2): Wasting Away Page 10

  “Healing takes time,” I told her. “You just have to hold on and wait. You have to let the pain sink in before it can numb.”

  “I know,” she replied.

  “They can’t keep walking around forever.”

  “But it’s been so long, don’t bodies rot away sooner than that?”

  “They’re supposed to,” I admitted. “I can’t imagine them going on forever. Everything eventually comes to an end.”

  “I hope so,” she said. “I don’t know how much longer I can stand it. I mean, what happens when we run out of food?”

  “Then we move on,” I told her.

  “And what happens when all of the food expires?” she asked. “It’s not like we can start a farm.”

  “I suppose not, but I don’t like to think that far into the future.”

  “It doesn’t seem like there will be a future,” she shook her head.

  “Like I said, they can’t keep on forever. We just have to wait them out.”

  She looked satisfied with my argument. “I hope you’re right,” she said, leaning back on the couch.

  I hope I am too, I thought.

  Being confined together took its toll. Even the freedom to wander from apartment to apartment eventually wore down on us. The building was nothing more than an oversized prison cell.

  Occasionally, we would spend hours away from each other, taking up residence in other apartments just to get some alone time. Sometimes being by your self is the best medicine. It allowed me time to consider my next move, of whether we should pack up and look for new surroundings, or wait until we ran so low on food that we wouldn’t have any other choice.

  The mission to find my wife had been put on hold. With someone to care for, someone to find common ground with, priorities change. As much as my wife’s memory nagged at me, I had new responsibilities, responsibilities that weighed on living right here and now.

  Sometimes, Constance would come looking for me and we would play cards to pass the time. It was a small reprieve from the constant boredom, but it gave us something to look forward to.

  Constance spoke of her sister often and her feelings about leaving her behind.

  “A piece of me died that day. I should have made her go first,” she said.

  “There was nothing else you could do,” I replied. “Your instincts took over and you were forced to react.”

  “I knew better.” Her lips quivered. “I knew that she wasn’t fast enough, I knew that and I still went first.”

  “You can’t blame yourself, it wasn’t your fault.”

  “The hell it wasn’t,” she cried. “I should have protected her.”

  I tried to comfort her, but she pushed me away. Truthfully, I couldn’t even cope with my own past, let alone someone else’s. I had no idea how to fix Constance’s issues. I was desperate and I kissed her.

  Her lips were soft and comforting. I lost myself in them, allowed them to filter away my own misgivings.

  She pushed me away again, but harder this time. “Don’t,” she said.

  “But, I…”

  “Just don’t,” she repeated. She stood from the couch and ran. She slammed the door to the bedroom and started to cry.

  “Constance,” I pleaded, but she didn’t answer.

  She became withdrawn after that and kept to herself. Eventually, she didn’t even search me out for cards or conversation. It weighed on me. I wanted to tell her that I was sorry, that I shouldn’t have kissed her, that I shouldn’t have taken advantage of the moment.

  “I don’t think you were taking advantage of her,” Mary said. “I think you just needed someone. I believe that when you come to the end of your rope, love is the only thing that seems to help.”

  “It still bothers me though,” I replied. “I should have just tried to keep talking to her. I should have listened more and reacted less.”

  “I think you’re wrong about that,” she said. “Sometimes life demands reaction. It’s all about cause and effect. When we’re hungry, we eat. When we’re tired, we sleep.”

  “Instincts are nothing but trouble,” I replied. “They put us into bad situations.”

  “Your instincts have kept you alive,” she said.

  I let out a small laugh. “You’re right,” I admitted. “But they’ve also caused me pain.”

  “You can’t live without a little pain,” she explained. “Happiness and pain are the flipside of the same coin. We live. We endure. We suffer for our choices. Hopefully, when it’s all said and done, we become better people because of it.”

  I felt more alone than I had ever been by myself. To have another person so close without communicating with them is more intense than torture. I waited for her and hoped that she would come around, that one day, she would deal with her feelings and give me another chance, but that day never came.

  Another day fell to the darkening sky.

  I watched the sun drift off behind rolling clouds and past the horizon, falling slowly into oblivion.

  Huddled up into the couch with a blanket, I tried to make sense of the situation. It had been days since Constance had spoken to me. Her silence was tearing me up from the inside, making me regret what I had done.

  I must have laid there for hours trying to drift off to sleep. The dead moaned out a chorus of despair and contempt like far away animals humming out calls to their prey. It was as if they were calling to me alone, boding me out into their world to relieve me from my worry.

  With all I was worth, I tried to think of something else to get my mind off of Constance. I thought of my wife and tried to concentrate on the good times, but the images of her lying there, being devoured as she screamed out for me to help crept up in my mind. Thoughts of her were my burden. They ripped at me from the inside and refused to give me peace.

  When I eventually fell asleep, the images kept playing out over and over, reminding me of what a coward I had been for running. I may not have been able to save her, but I could have at least killed the thing that took her from me, I could have made sure that she didn’t rise. I could have at least made the attempt.

  I had a nightmare. The memory of it was vague, but I saw my wife there on the ground, splatters of blood across her sundress. She looked up to me and asked why. She kept asking me why.

  Her stomach was thrown open, bits of skin and intestine littered the grass, but her face was the same. Her eyes were exactly the same way they were the last time I saw her. They were pleading.

  I awoke and sat up on the couch, covered in sweat.

  There came the sound of breaking glass. I jumped to my feet and ran to the bedroom. The window was broken out and a chair lay upon the floor, one of its legs broken off to the side.

  I gritted my teeth as I peered out to the ground, but she wasn’t there. Across the starlit street, I saw her flee. She weaved between the dead and she was gone into the night. I tried to yell after her, but my voice would not come.

  “She left you?!” Mary asked, her voice laden in shock. “Why on earth would she do that?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied. “It’s a question I’ve been turning over in my head ever since. I thought it was because I kissed her, but I just don’t know.”

  “Take it from me,” she said, “unless her head was severely screwed up, she wouldn’t leave you just because of that. It takes quite a bit for someone to put their life on the line and jump from a second story window.”

  “Like I said, I just don’t know. Anyone who has made it this far has had to deal with more than their fair share of misery and regret. None of us are free from loss or pain.”

  “Are you sure she wasn’t trying to kill herself?”

  I let out a sigh and replied, “The thought never occurred to me, but I suppose it’s possible.”

  “Maybe she wanted to die because of the guilt she felt. Maybe she wanted to end it all because that’s all she could see – pain, misery, guilt: they all end in depression.”

  “It hurts to think that
I didn’t mean enough to her to get her to stay. It’s painful to think that she would have rather ended her life than to be stuck with me.”

  “If that was the case and she was trying to kill herself, I’m sure you were the last thing on her mind. People who commit suicide have tunnel vision. They only see in a straight line. They see what began their depression and they see death as a remedy.”

  “Whatever it was, Constance didn’t die. She fled. She left me there alone.”

  “And that’s exactly what suicide is,” Mary replied. “It’s the most selfish act someone can commit to.”

  “You really believe she was trying to kill herself?”

  “I can’t think of any other reason a person would jump out a window. If she wanted to leave, she could have just walked out the door.”

  I let out another sigh and continued my story.

  The dead were already homing in on her, trying to follow, but she was too fast for them. She was an arching beam of life in the moaning blackness.

  I turned away and looked toward the bed. A note was placed on top of the covers written on flower print stationary.

  The paper was still crisp and I held it in my hand, unwilling to open it. My name was on the front flap. I didn’t want to know why. I was afraid to read the words. I was as much a coward as I have always been. I took the folded note and placed it into my pocket.

  In the beginning, I had seen people throw themselves from windows. I had seen children eaten by undead parents. I had watched the weak commit suicide in hope of not returning to life as a wretched, walking abomination.

  As I’ve wandered from town to town and past cities burning from disrepair, I have seen every type of way a person could take their own life. It was never easy, but it was too commonplace to not recognize it as part of the new world. Some strove to continue on no matter the consequences and others choose to go out by their own hand, in their own way. But to have someone you care about leave of their own accord, to go to that extent to get away from you, it was so much more than I deserved.

  Honestly, I don’t know why I continued to fight, why I persisted to struggle in a world that was too dead to sustain me. At times, I thought that I enjoyed the pain; that it kept me moving forward, always searching for a hope that just wasn’t there.

  I sat on the couch and stared at the old radio for hours. I thought of the girl and played with the folded note she left me. I could imagine her standing there at the window crying, struggling with her own memories, desperate for answers and looking for a way out.

  Looking for answers, I scoured my mind, but nothing made a connection. She was gone and I was painfully alone. Nothing else seemed to matter.

  I thought about death and how sweet its release would have been. But more than anything else, I wondered what the point of continuing was. It all seemed so futile, so pointless and discouraging.

  The sun was bright through the window before I finally ate something. I took a can from the duffle bag and placed it on the kitchen counter. I picked at the label and scratched away at the logo on the front of the can. There was a knocking at my heart and I considered starving. I played with the idea, empathetic of all those who had starved to death before me. It made the pain in my stomach all that much more unbearable.

  With the can opener, I eventually removed the top and drank down the cold soup. I was even too much a coward to die slowly. And I was a fool for thinking otherwise.

  I drifted in and out of sleep for days, letting the filth gather on my skin, letting sores fester there so I could feel something. I ate when I could no longer take the hunger and pissed out of the open window when the urge arose.

  “She meant that much to you?” Mary asked.

  “It wasn’t that she meant anything, it was the realization that she couldn’t bear to be around me. I felt lost. No matter how much I thought about it, I couldn’t figure out why she had decided to face the dead rather than be with me.”

  “She was young and vulnerable.” She looked at me, her brow rose slightly with compassion. “You can imagine what it was like to lose your family, but can you imagine what it would have been like to lose them at such a young age? When you’re young, you’re already dealing with so many confusing emotions. So much of life is a mystery. To have everything ripped away on top of that by dead hands. It was just too much for her.”

  “Yeah, I thought of that too,” I said. “And it made that single kiss a bitter taste on my lips.”

  Resentment quaked inside of me for the girl leaving, resentment for the knowledge that I wasn’t good enough to stay with, resentment for having kissed her. There was pain and despair that went deeper than anything I had felt in a very long time.

  I hated the way that it ate at me, that knotted feeling in the pit of my stomach, trying to purge itself from me up along my throat and out of my mouth. I wanted to retch. I longed for its sting, for its putrid taste to become free of me, to stream from my guts and out into the gruesome world beyond.

  “So it was about you,” she said.

  “Yes,” I replied. “It was a selfish thing, the misery I went through. I was so tired of being alone.”

  One day, I arose. I stood up and brushed myself off. With the clothes I had found in the other apartment, I dressed myself and packed as much food as I could carry in my pack. I filled the water-skin that was concealed in the back of the bag and laced the straw down from the strap and placed the cap over it. I threw my jacket over my shoulders.

  In the bathroom mirror, I looked myself over. I stared at the bearded man in the reflection and couldn’t recognize him any longer. This man was sickly and thin, a waif of a man, really. He was as profound as he was unfamiliar. Somehow, I was encouraged by the image. It was like I was someone new, someone without a history to bind him.

  I shook off the gnawing feelings of loss that I had endured and made my way back outside. I threw away my other self and I spat on its shadow.

  My legs were stiff from being stagnant for so long, and I worried about the dead being able to catch up with me. But the ground felt good beneath my feet and I was inclined to start anew, to get as far away from the loss as I could. I simply wanted nothing more than to get away.

  I walked away the despair in my soul, trekked through the anguish, and rose beyond the confines of my regret, always heading for home. My wife was still there, shrouded in anguish, and I was bound to set her free.

  Every footfall helped me forget and allowed me to forge farther into the wastes. This is what you do best, I thought, you run away.

  And once I was far enough away from the city, far out along the highway, heading home, I was able to look around and completely forget myself.

  From a dirt road out in the middle of nowhere, miles from the onslaught of ruin and decay, I was able to have a brief moment of peace. As fleeting as it was, it was comforting to consider that there was nothing left but my beating heart and sweaty brow. I was all there was at that moment, just me and my reprieve.

  “In some strange way, Constance encouraged my youth. But as time went on, stuck in there together, I realized it wasn’t my youth that I was after. I wanted peace. I wanted to reclaim my life. Her acceptance meant so much to me because that’s what we’re all hardwired to believe. We want to fit in with someone else so bad that we tend to forget who we truly are.

  Children are taught to be themselves, to stand out and shine, to be that special individual. What really bothers me is that no matter how hard we try, we can never be truly unique. We are burdened by our environment, our past, our memories, our own images of what is acceptable and what isn’t acceptable.

  From the time we come out from the womb, we are cursed to become whatever it is that our environment dictates. We are cursed to become another copy of what our parents were, just slightly changed with new blemishes and fresh scars.”

  Mary moved in the chair, her gaze directed toward the plates that we had used, covered in a thin layer of dry sauce. She stood and took them to the kitchen
. After some time, she returned. She stood by the doorway and looked at a few pictures that hung on the wall.

  “We can never be anything but what we are. We learn from our mistakes and move on,” she said. “I do agree with you that we are cursed. We’re cursed to repeat the same things over and over again because we don’t know any different. But sometimes, we learn and try something new and it happens to work out. Sometimes we evolve out of the vicious circle and do something so entirely different than the rest of the flock that we become individual. And eventually, if the idea is good enough, others follow suit and then that original idea becomes the norm. To me, that’s progress.”

  “Once we become individual, and others follow our turn, that special thing becomes the norm and we are cursed again. The circle starts over,” I said.

  “What, exactly are you looking for?” she asked.

  I shook my head. “I don’t know. I’m just looking for something better.”

  “There is nothing better,” she replied. “This is it. What you see outside, what we have become, that’s all there is.”

  “I just want to find a way to make it better than it was.”

  “And you’ll search for the rest of your life to find that one thing. But where does it all lead to?”

  “A better way of life,” I replied.

  “Even if every one of those things suddenly fell over right now, and we were given all the time in the world, we would eventually come right back to where we started. You have to understand that change starts inside of yourself. No matter how much others try to tread the old path, it is up to you to make change happen. But I’ll be honest, no matter how hard you try, there will always be conflict, there will always be that person out there who refuses to adapt. Unless you intend to become the next Hitler or Stalin, you’re as cursed as the rest of us to repeat the process.”