Waiting to Die (Book 2): Wasting Away Page 11

  “I’m not saying I’m right, this is just how I feel.”

  “Feelings are lies,” she said. “Describe to me what love is and there will be countless others to disagree. It’s all a part of that circle you spoke of. We’re damned unless we suddenly become completely logical about every little thing. I don’t know about you, but I wouldn’t want to live in a world governed by logic. It would be too cold to endure.

  That’s why we need religion and faith and family and emotion. Without all of those things, life is cold and brittle. Even if all of that came to pass, there would be someone at some point who would answer that logic with a feeling, no matter how hard you tried to beat it out of them. We’re only human and that is our nature.”

  “Those are the thoughts I had after Constance left and I was on my own again. It wasn’t that she was special, it was simply that she was there,” I said.

  “Is that what I am, just someone to pass the time with?”

  “No, Mary. You’re more than that,” I replied. “You’re the first person I’ve really talked to about any of this. You’re the first person to listen. For some strange reason, I trust you.”

  She smiled and sat down, adjusting the pillows behind her back. “I appreciate this,” she said. “I really do. I’ve been stuck here for so long that I have forgotten what it was like to be with another person. In a way, you’re helping me too. What you’re saying just reconfirms everything I’ve always believed in. When it all comes down to it, life is about love and being loved. Isn’t that what we really want? Isn’t that the root behind everything we do? Fancy cars, fat bank accounts, success in life; it all comes down to wanting love, wanting to be accepted for who we are.”

  “You’re absolutely right,” I agreed. “But I needed to find that out on my own. I think that’s why I stopped running.”

  Chapter 13

  Near collapse, I spotted a gas station, a small mini-mart on the side of the freeway. It was the type of place travelers stop to get a quick bite, maybe a comb and some toothpaste or a map to figure out if they’re going in the right direction. The front doors were locked and a closed sign hung next to the entrance.

  I wasn’t sure how far I’d gone. I had walked the whole night, so it was possible that I had gone about ten miles, but I wasn’t sure. As tired as I was, it wasn’t the need for sleep that kept me going, it was starvation. I hadn’t eaten in a few days, and only drank a little water from my pack. It was self inflicted. I could have found a place to rest along the way to eat what I had scavenged back at the apartments. But the suffering made me keep moving. I was driven to get home.

  Seeing that tiny little gas station out in the middle of nowhere, I thought of Constance again. I thought about how she had escaped the same sort of place and lost everything in the process.

  With a new found purpose, I walked around the building and found a ladder access to the roof next to a dumpster. With all the walking, I hadn’t noticed, but my feet were bleeding in my shoes. I had walked so much that blisters had formed on my feet. As the realization set in, I began to feel the pain. Along with all the other pain in my body, I must have blocked it out.

  There were only a few of them around. They are always somewhere, just a little ways in the distance. I kept quiet as I scaled the dumpster and leaned out along the building, inching my hands along the block, reaching for the first wrung of the ladder. My fingers slipped around the bar and I swung my body out. Hand over hand I climbed, ignoring the pain in my arms.

  It wasn’t long before I was at the roof, staring down at the access panel. Of course, it was locked. They always are. I snapped the top of the main vent and glared down at shining, galvanized steel. A few feet down at an elbow, the vent made a sharp turn, extending farther into the building.

  I slid down, face first to make the first bend.

  I saw the first vent ahead only a few feet, and scaled over it. Once I was on the far side, I kicked it in and lowered myself through the gap. I was in an office. A single chair rolled half way out from behind a cheap desk. Filing cabinets lined one of the walls. There was a framed poster on the wall that said something about teamwork and reaching your goals. It made me laugh. I had seen the same poster when I was starting out as a box-boy at a grocery store. They could have plastered the same poster across the four corners of the world and it wouldn’t have made any difference to a low paying, dead end job. I actually wondered if anyone had ever been inspired by such a thing.

  I left the manager’s office and looked out into the store. In the back, long shelves lined the wall, stocked with liquor and drink mixes. The refrigerator cases were packed with beer, soda and water. What was funny was the first thing I went for was the case above the cash register. I looked through the boxes until I found my brand and snagged a pack of cigarettes. I packed the box on the palm of my hand a couple of times and then thought better of it as I checked through the front windows to see if the dead had noticed the sound. They were still shambling along as usual. I opened the box and took a disposable lighter from a display on the counter.

  That first drag, it was as if it had been waiting for me all along. It was so sweet that I checked the box to make sure it was real. I hadn’t smoked in eight years. I gave it up when my wife and I decided we wanted to try to have a baby. I stared at the cigarette as I thought about it. Suddenly, lung cancer didn’t seem so bad.

  I opened a tin after I had finished my smoke and ate the tuna with my fingers. When I was a kid, I remembered going camping with a few of my friends from school. We caught fish at the nearby lake and cooked them over an open fire. The taste was unlike anything I’d ever had. Maybe it was the work involved, catching the fish. Maybe it was the open fire. All I know is that it was exactly like the tuna I scrounged. It was possibly the greatest meal I’ve ever had. I washed it down with a warm Coke and leaned against the inside of the counter and had another cigarette. This one wasn’t as sweet as the first, but it still tasted pretty damn good.

  It was the first time since the dead had awakened that I was able to really look at things, take in the mess that life had become. I cleaned my feet with peroxide and applied some Neosporin and wrapped them in strips of bandages. Once they were clean, they hurt even more. It was like I had washed away whatever it was that was keeping the pain at bay. I sat down on the floor, my legs outstretched before me, and I thought about what I was going to do.

  In so many ways, all of our wishes had been granted, at least for those who had made it through. No more taxes, no car payments or rent. Many of life’s stresses had vanished, but at what cost? It begged the question: what the hell was it all for in the first place?

  There in that gas station, I felt safe. The dead were sparse. I only saw them once in a while when they shambled past the window. I kept to the back of the building where it was too dark for them to see me and only came out for food or smokes. It wasn’t perfect, but it was a hell of a lot better than being out there.

  “So you locked yourself in again,” she said.

  “Yes.” I nodded. “Yes I did.”

  “At least you know what kind of fear it is that keeps me here.”

  “The kind of fear that says everything about them is wrong,” I replied. “It’s the kind of fear that makes you think they’re supernatural, beyond our scope of reason.”

  She nodded in agreement.

  “They’re not beyond death,” I said. “They’re not bereft of true death. They’re just waiting for us to help them along.”

  “Those are brave words,” she replied.

  “Well, there isn’t much left other than bravery and stupidity.”

  “So you’re saying it’s like the old west.” She gazed up at the ceiling and thought for a moment. “You eat, sleep, and run from the wild.”

  “Yeah, in a way, it’s true, but not everything is constant. Sometimes eating and sleeping become negotiable.”

  Mary edged a smile from the corner of her mouth. “So running is an absolute.”

 
; “It’s a type of change, and that’s the only real absolute in life.”

  “Gandhi said the same thing.”

  “Yeah, I stole it from him.”

  She laughed. “I don’t think he would mind.”

  “Probably not,” I said. “But he also went on to say that we have to be the change we want to see in life. Just like what we were talking about earlier.”

  “What did you do to initiate change?”

  “I decided to help people when I encountered them,” I said. “Instead of looking the other way, I wanted to become a catalyst for change.”

  “Is that what you’re trying to do for me?”

  I nodded. “You’re my first.”

  For weeks, everything was the same. I woke up and ate. I smoked cigarettes. One time, I even got drunk. And that’s when it hit me. If anything was going to change, I had to be the spark that lit the fire. If I didn’t do it, who would?

  Progress starts with a single voice.

  I know, it sounds like a lofty idea, but if I began the war, maybe others would follow. Maybe this would end in my lifetime and I could watch the sun set over the horizon, free from fear, free from the wandering dead.

  Don’t get me wrong, I would have stayed there, but I knew the food would eventually run out, and I had my special quest. In time, I would make a mistake (one noise too many) and the dead would find me hiding like a coward.

  I found a knapsack in the manager’s office and started planning my escape. I packed essentials. Some water, a few lighters, some tools from the maintenance room, whatever I thought I would need. I kept the pistol on the counter and flipped through the rounds every so often. It was a type of meditation to me, like counting prayer beads and making atonement for digressions. That’s what kept me focused, thumbing through the rounds every time I felt weak.

  One morning I awoke and shuffled through the store, still half asleep. I gazed through the windows and found that there were only a few bodies out there. I shoved some more food in the pack and tucked the pistol into my waistband. On my way out through the back door, I grabbed a rusty crowbar from inside an unfinished portion of wall, seated in between a couple of studs. It looked like it had been there, waiting for me since back when the building was constructed. I thought of it as my stroke of luck. Some carpenter in the days of old placed it there and forgot about it just so I could find it. I know it sounds crazy, and I’m pretty sure that’s not how it went, but it made me feel like I was destined to insight the change I had been talking about. It felt like somewhere out there, something was guiding me. And with the first swing of the bar, destiny was to be had.

  Little did I know; that first swing would happen so soon.

  I breathed slowly when I saw them. I was trying to calm myself, trying to rationalize that there were only a few. I kept telling myself that I could handle them, that there weren’t very many. It took everything I had not to run back inside and bolt the door.

  The bag landed with a thud next to me. The sound was muffled and dark as my heart beat out a steady rhythm. Everything became quiet, muted through the blood rushing into my ears. I could see the dead, their bodies releasing rot. I could hear them moaning over the thumping of my heart. I held the crowbar at my side, and as one of them lurched forward, I swung upward.

  All the sounds I had missed came rushing in. Deafening howls split through the alley as the hook end of the bar tore through the creature’s jaw. Its head whipped backwards and a clotted mess of stench rushed from the wound. It fell to the ground in a heap and I came down with the bar again, using the rear, blunt end of the hook. It shivered and twitched, and finally was no more.

  Three more came from around the corner into the alley. Weak, stumbling things and they were so close. The fear was still with me and it told me to run. It told me to turn on my heels, to get away from them.

  One of the bodies reached out, a pathetic thing in stained rags. She had been an old woman at the end of her life, and then that life was stolen away. She wasn’t bloody, she didn’t have the same look as the others; that mindless stare, that empty gaze. When I looked at her, she pleaded with me. Under those white eyes there was something left and it asked me to make it all go away.

  It was the first time I shed a tear for the dead. They weren’t the monsters of nightmare; they were the husks of life. They were poor, straining things taken in by this new curiosity. No one deserved that. Not a single one of them.

  I held the bar above my head and waited until she was close enough and I took her down with one swing. I made it count - I made sure there wouldn’t be a struggle.

  “And this is what you want for me?” Mary asked. “You want to take me out there and see these things?” Her stare glazed over and a tear revealed itself out of the corner of her eye.

  “I wouldn’t wish that for anyone,” I said. “She could have been my own grandmother. She could have been that little old lady at the end of the street, feeding cookies to the neighborhood kids. But what I really saw was myself. I saw that life was more fragile than I could have ever imagined. I saw that I could just as easily be on the other side of a weapon destined to cure the death that wouldn’t stop.”

  “How many of them have you had to kill?”

  “I don’t know,” I replied.

  “That many?” she asked.

  “More than I dare to count.”

  She wiped her eyes and glanced out the window again. “When I first saw this happening, I didn’t want to believe it. I chose to turn my eyes away. I would rather have died than to look at those things. Everything about them is blasphemous. Not in a religious way, but in a way that goes against nature, itself.”

  “Is that why you’ve stayed hidden for so long?” I asked.

  “In part,” she said. “In another way, it was the fear that I could be like them one day, wandering the world in a lifeless haze. Do you think there’s anything left of what they were?”

  “I don’t know, but I’ve never seen any one of them look at me the way that old woman did.”

  “Maybe you’re just not paying attention anymore.”

  “That could be,” I said. “To be honest, I wouldn’t want to see that again. It was like there was a little bit of her left, and that’s much more terrifying than living.”

  “And now you know why I’ve stayed here. I’ve watched them, not when they kill, but when they wander aimlessly. I’ve seen them stare at the sky like they’re full of wonderment. I have watched them touch one another, almost lovingly. It’s not all the time, but I have caught it out of the corner of my eye when I’m looking away. It’s like seeing a ghost.”

  “A few weeks back when this was all fresh, I saw one of them stuck inside of a building. The way it moaned was so sad. It had this rattle in its voice - a lamb crying for its mother. I watched several of them beat at the glass in front of the building until they broke through. The corpse inside wavered and stared at the others, and finally stepped through. Maybe it was just the way I saw it, maybe something inside of me wanted to see it happen that way. Maybe it was just a dream shrouded in my own morality. I don’t know.”

  “Even after you saw that, you can still go out and kill them?” she asked. “Even after what you’ve seen, you can still see yourself on some mission to rid the earth of the terrible monsters?”

  “That’s the problem, Mary,” I said. “Even after all that, they are still killers. They will stop at nothing once they’ve seen you. I could walk right off the side of a cliff and they would follow. I could set myself on fire and they would still try to get at me. There’s nothing that will stop them. Whatever it is that has brought them back also makes them the perfect killers. They will stop at nothing to see me dead, to see you dead. They will kill until there’s nothing left.”

  There are only so many ways to kill, and I have utilized every method. I’ve set them on fire. I’ve shot them. I have beaten their skulls in until there was nothing left but rancid pulp, and it felt nothing like it did when I killed that
little old lady.

  Something in my mind shut down that day, and I’ve never been the same since. I never look them in the eyes anymore. Even as white and glossed over as they are, I’m afraid I’ll see that pleading stare again. I’m afraid they’ll beg for forgiveness at that moment before they sink their teeth into my neck. I’m afraid they’ll look right through me before they draw blood.

  I no longer discriminate. They’re all the same thing to me now. They are the things that took away my wife and unborn child. They are the things that have gorged themselves on friends and family. They are everything that was wrong with the world when they were alive, and I am burning inside to make sure they never do it again.

  I fight them with everything I have, and still, it never seems to be enough. When one falls, there is always another to take its place. But I continue and I move forward a little bit every day. And I hope that eventually I’ll take my last swing. I hope that I’ll be able to look around me and find that they are all gone.

  “They were everything that was wrong with the world when they were alive?” she asked. “What do you mean by that?”

  “Look at what we had,” I said. “We were living in a time where every bit of information was available. For the first time in history, anything could be researched and dissected. But what did we do with it? We downloaded songs and stole television shows, pirated movies and corrupted language in text messages.”

  “But not everyone was that way,” she said.

  “No,” I agreed, “but when the majority does it, it becomes the norm, you said so yourself. We were so preoccupied with our smart phones, our tablets, and our silly gadgets that we forgot about who we really are. It was called the information age, but it really was just misinformation and gossip. We were more concerned with some readymade star than with science or medicine or truth. Sports icons made tens of millions peddling shoes made in sweat shops in China while scientists begged for a few dollars to find cures for diseases that killed hundreds of thousands of people every day. Men with gold chains spewed vulgarities against women and made a fortune while philanthropists fed starving children and went unnoticed. So everything that was wrong with the world before is still happening, but it has been replaced by something much simpler: they now want to kill you and eat you rather than killing you slowly with their readymade bullshit.”