The barn had everything you’d want in a place to die.
Some soft, golden hay, a few chickens down below if you liked your eggs raw, an old hand-operated water pump that sucked cold water from an artesian well deep beneath the soil. It was quiet, except for the chickens, and surrounded on all sides by unkempt but level pastures. Not a living soul in sight.
No unliving souls, either.
The little farmhouse at the end of the dirt road had burned days before. Casey had kicked around in the charred chunks, looking for anything useful like canned vegetables or metal tools, but all he’d found were some coins and a handful of bone fragments. The fragments bore teeth marks.
Leaning against a hay bale in the loft of the barn, he tossed one of the blackened coins in the air.
“Heads or tails,” he said.
“Heads,” Maleah said.
Casey let the coin hit the hard boards of the floor. It rolled until it found a crack, then fell through into the dried manure below.
“Guess it won’t be so easy,” Casey said.
“Did you think it would be?”
Seven days on the road, and they’d developed an uneasy conversational style. Casey, the hardened optimist and Maleah, the determined cynic. They might have made a good comedy team. The Belushi and Akroyd of the apocalypse. The audience would be dying with laughter.
Beyond the pastures, the gentle hills rolled in September splendor. The ocher, purple, and scarlet of the changing leaves were like a rumpled patchwork quilt. If not for the thin threads of smoke on the horizon, then it might have passed for an idyllic autumn day in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
“You never told me where you were headed,” Casey said.
“Is anybody headed anywhere?”
Casey was annoyed by her habit of making a question out of everything. He had as many questions as the next guy. Like, “What the hell happened?” and “Why is God such a heartless bastard?” But did you hear him going on and on about it? No. He played the cards you dealt him. “I mean, before all this. You had a family, right?”
Maleah twisted her wedding ring. She hadn’t mentioned her husband. It was another of those questions that Casey had kept to himself. God was heartless, but adultery was a sin, and the less said about that, the better.
“I was going to Charlotte,” Maleah said. “I thought I’d fly to the Bahamas. But they’d already closed the airport.”
“They’re probably in the Bahamas by now anyway.”
“Probably everywhere.”
“Arctic, maybe. Do people live up above Canada? Maybe if it’s too cold, they can’t move.”
“They’re dead. I doubt they feel the cold.”
Casey stood and walked to the shelf where hand tools, farm supplies, and buckets of screws and nails huddled in dusty piles. The wall was covered with dried-out strips of harness, yellow rope, baling wire, and chains. A couple of shovels, a hoe, and a blunt, rusty axe hung from ten-penny nails. A dented trash can in the corner was half full of dried feed corn. Casey scooped a palm full of kernels and tossed them through a hay chute. Below, chickens squawked and tussled over the grain.
Maybe they would cook a chicken first. Casey had killed chickens as a kid while visiting his grandfather’s farm. Well, he hadn’t actually been the one to bring down the blade, but he was there when the chickens ran around, frantic and flapping, their heads lying with beaks opening and closing, probably asking questions of the god of the chickens.
He could do it. Bring the blade down quick—that’s what Grampy Willers said. You owed it to them to do it clean. “Painless that way,” Grampy insisted, as if he knew the feelings of chickens.
Casey tore a strip of tar paper from the roll beside the shelf. He carried it to the window, which was just a square opening covered with chicken wire. He spread out the strip of tar paper and fished a small can of pork and beans from his pocket. He placed the can on the black paper so the sun would heat it up.
“Pork and beans again?” Maleah said.
Beans made him fart. Maleah said something the first time, as if manners still mattered. And for a while, Casey would walk a little bit away, release his gas, and sidle back over, barely missing a step. Then he decided this was no time to be uptight about farting, so he let them rip whenever he felt like it.
“I thought about cooking up a chicken,” Casey said. “We’d have to make a fire, and they might smell the meat.”
“They smell the meat anyway.”
Maleah, sitting on a bale of hay, pulled an apple from her satchel. She rubbed it against the thigh of her jeans and took a crisp, wet bite. Chomping with her mouth open, she said, “Wonder what—happened—to the—people—in—”
“You know what happened.” Casey was mad now. “It doesn’t matter what people, where, or when. You know what happened.”
She finished chewing before she spoke again. “Have you seen anybody get bit? Up close, I mean?”
Casey didn’t want to remember, but it was one of those things. The soldiers had already broken ranks, at last recognizing a new chain of command. But they still clustered with their guns, suspicious and scared and clinging to the dregs of honor and duty. They were shooting anything that moved, holed up in a restaurant in downtown Asheville, and Casey had nearly taken a bullet when he broke in through the service bay to prowl the kitchen.
While he was explaining himself at gunpoint, a walkie talkie crackled, informing the soldiers that Sector 37 had been overrun. Casey didn’t know anything about sectors. He’d waited until the soldiers evacuated, then cleaned out the refrigerator. Those were the good old days, the immediate aftermath, when the power was out but most things were still close to normal.
If you didn’t count the zombies.
Casey had thought about waiting out whatever needed to be waited out, right there in the restaurant, but when he opened the walk-in cooler to look for bacon, one of the zombies had staggered out, mouth wet with gore. Casey had shoved the door closed and the zombie had hammered on it from the inside, too stupid to push the little handle and get out.
So, technically, he hadn’t seen that mutilated, screaming waitress get bitten, but he’d seen plenty enough to imagine it all.
“Saw some in Asheville,” he said. “In the early days.”
“Asheville is nice,” Maleah said. “I took the kids to the art museum there. In the old days.”
Casey noticed that time was measured in days lately: Old Days, Early Days, Final Days. If you liked years, well, you were pretty much in the wrong time. Simple as that.
“Were they with you in Charlotte?”
“No. They went with their dad. Figured a cruise ship was safer. Things were . . . you know how people get under stress.”
Yep. Casey knew. His mother was in Raleigh. Even if you had a car, you couldn’t get gas, and even if you had gas, all the roads were blocked with broken-down cars. A motorcycle might have done some good, but those had been snatched up by people with rifles. So Casey put his mother out of his mind. Simple as that.
“That where you got the bruise?” Casey said, taking the can of pork and beans to her. They weren’t warm yet, but at least he’d tried. He flipped the tab, peeled the lid, and gave her the can.
She touched the side of her face before taking the can. “No,” she said, so fast that the lie was out there hanging in the air like a bean fart. “I banged into a door.”
“Mob scenes,” Casey said, feeding the lie a little so she could relax. Anxiety was bad for the digestion and he never should have asked.
She stared into the greasy sheen riding the top of the can’s contents. “You’d like to think we would have done better.”
Casey nodded, and then realized she wasn’t looking at him. She was staring into the brown liquid as if reliving some callous atrocity, a kid knocked off his bike in the rush to escape them, a woman tossing her baby at one to buy a little more time to run. Or maybe someone leaving a waitress trapped in a walk-in cooler so the zombie would eat her instead of him.
r /> Things like that. Things you didn’t want to remember.
She was already a goner. You couldn’t have saved her. That’s the story you stick with.
He told her that version, the one where he was almost a hero.
Maleah fished her knife around in the can and came up with a few beans. “I can’t eat meat anymore,” she said.
“Too bad,” he said. “I was thinking about those chickens.”
As if volunteering for the roasting spit, a rooster crowed, the sound cracked and piercing in the pastoral calm. Casey glanced out the window, measuring the sun against the horizon. Maybe half an hour until dark.
Not that they cared about dark. They marched and munched all the same, full-time hunger, plenty to do and forever to do it in.
But dark made a big difference if you counted on sight instead of smell. Zombies did their best work at night because the prey was more vulnerable. Nature’s rules were pretty simple. Survival of the fittest.
“We could keep going north,” Casey said.
“And make Canada in, what, two years?”
“You never know. There have to be pockets. Soldiers and the government and police. Somebody had to be ready for this.”
“How could you be ready for this?”
“Lakes.” Casey was getting annoyed, and he didn’t like the whispering in his head. With the waitress, it had been easy. She was a stranger. Just another wide-eyed, open-mouthed rack of ribs, half his size. Easy to shove into the walk-in cooler.
But this woman . . . well, they’d gotten to know each other.
“And what do we do if we find a lake?” She spoke around a mouthful of beans, and a piece of pork clung to her lips. In her hunger, she’d already given up her newfound vegetarianism.
“A boat, maybe. They probably can’t swim.”
“And we live on fish?”
He looked at the ax on the wall, and the chains. The farmer had probably killed his hogs in this barn, slit their throats and hung them up below, their corpses dangling from chains while he worked out the innards. Blood dripping onto the packed carpet of hay and manure, flies orbiting in a red frenzy.
“Hard losing your kids that way, huh?” he said.
“I haven’t lost them. They’re out there somewhere.”
Sure they were. Just like his mother and the waitress and his best friend Tyler who’d climbed a tree with a shotgun and a week’s worth of cheese and crackers and a twelve-pack, determined to wait them out. Everyone was out there somewhere. Everyone was doing just fine.
Casey pulled the cell phone out of his pocket. He flipped it open to check the signal. Whatever had knocked out the electricity must have messed with the phones, too. Terrorists, he’d heard. Well, there was a new kind of terror to worry about
The battery probably had another day or so. It meant nothing but comfort. A last link with the way things used to be. He resisted the urge to click through his numbers. It would only make him think about how those people might have been caught.
Maleah wiped her mouth with the sleeve of her pumpkin-colored blouse. She was a redhead and the colors didn’t go well together.
“Want some?” she asked, holding out the can.
“I’m not real hungry,” he said.
He’d found a rifle in Hickory, a furniture-factory town that had been dying long before the end of the world arrived. The rifle had some icky gel on the shoulder stock, and Casey had worried he’d catch an infection from it. But the rifle was a single-shot, low-caliber. He didn’t know much about guns but he’d fired at one of them. The zombie had been digging in a bundle of clothes on the far end of the street.
At least, he was pretty sure it was a zombie.
Some guy in a cowboy hat told him the next day you had to shoot them in the head or it was a waste of good ammo. The cowboy seemed to be having the time of his life, tooling around in an open-top Jeep with big tires. The Jeep bristled with barbed wire, and in the passenger seat were half a dozen guns. The cowboy offered him a ride, said they could go cross-country and not worry about the clogged roads, but he was headed toward the zombies, not away from them.
North. That was what everybody else said to do.
No reason, really. People just had to go somewhere, and having a direction was almost as good as having a reason to live.
“It’ll be dark soon,” he said.
She touched the top button of her blouse, as if she were undecided whether she would undress again. Or maybe just embarrassed. Things you did in the dark were easier to forget happened. Maybe it was even easier to die in the dark.
“How far is the next town?” she asked.
“Probably ten miles,” he said.
He’d just picked a number out of thin air. Ten miles didn’t sound too far, but not close enough for her to want to leave the barn. He didn’t suppose there were a lot of “nexts” left in the world. Only plenty of “lasts.”
She scraped up the last of the beans with the knife and slid them into her mouth, careful not to cut her tongue. She licked the blade and folded it closed.
“Chickens might have laid some eggs,” Casey said. He hadn’t looked around too much when they’d entered the barn. There were too many shadowy pens and corn bins, barrels and stacked wooden crates. A rusty tractor was parked at one end of the barn, but Casey hadn’t even bothered to start it. Even at full speed, it wouldn’t outrun them.
“Bacon would be nice,” Maleah said, forgetting she was almost a vegetarian.
“And sausage and pancakes and toast. A good cup of coffee. Brewed, not that powdered instant in cold water.”
She tossed the empty can through the square hole in the floor. The holes were used to throw down bales of hay to the animals. They’d bothered Casey at first, because he imagined ways they might crawl up through them in the night. The wooden door blocking the narrow stairs was heavy and solid, and there was no other easy way in except the holes. But the hayloft was 12 feet above the dirt, and Casey figured holes worked both ways, because they could get out fast if necessary.
“How many could you fight off if you had to?” she said. She didn’t give him back the knife. She wormed it into the front pocket of her jeans.
“I don’t know. Two, maybe. Three if I had room.”
“The one in Asheville, did it touch you?”
“Not my skin. It grabbed my shirt and tore it. But I got him away before he got close.”
“Do you feel bad that you couldn’t save her?”
He shrugged. “She was a goner anyway.”
Weak. Slow. Trying to help him when she should have been running away.
Stupid.
“Well, maybe in a way, you made up for it by finding me.”
They’d met in the snack section of a convenience store. The front glass had been broken out. She had an armful of potato chip bags and he’d suggested she grab some drinks because she’d soon be thirsty. The beer was warm so he went for Gatorade. The store had been plenty wrecked.
As they were leaving, he noticed the cash register was open and the bills gone. Some people never changed. Unless they got bit.
Then they changed plenty.
The two of them didn’t discuss traveling together. They’d just both started down the same street in the same direction at the same time. A few other people were around, a dark-skinned boy running, one tennis shoe lost, his bare foot slapping on the pavement. An old man wobbled by, leaning on his cane, eyeing them as if unsure whether they were human or zombie. A woman pushing a baby carriage crossed in front of them, staring way into the distance where fire sirens were screaming. A female cop trying to direct traffic, pointing her pistol in the air and getting ignored.
Casey kept walking, and Maleah kept walking, and now here they were.
“They smell bad,” Casey offered, as if to downplay the stench of chicken manure. “Like a septic tank and rotten eggs and roadkill skunk rolled into one.”
“A lot of infection. I studied that in nursing school. A human mouth
has more germs than a dog mouth.”
Casey gazed out across the pasture to the west. The night would be bad. They could run for it, and maybe make it. For one more day.
“Just supposin’,” Casey said. “What if you had your kids, and you were trapped, and those things were breaking in. Could you stand to see it?”
Maleah flipped the knife back open as if imagining the scene. “Depends on if I had a gun or not.”
“Okay, then. Two kids, three bullets. Five zombies. You know how they come in packs.”
She stood, trembling, lips peeled back in anger, and at first he thought she was going to stab him. She gripped the knife in her slender fingers. “You want me to kill them, don’t you? That’s what you’re asking. Even if I killed three zombies—and I’ve never shot a gun in my life—then there would still be two to eat my children.”
Casey backed up a step in the face of her sudden frenzy. He’d just meant to get the idea planted, not piss her off. Women. You can never use logic on them. He didn’t know why he had to keep relearning that lesson.
She went limp, letting the knife fall to the hard wooden floor, where it clattered. Her outburst had upset a hen, which squawked downstairs from some dusty hutch. Casey wondered if zombies could hear things like that.
“Amber and Stevie,” she said, voice now far away, as if these past few weeks had never happened.
“I’m sure they’re fine,” he said. He’d already made her kill them in her mind, so he could afford a little mercy.
In this world, if you wanted to make it, you had to kill off everybody. The living and the dead.
The chicken had calmed down a little, the frantic clucks giving way to uneasy cooing. Grampy said that’s how you picked out which one to kill, the one that was nervous. “Natural selection,” he called it, a phrase Casey dimly remembered from high school science. If the class had been more about what to do when dead people were walking around trying to eat you, Casey probably would have paid more attention and actually learned something useful.
What you did, Grampy said, was grab it around the neck. Some people liked to yank, popping the spine, but Grampy said the meat was better if you let the ax do the work, because then you were bleeding it at the same time. Two birds with one stone, he said. The headless chicken would run around for a minute or two, not knowing it was dead, spraying all that crazy out of its system.
Then you split it open and peeled its skin off like a glove—
“I killed them,” she said.
He forgot where he was, so deeply was he back on that Iowa farm, with its endless summer days, sweet corn on the cob, the swimming hole down at the creek, and Susan Vaughn in her pink wet shorts.
He blinked and stared at her. The dusk had settled, crept through the windows so fast he hadn’t noticed. Maleah’s face was radiant, caught in the last rays of that sagging egg-yolk sun.
“I saw where it was headed,” she said. “More of them and less of us, every single day. I couldn’t let them become them.”
She didn’t have to explain. That’s why Casey had run in the first place—not so much to survive, but because he couldn’t stand the notion of familiar forms shambling toward him with that bottomless hunger in their dead eyes. Grampy without his dentures, gums flapping. Susan Vaughn with blood on her shorts. His mother with her bad knees, wriggling forward like a snake. Tyler and his Busch-Lite-hangover shuffle.
Something had changed outside, and the angle of the light made the trees soft and golden, and shadows grew over the land. Autumn had this way about it, sad and sweet at the same time, like a kiss that had to end.
There was movement in the trees, but the wind was dead.
So were the things that walked from the forest.
“Here they come,” he said, and the words were easy, like he’d rehearsed them in his head a million times.
He’d wanted to ask how she’d done it. Knife, gun, drowning in the bathtub. He’d seen her stretch marks and knew how crazy women got over the things they’d carried in their bellies.
Maybe she hadn’t been afraid of them turning at all. She might have been more afraid at turning herself and then putting those babies back in her belly.
He was going to ask if they should run for it. Say something like, “Next town is only ten miles.” But running in the dark was no good, and the moon had been shrinking each night. Plus she was tired.
Survival of the fittest, and she wasn’t so fit anymore.
In the last of the light, he went to the wall of the barn. Rope, chains, a spiky tool that looked like it was used to roll logs. The ax was the way to go. Take off the head with one chop. Just like with Grampy’s chickens.
“I should have done it myself,” she said. “But I was too chicken.”
“I know,” he said, thinking of the bullets in the rifle he’d wasted. The ax felt good in his hands.
Outside, the forms were moving across the yellow stubble of the pasture, down rows of dying corn, through the brown briars. Walking toward the barn, the only meat for miles.
Casey wondered if they would eat the chickens, too.
“Think you can?” she asked.
Like a kiss that had to end.
He went to her as dark fell.
Scott Nicholson has written more than 20 books, including After: The Shock, The Home, The Red Church, Solom, The Harvest, Speed Dating with the Dead, Disintegration, Liquid Fear, and The Skull Ring. Other electronic works include Burial to Follow and the story collections Ashes, The First, Zombie Bits, Gateway Drug, and Flowers. I live in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina, where I play guitar, raise an organic garden, and waste way too much time on Facebook.
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