Chapter 2 – Zombie Walk
The antique alarm clock shrilled at four-thirty, when the morning was at its coldest and its darkest. Rose Pilger grunted as she rolled over upon her sofa’s cushions, throwing off the layers of smeared newsprint and fraying blankets she gathered for warmth. He feet crunched upon a brown paper bag, all that was left of the sandwich delivered some weeks ago for an evening dinner, before her toes found a waiting pair of slippers. She winced for the pain that flared in her knees as she shifted her weight onto her legs. She had not been young for many years, and survival’s effort took a greater toll upon her with each day.
“Thank the heavens, Connor, that you didn’t have to see how the world’s gone to hell since you died on me. You always told me the world would. You always told me all the lazy cretins crowding this excuse of a town would drag all of us down. But thank heavens that at least you’re spared the pain of looking at it.”
Rose’s custom was to talk to ghosts, for she feared that only the haunts and shades of the past possessed any chance of forgiving her for her dark brooding. Her nose no longer wrinkled from the smell of cat urine and ammonia that rose from the carpet. Perhaps that scent had finally turned her nostrils too numb, or perhaps she needed all of her concentration to navigate through the piles of Styrofoam packaging peanuts and plastic bubble wrap, through the stacks of magazines and cardboard boxes, through the teetering towers of broken radios and portable televisions to reach her crowded kitchen’s confines.
The stacks of empty food tins and unwashed dishes left her little room to operate, but Rose could still reach the coffee maker she employed each morning to warm a carafe of water. Coffee was no longer a luxury found in her cabinets. Taking from the last box of tea packets was a pleasure reserved for formal company, a pleasure that Rose had not shared with guests for years, a pleasure she doubted anyone would enjoy until some brave soul attempted to clean enough of her home for a wake.
The hot water did what it could to sooth the aches in all of Rose’s joints and motivated her to stretch upon her toes to reach her tins of cat food. A hole in the kitchen ceiling remained where a raccoon had plummeted down from the attic, the ceiling finally too ruined from the home’s leaking roof to support the weight of the trespassing vermin. She winced as her fingers twisted a dull can-opener upon a tin, for the electrical opener long ago fell into disrepair, and Rose didn’t dare invest any of the few dollars remaining to her in the purchase of such a new appliance. Her home was crowded with cheap, broken appliances. Rose took several deep breaths until the pain receded from her hands, and then she helped herself to several spoonfuls of the cats’ breakfast before dumping the tin’s contents into one of several bowls set upon the floor.
“I only took a taste, lovies,” Rose’s back flared in pain as she attempted to pet the ear of one of the dozen cats, a complete spectrum of colors and of fur types, that jumped out of more cardboard boxes and plastic clothes hampers to bite at their morning sustenance.
“Connor, you’ll just have to forgive me for collecting so many cats. I know you never liked them. But I need the company, and I can’t take care of a dog anymore. Certainly none of your retrievers you so loved. Those cats are the best company I can find in those terrible times.”
Her sore hands clutched her mug of warm water as she retraced her path back to her parlor with careful and small steps. A few years ago, she had fallen into that room’s clutter, badly bruising her hip. She had been lucky not to have broken a bone. But she had been trapped upon that stained and stinking carpet for the better part of a morning, before finally finding the strength to push herself back onto her swollen feet. Rose was afraid that no one would come to her door and discover her if she ever fell again, and so she twisted as carefully as she could between formations of black garbage bags filled with discarded clothing and inexpensive shelving, heavy with wind-up nicknacks and souvenir snow-globes. Passing beyond the stacks of vinyl gospel records of which her husband had once loved, Rose stood before her parlor’s wide and tall window and peeked her head between the heavy and dark curtains that kept the home so dim.
“I don’t want to feel your ghost reprimanding me behind my back, Connor.” Rose hissed as the pile of softcover romances fell from the window ledge as she pushed her face closer to the glass. “If you wanted me to keep a cleaner home after you left, then you should’ve left me with the money to afford a cleaning lady.”
Rose looked through her window upon the crumbling street that passed in front of her home. The streetlights were always dark so early in the morning, and Rose always needed to pay close attention to notice when the first figure appeared at the far end of that road riddled with potholes. She paid attention the the faint shadows. She had learned to watch stray cats dart across the ditches, to listen to the barking of dogs, to notice the first signals that heralded the arrival of those limping men and women Rose looked upon each morning from cover of her heavy curtains.
“I must have a terrible craving for punishment, coming to this window every morning the way I do,” Rose sighed, perhaps to Connor’s ghost, perhaps to the cats that nuzzled against her swollen ankles, “but I just keep peeking out of these curtains hoping to see something that gives me hope that this foul town still holds some kind of place for those who actually work to earn their living.”
The first stiff, shambling zombie appeared just as Rose reached the bottom of her mug of warm water. Rose instantly knew it was one of the zombies. The slumped shoulders, the fallen neck, the long arms that hung dejectedly from the figure’s sides all told her it was another of the town’s dejected and lethargic souls. The zombie moved several steps closer to her cluttered lawn, and Rose recognized it as the first zombie who always appeared each morning upon that roadway. Sometimes, that zombie held a shovel. Sometimes he held an axe, sometimes a hammer, and sometimes a rake. But the figure of that zombie was always the first, and Rose suspected that particular zombie, with the eyes that never lifted off of the toes of his boots, was ever the first zombie to appear upon that cracking street.
“You make me sick. You truly do.” Rose hissed at the zombie from behind her curtains. “How long have you been limping down my street? How long have you been depending upon the taxes of us good, honest folks who’ve worked so hard all these years to make a living? I would be ashamed if the only think I had to do each morning was to just shamble down this town’s streets. I have would have the character and the ethic to get myself off of the street. I would not be satisfied to just feel sorry for myself as I shuffled through Beckmire.”
A little more time passed before the other zombies appeared in Rose’s view out of her parlor window. Those who looked like the strongest of the zombies’ numbers always walked in the front of that procession that moved so slowly through the heart of town in the direction of their day’s appointed labor. Rose had no idea what work forced those zombies into the street. She would guess there was a garden or a field in need of service when the zombies carried rakes. She would guess there was a barn or a garage in need of repair or construction when the zombies held hammers. When they carried shovels, Rose often imagined that the cemetery needed new graves. She had peeked on so many of those limping zombie walks while hiding behind her curtains since the day her Connor died, and Rose had never exactly known where those zombies ever took their labor.
“I don’t know how your employers, whoever they may be, just let you all mope so slowly down my street,” Rose frowned as a trio of pale men trudged passed her house. “It’s not like you’re carrying those big sledgehammers this morning. The day’s coming work can’t be too hard on you. You should be thankful to have a chance to be productive.”
Rose used to feel sick to her stomach when she first saw the wounds that festered upon many of those zombies. She used to worry if those zombies could afford the proper care required of those hurts collected in the field. She used to feel so sorry for their sunburned skin that her own flesh would itch out of sympathy pain. The sight of one of
the zombie women limping through town used to make her knees throb. There was a time when Rose had to turn away before she gazed upon the wagonloads of zombie children, pulled by zombie men whose hands bled for the way the cruel ropes bit into their palms. She used to lose sleep at night thinking about the elderly zombies leaning against that wagon for support. Looking upon that procession dressed in rags and bandages used to make Rose’s heart crack.
That, however, was long ago. Rose had watched the zombie ranks multiply and balloon in the days since the first zombie appeared in the street. She had witnessed so many of her neighbors take a place in that zombie parade. She had been disgusted to see how more and more people in Beckmire gave up even trying to earn an honest living and instead took the easy route to languidly walk alongside those zombies plaguing town. No one wanted to strive anymore. No one wanted to hold a real job. Everyone wanted it so easy. Everyone wanted to beg. Everyone wanted to just limp along with the zombies.
Those zombies were a plague, an infestation, a curse that would swarm and devour men and women of finer character. Rose feared losing herself at the hands of those zombies each morning when she peered through her window’s curtains. She was no longer foolish nor naive. She no longer felt sorry for any of them - not for the zombie girl with the fraying shoes, not for the zombie boy with the bandaged eye, not for the zombie man with the face sunken from hunger, certainly not for the old, zombie woman leaning upon a crutch.
“Don’t none of you look towards my home for a second,” Rose hissed. “If you all don’t like your lot, if you all can’t appreciate how you’re all given a chance to earn your supper, then you can all just decide to work like the rest of us and get your lazy butts off of the street.”
Rose held a breath as a zombie woman with frail shoulders fell to a knee upon the edge of Rose’s lawn. Rose listened to the woman pant for breath through the glass. The woman’s face shifted, and Rose jumped behind the curtain and into her home before that zombie could look at her face. Rose scolded herself. For the last few months, Rose had vowed that she wouldn’t turn away from any face that peeked in her direction. Yet, as always, she had hidden into her home’s shadows, terrified that a zombie might recognize her. It’s what the zombies did to people. They made good members of the community feel ashamed that they did not have to assemble next to those zombies in the street. The zombies made those who owned homes feel ashamed that they had worked to earn mortgages, or to pay property taxes. The zombies tricked good, caring souls into forgetting that it was the zombie who deserved to feel ashamed.
“Thank goodness you’re not alive to see any of it, Connor.” Rose trembled back within her home’s shadows. “It would break your heart to see Beckmire so empty. After how you cared for the town, it would crush you to know it was filled with zombies.”
Her stomach rumbled. She had limited her recent diet to butter crackers and peanut butter. She decided that she would relax her discipline and treat herself to something special remaining in the basement’s working freezer. Connor would’ve understood. Her spirit needed a little lift, a little encouragement after watching that procession shamble so slowly by her home.
“It’s like you always taught me, Connor. A good meal does a person wonders.”
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