Eric
Chapter 17
Eric
Rachel is pissed. I don’t need the Magic 8 Ball I had as a kid to suss that out. All Signs Point to Pissed, from her tight lips to the way her eyes have gone hard. Rachel is the girl you see in an advertisement for healthy living—loose limbs, white teeth, long dark blonde hair, comfortable in her own body, confident of her own strength—but right now her shoulders are by her ears and her torso folded protectively where she sits on the forest floor.
“Just leave, Eric,” she snaps at me.
“Rach, I’m not leaving you—”
She cuts me off with a harsh laugh. “Look out everyone, Steadfast Eric is going to save the day! Just. Leave.”
I sigh. She’s frustrated. I’m frustrated. I’m used to being dirty and risking my life, although in a less dramatic manner, but nothing has properly prepared me for being hunted by zombies. I’m better off than most—we both are—though you wouldn’t know it by the way we act.
If you want to see how fast a tenuous relationship can fall apart, just add in a dash of apocalypse. Our romance burned out in the past year, long before zombies, but the last of our friendship went up in smoke days ago. After we broke up, we agreed we’d finish out the remainder of Rachel’s final year of grad school in our house and then go our separate ways with no hard feelings. Of course, I hadn’t envisioned separate ways to mean my girlfriend of many years heading into Philadelphia on her own. Philly is crawling with zombies.
“Just let me get you to your brother,” I say. “Then I’m gone. You’ll never have to see me again.”
When we first started out from our house in rural Pennsylvania, the plan was to meet up with my sister, Cassie, at our parents’ log cabin in upstate New York. That plan fell by the wayside when Rachel informed me she was going to Philadelphia to find her brother, Grant. It’s dangerous, to say the least. And Rachel, the person who has climbed mountains beside me, who planned to join the Peace Corps, has now reached her breaking point. She’ll never make it in by herself, not with the way she cries over scratches like a baby. I want to shake her, not because she’s afraid—I’m afraid, and with good reason—but because she’s being a bitch. It isn’t my goddamn fault the world has gone to hell.
She closes her eyes and leans her head against the rough bark of a tree. “I’m sorry. I’m just really scared.”
A tear slips down her cheek. I kneel to brush it away, annoyance dissipating. Girls’ tears have that effect. “So come with me to the cabin. Wait with me and Cassie until it’s safe. I promise we’ll come back then.”
“Eric,” she says, eyes still closed, “you don’t really think she made it out, do you?”
I don’t, although I hope. I last spoke to my sister a little more than twelve hours before they blew up the bridges into—and, more importantly, out of—New York City. Cassie said she’d leave Brooklyn for the cabin if Bornavirus LX worsened. It did get worse, and quickly, but they didn’t give anyone in New York time to figure that out before they cut off access.
We watched the fires on television. The bodies on the streets and the boats trying to cross the water. The crowds of people on roofs, screaming at the news helicopters for salvation that didn’t come—one did try, and the entire copter was taken down by the weight of desperate people hanging from its skids. Rachel shrieked when it crashed to the street to start a new conflagration. And then the news went dark. Phones stopped once and for all. The internet became a memory.
“I’m going to check the apartment first,” I say. It wasn’t a fully-formed plan until this moment, and, judging by the way Rachel’s eyes pop open, it isn’t a good one.
“You’re crazy,” she says. “You’re going into Brooklyn? In this?”
I raise an eyebrow. “Oh, excuse me, Ms. I’m-going-to-stroll-right-into-Philly-in-the-midst-of-the-zombie-apocalypse.”
Rachel giggles. It becomes a laugh and then moves into hysterics territory. She holds her stomach, cheeks wet, and howls at the treetops. This is more like the Rachel I know, the Rachel I loved. Even if the romance is gone, she’s still counted among my closest friends, and that means I’ll see her to safety.
“Okay, maybe we’re both fucking crazy,” she says when she’s finally calmed. “Jesus, this is the last place I thought we’d end up.”
“Now, that’s crazy,” I say, and lower myself down. “We’ve spent half our lives in the woods. How is this any different?” I point to the evening sky between tree branches. “It’s a lovely day for a ramble.”
She sighs. “Just promise me you’ll be careful. You can get pretty stupid sometimes if I’m not there to stop you.”
“Scout’s honor,” I say with two fingers in the air. “I’ll miss your nagging, though.”
She turns, face close to mine. “I’ll miss you, too.”
It’s pointless, even now, to think of trying again. She’s found someone else, which is the other reason she wants to go to Philly, although neither of us has mentioned it. I was glad, if slightly jealous, when she met Nathan in a joint research project at UPenn. She began to spend the week, and then weekends, in Philly. It was only a quiet space in which to finish her thesis that put her at our house when this went down.
I’ve gone on a few dates and had a few hook-ups since our breakup, but no one’s made it to consistent dating status. And I haven’t told my sister about us yet—she’ll be devastated by the news. I figured I’d drop the bomb once school was over and Rachel was gone.
“Should we set up camp?” Rachel asks. “We’ll make Philly tomorrow.”
The weather is nice enough that we don’t need the tiny backpacking tent, but it keeps us out of sight of undead eyes. We appear to be in the woods, but looks are deceiving, as we’re only a half-day’s hike from Philly. This patch of woods is surrounded by zombies and suburbs.
We erect the tent and cover it with debris and branches, then eat trail mix in our sleeping bags as it grows dark. Tomorrow we’ll say goodbye. We both wanted out, but not like this. I wanted to imagine her life as a series of events—the career, the husband, the house, the kids—and to remain friends with a social media buffer, so I could see the pictures as it all happened. Now, once I walk away, I’ll most likely never know if she’s even alive. I have no illusions about how bad it is. The world is over.
“We can get Grant and take him upstate,” I say, about her brother. She chews her lip, so I lay out the big offer. “Nathan’s welcome, too. You guys can head upstate while I go into Brooklyn.”
“Really?” she says. “You’re amazing. You know that?”
“I’m well aware of my amazingness.”
“Too aware,” she says with a laugh. “Let’s get into Philly first. But thank you.” She brushes my cheek with gentle fingers. “I wish…I’m sorry that we…”
A longing for the old days floods in. To have the two of us and a tent be all we need. I think that if I kissed her now, she wouldn’t say no. I could feel her move against me one last time. But it’s a bad idea; she’d never forgive herself, or me. “Me, too. But we’re friends, right?”
“Always,” she says.
***
In the morning, we see plenty of cars for the taking, but no roads on which to drive them. Like the people who fled Philly into the suburbs and the suburbanites who fled the suburbs for the country, we abandoned our car many miles ago at stopped traffic, although by then the cars were empty and the zombies were thick on the ground.
They’re thick here, too. We make our way between houses through giant yards, looking for bicycles. We find them locked inside a three-car garage at a brick house set back from the road by a curved driveway.
Rachel stands on her toes and peers at the street through the thick shrubbery. “If we break the glass, they’ll come.”
I nod. “We need a wire hanger.”
“Why?”
I point through the glass windows at the red cord that hangs from the door mechanism. “See that cord? If we pull that or the la
tch above, the door will unlock.”
But wire hangers are not plentiful on suburban lawns, even immense ones like these. I use my knife to cut a green stick that will bend without breaking and pull the duct tape from my pack along with my tin cup. The folding wire cup handle snaps off the side easily—too easily for a cup with a lifetime guarantee. “This thing cost fifteen bucks. Did you see how the handle broke off, no problem?”
Rachel, who’s standing watch, glances back. “Really? I’ll get you a new cup.”
I tape the curved metal to the stick and use a thicker stick to open the seal on the garage door’s upper edge. Easing the metal through the space, I say, “I’m just saying, they don’t make things like they used to. My dad had the same tin cup his entire life. He camped with it, cooked in it—”
“Shh,” Rachel says. Her shoulders have loosened, though, which is why I said it in the first place. The way she stood, tense and ready to scream at the first sign of trouble, made me think she’d lose her shit at the next squirrel that frolics by. I’ll get her to Philly, but I have no intention of dying.
I manage to get the stick to the lever. Now is the moment of truth. I used a lot of duct tape, but if I shit around too much, the end is bound to come off. Goodbye, cup handle. I fit it carefully over the latch and give it one good tug. The latch drops and the door comes up with a yank. Luckily, the house is new or well-maintained enough that it doesn’t squeak.
We enter the garage and lower the door, watching out the window to see if we’ve attracted attention. We haven’t. Rachel nudges my side playfully, happy for the first time in hours. “Do I want to know how you knew how to break into a garage?”
“Paul,” I say.
I last spoke to Paul, my oldest friend, the day I spoke to Cassie. He lives in Brooklyn still, with his wife and son. He’s a firefighter and he didn’t know anything more than I did; they were as tight-lipped with the FDNY as they were with everyone else. I managed to extract a promise that he’d come to the cabin if need be, but he was on duty and almost certainly didn’t get out before the bridges blew.
“Of course.” Rachel rolls her eyes and crosses to the bikes. “This one looks—”
One of them, a zombie, stumbles into her from behind an upright freezer. He died in his boxers, and the dark hair that covers his chest and stomach is matted with blood. Rachel goes down with a screech. My hand goes for my knife without thought—I stopped keeping count somewhere after thirty—and I cross the space before he can fall after her.
My knife has become my best friend. The Swedish-made, black handled knife doesn’t look like much, but, as they say, you should never judge a book by its cover. It set me back a few hundred dollars years ago, and it was worth every penny then. More so now that it’s kept its edge through skulls and eye sockets. We have guns, but we quickly learned guns are the last resort. If you make noise, you get zombies, and the whole object of the game is to avoid them.
I let the man take my jacket when I near. In order to get a good strike, you have to get close. Close enough to smell their stinking mouths and see the thin, dark blood vessels on gray skin. Close enough to count their brown-stained teeth and wonder how the world has gone downhill so fast.
I bring the blade into the side of his head. Rachel is up, knife out and red-faced, before he reaches the ground. Her knife doesn’t lower. I ask, “You okay?”
“Behind you!”
The connecting door to the house is open. It was hidden by the freezer, and I’m an idiot for not checking immediately upon entering. The rest of the family feeds out—a woman and two girls, maybe ages five and three. I’ll let the girls nip at my legs and waist; I wear a waxed canvas jacket and jeans lined with long johns, and I have a bigger problem coming my way. Mom hits me belly-first, sumo wrestler-style. I draw her head back by the hair to expose the underside of her chin. A long enough knife, right up the side of the trachea, works like a charm.
Rachel has backed onto the hood of the sedan. There’s no way she’ll get into Philly alone. She hates to kill them. Hates to touch them. She’s done it when push has come to shove, but I know why she hasn’t this time: kids are different. Even bloody and growling, they retain an air of innocence—feral kittens that could be tamed if you tried hard enough. I try to think of them as little zombies. They’re just as ferocious as their parents. They’re already dead. They’ll kill me just as dead.
The girls head for Rachel, the small one’s pink nightgown swinging around her frail calves. I ram my knife through the base of the older sister’s skull. I tell myself I’m doing her a service, a mercy. It doesn’t feel like it. I take the little one by her long dark hair, and her socked feet scrabble on the smooth concrete. I slide my knife into the same spot as I did her sister, lower her to the floor, and then move to shut the door.
When I turn, Rachel is in tears. It’s the tenth cry of the day for her, and it’s the final straw for me. The tears that usually soften my heart only annoy me more. I bend to wipe my knife on the mother’s shirt and tell myself not to say it. Don’t say the words.
I look to where she trembles. “Thanks for the help.”
Fuck.
“I’m sorry I can’t kill them the way you do,” she sputters. “You don’t even care. Look at this fucking world, Eric! You don’t even care!”
It’s a new manifestation of the same old conversation. Now, it’s that I don’t care. Before, I was too brutal. Before that, she hated to see my face when I killed them.
Anger zips through me like electricity. I miss electricity. I walk closer, sliding my knife into its sheath so I’m not tempted to use it on her. “What do you want me to do? Bury them and say a prayer so I can be eaten while I do it? Get a fucking grip, Rachel. I don’t have time to care because I have to kill them while you sit and cry on a goddamn car!”
She wraps her arms around her legs. “Yeah, maybe because I’m still fucking human.”
The words hurt. The snarl on her face hurts. My arms hurt from shoving my knife through bone. My legs hurt from the endless walking, the spurts of running, and from being tense every second of the day. When you hike, when you climb, you have downtime and stories around camp, jokes to exchange. There’s no downtime now. Not ever. Not until I’ve gotten home, and maybe not even then.
I’m trying to keep this together, keep her together. I’ve offered to escort my ex-girlfriend to her new boyfriend—to live in the same house as him, for fuck’s sake—and I’m not human.
I step over the girls’ bodies and grab the man’s bike. It looks fine, and although I should check it more thoroughly, if I have to spend one more minute in this garage I’ll kill Rachel. I carry it to the door and keep my eyes on the window. “Ready?”
A few moments later, she wheels her bike over.
Chapter 18
Rachel’s brother, Grant, lives by the art museum on the west side of the city, on a street of well-maintained attached brick houses, also known as rowhomes. The bikes cut our half-day hike to an hour or so—without zombies. With zombies, it’s a circuitous route of back streets that dead-end and circle until we find a map in a glove compartment and a quiet street on which to plan a route.
I study the roads. We’re getting there, but the streets are deadly and turning deadlier as we close in on Philly. So many people lived, and died, and now live again that avoiding them is impossible. It doesn’t bode well for Rachel, or for Brooklyn. I put it out of my mind and point to the railroad tracks that lead to where multiple bridges cross the river into the city. Philly isn’t an island, so I think there’s a good chance the bridges still stand.
“See the train tracks here?” I point to the map. Rachel doesn’t turn. “It’ll be a bumpy ride, but I’m game for a little cross-country cycling if you are.”
Rachel stands astride her bike and nods into the distance. Her hair is a mess, her pants are ripped, but she hasn’t cried since we left the garage. She hasn’t spoken to or looked at me, either. Not crying is enough. Her words have repeated in my
mind until I’ve reached the point where I can’t wait to be rid of her.
“This isn’t funny, Eric,” Rachel says, lips barely moving. “Stop trying to make light of it.”
Rachel has a sense of humor, but it’s more of the conventional kind. It makes me miss my sister even more. Cassie was beaten down by the deaths of our parents in a car accident three years ago and checked out of life for a while, but she hasn’t lost her sense of humor. She might choose beer and a board game over rappelling down a cliff any day of the week, but I’m positive she isn’t freaking out. It’s impossible not to freak out a little, at least at first, but once you wrap your head around the craziness, you have to stay sane somehow. Dark humor is in our genes. I can die having laughed every chance I got, or I can die having been miserable. Either way, I’ll be dead. Besides, I didn’t mean it as much of a joke.
I start off without a word. Rachel catches up quickly. We ride east as far as possible, sticking to a two-lane country-ish road filled with cars. Our bikes are silent and maneuverable, and the large front yards give us room to pass around clumps of corpses. We make it into a small town full of useless shops in quaint red brick buildings. They were useful when one needed jewelry, boutique clothing or children’s books, but those things are no longer on my list. We brought along dehydrated food and, with the supplemental food we’ve found along the way, we don’t need to venture into the bagel shop.
The children’s books remind me of Leo, Paul’s son. Blond-haired and sweet, though with that devious side little boys have—maybe always have. Whenever I visit, he climbs all over me and talks my ear off. I hope he’s still talking, at a lower volume. He is if Paul has had anything to say about it.