Chapter 10: Memory Cards

Five months ago

I didn't remember the last time we got out. Since the evening curfews started, Elise and I found ourselves staying in our apartment more and more. On an unseasonably warm Saturday morning, we snuck out to The Fort during the day, intending to organize some of our supplies, but by the time we got out there, we decided that the beautiful day could not be wasted.
Elise smiled at me. “You wanna take a walk?”
I shrugged. “Sure.”
Holding hands, we walked down the hill, passing through an arch of leaning birch trees and down into a large meadow full of weeds and wildflowers. A narrow path led out of the field into a thick stand of trees, wound through the forest to a small creek.
A rickety-looking footbridge crossed the creek at the deepest but narrowest part. The water gurgled around smooth green rocks, through a thick bunch of reeds.
I stopped and stared down into the creek. I imagined that I could feel the cold of the early spring water.
“I think it will hold,” Elise said, inching across the bridge, staying on the outside edge to keep here weight on the heavy beams that spanned the water.
I held the railing tight, though it wobbled and shook. I didn't move.
“You okay.”
“Huh? Yeah, I'm great.”
“It will hold,” Elise said, bouncing on the beams. Something creaked. “See?”
I stepped up onto the beam, stood for a second and then stepped back down. “Yeah, looks safe.”
“That water isn't even that deep,” she said.
“I can't swim.” I smiled, embarrassed.
“Really?”
“Really.”
“No shit?”
“Are you trying to make this as difficult as possible?”
Elise smiled sweetly. “No. Hold on.” She inched back to my side of the creek, until she was standing close enough to slow dance. “Hold my hand.”
Without hesitation, I took her hand.
She stepped back, leading me out onto the bridge. I glanced down at the swirling water underneath me. It was crystal clear and I could easily see the bottom, ten feet below.
“I figured 'Don't look down' kind of went without saying. Duh.”
I laughed. “If I drown.”
“I won't let you drown, doofus. Besides, what were you doing when all the other kids were learning how to swim? Were you experimenting with inappropriate touching?”
“Games. Video games. I was a hardcore gamer.”
“I didn't know that. You don't play video games, now though.”
“Yeah, I quit.”
“Why?”
“I don't know. I just quit.”
“Sad.”
“Sad that I played video games?”
Elise shrugged, still holding my hands. “No, I just think its sad when people give up the things they love to do.”
“I guess.” Silence, but for the sound of water rushing. “I, uh, I was playing one night, I was maybe fifteen, just off in my own world and the phone rings, I didn't even hear it and then hours later, not sure even how much later, there's someone pounding at the door. I don't hear that either.”
“Did you get in trouble with your parents?”
“It's the cops. They knock on the window so hard, that it breaks. I heard that.”
“Did you get busted?”
“My parents had been in an accident, a truck hit their car.”
“Oh my God, Dave.”
“My, uh, my mother tried to call from the wreck. From in the wreck. She tried to call me and I didn't hear the phone ring. I was playing HALF-LIFE and I missed my mother calling from a car wreck. They both died on the way to the hospital. The paramedic told me later that my mother still had her cell phone in her hand.”
I stopped, let go of her hands. I rubbed my eyes. We had gotten halfway across the bridge. I took a deep breath, but it caught in my throat.
“I don't know what to say.”
“You don't have to say anything,” I said, shaking my head.
Elise took my chin and turned my face back up to her. She swept her hair back out of her face and then traced her scar with her index finger. “My Dad was a cop. A sheriff in Shipley, Indiana, where I'm from. People liked him. He was a good man and a good sheriff, but what he really could do was shoot. He never said he wanted a son, but I had a .22 in my hands as soon as I could hold one. I mean, he would play dollies and have tea parties, don't get me wrong, but he just loved to shoot. He never missed. Ever.”
“Is that why you're the poster child for the NRA?”
“Don't be jealous.”
“Before they changed the rules about that sort of thing, Dad used to drive the Sheriff's car around when he was off duty, not that you're ever off duty as a sheriff, but when he was just out and about. He would take me out for ice cream or maybe we would stop at the Outpost for an Icee.”
A shadow crossed Elise's face. A cloud passing over her head or a memory passing within. “One night we stopped to get an Icee. Cherry was my favorite. My Dad liked Grape. We were arguing about it. I was ten-years-old, sitting in the passenger seat of the sheriff's cruiser parked in front of the Outpost. Dad always called the gas station/convenience stores 'Stop and Robs'. On that night, he was right.”
I opened my mouth, but nothing came out.
“The three guys robbing the place started shooting as soon as they saw the cruiser. The first bullets went through the passenger side window and hit me in the face.” Elise touched her scar. “Just grazed me, but my dad...they had just shot his only daughter. He was halfway out of the car, so none of it hit him, but...he was like a machine. He drew his pistol and fired three shots. Bang. Bang. Bang. The three of them dropped. Jimmy, the deputy, told me that the first two shots were a head shot and a heart shot.”
“Oh, shit,” I said, just so I could exhale.
“The third guy, though, hadn't been hit at all. He just fell down when the other two did. Playing possum. While Dad was calling it in on the radio, and holding a compress to my bleeding face, the other man walked up and shot him in the head. If I'd been watching, I could have done something. If he hadn't been talking care of me, he would have seen the man coming. If I had not been shot, he would not have missed. He never missed. I never miss. It's the least I can do.”
I wanted to tell her that it wasn't her fault. To tell her that her father was a responsible adult and that the knew the risks of his job and that he did the right thing protecting his daughter. I wanted to tell her all these things, but I didn't. Sometimes you have to carry your weight and it isn't someone else's place to try to absolve you of your sins, even if they aren't exactly your sins.
I hugged my wife and we both fought tears as long as we could. After a few minutes, she led me the rest of the way across the bridge. “See? I told you I wouldn't let your drown.”

Chapter 9: Newbie

You can't hold your breath forever.
The thought flashed through my head the second time that I went under. The time I don't come up.
The river flushed me along in an airless grip of green light. The dark water beneath me froze my feet, even as I could see the sunlight filtered down from above.
You can't hold your breath forever, even if you wanted to. There's a part of your brain, this automatic reflex part, that forces you to take a breath, forces you to drown. This is me, over thinking even as I am trying to save myself.
The muddy silt on the bottom felt soft and cold as it dragged past me, like a conveyor belt going the wrong way.
I tried to remember how to swim, but fear blanked my mind, tightened its grip on my limbs.
Lungs burned.
I tried to flail my arms. I tried to...
Hot pain exploded in my back.
A scream turned into a cough and for a second, three frantic heartbeats, I'm breathing water.
Hit something.
A algae-slick log.
I have time to realize that I'm stuck in sharp branches before my mind decides its time to start breathing.
The water tasted like dirt, smelled like dead leaves.
Elise.

The sky was dark when I surfaced. Stars so bright and numerous that they looked fake.
I floated fast, swirling, first facing upstream, then down. The lights in the sky twirl so fast that they looked like the print of Van Gogh's Starry Night that used to hang on the wall of Elise's dorm room.
I was stuck. I remembered. A log. I can't swim. One thought snuck up behind me, tapped me on the shoulder with one cold, skeleton hand.
Corpses float.
Mud beneath my hands and I was laying on the shore. I thought about CPR for a long time, laying there, staring up at the Van Gogh sky. I didn't cough up any water. My heart was not beating wildly in my chest. I felt my neck, searching for the pulse that was not there and my skin was cold.
My arms dropped to my sides.
I pulled in a deep breath, but I could hear the gurgle of a lungful of river water that told me it wasn't going to work.
I could smell, though. Dead leaves and river water and summer and and something else. Barbecue. Somewhere somebody was grilling out. Hot dogs and hamburgers. The smell was smoky and fat on the air. I imagined a hot dog, blackened from the charcoal, the bun soft as a cloud. A cold Pepsi out of a cooler full of ice. I'm dead and somebody was having a picnic.
I couldn't move.
Sleep dropped on me distant and dreamless as a log at the bottom of a river.

I was on my feet and moving before I was even awake, confused as having changed channels to a movie already in progress. My legs were stiff. Sleepwalking. That was new.
I was walking down a street lined with charming brick houses flanked by enormous trees, sighing in the summer wind. Just this side of noon, the was already hot, though I did not feel it. My hands ached from the cold.
I stood in the middle of the empty street staring at my hands. They were white, the nails bluish.
“Fuck,” I tried to say, but a gallon or so of water came out instead. Leaning forward, I released a deluge. I'm a little teapot, I thought, tip me over and pour me out.
After a few minutes, I gave up.
Standing up straight, I could smell the barbeque again. People. Maybe they can help me. I followed the smell, hurrying the best that I could on stiff legs.
The street opened up a block later, revealing a large park several blocks long. I stopped at the end of the street unable to believe what I was seeing. A brown and white horse raced down the street, mane blowing in the wind, hooves rumbling like thunder, rumbling like a Biblical prophecy. It crossed the park, tearing up grass and earth in its wake.
Several more horses joined him and suddenly there was a stampede, dozens of horses, eyes wide, nostrils flared. Shear terror in such a beautiful animal that it broke my unbeating heart.
That's when I saw the zombies. A hoard of them coming from the same direction the horses had come. The zombies fastest was barely a stagger and the horses easily keep ahead of their undead pursuers. The horses circled in the grass, though, their group getting small, tighter.
I didn't even see the trap until it was closed.
At the treeline, the zombies appeared, filtering out from their hiding places.
“Oh, shit,” I tried to say, but only a fetid belch escaped me.
The zombies close in.
To their credit, the horses fought. They reared up. They kicked. But for each horse there were ten zombies clawing at them.
I couldn't watch. I continued down the street away from the park heading towards what I thought was west, though I wasn't sure. The smell of barbecue returned. I'm not sure if I am more excited about the prospect of food or the prospect of people.
My eye itched and I scratched at it, thinking that I must have gotten something in it when I was in the water. My stomach growled loud enough to hear if you were standing close enough to me.
The barbecue smell drove me crazy. I scrambled after it, my stiff legs stumbling over the curb. I pushed my way through a gate into a small back yard and froze, smelling hot dogs and hamburgers and...
The dead woman lay in the grass just outside her back door, her insides ripped open, a quick and dirty anatomy lesson. Her gas grill sat unlit.
I could still smell the barbecue.
I couldn't do this.
I was so hungry.
I couldn't.
I'm...so...sorry.
I fell on her clawing with my hands, burying my face in her guts. She tasted like hot dogs and hamburgers and filet mignon. She was apple pie, blueberry pancakes and crispy bacon. She was my first kiss, first lay and first love. I loved her flesh more than I'd love anything. Elise. My mother. My father. My grandmother. Anyone. My face was so deep in her insides that I couldn't see anything, so far that I couldn't breathe even if I had needed to.
I ate her corpse like Thanksgiving dinner and then collapsed once again on the grass. My eyes were slick with blood and I rubbed at it, dig at it, until I could feel it burst in my skull.
I got to my feet and went inside her house. The bathroom was just inside the backdoor off the kitchen. I find a mirror.
My skin was pale, blue at the lips and eyes, one missing, its dark socket torn by something underwater. My face was awash with old blood. I turned on the faucet and after a second cold water came out. I washed my face with antimicrobial soap that smelled like lavender. Drying my face, I realize I must be using the good towels, the ones for company. I don't imagine that I was the company that they were thinking of. A dinner guest.
Outside, the woman was till laying where I ate her.
“She was dead when I got here,” I try to say, an eruption of blood and dirty water instead.
I left the house and walked three blocks before I found a street that I recognized. I followed it west toward the late afternoon sun, until something in the street caught my eye. I stopped.
A samurai sword lay in the street.
My laugh splattered on the pavement as I scooped up the sword and headed for the bridge that crossed the west branch of the Hoosier.
The bridge was not the only thing that was missing. The world was gone. I stood at the edge of the river and saw nothing at all. Empty space, perfectly nothing, a bottomless pit between here and there.
This was why zombies don't cross water.
I closed my eye and I could still smell the water. I could still hear it. I opened my eye. The hole in the world reaches on forever. My head swam with terror and vertigo. I couldn't cross the space. It would be easier to step off the top of a building. I had to, even though I've proven that river-crossing is not my specialty.
I hurried back towards the houses and found two cinder blocks in a garage. I grabbed an orange extension cord on the way out.
I lashed the cinder blocks together with the extension cord. I tested the weight. Heavy enough. A proper anchor. Dragging the cinder block anchor behind me, I stumbled down to the edge of the great, deep nothing and closed my eye.
I could smell the water. I could hear it. I took a step forward, eye still closed.
The shallower water was warm in the afternoon, soaking my shoe. I pushed out into the water, the bricks sinking into the silt of the river bottom.
I was fine until the water reached my face, warm against my lips.
I panicked.
I could keenly remember the last moments of my life, my real life. The water in my nose and mouth. The water in my lungs. I shivered.
Even as I stepped forward, even as the water began to cover my face, I still lifted my head uselessly as if to keep my face above water to breathe.
I kept my eye clamped shut.
I moved across the river bottom, dragging cinder blocks behind me. The makeshift anchor kept my corpse from drifting away in the currents. My second attempt at crossing a river actually worked. The learning curve, though, was a bitch.
On the other side of the river, I left the bricks in the shallows and lumbered out of the water like the Creature from The Black Lagoon. I kept my eye closed until I was safely on the shore.
I know that the water is there, but the chasm of nothingness is too much for me. It made my head swim. As zombies go, I was kind of a pussy.
Standing in the middle of the highway, I stared west toward Blakefield, toward Elise. I checked my pocket to make sure I still had the pass key card. It was still in my pocket. I had lost my gun, my backpack, my eye and my life, but I still had the cheap piece of plastic. Oh, and my samurai sword.
Do not go gentle into that good night. Rage, rage against the dying of the light.
I staggered west.
I'm coming, Elise.