The Dead and Empty World Page 8
Danny sat on the edge of the couch, his face pale as he rubbed a hand over his eyes. On TV, the newscasters became more desperate while in the distance we heard an unending stream of sirens.
We knew it was only a matter of time before we heard something else. Moaning and shattering glass. Screaming and gunshots.
“When are Mom and Dad supposed to be home?” It was probably the twentieth time I’d asked this question, but to give him credit my brother didn’t hesitate to give me the same answer: “Their flight was supposed to get in at ten.”
By that time it was already noon, and the airport was shut down. We’d called both our parents’ cells a dozen times, leaving frantic messages when we were sent straight to voice mail. We stared at our phones and willed them to ring, but all we heard was the silence of desperation.
“The first time I kissed a boy was behind the gymnasium during a football game and it took us thirty minutes of standing close before one of us had the courage to lean in,” I say.
Danny pours more wine into my cup. When gathering supplies on that first night we’d brought up all the bottles from the basement as an afterthought because it seemed like a smart thing to do while the world was falling apart around us. Since then the number of bottles has dwindled and what’s left has been turned sour by the heat. But that doesn’t stop us drinking. It sits heavy and warm in my stomach, curling my tongue as I swallow until my skin starts to buzz.
He laughs. “Who was it?”
I feel my cheeks burn as I mumble my brother’s friend’s name. “Germaine.”
Danny just laughs and laughs and laughs, and for a moment we forget there are other sounds to be worried about.
All during that first afternoon we argued while the television flickered the same gruesome images in a loop: highways stuffed with risen dead, fires burning unchecked, stores being looted, ambulances crashed to their sides with rear doors flapping open.
They were everywhere. Already. Broken people coming back from the dead—a total and horrible impossibility. And yet true. I closed my eyes and thought about how a world can multiply so fast.
By then it was too late to tempt the outside world. The roads were impossible and we were stuck in our neighborhood bordering the edge of the city. I thought we should head to the attic above the detached garage, but Danny thought we should stay in the house.
“There are too many windows,” I pointed out. “Ground level, and there’s no way we can barricade them all.”
He blew out a long and frustrated sigh. “But there’s air conditioning. It’s August, Julie. We’ll roast out in the garage.”
From somewhere far away I heard a siren rising and falling. “We’ll have the cars,” I told him. “We can charge the phone off your truck battery.” What I didn’t say was in case Mom and Dad finally call us back, but he understood that anyway.
After he eventually agreed, we started filling up anything that could hold water and shoved food into grocery bags, taking it all out to the garage. Around us the sound of sawing and hammering echoed through the neighborhood while other families loaded up massive SUVs. Last week these were the people I’d have turned to for help—we’d shared lemonade stands and yard sales, babysitting and bike pumps.
They knew Mom and Dad were out of town, that Danny and I were left here alone. Our parents had given the neighbors strict instructions to watch out for wild parties or curfew breaks. A few of them glanced my way as I trundled boxes and bottles from the house to the garage. I wondered if they thought about inviting us over, taking us in.
But we were mouths to feed and bodies to water. We all had to be selfish now.
“The first time I snuck out it was totally Fiona’s fault,” I explain. We lie on our backs, sweat beading our foreheads even though it must be close to midnight. A few days ago Danny managed to saw his way through part of the roof in order to open up the garage attic to a bit of air. Overhead, stars litter the night.
“Where’d you go?” his question comes out as a grunt, and I think about sliding my gaze his way, but I know what I’ll see: deeply bruised eyes, sunken cheeks, parched lips.
“Leroy’s,” I tell him. “He was having some kind of secret sweet sixteen party, and Fiona claimed to have a special present for him.” At the term special present, I hold up my hands in air quotes. Danny laughs. It’s more like a wheeze but still I feel a sense of accomplishment.
It was Danny who thought to snake the hose up through the vents under the eaves of the garage. He left the faucet on a slow drip so we could refill bottles and wash our hands.
“How long will the water pressure last?” I asked him as he sat staring at the television, watching reports of road closings and neighborhood outbreaks that seemed endless and unceasing. My father once used the garage as a shop and so it was already wired for cable and electricity; we’d just had to string a series of extension cords so we could maintain the illusion of contact with the outside world.
Down the road a house alarm blazed. It had been going off for six hours and I kept hoping I’d get used to it, but every blare of the horn grated against my ears, increasing the pounding in my head.
My brother lifted a shoulder. I don’t know why I felt like he should know the answers to my questions. He was only eleven months older than me. Irish Twins, my aunt always called us.
Nuisance is the term my brother preferred. But still, it was nice to have someone to ask the hard questions. Even if he didn’t have the easy answers.
“The first time I… you know—” I wave my hand in the air, suddenly completely incapable of using the word sex in my brother’s presence— “was at the lake.”
“Oh, God, ew. I don’t want to hear this,” Danny protests, but I fling my elbow in the general direction of his shoulder and he shuts up.
We’ve been playing this game of firsts for too long to give up now. Already it’s begun to carry an air of significance, as if we both know one of us might not make it out of here and the other will have to bear the burden of memory.
“It was Micah,” I say, my mouth starting to twist into a grin because I know what his response will be.
As if I’d choreographed it myself, Danny begins making choking sounds. “Ewwww! Why?”
He can’t see my expression, the smoke from the burning city blocks out the moon and makes the air acrid and dry. “He was nice,” is all I manage to say.
At first it felt like maybe we’d be okay. We lived in a gated community, and I guessed that maybe someone had barricaded the entrance at some point because during those first three days, we didn’t see any of the zombies.
The neighborhood took on this sort of hesitant feel to it, almost as if we were all holding our breaths as one, waiting. The newsman flashed pictures of military bases, their razor wire fences clogged with writhing bodies. I tried to look beyond, wanting to see soldiers amassing rescue efforts, but it was impossible to see past the zombie hordes.
“Maybe we’ll be okay,” Danny whispered that second night. We’d both been pretending to sleep for hours, but in reality neither one of us had slept since that first morning.
I slid my hand over the blanket I’d spread across the plywood floor, finding wood to rap my knuckles against. “Maybe,” I whispered back, but I had this bizarre impulse to cross my fingers like we did when we were kids so our parents couldn’t catch us in a lie.
“The first time I saw a naked woman it was Mackenzie from next door.” Danny’s grin is sly and obviously proud.
“You peeping tom!” I chide, slapping at his shoulder, but not hard enough to matter.
“What? She was home from college and you could tell she wanted people to see,” he explains. “She never closed her blinds—not once the entire summer. It got to be so regular, I’d sell tickets.”
I choke on a swallow of water. “Oh my God, that’s how you could afford those new speakers? I always wondered.” His eyes twinkle with mischief as he grins and nods his head.
I guess we started to take for g
ranted the idea that we might be safe because we got used to sneaking back into the house for various things, like the toilet, or grabbing another pillow, or finding a marker to write “Alive Inside” on a sheet we draped over the garage roof.
It was stupid to become so lackadaisical, but we were tired and headachy and bored. On the news they started sounding hopeful, and perhaps we let that hope sink in, filling us in a way food and wine hadn’t.
When I slipped into the house on that fourth morning, I saw the glass scattered on the floor and my first thought was looters, not zombies. It wasn’t until the woman came shuddering into the kitchen that I fully understood.
What she’d been doing in our house I have no idea—there was no one living there anymore, no scent of uninfected people to draw her in. But none of that mattered. What mattered was that my mind went blank. My hand clutching a long, heavy flashlight went limp, letting my only weapon crash to the ground.
She lunged at me, her movements like someone trapped underwater, slow and sluggish. Her mouth twisted open, dried lips cracking and splitting almost down to her chin. Her shirt was ripped half from her body, a black lace bra showing through the tears, and I remember thinking, “I tried that on at Victoria’s Secret last week,” and for some reason that’s the thought that hit me hardest.
Only a week ago life had been so normal. I’d stood in the dressing room staring at my body, worried about whether the bra made my boobs look big enough to attract a guy’s attention. I’d fingered the lacy edges, wondering if they would chafe and itch.
Those had been my only worries then. And now this.
I screamed and ran, forgetting everything: to close the door behind me, to grab the keys from the lock, to pick up the flashlight. Terror made everything hazy. I tore across the driveway toward the garage and Danny must have heard me because he looked down from the entrance to the attic, his face a perfect O of surprise.
He flipped the stairs down from the ceiling and I lunged up them. When he pushed past me, I was screaming for him to come back. He’d remembered, though. While I panicked, he knew what to do. He dashed to the keypad by the garage door and mashed the button, even standing there while the door rumbled down to make sure it closed and nothing got in the way of the sensor to send it bounding back up.
Just as the grinding gear of the opener shuddered silent, we heard the pounding. The woman had followed me out of the house, and now she was at the garage moaning for us, trying to scratch her way in.
Danny stood there, his shoulders shaking, and I wanted to climb down the ladder to him, I really did, but I couldn’t force my fingers to unclench from the railing.
He was crying. We both were. We’d thought there was a chance, but now they’d found us and suddenly the possibility of surviving seemed that much farther away.
“She was my first dead body,” I say, legs tucked against my chest and chin on my knees. I’m rocking slowly, not caring about the oppressive heat or the rain that trickles in through the hole in the roof. The woman’s been banging at the garage door all afternoon, and I can’t stand the sound anymore. I keep trying to get Danny to talk, but he just paces around the tiny space, his hands in continuous motion.
We’d seen them on TV, but that was different. They were anonymous then.
“Mrs. Neimeyer.” I’ve been trying to say her name all day, forcing myself to remember that she’s not an “it.” She lived two doors down. She had an annoyingly loud laugh, and on holidays she’d sit out on the back patio with her husband and a cooler of beer and she’d laugh and laugh and laugh and we’d roll our eyes and say, “There she goes again.”
Danny stops his pacing, shoving his fingers through his hair and wincing. We’re both sweaty and greasy. “I never realized she had such a nice body.”
He seems horrified by what he’s just said and the expression on his face is so priceless that I can’t help but giggle.
He lets a smile ripple along his lips as his cheeks blaze red. “It’s true.”
I nod. “And I almost bought that same bra last week.” I toss a pillow at him and he dodges out of the way, muttering, “TMI, Jules.”
The first few times we heard the choppers overhead we fought our way through the hole in the roof to try to wave them down. Even though we’d draped a white sheet across the roof to indicate there were survivors inside, we never saw any indication the pilots noticed us or cared. Eventually we gave up and let them drone past, the beat of their rotors causing the entire garage to vibrate softly. More neighbors joined Mrs. Neimeyer beating at the doors and walls. The moaning became as constant as the buzz of cicadas and nothing we did could keep the sound of it from grating on us. It was a hot summer, the sun burning bright in the morning and giving way to vicious storms in the afternoon. One of them knocked out the cable for good and we’d had nothing to distract us except for what we could call up on our phones.
Even those were useless. No matter how many times we tried to reach our parents or 911 or even friends from school we got nothing—just voice mail after voice mail after voice mail. A few times we talked about getting in the car and taking our chances out on the roads but then we’re remember the images from the news: highways choked with empty cars, all of them crawling with the risen dead.
“We’re safer here,” Danny said and I swallowed the words, for how long?
On the seventh day, the power blew, and a few hours later Danny looked over at me. “I’m out of juice.” He held up his phone. “Where are the keys to the truck so I can charge it up?”
That’s when I remembered the day in the kitchen. Dropping the flashlight, leaving the door open, forgetting the key ring still lodged in the lock.
My body became still, my lungs squeezing out any air I’d ever breathed.
I didn’t have to say it. Danny knew from my expression. He reached over to the phone in my hand and slid the power switch to off. “We’ll check it at noon and midnight. For a few minutes, just to look for news and see if Mom and Dad called.”
Numbly, I nodded. Outside the zombies still came, stumbling into the cul-de-sac as if drawn by our sign: Alive Inside. Might as well have been an advertisement for a 24/7 diner. Not that the zombies could read.
“I cheated on my math final last year,” Danny admits.
I’m stunned into silence. My brother’s always been the one with better grades and it never occurred to me he’d come by them any way other than honestly. “Why?”
He’s sitting under the hole in the roof, letting a fine mist of rain dance on his shoulders. “I wasn’t spending enough time studying.” He stares at his hands. “I was worrying about the SATs and where to apply for college and…” he trails off.
“No one ever figured it out?” I realize it’s a stupid question. I’d have known if they had. Mom and Dad would have been absolutely livid. “Was that the first time?”
When he looks up at me rain slides down his face, and for a moment I mistake it for tears. He shakes his head. “Everyone thinks of me as the smart one and if I’m not that, then what am I?”
His admission makes my lungs feel too small. How could I not have realized how he felt?
I try to figure out how to respond but my brother’s first to break the silence, shifting the conversation away to shallower topics. “Being holed up here in the garage makes you wish we’d been allowed to go on that senior cruise after all, right?”
The pounding downstairs was more insistent than the usual fare and it jolted us both. “Come on, man,” someone shouted from outside. “Let me in!”
Danny scrambled out of the hole in the roof before I had a chance to tell him maybe it was a bad idea, because what if they were dangerous? The news had reported bandits were searching for safe places to shack up and we had a big white sheet on display for anyone who was looking.
Just as I started to go after him he jumped back into the attic and ran for the trap door, pushing open the stairs and sliding down them. I grabbed his arm. “What are you doing?” I hissed.
“So?” I raised my eyebrows.
His forehead crinkled, confused. “He’s outside. He’s in trouble. We gotta get him through the window before the dead break down the fence to reach him.”
“Danny…”
“We gotta help him.”
I hated the way his words made me feel: selfish and ashamed. But I didn’t know what else to do. We didn’t have a lot of supplies, and no one knew how long this would all last. It didn’t matter in the end though, because Danny slid the window open and in Raf came.
He stood panting, hands fisted on his knees, and then he grabbed my brother, holding him tight and sobbing, telling him again and again, “Thank you. Thank you.”
Danny wakes up one night with the idea that he’ll figure out how to hot-wire the truck by looking it up online. I watch as the battery icon draws down on the cell phone, eventually turning red. The glow of the screen makes his face appear green—dead like the neighbors pounding away downstairs.
Eventually it cuts out and we’re back to darkness.
“Did you figure it out?”
I hear his head move, the rustle of the skin along the back of his neck against the collar of his shirt, but I don’t know if he’s nodding or not.
We ran out of food during the fourth week and water became pretty scarce soon after. I was fairly proud we’d been able to ration that long, and we’d have been able to go even longer if it hadn’t been for Raf.
Every time I saw the way my brother’s cheeks sunk farther into his face I wanted to scream at them both: tell them how stupid it was to let Raf in. How we’d have had another three weeks otherwise. Raf must have figured how angry I was because he knew to keep clear of me, especially when the heat climbed in the middle of the day.
And then one night I woke up to the sound of a car engine idling. Danny threw down the trap door, keeping the stairs from falling open. A weak light drifted up from below and it took a lot of energy to drag myself across the floor and look down into the garage.