THE DEAD OUTSIDE MY DOOR

STEVE RASNIC TEM

Some days the dead drifted: the ones empty of viscera, whose skeletons had worn wafer-thin, whose remaining skin was like parchment. They were as vague and insubstantial as memories imperfectly recalled. Sometimes the slightest breeze picked them up and tumbled them along the ground or flew them like kites. Jay suspected no one flew kites anymore and he didn’t have the words to express how sad this made him.

He saw but this limited sample of the world, but he assumed only the dead gathered in groups. He couldn’t imagine more church picnics or basketball games, sports of any kind. People—assuming there were others alive in the way he was alive—now understood what they always tried not to know, that they lived their imperfect lives alone.

The wind blew the dead into mangled clumps or dangled them from trees, still animated, gesturing their unconscious dismay. For the past few months, a semblance of a human being hung from the top branches of the hemlock across the road. He’d watched its slow dissolve into fluttering, translucent wisps of skin, so like a deteriorating plastic bag.

This new normal was not as it was once portrayed in the movies, the TV shows, the comic books. Not at all. He and his brother had had lengthy arguments over who was best prepared in the event of a zombie apocalypse. They didn’t know what the hell they were talking about.

Jay considered it essential all this be documented. Perhaps there were others writing this down or making recordings, but he couldn’t be sure. He had no illusions about his own importance, or his talent. At least he could put words on paper. He said them out loud first until they sounded right, then he wrote them down. At times they never sounded right, no matter how many ways he said them, and he would get discouraged, and behind. He might go a couple of weeks without writing, and then he had to rely on memory. Certain observations were lost, but those probably weren’t the important ones. He kept talking even if he wasn’t writing the words down to pretend he was having actual conversations.

He would talk to himself for hours and it all sounded quite wonderful, and he’d become drunk on the words and forget to write them. Or his hands would cramp near the end of a long session and he could no longer read his own handwriting. All in all, he was a poor selection for the role of scribe, but there had been a serious lack of volunteers.

“The dead are unaware. They’ve been blessed that way. At least that is my hope. If they have an awareness, even a small one, that’s too terrible to think about. It’s springtime, at least I think it is. I haven’t been outside in months and if Mom and Dad owned a calendar, I haven’t been able to find it. But the windows are full of green, and the air carries spring’s odor of sweetness, the scent of flowers and moist breezes, and underneath all that, rot, the stench you get when the ground breaks open after a long, deep winter. And now, unfortunately, the corrupt smell of human decay, everywhere.

“In Southwest virginia spring usually means oaks and maples budding into life, fresh produce in the restaurants, outdoor music concerts, walls of mountain laurel along the paths, weekend trips to the catfish pond, explosions of rhododendron, the pleasing smell of honeysuckle, violets and fleabane, wild red geraniums, azalea bushes, flowering dogwoods with white and pink blossoms. It has always been beautiful country. In many ways it still is. I have to say I’ve never seen so many different shades of green as I can see here in my windows.

“When I say the windows are full of green, I mean that literally. Every year when growing season comes the weeds and the vines and the bushes are so aggressive, they cover the house in no time. I get tired of hacking them away. I can’t keep up. All the windows are covered by a couple of years’ worth of vine, the dead stuff closest to the glass, the new green stuff on top, sending feelers inside. I keep the attic window relatively clear, so I can get air into the house. Of course, it’s an old house and air leaks in anyway, so I figure that means this ailment isn’t airborne, right? Otherwise I would have turned already unless I’m immune. I don’t really know, and I have no one to ask. Some day I will have to get out there and cut all the growth away, otherwise it’ll pull the house apart. At least I think so. I don’t look forward to spending extensive time outside.”

Besides the burgeoning growth, the dead were more in evidence this time of year. Jay didn’t know why—maybe they didn’t like the cold. He had never believed Mother Nature had any sort of intelligence, or any sort of consciousness, but some chain of events must have been triggered, an unknown tipping point surpassed.

His brother had hated the cold. When Ryan was a kid, he couldn’t wear enough sweaters and socks. This past winter Jay had been sorely tempted to go outside and throw a blanket over Ryan. He never did. Through the sidelights by the front door he could see his brother’s body greening up, splotched with moss and lichen and ground covers supplying modesty patches where his shorts had rotted away. Ryan’s head still moved aimlessly. He appeared to be looking at the front door, looking for Jay. Jay avoided gazing at his brother, afraid their eyes might meet.

“The day I saw Ryan sprawled near the front steps I wanted to rush out and drag him inside. But I didn’t. I didn’t want to take the risk. Besides, he wasn’t the same Ryan anymore, I didn’t think. I wish I could be sure.

“I don’t know how long he’d been there. I almost never looked out those windows. His feet and one arm were missing. I wondered if some predator carried them away. I don’t see how he could have made it this far without feet. But he hasn’t gotten any closer. I don’t think he can.

“I figure he was trying to get home the way I was. I just got here first. Mom and Dad weren’t here. Maybe they went out to find us. I’ll never know. But they never came back, and now I can only hope I never see them again.

“Ryan would have been a lot better at this. He was good with his hands, and knew about wells and electricity and plumbing, running a farm, raising food, using a compass. He’d have been a great Robinson Crusoe. I read Robinson Crusoe, and Defoe’s other novels, but never learned anything practical from them. Dad would have wanted Ryan to run this place. He would have been disappointed with how I’ve let everything fall apart.”

Jay getting to the farm first had been a matter of luck. He’d already been on his way, his car packed with all he owned. He’d just dropped out of college in his senior year, six months before graduation, a graduation which wasn’t going to happen anyway. He was still figuring out what he was going to tell his parents, but it was a long drive. He had time to figure out an explanation for why he was disappointing them once again.

He knew he shouldn’t be there anymore. He didn’t know what he could do with an English degree anyway. Oh yeah, chronicle the end of humanity.

He’d just left the Richmond city limits, west on Interstate 64, when he saw people driving off the highway, accidents everywhere. He tried to get off at Charlottesville, but all the exits were jammed. Near Waynesboro he saw his first pile of bodies, along with some struggling to free themselves from dead weight and tangled limbs. He stopped the car and tried to help a young woman, but there was something wrong with her. She didn’t try to attack him. Again, not like in the movies, but she scared him, because she seemed to be losing bits of herself, leaving them in a trail behind her in the grass.

His cellphone was useless. On I-81 he tried tuning up and down the dial, getting rational snippets, but no answers. It was his last exposure to mass media, and he didn’t expect to encounter it again in his lifetime.

It took him an embarrassing length of time after he arrived home to realize all their farm animals were gone. Maybe his parents liberated them before they went looking for their sons, or maybe it was something more sinister, or maybe there was a simple explanation he hadn’t thought of. It was a question Jay was never able to answer.

“Ryan should be the one recording this. He was the star. He always had practical strategies for almost every situation. He was the one who had the best ideas about what we could do if the zombies ever came. Of course, he was completely wrong about that, but maybe he’d have better ideas now.

“Is this an epidemiological event, a metaphysical catastrophe, or the result of warfare? Ryan would be the first to say it doesn’t matter. The world has turned back to a time when no one knew anything about anything, so they made up explanations as they went along.”

Jay never knew the time, or if the kitchen wall clock was ever correct. He knew eventually he would run through his parents’ huge store of batteries, and then it would fail.

If he’d been thinking clearly, he could have created a calendar from the beginning, even if it were simply marks on a wall. He could remember neither the day nor the date he first arrived. He knew there were ways using instruments or astronomical knowledge to figure those things out, but he possessed none of those skills.

In his new world there were warm days and cold days, days with more sun than others, days which were longer or shorter than others, days when it rained, days when the sky was beautiful and he was tempted, but didn’t dare, go outside.

There were frequent electrical outages. This caused him great anxiety since electricity powered the pump for the well. Eventually he would lose power. That he had it now seemed a miracle; wasn’t some sort of maintenance required? He had no idea how things worked now, but then he never had. He didn’t dare hope there were people still running things.

Within months of his arrival home his life before began to feel like a dream. He couldn’t quite believe he had ever attended classes, gone out to movies, or had friends. After the first year he began to entertain the possibility he might have hallucinated that entire other life. A lifetime in isolation was a difficult fate. Imagining a former life which included people seemed a logical remedy.

* * *

“I still have enough food for six months or so if I’m careful. Mom and Dad kept years of it: jars, bottles, and cans stuffed into every corner of the cellar. There’s some meat left in the big freezer. But at some point, obviously, I’ll have to leave. I’ll have to go exploring outside.

“The dead don’t bother you. Again, nothing like the movies. The few times I had to go out, to unload the car, to retrieve stuff from the barn, I was clumsy. I made noise. I even screamed once when one of them surprised me. They don’t notice you’re there. The dead don’t care. But I don’t want to have whatever it is they have.

“I have no idea how it all works, how you get infected. If it’s not the air, then maybe it’s the touch, or something else. Certain people get it right away and a few people can’t get it at all, although I haven’t seen anyone else who wasn’t dead. At least I don’t think so. Maybe it’s something we don’t even have words for. No pronouns, no nouns, no adjectives, no verbs—maybe nothing I can say has anything to do with what is happening to the world.”

The narrow, paved road through the farm was rarely used. It was an access road to smaller farms and properties beyond, and another, bigger road leading into Tennessee. It was unpaved the year Jay was born. They had their buildings and the garden on this side of the road. The other side was all hayfields and pastures for the cattle. They’d never had many visitors. Most people were just passing through.

The dead often arrived two or three at a time, sometimes in a group of a dozen or more, most on the road, and a few came out of the distant fields. Many wore pieces of clothing. Others didn’t even have their skin.

Most of the dead staggered on, to the farms and lands beyond, but several stopped here, where an accumulation of them remained. Did they know he was here, though they paid him no attention? They lay down in the yard, or they lingered among the trees, or leaned against the barn. They stood out in the fields like noble scarecrows, until bit by bit they went away, perhaps stolen by the animals Jay never saw.

During the previous late fall and winter, a lesser number of the dead came with the weather. The wind blew them in, or they drifted out of the clouds with the snow, or they arrived like hail and shattered when they hit. Clouds rolled in and clouds rolled away, stars appeared, snow drifted, and the empty dead floated by.

“I know little about the human body. I doubt I could pass a basic anatomy test. I know nothing of pathology, or of the stages of decomposition, but what I see out of the attic window makes no sense. From up here, surrounded by my family’s aged possessions, relics of a world that is no longer, I get a pretty good view of our farm: the yard, the barn, the sheds, the empty chicken coop, the weed-filled vegetable garden, the endless pastures. All of it smothered in green and a vinery brown, the land overgrown and the structures collapsing.

“And scattered throughout: the dead, like Halloween decorations, grotesque marionettes, pale ornaments dangling from trees, broken bits moving in a corner or ditch. These ghastly memorials show an unlikely variety in rates of decay—I wish there were a doctor I could speak to for some logical explanation. Why do some look so healthy, as if they were sleep walking, or just staggering down to the fridge for a glass of milk, and others appear to have been in the ground for years, recently dug up and whatever’s left of them somehow animated?

“For many of those walking the roads their locomotion seems an impossibility. They shouldn’t be able to sustain themselves mechanically as the connective tissue and the joints begin to fail. A hand drops off, an arm. Some do collapse because their legs will no longer support them, and they literally fall to pieces.

“Even many of the relatively fresh-looking ones degenerate at a rapid rate. By the time they get from one edge of our property to the other an accelerated decay has reduced them to almost nothing.

“I’ve watched how, for a few, a kind of self-digestion occurs. As they wobble down the road their bellies or their groins suddenly split open, and a foul mess of organs drops out. Some look down at this point, watching themselves stepping through their own insides. Others—perhaps the lucky ones—continue as if nothing has occurred.

“So, like the rest of us, the dead are both individuals and part of the herd. It makes sense—each of us suffers a different death, but we all, every one of us, dies. I think maybe I’m not out of the woods yet. I might still come down with this, and at any time.

“I use us as if it’s a given. I have no idea. I never thought I was special. Now I hope to God I’m not.”

Jay utilized his dad’s old binoculars to get a better look at their faces. Early on, these faces were still recognizable as once-living personalities, with varying proportions, and individual noses, chins, eyes, and the like. Their features showed a range in expression, although for the most part these were simulations of living emotions, some variation of surprise, shock, or alarm.

Given their ages (although death, like the camera, can add years to a face), he assumed he’d know a few of them from high school or elementary, or he might have seen them in town. He tried not to make comparisons or think too much about familiar details. This continued to nag him, and when further deterioration resulted in anonymity, he felt relieved.

In some the eyeballs fell out. In others the eyeballs shrank and receded into the skull. Sometimes there was liquification and bloating. Or there was significant aridity and a paper-like appearance. Sometimes a dark leakage from the abdomen would dribble down the legs. Sometimes the skin looked tight and stretched like a drum. In others there was a great deal of skin slippage and teeth falling out. The world of the dead was every bit as unequal and unjust as the world of the living.

In church, when Jay was small, the preacher said when the rapture happens the souls of the believers would be delivered to heaven, leaving their sinful bodies behind. One afternoon he thought he saw the preacher’s body lurching up the road. He turned away and went downstairs. He wasn’t sure if it was out of respect, but he didn’t want to see any more.

Then there had been the girl he’d always wanted to ask out in high school, but never did. He’d been too shy. Lately the dead who appeared on the road were so deteriorated, even if she’d been among them, he would not have recognized her. He was grateful for that much.

“All my life I’ve dreamed of the dead. Both in waking dreams and sleeping dreams I have seen them: passing through rooms, gliding across lawns, sometimes perched on rooftops. Sometimes in these dreams they confront me, angry because of something I’ve done or simply because I’m still alive. I’ve always come away from these dreams feeling guilty, either because of something thoughtless I said or something heartfelt I lacked the courage to reveal. But the most peculiar thing is that I’ve never dreamt of the actual dead. The dead people in my dreams have always been living at the time.

“Like everyone else I’ve lost elderly relatives. We expect grandparents to die, older parents, old men and women in the neighborhood. It seems natural. I loved my grandfather very much; he built this farm from nothing. But the last decade of his life I pulled away from him. I was still glad to see him when I did, but I didn’t seek him out. Part of it was I was busy with my own life, and we didn’t have as much in common anymore. But I know much of it was because I realized his life was on its way out. He was going to die relatively soon, and I didn’t want to be close enough to watch.

“I’m ashamed of that now. I wanted to ask him how it felt—I admit that was more about my own anxieties than anything meant to comfort him—but I wanted to know how it was to lose most of the people you’d ever known, most of the people you’d ever loved, and knowing you were both the last and the next. No wonder the old looked so tired and moved as if they were carrying a great weight.

“I wish I had asked. I could really use that information right now.

“The first young person I knew who died was a popular high school boy who lived on a farm a few miles away. I was in elementary school, but everyone knew who he was—a star player on the high school football team, in the choir at church, and he always smiled and said hello to me even though I was just this scrawny kid he didn’t really know.

“His junior year he was on a tractor helping his dad out when it rolled over on him, trapping him underneath. All the boys drove tractors around here, helping on the family farm. They tried everything to get him out while he screamed until he passed out, but he died under there.

“For years I just couldn’t get him out of my head. Anytime anything big happened—a huge snowstorm, an important game, a new Star Wars film, the terrorist attack on the World Trade Center—the first thing I thought was Frankie missed this, like he missed falling in love, getting married, having kids, having a career. I wouldn’t have said it was unfair because that’s just the way life works. But I thought it was strange, the way it all works, a short life and a forever death. For the dead, death just is, I suppose. For the living it’s about everything they missed, and what you miss about them. Until now, of course.

“What is happening now is much stranger. I’m glad Frankie died all those years ago, and not recently. I wouldn’t want to see him walking around dead, like my brother Ryan before he ended up by the front steps.

“I haven’t written down anything in a while. Sometimes I don’t see the point. The power has been blinking out a lot lately. The other day it must have been 8 hours or more. Pretty soon it will go out for good. I’ve been lucky to have it this long. But the pump isn’t working right, I think maybe because of all the power outages. You can’t live without water. I may not know much about survival, but I know that much.

“I’ve got a backpack filled with some food, a blanket, a knife and a few tools, a change of clothes, extra shoes, some first aid stuff. I’ll bring the journal and several pens as well. I’ll see new things, so I’ll have new things to write about.

“I’m a fool for not thinking more about what to pack for my exit from home. I had the time. I’m a fool for not maintaining my car. But I didn’t want to go out there, and who knows if there’s any gas to be found, or a clear space to drive. Lately the dead fill the road. I’ll know soon enough. I’ll know a lot of things I don’t know now. Human beings, we’re always learning.”

Jay went out the front door the next morning. He left the door open, for another survivor, or as a new space the dead could—whatever. He would have liked to stay and watch that happen. That would have been too foolish even for him.

He would look for a place with a spring—quite possible in southwest virginia, and if there was a store nearby, he was all set. Problem solved.

He stopped at Ryan’s body and watched him for a few moments. The body wasn’t exactly moving, but Jay detected a subtle trembling, a vibration, a Ryan quake. His brother had turned his face downward, as if in a deep contemplation of the ground and what lay beyond.

The dead in the yard paid no attention. He meant nothing to them. He dwelled in a different universe. There was a pervasive stench which, although not fresh, was deeply unpleasant. He was now close enough to examine the dead more thoroughly, but chose not to, assuming he would have many such chances later.

When he stepped onto the road Jay was pleased to see he would be able to ease past the walking forms without having to touch them. He wasn’t sure which direction to take. It made little difference, but he decided to go right first, toward the small towns, for a greater selection of supplies. It did mean going against traffic, for all the dead were traveling the other way. Another thing he’d never been able to figure out—why all in the same direction? There was nothing for them there.

He was so tired. He hadn’t slept well in, what? Months. He felt his hands trembling and brought them up to his face. When had they gotten so thin? And spotted. He had brownish spots everywhere. As his mother turned old she used to call those age spots. And skin so thin it looked like tissue. But still he looked better than these poor souls. So many things had happened to him. He was last of his kind.

He became momentarily confused and wasn’t sure where he was going. He turned and turned and finally fell into pace with the rest of them.

He felt a great weight pressing on his shoulders. He may have put too much into his pack. He kept moving his feet, but it was becoming increasingly difficult. He was aware when the lower part of his body let go. There was a hushing sound, and a tremendous release. A great sigh rushed through him. He was still thinking. He was still thinking.