No one’s ever woken my ass up with smelling salts before, so when Billy does it, it hits my nose and hits my brain like a herd of cattle going over the edge of a cliff. My head whips back and the world goes full-tilt boogie for the better part of five seconds.
But it’s only my head that moves. My hands? Bound behind me. My feet are fixed beneath me. Takes me a second to figure that out: I’m tied to a goddamn chair. Held fast by a generous swaddling of duct tape.
Billy’s face roams into view: those scrubby cheeks, that wild hair, that grin that shows off his one cracked canine.
“I got you, brother,” is the first thing he says.
I got you, brother.
He says it like it’s a good thing. Like he’s taking care of me.
(Ain’t that ironic.)
“Billy, you shit, let me go.”
“Maybe soon,” he says. “Maybe soon.”
He pats my cheek, pat pat pat, way a parent condescends to a child.
I think to ask him where we’re at, but my eyes adjust quick enough and tell me true: we’re at Mom and Pop’s cabin up near Lake Wallenpaupack. Cobwebs haunt the corners like ghosts. Everything’s got a greasy sheen of dust on it. An Amish hex hangs above the door. One of Grammy’s quilts hangs above that old leather couch. Kitchen to my right. Hallway and a pair of bedrooms to my left. All around are windows and beyond the glass is the black of night.
On a nightstand, I see it:
My gun. It’s a Smith & Wesson 327. Big grip .357 Magnum with the stubbiest two-inch barrel you’ve ever seen. Like a thumb that’ll pop the brain out the back of your head. I keep that in the truck with me always, just in case. Never know what’s out there on the road, from coyotes to carjackers. And now, so much worse.
“Why are we here, Billy?” I ask, struggling.
“You know why, Max. You know why.”
“Truck’s outside?”
“Truck’s outside. Trailer, too.”
“Then let me free. We gotta go. This isn’t a time to fuck around, Billy. Things are bad out there. Something’s happening—”
“Something’s happened.”
“Whatever!” I bark, angrier-sounding than I mean. “Let me go.”
“I can’t do that.” He’s pacing, now. Back and forth, back and forth, like he wants to wear a rut in the ratty rug on the wooden floor. Every step creaks like the troubled dead. “You know I can’t.”
“You’re high.”
“A little. Just pills. It’s a good high. I’m thinking straight.”
Goddamnit. I try to sand down the bumps in my voice, try to speak calmly—I can’t razz him, or he’ll just recoil further. “Billy. I came to get you because—because I wanted family to be together in this. We’re the last of what we got. Just you and me, now. I saw what was going on out there—not just on the news, Billy, but I saw it on the highway, I saw it in neighborhoods—and I knew I had to come get you.” My mother’s voice rises up in me like an echo bouncing through a cavern: Take care of him, he needs you. Care of him, he needs you. Care of him, needs you …
Billy stops. He’s got a smile hanging between his cheekbones but it’s not a happy one. A sadness lives there. Or maybe died there. “I know, brother. I know. But I also know what you wanted to do. And I couldn’t let you do it. This isn’t about them. This is about us.”
“We can help people.”
“We need to help ourselves.”
“Billy, goddamnit!” That’s when I lose my cool. I feel heat go to my cheeks. Spit wets my lips. I yell at him. I call him names. I don’t mean to. He’s weak and confused and never had his shit together and I’m here taking him apart like I’m whittling twigs with a hunting knife. Every word hurts him, and I can tell because he flinches like he’s taking punches. Finally I guess he just has enough, because next thing I know, he’s pulling out a toolbox from under the side table and drawing a band of duct tape from the roll with a sticky stutter—he wraps it around my head a couple times to shut me up. It only makes me madder, but eventually I’m glad to just hear myself stop yelling. But it leaves me to my thoughts.
And in my thoughts, I think about them.
* * *
First one I saw was on the road. Girl came running up out of the woods along 80, running right out in front of the truck, arms pinwheeling, dress caught in the wind. My foot jammed the brakes. Hydraulics screamed as the truck lurched to a halt—all the while me praying to whatever god that governs the highways that I wouldn’t jackknife my truck. It didn’t. She staggered, fell at the shock of seeing my Peterbilt coming at her.
Then something came out of the woods.
I say something, because that’s what it was. It was human-shaped. But it damn sure wasn’t human. It came slow. One leg hanging limp like a piece of meat it had to drag along instead of use, a sharp bone coming out of its thigh—broken like a broom handle you snapped over one knee.
As it stepped into the light from my truck, I saw that its face was mostly gone. Forehead just a red rotten mess. Scalp ragged. The jaw was still intact, but off-kilter, like it had been set a couple inches too far to one side, and it worked the air with a kind of eager, malevolent hunger. Everything about it was gray. Gray like old meat.
I like to think I got out of that truck, a hero, and saved the day.
But I didn’t.
Best I could muster was lying on the horn hard. And the Peterbilt has a good one—sounds like a boat coming in through the fog. It woke the girl up, got her back up and running in the direction she was going.
The thing out there, that dead thing, the horn got its attention.
It turned toward me. That jaw opening wide, too wide, like a snake thinking on swallowing a fat hare whole. Its tongue flipped and flopped.
I hit the gas. Truck like mine doesn’t leap when it’s kicked—it’s not quick to rouse. But it hissed and it lumbered to a hard and certain roll, and the thing ahead of me didn’t seem to think twice about it. A pair of hands reached for the truck as the lights swallowed it. Like the fucking thing thought it could catch me or something, like it could just reach up and pluck me out through the glass. It couldn’t. The truck rolled over it. The bumper thudded dully against its head. I felt every tire of the truck and the trailer run over the thing’s body, thump, whump, badump. One after the next.
Looking back in the rearview, I saw it in the hell’s glow of the taillights—still moving around even though it had been flattened there like a squirrel. Arms up, reaching for nothing, as if to pull itself up by grabbing hold of the light of the moon.
That thing wasn’t human.
And neither was the scared sound that rose up out of me.
* * *
Second one I saw, I saw in a Giant Eagle parking lot. There by the shopping carts, one of the dead things was lying across a person—still alive, I think—eating out of the back of the guy’s head like it was a soup bowl. Problem is, the dead thing had no bottom. Its torso was gone—all spine and loops of bowels, so as it ate, whatever it ate came back out the bottom. Like it was just making sausage.
The man screamed. I threw up.
* * *
I saw more that night. More of them.
Saw them out there in the woods along the road. Across the highway. Stumbling across overpasses. I hit a few more with my truck. Didn’t stop. Plowed forward. My tires turned them to slop and I kept on keeping on.
That’s when I had the plan.
My trucking company has me doing runs for the store, Giant Eagle. Grocery runs. Not refrigerated, no, but stuff from the Emp-Ag food company—Emp-Ag owns a whole lot. A fifth of what you see on shelves probably comes from one of their companies. They own cereal, soup, spices, soda, bottled water. They own organic brands and store brands. They own highfalutin hipster locavore small-batch bullshit and they own the stuff only poor people can buy. They own it all.
And I carry it all.
I don’t just carry one thing at a time, either. It’s not just a truck full of cereal. It’s pallets of everything. Food and water, the two core components of survival since fish walked out of water and grew getaway sticks. Cereal and soda. Beef jerky and lemonade. I got every last bit.
And as the fire sirens went off, and as the radio went dead, I knew this was something big and bad and I knew that maybe one day it would be okay again, but that day wasn’t today, and that meant I had to survive whatever this was and whatever was still coming down the pike.
But I don’t believe in surviving alone. Being a truck driver, sure, you’re alone, but you’re part of something. You’re a blood cell in the American artery. I move things from Point A to Point B. You want to see the country fall apart, you take out the truckers first. Wanna save the country, you save the truck drivers. We’ll keep it all together.
So I said to myself, you ain’t taking me out.
I thought, I’m gonna take this show on the road.
I know the highways. I know the back roads.
I know the towns with good people.
I know who needs help.
The vision bloomed like a flower in my head, made me feel mad and giddy like I was high on something other than my own pants-shitting fear. I’ll drive around. I’ll give out food and water. Maybe I’ll find a town to hunker down in, help the people there. The Peterbilt can get me there. It’ll get me through all these suckers. Mow ’em down, one by one.
But first, I thought, I needed my brother.
* * *
Billy wakes me up by talking. I didn’t even know I fell asleep, but I did—nose whistling as the tape pulls hard at my stubbled cheeks. My chin had dipped to my chest and when I yank my head back pain shoots through my neck just from sitting in a bad position for so long.
“Climate change,” he’s saying, like I missed the first part of the thought. “Thawing everything out. You get reindeer thawed out and then you get anthrax coming back. Maybe it’s anthrax or something like it.” He looks at me, then says, “Oh, you’re awake,” like he knew I was asleep but just kept talking anyway. “I was just saying, it’s climate change. We did this to ourselves. Warmed everything up and diseases are rampant.”
He comes over, rips part of the tape off my mouth—the flap hangs loose, so when I talk, it flutters like the wing of a moth. My cheeks burn like they’ve been slapped.
“It’s not a disease,” I say, wincing. “Diseases don’t do this.”
“You don’t know that. I read things. You never read much.”
“I read comic books.”
“There’s your problem,” he says, snapping his fingers. “I read like, books books, brother. You know there’s a fungus that turns ants into zombies? And wasps that can control roaches by messing with their heads? There’s that cat-shit parasite, too. Changes the way you think of things. Makes rats wanna fuck cats. Turns humans into hoarders. We haven’t even cracked the case on what microbes and parasites can do.”
“Doesn’t matter what it is,” I say. My voice sounds like I’m humming through a jar of gravel. “You and me aren’t going to fix it. But what we can do is help people.”
“We help each other. We’re family.”
“We can help other survivors, too.”
“They aren’t family.”
“They don’t have to be.”
“Yes they do!” he says, hurrying over, his jaw so tight I’m afraid he might crack a tooth. “They do. Mom and Pop said family was everything.”
“Dad was a police officer. He knew it was bigger than that.”
Billy leans back then. Smug, somehow. Arms folded in front of him all protective. “And where’d that get him, huh?”
It got him dead, Billy. We all know that.
“Fuck you, Billy. You weak-ass piece of shit.”
He slaps the tape back across my mouth. “You’ll thank me,” he says. “You’ll figure out soon enough that we only need each other.”
* * *
Pop, he died from being a cop. Not like you think. He didn’t get shot or anything. He was on a routine stop on the highway, standing there writing a ticket for someone who had been speeding—and a drunk driver in a brand new Camaro came whipping past. Front end hit his hip, twisted him up like a corkscrew, shattering most of what was inside him. He died there on the road, bleeding out like that thing with its lower half missing.
Mom, well. She went slower. It was her lower half, too, though: colon cancer had been cooking her bowels low and slow for months, years, who even knows how long. We got to talk a good bit because that kind of death is bad in part because it takes so damn long.
Her face was like paper. Her eyes shot through with blood. She held my hand tight, though, with surprising strength, when she talked about Billy.
“He’s not like you,” she said.
“I know that. But he’s fine.”
“He’s not fine. He doesn’t have it together.”
“Not yet.”
“He shoulda, by now. He’s past thirty.”
I shrugged and just told her that it seemed people didn’t grow up as fast as they used to. An excuse, I knew. In part because Billy was all of our fault. He was hers and Pop’s and even mine. He was what he was because somehow, we made him that way. Either through how we treated him or through whatever we had crawling around in our DNA.
“You’re the older brother,” she said, almost an accusation.
“I know that.”
“When I die—”
“We don’t know you’re going to die,” I said at the time even though I knew at the time she was. We all knew it. On the simplest level, we all die. That’s not a thing you get away from. But her? She was coming up on it faster than most. Driving right toward that cliff and yet there I was pretending it was a road ahead and not a thousand-foot drop.
“I’m dead already, my brain just hasn’t caught up. When I die—no protests, now!—when I die, you take care of him. You take care of him! He needs you. You listening? Billy can’t do this by himself. Take care of him.”
“I will, Mom.”
“You better.”
“I will.”
“You’re a good boy, Max.”
“You were a good mother.” Were, I said. Not are. There I was, betraying exactly what I didn’t want to tell her—made me feel like a right shitty coward saying that to her. I saw her face tighten as it came out of me. It stung her. But whaddya gonna do. I said what I said and I couldn’t reel it back in and say it differently. Best I could do was smile.
And I made her that promise.
Take care of Billy.
That’s why I went to get him that night.
* * *
I didn’t give him long to pack. He wanted to take time and put together a whole suitcase, but I said we didn’t want to mess around. I’d seen those things in his neighborhood. I heard screams coming from down the block, where those rat-ass condos were, where those hillbillies sell weed and meth. As he packed his shit, I told him the plan. Get in the truck. Drive around. Help people. Like the ice cream man of the fucking apocalypse, I said all manic like. He didn’t respond to that so I tried just small talk—
Was he still with that girl, Jasmine?
(No.)
He still have that job at the pawn shop?
(No, and blah blah blah it was their fault for losing him.)
Well, he paying his bills okay?
(Yes, of course, he said too defensively—meaning he wasn’t.)
I told him I could get him a job maybe at the trucking company—Billy’d gone and gotten his CDL same as I had, and used to drive a dump truck for the quarry, so he knew how to handle a rig.
He was done, we went out to the truck.
He picked up something off his lawn.
I turned, saw him there with a clay pot that contained a set of dead geraniums. He had it raised above his head.
Then he brought it down on mine.
Next thing I knew, I woke up here in Mom and Pop’s cabin.
* * *
Billy’s eating dry ramen noodles like that’s a thing you do. He’s not even breaking bits off—he’s eating it like it’s a fucking biscuit or something. Taking big bites right out of it, crunch crunch crunch. He must see the way I’m looking at him because he says, “I saw corn chips but the pallet was in the back.” All he would’ve had to do was move them around, but Billy’s always been a lazy fucker. I try to tell him what he is.
“Mphlaby pphhggr,” I fail to say behind the tape.
He rolls his eyes, comes over, peels the tape off again.
“You want some?” he asks, holding the ramen package at me. The wrapping crinkles and crunches.
“No. I could use some water, though. Throat’s dry as a bone.”
He nods, goes and gets me a Coke. “I have one open.”
It’s warm and fizzy and it burns my throat, but it’s something, and I gulp it greedily. I gasp as I finish and pull my face away. “Billy, listen. It’s dangerous being here. We’re in the middle of nowhere—”
“Exactly. Nothing’s gonna find us here.”
“You don’t know that.”
“What’s even around? Nothing.”
“Nothing? Two campgrounds in five miles. Plus the old Methodist church up past the bend—they got a damn graveyard.”
“This is a disease. A disease doesn’t affect the already dead.” He laughs like I’m the idiot. Like he’s the expert at something other than being a bona fide fuck-up.
I steel myself. “Here’s what we do, Bill. You and me, we get back in the truck. We forget everything that happened here. We won’t stop anywhere. We don’t have to help people. Just you and me on the road. Mobile. Ready to go at a moment’s notice. Truck cab has a bunk. The trailer is safe, locked up tight. It’s like a mobile fortress.” It’s a lie, in part. I’m not abandoning my mission. I just need him to believe it. If he buys it, I’ll knock the teeth out of his mouth and drag him wherever I want him to go—or leave him here in the woods to get eaten by them.
He swallows visibly. “You wanna go out there?” Billy waves me off. “I hit you too hard, big brother. Knocked some seeds loose in that gourd of yours. Out there is where they are. We’re safe here. Besides, this is our cabin. Our family’s cabin. Remember?” His eyes go foggy as he stares at an unfixed point. He smiles. “Remember coming up here. Bag of marshmallows for the fire outside. Hatfield hot dogs. Pop with his pipe. Mom with her wine. You and me out there, messing around—hah, you remember that time you took pinesap and rubbed it in my hair? Mom had to cut off a whole hank of it—had to shave my head to hide the bald patch!” And now he’s laughing, braying like a mule until he’s wheezing and damn near crying. His mirth dissolves into something more like maudlin grief before he slumps against the couch arm, staring off at nothing.
I’m about to tell him I remember, and I remember that time he ran off without telling everyone and we were worried all day. I remember the time he almost burned the cabin down with one of Pop’s old cigarettes. I remember the time he threw my Walkman into the lake because—I can’t even recall why he did it, just that he was mad at me for some stupid shit.
But I don’t get to say it.
Because we both hear the sound.
A sharp snap outside. Like a branch breaking clean in half.
He gasps. Then immediately he’s saying, “It’s nothing. Just a deer.”
A shushing shuffle follows. Like feet through leaves. Slow. Deliberate. A hissing susurrus.
He holds a finger to his lips.
“The gun,” I hiss.
He mouths one word: What?
“The. Gun.”
Billy swallows hard, looking around for the revolver—I gesture toward it with my head but he finally sees it on his own. He fumbles for it and holds it in a trembling grip.
Could just be an animal, I think. Maybe he’s right. Or maybe it’s a survivor. And that creates its own worry, because not every survivor is going to be someone looking for shelter or someone looking to help. You get a disaster like this, more people want to help than hurt—but you always have people who want to take advantage, who want to steal, rob, rape, kill. Then my mind runs away as I start thinking that whatever is really going on, the real danger isn’t in what’s coming but what’s already here.
Silence stretches out like a hangman’s rope.
“Billy,” I whisper as loud as one can whisper. “Come cut me free.”
His answer is again holding a finger to his lips.
I’m about to chastise him—
But I don’t get the chance.
The window behind me shatters. Glass clatters at my feet. I can’t see what’s happening because I’m facing the wrong damn way, but a new shadow enters the room and I hear the gassy, wet gurgle behind me—the pawing, the scraping, the viscera gush, and I see that reflected in Billy’s eyes. Eyes struck wide with fear. Gun up. Hands shaking.
I’m screaming at him to shoot, shoot—
He pulls the trigger.
Click.
Shit.
He never loaded it.
I don’t keep it loaded. Not legal to keep it loaded. I keep the speed-loader under my seat and of course Billy didn’t think to look—he’s not stupid, but he’s high, and he never checked the damn gun—
Something grabs at me from behind—rotten, soft hands on my shoulders, and with it comes a smell like you get when you drive past a dead deer on a summer day: sickly sweet, pickled death, rancid as hot puke. I cry out and do all I can do, which is rock hard to the side—
The chair goes down as I slip from the thing’s grip. Bam.
My shoulder cracks hard against the floor. I crane my neck just so. And it lets me see what’s come inside our cabin.
It’s a man. Or was. Gray cheeks striated with wine-dark stains. Eyes like fat corks straining against the mooring of their puffy sockets. Fluid leaks from cracked lips and black blood crawls from puckered nose holes. I try to imagine who this man was once: a polo shirt soggy with stains, a pair of cargo shorts ripped and ruined, a set of boat shoes muddy and gory. A camper, maybe. A family man, maybe. Doesn’t matter.
Whoever he was isn’t who he is now.
That man is gone.
What’s left is death and hunger, grotesquely intertwined.
The thing lurches toward me. I don’t know what else to do so I shift my hips and the chair judders along the floor—the thing’s legs step into the tangle of the chair’s legs and then the dead thing comes toppling down—
Right on top of me.
Its mouth is right over me. Shriveled teeth inside gummy sockets. Tongue like a separate thing, like a snake trying to escape its handler.
Then it’s gone. A thudding sound fills the air and it rolls away. Billy drags it off of me. He gets on top of it and brings a side table with a lamp down onto the thing’s head. Then he lifts it up and does it again.
And again.
And again.
Until soon it’s all just mess. Like a raccoon hit by a score of cars and trucks. Tires turning it to a pudding of hair and organs and mess.
* * *
Billy lets me go. He’s upset. Rattled by what just happened. So am I, but I’m keeping it together better.
“We’re not safe here,” he says, packing up his bag. His voice is shaking. Not even shaking: vibrating. “You were right.”
“It’s okay,” I say.
“We do it your way.”
“Okay, Billy, okay.” I swallow a little pride and I say, “You saved me. I won’t forget that.”
He offers me a weak, mushy smile. “When Mom died,” Billy says, “she told me to take care of you. Said you needed me.”
I can’t help but laugh. I don’t bother telling him she said the same damn thing to me. I just nod and tell him he’s right. I do. That’s why I came to get him, because I needed him.
“I’ll take care of you,” he says.
“And I’ll take care of you,” I say back.
Then on the way out to the truck, I see it. Along the underside of his right forearm—two half-moon injuries. Bite marks. The damn thing bit him. My gorge surges. All the stuff Billy said about diseases and parasites comes back into my head and I look down at the gun in his hand and I think to the speed-loader full of rounds under my seat.
And Mom’s voice hits me again:
Take care of him.
Take care of him …
. .