Dar settled near the back of the barn, keeping a close eye on Styx sleeping on a bale of hay. Flies buzzed around the boy's head and caused him to wrinkle his tiny nose. The odor of hay and horse shit reminded her of that brutal Maine winter spent on her uncle's farm. She was upset with herself because she'd left her pack back in the rig. Why it meant so much to her she didn't quite know. Maybe it was because her uncle's zombified head, like her father's rambling manuscript, remained the last link to her family history.
The light inside the barn began to fade and the walls swayed as the wind outside picked up. Styx tossed and turned in his sleep, punching his arms in the air at the zombies invading his tortured dream. Strands of hay clung to his sweaty cheeks whenever he turned his head. The other survivors sat talking in small groups or else took naps. Their numbers had been cut down significantly in the last twenty-four hours and she wondered how many more would die before it was all said and done.
Virgil had been right about coming here. She'd obviously overlooked the man's talents back at the Boston Common. Then again, he was only one out of a few thousand people living there and had kept a low profile, having flown under everyone's radar. Who knew he'd been a prestigious scientist at MIT and had taught biology? Did it matter? There were hundreds of smart people living inside that camp, including doctors, professors and engineers. Snow's narrow academic skills wouldn't have parlayed well in that situation anyways unless he'd come up with an antidote to the plague, which he clearly hadn't.
She asked one of the girls to keep an eye on Styx and then walked around the barn to survey the situation. People greeted her with a subservient nod or nervous smile, indicating that she'd not yet lost all their support. She wasn't naive enough not to realize that much of it came from the sharpened blade of her ax. But she also knew that at some point she'd need to earn their trust or else she too would fall from grace.
Gasps went up as wind gusts caused the barn to sway noticeably. She opened the barn door and saw all the trees bending in the wind. Debris flew up and swirled in eddies passing over the fields. Streaks of lightning spider-webbed across the sky. The wind blew so hard that she struggled to close the barn door and secure it. It whistled and moaned as it passed through the tree limbs and flew up over the barn's shingles. She saw a basket of bread and some fruit sitting on one of the bales of hay. Realizing that she was hungry, she grabbed a pear and took a bite out of it, savoring the sweetness of its pale green flesh.
Thunder cracked overhead, causing the ground to shake. A hard, pounding rain began to fall upon the roof like machine gunfire. By the time she made it back to her son she noticed an unfamiliar person lying across from the boy. It was the young soldier who had joined up with their group. That she thought of him as young struck her as odd; she was not even twenty herself. But then again she felt she'd grown old before her time trying to survive in these times and keep everyone safe.
She sat down next to Styx and excused the girl watching him. The soldier lay across from her, his hand on his cheek and propping up his muscular torso. He smiled as he watched her brush Styx's sweaty locks over.
“Fuck you looking at?”
“People around here scared shitless of you, saying you one crazy bitch. You sure don't look that scary-crazy to me.”
Dar had a right mind to go over and kick his ass but decided to keep calm for the sake of the people mourning around them.
“Find it hard to believe all the stories they been saying about you. How you such a badass.”
She continued to stroke Styx's curly locks, not bothering to look at him.
“They saying you ran that camp back in Boston with an iron fist. Killing zombies for the fun of it. Damn!”
She glanced over at him with her grimmest expression.
“Whoa! Now I'm not saying I don't believe it, just find it hard to picture a girl like you being so gangster.”
“Go fuck yourself.”
“I'm just saying.”
“Why don't you go bother someone else and leave me alone?”
“Because I'm the only one here not scared shitless of you. Felt I needed to introduce myself while I got the chance, hoping you might take pity on a poor brother from another mother.”
Dar stared at him, trying to keep from laughing. The smart-ass soldier was right. She was like the prettiest girl in school who no one asked to the dance because they were too scared. But not this guy. She could see he'd grown a pair during the crisis and could be of use. Besides, this kid had never seen the dark side of her personality that had caused every other person in this barn to tremble in fear whenever she approached.
“What's your name again?”
“Eddie Brown, but my peeps call me Brownie.”
“Where you from, Brownie?”
“Grew up outside of Seattle in a cozy seaside ghetto called Tacoma.”
“Sounds like a real dump.”
“Dump'd be a step up from this place. Lived in a hood filled with zombies before they was the real thing. Guess I was ahead of my time.”
“Look, Brownie, we'll soon be heading out to Washington State. If you want to tag along and be of some use, maybe you can find members of your own family.”
“My family? Ha! Could barely find them when they was alive, so what makes you think I'll find them now? They was all gang-bangers, drug dealers and convicts. Of course I imagine they all gone by now, swept up in this plague. But they was already dead before they died.”
“Wow. Thought I had it bad growing up.”
“We wasn't poor. No, poor would have been a step up in class in my section of the hood. My old man used to come by every blue moon to beg my mom for a few dollars. My mama drank her welfare checks away, watching Jerry Springer and Maury Povich instead of her own kids. You ain't seen a real zombie until you seen my mama by dinnertime. I once found her passed out on the lawn and had to carry her back inside.”
“Bummer.”
Thunder clapped overhead followed by a frightening gust of wind.
“Yeah, life sucks and then you die—then you come back to life again,” he said, laughing. “How about you?”
“Grew up a rich, spoiled brat in a multi-million dollar condo in the heart of Boston. Ate organic crap until it was coming out of my ears and went to the most expensive private schools and shrinks in town.”
“Whoa! You were once a rich bitch? Hard to believe.”
“All true.”
“Your old man a CEO or something?”
“Ever heard of the writer Thomas Swiftley?”
“Not much of a reader. But I love movies.”
“Well, a lot of people bought his bullshit novels. Even made a crappy movie out of one of them.”
“Sounds like you got a serious beef with the dude.”
Dar laughed. “Yeah, you could say I got a beef with him. It's why I want to travel out to Washington State and tie up some loose ends, if you catch my drift.”
“Dude brought home some serious chedda. What's so wrong with that?”
“You don't have to be poor to be miserable.”
“Yeah, but it don't hurt none to have a few dead presidents in your pocket.”
“My parents were phonies. Neither one of them could ever see the pain my brother and I were in,” she said, wondering why she was opening up to this flippant shit. But she had to admit it that felt good to get some of this off her chest. “My mother was messed-up big time but my dad never even noticed her. Dude only saw what he wanted to see.”
“Don't sound like a bad life to me coming from a neighborhood where all you hear is gunshots all day instead of birds chirping.”
“I'd rather live in this world any day than go back to the way I was living.”
“That bad, huh?”
“My father wasn't there for me when I most needed him. In all the interviews he gave he claimed that family was the most important thing in his life. But it was all an act. And when he was home he was either up in the study writing or holed up reading in his library slurping scotch. The rest of the time he was traveling around the country, promoting his latest novel,” she said, cuddling next to Styx. “It's why my mother cheated on my father throughout their marriage. She used to take me along with her when I was little and leave me in the other room while she got it on.”
“And your dad didn't know she was cheating on him?”
“Either he didn't know or didn't want to know. I was too young to realize what was happening.”
“Them dudes never laid a finger on you did they?”
“No, but they might as well for how badly it screwed me up.”
“She was no mother to you just like mine wasn't to me,” Brownie said, an angry expression forming over his face. “What happened to your bro?”
“Stephen? They thought he was the perfect child. He got all A's, excelled at sports and knew how to kiss ass to get what he wanted. But the truth is that Stephen was a sick pup in his own right. The two of us never got along. Fought like cats and dogs.”
“What he do?”
“He was a thief, pathological liar, kleptomaniac and pickpocket extraordinaire. He could steal your wallet and you wouldn't even know.”
“That psychological bullshit probably worse than neglect, huh? Can screw a kid up pretty bad.”
“I don't know why I'm spilling my guts to you of all people,” she snapped, suddenly feeling ashamed for opening up. “I barely know you.”
“And me you, but we got a lot in common. Besides, my grandma always said I had a trusting face.”
“Your grandma must have been blind as a bat.”
He laughed. “She could see fine, but my grandma couldn't hear for shit.” Another clap of thunder boomed above. “Why go to Washington State then if that family of yours was so cold?”
“Because I have their genes inside me, kid. Because I'm a goddamn hopeless idiot laboring under the delusion that there's a place out there filled with milk and honey where I can raise my son. Because in my screwed-up head I still harbor some crazy notion that my family will one day get back together again and we'll all be normal, even though I know that it's stupid.”
“There's always hope, girl. Without that we might as throw up our hands and open wide the flood gates.”
“If you call me girl one more time I'm going to go over there and stick this ax up your ass.”
“Sorry, Dar.”
“Go on! Get out of my face.”
Dar laid her head down next to Styx and snuggled her lean frame next to the boy. Another crack of thunder boomed and shook the barn. The howling winds blew unabated and seemed to be getting worse. It felt as if the barn might get swept up into the atmosphere. She didn't care much about her own health as much as she did that of her son. A droplet of rain fell on her head. The roof was beginning to leak. So much for the renowned Amish construction. She picked Styx up in her arms and moved him to a drier spot.
The world had changed and, unlike her father, she'd come to accept the new reality. No God or army of angels would save them. Only she had the power to control her own destiny. Her father believed in all that new age bullshit: Buddhism, enlightenment, the Dali Lama. He practiced yoga and meditated daily. He studied Indian mysticism and Native American spirituality. He so desperately wanted to believe that the dead were a progressive force sent down to earth to warn them about the dangers of pollution, war, inequality, materialism, capitalism, etc., etc.
The world had been shaken by this plague and now the horde reigned supreme. The cause of it did not concern her as much as the consequences. The earth was suffering. Even the weather was starting to take a turn for the worse. She truly believed that nature was rebelling from whatever had made it sick in the first place. Maybe that's where the plague pointed to; the end of the line rather than redemption.
The rain changed cadence and direction. Dar fell asleep and then sometime later she opened her eyes and glanced around the barn, trying to adjust to the darkness, wondering how long she had slept.
The wind, rain and thunder had stopped. The barn creaked in eerie silence and she realized she couldn't go back to sleep. She walked over and asked the same sleepy girl to lie next to Styx. Then she grabbed her ax and strode with purpose to the front of the barn. An owl hooted in the rafters as if to warn her to turn back. Quietly, she slipped out the door and made her way across the grounds.
A full moon lit up the sky, allowing her a partial view of the farmland. Sticks and branches lay everywhere. She walked over to the wooden fence located at the front of the compound. Branches and leaves lay scattered along the dirt. She hoisted herself up on the two-by-four rail and peeked over the top. About a dozen zombies shuffled in front of the gate. They looked like farmhands and country folks from the surrounding farms. One of the zombies wore a blue service station uniform with the name Earl stitched over the pocket. Dar wet her lips at the sight of fresh prey. She needed to release her pent-up fury and feed the beast clamoring in her soul. But something seemed different and she couldn't quite put her finger on what it was. But then it hit her as she straddled the top part of the fence. The dead bodies were gone. But who had cleaned them up?
The dozen zombies turned and began to stumble in her direction. She felt excited and alive. It felt like old times again. Motherhood had smoothed out the rough edges of her psyche but it couldn't extinguish the eternal flame of resentment that had taken up residence in her soul.
By the glint of moonlight she danced with the dead, a dance which she'd now become keenly accustomed to. The zombies approached, appearing as shadows. She swung, splitting the first female zombie at the bridge of the nose. The ax sliced through her occipital bone and emerged wet and dripping. She grunted loudly each time she swung. A thin veil of sweat fell over her brow and by the time she dropped the last zombie the muscles in her neck and arms had loosened up. She stared over at the dead bodies strewn over the stippled mud. Gray brain matter glistened in the faint moonlight. Some of their eyes remained open, staring unblinking into a vast, uncaring universe. She laughed, wiping the sweat from her brow, before realizing that she needed to kill more in order to slake her thirst.
But then she remembered the backpack she'd left in the truck, filled with Rick's head and her father's manuscript. If those Army bastards discovered the truck they would certainly destroy the last links to her family.
Gripping the ax in her right hand, she sprinted down the mud caked road and in the direction of the truck. Rivulets of rainwater streamed through the dirt crevices. Broken branches and tree limbs lay across the road and she had to be careful not to trip. Off in the distance the sun began to rise in the pink-lit sky. When she reached the vehicles she climbed up into the rig and opened the driver's door, moving inside the cab. It looked the same as when she'd left it. She clicked on the overhead light and searched behind the seats until she found her backpack. Glancing inside, she heard her uncle's head writhing in the box. She reached inside and felt the thick manuscript sitting at the bottom of the sack. The Second Scroll, she'd called it back at the Common. What a farce. She'd only named it that in order to legitimize her rule as the secular and religious leader. Starting a new religion based on the two books had been a brilliant idea she'd devised to cement her leadership. She slung the pack over her shoulder and turned to head out, only to see dozens of zombies surrounding the truck. Where the hell had they come from?
The keys were not in the ignition, not that she knew how to drive the rig. Her only chance was to jump down and try to navigate her way back to camp. Dying had ceased to scare her, only the notion of being separated from her son meant anything to her. She fastened the pack around her back, cinched the belt around her waist and gripped the ax by the handle. Then she opened the door and jumped, killing the first zombie before her feet even hit the ground.
She swung the ax with such ferocity that she dismembered two zombies at once. Blood sprayed in the air and misted back on her. She turned and saw the horde converging from every angle, stumbling through the mud and kicking branches and twigs along the road. She lowered her center of gravity and took off, feeling their cold hands brushing up against her body. The stench of death nearly made her gag but she suppressed it long enough to keep her head up. The fence was located fifty yards away, but there were dozens of dead in her path and more approaching.
She cut to her left, looking for the next open lane. The horde growled and roared, turning to follow her. She stopped for a moment to figure out her next move only to feel a hand grab the pack from behind and start to pull her backwards. Spinning on her heels, she cut the zombie down at the knees with one swing, but by the time she turned around, ten more zombies had her surrounded. She squatted, swinging the ax low, and cut off their feet at the ankles. Without feet the three zombies collapsed to the ground. The narrow opening allowed her to sprint for the fence. One of the zombies crawling along the ground reached out and tripped her and she went flying headfirst into the mud. She rolled onto her back and saw a swarm of the nasty fuckers glaring, their bloodied hands reaching down for her. She closed her eyes and waited for the first bite into her flesh. Tears streamed down her cheeks as she thought about Styx. She opened her eyes and made out a sliver of beautiful morning sky and decided not to give up.