The first night after Ghost died, I lay down on my cot and focused on my heart. I knew there was nothing I could do to heal it, so I concentrated on trying to stop it. I was just starting to feel there might be a future after all when I discovered how Ghost felt for me. When we talked I could imagine a life beyond the refugee center, even beyond my family. He gave me a reason to get up in the morning, and he put to rest any thoughts I had about giving up. He made me want to carry on.
But if someone like Ghost can’t make it, then who can? What’s the point if we’re all facing the inevitable? How much more food and water do we have anyways? Do we stand a chance against the soldiers with their equipment and weapons when supplies get scarce? They look at us with such obvious disdain…if they look at us at all. They even try to avoid using our names, like a parent at the pound discouraging their kids from naming animals they have no intention of giving a home to.
And if Ghost couldn’t take care of himself, how can I take care of my family? I can’t imagine feeling emptier than I do now, yet I know I could if something happened to them. If the soldiers do decide to take us out, I hope they do it with some kind of sleeping gas so we can lie down and never get up. Right now that sounds like the best outcome, peacefully drifting off until we’re free of all the fear and loss we suffer from day to day. I’m sure the soldiers would prefer to do it that way because they’d rather save their bullets for the Infected. And that’s pretty much all the hope that I can muster these days.
I do have brief spells of what I can only describe as cozy numbness. Some of those are due to the efforts of my family and friends. Although I no longer feel capable of showing it, I am grateful for their love. I’m also grateful they haven’t given up on me. Even Jesse has ceased to annoy me. Seeing her and her antics doesn’t fill me with joy like it does some people though, because all I can think of are the many ways I could lose her.
The Dumb Luck Club hasn’t met since Ghost died, at least as far as I know. Maybe I’ve become too “Katatonic” to be anything but a liability these days. But Mouse’s crusade to record the residents here carries on, and she’s recruited me to draw the faces to go along with the stories. Sometimes I sketch people while she interviews them, and sometimes I sketch them alone while they sit in silence. These are the ones who don’t want to talk, the ones who submitted their one-page bio in lieu of an interview. Their stories are so gut wrenching and shocking they lessen my self-pity…but not my pain.
There is a new source of comfort in my life now: the companionship of Killer. He hid in the shadows from the moment the soldiers let him go; like many of us, he didn’t seem to trust anyone. I remember the first time I saw him in the refugee center. I was working the lights over the stage, having fun moving the spotlight away from Nemesis or shrinking it till it only lit up her feet. I saw a flash of movement out of the corner of my eye. I left the spotlight trained on Nemesis’s tapping foot and let my eyes follow a waiting figure only a shade darker than the blackness around it—Killer. “What are you doing here?” I mumbled while I reached out to pick him up. But with one swift movement he hopped up to a higher plane, and then again, and again. Stairs! I carefully climbed in the pitched darkness until, “Ouch!” I hit a door. Good thing I was looking down at the time, or I would have hit it with my nose instead of my forehead.
I couldn’t open it, but that was okay; I knew I could get Ghost to pick the lock. He didn’t come alone, the rest of the lighting crew (plus an uninvited, but very observant, Nemesis) came with him. Oh yeah, and there was Killer too, staying just out of the way.
It wasn’t a special room, it was more like a storage room, and it was disappointingly empty. Well, empty except for a few discarded cans of food and a sharpie-made sign that read, “Abandon all hope ye who have entered here.” Ghost believed one of the disappeared had chosen to live up here and got caught when he came down for more supplies.
“Why do you assume it was a he?” I asked, slightly offended.
“Because a woman wouldn’t have left those cans lying about,” he said matter-of-factly.
“Hey! That’s sexist!” I shot back. “I’m just as capable as you guys are at being a slob!”
Kaboom thought he was a simpleton because he got the quote all wrong…but I understood what he/she meant. I didn’t care. I was just amazed that a cat would lead us to the perfect meeting spot for the lighting crew, later known as the Dumb Luck Club.
Killer leapt into the room like it was his, and he seemed to spend most of his time up there, out of sight, in the shadows. Until now that is. Now he’s my shadow. We hardly see Naked these days because the soldiers use her on their patrols, so it’s nice to cuddle up to something soft and purring and warm. I know it’s senseless to feel safe because of a little black cat, and yet somehow I feel protected by Killer, like Ghost sent him to watch over me.
That’s not all that Ghost sent me. I was in too much of a state to notice anything those first few days after he died, but one night I flopped down on my pillow and heard a “clunk!” as I hit something hard. There was something in my pillow! I reached into my pillowcase and felt around. I stretched my fingers into the space and drew out a book.
But not just any book. This book was homemade, unpublished. It was an ordinary notebook that someone had turned into a book. A printed label had been made for the front, but everything else was handwritten. The label read, Notes From A Necrophobe.
For the first time since Ghost died I felt excited about something. Who could resist that title? I had to see what that book contained. My heart beat fast and my anguish disappeared as I lost myself in its pages. The inside cover read, “By Eric Holdings.” A more familiar script had been added just under Eric’s name. It was in handwriting I recognized from study sessions in the library: “And W. Benedict.”
Ghost! That had to be Ghost! A warm soothing feeling spread through me, like hot chocolate after a cold day in the snow. I was holding a gift from Ghost.
This book is my consolation prize. I didn’t win more time with Ghost, but I did get something to remember him by. I carry it with me everywhere; it usually sits in an inconspicuous pocket inside my jacket. At night I sleep with it under my pillow. I pull it out whenever no one’s around, dividing my reading between the Dumb Luck clubhouse and my cot. I feel Ghost’s voice in its pages, a voice that carries with it a tiny bit of hope. I realize that I’m not as helpless as I thought I was as I read its pages. I may be able to protect my family after all. There’s so much valuable information in Ghost’s book, it just might help us survive whatever the soldiers plan on throwing at us.
The first few chapters were obviously written by Eric in his spidery humorless scrawl. They cover things like “Hoard your supplies on the upper level and get rid of the stairs if at all possible,” and “Create a quick exit to the roof,” or even “In case of the infected breaking in and stacking themselves up to the second floor, expand laundry chute for another method of escape.”
“Buy Jeep with plastic sides and reinforced bulletproof front windshield to prevent breakages during flight. Run engine every five days (with proper ventilation!) to prevent battery from dying.” Okay, that explained the Jeep…the plastic sides could be pushed in without breaking and were too thick and strong to bite through. The hood was also large enough to provide a bit of a barrier to the front windshield. Too bad we didn’t get to use it for long. Even if we found a way to fight off the crowd of cadavers that surround it, and even if we found a way to pull it out of the ditch, we still couldn’t start it without a source of power, ‘cause I’m pretty sure AAA is on hiatus.
Ghost and Eric’s writings were a bit back-and-forth in the middle of the book; this must have been written while Eric was teaching him how to survive without him. I felt bad for Ghost; a lot of this stuff was absolutely stomach churning. Eric went through the various stages of decomposition to explain how to recognize and defend yourself from the dead. “Carry a retractable stick, like a tension rod for a shower curtain, to pull out and extend at a moment’s notice. Note the state of the infected and use the stick to push the threat off its feet. The time it takes to upright itself will buy you time to get away.”
“Do not use the stick if the body is in the bloat stage. Never touch it under any circumstances unless wearing a Tyvek suit with gloves, face shield, and head cover.” I was wondering what a Tyvek suit was, but Ghost (or Eric) had helpfully drawn one. It looked like something you’d see on one of those CSI shows. “The bloat stage will be obvious. The byproduct of cellular breakdown is gas, which will inflate the abdomen. Face, arms, and legs will swell up to resemble balloons. A body can expand to four or five times its original size in this stage. Blowflies will overwhelm moist areas like the mouth, eyes, and groin. Skin will slough off in sheets. If you poke a bloated body with a stick the flesh can give way and cause the liquefied body tissue to suddenly rupture and cover you with infected tissue.”
Ugh, how could Ghost stand this? Skin coming off in sheets? Now I understand how he was able to scalp that zombie with his bare hands. My stomach said, “Stop reading, please!” My mind said, “Carry on; we might need to know this someday.” My heart said, “I sure hope not.”
Ghost’s parting message came through his edit of his Grandfather’s opinion. “Attachments to others carry a risk to your survival, avoid at all costs,” had been crossed out and replaced with “Find someone worth living for.”