We ended up staying in that old farmhouse for nearly a week. During daylight hours, we stayed inside and tried to remain as quiet as possible. Doc had an old deck of cards he carried with him and we’d spend hours sitting around the kitchen table, playing rummy, and whispering stories back and forth.
Slowly I began to piece their histories together: how Doc and Carl had met in a burned out grocery store and almost shot one-another, each initially thinking the other was a freshie; how Sadie and Watchmaker (whose real name turned out to be Tobias) had watched their children grow up and then have children of their own. How they had lived for the past half century in the same house, collecting a lifetime’s worth of memories and laughter within those walls. Even when Tobias first began to lose his sight and found it more and more difficult to work on the intricate cogs and gears from which his nickname stemmed, they still had each other and that had been enough. They told me how they’d stood in their front yard while yellow and blue flames licked at the night sky like hungry tongues of hell; how Watchmaker could feel the heat on his face and hear the crackling and popping but see only flickering shades of light and shadow. How they’d held each other and cried softly as all of their pictures and keepsakes had been devoured by the insatiable inferno.
The fire, of course, had attracted the attention of every freshy and rotter within miles. In a world that now only knew the darkness of night, a world where the Milky Way could finally be seen over the crumbling skylines of Los Angeles and New York, this blaze was a beacon.
They came lurching and staggering and running across the twenty-some acres of property; like waves of putrefied flesh, the carcasses rolled across the landscape from all sides. Before the roof had even collapsed, Sadie and Watchmaker had found themselves surrounded: an island of life amid a roiling sea of decay. But the raging fire had also drawn the attention of others….
They hadn’t really known why they’d been drawn to the blaze: they knew that the area would surely be swarming with the undead and any supplies that may have existed would already have been reduced to nothing more than cinder and ash.
“Hell,” Carl had joked during the telling of the story, “I just reckoned someone was having themselves a barbecue, that’s all.”
Whatever the reason, by the time they’d arrived Sadie and Watchmaker had holed up in a little storage shed in the backyard. The heat from the burning house had seeped into the corrugated walls and they could hear flesh sizzle like frying bacon as the zombies outside pounded and grabbed at the metal walls.
“It was like being trapped in an oven.” Watchmaker had said. “But I figured it was worlds better than what laid outside those doors.”
At this point, Doc had taken over the story and Carl began to look like a kid who had been called to the front of the class to recite Jabberwocky. His face was slightly flushed and he found any excuse to look away from the group as he rearranged the cards in his hand again and again.
“We knew there had to be something alive in that shed.” Doc said. “Otherwise those damn things wouldn’t have wanted in so badly. Only question was, how the hell do you get them out?”
Luckily for Sadie and Watchmaker, though, Carl had some kind of plan.
“No matter what happens,” Doc had continued, donning a pretty accurate imitation of his friend, “you get those people outta there. Don’t you worry ’bout me. And I couldn’t argue with him. He wasn’t having it.”
So Carl started yelling at the top of his lungs, his voice cutting through the banging of fists on metal and the roar of the blaze while Doc crouched in the shadows. No one could remember exactly what he was saying, but his words drew the attention of the zombies away from the shed.
“I remember thinking that he was a dead man.” Doc said. “I saw all those things turning to face him, saw the freshies lunge forward, pushing rotters out of their way. Didn’t think there was anyway a single person could survive that kind of attention.”
“And he didn’t even know us.” Sadie cut in. Her voice quivered as she spoke and I could see her eyes glistening as if a tear were about to roll across her wrinkled cheeks at any moment. “He could’ve met his maker out there. For perfect strangers.”
Carl squirmed in his chair and seemed to study a framed sampler on the wall that had the words They may be crazy, but they’re still my family stitched into the fabric.
“Hell, I was thinkin’ there might be some sorta lonely, supermodel in that shed. If I knew it was just your wrinkled old asses, woulda been a different story.”
Carl winked and we all laughed, but I found myself wondering why he did that: anytime someone said even the smallest thing about him, anything that showed him in a positive light, he was so quick to turn it into some kind of joke. He would make a quip and, while everyone else was distracted by laughter, a shadow would pass across his face; it was the same infinite sadness I’d seen before. An expression of sorrow and regret that somehow made me just want to take him in my arms and whisper Everything’s going to be fine. Everything’s going to be alright.
Anyhow once Carl had the full attention of the crowd of zombies, he took off running; being the single-minded creatures they are the undead followed, forgetting the people in the shed as quickly as children distracted by a newer and flashier toy. And he made sure he kept their attention, too, continuing to yell and whoop as he disappeared behind the burning house.
As soon as Doc thought it was safe, he slipped out from his hiding place and scurried over to the shed.
“We heard this man whispering,” Watchmaker said, “telling us to stay quiet, that they were gonna get us out of there.”
And they could hear gunshots echoing through the night. So many shots, they said, that at the time they’d assumed a small militia had come to their rescue.
“Never dreamed it was just one man makin’ all that racket.”
“Hey,” Carl said, “ I thought if I popped enough of them I was gonna win a kewpie doll. No one told me there weren’t any prizes involved.”
By the time Doc had freed the elderly couple from the shed, Carl had reappeared around the other side of the house. Behind him was a mass of flames that writhed and twisted in human-shaped forms as they continued to stumble forward.
“We later found out all the shooting had been Carl picking off the freshies first. Which was smart. After the freshies were all gone, he simply made zombie torches.”
I raised my eyebrows in a silent question and Carl, for once, chose to answer.
“You get a bunch of rotters all clustered together,” he said, “and then you just toss some fire right in the middle of ’em. Once they’ve been dead a while, they’re pretty dry. Go up like kindling. Zombie torches. Don’t need no gasoline or nothing.”
“What he’s not telling you,” Doc interrupted, “is that he burned the hell out of his hands lighting those fuckers up. Damn fool took a timber from the burning house.”
“Only one end was on fire. I didn’t think the wood on the other end would be so damn hot. Shows how much I know.”
“Anyways,” Sadie added, “that’s how we met these two fine boys. And they’ve been looking out for us ever since.”
That night, after the others had drifted off to sleep in the warm glow of the fireplace, Carl and I sat up late into the night. For the most part, we talked about movies we’d seen, books we had read, people we’d known. We sat side by side with our shoulders touching, snuggly wrapped in blankets, and whispering so as not to disturb the others.
There were times when we laughed, times when we bordered on tears, and occasions when we simply sat in silence, enjoying the closeness of each other’s company and stealing glances like two smitten teenagers.
But at one point, once the fire had burned down to nothing more than glowing coals, I touched his shoulder lightly and made sure he was looking into my eyes. I had to ask him, had to know.
“Carl, why do you do it?”
“Do what?”
He had seemed genuinely perplexed, as if I had just asked a question that couldn’t be answered.
“Why do you put yourself out there like that? Taking risks for people you barely even know?”
He tried to look away and I moved my hand to the rough stubble on his cheek, guiding his gaze back to my direction.
“Well,” he said after a moment, “it’s the right thing… ”
“No, it’s more than that. I can tell. There’s something else. Something I can’t put my finger on.”
He seemed agitated, as if his blanket had suddenly become coarse and itchy, and the half-grin melted from his face.
“I swear,” I coaxed, “you tell me and we never have to talk about it again if you don’t want to. But I have to know.”
And I did. I can’t explain why it was so important for me to understand this man, to know what made him tick so to speak; but it was and I would be as relentless as a rotter on the trail of the living if I had to be.
After what seemed to be an eternity, he managed a weak smile as he sighed.
“Atonement. Plain and simple. I gotta put things right again.”
And that was the last I ever heard him say on the matter. Far from sating my curiosity, though, his answer only served to fuel it: what had he done that was so bad he felt he had to risk his life time and time again simply so others could live?