Why do I have to see him like this? What good can I do if I can’t stroke his hair and try my best to comfort him? If I can’t hold his hand and mop the sweat from his brow? He’s dying and all I can do is stand here and watch as the light slowly fades from his eyes.
I’d rather remember him as he was during our time at the farmhouse: that crooked little grin that would creep across his face whenever I’d speak to him, the way he would genuinely laugh at even my feeblest attempts at humor….
When we sat together at night, he’d get this distant look in his eyes as he described a place we both so desperately wanted to believe existed: a small town surrounded by walls too high for the freshies and rotters to scale, packed with cottages where smoke curled from stone chimneys and fresh water was only a hand-pump away. In the mornings, he said, you’d be able to hear babies crying for their mothers’ breasts as you sat on the porch, sipping chicory root coffee and waving to the neighbors across the way. Being a vegetarian, I would fit right in seeing as how meat would be so rare of a commodity that it could be traded like gold. Instead, the garden would be our main source of nourishment and the produce would be fresh and abundant.
And then he’d tell me how what he really missed – more than television, movies, or even music – were fried green tomatoes. He’d had a little patch in his backyard during his former life and he’d describe how it had that earthy smell after a rain, how the fruit would plump up until they practically fell into his hands at the slightest touch. He’d gather the tomatoes in his hands and head to the kitchen where he’d slice them into thin circles, dredge them in flour seasoned with salt and pepper, and then savor the aroma as they sizzled in the cast iron skillet. It almost sounded like a religious experience, the way he told it; and it was little details like this that began to blossom the simple seed of physical attraction into something so much more beautiful.
At the same time Carl and I were growing so much closer, however, Sadie was in decline. It had started as nothing more than tightness in her chest and a tickle in the back of her throat.
“Just a bit under the weather.” she’d claimed. “No use getting your panties all in a bunch.”
Within days, though, the tickle had mutated into a cough that rattled deep within her chest. You could hear the phlegm in her lungs gurgling as it tried to break up and she would double over in a fit of coughing so bad that it wouldn’t have surprised me if she had vomited. But nothing ever came of it other than a raspy voice and a fever so high you could feel it without even touching her.
Watchmaker stayed by her side the entire time, giving her sips of water that had been melted from the snow and occasionally singing snippets of a song that was, as Carl later informed me, and old ballad by Johnny Cash. Her hand looked so small and dainty in his, as if with the slightest bit of pressure he could crush the brittle bones into indiscernible fragments; but there was tenderness there, a delicacy in the way he touched his wife that told a lifetime of stories in a single gesture.
“She needs meds.” Carl whispered from the dining room. “She’s just gonna get worse otherwise.”
Doc and I stood in silence, watching as Watchmaker pulled the tattered quilt up to Sadie’s chin. His hands felt for the couch cushion she was using as a pillow and from there found her face, brushing her cheek with the tips of his fingers.
“We could see if we can find a town.” Doc finally said. “Maybe raid a drugstore or doctor’s office. Bring back what she needs.”
Carl closed his eyes and leaned back in the kitchen chair as he pinched the bridge of his nose between thumb and forefinger.
“All well and good,” he said, “but what if we get lost out there? What if we can’t find our way back here?”
“Wait.” I interrupted. “What are we talking about? Taking her? We don’t even know how far the next town is. She could die out there and …”
“And I reckon she definitely will if we don’t, sweetie. You’ve seen how it is out there. Nothing but snow covered fields as far as the eye can see. Shit, it was just dumb luck we found this place to begin with.”
“We could Hansel and Gretel it.” Doc whispered. “Leave something as a trail so we can find our way back.”
Carl snorted and shook his head.
“And what happens if it decides to start snowing again? Before we’re even halfway back that little trail would be gone.”
I listened to the two bicker back and forth and watched the elderly couple in the other room; I watched as Watchmaker’s breath formed plumes in the air as he sung; I watched Sadie try to kick the blankets off her sweaty body and how he had to fight to make sure she remained covered. I watched the two and knew Carl was right: we had to do something.
“… if those things come ’round while we’re dragging our sorry asses across the prairie? It’s only a matter of time. They’ll find us, mark my words. They always do. We can’t stay here forever. Besides, we’re runnin’ out of food as well.”
“Fuck this.”
I stood and walked into the living room, leaving the two men in silence as they watched my departure. Standing next to Watchmaker, I placed my hand on his shoulder and he turned to look at me with those milky eyes.
Leaning close, I whispered in his ear, recounting the debate that had been raging in the kitchen. I explained the pros and cons of each side, laying it out as bluntly and factually as I could.
“So,” I said, “what do you think?”
Watchmaker sat there for a minute, listening to his wife cough as she shivered. Despite the sheen of sweat that glistened on her face and the mound of blankets beneath which she was buried, there were still goose bumps on her arms.
In that moment he looked far older than I had ever seen him, as if decades had passed in mere seconds. His face drained of color and he squeezed his eyes shut as if warding off a headache. When he next spoke, his voice was as thin and devoid of emotion as a rotter in the most advanced stages of decomposition.
“I don’t really see as we have much choice, do we?”
Though he tried to hide behind a tight-lipped mask of stoicism later that night – as the rest of us were preparing our meager supplies for an early departure – I could hear him weeping softly from the other room as he whispered prayers on his wife’s behalf. I couldn’t imagine what he had to be feeling and wanted nothing more than to hold this old man in my arms like a small child and allow my shoulder to absorb all of his fear and concern; I wanted to place my hand on Sadie’s forehead and draw the fever out, wanted to clear her lungs of the cloudy fluids which threatened to drown her. But all I could do was visualize a beautiful, healing white light surrounding the elderly couple as I continued shoving cans of outdated vegetables into my rucksack.
We said goodbye to the farmhouse just as the sun was beginning to peek over the horizon like a giant, fiery head. Streaks of yellows and orange blazed across the thin clouds as the last of the stars grew dimmer and dimmer until they were no more.
Somehow, this brilliant display made the cold more bearable, as if the cells of my body were channeling the rays of the newborn sun and amplifying them. Not only did this process radiate warmth from within the confines of clothes and skin, but it also awakened a sense of hope. Surely, we had to be close to some sort of town; before society collapsed, everyone had to go to the store. Everyone had to go to the doctor. We would find what we needed and begin the process of nursing Sadie back to health.
Doc had fashioned a sort of stretcher out of two poles and a piece of canvass that had been pulled taut and stapled to the wood; Sadie laid on it but to the uninitiated it probably looked more like a mound of blankets and quilts than anything even vaguely resembling the human form. He and Carl had decided that they would take turns pulling the stretcher behind them, trading off whenever the weight grew too heavy for their shoulders.
Somehow all this triggered a fleeting sense of deja vu in me: the jerry-rigged stretcher, the fevered woman so desperately in need of medicine, the snow covered fields all flat and white and seeming to stretch out for infinity…. I felt as if I had been through all of this before, perhaps in another lifetime. But just as quickly as it had appeared, the sensation was gone.
Doc had volunteered for the first shift, which left Carl and I ample time to talk as the exertion of pulling the stretcher through the snow demanded the strictest concentration on Doc’s part; and Watchmaker? He hadn’t said a word to anyone the entire morning and instead elected to hover near his wife in silence, presumably so he could be near in case she needed him.
“I reckon there might come a time when Doc and I have to share the load.” Carl said as he handed me his pistol. “That happens and it’s up to you to be point man, honey.”
The pistol felt as heavy as a brick in my hand and I remember looking at it and thinking how dark the metal looked against the blanket of snow that stretched out in all directions. I lifted it a few times, testing its weight as my stomach churned sickeningly; I chewed on my bottom lip and too a long, slow breath as I tried to keep my hands from trembling.
Carl must have noticed too but mistook my nervousness for something else.
“Yeah, I know what you’re thinking. That’s a helluva gun. And I won’t lie. It’ll kick like a mule in a bee’s nest. But as long as you’re expecting it, then it shouldn’t be too bad.”
I glanced at Carl and decided the time had come to be totally honest with him.
“I’ve never actually done it.”
“Done what?”
“You know… it.”
Carl suddenly seemed as if the mounds of clothing he’d donned had doubled in weight and he tugged at his collar as he cleared his throat.
“Look,” he said slowly, “I don’t know if now is really the time to be talking about that sort of thing. I can appreciate you being a virgin and all but I…. ”
I felt my face grow warm beneath the ski mask and was glad he couldn’t see the blush that washed across my cheeks. It never occurred to me that he would misunderstand.
“No.” I laughed in an unsteady voice. “No, you pervert. Not that. Of course I’ve done that.”
He now seemed more confused than ever and his tone grew short with frustration.
“Then what in tarnation are you talking about?”
Taking a deep breath of the cold winter air, I finally blurted out my confession.
“I’ve never killed one of those things, alright? I’ve never shot, bludgeoned, beheaded, or burned anything.”
Carl stopped walking as suddenly as if I’d told him the dead could now fly as well as walk. I could picture him standing there, his mouth hanging open and eyes wide with shock; but I kept trudging through the snow, refusing to look back.
Somehow, this admission embarrassed me even more than when Carl thought I was proclaiming virginity. Stuffing my hands into my pockets, I watched as my feet disappeared into the snow again and again.
“B-but,” he stammered from behind me. “you’re alive…. ”
“After all these years the cute boy finally realizes I exist.”
I tried to turn it into a joke; I suppose I was looking for a way to deflect the feeling I suddenly had of being under a microscope. But, for once, Carl didn’t laugh and I heard his footsteps crunching throw the snow as he ran to catch up with me.
“No, I want to understand this, Josie. You’ve never killed one of those things?”
His tone implied disbelief, that perhaps he suspected me of leading him on to some grand punch line. I couldn’t bring myself to look at him and continued to study the never-ending field of white that stretched out before us.
“Nope. Never.”
“But you said you had a shotgun?”
“Yeah, I said I had a shotgun. Never said I used it, though.”
Carl was silent for a moment as he mulled over this distinction and I listened to the Doc’s labored breathing and the soft swishing noise made by the stretcher as it was drug through the snow.
“How the hell are you still alive, kiddo?”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“I don’t know. Luck maybe? I’ve just been really good at avoiding them, I guess. Except for the silo. That was just stupidity on my part.”
“You’ve really never killed a zombie?”
I sighed and felt my chest tighten with frustration. Why was it so hard for him to believe I could make it as far as I had on wits alone?
“Look, Carl… I’ve spent the last fifteen years of my life practicing non-violence. I’ve embraced vegetarianism. I believe that every life is sacred, that there is a spark of the Almighty within every leaf, every squirrel, every person, dog, fish, or chicken.”
My tone was sharper than I had intended but somehow it felt as though a decade and a half of my personal beliefs were being put on trial.
“You probably don’t know how hard it is just to abandon everything you ever believed in. Seeing as how, by your own admission, you don’t believe in anything.”
“Look, Josie, I didn’t …”
“But I look at those things and I wonder how they fit in. I won’t kill a rabbit just so I can eat its flesh to stay alive. But would I kill one of them if I were being threatened?”
“Josie, I…. ”
I had grown so angry that tears streamed from the corners of my eyes and left icy trails down my cheeks; my hands were balled into fists so tightly that my knuckles ached.
“So don’t lecture me, okay? Don’t sit there all smug and mighty on your high horse and tell me how wrong I am because I’m having a little fucking trouble figuring out how my beliefs fit in with all this shit.”
We walked in silence for a while; I stomped through the snow with more force than was required while Carl lit and smoked the last cigarette from his dead man’s pack.
“Look, Josie,” he finally said softly, “I didn’t mean no offense. And I’m truly sorry for riling you up that way. I was just kinda shocked, that’s all. Hard to believe someone could be out here so long and never had to kill one of them bastards.”
I nodded my head silently and began trying to replay the conversation in my head. Had he really said anything to ignite the fury I’d unleashed on him? Or had he simply been a handy target for the conflict that raged within me?
“Believe you me, there’s a lot of killing I wish I could go back and erase. A lot of death I’d rather just forget. So, in a way, I really envy you, I guess. Your conscience is clean. And that’s pretty damn rare these days.”
There was something in the way his voice cracked, something in the pain that tinged his words, that made me finally glance at him out of the corner of my eye.
“See, there was this time when all this began that I…. ”
For the first time in half an hour or so, Doc’s voice boomed through our conversation.
“Town!”
Our heads snapped to attention and there it was: one of those little clusters of buildings that seem to pop up out of nowhere in the flat fields of the Midwest; like an oasis of brick and wood in a sea of withered cornstalks poking through waves of snow. The town seemed so tiny from this distance, like a scale model that had been constructed in God’s basement, but the shapes of houses and stores were unmistakable.
“I reckon about an hour and a half or so and we oughtta be there. Sound about right to you, Doc?”
The wind had started to blow a little causing Carl’s words to seem as if he were much further away than he actually was.
“Give or take, yeah, that’s a pretty accurate estimate.”
And, just like that, our first argument came to a close as we trudged on toward a little town that, we hoped, would have the supplies we needed to save Sadie’s life. But I always wondered: if Doc hadn’t spotted the town, what would Carl have told me that day? What closely guarded piece of his past would he have brought out into the light?
By the time we were within half a mile of the town, the wind had picked up to the point that we had to turn our heads away from its force just to see where we were going. Carl and Doc had swapped positions with the stretcher and for a while he and I had tried to make conversation with Watchmaker. The old man, however, was not in a talkative mood and the chill of the wind quickly dashed any further attempts at brightening his mood.
Silently, I’m sure we were all praying for the same thing: a small-town pharmacy that had remained unlooted or perhaps a doctor’s office with supplies of medicine still intact. Though muffled by the piles of cloth covering her and the howling of the wind, we could still hear Sadie cough every now and then and with each wet hack my heart fluttered with concern.
“What the fuck?”
The urgency in Carl’s voice made us all turn our heads into the wind from which we had previously tried to hide. In the distance, a wall of white advanced across the prairie like something from a biblical passage: it towered fifteen, maybe twenty, feet in the air and blotted out everything within its path, seeming to devour the occasional tree and crooked fence line as it barreled toward us.
“Holy shit…. ”
“We gotta move people!” Doc yelled out. “We gotta move now!”
“What the fuck is it?”
Doc dashed to the end of the stretcher and picked up the other end so that it was like a bridge connecting him to Carl.
“White out.” he called out. “Biggest fucking one I’ve ever seen. Now move!”
Doc barked out the words like a drill sergeant, leaving no room for further discussion as he and Carl tried to run through the snow without toppling Sadie into the dunes.
“Watchmaker, grab Josie’s coat. Josie you grab mine and for God’s sake people keep up and don’t let go!”
As Doc would later tell us, this type of whiteout is created when a strong wind surges across the plains; the wind scatters powdery snow and lifts it on its gales, scooping up millions of tiny crystals with each passing second. With no mountains or natural barriers to impede progress, it forms what he referred to as a blizzard without any actual snowfall. And this parapet of snow and wind was gusting toward us at sixty-plus miles an hour.
We knew we’d never make it to the town before the storm overtook us, but we needed to close as much distance as we could before it hit. The whiteout could blow by us in as few as five seconds… or it could rage around us for much longer, depending on how strong the wind was.
“Move, move, move!”
We couldn’t risk getting turned around in squall, wandering further and further from the town that possibly held Sadie’s only hope for survival. There was no other option than to push forward as quickly as we could.
We’d closed maybe half the distance by the time the howling winds blasted against our bodies with the force of a linebacker. I wasn’t prepared for how strong the gust would be, hadn’t braced myself for the shock of nature pushing at me with all of her might.
I staggered sideways, stumbled over my own feet, and fell face first into the snow. At the same time, I was aware that the pressure of Watchmaker holding onto the hem of my jacket was suddenly gone. And that Doc’s jacket had slipped from my grasp as easily as if it had been oiled.
Standing as quickly as I could, I looked around, trying desperately to find the others. But everything was obscured by a veil of whiteness so dense I could barely make out my own outstretched hands as I spun around, trying in vain to catch sight of my companions.
My heart hammered within my chest so hard I could feel the rhythm pound in my temples. I tried calling out for Carl, for Doc, for Sadie and Watchmaker; but the wind blew my voice back at me and made it sound so tiny and lost… even to my own ears.
Lurching forward, toward what I thought was the direction we had been heading in, I tried to fight off the images which haunted my mind: my body, lips blue and ice crystals stuck in my eyelashes, lying rigid and frozen in some godforsaken field that would never be tilled again.
Though I knew it was futile, I screamed Carl’s name again and tried to listen past the keening wind for even the faintest reply.
And it’s funny, but all I could think of as I pictured myself dead and stiffened in the subzero temperatures was Carl. How I would never see his crooked little grin again. How he would remember me as the woman who bit his head off on her last morning alive.
But then, like a phantom materializing within a cloak of fog, I saw a fuzzy silhouette form in the blinding whiteness. It’s hands were reaching out for me, ready to pull me back into the warmth and safety of the group.
“He found me.” I thought as the fear leached from my body, leaving my formerly tense muscles feeling tired and spent. “He found me.”
“Carl!”
I reached through the shroud of snow and wind, stretching my fingertips forward until finally connecting with his outstretched hands.
Only, it wasn’t the slick vinyl of gloves I felt beneath my hands. No, what I felt was so cold that it seeped through my mittens. And it had a rough texture, like something that had been cracked and chafed and abraded to the point that the flesh had begun to flake off.
Before I had the chance to realize what this meant, it seized my wrist and I was yanked forward as a blackened, gnarled face emerged from the obscurity of the storm.
At the same time, I heard – very faintly – an ancient voice screaming out in terror and pain.