Where We've Made It Dark, page 27
— Maybe they’ll back off.
My wrist strains against the seat while I pull out my own, stagecoached and proppy.
Low-grown trees crush the space between us. They keep coming through the lot, the car light and unstoppable. The rust-splashed sign for the shopping center divides us, erasing them before they veer for the exit behind. Shrubbery bursts in the wake as they correct hard onto the street and catch speed.
— They’re faster than us.
— I know, I know!
The car rushes in, catching close before taking the lane on Lulu’s side.
— Get your window down!
— Shit. Shit.
She presses at the button as they push into view. Pale faces make aquarium shifts in the cab. A long, black thing goes up to the passenger.
Dale shakes his gun at them while trying to get the window out of the way. We’re locked straight and straining as his attention is off the road. We dip into another hollow, only sinking closer together.
— What’s your fucking problem?
The words are swallowed outside.
They tug in line with us, looking. Dale nocks his gun over his elbow and fires a burst, the pops jolting. Something splinters at their passenger door, but they only half flinch. The one behind aims at him as the other with the shotgun points it outside to the tire. Dale drops into the seat and jerks the wheel, breaking my grip as everything shakes with our fuselages locked together and holding us forward. The air turns humid with glass as everything cracks loudly apart. Lulu shrieks into her lap while a face appears over the door that she frantically shoves the barrel end to. A hand rears with it and she fires, louder, sending loose a wet mist.
We drop into a tight fishtail that Dale wrestles back down. My breath and Lulu’s push together, elbow in her thigh. I get up from her cascaded slouch to see their position, and the glass punches through around me. I land hard into the seat belt and Lulu points back over the edge, firing once and two times unlooking. I go to follow, and what’s beneath us clangs, which bleeds into a long screeching. I lean against the drift to squeeze a few shots over Lulu to the driver, one making him move. They gain speed into the sidewalk, the shotgunner going for the wheel and the other in the way; faster into the column of a mall-modern office complex that slides him through the windshield and caught onto the hood.
The wool-worn trunk of a pine tree hits us head-on. My clavicle is slammed unbreathing into the seat belt, which leaves me numb once we’re still. It won’t unbuckle.
Past Lulu’s bleeding scalp across the street, the white-fragmented window of the office bends forward, hands pushing it down from inside. A woman, a man, then others burst through the opening, climbing over each other and onto the car. The crashed man wakes up after they’re on him.
Pillowed shots come from inside the wreck, continuing as someone falls out the door and hobbles free on a bent ankle. He staggers slow and straight ahead, and two keep with him through the lot. The gunshots continue until there’s screaming as more press into windows and the open door.
— Dale, come on.
Blood is locked on his fist.
— I don’t think I can.
— No, come on.
Lulu pushes me coming out and hurries to the front. He looks back, eyes lowered at her. She grabs him anyway. He bites in the pain as the rest of him slowly escapes the pinched wheel.
The man is onto the street, waving, the two there with him. The other car comes screeching through, sliding past and spilling out with more shooting. They open fire at the closest, making the man hunker as the others both keep through, their flesh rippling in bits as they continue onto his back. He tries to break away as he is bitten from behind, shot in the shoulder, and shot in the top of the head. One zombie loses its face and the other falls flat from its hip.
The two stop firing and stay quick to the edges of their truck. They wait and gesture something as the ground is still moving behind them. They break free, slow and crouched into the open, pressing evenly to us, pincering, looking at the cab, the sides. The woman bends lower, lower to the bottom, where I’m aimed damp in the grass. I shoot into her hung out form, and she drops hard on top of her gun, crying to get it back out. The tree hums hit, the impact boring through to me as I try again, this time leaving her collapsing over herself, wailing. The truck shudders all over as the man tries to stop me, gunning in fast and denying the angle. I get back but Lulu is already standing and firing. She falls back to the ground, and the deafening swell stops, its space empty and held in with a growing, ethereal shriek.
The breathing coming in, humid in ragged intervals. Lulu’s sour and wincing. Dale’s duller, flagging. The man Lulu shot back, more of a gasping, reaching. The unbridled frustration of the woman resonating tight against the road. Me. A hard, coursing void churning at my chest.
Then the movement coming around their truck, surging at the sides. The first woman gushed with blood. The man with his head uncapped. The one with no jaw or face, but still there. Another fresh one. A child.
She sees it. Reaching dirt-deep into the concrete, her lower half bends up to inch, inch further to nowhere. She sees me and turns back to them. Her short-cut hair walls her expression from me, silent. Another step closer, the back of her head erupts with a thin, jetting pop. The blood starts pooling.
The closest zombies kneel anyway. A hand pulls me down.
— We need help.
The voice comes from elsewhere, down and up at once. Blood in the same stream continues under Lulu’s collar, her eyes reaching me lacustrine, cold.
— Grab him.
Dale looks ahead to the ground as I have him by the shoulder. His limbs reach it like antennae while the weight hurts, taking its place against me. Lulu lays her hand on my back, tying us against the dry shuffle of shoes on concrete, grass breaking, mouths wide and hushed.
The weight carries deeper into my shoulders, closing off my breath on hot-panned thighs. A country house ahead in overgrown grass. Dale sinks to the ground, rooted against my tugging.
— No, come on.
Lulu pushes, pries, and he turns up into her.
— It’s alright. It’s alright.
He half hugs into her grip, and she stays onto him as he releases. He doesn’t turn well, and his voice rises graveled against her.
— Let me go.
A hand comes barked into her face, making her stop turned to the approaching legs.
— Keep dragging him.
She jolts away, close enough for the woman to twist after her. The other with what’s left of a forehead lumped into his eyes bumps her along back to us.
— Don’t fire at them!
The words cut voicelessly in on themselves, twisting the air with raised arms that loudly shatter the mangled one’s skull up free from itself. Lulu grits forward, and something like a warning is stifled before she takes the next shot, close to them. It catches the woman and puts her closer to us.
I scrape Dale back a step, another as Lulu takes more time aiming at the woman’s knee, which bolts the wrong way as she continues to come for us. The others circle onto Lulu, ahead and behind. She steps back. One from deep in the street closes her path.
She moves to him in stiff, banded steps. She shoots into his mouth, making it fall apart at the cheek and jaw before the head coils back on itself. He doesn’t stop. She aims higher, fountaining the missing mouth skyward, and the feet keep their place in front of her with hands grasping back on nothing.
She stops, stalls while clicking empty down at the knee, and returns to the faceless mass in front of her. Dale drops in my fingers, the crawling coming closer into view. I keep him moving by my nails.
The child tumbles chest first into her, dragging its face through her white-hot cry like summer fruit. It’s pushed drenched back from her hip. She has it by the sides of the head, still moving at her abdomen.
Writhing heaves under me, weighted underwater, only physics to pull it back up. I keep going as the woman crawls hands over shirt in front of us.
Lulu’s scream thrashes as the child moves higher, together swaying into a fall. The sound she makes lights on fire. It tears wordless into the air. Dale raises the gun, gnarled and fighting to keep balance on the shape that’s now three, four. He doesn’t fire.
The woman watches his shoes dangle tug, tug over the sidewalk. She’s shot with what’s left, shredding her face into canvas. The reloading goes slow and rigid as her arm comes forward again and she returns noseless to the shoes. Dale drops in the pull, his fingers suddenly flailing at me and losing their place against the sidewalk. He’s back in my hands, but they don’t grab. They just hang under their icy water. The breath comes swift and ragged from him.
— Move me!
I put my hands to his jacket again and tug. He tumbles back with wide eyes up at me.
— Go on, move me! Don’t leave me here.
I drop hold of him, my arm screaming, lungs scored. He aims the gun back up at me.
— Do it or I’ll kill you too.
— I can’t anymore.
His eyes wrinkle fierce after something in me. He moves and I slip back, running from the confluence that’s centered now just on him. He grits hard and turns away to the opened face of the woman fully at his feet, now with the other man, the child. He fires until her forehead opens up in chunks and she drops flat. The man from before falls into his shoulder, and the barrel jams into the ruin of his mouth and fires and fires. In the fall, the zombie grabs Dale and makes him scream.
I hook onto the dirt driveway to an isolated grandmother cottage padded high with rosebushes. I stomp wooden up the stairs, and there’s another gunshot. Nothing moves behind the half-shrubbed privacy wall. The door is cracked ajar and I slam it, lock it, and wait with my back against it for my eyes to adjust.
HOME
The floor is crunching. Powdered clumps of barely illuminated food pointed with wrappers coat the entrance onto the living room. Tiny bones too. The inside air is brought down and still, too taken away to stink. The blackness in the kitchen, in the hallway holds dense and waiting for change.
The deadbolt slides loudly through. The front of my shoe squishes into the mess, slick and crinkling, only it ahead. Another, and I’m through to the foam-frayed corner of the couch, where something is lying in desiccated fur. I get to a part that seems clear and squat quick against it. The burnt matchsticks of my arms taper bent in front of me. The fingers hook apart, locked in spider ticks, and I clasp them quickly back on each other with the nails scraping in. My breath stops on top of diaphragm at the edge of spitting the last bit and what’s with it out.
My eyes shut tight, making the darkness grow and come close. My heartbeat comes with it, the current still charging trapped through me. Footsteps, something like footsteps comes too. Soft, gently scratching its way in. Nestled already inside.
The wispy parts of me come back together without regaining their balance, aching back in movement. Up close, the thick plastic edge of the blind holds back a sliver of shirt, a moving shape in the grass. I swing a chair tight into the doorknob. Still going. The whole house is raised high and out of reach, the porch blank of anything but the door itself. Another joins, small in a persistent counterbeat. They stumble closer together, then magnet apart. One opens its mouth. I thresh into the regolith and find the spot farthest away and wait.
One’s still at the door, up with a hard fall that became a slow, heavy sliding upwards until it was already here. Its weight is just there, standing behind with what should be warmth. The air still moving from its mouth is nothing, genderless, neutral. What’s in it isn’t eager or curious or angry. It’s not restless or bored. The quiet is cut off from anything close to wonder. The movement of a rock through a vacuum. It’s there with nothing more.
The still-ticking on the wall clicks and clicks and clicks. I’m package-stuffed with air sodden crackers and turned walnuts. The ceramics around me stare white into other spots of the room, over the dust-hardened bed that’s at least somewhere to be. A growl rumbles not far below the window. Then a hissing that’s more in than out. It walks on.
The popcorn ceiling hums blue black on the dark. Blue black. Blue black.
Something else comes through the grass, and the two sounds meet stony together.
I close my eyes tight enough to press them out.
Two stand dark through the rosebush, their heads a turned mash of hair. I stay crouched to the porch with the old lady purse as steps plod somewhere and stop.
The yard is black stoneware. A tree-pierced fence line keeps the street from the spread of grass that’s light with pollen, almost bright enough to show what’s lying in it. The woman. Dale.
I slip over the back of the porch with the purse close, hanging exposed and hitting hard on the ground. Their sounds keep on, neither turned. I inch to the side of the house; it’s blank of the one that’s still there somewhere. Grass hums silent.
I move low into the opening. Unable to look anywhere but ahead, the uninterrupted geometry of the fence line comes closer, nearing in its gravity. Something drones there, a low rumble in the hatching, an engine and more. More.
Looking rough through, the stretch of sidewalk keeps still with a wide, dark spot and something small raised in it. Gone and not nearby.
The bag drops on the other side. Louder, I strain my weight on and over, boots knocking together.
They’re around the truck. My stuff, the axe, all the ammunition. Tall forms and short turn right towards me and start coming. More than before. Something rustles at my ankles, and I jolt into the sidewalk, nearing the stain and what’s in it. One crawling in a jumble faces me, unlit in front of the bag. The others have the gap already closed. I go the other way, steps bare into the gulped wide continuation of street.
ALONE
A verrucous nest is grown pink over the first house, the flower fronds bodied ethereal in front of the rust wire and waist-high grass. A plastic chair sits inside, too close to be used. A faded SLOW CHILDREN AT PLAY has its own spot marked where there’s nowhere off of the beaten road to run.
I pedal to a sun-stripped truck, and a dull black sweatshirt with a gardening bin stands inside next to a trellis of overgrown wisteria. The person in it looks up with wrinkles of sweat and brown waves of bed-bent hair.
— Hi.
She stays squinted at me, and I try to smile through. Her voice rises hard between us.
— Do you want something?
She picks off her gloves at me. Around her, the plants are weed choked and inedible.
— Water, if you have it.
— We’ve got water.
She stops, then picks back up again.
— I can give it to you.
Her face is lined and still. I try to relax off the bike, keeping everything slow.
— Thank you.
— You wait right there.
She ambles through to the house, moving older than she looks. Its long row of windows is boarded across the inside, clogging the movement in. Behind’s a tin shed where the grass carries on tall below a basketball hoop. New roof.
On ahead, a pair of horses watches from a wide-stretched paddock. The sky and hillside lift around them.
The slam of the porch leaves her firm back in the doorway, stopped with her hands center, the rest dark. Everything goes tense, and I try to keep my hands spaced, shoulders overly sloped. She steps out with a crystalline glass. We come together in the low gated driveway.
— Thanks.
The water is earthen, washing through what’s still hotpressed. I finish and offer her the glass, which she takes.
— I don’t got much else for you.
— It’s okay.
She continues to look me over, disinterested and still staring.
— I just lost my things and the people I was with.
She looks back at me.
— I’m sorry to hear that.
The green and manure come new back to my lungs. I step back in the gravel, smiling without turning.
— Thanks again.
She stays as I pick up the bike and carry slowly on, both of us there too long until I start with the sound of wheels rising under me.
Hanging inkblots catch me in the distance, each of the horses locked with canine passivity. Their chestnut flanks keep muscle and bone bound waiting together. The swollen hillside coats them close in green against the barn towered over with whitebarked oak. Someone has painted the front purple with butterflies and a sunflower.
A burst of objects fills the space between barn and the lone house. A backhoe. Two horse trailers left over from different decades. Rusted tractors. A homebuilt lopsided shed. A smaller barn with a collapsed roof. TV antenna caught inside some sort of tree. A polarized cluster of golden poppies at another deep brown shed. A trailer and a white station wagon, both sinking into the ground.
I stop at a long row of mailboxes on a wagon wheel in front of the house. What’s gated is more overgrown than what’s outside. Its kennel door is far to the side at a half-hidden pathway marked more by old rain than feet.
The house is shaded dark against the too-bright hillside that’s all around. Ahead, the road goes to nowhere. I tap on the newest mailbox and call out hello. The sound of it is crushed in the air.
There’s movement and shuffling with the door at the porch. The feet stay facing me through the dull sheen of oak.
— What is it?
— Nothing, I’m just passing through.
— So pass through.
I wince at the tree between us.
— Can we talk?
Something of a sigh comes from her, and she comes down with sandals and a shotgun half raised at me.
— Woah, not necessary!
I put up my hand with the other held low, feeling the space close between us. The barrel stays on me as she calls out.
— Yeah, I’ll decide that.
I show more of my face.
— Come on, if I was here to rob you or whatever, I wouldn’t be knocking.
— Don’t sell yourself short.
