V

We spent hours together like they were lifetimes 

Quiet kisses in the cozy corners of your couch. 

Nestled in your neck and yours in mine. 

How could you forget

The brightness behind our eyes lit the dark

Huge warm smiles that carried the toiled tattered miles away 

Laughter that was as easy as the breath we breathed 

And somehow you forgot 

I've been wiping dead skin and dust from this heart

Picking up the pieces of what I believe is me

Killing my memory of you one death a day

Yet I am unable to forget. 

That's love...? 

John (chapter draft)

Muffled static, like sandpaper across my eardrum, scratches and crawls up my spine one aching vertebrae at a time.  It seems to go on and on, labored breaths of uncertainty and panic, commotion and dissonance molest the receiver. It hasn’t even dawned on me that I haven’t taken a breath until my lungs begin to burn with fire. 

“Hello,” the weary voice slips into my ear, heavy and full of fatigue. I recognize it like a ghost, an echo from the past. 

“Emma, honey?”

“John, you’re okay,” she pauses,“...alive?” Her voice is like a warm hug. A distant embrace held apart by so much death and malevolence. 

“Emma are you safe? The Clarks? You’re with them?”

“John...” 

“Mr. Clark is a strong, resourceful man. He knows how to survive.”

“John?” 

“You are in good hands with him, he will keep you safe.”

“John! They’re dead.”

Little beads of sweat, filthy and brown, cool and wet sting my forehead. I collapse against the corner of the phone booth like a prizefighter taking a pummeling against the ropes. I'm lost in the muttle. I stare at Joe pacing the parking lot. He looks like he’s aged years in the past week. His white shirt smattered with tiny crimson rorschach's, his Beatles mop twisting in the warm Atlantic breeze.  A far different kid now than the one I met spinning tales beyond his years and serving me Dark and Stormies on the last living day of our lives.  We fled Carolina Beach and made it as far as Wilmington, NC before the hoards pushed us northeast towards the coastal town of Hampstead. With our backs against the ocean we soon will have to face the enclave of dead.  

Word spread that Camp Lejeune, the Marine Base, was a refuge, others said the it was the source of the outbreak, plague, pestilence, whatever.  The only thing we know is that everyday it’s getting worse and it seems to be sprawling in every direction. The things, the horror we've witnessed imprint themselves in black bloody globs, staining our sleep with gore and bits of flesh, lingering the way vomit does in the back of your throat. 

"John? Are you there?" Emma says. 

I hear her, but I don't. I can't make the connecting. Joe is kicking a rock across the parking lot. I see a twenty something kid, transformed, evolving into something no one thought he could be, not even himself. The fact is, we no longer exist! All we knew, all we thought about us, as people has changed. A simple singularity connects us all now, the will to survive. The how, the why is a greater enegima than it ever was before. Purpose be damned. A hero made in one split second of a decision or casualty a half a second too long.  

"John? Say something."

"Are you safe?" I stammer. 

"Yes. John what is going on? Where are you?" 

"North Carolina. Was attending a conference when it all began."

"I'm scared."

“Me too. Do you have a...I mean, how are you protecting yourself?”

I already know I must reveal my secret, expose her to my shame. 

“There’s a bat, I keep in my car, but I panicked. I’ve been hiding in your basement for days.”

I must tell her. I don’t want to but it’s the only way to keep her safe.  

“Emma, don’t go outside. I need you to listen to me. I need you to go to the attic. In the corner, there’s an old trunk. Inside is a small wooden box. I need you to get it. Can you do that?” 

“Yes, I can.” 

I hear her steps on the hardwood. With each one the static rises and crackles a little more. The signal is fading, along with the chance of disconnect growing and separation hovering on permanences.  I have to do what I can to keep her safe. 

“Emma? You need to set the phone down. We can’t lose the connection!”

“Okay, John.”

I can almost feel her set the phone down with care, like putting a sleeping baby in their crib. Her steps slowly recess and fade away. The attic door squeaks on rusty springs as she pulls the chain and lowers it to the floor. I hear her first step and then she’s gone.

At the top of the attic stairs, our christmas tree, ornaments and tinsel of christmas past, frozen in a time when love breathed a deeper breath within those four walls. Next to it, a bookcase, surrounded by draping and worn out insulation, a makeshift eulogy of a life past and forgotten strun amongst the shelves. Pictures of Emma, age five and up, until there were no more. Pictures of Sabrina and I, when things were...not perfect, but not weary as they soon would become. A collection of memories, more illusion than actual remains now. The trunk in the corner was my grandfather's, a WWI relic. Inside, wrapped in Emma’s favorite blanket is small wooden box finished and stained with a secret. It will feel heavy in her hands and the weight will shift inside when she moves it. She will try to open it but it is locked, the last line of defense and protection against myself.

Joe has wandered a little further down the road, a little too far for my comfort. The Shell station yielded nothing more than a few bottles of water, Red Bulls and potato chips and this landline. A populous on the edge of uncertainty  will strip everything in sight for a chance at survival. A luxury I suppose of being at the beginning of the end in a familiar place and surroundings. I am not. I am out of my element. I am thankful for Joe. Lords knows I wouldn’t have survived this long without him. The sound of footsteps make their way back to my ears in between crunches of static. As Emma picks up the phone Joe’s disappears just out of my view and my nerves begin to rise.

“I have it John, but it’s locked.”

“I know honey. I need you to go into the kitchen now. The reception should reach.” 

Just then a loud thump pounds against my ear. Through many miles of telephone wire, I know exactly what the sound was and where it emanated from. Again it hits the front door with force and I hear the wood in the door frame split. Emma screams, helpless my blood turns cold. 

I don’t know if it’s a looter or a “Z”, either way they are coming through my door.

“Emma, in the kitchen drawer, the one by the stove, are a set of keys to unlock the box.” Another bang against the door and the glass cracks. 

“You have to hurry. Whatever is trying to get in, is gonna get in. You have to accept that baby."

"John I'm scared."

"I know honey but you have to focus. Get the keys and lock yourself in the bathroom." 

My own wits shatter before me as Joe comes running into view. The shotgun bounces heavy on his back and against his head. He's waving frantically and the intensity of his eyes glow even in the daylight. The stretch wiggles it's way up my nose before I even catch eye of the oppressors. We are being hunted. My attempt to keep my Emma safe has now put Joe and me in direct danger. Joe struggles to retrieve the keys to the Impala from his pocket mid stride. We don’t dare try and make a stand and fight. In my haste to stop we didn’t make a thorough sweep of the area. There’s no telling how many there might be wandering, waiting for us to screw up. The knot in my stomach grows and it feels like it might burst right out and onto the dusty phone booth floor.

“I have the keys. There are so many. Which one is it?” Emma squeals in agony. I am painfully aware that I have no time to explain or answer her question. That my time is running out and that I must leave. That this is possibly the last time I will ever hear her voice. That I must leave her to her own, abandon her again. 

“Emma honey, I must go. I’m in danger. I love you so much. Never forget that. Hide and keep yourself safe. I am coming to you. I will come for you.”

“John, wait...I don't know which one. There has to be over a hundred keys!”

Joe is screaming. 

Emma is crying. 

Z’s are quickly approaching. 

My head is caught in the toil.

“Emma, I am sorry honey. I love you. I cannot tell you which one. I don’t know, but one will open it, I promise. I am coming for you.” 

There is no more time. I cannot bring myself to hang the phone up. It seems too final. I let the receiver fall and it bangs against the glass. Joe revs the engine as I spin around the front of the hood. I am cut off from the passenger door by one of them. A mailman, perhaps in his fifties and recently bitten, a Freshy.  He snarls and is quick, not like the others approaching behind him. He bites the air with ferocity and lunges at me. I kick at him, exposing a limb to the fray and a possible bite. I kick again, knocking him off balance enough that he staggers back and falls into another. I grab the door handle as Joe is already pressing the accelerator. The gas station begins to slowly disappear behind us and I catch the phone booth in the side mirror. The receiver still swaying back and forth. Uncertainty on the other end. 

“I will come for you,” I mumble to myself, “I will come for you.”

Emma

Emma (chapter draft) Jim

It must have got in sometime during the night. The cool basement floor kept me chilled and my bones froze, but I slept deeper, longer than I have in days. My nerves, like splinters, sharp and painful, subsided briefly, a few hours maybe, until they awoke again, irritated and on edge with eerie echoing of the cracks and snaps coming from the wood floor above.

The house was otherwise quiet, stale and empty, mostly absent of the memories I made growing up here. I had been gone too long. The outbreak, disease or plague, whatever they called it before the world as I knew it stop calling it anything, stopped speaking, ceased breathing and rolled over and died at an alarming rate. A botched chemical test by the military, a mutated flu vaccine, judgement day...the cause seems to be irrelevant now, the only certainty is that they dead won’t stay dead.

Our most fascinating, self hating and loathing vision of ourselves has come true, ripping and tearing its way through reality, devouring its way through the living. No one wanted to call it was it was at first. The media made sure to not utter the ‘Z’ word, but we knew, everyone did, yet no one wanted to face what was so clearly right in front of us. The monstrous side of us that we had long ago created in our own image, a seething, grotesque side of humanity. Our zombie apocalypse has arrived.

The steps are slow. I can hear it move from the living room where I used to sit and watch The Little Mermaid on repeat. To the kitchen where John would make me half boiled eggs and butter and pepper my bread. My room where I used to hold tea parties with frogs and little bugs instead of girly dolls and princess outfits. This thing was invading my memories one stomp and step at a time.

John is my stepfather. The closest thing I’ve ever known to a real man. I adored him, but never showed it, never let him in, tortured him with teenaged angst and bad boys. I was a hand full, my mother and I trapped him in the middle and made his life a living hell. There’s only so much shit a man can take and mother and I gave it to him constantly. He started drinking heavily when I was sixteen. He wasn’t an angry drunk, just a solitary one. He would lock himself in the basement, play old records of Zeppelin and watch Civil War documentaries. When the basement stopped doing the trick, he just stopped coming home after class. He would find a bar, make himself a regular, until mother found out where he was, then he just found another one, rinse and repeat. Sometime before my eighteenth birthday he met someone, a woman that appreciated the good man that he was. Treated him they way he deserved, loved him the way he could love. But the guilt was too much for him to bare. The morning he told mother he was having an affair I felt my heart fall into my stomach. I was angry, hate swelled inside, I knew, but wouldn’t admit that this was my fault. Not in a, my parents are getting divorced and woe is me kind of way, but because it was my fault. I should have loved him when my mother wouldn’t. I left them both the day after graduation, vowing never to return. Four years later and I’ve returned to the house that offered me so much love and I’ve never felt more empty and alone. It’s been nine days now and all I can think about is John, out there somewhere as one of those things, carrying with him his anger towards mother and I, even in death devouring him.

The basement windows offers little insight into the world that exist beyond them. They are small and narrow and only give perspective on the front and rear of the house. In the back, a thicket of woods, mostly small saplings and brush sprawl out before dropping off into a ravine. Most of the leaves have fallen, turning the ground into an autumn brown. A house that wasn't there when I left sits on the other side of hill, unfamiliar and out of place.

The front yard was lush and green, John hadn’t mowed in weeks and the tall grass reduced my visibility of the front. Cars sat empty around the cul de sac as they were nine days ago. No belongings strapped to the roofs, no haste or urgency to leave.There didn’t seem to be a sense of panic at all. It was as if this was ground zero and death spread out from here.

The pavement has it’s own tale to tell. Sidewalks and steps stained with dried blood, smeared and sprayed. One the second day, I saw Mr. Clark, our neighbor across the street dragged off his porch and torn to bits by two teenagers. As a WWII vet, I can only imagine the death and carnage Mr. Clark had seen and experience, to persevere where so many others bled and died, to only meet an end as horrible as his. I watched in horror, helpless and catatonic as these things shred his flesh. They didn’t chew, they consumed chunks of muscle and ligaments in enormous swallows, throats bludging and stretching with no need for air. They paused only at distant screams and clatter, animals sniffing out there next prey.

I remembered one of the boys, Bobby, he lived a few house down. I baby sat him for a few years for extra cash, but mostly because I was crushing on his older brother. George drove an old Camaro and he made me feel funny and tingly inside. Poor Bobby was already a zombie then, pretty much anyway, a cocktail of antipsychotic and depression meds left him staring at anime, zoning out and wiping trails of drool from his chin. It was the easiest job I ever held.

The sound of sirens stopped about three days ago. Emergency broadcast system tones sang out for the first few days, followed by cliche static. Cell phone communication ceased within days at the emergence of the zombie panic. So many people reaching out to loved ones at once sent networks into a frenzy, crashing servers and disabling communication. When the power started failing and cell phone batteries lasting only a few days, our love and dependence on technology died, along our global connection.

I stalk the footsteps like dracula from below, stopping when they stop, contemplating their next move, knowing not what to do if it should find me. My only hope is that its dead legs will carry it tumbling down the basement steps, crashing down and breaking a few limbs along the way, disabling it long enough so that I can smash John’s thirteen inch black and white tv into its brain. They stop somewhere near John’s office. My heart races, I can feel it beat against my chest and it feels like it might collapse a lung. Has it discovered my presence, smelled me? Do these things retain some sense of memory, awareness to former surroundings? Does everything die but the pestilence swimming around in the soft tissue of their head or does a resemblance of their former self still exist? The simple things, movies and books have prophesied but this is reality and we don’t have the luxury to know until we are one.

Just when I think I can’t stand the silence anymore, it moves. Passing through the dining room and down the hallway, past the kitchen and back into the living room where it must have entered. The creaking sound of the hardwood grows louder in my ears as it moves closer and closer to the front door. With one final snap, the house is quiet again and on the verge of hyperventilating I pause and raise my arms above my head to allow the stale basement air to fill my lungs once more.

I rush to the window, grabbing the concrete ledge and hoisting myself on my tiptoes. Scrawny, pale legs in orthopedic shoes descend the porch, one unstable step at a time. The lavender dress moves and flutters in the diseased fall breeze. As she reaches the sidewalk I catch the first glimpse of my stalker and my stomach turns. Mrs. Clark! She stops, confused she turns back towards the house and faces me now. She’s fine, she hasn’t turned. Delusional and suffering from dementia for as long as I can remember, she must have went looking for Mr. Clark and thought she was returning to her own house. John was notorious for locking himself out and always kept a spare key with the Clark’s. She simply let herself in and had been wandering around the house trying to figure out where she was.

I rush up the steps, making more noise than I’m aware of until I reach the top step. I round the kitchen corner and shuffle down the hallway, easing my way through the dining room. Even though the front door stands wide open the grey autumn sky makes the living room frightenly dim. I sidle up next to the door frame. Mrs. Clark stands right where she had, her back to me.

“Mrs. Clark,” I whisper in a raspy, cracking voice. I realise its the first time I’ve actually spoke in days. Silence atrophied my throat and vocal folds and I notice the pain for the first time.

“Mrs. Clark,” I try again and with a little more gust. She turns slowly and meets my gaze with a warm smile.

“Oh, Emma, is that you? You’ve grown so much.” Her sweet voice carried me back to when I played in their backyard or when she would bring over brownies when mother and John weren’t home and telling me that little girls needed them to keep them sweet.

“Have you seen my Herald? He went for a walk and hasn’t come back yet.” As she takes another step towards me I feel as if a hand grabs me by the throat. Behind her, in the middle of the street is Bobby, on all fours, devouring what looks like a black lab. His face covered in blood like war paint. I try to speak but nothing comes. I manage to put my finger to my lips to quiet her.

“What is it sweetheart?” She says with a calmness, as if consoling me. I motion for her to come towards me in haste. As she takes a step a high, beeping tone emerges from her left hand. It has been so long since I had heard such I sound I almost don’t recognize it. She holds a cordless phone, an antique by todays standards, a relic that an archaeologist might find some years to come, if they all weren’t zombies by now, and conclude it was an instrument used by the old and frail to communicate. She doesn’t seem to notice the tone and continues walking towards me. Bobby rears his head and snarls at the sound. He leaps to his feet with more enthusiasm and vigor than I had ever seen him do when he was alive. Like a cat, pouncing on a unsuspecting mouse, he has her by the neck and blood pours like a fountain, soaking her moon silver hair. Mrs. Clark stares at me, dizzy and dazed. She doesn’t scream or make a sound. It’s as if she doesn’t mind at all. She drops to her knees and then collapses to her side with her face buried in the think green grass.

The phone rings again, I didn’t even notice it had landed at the base of the steps. I rush to the bottom and reach for it and quickly hit the answer button. Bobby notices me and we meet in a gaze. Chunks of Mrs. Clarks dribble and drop on her now lavender shroud. I wonder if he recognizes me. He growls and hisses and swallows bits of that sweet old lady. Slowly I pick up the phone, his dead eyes watching my every move. As I take a step back, Bobby shrugs me off, I suppose realizing I am not an immediate threat to his meal and dives back, deep into Mrs. Clark.

I close the door slowly, locking it and bracing myself against the opposite wall. My head is spinning and all I can think about is the horror I just witnessed. My breathing is so loud is seems to echo off the walls. I don’t even notice the voice speaking from my hand. It sounds distant and hollow. I put the phone to my ear and exhale my fear.

“Hello,” I sigh.

Dead- Girls Shame

Dead Girls Shame

"Now you've done it, Amy," came a voice crawling out the dark, seeping from the bloody gash in the side of my once beautiful and pristine head. I've always had a big mouth, the PMS kind, only I wasn't just bitchy one week out of the month, more like three hundred and sixty three days out of the year. Halloween and St. Pats day I am quite charming, a pleasant gal.

His name is Gary, the twat that all but buried a short handle axe in the side of my skull. Who does that shit? Gary Trammel that's who! He's a bit of a piece of shit. A Creve Coeur rich boy that lost his entire trust fund to blow and the dot-com boom and has a fondness for giving head to the south county boys down by the Arch for a little extra dough. A real stand up guy.

As likable as he is, I DID have a soft spot in my heart for him. I've always enjoyed the fatal flaws in others. Like a dead star, shown and shimmering in the night sky, and when that fatal light reaches it's end, it's already too late and forgotten. Just another tragedy.

Gary, as far as I can tell, has no sexual preference. He's not much of a talker, I like that. A time or two, ( maybe more) I've let Gary take me in the beer cooler, straddled and spread me over some light beer keg and let him go to town. It's wasn't sexual, just a thrill, desperate men pound a little harder. Enough Malibu rum (yeah I know) and I'll open up for just about anything.

It all started with the chain smoking hag at the end of my bar. She has a way of getting my panties in a twist and not the simple kind you just pull and release, but ones that take some digging. She's always sits in the same bar stool, shifting and squeaking her way into my head. Reeking of perm, she picks the hairs out from underneath her fingernails after a long day at the salon and stacks them in little piles for me to clean up. Sipping her crème de menthe and milk from my only martini glass she snorts and cackles at the fuzzy reception of old I Love Lucy reruns. She is truly a disgusting human being. What my father ever saw in her I will never know. He died long ago, so I can never ask. I'm a daddy's girl after all.

This particular day, Gary strolls in with O, my older brother. An impromptu family reunion. O is fired up on amaretto sours, I can see the cherry swirling in his absent eyes. We are a family of serious drinkers, the liquor just goes to our heads. Anyway, he's here to quarrel with mommy dearest. God knows what Gary has his head swimming with now, I said he's a bit of a piece if shit. I wasn't kidding.

"I need to talk about father," O slurred.
"For Christ sake O, not again," I laughed.
Gary held up his hand as to shush me. The hag caught my rage about to spew and beat me to the punch that would have landed Gary on the floor.
"O, we've been through this before my love. I did not murder your father. It was his addiction that proved fatal for him." For a withering, frail old woman, with teeth stained green from mint liquor, she spoke with elegance and speed.
"Come, let Amy make you a drink and let's forget about this absurdity."
I was one step ahead of her as the ice clanked into the glass.
"Lies, you always speak in riddles and lies," O shouted.

It's seems like spontaneity, but this was a very predictable scene, ritualistic almost. Sometimes he goes on about being kicked out when he was seventeen, sometimes it's that she never wanted him and wished he was dead. I'm not saying he has it all wrong. Witch, hag, slut...mother is all of these and has always had an agenda of her own. O's accusations, they're, well old fucking news. Water under the bridge. Move on already. Our family is fucked the fuck up. Move on big bro.

I splashed the glass with sour mix and slid it down the bar, skipping over the warped and alcohol soaked finish and right into O's hand like a champ. He cursed me with a smile and then took a hero sized swig, swishing and rolling it around in his mouth like a cow chewing cud before choking it down. The taste seemed to pacify his thirst and slake his temper. The hag lit another slim while the other one burned with half life. She exhaled in Gary’s direction and I saw him snap before I heard the crack. It came, surfacing and rushing up from the depths of a detestable fucking mute, “Better to make enemies, than offend the gods.”
“Gary, what the fucking fuck are you talking about,” I spouted. “Have those little boys been paying you in Go-Go Juice again?”

“Shut the fuck up Amy!” His tone startled me, stern yet flimsy, like a devil grabbed hold of his balls and released the roar and ferocity of a mouse. “You did this, you put this in his head first. You know the truth as I do. She had your father murdered and you ignore it now?”

He was right! I knew it. We all knew it. The truth always had a way of grinding my teeth. And I was not about to let a drugged out, piece of shit like Gary Trammel, huge cock or not, call me out like that. I freaked. The four foot high and three foot deep bar was no match for me. I leaped like a jaguar on the hunt, ready to dissect Gary into little pieces. I grabbed him by the throat and slammed him into the nearest support beam and proceeded to choke what little life he had left out of him.

It was with one fluid motion that it all happened. I never saw his arm raise or notice prior why or where the fuck came to acquire a hatchet. In his defence, I attacked him. All five foot five and hundred and eight pounds of pure rage. His eyes went wide when he had realized what had just happened. I felt the warm trickle of blood run down my face before I felt the pain. All I could think was, “Now you’ve done it!”

“Oh my god Amy, what have I done?” Gary said collapsing at my side and resting in the fast flowing blood and goo.

“You’ve split my head in two you cock sucking moron.” I wish I could say my pun sounded as smooth as it did in my head, well, what was left of it, but the truth was, my speech was already slipping due to many important and severed neurons.

“Amy, I’m so sorry, I never...I mean...I didn’t want...”
“Shut up Gary, please, just shut the hell up.”

Blurred and dizzy, I could make out O directly behind him. I couldn’t tell if it was shock or relief on his blowzy face. All these years, thanks to me, I’ve convinced him that killing our mother and severing our umbilical noose was the only way that justice could be given to our father. Now, I’m the one dying, bloody and in bits.

“O, I am sorry. I am sorry I never stood behind you. That I laid whispers in your ears and put this burden on you. Forgive me.”

O turned and without word walked up the steps and with one good eye I watched him disappear forever, feeling exiled from everything he ever cared about. With blood stuffing my ear full, I heard an all too familiar click, heavy inhale and the sound of an empty glass hitting the bar. Slipping in and out of consciousness, I don’t know exactly when she left me alone with Gary, my accidental murderer. I guess it suits me, tragedy embracing tragedy.

“Amy, I’m sorry. I love you”

“Gary, shut your whore mouth, please. Just go, just go before someone sees you.”

What’s the point in making nice now, It’s all pretense. I looked upon the defeat in his face one last time and tried my best to force a half smile. He stood, fascinating patterns of crimson spread out in the threads of his dirty jeans. He left me, just as I asked and somewhere deep in my damaged head, I’m already missing the asshole.