We found a lot of canned goods in the small space, so we loaded them up. I found some bags of flour, as well as a few large canvas bags of rice and dried beans. I wondered what happened to the people who managed to collect this much food and never eat it.
There was another hidden door in the floor in the storage room, which led to a room with an old TV and radio. I took the radio and raided the supplies, which consisted mainly of powdered milk and cereal. It was a weird combination, but I was betting I could live on Cheerios.
We made it to the cabin before night. It was raining hard—a sheet of turgid water turning the night a gray that pulled at my view and made it hard to see. We had some slow going for part of the ride, because the windshield wipers had been removed to make room for the metal plates.
The first night, Katherine and I spent an hour heating water to near boiling and pouring it in the old tub. But it was worth it. She said she hadn’t had a proper bath since the epidemic began.
The barricades were down for now—the ones that had hindered my life for the past half year. The barricade at the city, the barricade to my existence, and, so it seemed, the barricade to my heart. I smiled when I joined her in the tub, and told her I was glad she was with me. She smiled in return, and it broke down the last barricade. I wept for the first time in many years.
Part Two
I woke to the sound of thunder in the middle of the night. The rain that had set in the evening before was gone, but the sounds of the gods bowling across the heavens tore me out of sleep. I clutched at the warm body next to me and concentrated on her name. Katherine, not Allison. Allison was years ago—a lifetime to me. She was my first true love—and, I thought, the last—but things did not work out the way we planned. I think it was my choice of careers. After Special Forces, I got into security because there wasn’t much else for a guy like me to do. Personal escort was my favorite, protecting minor celebrities.
I moved on to consulting, but the pay wasn’t that great, and I was frequently gone for up to a week at a time. Missed my wife dearly during those days, but she didn’t miss me as much. It was a guy at work who did us in. I remember plotting to take him apart. I had a romantic vision stuck in my head. I would confront him, push him, and when he snapped and took a swing at me, I would separate his arm from his shoulder. Then I would break his jaw, leave him unable to beg Allison to come back. I spent hours and hours plotting. The play ran in my head, but I wised up after a few days and realized it was no use. It would just make me look like an animal to her.
Katherine had a gentle snore that was almost soothing after I’d spent so many months in this place without a soul to talk to. Her auburn hair was a mess in the moonlight, but I didn’t care. To me, she was the loveliest thing I had ever laid eyes upon. I longed to lean over and kiss her neck, but I feared waking her. Instead I lay, content, next to her warm body, breathing in her scent.
Damaged: that was a good way to describe her. Even though she had given herself to me, I could feel a gulf between us. It was as though I stood on one side of a stream, reaching out for her, but she remained on the other side, holding back as if she had a secret. I wanted to ask her about her life before the event, but I was afraid of the answer. She was with me now, and I didn’t want to hear about a past love. Perhaps my reluctance stemmed from my problems with Allison. I was not an insecure person by any stretch. I had always been very confident in myself and my abilities. The fact that I did not hang onto Allison could have torn me in half, but I didn’t let it.
I changed my mind and touched her after all, running my hand over her shoulder, which was bare and pale against the dark flannel sheets. The day had been warm, but nights in the cabin were cool. Thunder rattled across the sky, shaking the roof. Rain started to patter down once again, and I noticed that Katherine’s snores had stopped. She rolled over to face me in the dark, her eyes luminous in the pale light, like a cat’s eyes.
“When did that start?” she whispered.
“About five minutes ago. I’m surprised you slept through it for that long.”
“It’s beautiful.”
“The thunder?”
“After being in that enclosed space, large as it was, with all those people, I can’t believe how much I missed the sounds of nature. We don’t live in the Pacific Northwest because we want year-round sun. We live here for the beauty of the rain.”
“And here I was bored out of my mind with no one to talk to the whole time. Why didn’t I meet you on my way out of town back then?”
“That fickle bitch fate. You know how she likes to mess with our lives.”
I smiled at that and kissed her. She met the kiss but was still holding back, and I wanted to ask her what I was doing wrong. She went through the motions, but something was on her mind.
“Well, thank you for coming back with me. We should really talk about what the hell we’re going to do now. I don’t want to face an army of those things again, but I want to get to Portland.”
“I remember the first ones we ran into, during the whole zombie thing. It was bad enough that we had to put up with these groaning, moaning bastards with no brains that wandered around like lost kids. Alone, they weren’t that scary. I mean, you could see them coming a mile away and put a bullet in their skulls. It was around the third week that we felt like we were getting a handle on them. Masses were rounded up and taken away in trucks while we watched. The fence was just going up, and people were still running around town. Some were even going home at night.”
“Weird. I can’t picture the end of the world like that.”
“It wasn’t really the end. I mean, it isn’t now either. It’s like a bump in the road. Do you believe in evolution?”
That was a funny question. I was not a liberal, yet I couldn’t say that I was a religious man either. I needed explanations for stuff; I needed to see things to believe in them. The idea that there was some god sitting above me constantly judging my actions and planning to roast my ass in hell if I screwed up didn’t make sense. Then again, neither did the dead walking around.
“I think so. People have been changing for thousands of years, getting taller, losing their need for wisdom teeth, stuff like that.”
“And the ghouls are the natural offshoots of the zombies. The virus that reanimated the dead and created the mindless things, well, it affected the living in strange ways. It made them like a half-zombie hybrid.”
“What started it all?” I had never asked that question. Never really had anyone to ask it of.
“No one is really sure. Lots of theories but no answers. Some said it was a swine flu vaccine that went wrong, some said it was terrorists. Some said it was a comet strike stirring up weird stuff in the air. Space spores or something. We spent that whole first week listening to the news channels, talking, theorizing, but we never heard a real cause.”
“Someone has to know.”
“Maybe it is a form of evolution—a shifting bacterial infection that found a way to get rid of us. AIDS didn’t work; the black plague tried it; Ebola was a huge success. Maybe all those antibiotic-resistant monsters got together and figured out a way to kick our ass.”
“I like your ass right where it is.” I pushed myself against her as the rain came down harder than before. It rolled down the side of the house and splashed on the ground, making an ocean of noise.
Lightning lit the sky, and a glance out the window showed tall skeletons in the form of the trees surrounding the cabin. The air felt like it was charged. All those ions bouncing around from the flashes of light in the sky made my hair stand on end. Or maybe it was her shifting against me, under the covers, in that tiny bed.