They searched together, instead of splitting up. They could no longer imagine leaving each other’s sight. The first few houses were empty and looked like they had been looted already. One of them was burnt on the inside. The kitchen was a cave of ash, and when Eric looked in, he saw a blackened corpse, all charred bone, with its head stuck in the black remains of a gas stove. Eric turned Birdie away, but he was pretty sure she had already seen it. Birdie had seen a lot already. She’d seen worse.
When they re-grouped, Lucia looked nervous again. Sergio, picking up on his sister’s apprehension, was beside himself with fear. He kept moving from one foot to the other.
“Hey man,” he said to Eric. “There’s nothing here. Let’s try the next town.”
“No,” Eric said angrily. “We’re here, we need the food, we’re doing it.” He didn’t know why he was so adamant about it. Sergio made a whining sound, but then cut it off, as if he had betrayed himself. Lucia put a comforting hand on her brother’s shoulder, but wouldn’t look at Eric.
They continued down the street and then came to a large, sprawling light blue house with gray trim. The upper story was all gothic gables, and the largest gable, which hung over a large window and the entrance, was topped by a cast iron fence. It looked fortified, a wooden palisade of a house. Eric stopped in front of the white picket fence that ringed the yard and listened to the wind in the maple tree in the yard.
“You’ve got to be kidding me,” said Sergio, staring at the house.
“It was probably an inn or something,” Eric said, without looking at him. “It has food inside. I know it.”
He didn’t know it. He just didn’t like the look of the house. It was a challenge to him. It mocked him somehow. It seemed to say, “You’re a fucking coward, Eric. You don’t dare come in here. Your mother ruined you!” Eric stood in front, motionless.
There was a crash then and a gurgling scream. Sergio and Lucia sprang back and were halfway down the street when three zombies came out of the house.
Behind him, he could hear Lucia, Sergio, and Birdie, running, but Eric did not move.
He pulled out his pistol.
The first Zombie had lost an arm, and it walked in strange lunges. Its face was black, and there were holes where his nostrils once were. There was still a few tufts of bright red hair on his head. Eric leveled his .22 and fired. The Zombie stumbled, fell to its knees, snarling like a wolf. Eric fired two more times, both in the head. The holes in its skull spewed forth a black bile as if the contents had been under pressure. Then the cracked Zombie fell forward onto the lawn.
The other two lurched around the body. Eric shot once at a jawless Zombie in overalls before his pistol clicked empty. Turning, he ran down the road, following Lucia and Sergio and Birdie. While he ran, he flipped open his pistol and began reloading. When he reloaded, he turned and aimed. The next shot took the jawless Zombie in the chest, and it halted to spit up gobs of red and black from his mouth. The other came in something like a run. It was once an old woman and its face was wrinkled and black, like an olive. The cavities that were once eyes wriggled with white worms. Eric fired three times, and one of the shots caught her in an empty eye socket. She fell to the ground not more than six feet from him. The last one was still vomiting up its innards when Eric walked toward it, shooting. He shot it three times in the crown of the head before it feel forward. More black bile poured from its skull in spurting streams. The smell of the bile hit him like a hammer. It was like chemical warfare. Eric dropped to his knees and retched up his stomach on a lawn.
When he recovered, he was looking at three pair of legs standing beside him. The little legs next to him, he noticed, had pink socks.
“Let’s get out of here,” Sergio said in a shaky voice as Lucia helped him up.
“No,” Eric said firmly. “I’m going in the house.”
Inside the gothic house, there was graffiti on the wall in thick black paint:
Fuck the Minutemen! Minutemen are Massholes! Green Mountain Boys!
There was other graffiti. Names. Numbers. Dates. Inscrutable drawings. It was all painted messily over a floral wallpaper in the main room. The words dripped the same color as the black bile that had gushed from the Zombie’s skull.
In the back of the house, in the kitchen, they found a stainless steel door, still locked. Eric smashed the lock with a cast iron skillet. Inside was an untouched larder.
The walk-in was putrescent. They cupped their hand around nose and mouth as they passed through. Boxes once filled with lettuce and tomato now dripped a dark fluid. The floor was slippery with it. In the back, however, were three wire shelves filled with cans. Beans, corn, beets, peas, carrots, spinach, pickles, cranberry sauce, creamed corn, all of it untouched. While Eric filled their bags, he heard Sergio outside cry out.
“Flour!” he said. “And rice!” Then came a flood of Spanish as Lucia joined him.
When they left the house, their bags were bursting with food. So much that it was difficult to walk.
No one complained.
That night they feasted.
They mixed beans with corn. They ate spoonfuls of cranberry sauce, which tasted as sweet as candy. They slurped up cans of spinach and crunched into pickles pinched free from their salty, green brine. Mixing flour with their drinking water, Lucia fried the batter over the fire, and they had something like bread, which they dunked into cans of creamed corn happily. Their appetite was enormous.
Afterward, they sat content in front of the flickering flames.
Eric stayed up late, watching the fire and cleaning his gun. Birdie slept with her head next to him, the light from the fire warm and gentle across her body.
He could not understand what he felt. It was not entirely good. He listened to his own breathing, low and even. Nothing could touch them.
They entered Aitken State Forest the next day, moving north. All day they plunged through the forest. Weeks of walking had made their strides long and deep. They devoured the hilly terrain, stopping only to drink water and eat a hurried meal. Eric had never felt so close to the island. It no longer seemed a dream, but was real now, attainable.
They hiked to the foot of Bald Mountain and stopped to make camp when Sergio heard it.
“Listen,” he said, holding out his hands. They heard nothing. When Lucia said something in Spanish, he shook his head. There was only quiet around them, but Eric drew out his pistol. He had a feeling. He pictured the Land Rover crashing through the forest.
Then he heard it. Distant. Up the mountain somewhere. A chugging, puffing engine.
After quick conferral, the four of them crept slowly up the side of the mountain, following the sound. Around a bend, they saw a wooden shack, under green maple trees. Once it might have been a sugar shack, used for boiling down maple sap into syrup. Now the hole that once vented out the steam was covered with bright blue tarpaulin. Chugging outside was a small, single piston generator. An orange drop cord connected it to the shack like an umbilical cord. They stood transfixed by the oddity of it. Eric hardly had time to pull out his pistol before the old man came out the door.
He was carrying a metal pan of water when he walked out the door. Seeing the .22 pointed at him, he dropped the pan to the ground.