Thirty-Seven

Not long after the screaming had stopped, Misty got onto her hands and knees and reached under the bed, fished out the last of the liquor her bedroom had to offer—a quarter of a bottle of cheap Canadian whisky that tasted like piss if piss were made of fire.

She drank it all, knocked it down with Olympian speed, and slept through the night and well into the next day. She awoke to an explosion of sunlight and the sensation that there were chunks of brick embedded in her brain.

She sat up and put her feet on the floor and rubbed her eyes and waited to die. When that didn’t happen she got up and stepped into the bathroom. She sat on the toilet and did her business, and her eyeballs seemed to toy with the idea of popping within their sockets. Flushing the toilet and pulling up her pants, she rinsed her hands and then grabbed the cup that contained her toothbrush and a tightly rolled tube of toothpaste, dumped its contents into the sink, and filled with cup with cool water from the tap. She emptied the cup, filled it once more, and took the second cup a little slower, setting it down long enough to rummage through the medicine cabinet and produce two aspirin tablets.

In the bedroom, she looked through the window and into the back yard, which was littered with fallen corpses. She picked up her pistol and looked at it, wondered if she had the strength. She doubted it. The previous night, she lay in bed drinking and listening to Cardo and the black guy slaughter the dead in the stairwell. By that point, she’d been certain that Crate was dead, that he’d been murdered by the cop, and though she’d lain with a loaded gun in her hand, the barrel inches from her lips, she’d hoped on some level that one of them would make it easy on her—just kick the door in and put one between her eyes.

This had not happened, and now she was alone. She searched the folds of the blanket strewn across her bed and discovered her gun beneath her pillow. She checked the cylinder. She had five shots left.

The hallway outside the bedroom was empty. Before reaching the stairwell, she stepped into the cluttered guest bedroom. Spent shell casings littered the floor and the bed. The window was still open. The air smelled like morning dew on grass and leaves. Only a trace of the scent of charred flesh reached her nose, and as she looked down at the mad scattering of dead bodies in the parking lot, she knew that the air would not smell so nice for much longer.

Two walking corpses walked strange and uneven circles before the store, their feet tracking blood from the burst remains of the dead things that had been unable to get out of the way when the big truck had rumbled out of the parking lot.

Downstairs she found the back door wide open. Two bodies lay huddled together across the threshold, and she would not be able to close the door until they were gone. She stepped into the store and realized that there’d be little point in closing the back door: the front door was shattered. Anyone or anything that wanted to get in would have no trouble doing so.

Between herself and the shattered door, there lay a twisted and flayed form, barely recognizable as human. Its clothes had been peeled away and were strewn around it in blood-blackened tatters, and its body had been pecked clean. It was little more than a skeleton caked in dried blood and gristle.

She remembered the scream, the wailing and inhuman scream.

“Oh, Crate,” she said, stepping toward her husband’s remains. A sound to her left made her jump.

A dead boy sat before the cooler farthest away from where she stood. It looked to be ten or twelve and held an unopened bottle of chocolate milk in its bloodless right hand. Its face was taut and multi-colored—the right side bone-white, the left bruised with settled blood, deepest purple washing to crimson at the edges. It looked up at her, dropped the milk bottle, and tried to stand.

She walked up to where it struggled to find its footing and shot it through the head.

“God,” she said, stepping back and jamming a finger into her ear, working it. She looked back at the front door and realized her mistake. Walking past the thing on the ground—maybe it wasn’t Crate… maybe—and through the broken glass door, she looked out into the parking lot and saw that the two corpses she’d seen from the upstairs window had given up their aimless wandering and now moved toward the building.

She turned her back to them and walked over to the thing on the floor, dropped to her knees beside it. She saw the matted tuft of hair on the floor next to the thing’s raw skull and any doubt she’d had was laid to rest.

“Crate, honey,” she said, and rolled the thing onto its back, winced at the feel of it, like something from a butcher shop. Its face was mostly skull. One of its eye sockets was empty. The other contained a blue eye that moved left and right, following her every move.

Feet crunched on broken glass and she looked up to see the first of the walking corpses stepping into the store. She got up, walked toward it, and shot it between the eyes. She waited for a moment and shot the next one as it shuffled along behind its partner.

She stepped to the door and looked out, stepped onto the porch, looked around. The only dead were the truly dead.

She went back into the store and looked down at what was left of her husband. The blue eye moved left to right, left to right in its lidless red socket.

“You dumb old shit,” she said.

Two bullets.