Delusions of the Dead, page 15
It looked cold and inviting at the same time. I was troubled by the lack of life on its streets but drawn to the thought of a shower and a real bed. “Do you think it’s safe?” I asked Ghost.
“Do you feel fear?”
“I don’t feel fear, I feel unease. You know, it’s like something isn’t right. It looks like a nice bit of civilization but…”
“What are you talking about?” Margaret asked, exasperated. “I find you safe and clean shelter in a solider-free neighborhood, and you turn your nose up at it!”
“It’s probably one of those newly-built housing complexes,” said Dan. “They were going to sell peace and scenery to retirees, but their clients all died before they had a chance to inhabit their homes. I say we go for it.”
I looked behind me at the mass of rotting flesh that was closing in on us while we stood there deciding. I really did not want them to catch up to us. The thought of being near enough to see their complexions propelled me forward, and the rest followed without a word of protest. The closer we got the faster we ran, until we were practically flying down the hill, with the exception of Dan, who carefully made his way down with Danny still clinging to his back. The kid was starting to sweat, which was weird because it was still as cold as a lawyer’s heart. I hoped he wasn’t getting sick.
We went into the show home first. I half-expected to be greeted by an over-eager salesperson, but the place echoed with emptiness. It had furniture and the requisite plastic food and TVs, but no pinstriped fake-tan estate agent graced its entrance. I was happy to see there were lights on because lights meant power.
“This complex must have been finished during the summer,” Houston said. His voice echoed around the cavernous front hall. I could imagine a sleazy salesman pointing out the “Marble foyer decorated in neutral colors and graced by cathedral ceilings!”
“Why do you think that?” asked Mouse.
“Because the air-conditioning is on full-blast. It’s turned this place into a meat locker.”
He was right. It was much colder inside than outside. I found the thermostat in the Touches of Classical European style combined with American Craftsman accents! Front hall and tried to put the heat on, but the temperature gauge remained stubbornly stuck on thirty Fahrenheit. “That’s odd. Why would they keep this place so cold? Wouldn’t that drive all the customers away?”
“Maybe their customers were old people and they were trying to preserve them,” Jesse said with a smirk.
“Or they realized they would have to put this project on ice until life got back to normal. The cold dry air would keep the insides from deteriorating,” said Ghost, which made more sense.
We started to explore the property on our own. We split up Scooby-Doo style, not because we could cover more ground that way, but to get a break from each other. We didn’t think twice about doing that because nothing in the show home felt dangerous. It was clear no one had ever lived here, and it wasn’t terribly exciting to look at, despite the five bedrooms, each with their own private bathroom! Hardwood floors throughout! Dynamic floor plan! Incredible attention to detail! Chef’s kitchen with granite countertops! We turned on the faucets and showers, but all their fixtures seemed to be frozen on the “Artic Assault” setting. We gave a happy start when we saw a hearth in the master bedroom, but it turned out to be a gas fireplace minus the gas. This place was too cold to stay in.
We silently stepped outside and looked over the rest of the complex. All we saw were more homes on Lush lots with professional landscaping and ground sprinkler systems! in a similar style to the one we just explored.
“Uh, who’s been mowing the grass?” asked Nemesis.
Good question. “They probably send a gardener out once a week to keep this place in shape. You know, in case the customers come back,” Dan guessed.
“Or they could be making a bid to the government to turn this into the next domed community,” Ghost mused. That made even more sense than his first theory. “Let’s see if we can find a house with hot water and electricity.”
“Should we split up again and look?” Mouse asked nervously. She seemed to be hoping we wouldn’t be doing that again.
“No,” replied Ghost. “I know it would save a lot of time, but KC’s right, something out there doesn’t feel right.”
We went up and down the streets, each of us taking turns carrying Danny on our backs to give his father a break. Danny kept saying his leg really, really hurt and he was crying by the time it was my turn to carry him. The kid felt hot as hell, which drove the cold out of my bones but filled me with worry. I knew we should stop and look him over, but we needed a place to stay to check him out.
The smell of rot was in the air again, even though there were no signs of our undead companions. It was different to anything I had smelled before, and it made me queasy in a way the corpses did not.
Every door and window we tried was locked. It took us only ten houses of this useless searching before we decided to get a rock from the Professional Landscaping! and break a window with it. Houston found the biggest rock he could and held it high over his head, ready to smash in the strip of window that flanked a front door; but he stopped when we heard Margaret shout, “Wait!”
“For what?” Houston asked.
“Someone just switched the light on in that house!” She pointed down the street to one of the few homes that was as big as the show home, but different Tuscan Style Villa! in design. She was right. “I looked down that street just minutes ago and there were no lights on. Well, now there is.”
“Let’s not get our hopes up,” said Ghost. “It looks like a show home for the second half of the community. It could be on automatic timer.”
“And just as cold as the last show home,” I added. “But we should try it anyway.” I didn’t care if it was cold, I wanted a place to put Danny down and see if there was anything we could do to help him. He was feverish and becoming more and more of a dead weight, but at least he had stopped scratching.
We approached the home cautiously and stared through the windows to see if there were any signs of life. There were none. If it wasn’t a timer and someone had turned the lights on, they were already gone.
Or hiding.
We tried the door and discovered the first unlocked house since the show home. That didn’t make us feel any better. We entered the same Marble floors! Cathedral Ceiling! front hall like we did before. This time we remained huddled together, collectively questioning if it was okay to go any farther.
“Is it safe?” asked Mouse finally.
“Why don’t the rest of you stay here while Ghost and I check this place out?” said Houston.
“I’ll come!” Margaret called out as they started to go down the hall. That really surprised me and by the slump of Houston’s shoulders, disappointed him. The rest of us held our breath while their shoes made muted taps on the Hardwood floors throughout! the rest of the house.
Daniel pulled his overly-warm son off my back and cradled him in his arms. We weren’t talking, just looking. This place had more ornate, Italian style furniture, and a lot of it. It also had overly fancy gold-filigreed mirrors, which only made things seem spookier. My eye kept darting back and forth between each oversized mirror, looking for some figure to appear in one of them. I didn’t see a person, but my visual sweeps did pick up on something that made me want to cry out in warning. There were magazines on the table, faint butt prints on the brown leather sofas, and a pair of shoes—men’s size large—by the front door. The room was getting warmer by the minute. I may have been hearing things, but I could swear I heard the gentle buzzing of a housefly. And if that wasn’t unsettling enough, a coffee maker in the kitchen sprung to life, filling the air with the rich aroma of gourmet-fresh ground roast. It should have been a comforting smell, but in this context it was terrifying.
At this moment we were all Goldilocks. And we were not alone.
GHOST
“Someone lives here.” Houston said this without any stress in his voice.
“Do you think they’re here now?” Margaret asked.
“I don’t think so. At least, it doesn’t feel like someone is here right now. Those microscopic invaders in my brain are not sending any warnings. If they were, I wouldn’t be standing here talking to you. I’d be downstairs rushing the others out the door and into hiding.”
I know what he meant. You could love or hate what was happening in our minds since the microbes moved in, but they were great with sensing danger. That didn’t stop the human side of my brain shouting out about all the red flags popping up here and there; reminding me that what was good for the dead wasn’t necessarily good for the living.
“What makes you think someone lives here?” asked Margaret.
“This place is warming up like someone turned up the thermostat. And look, the drawers and closets are full of clothes and shoes, both men and women’s. Plus there are fresh towels in the bathroom.” Houston seemed surprised that someone like Margaret would miss something that obvious, but Margaret appeared to be distracted by something.
I walked into the on-suite and turned the shower on, just to see if this really was different to the other show home. I was richly rewarded with a shot of hot water. This was going to make the others very, very happy.
“Anything else, Einstein?” asked Margaret impatiently.
“Yeah,” said Houston. “There are magazines beside the bed. There’s even a copy of Sporks Illustrated.”
“You mean Sports Illustrated,” she said condescendingly.
“No, Sporks Illustrated. It’s a kitchen catalogue.”
I laughed out loud, but Margaret was not amused. “Are you two done with being stupid?” she said angrily. She let out a sigh of pure exasperation and said, “Look, I came up with you two because I wanted to talk about something. Have either one of you noticed how sick Danny has been lately?”
I looked at Houston to see if he understood what she was talking about and he did. Of course we were worried about Danny. He was hot to the touch; he was in pain and worst of all he smelled. At first I thought it was the scent of the dead following us, but when I carried him I noticed it was something different, something vile.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” asked Margaret.
“Gangrene,” whispered Houston.
The word dropped like a poisonous spider descending on a thread. It’s what I feared as well but hoped I was wrong. I made sure to have antibiotics with me in my split kit ever since the Mclean High School Siege, but I didn’t think they were strong enough to treat gangrene.
“But how did he get it?” asked Houston.
“I don’t know,” said Margaret sadly. “Let’s quickly finish up with our search and talk to the others.”
We checked every corner and closet, paying special attention to the bathroom cabinets in hopes of finding medicine. No luck. This place was luxurious, stocked with expensive clothing and furniture but no electronics, no flashlights, no winter gear and even worse, no food. It was a house full of possessions but lacking anything of real use. I could hear my mother’s voice in my head declare: “Only the rich can afford this much nothing.”
“This place is as pointless as a reform school for goldfish,” said Houston as if he could read my thoughts. “Wait, I take it back; we have taps with temperature. Let’s give the others the good news about an empty house and hot water.”
The house was even emptier when we went downstairs because the others were waiting outside. We told them about the comfortable beds and warm showers, but they still seemed reluctant to come in. “The coffee maker in the kitchen just came on. That means someone else lives here!” said KC. “What if they come back?”
“One of us will stand watch and explain our situation,” Houston said encouragingly. “Besides, we need to get Danny inside and find out what’s wrong with him.” His expression looked grim. I’m sure it matched mine.
Danny had the final word. “I’m hungry. Can we go inside and have a bowla bisghetti?”
So we all went inside, but unfortunately we did not enjoy a bowla bisghetti. The kitchen was as useless as the rest of the house; it contained nothing edible apart from the coffee. I’ve never been a coffee drinker, but I found myself drawn to the smell. It made me think of the home I had when my family was still alive. Even better, its aroma helped to mask the smell of deteriorating flesh coming from Danny. It also made the rest of us hungry, and we greedily tore into the fat-fueled MREs in our split kits.
“I can’t believe this place has coffee but no food,” complained Nemesis. “Only college students can live off of coffee alone! Maybe someone resides here, but they don’t live here. Know what I mean?” There was no reply to this because we were too busy tucking into our meager dinners.
It was a good thing we ate quickly because it wasn’t long before Margaret ruined our appetites. “Little boy,” she asked with the voice of a patronizing kindergarten teacher, “why have you stopped scratching your leg?”
“’Cause it stopped itching and started hurting,” said Danny. “But it don’t hurt no more. Now look what I can do!” He hitched his loose trousers to his knees, exposing swollen and blistered skin. Three of his bug bites had been replaced by holes that leaked the most foul-smelling pus imaginable. Half of us gasped in horror and the other half cried out “NO!” in unison. Danny must have misinterpreted our shock as surprise and enthusiastically responded with, “See? I can make my finger disappear!” He poked one of his tiny fingers into a purple-red hole near his knee and sure enough, it disappeared right into his leg. Mouse turned around and threw up in the sink behind her. The rest of us covered our mouths in shock. It’s what Margaret and Houston feared, but nothing could have prepared us for the uncovered stink and sheer grossness of it. Danny’s leg was puffy and the skin around the holes was soft, putrid, rotten, and dark. It was unbearable to look at, and the rank odor coming from it made it hard to breathe.
Dan cried out, “No, it can’t be!” and grasped his son into a tight bear hug as if he could protect him from his own infection.
Margaret breathed out heavily and said, “It’s liquefactive necrosis. Wet gangrene.”
“What is that?” yelped a traumatized Jesse. “Is there a cure? Will he die?”
This made Daniel hold his son tighter and cry even harder. Margaret went into full-on clinician mode. I probably would have too if I knew as much about gangrene as she did; it’s a better way to deal with a crisis than running around waving your arms in circles and weeping. “He must have transferred bacteria from all that nasty dirt under his fingernails into the bug bites. The area around the site must have been steeped with stagnant blood. That in turn would encourage the bacteria to grow faster and promote septicemia. It’s logical, really, because there’s easy contact between infected fluid and circulatory fluid. The bacterial infection will lead to septic shock and yes, he will die.”
Danny didn’t react to this. The kid was just told he had something that would kill him and he didn’t seem to take it in. Instead he sleepily said, “I don’t understand her. She talks in scribbles.”
“Confusion is one of the symptoms. There may be rapid heart rate, lightheadedness, low blood pressure, shortness of breath...”
“Wait, you said it was caused by bacteria! My dad put stuff in our split kits that kills bacteria!” Jesse said hopefully. Dan let go of his son so he could turn around and look Margaret in the eye. He appeared as optimistic as Jesse did.
“That’s nice,” said Margaret wistfully, “but antibacterials will not work on their own.”
“Why not?” asked Dan.
“Because they will not be able to penetrated the infected tissue enough to cure it. This is serious stuff! If we were in a hospital he would undergo surgery for debridement and have powerful antibiotics intravenously.” She saw the question in our eyes and quickly explained, “Debridement is the removal of dead tissue. Anyway, if that doesn’t work they amputate the limb to keep the infection from spreading and killing the host.”
“What does amputate mean?” asked a mildly curious Danny.
“It means they’re going to have to chop off your…” Jesse started to explain, but was quickly silenced by KC yelling.
“Jesse! Quiet!”
This brought tears to her eyes and she ran off to the living room.
“Did anyone notice a hospital on the way here?” Dan asked in desperation. “I bet we could break into the garage and find a car and hotwire it and find a map in the glove compartment and find a hospital on it and…”
“We’re on it,” Houston said, walking towards the one door from the kitchen that we didn’t open. “You stay and take care of Danny.” Nemesis followed him without explanation.
An uncomfortable silence followed. Margaret broke it by making things even more uncomfortable. “At least it’s not Gas Gangrene. If it were, his skin would make crackling sounds when you pressed down on it. And it’s not Fournier’s Gangrene where the genitals…”
“Shut up Margaret!” shouted KC before she could finish her medical musings. “You’re not helping!”
Now it was Margaret’s turn to feel hurt. She stomped off to the living room; presumably to let Jesse know what an insensitive and ungrateful older sister she had been cursed with. I should have pointed out that Margaret had been very helpful and useful in diagnosing Danny, but KC was my girlfriend and Margaret was, well, Margaret was annoying.
I heard the sound of tinkering in what I assumed was the garage, so I walked over to the door to see if they found anything. To be honest, I also walked over there to get away from the putrid smell coming from Danny’s decaying leg. I was relieved he didn’t seem to understand what was going on. I don’t think I could have handled a five year olds hysterics on top of everything else.
The door opened before I could reach it, and Houston stepped through holding a set of keys. I was disappointed to see the golf cart behind him instead of a sedan, but it was plugged into a socket and could still be of help in transporting Danny. The problem was, I had a map to the area. I had studied it over and over before I filled the ambulance up with friends and refugees and I knew there were no hospitals anywhere near us. If they existed at all they were off the map, and we would have to take a gamble and set off in different directions trying to find one. And if it was off the map, it was too far for a golf cart to go before running out of juice.
