Eden 01 - Eden, page 31
“Bobby. Bobby. This morning, the gate. It was Thompson, Bobby . . .” Thompson was seated on the floor, shaking his head vehemently. “Thompson opened the gate, Bobby. Thompson let them into Eden. Thompson broke into my house and Thompson left the door open so they could get in.”
“Jesus Christ, Harris, what’s a matta’ with ya’? Your skin, man . . . oh.” Bobby realized. “Ya been bit.”
While they were talking, Bobby had moved forward, closer to Harris and Thompson. Spying the bandage on Harris’s shoulder, a sad look crossed his face and he brought his lower lip up over his upper. The rifle was still slung across his back.
“Harris, first thing we gotta get Thompson here untied, get him some—” Bobby stepped toward Thompson seated on the floor, ignoring Harris, meaning to unbind the young man.
The metal collar attached to the end of the chain caught Bobby in the side of the face and he went down. Evers hit his knees and held out a hand, unable to see from one eye, the collar hitting his hand as Harris jerked it back and forward like a wet towel, snapping back three of Bobby’s fingers. Evers let out a final “Jaysis” and rolled onto his left side, shrugging off the .30-.30, but Harris was upon him from behind, wrapping a forearm around his neck and pulling back on it with everything he had.
“Just fucking don’t move, Bobby,” spat Harris, straining. “Just be still, damn you.”
Bobby flailed, trying to reach around and pry Harris from his neck, the hunting rifle sliding across the floor during their struggle.
“Damn you, Bobby, damn you . . .” Harris growled between bared teeth.
The last thing Bobby saw was Thompson straining at the pole, trying to scream through the gag in his mouth.
Harris choked Bobby out, and then kept the Irishman locked like that for some time because he needed to be certain. He felt incredibly weak and worried that if Bobby was bluffing and got up when he let go, he might not be able to take him down again.
Sweating profusely, Harris wobbled when he stood and had to hold out a hand to the pole to steady himself.
“Yeah, Thompson, I got bit. Surprised?” Harris took up the metal collar again from the floor and placed it around his own ankle, snapping it shut.
“So you want to tell me what happened now Thompson, or do I gotta tell you?”
Crying silently, Thompson looked away from Harris.
“Okay. I tell you. But we gotta make this quick . . . before someone else comes looking.”
Before Bobby woke up.
Harris made sure the fit was snug, that his foot could not slip out of the restraint.
“So this morning, I wake up, and I’m being chewed on by some dead Rastafarian motherfucker, right? So the zombies come into my house and up into my bedroom, and they bite me, and they almost eat my girlfriend, Thompson. They almost eat my girlfriend. But we woke up. They almost got my girlfriend, Thompson. Think about that. My girlfriend, Thompson. Julie. Is that what you were hoping? Sick fuck.”
Harris tugged on the chain, checking its connection to the stake. He left enough slack in it so he could easily reach Thompson’s position. Satisfied, he sat down across from the other man, resting his back against the cold pole.
“You know, Thompson, when she first came to Eden, you wouldn’t leave Julie alone. How’d it go? Let me guess. Oh yeah, first the initial attraction, that puppy dog crush. Then the friendly-guy, let-me-help-you-out-there—that whole act, seeing if maybe she’d take to this nice guy, this kind fellow looking out for her.”
Thompson whimpered.
“But she doesn’t show any romantic interest in Mr. Nice Guy, so Mr. Nice Guy starts obsessing in his mind, and all he can do is think about the leggy woman, the one who wants nothing to do with him romantically. So Mr. Nice Guy—that’s you, isn’t it, Thompson? Mr. Nice Guy goes and gets drunk off his ass one night and—in front of everyone else—declares his love for this girl who doesn’t care one whit about him, not the way he thinks she should. And what’s worse—you know what’s worse, Thompson?”
Harris picked up his 9-mil and waved it in Thompson’s direction.
“What’s worse is she’s got a boyfriend by then, and he’s there that night, and her boyfriend tries to calm you down . . . because by now you’re yelling and making a scene . . . and you’re yelling at the girl and making her feel uncomfortable. And you get stupid enough to take a swing at the boyfriend . . . and he has to lay you out like . . . like the punk motherfucking faggot that you are. And that’s humiliating, isn’t it, Thompson? That’s frustrating, right?
“Oh yeah, you can’t answer.”
Harris dropped the clip and started popping 9-millimeter rounds out of the magazine, tossing them over his shoulders.
“She loves you, she loves you not, she loves you . . . well, guess what, Thompson.” Harris held the final bullet up between his index finger and thumb and appraised it. “She doesn’t love you, motherfucker. So the next morning, you apologize to everyone involved . . . say it was the drink.
“But you know what, Thompson? I never bought that excuse. I been drunk before . . . and done stuff I regretted later . . . but the drink didn’t make me do it. I did it because . . . because I wanted to do it, Thompson . . . that’s how I felt. All the drink did was lower my inhibitions.
“But you, Thompson, you wake up . . . and you’re convinced Julie will never be yours because . . . well . . . because she doesn’t like you . . . matter of fact she’s probably feeling pretty repulsed by you.
“Uh . . . let me finish . . . we’re almost done here.”
Harris thumbed the last round back into the magazine.
“So you apologize . . . and everyone says it’s okay, but truth is . . . it’s not okay, not least of all by your way . . . and you can’t get her out of your mind . . . but you don’t want to be a stalker and you know . . . know how the community wouldn’t take too kindly to that. So you start to scheme and plot in your head, thinking maybe, maybe, if you can get the boyfriend out of the way . . . then you’d have a chance. Right?”
Thompson was saying something through the gag.
“And maybe you’d be the one leading the charge . . . leading the rescue . . . come guns blazing into the house.”
Harris popped the magazine back into the pistol. He pulled back on the slide and let it snap forward, chambering the round. He hit the release button and dumped the magazine again, tossing it away.
“Girl’s boyfriend is dead now . . . right, and what’s she gonna remember? She’s gonna remember you saving her ass from the same fate . . . and maybe she’d lighten up, and in time . . . as she got over the dead boyfriend . . . maybe she’d start to feel differently about you . . . maybe you two could have a future together, right?”
Thompson was protesting violently, shaking his head back and forth, pleading through the gag.
“Or maybe”—the color had gone out of Harris’s face—“just maybe, Thompson, maybe you’re so goddamn sick . . . in your fucking head . . . that you figure . . . if I can’t have her, no one can . . . and you expect she’d be killed . . . along with the boyfriend. Are you that sick, Thompson? Are you?” Each word was an effort now. “Because anyone who opens . . . opens the front fucking door . . . and lets those things into Eden . . . he’s gotta be.”
Harris looked at the pistol in his hand.
“No, Thompson. I hate you. I fucking hate you. And you know what I hate the most about you? I hate . . . the fact that I’m going to spend my last moments with you. With you of all people. That fact makes me . . . sick. I hate that you make me feel this way.”
Harris shook his head and a tear streaked down his cheek.
“. . . that because of you . . . I see that I can be this way to another human being. That I have this in me.”
Harris ignored whatever Thompson was babbling about, reached into his pocket, and found the lighter. He slid the Zippo across the small amount of floor that separated them.
“I found that outside this morning,” he said. “By the gate.”
Thompson looked at his Zippo and the look of disbelief on his face broke as more tears and bawls came. He sobbed and his face turned red as he begged Harris through the cloth to listen to him, to talk to him.
Harris ignored Thompson. He thought about Julie, and then Raquel. He flicked the safety off the pistol, pushed it against his own chest, and fired.
It was like getting hit harder than he could ever imagine being hit and it burned, it burned very badly.
The gunshot sobered Thompson up. He watched in shock as Harris collapsed from a seated position onto his side. The hand under Harris still clutched the pistol. His other arm was draped over his head, stretched out, the fingers of that hand twitching spasmodically.
Harris’s mouth opened as he gasped for breath. His hand let go of the pistol as he rolled onto his back, both hands going to his chest where the blood flowed.
Harris heard the muffled protests coming from Thompson as if from a distance. He couldn’t breathe. It was like someone had knocked the breath from him, like when he got hit in the chest with the dodgeball back in fifth-grade gym class. The floor felt hard and cold under him but it wasn’t a bad feeling.
The chain around Harris’s ankle lay slack, a loop of it running to the pole.
Harris’s head lolled to one side, his eyes staring at an empty wall, staring into the illimitable void. Someone was saying something somewhere, but he couldn’t make out the words.
The basement was still and Thompson watched as Harris’s panting lessened, subsided, ceased. Harris was facing away from him so Thompson couldn’t see the glassy look steal over his eyes.
Thompson beheld his lighter and wept. Harris was dead. Bobby wasn’t moving and looked dead as well. Thompson’s nose was running and he couldn’t wipe it, he was heaving with his sobs. He strained against the chains that were looped through his wrists and arms and lap, but they wouldn’t give. His arms, his ribs, most of his body screamed at him.
Stuck tight to the pole, Thompson cried until there were no tears left.
Harris was dead.
Thompson sat there, alone in the basement, chained to a pole, unable to move. A dead man was chained to a pole not two feet from him. Thompson could reach out with his foot and prod Harris’s body if he wanted, but what was the use?
Every time he moved even the slightest bit, Thompson’s midsection sent searing jolts of pain through his core. He figured his ribs were broken. His one arm was useless and blood oozed from the splits in his scalp.
As Thompson sat wondering how long it would take someone to find him down in the basement, Harris’s body shuddered and sat up. The zombie turned its head and stared as Thompson began to shriek through the gag.
44.
John Turner brushed the back of his hand across his forehead, wiping the perspiration away, and pushed his glasses back up his nose. The sun was out, but it wasn’t a hot day. Working outdoors, mixing concrete and fixing sidewalks and curbs with his father Fred, with Panas and Thompson, the sun high in the sky, it all brought out the sweat. The leather from the holstered .38 on his side chafed him.
“Let’s take a break, guys,” announced his father. “How’s about it?”
Things were vastly different in Eden after Graham’s ouster. Decisions were argued over and reached by everyone, not disseminated from on high. There were no leaders, though most tended to defer to or at least listen very carefully to what certain people had to say, people like Buddy or Harris, even Bobby Evers. People also tended to hold John’s father in high esteem, as he was a hard worker and one of the older men in Eden.
“Sounds good.” Panas had an American flag do-ragged on his head.
Not everyone in Eden accorded respect to John’s father and the other older men and women. Guys like Diaz were pretty much selfish bastards. The only thing that seemed to keep them in line was the approval or disdain of everyone else, and some days even that wasn’t enough. Not that Diaz was disrespectful toward John’s father—if he was, John would have had to do something about it—the guy just had a certain attitude that made him unpleasant to be around.
Diaz wouldn’t have been someone John would have hung out with before all this happened, before Eden. And John would have flipped if either of his sisters had brought a guy like Diaz home.
“Hey, John,” Laurie called from down the block.
Laurie was a cute girl, a couple of years younger than John at eighteen. She’d been in Eden when John and his father had arrived, but she was alone, no boyfriend or parents.
John waved to her, held up a finger, letting her know he’d be there in a sec. He looked over at his dad.
“Want to grab some lunch?” Fred Turner gestured toward the mess tent up the block. The Turners repaired the cracks and fissures in the cement while another group pulled kitchen duty, prepping meals for the day. These days everyone shared responsibility in Eden, and all were expected to pull their weight to the extent that they could.
“In a few, Pop. Let me go talk to Laurie for a minute, see what’s up.”
His father nodded and John walked over to Laurie.
Bobby Evers nudged the elder Turner’s arm, smiling in the direction of John and Laurie. Fred smiled back.
“Hey, how you doing?” John asked Laurie. She was an attractive girl. John would have been too nervous and shy to talk to her in the real world. But after all the crap he and his father had been through—from what happened to his mom and his sisters, to his kid brother Kyle—after all that he didn’t give a crap. He wasn’t nervous because he did not expect anything much out of life anymore. John’s main goal these days was to keep his father out of harm’s way.
“Come here and look at this.” Laurie grabbed his arm and led him off down an alleyway. It was the same alleyway in which John had come across Isabel a few nights earlier. His father referred to Isabel as a jezebel and a tramp, as well as other names he was familiar with, and some he wasn’t. His father told John to leave her alone, that she was no good. That night Isabel had been kneeling between Palmer and Diaz, servicing the two of them. The whole thing had kind of turned John on and disgusted him at the same time. He’d walked away before they’d seen him. He’d gone home and whacked off, then felt strangely guilty about it afterward.
The alleyway let out onto a community drive behind the row of homes. Most of the fences dividing the yards behind each house had been uprooted, allowing for the creation of a single long track of land where vegetables and fruit were grown. There were three or four people in a backyard a few houses over, pulling weeds.
Laurie led John up the stairs and into a backyard where tomatoes flourished on their stakes. He walked a step behind, admiring her form, the way her hips swayed as she moved. They watched their steps as they made their way to the back of the yard and the bulwark. This wall was a part of the original yard when the block had been designed decades ago. It was flush now with the greater wall that had been erected to guard them from the undead outside.
Laurie beckoned him up a small ladder onto the scaffolding next to her, and he climbed. John enjoyed their proximity, his arm and side brushing hers. Then Laurie pulled herself up on top of the wall itself, the lip of it wide enough for her to sit safely on and look over into the yards beyond.
John didn’t feel a need to go and look at the zombies that were probably standing around down there on the other side. He detested the undead for what they had done to his mother, his sisters, and Kyle. For what they had done to all those other people he and his father had had to watch die. John hated them, but he feared them more.
Eden’s walls kept the undead at bay, but they visited John in his nightmares.
“Come on,” Laurie summoned him. “It’s safe.”
John shrugged, stepped up the remaining rungs to the scaffold, got his grip, and hauled himself up the wall beside her. He smiled at her as he did so, self-conscious of the sweat beading his brow, wiping at it, his forefinger pushing his eyeglasses up the bridge of his nose.
“Look,” Laurie almost whispered.
Past the wall on which they sat was a backyard, another row of houses parallel to their own, similar to Eden’s, complete with a community drive and individual yards. The fences in these yards still stood because no one had torn them down. This particular yard was ringed on three sides by an eight-foot-tall wooden fence. A separate wire fence at the front overlooked the stairs that led down into the driveway.
There was a zombie on the stairs, standing there looking at the ground, seemingly oblivious to their presence. John had seen this particular corpse before. Some of the undead were transient, others stood around for days and even weeks on end in the same spot, like they had nowhere to go, which, John figured, they did not.
This one had been a man, as attested by its nakedness from the waist down. No pants, shoes, or socks. Its mottled cock hung limp between its legs. The thing had sustained some kind of damage down there and its penis hung lower than normal, attached to its groin by a strand of skin that had been stretched out. From the waist up it wore a collared shirt, stained and bloodied, ripped in places. Most of the epidermis on its face was peeled away. From the nose down, the white of the skull shone through, as its lips were gnawed off to reveal decayed gums, the muscles of the neck and cheeks clinging to the bone.
It wasn’t a pleasant sight.
“I don’t think it knows we’re here,” said John.
“No, not that,” Laurie whispered back, pointing. “That.”
There were two sheds in the yard. One was large with a boarded-up window. Its entrance was around in the front, which John and Laurie couldn’t see. Behind this shed, nearer to them, stood a smaller, corrugated shed, similar to the one John’s father had had at home to store their lawn mower.
Laurie pointed to the space—three feet, if that—between this second smaller shed and the wall that ringed Eden. A calico cat stared up at them, watching John and Laurie intently, not sure whether the humans meant her harm or not. The cat had three kittens nursing her teats, and from the looks of it, John figured the kittens were only five or six weeks old.
