"You shall be driven mad by the sight of what you see."
- Deuteronomy 28:34
At first it feels as though you're having an out-of-the-body experience, looking down from some God-like vantage point, watching the wave of dead nursing home patients shuffle toward you in that narrow corridor. You observe yourself backing away, your muscles and tendons and joints working almost involuntarily. You watch the muzzle of your .22 rise up and bark. You see the flash of the blasts in the gloom, and the heads of some of the closest creatures snapping back, erupting with black fluids.
You note that only a few of them go down, the fallen ones trampled by the others in the endless wave of mummified, ragged monsters in medical gowns and threadbare terrycloth robes clamoring to get to you, anxious to sink their jagged, yellowed, decaying, snapping-turtle incisors into the tender flesh of your neck.
The bad news is that you have stumbled into an interior corridor - no egress to the outside, only locked doors leading to residential rooms - so you spin and race down the hallway toward the old man behind the metal-walker. You have one bullet left in the magazine. One bullet for scores of decomposing monsters in elastic waistbands and fuzzy slippers. You draw the buck-knife with your left hand while clutching the Ruger with your right. The thing behind the walker-apparatus lets out one last snarling growl as you approach. You swing the tip of the knife up and plunge it into the old man's ear, sinking it through his auditory canal and into the left hemisphere of his moldering brain.
Still feeling that odd, buoyant, out-of-the-body disconnection, you see yourself shove the limp form of Walker-Man to the floor, and then you watch yourself holster your gun and knife and grab the metal apparatus. You lift the rusty metal walker just in time to fend off the first wave of hungry dead seniors closing in on you. You slam the feet of the thing - metal posts tipped with the halves of old tennis balls - into the putrid faces of former grandmothers, retired salesmen, and kindly old uncles who now just want to feast on your throbbing jugular vein.
For just an instant, you find yourself locked in a strange stalemate. The army of seniors pushes in toward you, the rancid stench of their collective breath in your face, making you choke and cough and bellow with rage and horror as you stab the feet of the metal-walker at them. The tennis ball covers slip off the feet of the thing. You keep jabbing and poking and jabbing, one of the metal posts plunging into the jelly of an old woman's eye, another one impaling the forehead of a former orderly. You cry out in terror and frustration.
You feel yourself backing toward a dead-end wall - a security door marked AUTHORIZED PERSONNEL ONLY - but you keep valiantly stabbing the feet of the metal-walker at the oncoming horde, piercing temples and skewering milky eyeballs and plunging into nasal passages in spattering displays of gore. By this point, you're covered in the blood and spoor of the dead, and you're beginning to lose your bearings. The out of the body experience has deteriorated into a queasy memory of that surreal, extreme-slow-motion fall back at that horrible fork in the road.
You find yourself flashing back to that awful, ethereal moment when you felt as though you were literally suspended in midair - caught between life and death, fixed in the micro-second eternity of a sparking synapse - careening down the embankment of that forking pavement. You feel yourself letting go... falling... falling as if in a dream... giving up... free-falling. You see the ground looming, rising up to meet you, the lights of the carousel spinning around you, your mother's grasp slipping away.
Your back hits the locked service door at the end of that hallway, and you're wrenched back to the here and now. You slide to the floor. The horde approaches, their stench and atonal chorus of growls drowning your thoughts. You're out of options. You're done. You have one bullet left. You know what must come next.
The muzzle is cold against the taut, feverish flesh of your temple.
You start to squeeze the trigger when you feel the door against your back vibrate suddenly, a muffled voice cursing behind it. The sound of a dead bolt clanging open, and the door cracks a few inches, nudging you forward. You hear your name being called out by a hoarse, aged, rusty, and yet familiar voice.
You turn around just as the barrel of a 12-gauge shotgun protrudes from the half ajar door, the sudden blasts deafening - two and two, separated by the clank of a cocking mechanism -- enormous booming reports that are accompanied by plumes of phosphorous-bright sparks.
You duck down and cover your head as former senior citizens erupt like gore-filled balloons. The booming roar of the weapon rattles the foundation, and jars the back of your wisdom teeth. Rancid blood spatters the walls around you as the creatures fall at your feet like supplicants swooning in your presence. More blasts rip through the horde. Nearly a dozen monsters have been vanquished now.
The momentary lull that follows - your ears ringing again, the muffled clatter of shells hitting the floor - gives you time to glance over your shoulder.
You see the familiar face, the jowls, the thinning gray hair, the trademark Banlon golf shirt, and the belly hanging over Sansabelt slacks.
"Dad?"
The older man gives you a grin, pumping another couple of shells into the breach. "C'mon, let's blow this pop stand before these old bags of bones swarm up on us again!"
"Slow down, Winston!" Your mom rides shotgun in the enormous Buick town car as your dad concentrates on driving, weaving between heaps of crumbling wreckage, ignoring the pained entreaties of his wife. The car rumbles northward toward Milford.
You sit in the back seat reliving your childhood, watching the backs of their heads. Your mom's bouffant nearly scrapes the interior ceiling. They could be any age. They could be in their sixties, they could be in their eighties. You realize there's so much you've forgotten about them, it's as though they've become benevolent strangers. The only thing you remember with any degree of certainty is the fact that you left them in that nursing facility almost two years ago when you set out to find help, to find answers, to find light at the end of the tunnel.
Now you shiver with fever chills, your olive drag jacket soaked in your own sweat and other people's blood. "I'm still confused," you tell them. "I thought you were living in that place."
Neither your mom nor your dad bothers to look back at you over their shoulder. "We got out while the getting was good," your mom comments finally, letting out a weary sigh. "We saw the place going down the tubes, lost so many friends to the crud. So we moved back home."
"That's right," your dad concurs. "Still own our house, by God, mortgage all paid off. No matter how many dead folks come at us, they can't take that away from us."
You look at the backs of their heads. "But how did you know I'd come there for you?"
Your dad shoots a glance up at the rearview mirror, his gray eyes meeting your gaze. "Your friends told us."
"Who?"
"The Sentinels? The Sailors? What was it they called themselves, Honey?"
"Saviors," she corrects him. "The Saviors."
You stare at your father's eyes in the rear-view. "You talked to the Saviors? Where? When?"
Your dad shrugs. "Ran into them on the way to DC... we were looking for you. Your mother was worried. They told us you were probably headed this way."
You take this in, and you try and process it, but it refuses to be processed. You ride in silence for a spell, then you say to your mom, "I'm sorry but I have to ask."
"What's that, Sweetie?"
"You were diagnosed before all this happened, right? Before the shit went down? You were on chemo... doing great but that was five years ago."
The woman turns and gazes back at her son. The look on her face is heartbreaking, the glint in her eyes - magnified by the thick lenses of her eyeglasses - displays a mixture of wistful sorrow, wry amusement, and unconditional love. "First of all, watch your language. Second of all, I beat it, Sweetie. They took both my breasts and I've been cancer free for pretty near three years now."
Through the side window you can see the passing landscape of derelict industrial parks, burned shells of buildings, and fetid, mossy water treatment plants giving way to deserted strip malls and boarded storefronts. Welcome to what's left of Milford, Pennsylvania. Behind piles of wreckage, in between crumbling buildings, and dragging across the occasional intersection are the ubiquitous roaming dead. In fact, the town itself is a corpse, the air heavy with sulfur and carbon - the smell of organic material returning to its elemental state. Your father takes a short cut home.
Around dusk, you arrive at the old homestead. Pulling up to the two-story wood-frame edifice at the end of Rosewood Drive, you marvel at the hermetically sealed quality of the place. Surrounded by an impenetrable wooden barricade crowned with barbed wire, the place still has flowers growing in its window-boxes, a fresh coat of canary yellow paint on its clapboards, and double-hung window panes in pristine condition (behind which your mom's tiffany lamps still glow with inexplicable electric power, not to mention the presence of working light bulbs, which were thought to be a thing of the past, completely used up, extinct for many months now). You shake your head in amazement as your father maneuvers the car up to the gate, gets out, opens it, and pulls the massive town car inside the tiny compound.
He parks. You watch him get out again to close the gate, then you watch your mother climb out of the car and cheerfully pick a few flowers on her way to the front door. You find all this miraculous, so much so that you can hardly move or say a word. You can only stare in awe at the robust quality of your parents' movements and behavior, their cheerful demeanor, their casual affection for each other that you can't remember witnessing for at least a decade... until your mom notices your reluctance to get out of the car.
She saunters back over to the vehicle, leans down in front your open window, and gives you one of her patented twinkling grins. "You gonna come in or do I have to serve you dinner out here like you're at a drive-in restaurant?"
Somehow, in some strange and ironic parallel universe, your parents have figured out a way to make things better for themselves than they were before the outbreak. Granted, they have no living friends left, no social life, no town, no utilities, and no reason to go out other than the occasional foraging mission. But the life they have made for each other in this little fortified oasis of domestic tranquility is full and nourishing and sweet, and you seem to slip into their convivial routine as easily as you would an old pair of jeans.
Time passes in earnest. Day after day after day after day, you enjoy barbecues on the back deck, bridge games around the kitchen table, going through old photo albums, special dinners with wild game or fish, singing hymns on the porch swing at night, making homemade wine with your dad in the basement, learning how to knit with your mom in the upstairs sewing room, and telling each other stories of the good old days, which, incidentally, have never sounded as good as they do now. The days turn into weeks, the weeks into months. It's amazing how effortlessly you can pass the time here, sleeping in your boyhood bedroom, reminiscing with your parents, doing yard work, exploring old steamer trunks of memorabilia in the attic. You wonder if it's merely the familiarity of the place, or the respite from the horrors of the outside world, but you feel like a whole person here. You feel normal here for the first time in as long as you can remember. But it's not until that fateful autumn night that you realize what's really going on, and by that time it's basically too late to fix anything or change the massive undertow of your destiny.
"It's quiet out there tonight," your dad comments behind his newspaper, a dog-eared mess of yellowed pages that he has read and reread countless times in order to pretend the daily papers are still being published, and freckle-faced boys on mopeds still deliver them in the predawn light every morning, and you're still able to clip coupons for free early-bird dinners down at the Sirloin Stockade.
"What did Davey Crocket say in 'The Alamo'?" Your mom looks up from her knitting. She has a stocking cap and mittens spread out across the kitchen table in front of her, the rainbow colored cable-knit as bright as Crayola crayons. She is close to finishing the matching muffler for God-knows-whom. You wouldn't be caught dead wearing such a thing but somehow just the thought of her kitting these items makes you love the woman all the more. Now she affects a hilarious impersonation of John Wayne. "'Yup... it's sure quiet out there... a little too quiet. Keep your eyes peeled, fellas!'"
All at once, sitting across the table from your parents, doodling in the margins of a crossword puzzle and sipping instant coffee, you look up and realize how much you love these two shaggy old lions. And you now understand that this is why time has been passing with such ease. This is why the days have been so round and warm and fulfilling.
But on the heels of this thought - like a fuse being lit in the back of your mind -- you realize something else. You realize with sudden horror what's really happening. "No, no, no, no, no, no...." Your voice drops an octave. "No, God, please... no."
Your mother looks at you, her expression heartbreaking, a combination of tenderness, sympathy, and melancholia. Over the years she's grown accustomed to your strange behavior, your sudden mood swings, your hallucinations. "Okay, Honey, whatever it is... we'll work it out, we'll fix it."
The terror grows in you, choking off your words. The silence outside is the stillness before a storm - not even the crickets are audible any more.
Your scream erupts - silent and confined to your scrambled mind.