I wrote you a story for Halloween:
Through the dingy window I can see it limping. Its eyes find me like a spotlight and I can see the bones in its neck popping against the fatty skin as its head turns. It runs unevenly toward the house. The white hair that hasn’t fallen out is matted against its face and neck, held in place like a second skin by mud and crusted blood. Pale skin is pockmarked with fat, wriggling maggots and worms that have taken residence in its neck and shoulders. Its clothes are rotten and brown, revealing a dried, gaping wound under her ribs where its spongy intestines dangle and wrap around bare legs. Leathery skin stretched tight clings to sinew, bone and hard, muddy muscle. Something like a necklace, a choker, is rust-covered and digs into dry, papery skin around the throat and below its crackling spine.
It’s not the shuffling that bothers me, I told him as I hurried him through the outer wall.
Twilight had descended over the earth, but the moon had not yet climbed above the evergreens. The oily smoke coiling off of the flaming branch in my hand would have to wait to transfer to the signal torches. We’d struggled through 6 harvests since the last time we’d seen anyone foolish enough to travel on their own, yet he was in remarkable health. The absence of people is more common than groups. Groups are more common than lone travelers. Frayed, frenzied, and at each other’s throats. You can tell the leaders because they always have the eyes of someone who’s had to kill a member of their group. You can tell the burdens because they break down psychologically on arrival. You have a better chance guessing when a rattlesnake is going to strike than guessing when a group of starving travelers is going to go to hell in a handbasket.
It’s not the smell that bothers me, I told him as I dragged a heavy, wooden chair from under the rough table.
My wife, she’s a sleepwalker, a somnambulist. Her doctor’s word. The doctor advised me to not wake her when I found her rearranging the house in the darkness before the sunrise. He said it wouldn’t cause her any harm to outside of waking up exhausted each morning. I didn’t worry until she started sleepwalking outside. I’d wake in a cold sweat after standing over her bloody body, a coyote or a mountain lion sliding into the treeline.
It’s not the heavy silence of the winter that bothers me, I told him as my boots flexed the ancient floorboards of the kitchen.
We must have been some of the last people to be notified. Our house is miles from the nearest highway, and we never wanted anything to do with television or the noise coming out of the radio. There’s enough to do to keep my hands hard and calloused around this old place without worrying about such things. Our wood stove has charred a spot into the floor, and I keep the handle of the well pump loose and rust-free. You’d have to go miles to hear another generator, and we don’t want to hear them around anyway. Whenever the troopers stopped by with news I shrugged my shoulders and raised my axe to split another log. It made sense that they’d all be drawn toward the cities. People are packed in there like greasy fish in a tin. I guess it’s been about 12 years since then.
It’s not the sight of them that bothers me, I told him as his head collapsed into his hands.
We saw more people those first few years than we’d ever seen before. They crashed through with military vehicles and ATV’s, mopeds and mountain bikes. Next were the whine of snowmobiles and the silence of skis. Then leaves and twigs crackled underfoot, and the walkers were the first of any of them to take the time to notice the house. Some stalked up to the wall to see if the windows in our home burned with light or if they were cold and empty like the cities and the suburbs they had left in the control of those things. They’d snoop, and throw pinecones over the wall, but they’d always keep moving, thinking no one lived here. Even if the barbed wire at the top of the wall hadn’t sliced them up enough, they would have found this old house occupied, and souls with no intention of leaving their haunt.
It’s not their unhumanity that bothers me, I say as his skull collapses under the weight of my hammer.
The first person we cared to contact since the troopers was a frightened young woman with crazed eyes. Her skin was rubbery and sallow, and she needed help. The reinforced door in the wall shuddered as it opened and rust flaked from the hinges as I rushed out to collect her. Her mouth threw up a sound of terror and salvation. Halfway between the wall and the safety of our house her weight nearly toppled me as she collapsed in my arms. Her heels bounced along the bumpy path to the porch. My wife burst onto the porch with an old bucket full of fresh water and dishrag with a rooster embroidered onto it. She cleaned the grit off of the young woman’s pale skin as I loped back to force the rusty hinges to allow the door to swing closed.
It’s the moan that bothers me, I say as I heave his deadweight out onto the porch.
That thing lurches from below the dingy window to the porch with an animal urgency. Through the railing it digs its bony fingers into his shoulders and drags him against the wood closer to its lipless mouth. All teeth and tongue, ready to devour his flesh. It rips off his ear with its sandpaper fingernails while clawing open his stomach and spilling his slippery guts onto the wood. His shoulder dislocates with a sickening pop and he’s pulled halfway under the porch railing, the hinged collar around the papery skin of its neck. The chain on the back of the collar runs to a piece of rebar welded onto the weed choked bulk of an old tractor. The chain jingles and clanks as it drags dried offal in its links, keeping it from getting any closer than the edge of the porch.
It’s the moan that bothers me. It’s that abysmal, rasping moan that burst from that young woman as her chest heaved forward, and her arms and legs shot back like harpoons into the ground. It’s not even a moan. Its air, and mucus, and blood forcing its way out of the throat. The unnatural cacophony of life being restored to the dead. I didn’t know what it was then, and I was too far from my wife to keep that thing from biting a chunk out of the fleshy part of my wife’s palm. She scrambled inside and locked the door as I throttled the young woman. I crushed her still-chewing, blood-soaked mouth with an axe handle that found its way into my hands. She was no more than a skin-sack of chunky pulp when I buried her in a shallow grave as far as I dared venture outside our walls.
It’s the moan that I hate. The moan that escaped from my wife’s cracked lips, covered in spidery purple veins, after she had cursed my name with her last living breaths as she struggled against her restraints.
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