Life of the Dead (Book 1): Hell on Earth Read online

  For the past few days he’d been sick with worry that something could go wrong. That he’d get stopped by the police for something foolish like jaywalking or forgetting to use a turn signal and his false ID would fail a close inspection. Or that he’d somehow ended up on a watch list and the large, boot-shaped birthmark on his left cheek would make it all too easy for some overeager Secret Service agent to spot him in the crowd.

  He’d spent the entire night prior vomiting into a bucket in the back of his van and when he looked at himself in the mirror that morning he saw a man who could pass for a wino or drug addict. Fortunately, that wasn’t an unusual sight in the City of Brotherly Love. Two full bottles of Pepto Bismol and a one-dollar razor from the nearby WaWa helped clean up his insides and outsides. When he put on his suit, which was professional-looking but not designer (Do nothing to stand out) the transformation was complete.

  He looked toward the roof of City Hall and was pleased to see a collection of flags swaying in the wind. It’s time, he thought, with relief as his patience was exhausted.

  Doc reached into the pocket of his pants with his right hand and caressed the cool, smooth glass vials with his fingertips. He rolled them back and forth, enjoying the tinkling sounds they made as they danced together. All of the surrounding nonsense faded away as he popped off the corks with a thumbnail and emptied the contents into his palm.

  The President must have said something particularly inspiring because the crowd burst into cheer and threw their hands in the air in celebration. Doc followed their lead and, in doing so, opened his fist and released the almost invisible dust. He felt the gentle breeze caress his cheeks and blow his thin, gray hair askew and he knew it was done. Sorry, Mr. Eliot, but the world doesn’t end with a bang or with a whimper. It ends with the flick of the wrist.

  Doc turned his back on the President and worked his way through the army of admirers. Because they were packed together so tight; his retreat took nearly half an hour. That was okay. The pungent smells, the stupidity of the masses, the fear of being caught, it had all ceased to bother him. When he reached the end of the crowd on Broad Street, he glanced back and imagined what was to come and felt gooseflesh pop on his forearms.

  “Together we shall overcome those who stand against us!” the President’s voice boomed out over strategically placed loudspeakers. “Together we will not only survive, but thrive, and make America great again!”

  “Isn’t this... wonderful?”

  Doc turned to the source of the labored voice and saw a woman in a wheelchair staring up at him. Her too small body and the tube running from her throat were telltale signs of muscular dystrophy. She smiled with the kind of dopey optimism and happiness known to children who don’t understand the truth or feeble minded adults who can’t think for themselves.

  Doc nodded. “Indeed it is.”

  He saw tears leaking from her eyes as she looked toward the President who, at this distance, was little more than an ant.

  “I don’t think... I’ve ever felt...” she took another gasping breath, “So hopeful.”

  She reached out to Doc, a gesture which required considerable effort. He knelt down beside her so they were on the same level. Then, he took her limp, useless fingers in his death covered hand and gave them a gentle squeeze.

  “Everything is going to be better now,” he said.

  She smiled again. As she looked from the spec of the President to the man in front of her, her dull, pea soup green eyes found his birthmark. He’d grown used to the stares at the fist sized, wine-colored blemish but was taken aback when the crippled woman reached out and caressed it.

  “God bless you.”

  “He has. He most certainly has.”

  Doc left her and continued down the street until he came to the white panel van in which he’d been sleeping for the past three days. “AAA Construction” was stenciled on the side along with a cartoon gorilla smoking a cigar and wielding a hammer. He unlocked the van, climbed inside, and drove away, leaving the end of the world behind him.

  3

  The chickens died first.

  As usual, Wim woke early. Almost an hour before sunrise. He enjoyed the quiet of the predawn when he felt like the only living creature on the farm. It was a special sort of peace.

  He had an easy, if numbing, morning routine. He dragged the bedsheets back into place, then covered them with a blue and white log cabin quilt his Mama had sewn by hand. He dressed without giving it much thought as his entire wardrobe consisted of blue jeans and plaid shirts.

  With the bed made, he moved on to the bathroom where he sat on the toilet and gave a small shiver when his bare ass cheeks kissed the cold porcelain. It took considerable effort and a full eight minutes to go and he wondered if timing his bowel movements was a sign he was growing old.

  As he brushed his teeth, he caught himself staring at his twin in the mirror and tried to see his parents again. He recognized Mama’s pitch black hair in the mop atop his head and his Pa’s robin’s egg blue eyes staring back at him but the resemblances ended there. Wim had grown used to the crow’s feet at the corners of his eyes, but the longer he looked, he thought he saw the start of jowls, a sight which distressed him so much he pretended it was only a trick of the light from the bare bulb that hung from the ceiling. He jerked the cord and the room turned gray.

  After his bathroom duties, Wim put a pot of steel cut oats on the stove. As it cooked, he sorted through the fridge and passed by the milk and lemonade and chose a bottle of prune juice instead. He took a few awful swigs and shoved it back inside.

  He stirred the oats as he watched the sun climb over the horizon and turn the barn into a silhouette. It was a clear morning and the orange star chased away the night. As Wim ate the oats straight from the pot, only pausing a moment to blow cool air on each spoonful, he realized the silence had dragged on a bit too long.

  He had four roosters to accompany almost two dozen hens and one thing he could always count on from the males, aside from being nasty as sin, was their raspy cock-a-doodle-doos welcoming the daylight. This morning, there were no cocks or doodles or doos. Wim returned the oats to the stove and turned the burner down to warm.

  Although the barnyard was bright, the sun had done nothing to heat the air and Wim regretted not grabbing a jacket. Still due a hard frost, he thought. At least the cold kept the mud hard.

  He circled around the barn to where a thigh high chicken-wire fence formed the boundaries of the poultry playground. Not a single chicken occupied the fenced in area. Another bad sign. He lifted away the two by four that held the side door shut, set it aside, then pulled the faded, red door open.

  When he entered the barn, the first sight he saw was 40 dead chickens. Scattered about haphazard, the bird’s bodies were clean, not mutilated in any way. That ruled out a stray dog or coyote. Either would have eaten at least a few of them, not simply killed them for fun or sport. Wim crossed to the feathered corpses and knelt down.

  He expected to find small, bloody wounds which would have meant a weasel had gotten inside, killed them, and sucked out the blood. Only there were no wounds on the first bird he checked. Or the second or the third. Wim didn’t bother examining a fourth.

  He grabbed a wheelbarrow and filled it with the dead chickens. The mound of carcases heaped so high he thought it might be top heavy and tip as he maneuvered it out of the barn, but he made it. He pushed them to the far end of the barnyard where he burned his garbage and added them to the ash pile. After retrieving a red jug of gasoline from the barn, he poured a bit onto the mound and set them ablaze. Black smoke filled the air and the acrid smell made his eyes water. At least, he told himself it was the smell.

  Later that afternoon, as wisps of sour smoke still danced up from the burn pile, Wim saw the big sow he unoriginally referred to as “Miss Piggy” had collapsed on her side near the feed trough. Her breathing was shallow and her eyes closed. He rubbed his palm over her bristly skin.

  “What happened to you
, old girl?”

  Miss Piggy didn’t stir. Wim gently pushed up her eyelid and revealed an orb marred by a crisscrosses of blood red veins. Her iris had rolled too far back to be visible. He then pinched her lip between his thumb and forefinger and lifted. The sow’s skin peeled loose from her teeth like Velcro and inside her mouth was no saliva, only dried blood.

  Her skin was heavy and malleable like clay and stayed pushed up even when he pulled his hand away. Wim took care to mold her mouth back into shape, then stroked her ear. She remained unresponsive so he left her to check on the other three swine. Wim found them dead in the pigpen. He didn’t know what had brought this horror to his little farm but dread filled him up inside like an overfull water pitcher.

  Wim rang for the veterinarian on the rotary phone which hung on the kitchen wall. Each return of the wheel seemed an eternity and the line rang eight times before a harried answer came.

  “Yes!” It was more an exclamation than a greeting.

  “Doctor Allen? This is Wim Wagner.”

  “Oh. Hello, Wim.”

  “Something’s wrong here. This morning, my entire flock of chickens was dead. I just added three more pigs to the list and the fourth don’t look far behind.”

  “You’re a latecomer to that party, Wim.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I’m sorry. I don’t intend to be short with you but it’s the same all over the county. I returned from the McAndrews’ farm no more than 10 minutes ago. They lost over 90 head of cattle just like that.”

  Wim heard the doc’s fingers snap through the ear piece. “What’s going on?”

  “If I knew, I’d be in a hell of a lot better frame of mind.”

  Wim paused, unsure what, if anything, to say.

  “Listen. I’ll try to stop over this evening and if not then, tomorrow morning. What do you have left over there?” Doctor Allen asked.

  Wim tallied his stock in his head. “Five goats. Three cows. And Miss-- One pig.”

  “Mmm hmm. Well, try to segregate the animals from each other. Do that and hold down the fort until I get there. All right?”

  “Yessir. I will”

  “And Wim?”

  “Yes?”

  “You’ve got to put that sick pig down. I don’t know if it’s possible to stay ahead of this mess, but that’s the only chance.”

  The call clicked off without a goodbye from the good Doctor. Wim held onto the phone for a few long moments before he accepted the fact that better news wasn’t coming.

  He moved to a place in the house he seldom visited, his Pa’s old workroom. The first thing he noticed when he turned on the light were the tools the old man had used to tie flies. Small vises and hooks and bobbins with brightly colored threads. Pliers so small Wim doubted they’d be usable in his own meaty paws.

  He didn’t know if it was his imagination, but he thought he could still smell the Beech Nut tobacco Pa chewed almost nonstop. That, mixed with the aroma of Hoppes gun oil, was the old man’s cologne. Hung on the back wall of the room were a variety of rifles and revolvers. On the sprawling, oak desk his Pa had built all on his own were box upon box of ammunition. Wim ignored all the firearms and reached into a drawer to grab a different type of gun.

  The captive bolt pistol had been used only twice before. It was quick and efficient, like it was designed to be, but Wim thought it made doling out death obscenely easy. And as he shuffled across the barnyard toward his dying pig, he worried that she deserved a less mechanical ending.

  She hadn’t moved since he last saw her and her breaths came in shallow, hitching wheezes. He knelt before her and traced his fingers over her belly, gently scratching like she’d so enjoyed before this whole mess. She remained unresponsive. Wim leaned into her and whispered in her ear.

  “I’m real sorry about this, Miss. You were a good mama and a good pig.”

  He pressed the barrel of the gun against the center of her forehead. When he pulled the trigger, a stainless steel bolt shot out with a boom, broke through her skull, destroyed her brain, then retreated back into the pistol with a swish. The entire process took a fraction of a second.

  Wim followed the vet’s instructions and quarantined the rest of the animals from one another.

  It didn’t help. By sunset the doctor had failed to show and every animal on the farm was dead.

  4

  In May of her 18th year, Ramey Younkin lost her virginity, failed her senior year of high school and watched the world as she knew it come to an end. In many ways, the awkward and painful two minutes in the back of Bobby Mack’s Ford Tempo was the worst part. God, he was such a white trash loser.

  Life had been a consistent downward spiral since her father left them two years earlier. Not that she blamed him. Loretta, his wife and Ramey’s mother was almost a decade into a drug addiction which started with pain pills after a minor back injury. When the local pain clinics caught on to her game, she moved on to trading prescription narcotics with her minivan mom friends the same way little boys swap baseball cards.

  When her father left, he asked - more like begged - Ramey to join him. But she was one of the cool girls in her sophomore high school class and actually enjoyed living in the town she now realized to be nothing more than a dead-end wasteland of unemployment and welfare. The sort of place people only lived because they had young children to raise or old parents to look after. Or because they were too stupid to realize how awful it was. She also knew, if left all alone, her mother would be dead in no short order. So Ramey stayed.

  A year ago, Ramey woke to a four a.m. phone call. After taking 20 dollars for a happy ending at the truck stop by the turnpike, Loretta’s would be John turned out to be an undercover cop who arrested her for prostitution. Rather than go down quietly, she fought with the officer, scratching his eye so bad he needed surgery. Loretta was also high as a kite on oxy, a drug for which she had no prescription. That hat trick earned her three months in the county jail and a fine so hefty they had to sell the house Ramey grew up in.

  That’s how they ended up in a 35-year-old double-wide in the Happy Acres Mobile Home Park. And that’s how Ramey went from being elected to the homecoming court to daily catcalls and insults every time she strolled down the school hallway.

  At first she thought the taunting would end if she ignored it. It didn’t. She skipped a day here or there when she didn’t feel up to the harassment, then skipped entire weeks. When May rolled around, a letter came in the mail stating that she had missed 45 days and had been expelled. Apparently, the maximum number of days you could miss and still graduate was 40. If she’d known that fact, she would have kept count.

  The day she received the letter was the day Bobby Mack told her she looked beautiful in green when she passed him at the community mailboxes. He probably meant her tits looked good in the tight, “Kiss Me I’m Irish” (she was not) t-shirt she was wearing, but at her lowest of lows she took the bait. Ten minutes later they were sharing a joint in his car. Fifteen minutes after that he had her jean shorts off. Two minutes later she realized flunking out of high school a month before graduation wasn’t the worst part of her day after all.

  Bobby kept sniffing around like a randy dog but one mistake was enough for Ramey and every time she saw him around the trailer court, she spun and raced the other way. She vowed to get back on track and enrolled in cyber schooling. It was all going according to plan for about a week.

  Loretta threw open the metal screen door of the trailer. Because the hydraulic stopper was missing, it swung all the way out and crashed into the cheap, aluminum siding. Ramey, in the middle of a calc test on her laptop, barely looked up. Nothing about her mother was subtle, not even her entrances.

  “Hi, mom.”

  “Morning, babe.”

  “It’s almost three in the afternoon.”

  “Thaswha Imeant.”

  Her eyelids drooped and she looked two decades older than her 40 years. She was pretty once, in a small town trashy sort of way with her p
ermed dishwater blonde hair and curvy figure. With a little maintenance, she could have been beautiful. But drugs had taken away her looks, just like they took her husband, her home, her job and her future. Her eyes sat deep in skeletal sockets and when she opened her mouth, she revealed a set of teeth that would scare away small children. Ramey still hadn’t grown accustomed to her mother’s new look.

  “Sure you did,” Ramey said without looking up from the computer.

  “Don’t sass me, smarmouth.”

  Loretta stumbled into the cabinet holding their mismatched, yard sale dishes. After paying her fines and buying this run down trailer, almost all the money from the sale of the house evaporated. Aside from a few thousand dollars that Ramey hid for a rainy day (she had a feeling a monsoon was coming), Loretta burned through the rest in months.

  With the stigma of her arrest, Loretta’s minivan mom friends turned their backs on her. After all, they only popped pills recreationally, they weren’t dirty whores. With her oxy supply cut off, Loretta turned to heroin. The sores and track marks on her arms gave that away and Ramey wasn’t believing her affirmations that they were mosquito bites or poison ivy, depending on which lie her mother felt like telling that particular day. She’d given up on trying to save her mom. It was hard enough trying to save herself.

  Loretta took an Old Milwaukee from the fridge and collapsed onto their stained, floral print couch. She turned on the old tube TV, possibly the only such television remaining in America, Ramey thought, and flipped through the channels.

  Ramey heard a reporter say, “Vice President has been sworn” before the station changed. Loretta settled on a faux reality show where camo clad hillbillies discussed the merits of jerky made from venison versus jerky made from beef. In the midst of their argument, the oldest of the men broke wind and Loretta laughed so hard she too farted, one so loud and wet that if she’d been sober, she might have checked her underwear just to be on the safe side. But sober she was not, so her own fart only made her cackle even more. The laughter quickly dissolved into a violent coughing fit which she drowned out with the beer.