Worse Than Dying Read online

“Hello there, little lady,” Alvin smiled. “What's your name?”

  “Abigail,” she beamed.

  “That’s a pretty name. A pretty name for a pretty little girl.”

  “Thanks!” She said with a toothy smile.

  “Hey. Volume.” Noah spoke as if he were shocked she didn’t listen the first time. He turned to Alvin. “We speak quietly inside. When we're outdoors we barely say anything, and if we do it's in a whisper.” He pointed outside. “Those things like noise.”

  Alvin nodded. “I'll be sure to follow the rules,” he whispered and gave a wink to Abby.

  She giggled.

  “You can wash up in the bathroom upstairs. I’ll fix up the guest room for you at the end of the hall.”

  “You have hot water?”

  “Yup.”

  “This place is amazing.”

  “For now. It won’t last.”

  “Did you get bit?” said Abigail.

  “Bit? No, but I would have if it weren't for your brother.”

  “He saved daddy too,” she said proudly. Then her demeanor downshifted. “But he couldn’t save mommy.”

  Noah looked at her sternly and shook his head. Abby stopped talking.

  “Speaking of,” said Noah, changing the subject, “where did you come from?”

  “Well,” Alvin stopped himself. “Abigail, why don't you go play while your brother and I talk?”

  Abigail frowned and clomped into the living room.

  “Heh. Cute kid. Reminds me of my own sister.” When she was out of earshot Alvin continued. “I’ve been the gate operator for Lock 17 on the Barge Canal for the last five years. It's a government job—great benefits—decent pay.”

  “Was,” Noah corrected him.

  “What?”

  “That life is over, man.”

  “Oh, right,” he looked down, pausing briefly, and then explained the events that led him there.

  Alvin had been sitting in the control cabin when a twenty-foot yacht drifted into the lock and slammed into the lower gate. He called to the ship on his bullhorn, but no one responded. Something was wrong. He opened the filling valve and waited for the yacht to rise.

  After it buoyed, Alvin hopped aboard and began exploring the ship’s deck. It was quiet—empty. When he reached the stern, he spotted a thick trail of blood leading below deck.

  “Hello?” he called into the darkened cabin. “Is someone hurt?”

  Footsteps sounded, slow and heavy. A chill swept over Alvin, freezing his lungs. The hazy-eyed, bloodied face of an elderly man passed into what little light reached down below. His skin was sallow, and he stunk like roadkill, but Alvin had yet to encounter the living dead, so he didn’t know what to make of the man.

  He shambled toward Alvin, arms outstretched, his jaw gently rising and falling. As Alvin backed away, he had tried to reason with him.

  “But that didn’t work. He just kept comin' toward me, and moanin'. God, those moans…,” Alvin said, rubbing his temples, “enough to strip the varnish off a deck. And then his old lady came out behind him. Aside from the man’s bloody face, he looked alright. But her,” he shuddered. “She was all messed up. Her tits were—just—gone. I mean, like, picked clean. You could see her ribs and everything, man.”

  Alvin had run to the bow, climbed over the pulpit, and dropped onto the catwalk that ran along the lock’s top gate. The dead couple followed. The woman climbed over the handrail, but she fell off the ship and buckled over the catwalk railing like a towel hung out to dry. The old man leaned over the pulpit and swiped at Alvin’s head. While trying to avoid his grasp, Alvin lost his balance and fell over the rail into the canal. He rolled beneath the muddy water, bobbing to the surface just in time to see the woman fall in after him. Frantically, Alvin paddled downstream, desperate to get as far away from the couple as possible.

  The river bent, depositing Alvin onto a sandbar. He coughed and wheezed as he crawled ashore before flopping onto his back at the water’s edge. The river gently lapped at his feet while he tried to catch his breath. He could have laid there for an hour—if it weren’t for the screams.

  Alvin crawled up the muddy incline toward a small fishing skiff that lay overturned at the crest of the riverbank. Slowly, he peeked over the skiff. He was in a trailer park.

  One of the trailers was engulfed in flames, and its blaze was starting to spread to the trailer next to it. The park's residents didn’t seem concerned. Instead, they chased each other in and out of the doublewides, tackling anyone who couldn’t get away. As Alvin looked over the carnage with utter incomprehension, he heard the rhythmic swishing of water behind him. He turned slowly, somehow already aware of what he'd find.

  The old woman from the boat had gotten hung up on the same sandbar as Alvin, and her interest in him hadn’t waned in the slightest. As she shambled towards him with water draining through her ribs in fine crimson rivulets, Alvin experienced a total paradigm shift. It was the same shift that everyone who encountered the living dead had gone through: the realization that no person could survive such horrific wounds for more than a few seconds, let alone continue to function unimpeded. These things were no longer human!

  Whether or not a person survived their first encounter usually depended on how quickly they accepted this new paradigm, or, as in Alvin’s case, just dumb luck. Either way, the odds were not favorable.

  Alvin crawled over the skiff and staggered toward the nearest trailer. Two more dead noticed him and began hobbling in his direction. He tried the door, but it was locked. Circling the trailer, he came across a collection of junk stacked against the rear of the home. Alvin pulled a broken lawn chair from the junk pile. He opened the chair and set it beneath a window.

  As his pursuers drew nearer, Alvin climbed onto the chair, careful to keep his feet on the metal frame instead of on the frayed webbed seat. Nerves formed a small pit in his stomach. He knew he didn’t have the strength to keep running if the window was locked. He gritted his teeth as he pushed on it hard. The latch was resistant, but it gave. Alvin forced the window open and, with his last measure of strength, pulled his body inside the trailer.

  He landed on an orange shag carpet at the foot of a bed. Alvin closed his eyes, took a deep breath and then dragged himself to his feet. Just as he grasped the top rail on the window, a pair of blanched hands lashed the sill. The hands were followed by the head of a young man, no more than twenty years old, with messy blond hair and a pierced nose. One side of the boy’s face was caked with dirt and dried blood. He snarled at Alvin, revealing two missing teeth, and then reached for him. But before the boy could grab hold of him, there was a sound of tearing fabric and he disappeared.

  Alvin took one last look outside. The boy thrashed on the ground, the lawn chair having closed around his legs like the world’s most benign bear trap. Relieved, Alvin closed the window and engaged the latch.

  As he surveilled the room, he discovered the body of a middle-aged woman in the bed. On the nightstand beside her sat an empty pill bottle and a half-finished fifth of Jim Beam. The body twitched and Alvin jumped back knocking a framed photo off the wall. He stared at the woman, waiting for something else to happen, but nothing did. Nerves, he thought.

  Alvin stepped into the hallway and softly closed the door. He scanned the trailer. The home was minimalistic, either by choice or financial circumstance. There was a kitchen with a small table and two chairs. In the living area, there was only a worn-out couch sitting in front of an old boxy CRT television. No people, thankfully.

  Alvin checked the front door, making sure it was locked. The windows were all out of reach from ground level, but he made sure they were latched as well in case any of those things were smarter than the ones he'd encountered so far. After the place was secured, Alvin rifled through the kitchen cabinets until he uncovered a bottle of Tennessee Williams whiskey. He plopped onto the floral-pattern couch and took a few pulls from the bottle before passing out.

  Alvin was awoken the next morning
by a distant thumping sound. He blinked at his surroundings. Nothing looked familiar. More thumps sounded in slow succession, and it was then that he remembered what happened the day before. As Alvin stood up, the bottle of Evan Williams fell off his lap spilling whiskey onto the carpet. He stared down the hallway.

  Thump… thump… thump.

  Alvin swallowed the knot in his throat. He crept down the hall, stopping outside the bedroom, and put his ear to the door. As if the woman could sense his presence, she slammed against the door hard enough to jar his head. Alvin fell back against the wall, cracking the wood paneling beneath his weight.

  The woman in the bedroom let out a slow, undulating moan that caused every hair on Alvin’s body to rise to attention. It suddenly occurred to him that he hadn’t locked the bedroom door the day before—wasn’t sure it even had a lock. If the woman simply turned the doorknob, she would be right on top of him.

  Alvin flew out the front door of the trailer. The sun was yet to rise, but it was light enough to see more than a dozen of those things lumbering in between homes and on the gravel drive. Their heads perked up, alerted by Alvin’s noisy exit.

  He ran to the overturned fishing skiff and righted it in an instant. Alvin pushed the boat into the water and a shrill screech sounded as the aluminum hull scraped against rocks and roots. The noise attracted the attention of every corpse in the trailer park, and they all began to swarm. The fresher corpses seemed to move faster than the elderly couple he’d encountered on the yacht.

  The young man with missing teeth had apparently escaped the chair-trap and reached the riverbank. He stumbled down the incline and landed headfirst on a rock. Alvin stared, expecting him to get up, but, for some reason, he didn’t. As more dead drew close, Alvin moved to the bow and dragged the skiff into the water. He pulled the boat to the edge of the sandbar and jumped inside.

  The old woman from the yacht pushed her way to the front of the mob. She stumbled down the sandbar and managed to grab hold of the transom with one hand. Alvin sneered. This woman was his curse. He climbed into the stern.

  “Leave me alone!” he said as he stomped on her hand.

  He crushed the tips of her index and middle fingers, and with that she lost her grip and sank into the canal. Alvin sat down on the stern seat, never taking his eyes off the ripples that marked his stalker’s disappearance.

  The current carried Alvin several miles downstream before he was driven ashore by hunger. He managed to eke out a few weeks in a cabin along the riverbank, but there was little food. Alvin threw his fate back to the will of the canal, which eventually carried him parallel to the Barnes’s home. Alvin had climbed through a drainage ditch that ran under the road and tried to get into the house across the creek from Noah’s.

  “But there were more of those ghouls inside.”

  “The Fitzpatricks,” Noah interjected.

  “Huh?”

  “The ones chasing you—they were my neighbors. I thought they might have turned. Checked their place a while back. I could hear them moving around inside, but it didn’t sound right, and I wasn’t about to risk my neck for a few cans of soup. I wonder if their son Adam is still alive. He wasn’t with them.”

  Alvin shrugged. “I didn’t think to ask,” he said wryly. “That's when you found me.” He swallowed the memory along with a heaping spoonful of beans. “I owe you.”

  “You don't owe me anything, Al. It's what you do in that situation—if you can.” Noah saw that his chewing became more labored with every spoonful. “Why don’t you go wash up and then rest a bit? You must be exhausted after all that.”

  Alvin nodded. “Thank you, Noah.” He took his hand and gave it a firm shake. “Thank you.”

  But Noah wasn’t paying attention. His head was cocked to the side, the lower eye squinting while the upper widened under a raised eyebrow. He put his finger over his lips.

  Silently, he moved to the kitchen window and peered through a gap in the boards. Four dead were milling around outside.

  Noah turned back to Alvin and whispered, “They’re here for the gunshot.” He glanced out the window again. “Don’t move. Don’t make another sound until I tell you it’s ok. They should move on so long as they don’t think there’s anything here to eat.”

  Alvin nodded rapidly.

  “I’ll tell the others.”

  As Noah crept into the living room, Alvin settled down onto a kitchen chair with only a creak to give away his movement. He couldn’t keep his eyes open for more than a few minutes. After that he lay his head on the breakfast table and, within seconds, was fast asleep.

  II

  Adam Fitzpatrick stood before the altar of the church of Saint Anthony of Abbot. The Roman Catholic church was locally renowned for being made entirely of wood—even using wooden pegs instead of nails. Adam milled around the pulpit aimlessly. He had entered the cathedral to investigate a clamorous noise he heard that afternoon but found nothing, aside from others like him.

  A month earlier, Adam was alive—working as a delivery man for Sears department store. He and his coworker, Jason Davies, had pulled into the driveway of a small, two-story home at the end of Lansing Street to deliver a dishwasher to a recently widowed senior. Jason sat in the truck listening to the radio while Adam knocked on the back door. No one came to let him in. Instead, his presence was acknowledged by a low groan, like that of a man in pain.

  Adam’s EMT training took over. He kicked open the door and rushed inside. The kitchen lights were off. After his eyes adjusted to the darkness, he spotted the old man standing naked in the dining room. Judging by his pale complexion and dazed look, Fitzpatrick guessed he’d had a stroke.

  “Are you okay, sir?” he spoke loudly.

  The man didn’t respond. He lurched toward the boy, mouth agape.

  When Adam reached out to steady him, the old man clamped his false teeth on Adam’s index and middle fingers, tearing them off with a jerk of his head.

  Adam yelled and pushed the old man to the floor. When he examined his hand and saw the bloody stumps that used to be two calloused fingers, he let out a shrill scream.

  Fitzpatrick backed toward the door as the old man took to his feet, the severed fingers still rolling around his gnashing porcelain teeth. The octogenarian maniac shuffled toward him. As Adam stepped backward, he tripped on the door’s threshold and fell down the stairs onto the concrete walkway, chipping the bone in his left elbow. A wave of pain shot up his arm. Before Adam could recover, the old man stumbled out the door and tumbled on top of him.

  Fitzpatrick tried to block his attacks, but the pain left him disoriented, and the old man managed to sink his dentures into Adam’s neck. He bit off a mouthful of flesh, and Adam let out a cry.

  Jason barely heard Fitzpatrick’s screams over the heavy guitar and rapid double-bass of Metallica blaring on the radio. He killed the music and craned his head out the window. Someone had his partner pinned to the ground.

  Jason jumped out of the truck to help his coworker. When the old man heard him approaching, he slowly turned his head and let out a gravelly moan. Shreds of Adam’s flesh were stuck between his rust-colored teeth. Jason stared into his frosted brown eyes, devoid of humanity. It was an image he couldn’t have dreamt up in his wildest nightmares. Jason opened his mouth to speak, but the only thing that came out was a timorous “No.” He jumped back into the truck and peeled out of the driveway taking one of the neighbor’s sentinel shrubs with him.

  The old man continued to feed until the meat grew cold and unappetizing. No longer interested, he moved on to find warm flesh.

  Within minutes Adam’s body began to twitch. A mild trembling grew to full-on convulsions, which continued for several seconds until, all at once, his body ceased moving. After a moment of stillness, his eyelids opened revealing a pair of glazed brown eyes. Adam turned onto his side and slowly picked himself off the ground. He let out a long, inaugural moan.

  Pistol shots broke out down the street. Adam’s head swiveled tow
ard the noise, his mouth agape with excitement. Then he awkwardly shuffled off in their direction.

  After a couple hours of exploration, it appeared there was nothing to eat in the cathedral. Eventually Adam and the other corpses slowly staggered down the red-carpeted aisle and out into the gray June afternoon.

  Adam stumbled down Church Street like a drunk, not quite aware of where he was going or what he was looking for. He was only aware of a primal impulse originating from the center of his decaying brain, urging him to eat—to survive.

  A plastic shopping bag blew across the street. Adam lunged after it. He grabbed hold of the bag and brought it up to his mouth. It took only one bite to realize that this was not food, even though it had moved. Adam let go of the bag and it floated to the ground.

  A moan sounded from down the street. It was followed by another moan, and then another, and another. When the call relayed to Fitzpatrick's location, he too moaned and then ambled off in that direction.

  Halfway down the street an orange tomcat darted across the road. Fitzpatrick chased after the cat with such focus that he ran right into a black wrought-iron fence. Adam buckled over with enough force that the spear-like tip of one of the posts stabbed into his gut. He let out a visceral groan prompting a few of his brethren to investigate, but they moved on as soon as they saw that no food was involved.

  Adam pushed himself off the fencepost. A chunk of his liver remained skewered on the spike. The singular motion of the mob caused him to forget about the cat, and he continued walking down the street in the direction of the other corpses.

  This went on for hours—walking, getting distracted, losing attention, another distraction, more walking…. It had been two hours since Fitzpatrick left Saint Anthony’s, yet he hadn't ventured more than a mile from the cathedral—none of them had.

  At exactly five o’clock, an electronic timer triggered the church's mechanical carillon, creating a long melody of bells, which used to alert the town of evening mass. Every corpse within a two-mile radius heard the sonorous bells, and each one gravitated toward the source of the sound, just as they had twice-a-day, every day since the majority of the town’s residents had died.