Original Fic: My Boy
Written for Zombie Fest 2012 @ zombi_fic_ation
Tommy staggers toward her, hands reaching for her, his mouth wide with laughter. “Mama!” She catches him in her arms and hugs him tightly.
“Tommy! My boy!”
She comes awake slowly. She’s never in a hurry to wake up these days. A quick, habitual glance at the clock on the wall reminds her that it stopped long ago. It doesn’t really matter. She doesn’t have anywhere to be. There’s nothing she has to be doing. It’s always the same time in this underground room, anyway. Time to sleep; time to remember things - people - that are gone.
She sits up in the bed and contemplates the shirt and pants she’s wearing. They are still relatively clean, so she puts on her shoes. Always be ready to run, Tommy -Tom- had told her, and she is. She snags her aluminum bat from where it is leaning against the bedside table before she unbars the door and leaves the room.
Upstairs, the light showing through the cracks of the boarded-up kitchen window tells her it’s daylight. Her stomach grumbles at her. She opens the pantry cupboard. There is plenty to eat, if she had electricity to cook anything. She props her bat within arm’s reach and pulls out the last of the food she can eat without heating. Green beans. She pops the lid and shovels forkfuls of the mushy vegetables into her mouth until, all too quickly, they’re gone. She chokes down the leftover liquid with a grimace. Waste not, want not. Not true; she still wants.
“I can’t put it off any longer,” she whispers. She hasn’t spoken aloud in days - the sound of her own voice almost breaks her; she wants to shout, scream, laugh hysterically, anything to shatter the silence in the house.
Instead, she picks up her bat and climbs the stairs to the second floor.
Tom would have preferred to make the second floor their hideout - hideout, like bank robbers - but he couldn’t destroy the staircase without damaging the structural integrity of the house. They had briefly considered leaving, but nowhere was really safe anymore, and here they had home field advantage. According to Tom, anyway. They had managed to survive for months. She wasn’t sure why her survival was important, but she hadn’t wanted her son to be alone. Now, though…
She stops in the middle of the hallway. She leans her bat against the wall and reaches up to pull the string hanging from the trapdoor in the ceiling. The door swings down easily, the ladder unfolding smoothly in front of her. She climbs up into the attic, which is really little more than a crawlspace. A walkway of wooden planks runs the length of the space under the highest point of the roof. Fluffy pink insulation fills the gaps between the joists of the unfinished floor. The trapdoor swings shut automatically. The quiet thunk makes her jump, even though she is expecting it.
At the front of the house, there is a little round window. She creeps up to it and peeks out. The street is empty. She watches, her eyes drawn to every movement. It’s slightly windy. A rabbit darts across the street as if it’s being chased. She focuses on the yard it came from intently, but nothing else appears, to her relief. Wild dogs are just as difficult to deal with as…other things. Her attention is constantly pulled to the far end of the street, where a bundle - clothes, they’re just clothes - is lying against the curb. A loose bit of fabric occasionally flaps in the breeze. She tries to ignore it; she knows there’s no threat and she can’t let it distract her from real dangers. She wishes, as she does every time she performs this task, that she could just go out and get rid of the…it. Or that the wild dogs would drag it away - but they won’t touch it, they won’t go near it - or that it would turn to dust and blow away. Or that this was all just a dream.
She watches long after she should stop. The air is stifling, warm and somehow sticky in her throat. Suddenly, she can’t get enough air in her lungs. She backs away from the window and scrambles over to the trapdoor, almost throwing herself down the stairs. Her feet get caught in the bottom rung, and she ends up sprawled on the floor. The air on the second floor isn’t really that much cooler, but she sucks in several desperate breaths. Once her frantic breathing slows, she pulls her foot out from between the rungs of the stairs and waits for them to fold up.
Time to go. She hauls herself to her feet, and enters the bedroom at the back of the house. The room is impersonally inviting; it used to be the guest room. On the bed, there is a hiker’s backpack. She grabs it and goes to stand by the window overlooking the backyard. The back seems to be just as quiet as the front, and she doesn’t spend nearly as much time watching as she had in the attic. There really isn’t any point. The window is open slightly to accommodate the hooks of the emergency fire escape ladder hanging from the sill. She pulls it up the rest of the way and drops the backpack to the ground below.
It’s not until she has one leg out the window that she realizes she doesn’t have her bat. I suppose I should be worried that I forgot it. But she can’t seem to make herself care. She retrieves the weapon and, with another quick check of the yard, climbs outside.
At the bottom of the ladder, she stops for a moment to take a deep breath. The fresh air feels so good after being cooped up in the house, despite the ever present undertone of rot. She scoops up the backpack and puts it on, adjusts the straps a little, and then fastens the belt around her waist.
There are still houses in the neighborhood that they haven’t looted for food and other supplies. Instead of approaching any of them, she walks to the end of the street, where that damned bundle is fetched up against the curb. She hesitates as she gets closer, half expecting it to lunge for her, but it doesn’t move. Its skin is pulled tight over its bones and its hair has fallen out in clumps. Almost half of its face had been torn off, leaving the bone of its skull visible. There is a small round hole in its forehead. Its lips are pulled back, revealing a set of jagged teeth. The upper half of its torn shirt is stained brown with dried blood; it is still partially tucked in, but it’s loose enough to flap in every stray breeze. Its pants are also stained and shredded, and one of its shoes is missing. The corpse isn’t recognizable anymore, but she remembers who he was. He had lived a few more houses down the street. She’d always had so much trouble remembering his name when they would cross each other’s path. She wishes she could remember it now.
“Sorry about this,” she whispers. She hooks a foot under his - its - midsection and rolls it over onto the curb. It is surprisingly light, and she continues to flip the body using her foot and the bat, moving it across the sidewalk and into the overgrown lawn of what used to be a tidy duplex. As soon as a quick check shows that it is no longer in view of her house, she turns away from it and walks down the street.
She decides not to try any of the unsearched houses. Tom had always done most of the work when they needed supplies - breaking down doors if necessary, checking for…danger, carrying the lion’s share of the food. She had mostly trailed behind him with her bat ready, feeling entirely useless. When he had decided they needed things that they couldn’t find in their own neighborhood, she had stayed behind, expecting him to be gone for perhaps a day. That had been two weeks ago.
There is a little neighborhood store a few blocks away. It had carried a little of everything, including groceries - most likely looted long ago, but she thinks it’s worth a look. Maybe Tom had gone there.
She tries to remember that just being outside is dangerous, but the sun is shining, and the slight breeze keeps her from getting too hot. It’s almost like the walks she used to take just after her husband had died, except for the absolute silence. At least I’ll be able to hear them coming. She looks for possible hiding places, just as Tom had taught her, but she thinks her potential choices might also be death traps.
A short time later, she is almost at her destination. She rounds a corner and sees one of them standing in front of the general store. It sways, off-balance, as it paws at the glass door. There’s something familiar about it. Of course it looks familiar. It probably used to be someone I passed on the street every day. But the jacket it’s wearing is the same color as Tom’s, the one he was wearing the day he left. And its shoes are the same brand. And its hair is the same color. She tries to convince herself that its pants are not like the pair Tom was wearing that day, but she honestly can’t remember.
It turns toward her, and the tiny flicker of hope she hasn’t been able to crush, the hope that Tom might be alive somewhere even after all this time, dies. Because it’s him, and for the first time in three years, she’s glad her husband is dead. Glad he has been spared the horror the world has become, but moreso that he never had to see this - their son dead, his body mangled and bloody, his eyes, once so like his father’s, now covered in a milky film. Their son, who isn’t looking at her with love, or even that fond irritation that had developed near the end of the hellish teen years; who isn’t seeing her at all. Who is driven toward her by some terrible hunger that she doesn’t understand.
Tom staggers toward her, hands reaching for her, his mouth wide as he moans. Her bat falls from her nerveless fingers. She holds her arms out to him.
“Tommy. My boy.”
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