Chapter One It begins. It has already begun. Crystal was sitting with her long legs stretched out and propped up onto an overturned chair.     Her husband had built the one she was in and it was the first, the only one he’d gotten to finish and the other one was plastic, without a finish, cheap and broken and the deck underneath her was brown and peeling like rust in reverse.     The end she sat facing was unfinished too, with no rails, the drop off an open mouth staring out into the woods. It would never be finished, not now, probably not ever. Nothing would. Her husband, her child, were dead and the sun was setting and turning the trees that surrounded the house orange like they were burning and Crystal was laughing and it just didn’t matter. There was no one around to hear her. The ice from the glass in her hand was tinkling softly and she was thinking that was a funny word. Tinkling. Wasn’t that what the stars did? No, that was twinkle and she was laughing to herself again because nothing twinkled anymore, it tinkled. It pissed and it ran like waste and she was thinking that’s all it was, all of it, waste. She was staring at the glass, she couldn’t quite remember what it was she’d been drinking, and it was diluted, polluted at the bottom and Crystal was sighing, the oncoming wind seeming to pick it up, carry it longer. She was throwing the glass over the edge of the unfinished deck and listening for the impact and there was a soft smacking of glass and concrete colliding.     Then, there were the moans.     The low moans from below and she was remembering what had been in the glass and it had been iced tea. They used to drink iced tea on the deck together, back when her husband was still alive, back before all this started.     Crystal was looking down through the cracks in the wood and watching the movement below. There were definitely more of them now, she was sure of it. She was laughing again, making it louder, making them louder, unable to stop it and the shuffling below her was growing worse, chaotic and she was still laughing. It just didn’t matter.     There was no one around to hear her.     No one alive. Not really, anyway. Twenty miles away, past the trees where Crystal Davis sat silently wishing they really were burning and past the road she was thinking of as she was standing up on the deck and stomping her feet and screaming and tears were filling her eyes as the noises below her were growing louder, was the town of Fairfield. What was left of it.     In the middle of town, past the corner grocery store where old man Grisold had been working before they had eaten his stomach and his empty skull was left sitting polished and licked clean on the counter like some obscene Halloween display, his son was still alive. Elliot Grisold, just-turned-seventeen Elliot, was in school. School was out of course, the teachers, the students, were all dead or probably dead or not really dead since there didn’t really seem to be such a thing as really dead anymore. Elliot was crying like he hadn’t cried since he was very little and it wasn’t for the other kids, his friends, the others he used to pass in the hall that seemed to make the big building so much smaller then. He wasn’t even crying for his father. He was curled up in the farthest corner of the basement and he was staring at his arm. The tears weren’t stopping and he was looking at the wound there through blurry eyes and he was thinking one, simple thing. I’ve been bit.     He was repeating this over and over in his head and his hand was reaching into the backpack he had taken from his father’s store when they first came. He’d been home from school and helping in the store and lucky, if you could call it that, because of the backroom with the big locks and the steel door. Elliot was closing his eyes and they were stinging and the stinging in his arm was growing worse. Then the gun was in his hand and the thoughts in his head were changing to I won’t be like one of them, I won’t. He was thinking his dad shouldn’t have left the back storeroom. He shouldn’t have opened the door to take a peek, just one tiny peek and gotten grabbed and gotten eaten and then he wouldn’t have had to scream and turn and push and grab and run and be here instead. Then the gun, the one his dad had kept behind the counter “for protection” (and this thought was giving him a final brief laugh) was next to his temple.     Then he was screaming and squeezing and the blast was echoing and small pieces of Elliot, brain and matter, were sliding down the wall behind the big piece, the rest of him that was slumping forward. The radio was playing an old song and the lyrics were something about tell me if I’m makin’ you bleed and Joe Allen was smiling. Joe was sure he knew the song, but that wasn’t what mattered. What mattered was the radio was playing something. There was music, actual music, coming from out of the tiny speakers of the truck. It wasn’t just the endless stream of static or the screams he had heard while driving on the nearly empty road as he had crossed the border into Montana. Those had seemed to go on forever and the whole time he had been wondering how it was possible for someone to scream that long. He stopped wondering when he finally had to shut it off because he had almost found himself humming along.     He’d pulled off the road after that, jumping out before the truck had completely stopped because the vomit had filled his mouth without warning. Outside the cab the fields around him were full of half-eaten cattle and he had fallen to his knees, actually screaming out bile and falling onto his back. Above him, was the biggest, bluest sky he seen in a long time. Joe had allowed himself a moment of peace and tried to remember what the world used to be like before. Then the wind had changed and the smell of death had filled his lungs and he had left what remained of the contents of his stomach on the black asphalt and his blue denim shirt. Out on the road, out in the vast emptiness of God’s Country, he had heard the shuffling. He had heard the moaning and was on his feet and back inside the cab and the truck was lurching forward and he was not looking back, not looking around, but forward and he had continued to accelerate. He had gone on like that for awhile, he wasn’t sure how long since time didn’t really matter anymore except for when it was going to get dark. His eyes had wandered only once to turn the radio back on.     But that was then. Now, he was looking around. Now, was humming and singing at the top of his lungs. The song was beginning to fade and was being replaced by another and he was wishing he could dance while driving, because the signal seemed to be getting stronger. On the horizon the smothering cover of the mountains were broken by an empty space. He knew, recognized it, and he was singing louder. Joe had seen the sign on the side of the road right before the static had been broken by music.     It had read: HELENA 20 Miles. Marty had owned a puppy once.     He had been twelve, maybe thirteen when they had to put it down. He and his mother had come home from church to find another one of its “gifts” on the doorstop. Charlie, that was his name, Marty was thinking as he was remembering his mother screaming, saying, “This is the last time I come home to this”. He had been laughing to himself, always just to himself and thinking it’s only a dead squirrel, mom. It didn’t bother him then, not as a boy, to think his pup was just trying to show them what he had done, maybe trying to show a bit of pride at his ability. But what bothered him now was the arm that sat on his doorstep, probably from a grown man judging by the size of it. It hadn’t been there when he had taken his car into town, leaving the engine running as he jumped out, guns in hand, to raid the hardware store for more ammunition and lumber. There had only been a few of there this time, his journey uneventful except for the lone and eyeless rotting form that had bounced quite nicely off his hood when it appeared in the road on the way back.     That was normal. They rambled aimlessly on the roads, seeming only to snap out of their daze when he appeared. Only when the promise of a meal appeared. But this, judging by the deep rich red of the blood underneath, this lone piece of a what had been a live man, this was not normal. Marty found himself sweating and afraid to get out of the car. He was staring at the arm, the fresh blood running in a small trickle off the porch and down the stairs. The sun was warm and he was looking past the arm and into the small window that cut eye-level on his door. It was still dark inside, there were no signs of movement, no signs of forced entry, but it just felt . . . wrong. Marty was looking at the door again, the arm, then at the front of the house and the tree that sat cut down in the yard. He had used the chainsaw to cut it in half himself back when this madness had all started. He didn’t think they could climb, but he didn’t want any surprises when he tried to catch what few hours of sleep he was able to get locked away upstairs, tucked inside the boards and the barricades, his gun always at his side. The tree was dying anyway, just like what was left of the world.     It was good I cut it down, Marty was thinking. Something stays in one place too long it’s as good as dead anyway.     With that, Martin Dreschel was clicking the car into gear and heading up the empty street. Madness. This is what Stacey saw.     She was looking through the metal grating of the vent, the scene playing out below her dividing into tiny little sections. A classmate of hers was down there, she couldn’t remember his name, she knew she knew his name, but her mind was reeling at the sight, rolling like the inside of her stomach. It was the banging that had gotten her attention. She had been hiding in the ventilation shafts, crawling, covered in dust with her lungs screaming, for days. She never meant to be here, trapped in the school, the last place she wanted to be during all this. Her home was no longer safe. Her father was one of them now. Before, before she had been hiding in the cellar, watching her dad’s frantic eyes in the half-lit darkness. The two of them were forced down into the blackness after the first rotted thing had come through the window, taking her mother out with what seemed to be one pull until she realized there were many, too many hands, pulling her through. The last thing she remembered clearly before her mind started to shut down was her mother’s new dress. It was the one they had picked out together, the one that she had picked out for her mom to make her more ‘hip’, to make her dress like the beautiful young woman she was. She remembered the cutting and the spurting and the dress being covered in red as her mom’s neck caught on a jagged piece of glass as she was pulled through. Then they were out the back door, her father pulling loose the locks and dragging her into the cellar, his gun going off in ragged bursts, the shots, the exploding pieces of dead people ringing in her ears. They had sat down there for what had seemed like forever. Stacey had always thought her dad to be a little crazy, a little weird in his “militant” views. But she silently thanked him those first few days as he sat shooting at the things through the tiny window, though she also thought silently that he maybe liked it in some way. His endless rants about the end of the world were coming true. Then he had to be tough, had to be macho and open the cellar door and there was his screaming and there was that awful tearing sound and pieces of him coming back down the cellar stairs. Then she was shutting the door and pulling him back and watching his eyes flicker and close while the blood ran through the fingers that she had pressing against his wounds. Then later she was running up the stairs, knocking over the walking corpses, not looking back through tears at her father’s own dead body not dead anymore and walking. She supposed she had come here subconsciously, one of the only other places in town she was ever allowed to go to alone. The school was overrun too. They were everywhere. Lumbering around, huddled in corners fighting over fresh and not so fresh bodies and she had managed to get past them though she still wasn’t sure how and climb up on a bench and crawl into the shaft. She remembered the open vent from the time that she and her friend Kathy had crawled through it trying to find a way to sneak a peek at the boy’s locker room. Especially a peek at Elliot Grisold, who she thought, was really cute and kind of quiet and mysterious. They had never found the locker room then but Stacey had found it now.     Below her the boy was swinging an axe, driving it repeatedly into the body of one of the walking corpses. The thing was taking each blow, slamming into the lockers that they were next to. Then the boy was pulling it out and swinging again and the thing was only staggering, seeming annoyed and thrown off balance. Another one was appearing in the doorway and she wanted to scream at the boy, call to him up, pull him up, but he was big, one of the “jocks” who she never talked to and didn’t really like, but she couldn’t, just couldn’t.     Slam. The thing was back against the lockers and the other one was advancing and the axe was sticking in the first one and it was falling back and the boy was still holding onto the handle of the axe and it was taking the boy with him. The other one was suddenly closer and there was a flash of flailing arms and the boy was on the ground and she was backing herself back down the shaft. The boy had been quiet before, the only sounds from him grunts as he swung the axe and now she heard him screaming and screaming and the sounds echoed off the walls of the vent, seeming to be everywhere. Stacey kept backing up and she was reaching the place where the vents were connecting to the upward shaft that went to the roof and she was sitting upright. The screaming was stopping and she was sitting and breathing in shallow pants and she was thinking, just sit here. Just disappear. You did it in school. No one ever saw you in school. No one saw your dirty blond hair and your hazel eyes and you’re plain, ordinary, a blank, a nobody. Part of the background.     You can hide here.     You always hid here.
	© 2009 Glen Alan Hamilton

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