The Apocalypse

Chapter 34

Neil

Illinois River



Neil couldn't remember a better night since the entire apocalypse began. He laid there with two women huddled into him for warmth and was surprised to find himself enjoying the aromas of both. In his old life something either smelled good or bad too him—they had never intrigued him. This was a first.

With Sarah there was that particular odor that rum presented, though it was very light; and there was the grey, neutral smell of the river water, while beneath both she still possessed a hint of perfume in her hair and it was this that he concentrated on and he breathed her in longingly. On the other hand Sadie smelled like a kid—a touch of shampoo over the lightest scent of sweat, but above both an earthy natural smell. It was the way a kid smelled when she came in after dark after a two hour game of kick the can.

Since they had gone to bed so early, Neil woke while it was still deep dark and this gave him a lot of time to enjoy the different scents. He had never known such contentment in so little a thing before.

On the other hand he was absolutely positive that he stank to all hell. It could not be any other way in his mind. He was a man and even the smallest man accumulated stink like a bee gathered pollen, he just had to walk around. There in the dark he vowed to bath in the river the following day no matter how cold it was, and if the weather could be judged by the wailing wind, it was going to be cold indeed.

He wasn't the only one who couldn't sleep for eighteen hours straight. At some point before dawn Sadie whispered urgently, “We need to talk real bad.”

“Your talk can't wait until morning?” he asked. Her dark eyes looked huge in the dim tent; she shook her head and he sighed.

Sarah stirred next to him and spoke with a sharp edge to her voice, “Your talk can wait. There were zombies down there a little while ago.”

“I don't care,” Sadie said, getting up and unzipping the tent. “It has to be now or else.” Sarah began to argue some more and Neil tried to pat her on the shoulder but ended up patting her on the breast instead and to make matters worse because what he was touching was round like a shoulder but was so very soft he grew confused at what it was, which had his hand exploring until Sarah smacked it away.


“Sorry,” he said quickly. “That was, um. I'll explain later.”

Simply put Sadie and Neil were both rather gun shy when it came to using the restroom in public, and since someone had to stand guard while the other went, they had developed codes rather than blurt out that nature was calling. They had come up with the idea in the short time that they had been with Chuck and his son.

There were two codes: We need to talk and We need to have a long talk. Thankfully it was only a talk that had Sadie so insistent just then.

When Neil backed out of the tent, Sadie was dancing the I gotta Tinkle Two-step with her hand pointing in alarm. Below them something shuffled about, which ruled out a whole lot of privacy. Looking around, he grabbed her and tiptoed to the farthest corner of the hayloft and quickly made a pile out of the stiff straw to about three feet, giving her the tiniest bit of privacy. He would've made it higher but she was already heading in.

Walking away he made a great point of looking for the zombie below until he could hear her crunching softly up to him. “Thanks, that was close,” she said in a breathy whisper. She held up the hem of her muumuu, which she had ripped. “Got plenty more if you need to have a long talk.”

“I'm good.”

Climbing in the tent they saw Sarah sitting cross-legged, she shook her head at them and said in a low voice, “That was one tough code to crack. You guys should work for the CIA.” Sadie snorted at this, but Neil only smiled, noting that the blonde had shifted away from him. Stupid! He swore inwardly at himself. It had been the free feel that had scared her off.

In the morning, after the women took turns playing with each other's hair for two straight hours waiting for the sun to rise, they crept out of the tent and were happy to see that the zombies had all moved on, though some hadn't gone too far. A few stood about idly in the next field in that strange way of theirs. Just in case, Neil, armed with the M16, checked all around the barn, creeping around in the new frost, barefoot, pretending he was tough when his feet were really on fire with the cold. Next he made sure the house was empty and when it passed his inspection he waved the two women over.

Both were as barefoot as he and they came, limping and cursing, holding onto each other, until they got into the house and there they huddled under blankets that Neil had scrounged from a hall closet.

“It was warmer back in the tent,” Sadie said, unhappily.

“Yeah but my back was killing me,” Sarah put in. “And the snoring? Yikes.”

Neil sagged, “I snored?”

Sadie nodded. “And farted. But don't worry it was a big manly fart, ROOMP!” She cackled lively at his look of embarrassment. “I'm just kidding. You didn't fart.”

“And what about the free feels? What was that about?” Sarah asked with an eyebrow cocked.

“Who got a free feel? Neil did? You dog! You're a stinking dog. Especially with me right there. I'm a minor! There are laws against such filth, you know. I do declare I must speak to the church elders about you and your wicked, wicked ways.”

He could feel his cheeks begin to burn and so he threw the blanket over his head. “I thought it was her shoulder,” he tried to explain.

This had Sadie cracking up and it got worse when Sarah asked, “Has it been that long that you can't tell the difference.” Neil pulled his head out to argue his case, but caught Sarah smiling at him in such an open manner that he forgot entirely what he was about to say.

“Maybe it was an honest mistake,” Sadie said. “Once when John was about to kill Neil, I felt in his pockets for the keys to my truck and my hand came on something rock hard and bulging. I was all like: Is that a gun in your pocket or are you just happy to see me?”

“Sadie!” Neil said grimacing at how Sarah's smile went crooked. “It was a gun, honest. I had it right here in my pants.”

“Relax Neil, I believe you,” Sarah said, laughing again. “You two seem to have had your share of adventures, while I…I was like those sheep-people you were talking about, Sadie. Our little town wasn't hit hard at all by the zombies and we just sort of waited to see what was going to happen without doing much to preserve our future. It was stupid…I was stupid. I wish I had gone right away to New York. Maybe I could've saved my daughter.”

“And maybe you could've met me and Neil in New Jersey,” Sadie said. She had been smiles and now she slumped. “I miss my truck. None of this would be an issue if we had the truck. We could just lit on out of here, running over any zombie that got in our way.”

“Your choice of words reminds me,” Neil said. “Where are we, and where are we going? The closest that I can put us is somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis. Aren't you from around here? Do you happen to know?”

Sarah stuck out her lower lip as she nodded. “Danville is a hundred miles east of here, but even if I lived closer, one farm looks a lot like another, so I don’t know for certain. I don’t even know exactly where on the Illinois River that Island was, and how long we floated down the river yesterday, I couldn't say. Two hours, maybe longer?”

“So you're saying you agree with Neil?” Sadie asked. “That we're lost.”

She shrugged to say: yes. Neil blew out in a gust. “Alright, we're somewhere between here, there and nowhere, but I wouldn't say we're lost. The Island is to the north—we don't want to go that way. We were warned against going west like we originally planned, so that leaves south…or south east toward Tennessee or one of those states.”

“I like the way you say one of those states,” Sarah said. “What you mean is one of those less important states.”

It was true, Neil had always looked down his nose at the southern states for their backwardness, and the mid-western states for their endless farm emptiness, and the Rocky Mountain states for their dry isolation. He shrugged as an answer.

“What about Southwest?” Sadie asked. “I could use some heat right now.”

“Same reason we don't go up into the mountains: no food,” Neil replied. “Not to mention water would be a difficulty as well. I think the southeast is our best bet. The winter will be warmer.”

Sadie was up for the idea, while Sarah was noncommittal. She stared out at the cold, miserable day and didn't say anything except, “How are we going to get there. I don't have any shoes.”

“I'll get you some, don't worry,” Neil answered quickly, getting up and searching, though it was in vain. The farmhouse could not provide for her since Farmer Jones' wife must have had feet twice the size of Neil's and wore something close to a twelve.

Because shoes weren't the only thing missing in their lives, Neil decided to go explore downriver, hoping to find a car or some food, or anything, really. They were without most of the essentials of life.

“I should go with you,” Sadie said. “You need me to protect you.”

“Hardly,” Neil replied and then he added in a whisper, “I need you to protect Sarah. She seems out of it. Keep an eye out for the zombies and an ear out for the soldiers. Hide in the loft if anything happens.”

After a few crackers layered with an inch of peanut butter, Neil took the M16 and the axe, and set out. He wore his now dry penny loafers and his khakis, and beneath he had on the long johns, which he had trimmed at the ankle with a pair of scissors, though still they stuck out from beneath his pants. A heavy leather jacket borrowed from Farmer Jones and an orange hunting backpack completed an outfit he would not have been caught dead in not long before.


At some point during the night, Indian summer had turned into early winter and Neil's teeth chattered as he walked. He feared the cold more than the zombies, mainly because he knew that he could escape them by plunging into the river. It was the last thing he wanted to do. The river hung with tendrils of grey fog that seemed to suggest a deadly cold beneath.

Still he kept close to it as he trudged, and he kept a sharp eye out for the undead, of which he killed two before he came on the first house. Thankfully both were smallish, women zombies, and better for him they came at him one at a time.

“Sorry,” he said around a grimacing face as he hewed the first with the axe—the M16 with its scant ammo was for emergencies only. He split her head and then took the time to clean the axe in the river where the second came sloshing toward him. She was having a rough time of the sucking mud of the river and he might have been able to simply walk away from her, however he feared her following along after him and surprising him while he was in the middle of taking a leak.

The axe was a good weapon. It had good reach and Farmer Jones had kept it sharp. After he killed the second zombie, Neil slung it on his shoulder and marched on to the distant farmhouse. This one was off the river a ways and so he approached it very carefully making sure to keep low.

A score of Zombies prowled around a squat rectangular outbuilding. Neil made sure to keep the house between him and it, knowing that if even one caught sight of him it would mean a wild chase back to the river. The back yard of the house was dirt and hen pecked. Chickens had lived there, but had died in their wire cages, their bones all that were left of them. Whether it was the chickens or something more, the house had a rancid odor emanating from it, which had Neil's teeth chattering from more than the cold.

He tried the back door, turning the knob slowly, hoping that whatever was creating the smell was truly dead and not just zombie dead. The door opened onto a back hall that was dim to the point of dark and though the door had opened without sound, Neil's first step sent an empty soda can skidding away in a fuss.

“Darn it!” he whispered.

It was as good a test as any that would alert him to the presence of zombies and with quick light breaths panting in and out, he hoisted the axe, ready to swing it at the first thing that moved. Nothing did and after a minute, Neil forced himself to take another step—this one came down on what he thought was glass, but what turned out to be broken china. He bent to squint down at the floor and saw it strewn with plates and cups, and this comforted him in the slightest.

When zombies made a mess it was incidental to their feeding. This mess had been done by humans, likely the soldiers from the Island, meaning there weren't going to be any 'live' zombies in the house. Still Neil was cautious and the smell had him nervous, though as he went room to room he grew somewhat used to it.

He found the source of the smell searing up from a couple of bloated bodies in the garage. The stench was so overwhelming that he gagged and went dizzy and shut the door again. Taking deep breaths to keep from vomiting, he went back into the house and stood in a hall until his stomach settled down. Wiping cold sweat from his forehead he took a towel down off a bathroom curtain where it had been left to dry ages ago and wrapped it about his face and went back to the garage to search, and among the bikes and the sleds and the boxes filled with odd junk he found something that had been overlooked: a compound bow and six arrows.

The arrows had him whistling. The tips were sharp as razors. That they were deadly there was no doubt, but against zombies he didn't know if they would be all that useful. Could an arrow pierce bone? It was a question that he didn't have an answer to. He had whistled at the arrows, but to the compound bow he grunted as he strained at the cable that ran circled about two pulleys—one at the top and one at the bottom of the bow—until his fingers ached.

“What the hell?” he whispered. What kind of bow was it that you couldn't draw back? Wondering if it had a safety, like a gun, he studied it closely, but there was nothing to indicate a safety and so he tried again, only this time he tucked his hand up into his sleeve so that the cable wouldn't bite as it did.

“Yes!” he said in a happy whisper as the cable came back. Strangely, the further he pulled the easier it became, so that when it was fully drawn it was nothing to hold steady. He decided to keep the bow, hoping that with a little practice it would come in handy.

Though the house had been long lived in, there wasn't more to it that Neil considered worth taking and so he left, leaving the out building to be explored by someone else. With the axe sticking out of his backpack, Neil continued his trek, flexing the bow at intervals, looking for an opportunity to use it.

Not a half hour later another girl zombie came shambling down to the river, ignoring Neil who had frozen in place near a bush. He watched amazed as the creature actually drank from the water on all fours like a dog. This was a new phenomenon to him. So far he had only looked upon the zombies as something out of comic books that were created only to eat brains and frighten women into his arms. That it drank seemed absurdly unnatural to Neil Martin. In disgust he fitted an arrow into his bow, heaved back on the cable and let it loose with a satisfactory ffft. The arrow went into the river three feet from the zombie and Neil kicked at nothing in frustration.

The zombie didn't know where the arrow had come from. It only looked at the water, which had splashed a little in front of it. Neil got another arrow ready. “Hey,” he said, remembering not say yoo-hoo. “Hey you.”

This had the zombie's attention and Neil waited a couple of seconds as the thing got to its feet and presented him with a much better target. Neil even moved to his right so that in case of another miss he wouldn't lose a second arrow—which was very smart since the arrow whizzed past the beast harmlessly.

“Crap!” he said and grabbed a third arrow, but before he could fit it onto the cable he thought better of taking another shot and tugged out his axe instead. And only just in time. The zombie had been picking up speed as the ground beneath its feet had gone from mud to sand to hard packed earth.

In fact she was so fast that Neil didn't get the axe around in time and only hit the zombie on its arm with the side of the handle. And then the creature was on him like a rabid dog, biting and tearing, as maggots sloughed off its head to drop onto Neil's face and into his screaming mouth.