Shambles Second Draft

Back in the day I used to write when everything was too much. When Rick Davis didn’t invite me to homecoming, I cried about it to my journal. I wrote how scared I was the night before I started my first job out of college. I wrote practically a whole book about canceling my engagement. I gave it up after that, though. I felt wrung-out and I felt, stupidly, that somehow putting pen to paper was no longer a viable option and that by writing my feelings I was wallowing in them. Everything is too much now and there’s really nobody to talk to about it any more. I didn’t know what to write about. I’m just rambling.

They used to say your nose is your most effective tool for remembering things. Your eyes can be fooled and you can mistake a voice but a smell takes you back. Conversely, if you smell something for too long it becomes ordinary, baseline.

The thing about the dead is they stink. They smell like raw biology. Flesh and bone and congealed blood. It’s almost hot and thick but it feels like it cuts the inside of your nose. It’s the smell of your mother’s womb and the ground to which you must return all at once. That’s life desperately trying to hold on to life in whatever way it can, no matter how twisted the semblance. A little while after the beginning, the smell seemed to die down and then I couldn’t tell anymore. I dreaded a breath of fresh air because the next haze of stench became just like the first. I can’t say the word “vile” out loud any more because it makes me want to puke.

You couldn’t look left or right without seeing the remains of something. Some pet, some wild animal, some person. About the twenty-fifth time you saw something dead that used to be living and precious to someone, your mind was getting the idea that maybe it’s time to step back a little bit. Let the animal inside drive for a while. Seriously, you wouldn’t believe the cacophony of stink. People defecate when they die sometimes. I take that back. They shit themselves. I always used to think that I hope I didn’t shit myself when I die but I don’t know if there’s any other way when you’re dying from being eaten alive. I’ve seen it happen and if it comes to that I’m going to kiss my gun like it’s a boy, with tongue and everything. Every time I smell the shambles coming I think about that then I think about anything that smells better than the shambles. I like to think about the smell of pot. I have some but I can’t bring myself to smoke it.

I know I’m off the track but now I’m thinking about Alexis. The last time I saw her was on the last plane I took and she was supposed to be on it. I could say some mooshy shit like “I’ll never fly again” but even if that was true it wouldn’t be because of Alexis. It’d be because some dumbfuck left some door unblocked or some gate open, and the shambles got in and ate the control tower staff. I hate the word “zombies” because zombies is such a stupid word. Zombie is an icon. I shot zombies in videogames. Zombies were in movies. Zombies aren’t real. Shambles are for real. They do that, seriously. They shuffle, they amble, they lope, secure in the knowledge that eventually there will be something with a pulse. Something they can eat. It looks like they are so slow, but they’re quicker than you think. You can spot one ten feet away and when you turn your head for just a second to find a safe escape route it uses the Voorhees Unreality Engine to suddenly be upon you. Time means nothing to the dead, man.

Anyway I was in an airplane hangar. This place had been commandeered by the military and whenever survivors stumbled upon it they would send them out on the regular supply flights. Supplies out, passengers in, it worked pretty well. In this case, I give the remains of the government credit. Once it got outrageous and the population dwindled, they did everything they could to find survivors and remove them to safety, where they all fucked like rabbits because if they didn’t think they needed to repopulate the world, at least they thought they might as well spend the last whatever of their life getting it on. Whatever. They kept pregnant families in the safest parts of their bases. Lucky bitches.

Alexis was in the corner talking to a couple of the soldiers, laughing in her brash way and punctuating her words with her earnest expression and New York diction. I sat looking out the window at the plane. We were on the ground floor, seriously. Like I was looking at that tall yellow stairway they were rolling up and thinking about why my thighs were looking so good without anyone to appreciate them. Of all the luck. That’s something Alexis would say. She cracked me up, and it was pure luck that we ran into each other a few months ago. In our other life, our “before” life, I used to see her a few times a year at gatherings of our friends. I didn’t know her intimately, we never went shopping together, but if I had to assign her to a group I could say she’s a good friend.

People used to have a thing about good friends but now someone can become your good friend in a day. Everything is so transitory. I had a few years with Alexis. The Fourth of July, Thanksgiving, birthday parties, same place/same time. I don’t even remember the first time I met her. I was too drunk. The second time I met her we sat on the bed in our friend’s room and talked over bowls about men and sex and sex toys. We were high and scandalous and we stayed upstairs and watched the fireworks through the window. They set a roof on fire across the street. We laughed the whole time. I became memorable to her when she tried out a drink my mom made: the hairy buffalo. It’s like a watermelon with a skabillion different kinds of liquor soaked in it for 2 days. She loved it and for every gathering I would go to my mom and look at her sweetly “Mom can you make a hairy buffalo?” And she always did. She didn’t even drink.

At some point during every party Alexis talked me into taking shots and we talked about the food and eating too much of it, and kept eating it as we became more intoxicated through the night. At the next party I would then pretend to commiserate with her about her imaginary giant hips. I was with family and good friends and I always looked forward to those times. The last time I saw her before the shambles she taught me to roll a joint. I couldn’t do it for years, I mean EVERYONE tried to teach me. She managed it in under 10 minutes then we smoked it and she told me how to make it less pathetic next time. The next time I saw her we were both at McCarran Airport waiting for a shuttle bus to take us to Nellis Air Force Base. They were going to send us somewhere safer. I was smoking a joint because nobody cared and I had one.

“What is this shit? Do you see this bitch? How the fu-?” This angry woman came to my side. “How the fuck you gonna sit there and smoke that in the airport? This is the AIRPORT, bitch! NO SMOKING! Someone come and get this fucking terrorist!” I choked mid-hit and started coughing, bent double.

“You deserve that. Look at you. Blazing up in the airport and you’re not even gonna share?” I handed it over. “Alexis you have problems.” I started to cry. I turned to her and we hugged, and I just cried like a little bitch. She probably wouldn’t want me telling anyone this but she did too. If there’s ever somehow movies again I’ll write a movie about her and she’ll be really stoic. Maybe I’ll just write a book and save it for when they’re making those again.

We walked a lot. She still complained that her hips were growing but she was as skinny as a minute. Even if she was imagining them they were gone now. We hiked everywhere. We had guns. We rummaged through houses and apartments for pot and sometimes we found some. We holed up wherever we could because sometimes the train station we were waiting at got overrun and next thing you know, you know the answer to “Are the lambs still screaming, Clarice?” Sometimes cellphones worked and sometimes they didn’t. We ran into people and hung out with them and found food that wasn’t spoiled. Eventually we learned to kill creatures because we had to. Reality was setting in and we knew we were fucked. But we always carried weed and we would sit wherever we were when we were safe for a while, and light up and talk about stuff. Not about old times too much. We had too many friends in common that we lost either figuratively or literally. We talked about what we’d do when all the shambles finally died. It had to happen someday, and folks were being moved to safe locations pretty consistently.

We were gonna take these seeds we collected and become pot scientists. It’s not like anyone would stop us. We just wanted some peace. Shit it’s all everyone wanted now. Can’t even find any in a ghost town. One night in Arizona a shamble wandered through the broken door of a store we were looting. It’s not like anyone was going to be back for that stuff. I smelled it and Alexis came up beside me with her finger to her lips. It turned anyway and I grabbed my gun. I pointed it at it but I never killed anybody before and I got paralyzed. Holy shit I mean I was just frozen and she came up and grabbed my gun hand and squeezed the trigger a few times and it fell down, making those horrible huffing sounds they make. It had a big head and she got it right in the side. It was disgusting and I threw up while she peeled my hand off the gun. She handed it and some paper towels to me when I stood back up. “Drink this water, here” and she thrust a bottle of water toward me.

We took our stolen goods back to the cheap motel where we had found a refuge. I mean it was free but the place was just cheap. Freezing in there. There was a heart on the wall but you had to be right in front of it to get any warmth, and the door was flimsy with just a doorknob lock. Hell even an uncoordinated shamble could get in. Makes for light sleeping. We sat cross-legged in front of the heater, holding our hands close enough to get them warm but not touching it.

“You can’t freeze up like that. Those things are like ticks. They home in on warm blood and then they attack you. They’re not gonna turn away just because you’re holding a gun. People do that. These are not people. You have to use it.” I stared at the radiator fins.

“Sorry. I mean I’ve only shot at like paper figures before or cans or something. He was looking right at me and I just-“

“Girl you better remember that’s not a ‘him’ that’s an ‘it’. They’re all ‘it’s. You keep forgetting that, one day you’re gonna be an ‘it’ too and I’ll put a bullet in your head as fast as I did to that thing and I won’t cry for you because I’ll be too pissed off you were stupid.”

“I won’t forget.”

“Don’t tell me. Tell yourself when you don’t have me to kill it for you.” She hit a blunt rolled with some pilfered Bali Hai papers and passed it to me. She wasn’t one to dwell.

It’s crazy how just thinking about that smell makes me remember her voice and her mannerisms. Even with my eyes open it’s like a movie I replay again and again. Back at the hangar, just before the plane. Alexis came back over to me and we talked about the soldiers she was trading stories with because one of them was from New York. We were just sitting there talking and then gunshots. Shouting. And then screaming. The fucking screaming. That never stops being awful.

“Alright people, MOVE!” a soldier shouted at us and I jumped up, shouldered my backpack and headed for the door. Halfway to the door I realized I left a book on a table. My mom had given it to me. I’d already read it but I was sad about having to leave it. There wasn’t any time to go back for it now. I’d tell Alexis on the plane and we would commiserate over a smoke. She understood because that happened pretty often to people. It was like letting go of a piece of what we used to have. What I used to have. I would cry to her and she would understand. On the way out the hangar door I looked to my right and I saw a line of soldiers broken by a parody of a human being and its undead entourage. Then huffing from the left and I stopped to see a swarm of shambles, human and animal. I had about four seconds to wonder how the hell they got in before I was hit with their stench. I rushed up the damn yellow stairs, absurdly touching my pocket to make sure my lighter was in there and not even caring about my thighs. I got seated in a spot that wasn’t taken up by supplies and took a baggie out of my pocket to get started with our ritual.

“HOLY SHIT GET THIS FUCKER OFF ME!” Alexis. Oh shit she sounds panicked. That’s I thought when I heard it. I turned and leaned to the window and I just saw about five soldiers surrounding her and trying to get her to the plane while the shambles crowded around them. I just stared, even when the plane started moving, the door closing as it was pulling off. “Just GO!” sounded surreal and echoed in my head as I realized we were leaving without Alexis.

“No! Wait!”

“WAIT!” “WAIT!” By then though we were already moving fast. We weren’t going to stop. I cried and I didn’t have Alexis to cry to. I just stuffed my baggie back in my pocket. She passed through me and my life but now I was in the air and she was on the ground and the people turned into dots and the crowd became miniatures and then the plane tilted and I couldn’t see them anymore.