You can take Jim’s theory and run with that if you want.

Me? I still aint sure why it all happened.

The Old Testament, ‘Wrath of God’ shit seems a little far gone to me. I don’t remember Moses or Noah running into many zombies in the bible class my folks sent me to…

It may have been aliens, diseases, biological weapons or some other military shit. Take your pick. All I know is one day everything on Earth was the way it’d always been, the next it seemed to have fallen into Hell.

We had three months, Maddie and I. That’s how long we’d been married. She was smart with a career and prospects. She was beautiful and kind too – and for a reason I never understood, she loved me as much as I did her. Things had seemed to be on the up for us. I’d managed to hold down a job for more than a week. We’d bought our first house. Maddie had been elected president of this local charity group, helping the homeless and disabled, and she was starting to get noticed downtown.

And there it is – right there. That’s the problem I have with Jim’s ideas. Not everyone is an asshole. Not everyone deserves to burn. You’d think a God with the power to create it all might have the power to be selective. You’d think he’d have let her live.

 

Jim was some kind of priest – at least I came to think of him that way.

We met, him and me, just a few weeks after it happened. There was me, staggering through the corpses and waste, half-starved and halfway down that slippery slope to batshit. The Deadmeats were close – there was a quiet in the air. No birds singing. I’d seen three packs that day and one of them had picked up my scent. They don’t move quickly but they never stop, never tire, night or day. When you’re already dead, an empty stomach or blistered feet don’t really matter a damn.

But I was telling you about Jim.

I was passing the body of a man. I didn’t pay it much mind – after your first thousand the novelty kind of wears off. As I pass, this ‘corpse’ bolts to its feet and puts an arm around my throat. Christ you should have heard me scream – I reckon every Deadmeat in a mile radius thought it was dinner time. So I stand there and wait for the bite. It doesn’t come. And I start thinking how the arm isn’t cold and how he doesn’t smell so much of rotting shit as the others do.

“My mistake,” he says (real educated accent he had, English maybe) “I thought you were one of the Lost.”

“Christ,” I shout and I’m shaking like a nun in a whorehouse. “You… you scared the shit outta me!”

So this man turns me around by the shoulders. He’s this big, overweight, sweaty guy in some kind of jogging outfit with a grey beard like Gandalf and hair to his shoulders. He puts his nose right up to mine. “Don’t take His name in vain my boy. People cursing His name… blasphemy and godlessness…” he gestures around us, “… well why do you think all this occurred?”

I shrugged – tired of asking myself the same. “Just shit happening like it does?”

“Shit doesn’t just happen, son. Shit needs a big stinking arse to fall out of.”

 

So that was Jim.

It changed everything, meeting him. I don’t just mean the food and shelter he would share – I don’t even mean that I would probably have died that day with a dozen jaws sunk into my pecker.

What I mean is Jim changed my outlook on everything. Everything.

You see, he’d grabbed me thinking I was a Deadmeat. Deliberately. And when I asked him why a fella would do something so goddamned stupid he bashed me around the ears and said it all again – you know, cursing, blasphemy and that shit. It wasn’t stupid, he told me. It was God’s work.

And what he told me later is what changed it all.

 

I started searching for Maddie after that. Jim came along. So far as he was concerned, he could do ‘God’s work’ as well in one direction as the other. I headed back to the house we’d shared – only now it wasn’t a house so much as a shit hole. There were three stiffs on the front lawn. The lucky ones. One was my neighbour, Mrs Grey, who had grown her own fruit and veg. She used to stand there on her drive all weekend, trying to sell strawberries and carrots and rhubarb to folks as they travelled to the superstore in their four-by-fours. I used to buy her stuff from her just coz I felt sorry for her. Anyway, there she was on my front lawn, grass stained the colour of that rhubarb she sold – head caved in like a boiled egg and just one set of bites that I could see. Must have been killed just after she turned – maybe as she turned. Lucky – like I said. The other two stiffs I didn’t know.

And there was no sign of Maddie.

Can you understand this? My Maddie, my sugar, the woman I loved more than life itself – I wanted to find her dead. Wanted it. Coz I knew damn well she hadn’t gotten away like I had, and the alternative made death look like a party. I felt that way even before Jim told me what he did. After he told me, I thought it a hundred times over.

 

“It’s not just death, Richie my boy,” he said. (‘Richie’ being me, in case you’re wondering.) “It’s something worse than death. Worse than possession.”

It was that first night. He had led me to this secret bunker in the vaults of some abandoned warehouse. Man you should have seen the shit he had stored away down there. It was like he had known it was coming – known for months. That’s why I listened to him – coz it seemed like he knew all about it.

“What can be worse?” I said. “I mean they’re dead aint they?”

He waved a dismissive hand and broke wind loud enough to bring dust from the walls. (With Jim, cleanliness wasn’t all that close to godliness – truth is they barely shared a ball park. I reckon if the local pastor had farted that way when I was a kid I would have felt drawn to religion myself.)

“Yes, of course they’re dead. You can see the bodies are rotting. You can smell the putrescence.”

I had a terrible thought then. “You mean their brains are alive? Their minds? They’re still awake and shit?”

“No boy!” He handed me a piece of raisin toast. “The brain can’t survive if the body dies. It has no oxygen or blood supply.”

“Then what are you damn… darn well getting at? If they’re dead…”

He stood up and bellowed at me – scaring the shit outta me for the second time that first day of our acquaintance. What he said next went beyond fear. What he said… well like I said it changed me.

“Souls, boy, souls. The infestation, the possession, the conversion – whatever you want to call it. It brings unnatural death. The soul gets trapped.” He came in closer again, never one to miss the opportunity for a grandstand performance. “Every one of those things out there – the ones missing arms and legs and faces. The ones who want to feast on you and make you one of their number… each has the soul of the person they once were – trapped on some spiritual shackle. That shackle can be broken only one way – when you destroy the dead brain and free them. That’s why I grabbed you, son. I thought your soul was in need of liberation.” He sat back down and farted louder than before. “And that’s God’s work, young Richie. Liberation of those tormented souls is His divine will.”

 

So all I could think about was Maddie. I pictured her out there somewhere, a walking, drooling, festering joke of the sweet woman I had loved. I pictured her tattered flesh, her torn clothing (for some reason it was always the yellow dress, though I know it’s not what she was wearing when Hell came to town). I pictured this creature with the remains of her face and there, trailing above her on a shimmering strand of silk was her soul – like a kid’s party balloon on a string. I pictured it as this great silver bird, wings all tattered as it fought against that shackle in a hopeless dream of heaven.

I saw that image whenever I closed my eyes. I dreamt it. And that’s why the next day, and every day for weeks afterward, I trailed what used to be streets, of what used to be a town, looking for the Deadmeat she had become – looking so I could batter her skull to pieces and let my beloved Maddie find rest.

Yes, I questioned what Jim had said, but just maybe he was right and the maybe was enough. The thought of leaving her to that fate ended any idea I had of running or hiding. From that moment on I became a hunter and a ‘liberator of souls.’

 

 

After we drew a blank at the remains of the house I wanted to try her office building. Stupid fucking idea of course – like the first thing a person does when their meat cools is to head somewhere familiar. She was dead, Jim reminded me – body and brain dead. The Deadmeats travel in packs (Jim reckons so they can have the odd chunk out of each other) and there was no reason to think different of her.

Now Jim had style, I’ll give him that. Rather than a spade or twelve-bore he went about his business with a fucking great altar cross. Christ knows where he came by it – probably got it off ebay when such a thing was possible. This thing had to be two feet long and weigh around fifteen pounds – fifteen pounds of sculpted, galvanized brass. The first time I saw him use it I almost forgot to puke afterwards. This Deadmeat blind-sides us as we’re routing through an old school building and quick as lightning Jim brings that dirty great cross around in an arc and just about cleaves the fucking thing’s skull in half. This great slab of dark brown, addled brain just slides outta the hole he’s made and busted teeth shower us like we’re getting married. The thing drops like a prom queen’s panties and never moves another inch. I swear it.

And you can guess, if you’ve been paying attention, what ol’ Jim does next. He kneels down by that rotting heap of bones and says a prayer for it. I even saw his eyes follow something invisible across the room and outta the window frame. (Whether he really sees anything I don’t ask, and he doesn’t say.)

“Shit,” I said, staring at that cross with my mouth full of puke. “Shit I gotta get me one of those!”

“When I die, it’s yours.” (Back then I was tooled up with a pickaxe that I came to consider a personal friend. I called it ‘Axle.’)

 

Anyway, after that Jim teaches me how to hunt them. He teaches me how they may travel in packs but aint really pack creatures at all. At the first sign of blood it’s every Deadmeat fucker for itself. The big ones – ones that used to be adult men – generally outpace the others. If you can keep them chasing for long enough the pack gets all stretched out and the leaders isolated. Then you turn and crush a cranium or two. If you’re lucky you find a place to hide before you run out of wind (not that Jim ever runs out of that) and if you’re real lucky you don’t get outflanked by another pack that’s heard the noise. Plan it properly, Jim taught me, and you can take out (‘liberate’) a dozen fuckers at a time. With me helping he reckoned we could get nearer to twenty – when I learned to come up from behind and pick off stragglers.

I signed up to all this pretty easy. The way I saw it, eventually we’d stumble across what had once been Maddie. One way or another. Until that day, I’d be perfectly happy freeing the good souls of the former citizens of this shit hole. After all, thirty thousand people had once called this place home. That made for a whole universe of brain-bashing and there hadn’t been a whole lot to watch on the TV in recent weeks.

The first one I dropped had been a little girl once. She still had one pigtail in her moss-covered hair and these pretty little red shoes like Dorothy. I hesitated, I’ll admit it. Even with the goo running out of the flap of meat that had once been her ear and the missing fingers, I found myself thinking of this thing as a ‘she’ not an ‘it.’ Wasn’t until ‘she’ had gotten ‘her’ stinking yellow maw a few inches from my face that the survival instinct kicked in. I swung Axle so hard he went clean through her little skull and right out the other side. When she went down I had to put my foot on her face and pull like crap to get him back out again. Jim and I prayed together over that one – only I was praying for my own soul not hers, in case what I had just done was worthy of hell. Just in case. It got easier after that though. It’s amazing what you can get used to. Jim’s work, and God’s, started rolling along just fine.

 

There were two things we hadn’t figured on – one was that we would run into other survivors. The other was that those survivors might turn out to be worse than the ‘meats.

 

We were out of town the day it happened – picking off Deadmeat strays in the suburbs and enjoying the summer sunshine. Shit, we could have been two guys walking a round of golf that morning – him with his brass cross and me with Axle slung over my shoulder ready to drive, chip and putt some skull. It got to be almost routine putting those sorry bastards down – we even stopped for sandwiches between brains.

Jim hears this commotion and gets me to follow him. (I’d been too busy stuffing salami into my face to hear much other than chewing). We trail across what was once a kiddie’s playground and there is a basketball court on the far side behind a sports hall. Most of the link fencing around it is still standing. Jim and I get real low and peep around it. What we see is a dozen Deadmeats crowded around something. That’s what we think we see, anyhow. These guys are dirty enough and scraggy enough. But when we look closer we see they ain’t got no bite marks, no missing pieces and no rot in them.

Stupid fuck that I am, I get up all ready to meet and greet my survivor brothers. They’re the first we’ve seen since we hooked up. Jim near enough yanks my arm from its socket pulling me back down.

“Stay low, young Richie,” he says to me. “Stay low.” And there is something new in his voice. Fear.

Well I look back at them and start to understand for myself. These fellas are crowded around something and at first I can’t make out what the hell it is. But after a time the group shifts a little and what I see makes me moan out loud. On the floor of that court they have a Deadmeat – one that used to be a woman. There’s one of them on each of its arms and legs and a fifth guy has its head pinned to the concrete. They’ve pulled the rags off ‘her’ and what the sixth guy is doing I can hardly bring myself to remember, leave alone write here. The other seven or eight guys are crowded round cheering like he’s landed a fish – cheering and waiting their turn.

Jim looks at me. He doesn’t need to say what he says, but he does anyway. “Godlessness. Evil.”

And I can’t help but agree this time. I can’t explain why but what they’re doing is worse than just fucking depraved. It’s disrespectful. That thing was a woman once. Probably had kids. A husband. OK, so if we’d stumbled across it we’d have put a wedge of metal between its ears – but that would have been to honour who it’d once been. What these bastards were doing was just despicable.

“Her soul,” Jim mumbles to no one in particular. “Her poor soul.” And I get wind of what he means. I imagine this woman’s shackled spirit – hovering, shimmering on its cord and witness to this final hurt.

“Fuckers,” I say to him. “Sick, bastard fuckers.”

And he says again what he’d said before. “People like these… Godless people like these…” and he looks around us at the hell that’s replaced suburbia. There’s no need for him to finish the sentence. No need at all.

Well we sneaked away and left that Deadmeat to its fate. Perhaps they finished it off when they were done or perhaps they didn’t. Point is, there wasn’t a whole lot we could do about it. A Deadmeat horde of a dozen had become easy pickings for us. A group of survivors would be a whole other matter. If they saw us they were as likely to hunt us down as welcome us. For the first time in weeks I was scared for myself. I’d never stopped being scared for my Maddie but between Jim and Axle I’d figured my own ass was pretty well covered. Not anymore. Not after what I saw that day.

 

God’s work became a whole lot more circumspect after that. We had a new sack full of shit to consider. I was feeling dizzy with the number of shifts my outlook had taken. For weeks I’d dreamt of finding other survivors, hooking up with them and restarting humanity (preferably with me at the centre of a harem of sweet young ladies needing help to begin a new generation). Now we’d found some, all I wanted was to let Axle go to work. I even suggested it to Jim. You can guess what he said.

“God will punish them. It isn’t for us to decide the fate of the living.”

“Well maybe we are God’s punishment,” I said to him. “Maybe we’re the sharp end of His wrath.”

“They will burn in Hell forever,” Jim says, “and with no help from us.”

It’s probably just as well. If we’d started hunting survivors, people, I reckon I’d have started down that slippery slope of madness all over again. Heck knows what we’d have become. In any case, we’d have gotten ourselves killed sooner or later.

They couldn’t all be that way could they? Survivors? Surely some good people had made it?

 

Jim wanted to move on after that day. I wanted to stay. I figured Maddie’s soul was still out there in the ruins of this place and I couldn’t think of abandoning her, even now. (And in my mind’s eye I had a new image: a Deadmeat pinned to that ball court beside a pile of tattered, dirty yellow linen – pinned down by a bunch of animals while a pair of dirty pale buttocks rocks up and down between her legs in some Morse code communion with the sky.)

Jim spent a whole two days deciding if he’d stay with me. I was pretty darn sure he would move on – though how he intended to carry the zillion cans of food and shit he’d stashed was beyond me. In any case, when he finally sat me down he said this:

“All right Richie, my lad. A week. We’ll stay a week in honour of your love for this woman.  We’ll search for her in the few places left we haven’t looked. But after that time, if her soul doesn’t present itself, we are leaving. I’ll drag you by your ears if I must.”

I was flattered by that. I guess he’d come to see me as a son or something. He just wanted to protect me from myself. I prayed that we would find her in time – coz dragged by the ears or not, I was going nowhere ’til that happened.

 

Well like I say, hunting wasn’t a round of golf after that. I spent most of my time scared half to death of what we’d find or what would find us. Jim was scared too though he hardly showed it. I could tell – the way he gripped that cross of his, his knuckles whiter than I’d seen them before.

So what happened? Did we ever find her? How was she when we did?

There’s been nothing much I can truly be thankful for since it all happened – save for meeting Jim that day. Here’s how it was with Maddie:

We’re picking through a freeway RTA site, Jim and I. God knows there’s plenty of them – people who were at the wheel when Satan took control of the highways. We’d been to this one before. The Deadmeats like them you see – full of the flesh of people who’ve passed without ever having turned at all. Fresh food to them, even weeks later. So, we swing by to see who’s dropped in for dinner. Coz we come at a different angle to before, I see something I hadn’t seen last time. From under this station wagon that’s all turned over on its side I see this long, blonde hair – matted and dirty but unmistakable. And I’m running toward it without even a thought – not even checking the coast is clear first. Jim comes after me, shouting shit as usual, but I hardly hear him.

I know that hair – God knows I should.

She was lying on her face, most of the weight of that vehicle lying on top of her – crushing her into the black-top. Her left hand was stretched out like she’d been reaching for something before she died, and on the ring finger a glint of diamond – the biggest I could afford at the time, which hadn’t been much. The vehicle had protected her body and there was not a bite on her. In a way she was already buried too. Looked like she’d been running away, maybe crossing that road without paying it enough mind.

I sat crouched over Maddie’s body and cried until nothing came out of me but air. Cried for losing her, and for finding her. Cried that I’d been propping up a bar instead of at her side when she’d needed me. Cried in relief that she had never had time to suffer the way others suffered.

“A clean death, Richie boy.” Jim put a hand on my shoulder. “Clean and swift.” Then he knelt beside me and prayed out loud for her. I loved him for that.

“Tomorrow,” I said when he was done. “We’ll leave tomorrow.”

What is it they say about tomorrow never comes?

 

Later, heading for home, I ask him at last about the stash of food he’d had prepared – about how he’d known.

“A vision, Richie my boy. God spoke to me as to Moses in the desert and told me to prepare for the coming of Satan.”

Like I said before, take Jim at his word or leave it. I’m darned if I know to this day.

And so we’re almost home the day we found Maddie, almost back to the safety of our private bunker, when a bunch of Deadmeats is on us from nowhere. Looking back I reckon we started to leave too much of our scent around that entrance. It was like an ambush, but I don’t reckon they have the shit to spring something like that. Do they?

If it’s me leading, it’s me that gets bit. As it turns out, Jim is leading. This fat bastard Deadmeat with no nose gets a hold of Jim’s head and bites a chunk out of his cheek. Old Jim crushes its skull but the damage is done. He knows it as well as me. I’m busy with Axle, dropping the other fuckers closing in from the sides, when Jim starts staggering and jerking around the way they do at the Turn. He drops that cross of his and shouts the last living words I ever hear from him.

“Do it, Richie. Do it!”

But I can’t. Not to him. Not ol’ Jim.

I get my ass to that door and use the key he gave me to get inside. Had to take a couple of rotting arms off before I got it closed. Then I throw the bolts and just stand there in the dark, listening to the thumping and thinking about being alone again – perhaps forever this time.

 

Life goes on, as they say. Took me about three weeks to find somewhere safe to move on to and then to shift all of Jim’s stuff there. (I say safe – I guess I’m just hoping for safer.) Does the story end there? I thought it might, but the other day I’m out getting some air, keeping low, ready to let Axle handle anything dead that gets too close, and I see him.

Jim.

There he’s standing across the field, looking a whole lot less damaged that most of the Deadmeats you see and a whole lot thinner than before – his jogging suit fair hanging off him. At his shoulder are a dozen more of them. At his shoulder I say – like they’re waiting for his lead. And he’s looking at me, I swear it. He’s looking and he knows who I am. And there, slung across his chest is that dirty great slug of an altar cross, looking a little more messed up than he kept it when he was alive.

And it comes to me then why I let him turn that day ‘stead of putting him down. I had thought just maybe it would be different – that somehow the shit he knew or believed would preserve him.

Anyway, Jim raises that cross above his dead head and shouts something I can barely understand. Then he drops it where he’s standing, turns and leads them away – walking with a purpose like no Deadmeat I’ve ever seen.

God bless Jim. I’ll be screwed if he aint become God’s own punishment like we talked about. There’s a certain crew of messed up assholes better be vacating that ball court of theirs.

I still expect trouble from the ‘meats, but I don’t reckon my path will cross Jim’s again. I might be crazy, but what he shouted across to me sounded like, “Live.”

 

Axle’s retired now. I keep him stored behind the door for emergencies.

But man, this darn cross is heavy as hell.