What You Leave Behind...

The waves lapped gently at the shore as Jackie buried her toes in the sand. She took a deep breath, appreciating the cool night air as it soothed her throat and filled her lungs. It felt good to be alive. It felt good to look up at the moon, large and looming but somehow comforting in the clear summer night.  Jackie was blonde and in good shape; a fact she was decidedly proud of, being 38 years old and having had a child not so long ago. She’d previously lived a fairly privileged life, working part-time at the office while her husband went to work at his law firm. The law didn’t matter much anymore, not in any civilised way at any rate.


Life had been hard recently, a nightmare in fact, and Jackie was thankful for the beach hut and a chance to rest. She still had worries though; right now Tom was back at the hut tending to Eddie, a guy they’d met in the city and who had been travelling with them for weeks now. He’d fallen ill; appendicitis was Tom’s best guess, but he wasn’t a doctor and they didn’t really know. It had been awful to watch him fade and be unable to do anything about it.  He’d been laid in the hut screaming in agony for the past few hours. When she couldn’t stand it anymore, Jackie had left and strolled down to the water to watch the tide roll in. She had still been able to hear him but somehow the distance had made those screams easier to bear.

His screams had stopped half an hour ago and just as Jackie was pondering getting up and heading back, she heard shuffling footsteps behind her. She slid a shaking hand to the pistol in her waistband and clicked off the safety as she darted forward into the surf. Swinging around, she zeroed in on the sound, her finger tense over the trigger. She almost fired; it was only his voice that stopped her.

“Jackie! It’s me! Damn it!” Toms face was pale as he waved his arms frantically at her.

Jackie flicked the safety back on and sighed loudly as she recognised him.

“Jesus, Tom! You should have said something sooner! I nearly killed you!”

Something about Toms’ face wiped the frown off her own and she took a couple of steps out of the water towards him. He looked pale and drained; his normally bright brown eyes seemed dull. Even though Jackie already knew the answer, she asked anyway.

“Eddie? He’s dead?”

Tom nodded slowly and turned his eyes out towards the horizon.

“Yeah, a few minutes ago. I did everything I could but…I’m no doctor

and if I’d tried to cut him, he would’ve just died sooner”

Jackie closed the distance between them and hugged him tenderly. She’d only met him a week ago and didn’t feel anything physical for him but they’d been through a lot together and Tom had tried to be strong for them all. She wondered how long he could keep that up. He returned her embrace and seemed to collapse into her arms.

“He kept asking for somebody, at the end” Tom’s voice was muffled at her

shoulder. “June. His wife I think. I told him…I told him that you’d gone to get her; he seemed happy with that”

          Jackie move to hold Tom at arms length, squeezing his shoulder with her hand as she smiled tightly at him.

          “You gave him comfort at the end Tom, that’s all you could do. Come on” She sighed deeply and looked back towards the beach hut. “We’d better get back there and burn his body”

         They turned and walked slowly back up the moon washed beach, neither said anything more, both alone with their thoughts as they approached the beach hut. They hadn’t trusted Eddie when they first met him but had grown close to him in the short time they had known him. Jackie was going to miss him; friends she could trust were proving very hard to find these days.  As they approached the hut, Jackie’s eyes glanced over at the smouldering pyre they had all created earlier. She stopped and watched Tom continue towards the door for a moment before she spoke.

         “Are we putting him on the fire over there?”

         Tom turned and looked at her before his eyes moved to where she gestured. Even in the bright light of the full moon, his eyes seemed to get darker.

         “No. We’re not putting him with them. Eddie deserves better than that”

         “Tom, I didn’t mean…it’s just that if we make anymore fires, we could attract attention” Her eyes were soft; she didn’t want to argue with him.

         “They’re not attracted by fire. We’ll be ok. He needs treating with respect” Tom turned, believing the conversation to be over.

         “I wasn’t talking about them. I was thinking we might attract other survivors”
         Jackie had discovered early on that the real danger in this new world was other survivors.  Tom stopped dead, his hand frozen as he reached out for the door handle.  When he spoke, his voice was low and serious.

         “I said No”

           She sighed as he twisted the handle and headed into the hut. With her head down, she followed Tom into the hut and nearly walked into him as he stood stock still in the doorway. Jackie looked past tom and surveyed the interior of the hut; she couldn’t see anything out of place and a frown touched her face. She opened her mouth to speak when Tom turned to look at her.

           “He’s gone”

           For a moment Jackie’s frown deepened and she stared at Tom stupidly. Eddie was dead, how could he be gone? Unless…

           “He…he’s one of them!?”

           Toms face had gone white and his hand was shaking as he reached down for the pistol tucked into his jeans. Jackie’s hand touched his softly, preventing him from pulling out the pistol and as he looked at her questioningly, she motioned her head towards the back of the hut.

           In the still that followed, Tom could hear a wet sound from the back of the hut, like a cat lapping at milk. He pulled the pistol from his belt slowly and clicked off the safety with a stiff, ginger motion. He nodded to Jackie who pulled out her own pistol and covered the door leading to the back of the hut. Tom began to move slowly towards the door; his footsteps slow, light and deliberate on the floorboards. He was aware of his heart pounding in his chest and the beads of sweat forming on his forehead. He glanced back at Jackie and saw that her hands were shaking but she still had the doorway in her sights.

Tom reached the door and pushed it open slowly, wishing with his entire mind that it would stay silent as it was pushed back.

          As the door opened he could see Eddie’s legs splayed out on the back porch of the hut. They were twitching gently, as if Eddie was dreaming about running. The door swung back more and Tom could finally see the source of the lapping sound. One of those things was hunched attentively over Eddie’s shoulder, lapping and chewing at a bloody wound there. It didn’t seem to notice Tom, engrossed as it was with its feast.

Jackie watched as Tom swung the door back, her nerves were making her arms shake and her aim down the gun sights was not the best. She felt like she should be over there with Tom, covering him better somehow. It was then that she noticed his face change; whatever he’d seen in there had made him as white as the sand outside. She was about to whisper over to him when he opened fire and the room was filled with the deafening crack of his pistol.

         Tom hit the creature square in the forehead and whatever was left of its brains slapped obscenely against the wooden wall behind it. It gazed up at Tom stupidly for a few seconds, the eyes looking almost human again as they quizzed him. Then it slumped sideways and backwards, thumping to the boards with a dead weight.

As she recovered from the shock of Tom’s pistol going off so close, Jackie saw him duck into the room, desperately grabbing at something. Her ears rang with the shot but she heard when he shouted her for help. She crossed the room quickly, and stepped into the doorway. The sight that confronted her was a confused mess of blood, flesh and the smell of gunpowder.  Tom was pulling at Eddie’s leg, dragging the corpse of their friend back through the doorway. Slumped over on its side was the body of a young woman, still dressed in beachwear with a halo of red softly spreading out around her head. There was a wound on Eddie’s shoulder that looked like it had been gnawed by an animal. Jackie pulled herself together and dropped to help Tom pull their friend back into the hut. Once the body was inside, she slammed the back door closed and leaned against it, putting a shaking hand to her head as she looked over at Tom.
 

         “How did he get out there!?” Jackie’s voice cracked as she spoke “Tom, how did he get out there!? You said he was-“

         “I don’t know Jackie!” Tom interrupted his eyes wide and glistening in the gloom.  “Maybe…maybe he wasn’t dead. I…I don’t know!”

         Jackie’s voice was low as her eyes searched his “Wasn’t dead? Didn’t you check Tom? I mean…considering what’s going on…didn’t you check!?”

        Tom sat on the floor beside Eddie’s corpse. He looked around the room, grasping for some kind of explanation. Eddie wasn’t breathing when he left the hut, he was sure of it. After the incident outside, he wasn’t sure; he should have checked for a pulse, should have made sure. His eyes moved to look at Jackie; she was stood leaning against the back door, her face pale but composed as she looked down at the chewed corpse of their friend.

         “Jackie, why don’t you get some sleep? We’ll have to move on tomorrow after this”

         She turned her blue eyes to him and frowned. He looked tired too.

* * *

         Jackie sat and stared at the computer screen in front of her. It was hard for her to concentrate because Nathan had taken Cody to the doctors and she was worried about her boy.  Cody had been born the year before and had been a sickly child since birth. He'd been three months premature and very small when he was born. Jackie and Nathan had tried not to be too precious with him but it was hard. They always wanted the best for him but he was very delicate and so a trip to the doctors was always a fresh worry for her.

Now she couldn't concentrate on work and kept wanting to text Nathan every five minutes. At the other end of the office, there was some commotion around Sylvia's pc; the guys were looking at footage of last nights riots in south central LA.

Jackie reached for her mobile phone once again, checked for messages once again; nothing. She knew Nathan wouldn’t text unless there was something she needed to know so she’d have to be content with the idea that ‘no news is good news’

She became aware in that moment of a sucking noise beside her desk. A frown touched her face and she had a momentary thought it didn’t happen this way before her eyes snapped wide open.

* * *

         The first thing she was aware of was staring at the grubby slats of wood that served as a roof for the shack. The second thing was the overwhelming iron tang of blood. Her first instinct was to jump up and get her bearings but then she heard the sucking and chewing and just turned her head slowly, muscles tight and skin tingling with fear.

She saw the figure hunched over Thomas and had to fight the scream back down her throat even as a tear rolled down her cheek. It was Eddie. Eddie was kneeling besides Tom and eating him; feeding on him. Jackie thought about moving; she thought about moving fast for the door but she wasn’t sure that her legs would carry her, wasn’t even sure she could stand. The fear slid along her spine, dragging a bone finger behind the bead of sweat that rolled along her skin.
 

         She lay there and stared at the wooden ceiling for what felt like eternity, listening to the sickening mulching as Eddie continued to gorge himself. The tears rolled silently down her face as she thought about every horrible moment of the nightmare that had befallen her. Jackie thought about her husband and young son, lost out there somewhere. Had they even survived? She had to hope they had, had to believe that they were alive. Then she had her answer; she had to survive, for them. She had to get out of here and try to find them. She’d spent the last week in a kind of daze, following Tom and just getting through each day. Now Tom was dead and Eddie was dead and the only reasons she had to live were missing somewhere in the city.

         She lowered her hands to her side, intending to slowly roll away while the creature that had been Eddie was occupied. Her hand touched the cold metal of the gun barrel and her plan changed. Painfully slowly, she lifted the gun onto her stomach and looked down her body at it, careful not to move too much. She felt for the safety with her fingers and gingerly flicked it to the off position, wincing at the click as she did so. She wiped the sweat off her hands onto her flannel shirt and gripped the gun tightly, finger curling around the trigger. Jackie took a deep, silent breath and moved.  Turning her head slowly, she kept her eyes locked onto Eddie as he pushed his head deeper into Tom’s stomach cavity. The creature was completely unaware of her presence, engrossed as it was in the grisly meal. She raised herself up slowly, the muscles in her stomach and lower back tight and sore through nerves and effort. With slow and quiet deliberation, she pointed the gun at the side of the creatures head and fired.

     
          The shot rang out around the small wooden shack and all but deafened Jackie. She flinched away from the muzzle flash and as she turned her head back around, ears ringing, she saw that she had hit her mark. Eddie was slumped over the still form of Tom, a small hole in the side of his head that she could see but the wooden wall behind him was coated in thick red globs of matter. Jackie relaxed and let her body slump in relief. She dropped the pistol onto the floor and wrung her hands on her shirt as she looked around the shack. She needed to gather her things and get out of there before more of those things, or even worse, other survivors arrived, attracted by the gun shot.

         Jackie spent the next half an hour going through the meagre supplies they had with them. She packed as much as she could into a rucksack, taking care to pack the water and the little dry food they had. She searched desperately around their supplies for more ammunition for the pistols but could find none. The gun Tom had used earlier had no bullets left in the magazine and the one she had used only had two rounds left.  While sorting out the supplies, she had been arguing with herself about what to do with the corpses of Tom and Eddie. She didn’t want to just leave them here at the mercy of those monsters outside but didn’t want to risk attracting other survivors with smoke from a fire. She had finally decided to set the shack ablaze somehow when she left in the hope that by the time it was spotted, she’d be long gone.

         Jackie was zipping shut the rucksack when she heard the shuffling sound behind her. She stiffened and stared straight ahead, her kneeling form tightening as her eyes grew wide. She stood and turned slowly, raising the pistol shakily as she did so. What she saw before her almost made her world drop away and for a split second, she felt the shack grow hazy as unconsciousness threatened to take her.  Tom had risen and was stalking across the shack towards her; his soft, confused gait belying the animal hunger in his dead eyes. As she stood and turned, he raised a hand, reaching out as if pleading to her for help and uttered a low pathetic moan. His chest and stomach were red and torn, his insides exposed and slewing away towards the floor as he moved. At one point his foot stepped onto his large intestine as it trailed along the floor and Jackie nearly cried out in horror.

         It was all she could do to keep herself conscious and Jackie had to dig her nails into her palm to bring herself back into focus, the pain and fear sending a surge of adrenaline through her body. She watched in disbelief as the man she had called friend, the man she had trusted with her life shambled across the shack towards her. She found her voice but her words were ineffectual and pointless.

         “Tom….god….no. No, no, no!” She shook her head as she spoke and tears streaked her cheeks.

         Tom didn’t answer, he continued to advance on her and she backed away, almost tripping over the rucksack before thumping into the wooden wall behind her. Her limbs had seized up; faced with the ruined form of her friend, Jackie couldn't move. Her legs felt like lead and her arms like jelly as the creature that was Tom approached her.

          Jackie stood watching in silent horror, tears streamed down her face now and she barely held onto the pistol. She could smell him; a rank miasma filled with the coppery edge of blood and the more base smell of shit as Toms intestines snaked along the floor beneath him. Through her tears she saw his eyes, blurred and indistinct but one thing was clear; whatever this thing in front of her was, it was no longer Tom. For Jackie, the rest followed in a blur.  The creature approached her, its fingers brushing along the skin of her neck and the smell of it overpowering in the small shack. Jackie cried out loudly as those cold fingers brushed her flesh and she knew it had her. She closed her eyes and with a whispered prayer, she lifted the gun straight up and fired.

         The bullet entered beneath the creatures chin and sent a cascade of blood, skull and brain matter into the air behind it. Tom kept moving forward, the hand clenching at Jackie's throat with more purpose until it loosened and fell away, the finally dead corpse of Tom dragging it to the floorboards. Silence descended onto the shack once more.

Jackie slid down the wall, her muscles ached and her hand was stinging from the recoil of the gun. Once again she fought to listen past the ringing in her ears but all she could hear was the distant roar of the sea. She looked down at Tom, he was lying in a halo of blood which seeped and crawled its way across the floorboards, soaked up hungrily by the wood. She sat there for awhile in her silence and let her aching muscles rest.

         An hour passed before Jackie felt she could move. Already the light through the boarded up windows was fading, though Jackie didn't know what time it actually was. She stood, grabbing the rucksack and the pistol as she did so. Only one bullet left. If it comes to it thought Jackie I'll save this one for me. She shouldered the rucksack and turned towards the window for a water bottle. It was then she realised her mistake. The light through the windows wasn't fading because of the sun, it was fading because there were people, bodies, pushed up against the window.  Holding her breath, Jackie listened and could hear soft scraping against the outside of the shack. The creatures had surrounded the building, drawn by either the gunfire or the powerful smell of blood and death around the place.

         Jackie felt the fear rise inside her again and she felt tears begin to well in her eyes. This time, she took a deep breath and steadied herself. She was determined she would not die, not here and not now. She would find her family and they would find a way to survive. Jackie looked around her quickly, spotting a sand shovel; she made a grab for it and hefted it like a weapon. She turned to face the door and ran toward it.

End.

Steven Kenny

04/04/2011.