Stained Pt. 2

Erin returned quickly enough that I figured she must have dog-trotted through the complex to the med quarters, where Sully slept.  The man in question looked remarkably well put-together for such an early visit, but then I realized that he would have been up before dawn.

“What is it?” He asked, all brisk business in his role as Councilman.   I squashed a memory of him as a gap-toothed, skinned-knee kid asking me if he could touch my gun.  He was Sulaiman to the people of the complex, not Sully.  Which is why I was always careful to keep that nickname to myself.

“I want to take a closer look at that zombie out there,” I said, and gave Erin a look that indicated she should offer up her rifle so Sully could take a closer look.  She did so, and so did he.

“Those marks aren’t natural,” he said, almost immediately.

“Nothing about zombies is natural,” I grinned, and he looked at me long enough to roll his eyes.

“I mean they’re not indicative of any disease I’ve studied, nor do they look like any sort of organism that might grow on decaying flesh.”

“So you’re saying I can catch it?”

He gave me an appalled look.  “Catch it?  No, I’m absolutely not saying that.  I’m saying we can shoot it in the head and you can study the remains in the field, should you so desire.”

“There are markings on the head,” I protested.  “I want to look at them first, maybe do some sketches, and then I’ll put it down, promise.”

“Absolutely not.  We’re not taking a chance like that for something as puerile as curiosity.”

I arched a brow at him and said, “Erin, will you give us a moment?”  Eyes wide, she nodded and carefully traced her steps back towards the stairs.

“Since when is curiosity puerile?” I hissed as soon as I was sure she was out of earshot.  “Your father would turn in his grave to hear you spout such anti-intellectual bullshit.”

Sully’s face flushed.  “I didn’t intend-”

“I don’t care what you did or didn’t intend.  I’m older and meaner than you, and I’m just as familiar with the risk of a live zombie, even one that’s obviously starving and half-frozen.  I won’t bring it inside the walls, but I want to take a closer look at it before I blow the back of it’s head off.  Which I will.  You know I will, Sully.”

Sully looked away.  He did indeed know I would.  Anyone who could put down their own newly-infected best friend wasn’t going to hesitate to put down a stranger’s corpse- not even an intriguing, mark-covered stranger.  He stared out at the zombie and sighed.

“The rest of the Council-”

“The rest of the Council is also younger and less mean than I am,” I countered.  “And they aren’t here.  I only asked for your input- your input, mind you, not your permission- because you’re better with disease than I am.  You confirmed that it’s not diseased, and that’s all I needed.  But then you had to tell me ‘no’ in front of a youngling.  And what did I always tell you about giving orders?”

“Not to give ones you know won’t be obeyed,” he said grudgingly.

“Right.  Now, I’ll forgive your momentary lapse of judgment because you’re young yet,” Sully snorted at this, as well he should: 55 was considered well-seasoned in this cruel new world of ours.  “But we need to call Erin back up here so you can publicly give me the permission that I don’t actually need.”

“You’re a pain in my ass, old-timer, you know that?” He muttered.  I smiled.

“Well maybe you’ll get lucky and it’ll bite me.”

Sully shuddered.  “Don’t say that.  Not even in jest.  If you turned so close-”

I placed a hand on his shoulder and gave it a squeeze.  “Sully, if it bites me, I’ll blow my own head off before any of the rest of you can blink.  I swear it on your father’s grave.”

Stained

I haven't had much time to write lately (more on that in a few days) but this evening I found myself with a spare hour, and feeling giddy with the possibility of it all.  I had a little story seed hit me in the head this afternoon, so I wrote it out, and started poking it with a stick to see what might come of it.

This is the beginning of it, with more percolating in my brain as I type (but I need to get to bed):

***

There aren’t many zombies left these days, but we keep patrol, regardless.  After all, it only takes one, and enough of us of us are old enough to remember what it was like during the First Panic to not want to take any chances, impassable walls or not.  Every day, every night, high summer or dead winter, five of us stand sentry, one on each wall, and we look out across the landscape for any signs of movement.  Sometimes we see something- and usually it’s a perfectly living nomad, sometimes a peddler, or even a caravan.  Very, very occasionally, it’s a zombie, usually moving pretty slowly by that point.  We let it get close, just to make sure it’s not leading anything else in (and, honestly, to make disposable a bit easier), and then we snipe it.  Usually two of us take the shot.  Some might call that a waste of bullets, but I say it pays to be sure.  Plus back when we only did one shot, we always knew exactly who killed it.  Which was fine until the day Pietor discovered he’d killed his long-missing sister.  What was left of her, anyway.  Yeah, we all know intellectually that zombies aren’t the people whose bodies they animate, but hearts don’t always care what brains know, and nightmares rarely consult the forebrain.

Anyway I was on the northeast wall, stomping my feet to ward off the cold and mentally encouraging dawn- and my replacement- to hurry up, when I caught sight of a flutter out on the horizon.  In a way the northeast wall is one of the easiest to patrol, because there’s nothing in that direction, just flat land as far as the eye can see.  To the northwest is similar, except there’s a lake to take into consideration.  West holds more lake, east  gets the rolling hills, and of course to the south is the forest.  In the early days we always had three people patrolling the south wall, because the forest likes to play tricks.

I squinted and leaned out over the parapet, not entirely certain it hadn’t been a low-flying bat.  The sky was lightening by that point, and whatever it was remained a black smudge against the blue ink of the horizon.  Not a swooping bat, then.  I hefted my rifle up to my shoulder so I could use the glass for a better view.

Human-shaped, whatever it was.  Time would tell if it was alive or not, but I was willing to bet it wasn’t: something about the gait said it was shuffling in a way that had nothing to do with being footsore.  Zombies slowed down when they were hungry, and they slowed down even more in the cold.  That’s why so many of us lived so far north these days; longer winters.  I’d heard rumors that the lands near the equator were damn near uninhabitable, because nothing ever cooled off, let alone froze over.  And nevermind what that kind of heat did to decaying flesh.  The mental image of soupy zombies, more liquid than solid, was guaranteed to turn my stomach every time.

I sighed deeply and settled in for a long wait.  At that speed whatever it was wouldn’t get close until after my watch was over, but if it really was a zombie, they’d need a second gun, anyway, so I might as well stay put.  And in the meantime, I checked on it periodically through the glass.

Before much longer Erin joined me on the wall, saying nothing but holding out a steaming mug.  I accepted the tea and jerked my chin out at the middle distance, where my “something” had resolved itself very definitely into a zombie.

“Got us some target practice,” I said.  “Something odd about it, tho’.  Can’t quite put my finger on it.”

Erin raised an eyebrow, then her rifle.

“Huh,” she said at last, and I could almost hear her squint.

“You see it too?” I asked.  She dropped the rifle.

“Yeah.  The skin looks… off.  Not like, rotting or peeling or any of the stuff you’d expect to see, just… weird.”

I nodded, satisfied that it wasn’t just me.  “Yeah.  Almost like it’s got markings.”

“Like tattoos?”  She peered through her glass again.  “Who would tattoo their face like that?”

“Maori,” I muttered.

“Who?”  Erin didn’t look away from the zombie, and I could tell she wasn’t that interested.  She was an adult, but young yet- only about sixteen.  She’d been born long after the First Panic, and her knowledge and experience had a lot more to do with survival in all it’s many forms than in cultures halfway around the world.  Still, I’d need to have a word with our teachers.

“We’ll talk about it later.  But it’s not just the face that’s tattooed, I don’t think.”

“Huh!  Well I’ll be damned.  I thought it was a patterned shirt.”

I looked through my own glass, trying to make sense of the dark and light patterns on the creature’s arms and torso.  Legs, too.  “Nope.  That’s what really convinced me it was dead: no one living would be walking around out there with so little clothing on.”

“You figure it’s close enough to put down yet?”  There was a touch of anxiousness in Erin’s voice.  This was her third patrol, and the first zombie we’d seen in over a year.

“Yeah, but I want to wait a little longer.  I want to figure out what’s going on with that skin.  Go fetch Sulaiman for me.”

That she didn’t argue with me showed how nervous she really was.  If she was older, or more experienced, she might have said something about plague, although it was rare for a zombie to be carrying one.  But she probably didn’t even realize that was a possibility.  Sulaiman, however, had trained under his doctor father, was on the council of five, and would have plenty to say about me letting an odd looking zombie get close to the walls.  I didn’t think it was diseased, tho’... but I did want another pair of experienced eyes on it.

A Candle Held By Steady Hand Goes Dancing in the Dark

I've mentioned before that I've repressed much of 1994, the year my father was diagnosed with- and died from- cancer.  This is just my brain's way of doing its best to protect me from the horror of that time, which just goes to show that Jerk Brain is definitely not part of my Real Brain, which is obviously a much more thoughtful and considerate entity.  Because when you've mostly repressed something, you can't really spend time dwelling on it, and if you don't really spend time dwelling on it, you're far less likely to slit your own wrists in a moment of poor judgement.  Of course, the flip side to that is that I also don't, generally speaking, remember the good times from that year, either- and yes, there were some; moments here and there of brave candlelight in a long dark night of fear and sorrow.

Yesterday I found out that my Great Aunt (sister to my father's mother) died.  I was at work when I heard, and work isn't really the time or place for processing such things, so I shoved it down and went along with my day, until I could get home and write in my journal.  And as I wrote in my journal about how I felt, and the impact Cordelia Ann Richmond Dew had on my life, memories suddenly bubbled up from the repressed darkness.

Until that moment, I hadn't realized that I thought of the summer of 1994 as The Terrible Summer- I mean, I didn't really think of it at all, so how could I have a Title for it?- but apparently I do.  And one of the things that happened during The Terrible Summer was that my brother and I, eight and thirteen, went to live with Aunt Dee and Uncle Gene while my dad was poked and prodded, poisoned and sliced open, and all those other things they do to try and save you when you're very very sick.  In the haze of recently-recovered adolescent-memories it seems as though we stayed with them The Whole Summer, but I know it wasn't- surely it wasn't more than a month, maybe even only three weeks.  Regardless, three or four weeks is a very long time for a child (even a very clever child who has had to do a lot of growing up over the previous few months) to be sent to live with a great-aunt with whom she's never been around except in the company of the rest of her boisterous family.

I was not very gracious about it.  I don't mean that I was a brat, or rebellious, or anything like that- I was too much the Goody-Two-Shoes for any sort of negative acting out- but I was very, very self-centered and selfish, and spent a great deal of time alone.  My memories are of swimming in their pool, discovering MTV on the television in their office (I have very vivid memories of watching the video for Black Hole Sun over and over again), and reading Renegades of Pern in the room that had been designated as mine.  I remember finding Dee's copy of How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way, and devouring it, and her providing me with reams of printer paper (remember when it was perforated?) to practice on, because she was an artist too and understood.  And I rememer her patiently showing me how to use the type writer so I could labor over my Very Epic SciFi Adventure Romance Story wherein a bunch of teenagers were abducted by aliens and dumped (naked, naturally) on an uncivilized planet to see if they'd survive (and breed, also naturally).  Definitely the main character was based on me (her name was Leia naturally) and the main love interest was 100% based on my three-years-older-than-me-crush.  And the other characters were also based on my best friends at the time and their crushes.  Just... thank goodness the Internet wasn't ubiquitous yet, that's all the commentary I have on that.

But back to the heart of the matter.

What I'm saying here with this long and rambling and typically self-centered bit of prose is that I spent a lot of time alone that month, doing and thinking about the things that suited me- and Dee gave me the space and support that I needed to do and think about those things.  She didn't hover, she wasn't trying to make me talk about shit I didn't want to talk about.  She was just... there for me.  And for my brother, who doesn't feature much in my self-absorbed memories of that time (beyond one moment of him dumping ketchup on his mashed potatoes, and her laughing).  And for my parents, who surely were having a much more hellish time than we were.  And for her sister, who was thereby freed to be with her son during said hellish time (something I now appreciate in a way that never would have occurred to me before I had my own son).  Dee was just... there, doing what needed to be done, and doing it without complaint while finding a way to smile and laugh and encourage you and give you what you actually needed rather than what society said you needed.  She was loving and accepting and smart and funny and loyal and wonderful, and I'm so grateful for what she did for me and for my family.  So grateful to have had her in my life at all.

I just hope she and her big sister picked a really excellent shade of crimson to slather the Hereafter with.