It’s like a scene straight out of a horror movie.
The entire room is stained with splatters of crusted and dried blood—from the creamy off-white carpet to the plaster ceilings. In the far corner of the room, just behind the king-sized bed, four rotted corpses lie in a pile. Their faces are unrecognizable—the soft and tender cartilage making up their features has long been eaten and decayed into nothing. Still, large chunks of hair and muscle are attached to the skeletal bodies.
I recognize the mother by her long brown hair. She lies on top of the other three corpses, protectively shielding them… but from what?
It’s then that I notice the fifth and final body. Based on size alone, I infer that it belongs to the father. Curiously, he is settled several feet from the rest of his family, slumped over a dusty cherry-wood desk.
For a moment, my breath has been taken away.
I’ve never seen a dead body before.
Back when I was a kid, I remember my Dad telling me about a funeral that he attended after his uncle passed away. Dad had mentioned that his uncle’s body had been displayed in an open casket for the funeral. Dad admitted that he had been uncomfortable for the entire service, because the makeup artists had fixed up his dead uncle’s face to make it look as though he was only sleeping.
I think I would have preferred it if these people looked like they were sleeping.
“Jesus,” Lavish whispers. “Do you think the R-Zombs got to them?”
“No.” I shake my head. “R-Zombs wouldn’t have left any flesh on the bones.”
“True. So, what do you think happened?”
I gaze over the scene again, and this time, a glint catches my eye. It’s then that I notice the shotgun on the floor besides the father’s body.
“He killed them,” I speak before I can stop myself. I look at Lavish helplessly. “Look at how they’re all piled up there. He probably backed them all into the corner of his room and executed them like… like dogs. And then he must have shot himself right afterwards.”
“Why would someone do that?” Lavish asks. “Aren’t you supposed to protect your family?”
An idea comes to me. “Maybe he was, Lavish,” I say. “Think about it, if the Ruthless were just beginning to emerge in the city over, what do you suppose any rational person would be thinking?”
Lavish shakes his head. “He probably thought this would be more merciful than being torn to shreds at the hands of an R-Zomb, huh?”
I nod soberly. “I think so.”
“God. I can’t look at this anymore.” Lavish begins to turn, but I grab his arm before he can leave.
“Ten more seconds, Lavish,” I say. I swallow down a lump forming in my throat.
“What?”
“Look, if we’re really going to do this, then we’re going to have to get used to seeing some pretty awful things,” I explain. “So, ten seconds. Feel whatever you need to feel. Because the next time we see something like this, we’re going to have to be stone-cold. You know?”
Lavish nods. He forces himself to turn back towards the corpses. “Yeah,” he says. “You’re right.”
I start the countdown in my head. Ten, nine, eight…
I take in the scene before me. I let the unpleasant mixture of disgust, fear, and anger battle it out in my chest.
Seven, six, five…
My eyes catch the pile of bodies. On the very bottom, I can just barely see a little arm sticking out—no doubt belonging to the boy. Strangely, this comforts me. If the boy is at the bottom of the pile, it means that he got the privilege of dying first. Maybe he didn’t even realize what was going on.
Four, three, two…
Still, it’s unfair. It’s unfair that humans have been forced to live like this because of the Ruthless. It’s unfair that a man should be torn between letting his family be killed—or killing them himself. It’s so unfair that it makes me want to cry.
One.
Like a switch in the back of my mind was just turned off, I suddenly feel nothing. It’s horrible that something like this happened, but we have to move on. I turn to Lavish.
“Ready?” I ask.
He steels his gaze. “Ready,” he replies.
Both of us know that there’s no turning back from this moment. The image of this tragedy will be burned into our minds until the day that we die.
But at least we still have each other until then.
Quieter than we were coming in, Lavish and I walk out of the farmhouse.
Lavish pulls out his tablet and maps out walking directions to the sewer entrance.
“To Artip?” Lavish asks.
“Lead the way,” I respond.
And with that, we’re off again. We leave the cruiser, the farmhouse, and the five dead bodies behind us as we make our way towards our next destination. The initial feelings of anxious excitement are all but extinguished now, replaced by the weight of reality. I think we’ve both realized: this isn’t going to be some fun adventure. It’s going to be hard, and painful, and it’s going to break us in every way imaginable.
But despite that, we plod on.
After a couple of minutes, we arrive at a dip in the plainlands, where the soft burbling of a stream can be heard. A large concrete cylinder sticks out of a man-made hill, and it spits out a slow trickle of murky water into the river.
Lavish irons out his lips. “God, I hope that’s just runoff.”
“Me, too.”
“Well, it should only be a ten-minute walk into the city from here. According to my analyses, the hourly thermal scan is set to start in about half-an-hour. You want to go in now, or wait for the scan to pass?”
“Let’s go now,” I say. “I feel like a sitting duck out in the open like this.”
Lavish nods. “I was thinking the same thing.”
He pulls out a flashlight from his bag and shines it into the sewer pipe. We both climb in, cringing as the running water sloshes around our boots.
Lavish leads the way. I follow after.
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