By Tom Barlow

from The Book of Dead Things

After my husband, C.B., was left with no choice but to beat his dad to death with a shovel, we finally agreed the time had come to get our kids away from Storm Lake. C.B. pulled out his atlas of cities rumored to harbor enclaves of Cleans.

“The kids are going to freak out if we tell them we’re planning to leave,” he said.

“Then we don’t tell them,” I said. “We tell them we’re going on a vacation. We’ll visit famous historical sites near the places on your list.”

As he laughed, his front teeth wobbled. “Who in their right mind takes a vacation in the middle of a plague?”

“Watch your attitude. The kids pick up on our moods, so keep it light.”

“Honey, if I kept it as light as you, I’d float away.”

Our daughter, Brianna, whined when I told her we were leaving Storm Lake, but our son, Little Charley, couldn’t wait to start.

“She’s got a boyfriend,” he explained as he crawled into my lap to study the map spread out on the kitchen table. “Where are we going?” His chubby fingers wandered across the map.

I’d marked the nearest famous sites we could use to disguise the true intention of our trip. “First stop, Mark Twain’s hometown.” Hannibal, Missouri topped C.B.’s list, based on a rumor passed along by his cousin Tim. “Doesn’t that sound like fun?”

I heard Brianna snort from the couch.

By bedtime, we had the sleeper cab of C.B.’s Peterbilt semi packed, and we were ready to roll at first light.

1. Mark Twain’s Home

We got a late start the next morning, though. As we were finishing breakfast, Brianna announced she’d invited her best friend, Zara, to join us on vacation. Before we could “discuss” it, Zara showed up at the door with her suitcase in hand.

“This is, like, so nice of you!” she said, hugging me and handing me a permission slip from her older sister.

C.B. and I almost swallowed our tongues to keep from shouting, but eventually decided that Zara’s presence might soften the bitterness that had begun to color our daughter’s personality. Besides, Zara had been vaccinated at the same time our kids were.

Hannibal was not all that far from our home in Iowa, but the decaying road system required numerous detours. We didn’t arrive until early evening.

Hannibal proved a disappointment in both respects. C.B. and I didn’t see any sign of human activity, much less a working enclave. And the Mississippi must have flooded that spring, because the downtown was still covered in shit-brown mud and smelled like a sewer.

We pretended to have sufficient enthusiasm for Twain to slog through the muck to the museum. But when Zara said, “I’m sorry, Mr. and Mrs. Bascomb, but I don’t think I can walk through that without throwing up,” we were relieved for the excuse to gracefully give up on the idea.

2. Central Park

It took us the best part of three days to pick our way from Missouri to New York City. On the bright side, there were thousands of abandoned trucks along the road, so we had no problem finding diesel fuel.

The NYC rumor had sounded crazier than most—an enclave set up in the subway tunnels? But we figured if there was anything left of the country, it would probably involve the Big Apple. We told the kids we wanted to show them Central Park.

We parked on the Jersey side, rather than risk the fragile bridges into the city. We had a great view of Manhattan’s rubble. Brianna and Zara didn’t believe me when I explained to them that, since the plague was supposed to have originated in a bio-lab there, the rest of the world had taken turns bombing the ‘zero vector.’ Not that it did any good.

We found an old ferryman to row us across the Hudson in return for four cans of beans and a deer that had run in front of the truck as we entered the outskirts of town. He set us on shore at Pier 83 by the old Javits Convention Center. From there we cut east across the island. When we reached Broadway, we found a steady stream of people lurching north toward the park.

“Why Central Park?” Charley asked.

I explained that his granddad had brought me to New York for the first time when I was about fifteen, twenty-five years before, back when the world still functioned. We’d taken a buggy ride through the park, and I still remembered it as the most magical moment of my life; lush greenery, towering buildings in the background, and a greater variety of people at a glance than I had seen in my entire Iowa childhood.

We took a break at 49th Street by the Rockefeller Center in the heart of the barbecue district. C.B. swapped a quart of clover honey for some country ham. It didn’t taste like the pig back home. C.B. speculated it might be Puerto Rican.

I saw Zara wince as she bit into a bit of bone. She turned her head from me, but not far enough, and I could see her pull a loose tooth from her lower jaw and flick it into a pile of trash.

As we rested, C.B. wandered the square, offering cigarettes in return for answers to his questions about the rumors.

“Nobody knows nothing about an enclave,” he reported when he returned. “They say the subways are still full of poison gas from back when the army first tried to contain the plague. But a couple of them claim that there is still a shadow government in D.C.”

Disappointed, we led the family over to Central Park as he and I talked about what we would do next.

“This is it?” Brianna said, stopping and putting her hands on her hips. “This is, like, your great Central Park?”

The park had been stripped bare, nothing remaining but stumps. Old, plastic, crowd-control fencing haphazardly divided the ground into compounds, each one holding its own herd of goats and guarded by men with staffs, swords, or shotguns in their laps.

“I can just feel the pride flowing through me,” Little Charley said. I’d told them that this trip would prove to them that America was too great a place to stay down for long, and he was throwing it back in my face.

We found another ferry at the 79th Street basin and made it back to our truck just before dark.

3. Lincoln’s Monument

As we crossed the Potomac into Washington, we could see blackened rubble where the Pentagon had stood. C.B. parked the truck in the middle of 17th Avenue, next to the tip of the Washington Monument.

Zara had been acting increasingly eccentric since New York. During a potty stop in Delaware, she’d wandered off toward a gang of ex-soldiers standing around a bonfire on the overpass. C.B. had to wrestle her back.

“I’m worried about her,” Brianna had said later, after Zara fell asleep.

“You think the bug has her?” I said, trying to keep my voice calm.

“I never told you, but she caught her dad and mom eating her older brother a couple of weeks ago.”

“And now you think she has it?” I was suddenly furious. “How could you have put you and your brother at such risk? You know the vaccine doesn’t always work. Different people, different bloodlines. You and your brother are blessed.”

She stuck out her lower lip. “I figured, since you and Dad have stayed OK for so long since you died, she would be, too.”

“You damned fool.” I walked away to keep from slapping her.

After the kids fell asleep, C.B. and I made our plans.

As soon as we reached the mall, I dragged Brianna and Charley toward the Lincoln Memorial while C.B. asked Zara to help him locate his grandfather’s name on the WWII memorial. Once out of our sight, he was to zip-tie her to a flagpole.

The children were unaware Zara was gone until she started to scream from the other side of the monument. Her voice was quickly drowned by a crowd of late-stage Japanese tourists, who joined in her screams like a pack of howling wolves.

C.B. came running back from behind the memorial, pursued by two women. Both seemed to have lost toes, though, and couldn’t move fast. They gave up quickly, but the fact that C.B. was now far gone enough to draw their appetite tore at my heart. Terminal victims began to emit an odor that other end-stage zombies found irresistible.

I’d anticipated difficulty getting the kids to abandon Zara, but all they wanted to do was run back to the safety of the truck. Once inside, I handed them each a shotgun and we held them at ready until we cleared Washington. None of us said a word until we were beyond the outerbelt.

“You must feel terrible,” I finally said to Brianna, “losing a friend like that.”

She rested her head on my shoulder. “She’s not the first I lost. I’ve gotten pretty tough.”

I stroked her hair, drinking in the clean, healthy smell. “I’m sorry you need such a thick skin. I’m afraid loss is going to be a big part of your lives. You have to keep looking ahead, not behind.”

“All I see ahead is more of the same.”

“Then we need to find a place where the view is better.”

We spent the night at a deserted pull-off near Albany. C.B. wandered off to look through the abandoned trucks for supplies, while Little Charley and Brianna helped me open cans for dinner.

“I want to go home,” Brianna said. “If I’m going to die, I want to do it at home, not with a pack of strangers, like Zara.” She crossed her arms on the picnic table and rested her forehead on them.

“I don’t want to go,” Charley said as he popped one Vienna sausage after another in his mouth. It looked like he was eating a can of fingers.

“No more Little Miss Negativity,” I said. “Let me tell you something.”

“Here comes the Zombie Plague speech,” Little Charley said.

“Damn straight,” I said. “When the bubonic plague hit Europe in the 1300s, people thought it was the end of the world. One in three people died. Anyway, that’s the way evolution works; something comes along and wipes out the weak, but the ones that live through a disaster are stronger. Some of you are going to survive. There is still a reason to hope.”

Unfortunately, it was at that moment that C.B. returned holding an almost empty bottle of Cuervo Gold.

After I got him settled into bed, I gave the kids their weekly inspection. To my relief, the bruise on Little Charley’s shoulder was simply a bruise and healing fast. I didn’t find any other signs of disease.

I gave Brianna an extra careful look-see, since she’d spent so much time with Zara. Not only did she continue to show no symptoms, but she was showing definite signs of maturing into a young lady.

After the kids fell sleep, I stepped outside and gave myself the same exam by the fading light of our campfire. The open sores on my knee had definitely grown. The entire left side of my face was purple.

I found the rum bottle I’d taken off C.B. and took a long pull. My father had shown the same symptoms shortly before his mind went to pot.

4. Niagara Falls

We reached the enclave at Syracuse too late.

The warning signs were still up on the fence of their compound near the university. A double-row of FEMA trailers sat neatly in the parking lot of the stadium, surrounded by miles of razor wire. But the people were gone. C.B. laid on the Peterbilt’s horn, but no one, except one very fat German shepherd, showed his face.

Nearby Niagara Falls was the biggest disappointment of the trip, attraction-wise. We hadn’t known that it had been bombed, turning the cliffs into rock jumbles through which the water flowed like ants crawling through a picnic.

The stop wasn’t a total loss, though. We ran into another functioning family, from Alabama, traveling in a big motor home.

We eyeballed one another from opposite ends of the observation area for a long time until the husband, an extremely tall black man, sidled up to us. He kept one hand on the pistol strapped to his waist.

“You folks, uh…?”

“Still in our right minds?” I said.

He smiled sheepishly. “Hard question to ask, isn’t it?”

“Hard to answer, too.”

After we confirmed that we were all still sane, he invited us over to his rig for coffee.

He described his family’s trip up the Natchez Trace, through the Ohio Valley. They were headed to Montreal, hoping to find his brother, a hard-core survivalist, still alive.

“You ever run across any towns that looked like they still functioned?” I eventually asked.

He rubbed his jaw. “Functioned? You mean like, law and order, schools, medicine? No, we haven’t seen anything but destruction. Makes me sick. You?”

We described our experiences.

“I did hear one rumor,” he finally said. “Just a passing conversation, really, a while back, with some folks we bought food from in Ohio. We were talking about great fishing spots we used to visit, and somebody mentioned Lake Michigan. Then somebody else made a comment about Mackinac Island, that a bunch of Coast Guard families had hijacked a load of vaccine and quarantined themselves there, shooting anybody that came around that wasn’t healthy.”

He poured another round of coffee. “Supposedly, they have a school going and a radio station running off the solar panels on the roof of the Grand Hotel. That’s the first open school I’d heard of since the plague hit. I figured, since the vaccine was discovered nearby at Michigan State, maybe there was something to the rumor.”

“So why aren’t you headed that way?”

He pulled back the collar of his shirt, revealing a seeping sore.

C.B. and I talked that evening after the kids went to bed.

“I thought we were going to Mt. Rushmore next, look for that militia camp supposed to be outside Sturgis,” he said, sipping on the cold coffee he’d been nursing all day.

I stretched out on the picnic table bench. The air felt cooler there near the falls, laden with moisture. “There weren’t that many people in the Dakotas even before the plague,” I said. “I don’t know what we were thinking. What’s the chances we’d find a functioning town out there? I say we give Mackinac a try.”

He took off his ball cap, and I was shocked to see how much of his skull was exposed through his scalp. “I’m thinking we’d be better off heading home. I’m with Brianna; I’d just as soon die at home.”

“Personally, I can compost as easy here as anywhere else. But the kids, they have a chance. They’re healthier than anybody we’ve seen in fifteen states. We can’t give up now.”

He touched the crown of his head. “Truth is, I don’t think I’m going to last. I’ve been getting these cravings…”

I closed my eyes and tried to lose my thoughts in the sound of the ruined falls. It didn’t work.

Finally, I got up, went back to the truck. When I returned, I took a big swig before handing C.B. the pint bottle of Old Granddad my uncle Jim had given me before we left home.

He smiled as his fist squeezed the bottle. “You’re the best wife I could have ever hoped for, you know that?” He stood up, kissed me hard, then chugged the entire pint without stopping to breath.

When he passed out, I picked up the shotgun and blew his brains out.

I tossed him over the fence of the observation deck, praying there wasn’t a zombie stupid enough to risk the river below for a meal. I watched my husband until he disappeared in the gathering darkness, then spent another couple of hours watching the darkness. I put his wedding band on my thumb, glad to find it so tight I’d never be able to get it off.

I drove through the night. By dawn, we were circling Cleveland. As soon as Charley woke, he asked, “Where’s Dad?”

I swallowed the lump in my throat. “Your Dad got real sick,” I said. “He had to stay behind.”

There was silence in the cab, then some sniffling. The plague had destroyed curiosity. I tried to think of something light to say, to ease their minds, but my mind had gone cold as a glacier. That glibness I’d been so proud of was now just a sour taste in my mouth.

5. Mackinac Island

Brianna and Charley didn’t say anything for hours as we crossed Ohio and turned north into Michigan. When Brianna turned on the DVD, I remembered that our visitors in Niagara had mentioned a radio. I had her scan the AM band, finding nothing, but at 107 FM we found a weak signal.

The transmission was obviously on an automatic repeat. “This is Alpha Nation North. If you are picking up this transmission, be warned that the territory north of Gaylord, Michigan, including the Upper Peninsula east of Copper City, is quarantined. Anyone with Holt’s disease attempting to enter this area will be shot on sight. This is the only warning you will receive.”

As ominous as the words were, I felt a glimmer of the hope I’d not dared acknowledge in a long, long time.

“What do they mean by Holt’s disease?” Brianna said.

“Zombie Plague,” Charley said, who loved to show off his smarts. “The lead scientist on the project was named Holt. He was trying to find a drug that would put wounded soldiers into a stable coma until they could receive treatment. That’s why people look like they’re dead in the first phase of the disease. He also created the vaccine. Which worked for about one in twenty of us.”

“Lucky us,” Brianna said, her voice heavy with irony.

We ran into a checkpoint north of Gaylord. The approach to the barricade was lined on both sides of the road, for over a mile, with abandoned vehicles.

I didn’t even have the chance to offer the bribe I’d prepared: a basket full of canned food, alcohol, and an almost-full bottle of my Mom’s Oxycontin. The figures in the HAZMAT suits took one look at me and indicated, by waving their rifle barrels, that I was to turn around and leave. When I popped my door open, three guns were shoved in my face.

I swung the Peterbilt around and drove east, looking for another way north. Before we hit the next checkpoint, on North Rt. 23, I put on a stocking cap and makeup.

It did no good. As soon as they spotted our truck approaching, the guards pulled a deuce-and-a-half across the road between two grenade launchers and waved for me to retreat.

We ended up parking in Alpena, on the shore of Lake Huron, that night. Little Charley, having slept late, was now wide wake, so we sat watching stars appear in the gathering darkness, like sugar thrown into a fire. I found myself wanting a cigarette, although I’d quit twenty years before. I also had a hankering for something to eat, but I couldn’t quite figure out what.

“Why are we really here?” Charley asked.

Without C.B., I didn’t have the heart to continue the charade.

“You and your sister don’t belong in Storm Lake. In six months, there won’t be anybody else left alive. You probably figured that out already, right?”

“Even you?” he said, staring at the ground.

“Even me, Charley.”

“Then I’m going to die, too.”

“You know better, kid. You and your sister are among the few that benefited from the vaccine. There are a few survivors of every disaster.”

“Then where are all the dinosaurs?”

Sometimes I hated that he was so smart.

I woke early the next morning and walked the docks, finally coming back to an eighteen-foot fishing boat with an Evinrude outboard that had avoided extensive damage.

The battery was dead, but the engine was equipped with a backup rope-pull starter. I filled the tank from gas cans and changed the plugs. It fired right up.

The kids peppered me with questions about what we were doing as I loaded the boat.

“Trust us,” Brianna said. “We’re not kids any more.”

I explained about Mackinac Island.

“And you think there are others like us there? Other kids? Adults?” Brianna said.

I nodded. “I don’t know. But I hope. That checkpoint is the first sign of a civilization we’ve seen in a thousand miles or more.”

Little Charley smiled for the first time in weeks.

“Sounds wonderful,” Brianna said. “I can’t take any more dead people.”

I gathered up all the full gas cans I could find, a box of the canned food from the truck, our sleeping bags, C.B.’s portable GPS unit, his lighter, and the lucky bear charm he wore hunting. We shoved off at dusk.

We put a mile buffer between us and the coastline, out of sight of shore guards, before turning north. Charlie and Brianna fell asleep after a couple of hours. The slap of water against the bow brought back memories of fishing on Storm Lake with C.B. I’d lost my virginity on the deck of his father’s bass boat while watching the Fourth of July fireworks from a quiet inlet.

Just before dawn, I turned back toward land and pulled us into the mouth of a shallow, sandy river south of Rogers City. The beach was swarming with black flies, but we found a vacant fishing cabin nearby.

The cabin smelled of fish and dirty socks, but the screens kept out the bugs. The kids found some board games and played them while I slept.

I woke up to the smell, the incredibly mouth-watering smell, of bacon frying.

“Canned bacon,” Brianna said when she saw my eyes open. “Who’d of thought?”

We made poor progress that night, as the wind shifted into our face. Every time I checked the GPS, we’d been blown off course and had to recover. Around five a.m., as we worked our way around Nine Mile Point, Little Charley said he could hear another engine. I killed ours immediately and knelt in the bottom of the boat.

I could hear it too—low, throaty—an inboard motor between us and the shore. Luckily, fog and cloud cover diminished the moonlight.

A spotlight arced toward us from a spot high enough above the waterline to tell me the boat was the size of a Coast Guard cutter. To our relief, the light stopped short of our boat. In five minutes, it was barely visible, and the sound of the engine gone with the wind.

We floated silently for half an hour anyway, sharing a can of cold beets and some pudding, before we resumed our journey. By dawn, we had reached the southern tip of Bois Blanc Island, only a few hours south of Mackinac Island.

We landed at a sailing club that had burned to the ground. We found a tent in one of the half-sunken boats and pitched camp behind the old sail house.

After we woke, I made the kids promise not to peek while I crept down to the small beach, stripped naked, and walked out into the icy waters of the lake, hoping the cold would quench my new appetite. Through the crystal-clear water I could see my foot, now more green than pink. A large flap of skin floated free of it in the current, like the tailfin of a fish. The bruising on my side now extended unbroken from my hairline to my knee. I ached— God, I ached.

We waited until dark and set off again. I kept my hand on the engine housing. The heat felt good as the temperature dropped.

An hour later, we got our first glimpse of Mackinac. A fire burned on the hill at the center of the island. As we entered the Straits of Mackinac, more lights came into view, many obviously electric.

Little Charley and Brianna leaned forward, drinking in the first signs of normalcy they’d seen in months. I had just pulled life jackets from the bait locker when a spotlight hit us like a firecracker. A cutter had approached from downwind with lights off, and, with our eyes fixed on the island, had been able to creep so close I almost jumped out of the boat in surprise when the voice came over their loudspeaker.

“Ahoy the boat,” it said. “Cut your engine.”

I killed the motor and stood unsteadily in the boat, rocking in the wake of the cutter.

“You’re trespassing.” The speaker sounded like he’d said the same thing a million times.

I cupped my hands and shouted, “My children. They’re clean. They had vaccine. They want to join you.”

“They?” Brianna said, pulling on my sleeve. “You mean, we.”

There was a pause as the cutter floated closer, until we were only thirty feet apart. The light was still full on us, blinding me.

“All of you strip,” the voice said, “and turn around.”

“What?” Brianna said.

I pulled Little Charley to his feet and began pulling off his clothes. “Strip,” I told Brianna. “They want to see that you’re clean.”

She sat on the bow and reluctantly unbuttoned her jacket.

As soon as Charley was naked, holding his hands over his pecker and blushing bright red, I turned him toward the light. I pried his arms up so they could see the undersides, then turned him around like I was showing off a prize pig. His skin was fish-belly white and as unmarred as a baby’s.

“And the girl, and you,” the voice said.

Brianna stepped out of her pants. Chewing her bottom lip, refusing to make eye contact with me, she unhooked her bra and shrugged it off, and wriggled out of her panties. She faced the spotlight as though it was an execution squad.

With her back to me, I saw, in the small of her back, a dark bruise the size of a grapefruit that had never been there before. Jagged on the edges, as though reaching out for more skin.

The temperature dropped suddenly. I put my arm around her shoulder. “You have to take my children,” I yelled to the light. “They’re here to help you rebuild the world.”

“Why do you keep saying they?” Brianna said.

“Turn her around. And you strip, too,” the voice said to me.

“No need for me to strip,” I said. “I’ve had it. I’m not going to try to fool you. It was these two got the vaccine.”

“Doesn’t matter. We don’t need more people. And we won’t separate kids and their parents under any circumstances.”

“But they have no home,” I said. “Nobody has a home anymore.”

“Too bad,” the voice said. “But we have no choice. The only way the plague is going to die is if the carriers die. Only survivors are welcome here.”

Brianna grabbed my arm. “You’re a survivor, Mom. Don’t leave us here.”

Little Charley stood trembling, seemingly unable to move. I picked up a life jacket and strapped it on him.

“Your children aren’t welcome here,” the voice said when he saw what I was doing. “Take your family home, lady. Love them.”

Something snapped in my head.

“Love my family?” I screamed. “Why else do you think I’m here?” Flushed with adrenaline, I picked up Little Charley. Like a mother picking up a car that has fallen on her child, terror gave me strength I’d never felt before, and I heaved my son as easily as a sack of flour. Before he hit the cold water, I could see the anguish on his face.

I could hear people scrambling on the deck of the cutter. “He’s your son, for Christ’s sake,” the voice said. “Pull him back in before he freezes.” I could see the sailors dropping a skiff into the water.

Instead of following the voice’s orders, I tugged the rope of the Evinrude. It barked into life. I immediately twisted the throttle and we slowly pulled away.

“What are we doing, Mom?” Brianna said, tugging at the life jacket I was standing on. “What about me?”

“I’m doing what I have to do.”

The skiff began moving in our direction. As soon as we were sufficiently clear of Charley, bobbing in the water, I let go of the throttle long enough to take C.B.’s knife and cut the anchor rope free from the boat.

Two sailors hauled Charley out of the water as I quickly wrapped the loose end of the anchor rope around my waist, then, hugging Brianna, took several turns around the both of us. My hand found the bruise in her back. The skin over it was loose.

The coast guard skiff started moving again, towards us.

“This is the only way I know of to show you how much I love the both of you,” I whispered to Brianna. I felt her trembling in my arms.

As soon as the skiff came close enough that I could see my son’s face, his teeth chattering, I blew a kiss to him and tossed the anchor into the water.

Brianna and I watched the rope uncoil until it pulled us over the side.