Trigger Kisses
George Lacroix

 

I stare at the infinite gray cement and pretend I’m an angel. Sixteen hours in the basement of a man that’s been dead longer than I care to remember, the echoes of every ghost floating above me like a symphony in this mad new world. My spit tastes as stale as rust and soon enough my mouth will fill with the smoky taste of a fresh hot bullet. Cold metal in my fist like it’s a part of my flesh, I take a few deep breaths and remember what she smelled like, the salty wisps of lavender and a smile that could knock out a cowboy.
Her name was Mandy and she was my wife. We were sleeping when it all first happened and now I imagine her soul is trapped in whichever dream was dancing in her mind at the time, the lush purple sky of an imaginary autumn afternoon. I sigh, bits of dust and blood spinning from my lungs like wet strands of red tissue paper. At any moment the moon will rise, a new day dawning over a dying world.
I stand up, feel the tired muscles in my legs twist and whine. We fled from them as fast as we could, the hordes of the dead pacing just us as we left what was our home for the last ten years. The depths of my nightmares came to life last night and I’m afraid if I look into a mirror the whites of my eyes will be a mix of red and black.
I silently count to fifty and close my eyes, hope that when I open them I’ll wake up next to Mandy. Maybe wake up with the bright sun shining, pale October clouds floating through a helpless sky. I open my eyes and the stench is the first thing to wake my mind from a momentary trance. They’re getting closer to me. I pick up the gun, hold it to the side of my head. Yesterday morning I couldn’t have dreamt of something like this happening, couldn’t dream of a day where everyone I knew would be ripped to shreds. I can still hear the screaming, the bloodletting of a million souls trapped in Hell.
Yesterday was my last day on earth. Yesterday was the last time I’d see Mandy’s gunmetal blue eyes twinkle with hope. Yesterday was the day God had an aneurysm. Yesterday God had a heart attack.
Yesterday seems like a thousand years ago.
#
It started with a flash in the sky, like a comet exploding into a million pieces of fiery silver glitter. The clock in our bedroom stopped at 4:14am. The crunching of metal filled the new morning air like a soundtrack from the apocalypse. It was only when I looked out the bedroom window that I saw the first plane fall from the sky like a bird hunted on a crisp fall day. It slammed into a house just around the block from ours, giant metal tube flattening the foundation like it was made of styrofoam. I gasped, felt the air draw from my lungs with one quick swoop. Blood rushed to my brain at the speed of a thousand blind horses. I stumbled backward until I could feel the soft linens of our bed, Mandy’s toes curled underneath.
“Honey? What is it?” Mandy’s voice hinted at the lingering depths of slumber still hidden in her eyes.
I couldn’t say a word, could only point out the bedroom window. Mandy slipped out of bed, oversized black t-shirt ending in the middle of her milky pale thighs. I could see it in her face, the dozens of explosions reflecting in the endless blue of her eyes. She drew a hand to her mouth, and then looked at me with the look of desperation. I grabbed her hand and mouthed the word “basement,” each of us running down both sets of stairs and slamming the door behind us. Deep breaths forced from our lungs, I shook my head and stared at the basement floor, hoping to find some sort of answer in the dank and dusty concrete just below our feet.
Mandy behind me, I peered out the tiny basement window. Carnage filled the streets and it took me a fill minute to realize that the haggard figures in the road were attacking my frightened neighbors. I watched as Doris, the kind elderly woman who often invited us over for coffee, pleaded with a rotting creature as it planted its hands on her shoulders. What happened next pulled tears from both Mandy’s and my eyes: the figure dug its hands into Doris’ face with absolute eyes, fingers hidden deep within her cheekbones as our neighbor shrieked with her final breaths of life. I had to look away as it brought the dripping flesh to its mouth and clamped its teeth together. Just as it leaned down to feed more, I could see another plane land from the sky and strike the ground with a cosmic burst of fire.
“Kal, Jesus, Kal…” Mandy couldn’t form a single full sentence and at this point I didn’t expect her to.
“Calm down for a second, baby, please.” I needed a few seconds to think. Just a few seconds to process the sights we both had just experienced. “Let’s just calm down…”
Part of me believed we were both dreaming. Part of me thought that we both died in our sleep and this was our purgatory. But a part of me knew we were doomed. I held Mandy in my arms for what felt like hours, maybe days. Before long I forced us from the ground and urged her to find warmer clothes in the dryer. What scared me the most was way she was quiet, the way she would look away me from me as if I were already dead.
I sifted through the laundry basket and found a pair of jeans and a black hooded sweatshirt. Mandy dressed herself in jeans and a bright red thermal shirt. I let the arms of the sweatshirt slide to my palms. Bringing them to my face, the smell of cheap detergent and flowers almost drew me away from the scene. It was only a matter of seconds before I could smell them.
The first of the horde banged on the basement door repeatedly, each sullen knock causing Mandy to twitch with fear. “Kal, what the hell is that?!”
“Stay there,” I said, brain ringing with lost memories and thoughts of any basement items that could be used as weapons. The next loud noise nearly tripped me, untied sneaker laces caught beneath my struggling feet. I grabbed a heavy shovel from the corner of the basement only a few seconds before the first one forced down the basement door, its scraggly legs falling down the stairs in rapid fashion.
“KAL!” Mandy’s eager shouts sent shivers between my lips. The first of the figures nearly grabbed hold of her before I let the shovel loose in a quick swing, its metal tip catching its decaying face. The only thing I noticed was that it didn’t bleed; the only liquid to fall from its new wound was black and oily. Mandy slid herself away from the corpse and grabbed hold of my sweatshirt, white-painted fingernails digging deep into the soft confines of my sides. More of them had fallen into the basement, each tumble strong enough to disable any normal human but not these rotting figures.
The odor of the undead was overpowering, each new body in the room forcing the bile from my insides to slither into my throat. I swallowed hard, stale taste of fear and defeat beginning to drip from the back of my tongue.
I counted four moving bodies in the room. The fifth one stood at the top of the basement staircase, as if in a departed trance. I expected the next explosion to be another plane fallen from the sky, but the spraying of bits of skull and gray matter told me that a bullet had found the head of the nearest figure to us.
“Move!” The voice boomed in the dead basement air. The next gunshots shattered the tension in only a few seconds, two of the three remaining figures falling to the ground in one undying lump. Mandy and I looked to the top of the staircase to see a man with short gray hair and the eyes of a hunter. He trotted down the stairs with reckless abandon, and before he reached the bottom of the staircase the stench closest to us turned to him. I buried the end of the shovel into the back of its skull, felt the hardened and rusted edges squishing into a heap of wormy brains. The corpse moaned an unearthly groan, whatever dying soul inhabiting its putrid form escaping with one final gasp. The body fell to the ground amidst its silent brethren, the foggy waves of gunpowder and rage sifting through the now quiet basement.
The man extended a meaty paw and smiled, two rows of perfect white teeth gleaming back at us. “Name’s Harper,” he said as I took his hand. “What do you think of all this?” He pointed in a circular motion and I couldn’t tell if he was talking about the corpses that just attacked us or the fact that the world seemed to be falling apart.
“Thanks,” was I all could muster. Mandy hid behind me like a schoolgirl afraid of thunder, chin barely touching the tip of my sweating shoulder. “What’s going on out there?”
Harper chuckled. “You haven’t been awake very long, have you?”
I curled my lips into an angry pout. “No.”
He shook his head and wiped his face with the back of his hand. He walked over the basement window, slid a finger against the dusty pane. “The world’s gone mad…that’s what’s happened.”
I nodded once, heart beating more slowly than before the horde attacked us. I gripped Mandy’s hand with mine and kissed her on the forehead. “You should sit down for a while.”
“No.” Harper turned to us, smile now faded from his face like he was a completely different man. “We can’t stay here. You guys are lucky it was this house I stopped at for supplies. You’d both be -”
“Dead.” I clenched my teeth so hard I could taste the blood rushing to my gums. “I get it.”
“Where are we going to go?” Mandy asked, leaning against the basement wall. It was hard not to see the beauty and hope in her face, long strands of blonde hair falling over her forehead like golden ice.
Harper pointed the gun in the air, one eye closed. “I live about twenty minutes from here. My basement is a lot sturdier than this. And I probably have enough food and water down there to last us a couple weeks.” The smile returned to his face.
“Can I pack anything?” Mandy inched forward, eyelashes hiding only the hints of terror in her mind. “There’s so much stuff I should bring…”
Harper nodded. “I’ll lead you guys upstairs. Be careful and stay behind me. Those fucking things are everywhere.” He placed his boot on the edge of the first stair. “And it’s not going to be easy as it was here to get rid of them.”
#
Harper stood at the edge of the bedroom doorway, back to us and fingers gripping his gun. I had only known him for about fifteen minutes and already he made me feel safe. Mandy and I quickly packed a single duffel bag with some t-shirts, jeans and toiletries. She picked up her watch from the dresser and the look on her face told me that if she could, she would have packed the entire house as to not leave any memories lingering behind.
“Let’s get moving, guys,” Harper said, ice cold stare planted on his face.
We followed him down the stairs and through the kitchen. He flipped his car keys out of his leather jacket and threw them at me. I caught them in mid-air and tilted my head. “Someone’s gotta drive…and someone’s gotta shoot,” he said.
We ran out of the house, red streaks on his black Camaro a sweet sign of immediate comfort. The only thing I noticed before hopping into the front seat of the car was the new odor gripping my nostrils. It wasn’t the smell of death, like it was in our basement. Syrupy dew stuck to the fog, a scent reminiscent of saffron. I took a moment to inhale before Harper screamed at me to get into the car.
Mandy slammed the backseat door at the same moment I fired up the ignition. The engine purred with delight, the sounds of a dying world buried beneath the moaning vehicle. We could see the lingering figures stumbling about the neighborhood, some running after the remaining living and others dragging their lifeless limbs behind them in some sort of death march. In the rearview mirror, Mandy’s eyes were glued to the sky above.
“The clouds,” she said, “they’re so beautiful.”
Harped stuck his head out of the open passenger side window and slowly brought it back in. “They’re…purple,” he whispered to himself.
I stopped the car in the middle of the road, the only walking corpse now hundreds of yards behind us. I shifted the car into park and looked out the window and up at the sky. Mandy was right; the clouds were beautiful. Fair streaks of black and green dressed each steel-colored cloud, bright blue of the morning sky replaced with an endless wash of green. It were almost as if a painter dipped the earth into a bucket of mixed paint and shook the globe until the colors ran and dripped down the sides.
“Kal, please get back in the car. We’re wasting time.” Harper did not look at me as he said the words, only stared straight ahead.
I took a final look at the sky and remembered that if anything, this was a nightmare in which I might never awake.
#
The day’s events never fully entered my mind until five minutes into our drive. The flesh-eating figure across the street, the explosions, the attack, even the goddamn sky…none of it had pierced the sticky viscera around my tired brain. It was only when we passed the wreckage of a plane did it all fully sink in. I slowed the car to only ten miles per hour, eyes glued to the mangled metal laid out in front of us. Limbs were scattered about, portions of plaid seat cushions and jumbled planks of steel resting as if they had been there for a lifetime.
The odd hum of the stars above us, I pushed down on the gas pedal just as fast as my heart could start beating again.
#
We pulled in front of Harper’s house and quickly followed him inside. I was surprised that there were no signs of struggle at this place, no signs of the rotting figures trying to break in. He slid the key into the door in a matter of seconds, the alluring smell of home the first thing that greeted us. Harper locked the door behind us, eye glued to the peephole. He sighed and closed his eyes. “I’m not taking my chances on the first floor,” he said. “The basement entrance is down the hall. You and Mandy head down there and wait for me. I need to grab a few things before we settle in.”
I nodded and gripped Mandy’s hand. We jogged to the basement door, pulled it open and flung the duffel bag. It struck the ground before I could flip on the light switch. Mandy hurried down the stairs and I followed her, breaths absent of grace and chest as tight as the ringing in my ears.
We sat on the dusty leather sofa below the lone basement window. Mandy rested her head on my shoulder and before long I could hear her breaths crawl to the pace of slumber. Even Harper’s slamming of the basement door couldn’t wake her. I stared at her cheeks, which were Christmas red. I imagined that she was dreaming about better days.
I left her on the couch and followed Harper to the corner of the basement. He handed me a gun and took a deep breath. “It’s about survival now. For the past few hours I’ve barely thought clearly, like maybe I was hallucinating all of this.”
I knew the feeling. “What are we going to do?”
Harper shook his head, peppered stubble curled into a frown. “I don’t know. I just don’t know.”
“How did all of this start?”
Harper sat on a barstool that could have been made before I was born. “I heard a few minutes of someone on the radio before all communication went dead. They saw the same things we saw: planes dropping like flies, explosions in the sky…and the rising dead.”
“Jesus.” I took a deep breath, tried to picture my life before this.
“This is it for us, humans,” Harper said. “These are the final days. The end of times.”
All I could do was nod, hints of weariness pinching at the back of my mind. I joined Mandy on the couch and in only a few minutes, I was dreaming of the same things as she.
#
I twinkled my nose, remembered the smell. A loud crash then Harper screaming. Gunshots fired and one of the light bulbs burst. The night bled dark into terror, and soon enough the stench was familiar. I jumped off the couch and grabbed Mandy, who shouted at the sight of at least four figures. I couldn’t believe that not one of us had heard them bust into the house, even bust down the basement door. The crept onto us like the shadows of the dead, the lost souls that reinvigorated every rotting corpse in every swollen graveyard.
The closest one to Harper easily overpowered him, grabbing his throat with one hand and piercing the aging flesh of his forehead with its sharp teeth. The bulbous mass that was Harper’s eyeball pulsated with a final twitch before ounces of crimson goop spilled from the socket. Another pounced on his falling body, mess of black greasy hair hiding the feeding. It raised its head, skeletal face wriggling with strands of fresh pink flesh.
I fired a shot at one of them, the bullet catching the figure in the head and sending it to the ground. Its fellow corpse immediately ran after me, bits of Harper’s face wriggling in its gaping mouth. Another gunshot and it slowed, stray bullet connecting with the figure’s shoulder. Mandy shouted from behind me and I turned to protect her, tried to drag her into the corner with me. Two more shots fired and one more went down, with the other two leering just a few inches from us, eager gray faces pure representations of Hell.
I didn’t expect to feel the first bite, or even feel the horrible sting of its claws upon my forearm. The gun fell from my hands and as I drooped over to shove the corpse away, Mandy’s scream reverberated in my bones, the faint traces of hope dissipating from her lungs like a million dead flies flapping away into the night. I turned to see her fall to the ground, flailing arms trying to swat away the figure’s angry attack. She was helpless from its aggression, crooked yellow teeth sinking into her flesh as if her skin were as soft as vanilla cake. My heart sunk in my chest and just as I freed myself from the corpse’s grasp, the shape lurched itself upon her again, tearing away the lining of flesh along her neck. I reached for the gun, felt its cool metal handle in my hands as I fired off a single shot into the figure’s head, explosion of bone and brain splattering against the concrete wall. I kicked my attacker in the chest, sending it to the ground with a lengthy groan. One bullet was all I needed to end its hungry assail.
I dropped to Mandy’s side, watched the most striking woman in the world bleed out in my arms. Long, chunky bits of blood adorned her hair. Her breaths slowed to a crawl and before I could utter the three words she needed to hear, the life drifted from her eyes like a ghost floating to the sky.
#
I sit here with the gun in my hand and wonder if any more of them will creep down the staircase, the fervent hunger glowing in their jet black eyes. Blood sloshes through my veins with a slight chug and at any second my heart might give out. After Mandy passed, I turned on the radio hidden atop one of the many shelves in the basement. The crackling voice faded in and out, infinite array of static and black noise a deranged sonata in my weary mind.
The voice said something about the sun, something about an endless winter. It spoke of death and destruction, the demise of mankind. The voice soon dropped out and I was left with only my own thoughts and a thousand bittersweet memories.
I walk over what’s left of Harper’s body, hope that some living character somewhere will say a silent prayer for him and my dead wife. Resting my arms on the windowpane, I stare into the black of day and wonder if the sun is really gone. Even if I don’t pull the trigger on myself, even if those things don’t tear my flesh from the bone…there’s nothing worth living for.
I take a deep breath and slide down the concrete wall until I’m sitting on the ground. The gun to my head, I think of Mandy. I think of yesterday morning and the hours curled up in bed, warmth of her soul swimming through the bedsheets. Finger kisses the trigger and the gun doesn’t feel so heavy anymore.
I only hope that when the metal pierces my skull I’ll wake from the nightmare with her sleeping next to me, the gentle breeze of another day floating above our bodies like the spirits of the dead.

 

 

Copyright © 2011 George Lacroix
Published on the World Wide Web by "www.storymania.com"