The Last Mailman: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Zombies

The Last Mailman: Neither Rain, Nor Sleet, Nor Zombies

Kevin J. Burke

Published by Permuted Press at Smashwords.

Copyright 2011 Kevin J. Burke.

www.PermutedPress.com

This book is dedicated to my brother, Jeff, known in some circles as Zombie Shakespeare. His cultivation of our mutual love for the undead directly resulted in this book.

PROLOGUE

I can never get used to the silence. Even my radio playing sounds a little strange when it’s the only noise. Whenever I’m asked what I miss most about the old world, that’s my answer. Noise. Everything now is too damn quiet. Therefore, it fills me with an odd delight when I hear the tires of my truck squeal as I hit the brakes. I pull over and park in front of the house, lean over, open the glove compartment and pull out a spiraled notebook.

Occasionally, a curious person will ask me why I conduct my business using a notebook with Disney’s High School Musical on the cover. They think it’s funny. Or cute. Well, for one thing, I’m not picky, I just need the paper, and I don’t particularly care what the picture on the front is. If I stop and think about it, though, I can come up with another reason.

It’s one of the things I think about when I have a rare moment to reflect on life—which isn’t often. Like maybe when I’m sitting in the truck getting ready, surveying the situation, I will suddenly pause a moment to wonder just what the hell I’m doing out here in the middle of nothing, putting my life on the line for the happiness of strangers. And happiness is not even accurate, really, because seldom do I bring my clients good news. I return home and, nine times out of ten, nineteen times out of twenty, it’s Yep, they’re all dead. Sorry. Anyway, my point about the notebook was that it is a reminder of better things. I will study the smiling faces of Troy and Gabriela and think about what things used to be like. This is what it’s all about, what we’re all working toward. There was a time when the world wasn’t full of nothing but death and silence. Troy and Gabriela on the cover of an old notebook remind me of that.

There’s an old woman in New York who calls me Angel. She said I’m doing the Lord’s work. I looked her square in the eye and said, I’m not doing the Lord’s work. I’m cleaning up His mess.

* * *

It’s bitterly cold on a day early in March, which generally means there shouldn’t be too much trouble. No guarantees, though. When you’re out in the wild and you’re all alone, you have to be prepared for anything. I rolled into town ten minutes ago and nothing moved, but it never means that something won’t move. There is always potential danger, always something that happens that makes me second guess myself for getting into this line of work. Back in the High School Musical days, I was not the kind of person who went out of his way to help people. Maybe a psychiatrist would tell me that I’m punishing myself or trying to redeem myself. I don’t know of any surviving psychiatrists so I can’t say for sure what they would tell me.

I flip my notebook to the last page with writing on it and confirm the Whitman address. I made it. Clichéd picket fence around the front yard, ranch-style, ugly mustard yellow exterior. No signs of forced entry. No signs of fortification either.

Mother, Judy, approximately 60 years old. Wife, Andrea, 28. Daughters, Molly and Regina, ages 6 and 4. I have a photo of the last three but not Mom. This guy had been a wreck that he didn’t have a picture of his mother on him, but what can you do? No one was thinking straight. It was the freaking apocalypse. There were two courses of action to take: stick together no matter what, or hide the weak and let the able-bodied get help. It must have been heart-wrenching for Mr. Whitman to leave behind every important female in his life, but he made it. He fucking made it to safety. It took him two and a half years, but he got help. (That’s me. I’m the help) Would he have made it if he had brought his family along with him? Honestly, probably not. Is the family he left behind dead anyway? Maybe. Probably. We’re about to find out. It just seems to me like there are no right answers, only wrong ones. Whitman was right to leave his family behind because it dramatically increased his own chances of survival, but at what cost? When I go back and tell him that his family didn’t make it, will he be able to live with that?

I slowly, very slowly, open the door of the truck and put one foot on the ground. The cold air hits me hard and almost takes my breath away, but it didn’t. My breath is still there because I can see it coming out of me, like when we were kids and used to pretend we were smoking. I tighten my gloves and zip up the turtleneck on my coat—not just for warmth, but also for protection. I am out of the truck now and close the door without making a sound. Nothing stirred up so far. Every situation is different, so even after all the times I’ve done this, I still can’t tell if this will be a good trip or a bad trip. Will it be my last? I hope not. I daresay it’s probably not, but I don’t want to get too cocky. Overconfidence kills.

I walk around to the bed of the truck and uncover the wire cage. The dog looks at me with pain in its eyes and shivers. Sorry it wasn’t the Hilton, boy, that’s what your fur coat is for. It’s a little terrier so it will yip like crazy and draw a lot of attention. I lift the cage out of the truck and open the door. The dog takes off like a bat out of hell, barking all the way. This is all good. Attention drawn on him is attention that is not focused on me.

Sure enough, three houses away, a one-armed, mostly decayed, wretched looking zombie lurches off the front porch. He is trying to chase the little dog, but his undead brain forgot about the steps and he falls on his face onto the concrete path. He is just lying there, letting out his little death moan. He’s pretty far gone as zombies go and does not seem to possess the ability to get up. Threat level? Um, can it be less than 1? I make the rules so, sure. Threat level: 0.1.

Now, could I have completed this mission without ever knowing that guy was there? Most definitely. Would I want to? No way. I treat zombies the same way I treat bugs. The thing that, uh, bugs, me about bugs (sorry) is that they just show up seemingly out of nowhere. That ant crawling across the counter I just noticed? Where was he before I saw him? It’s the same with zombies. I’d rather know there was one on the porch three houses away instead of emerging from the basement of my target’s house to see him standing there in front of me. Basically, I want to notice him before he notices me.

In the back of the truck I have a duffle bag full of things I might need and one thing I will definitely need. I pull out my gun, screw in the silencer, and glance around the area one last time. Porch zombie has thrashed himself onto the frozen lawn but shows no signs of getting up. No new movement has appeared from my vantage point. The dog is out of sight but I can hear his high-pitched bark somewhere in the distance. Nothing has caught him yet, which was unlikely, but still… Maybe he’ll come back. It’s always nice to be able to use a dog on more than one assignment. They’re getting harder and harder to come across as the world draws closer by the day to complete degradation.

Now comes the hard part. I push the gate open on the ridiculous picket fence and approach the Whitman house. The front door is locked, which believe it or not is sometimes enough. Zombies are most dangerous by their unrelenting numbers. If there are not enough present to bust down a door, then a lock should be enough. One zombie is not going to have the cognitive capacity to throw a shoulder into his obstacle or even give it a good kick. I venture to say you might be able to get away with just having the door closed and unlocked, but why chance it?

I don’t want to bust down this door myself if I can avoid it because, again, I want to stay subtle for as long as possible. I make my way around the side of the house to the backyard and I can now see that this is not going to end well. The forced entry had not come from the front of the house; it had been in the back. A glass patio door leading to a dining room that was completely filled with large furniture in a desperate attempt to hold back some hungry zombies had been pushed in and shattered, but it could only do so much for so long. The furniture had clearly been moved to form an awkward path into the house’s interior.

It’s not over yet. The girls could have escaped to a locked and fortified room—a basement or attic were good bets. The difficult thing about extractions where there is a forced entry is that I have no idea what to expect in there. During a routine extraction, the targets have either become zombies or they haven’t. In cases like this one, I’m dealing with targets that are either zombies or not, with the additional risk that the attacking zombies might still be in there. Just because they found a way in doesn’t mean they found their way back out again. Zombies are stupid, which can be dangerous.

It smells like death inside the house, which is a worthless clue to someone with my experience. Dead bodies, whether they are walking around or have been properly incapacitated, smell pretty much the same. That is, horrible. I tuck my mouth and nose under the turtleneck, which keeps the smell at bay only slightly. I’m really more concerned about an attack. I want to have as little exposed skin as possible. Zombie teeth that have gripped fabric in their rotten mouths are less likely to have gripped my flesh.

I make my way to the front of the house and hear a metallic clanging sound just outside. I draw back the dark curtains and see that porch zombie managed to get to his feet after all. He must have smelled the dog’s scent on the cage because he is really going after it. He knocked it out of the truck and is now kicking and chasing it, unable to simply bend down and pick it up. It would be funny if I wasn’t cursing myself. I said earlier that the zombies’ greatest advantage comes from their sheer numbers. That’s not entirely true. Their greatest advantage comes from their living enemies continually underestimating them. If we hadn’t done that, then they wouldn’t even have the numbers advantage in the first place.

And as I am thinking about how much even I underestimate zombies, I am knocked to the floor by one. Really should have seen that coming. I’m getting sloppy.

Hi, Judy! How are you? My name’s Jeremy, I say, as I scramble back up to my feet. I try to keep my distance and back away with care, talking in a gentle voice. It’s a technique that works on wild animals, but has been proven repeatedly to be ineffective against zombies. I don’t know why I do it. I guess the calm voice and careful movements are done more for myself, telling myself to stay calm in the face of danger.

Judy is still coming at me as I back my way into the dining room where all the furniture is piled up. I grab a table leg I see at waist length and disconnect it with a snap. When I throw it, it knocks Judy back a step but she doesn’t stop. This momentary distraction does give me enough time to draw my gun, however. But before I can fire, I feel something tugging at my leg. I look down to see one of the zombie kids has been lurking on the floor and now has a hold of me. Her mouth is dangerously close, which freaks me out, of course, and I instinctively pull away. This reaction causes me to trip over the table legs that are closer to the floor and I stumble and fall into the pile of furniture.

I am lost in a sea of chairs and who knows what else, scrambling to get into a more ready position but failing. Judy, in her unrelenting quest to get a piece of me, has also stumbled into the furniture and would be directly on top of me if not for a bar stool. The table top is directly to my right and when I look over, I can see the little girl’s dead fingers gripped around the end. Then she pulls her upper body forward so I can see her less than a foot from the top of my head.

Zombies don’t need to breathe, but somehow they still have awful breath. Both of my current opponents are close enough for me to smell their disgusting, diseased mouths. They’re close, but if I want to live, I can’t let them get any closer. I still have my gun ready to go. The problem is that I can’t maneuver my arm and the gun through the maze of wood to aim properly. Time is short. The kid is almost around the table and is pawing at my bald head. I push as hard as I can in order to squeeze my right forearm between the stool and my torso. Then I push even harder with my whole body to sit up and roll Judy and the stool into the table top.

This situation is all my own doing and I am cursing myself even as I stand up and recover from it. It’s over in the next five seconds. I am standing, freed from the furniture mess. Two headshots and the zombies are dispatched before they could ever figure out where I went. I’m done messing around. I walk with a purpose, stalking around the house until I find Andrea and Molly and take them out without incident. I also find what I presume is the zombie that broke into the house beaten to (final) death on the kitchen floor. He’s wearing a post office uniform.

Still pissed, I storm out the front door of the house and yell, Hey! Porch zombie looks up from the dog cage just in time for me to shoot him between the eyes. I am done blowing these things off. All zombies are threats no matter how stupid or decayed they are. I watch him collapse to the street and give him a few cathartic kicks with my boot.

Back inside, I piece together what happened. It doesn’t take a forensic scientist to figure it out, just some observation skills. The mailman busted into the house and got one of the kids. Almost bit her leg clean off from the looks of it. The survivors beat down the invader in the kitchen until he stopped moving. Kid’s crying and in a lot of pain so Grandma comforts her. Kid dies and bites Grandma. Mom and the other kid freak out and hide in the bedroom. Eventually, Mom loses all hope and takes the life of herself and her last child, presumably to avoid becoming zombies, but of course, that didn’t work.

I’ve seen this sort of thing before. Two common mistakes were made. First, statistically, you are much more likely to sustain a zombie bite from someone you know. Human beings do not have an emotional on/off switch and often have trouble seeing their loved ones as the enemy. There might have been only one casualty in the Whitman house had anyone been able to put emotion aside and destroy Regina Whitman’s brain before she turned. Which leads me to the second point. Suicide is not the answer. If you slit your wrists to avoid becoming a zombie, you will bleed to death and then become a zombie. No one knows how or why, but any form of death leads to reanimation. The only thing that can stop a zombie is destruction of the brain.

While it’s still light out, I secure the house as best I can and unload a half dozen air fresheners in the bedroom. It doesn’t completely kill the stench, but at least I will be able to spend a night here. I dig through the family CD collection, searching for anything that looks interesting. The mp3 died with electricity so the only way I can get music now is through tapes and CDs. My parents would have found something poetic in that, I think. I make myself comfortable in the bed formerly occupied by Mr. and Mrs. Whitman. It’s going to be a cold night so I had to dig up every blanket I could find. I’m not going to survive yet another encounter with zombies only to later freeze to death. You would think it would make me nervous to sleep out in the wild, but it really doesn’t. Yes, sleep is our most vulnerable time, but by taking proper precautions, one can get a solid night’s rest in the middle of a zombie-infested area.

As with moving through an infested area, the first key is to not draw any attention. This means absolutely no fires. If you have a flashlight, only use it when you need to. Waving a beam of light around in the dark is like flashing a beacon to the undead. My second rule is to pick your spot and stay there. I secured the entire Whitman house, but I am not leaving this bedroom until I am ready to never come back there. I have complete control over this one room. No unexpected zombies. No ants on the table. Finally, you must have a security system. I’ve set up tripwires all over the house to alert me of any unwanted visitors. A simple bunch of jingling cans or pots could be enough to wake me up and save my life.

* * *

I wake up at around seven the next morning and gather all my things (it’s just easier to have your own wire, cans and pots). In the kitchen, I dump out the contents of the dead mailman’s bag. Envelopes flutter and slide all over the room; some land on the corpse. They hold no interest for me—I just need something to carry stuff in. I walk around the house, searching for things that might have sentimental value to Mr. Whitman. I grab framed photographs mostly. They are the easiest and most obvious thing to have stories behind them. I also take some clothing. Briefly, I imagine Mr. Whitman burying his face in his wife’s sweater, trying to smell her. Smells are powerful memory triggers. On the bedroom dresser, I hit the jackpot. An envelope addressed to Alex. Short of finding the family alive, which let’s face it, is more than unlikely, this is the reason I come out here and do this. A final letter to a loved one is a valuable treasure. And I get to be the one to deliver it to its intended recipient. This is why they call me a mailman.

PART ONE

TO…

Chapter 1

The Little Apple

Dear Alexander,

I don’t hold out much hope that you will ever see this note, but if you do, please don’t blame yourself for what I have done. Your decision to set out to find our salvation was heroic and proved to me how much you love your family. You will be the man I love for all eternity which is why I am not sad that we never got to see each other again in this world. I know we will be together soon in the next one. It is our love that has given me the confidence to see you off and the confidence to go through with this now. The truth is that there is no place left in this earthly world for the family. Our friends and neighbors walk the streets devouring each other. We can’t leave our own house for fear of being attacked by monsters. The world is chaos and there is no room left for love. I cannot raise our children in this world. And so I won’t. You have my heart forever, Alex, and I will see you very soon.

Love,

Andrea

* * *

Now that is a very sweet note. You should hold on to that.

But, I mean, you’re sure? They were definitely all…monsters?

Well, yeah, zombies are kind of hard to mistake, ya know? You were away from them a long time. Probably longer than you thought. It would have been a miracle-

No, no, nooooooo!

Whitman was all over me the minute I passed through the gates of New York, like he had been standing there for the whole five weeks, anxiously awaiting my return. Hell, maybe that’s what he had done, he didn’t have much else to do. He couldn’t exactly acclimate himself to the new world when he still had possible ties to the old one. I understand. But that doesn’t mean I want someone in my face before I even get a moment to smell some air that doesn’t reek of decay.

DJ!

My boss, Bill Beckman, is approaching me with great haste. I nod to him so he knows I saw him, and then I turn back to Mr. Whitman.

Are you all right? We have counseling available. I brought you a bag I filled in your house. Maybe there are some mementos you’d like to keep? I extend my arm to hand him the mailbag but he doesn’t take it. I carefully set it down next to him and back away to give him some space. He’s distraught but he doesn’t look like the type who would want to hug it out.

Whitman is looking at me as I speak to him, but I know he is not listening. It’s that stunned grief that hits you when you first find out people you love are dead. While I was out in the wild all those weeks, Whitman could hold onto the small hope that I would find his family and reunite them. Now I was back with the bad news and it’s hitting him like a ton of bricks. I can see the pain in his face as the news sinks in over and over again. They’re really gone.

Bill has reached me now.

DJ, glad to see you’re back and in one piece. Another fine job, I’m sure. He pats me on the shoulder heartily. I’d like you to have your exam done ASAP. You’re back just in time for a very exciting meeting. Everyone in the office is buzzing about it. If you could go now. Please?

With all due respect, Bill, I’m finishing up with a client here. Plus, I don’t need a physical. You know what it looks like when someone’s been bitten. I’m fine.

I know you haven’t been bitten, Deej. But you were out in the wild for weeks. You know the procedure. We have to make sure you haven’t had any new developments in your health that could be detrimental. At the very least, you want to stay on the repopulation staff, don’t you? He winked and elbowed me as he said that last part and I have to admit he is right.

I smile at him and chuckle a little. You’re right, Bill. You’re absolutely ri—

Oh, fuck! Whoa, hey there, sir, take it easy! Bill cries.

While I had been bickering with my boss, the distraught Alex Whitman had swiped my gun right out of its holster.

I love you, Andrea! I’m coming to be with you now! he yells to the heavens.

No! I scream, but it is too late to stop him. His mind was made up well before I had a chance to do anything. There is no loud bang because of