Hug

A warm connection between two humans

Some hug their friends, strangers

I find those people odd

Some hug their grandparents, father, mother

I hugged my mom once, twice,

Oh, I lost count

Have you ever had a hug transform?

I have

I hugged my mom, plump mother of three

When I was little and innocent

I hugged my mom, plump, happy mother of three

When I was school age, rushing down the dead end road to the bus

I hugged my mom, plump, happy, stressed mother of three

When I was in Jr. High, proud of my first honors class

I hugged my mom plump, happy, stressed, cancer diagnosed mother of three

When I was a freshman, changing school buildings, changing life

I hugged my mom, plump, sad, stressed, radiation ridden mother of three

When I was in 10th grade and having my first kiss on the stage

I hugged my mom, thin, sad, stressed, bald mother of three

When I was a senior crashing my first car

I hugged my mom skin and bones, depressed, stressed, acne faced mother of three

When I was a first semester freshman, coming home on the weekends

I hugged my mom, skeleton, passed depressed, passed stressed, hopeless mother of three

When I was home for Christmas break, celebrating my winter birthday before going back

I hugged my mom

As she lay unconscious in her bed

Unable to hug back

Chapter Seven

I wake up the next morning to Mom standing by my bed.

“You need to get ready,” she stands over us with her hands on her hips. Her eyes look tired. The creases under her eyes are prominent, but her posture screams awake, “And you two know that one of you is supposed to be on the floor.” She gives me a glare. I hope she doesn’t tell Dad.

Brian’s eyes open, “Sorry, Mrs. Markson.”

She walks out of the room once she is satisfied that we are getting up.

Dad already has the last of the remaining coffee made and ready to go for everyone. A can of peas has been heated up for breakfast. Mmm, peas at sunrise. I sit down in the living room with my coffee and peas. Mom enters with a cup of water.

“What’s up with the water? No coffee?” She always used to drink black coffee. She would pour ¾ of the cup full of coffee and top it off with tap water or an ice cube.

She gives me a dirty look, “I haven’t had more than three cups of coffee all month, and I never have it right after treatments either. Coffee is too rough on my stomach, makes me sick if I have too much.”

“Oh,” and I go back to drinking my coffee. I knew that. One of those moments where you know something, yet ask anyway for conversation. I didn’t mean to offend her this early in the day.

“Your gardens look good, Mom, despite not having been weeded in awhile. Better than every other yard in the neighborhood.”

“It’s that Preen and Green. It keeps the weeds away like no other. On the east side of the house my irises are coming up. The Tiger Lillies will be blooming soon, too. I didn’t get to plant any of my annuals this year though. Your Aunt Tris was going to come over and help me with that this year.”

“Did you ever hear from Aunt Tris and Uncle Jim before the power went out?”

“No, but I’m sure they’re fine,” she takes a sip of water, “I always asked God to let me be the first of my siblings to pass away so that I can make a place for them in Heaven with our dad. I made that wish the year he died.”

This phrase stings, is this God’s sick way of answering her prayer? I don’t reply with words, but I nod my head and sip my coffee.

Dad is packing up the last of the bags and boxes Mom had put together. I better go get ready. I wish I could take a shower, but instead I brush my teeth with a bottle of water and use some to wet a washcloth in the downstairs bathroom. Tom finds me as I finish putting my toothbrush away.

“Hey, I’m sorry about last night,” he says.

“It’s okay. Times are stressful. I get it.” I try to brush past him, but he puts a hand on my shoulder.

“I want to give you something. You have always been about the closest thing to a best friend I have ever had.” He reaches into his back pocket and pulls out a cross necklace. “I know God is important to you, so here.” He smiles as he holds it out to me. I take it. It’s a simple little iron cross on a leather cord.

“Thank you.”

“I felt bad. You’re right Zoe, you’re not a toy. I just, well, it took an apocalypse for me to realize I don’t want to lose you. I love you. Not that I want to scare you. I love you like a best friend, and if you weren’t the strong, independent chick that you are I probably wouldn’t feel the same. The cross was a gift to me from my dad a long time ago. I figured if anyone can protect you now it’s God and yourself.”

I hug him. I can’t stay mad at him. I step back and slip the cross over my head. Sometimes I don’t feel very strong. I just do what I have to do to go to school everyday even though I want to lie in bed and cry, but this gift means a lot to me.

I walk up the stairs and put on my jeans with the deepest pockets, which given that they are girl jeans, have pockets that barely fit a cell phone. I fill each pocket with a knife, and one with a lighter and matches, too. I strap my favorite throwing knife to my belt loop, and then I find Brian in the upstairs bathroom. He is attempting to trim his beard. In school he always kept it clean-shaven, but he looks much older and ragged with his light brown beard coming in and contrasting with his blonde hair.

“Hey, babe,” he says to me in the mirror.

“Hey, I think we are almost ready to head out.”

He finishes and puts the scissors down, he turns to me and looks graven.

“Zoe…We will be fine.”

“I know,” I say. I must have looked crestfallen without meaning to.

“You always sound so confident, but you look exhausted, and if you don’t stop wringing your hands I’m going to tie them together.”

I put my hands down to my side. I guess I never realized it, but in retrospect I guess it does make me look crazy. I look up at him, my face blank. I am ready to go on this possible suicide mission. He wraps his arms around me and we head downstairs together hand in hand.

Tom is in the kitchen now. Mom is sitting at the table, looking more tired than I just saw her ten minutes ago. She is giving Tom an extensive list for the puppy both verbal and written.

“Since he’s still growing you can feed him twice a day, make sure he gets fully covered up at night, and please try and train him to go to the bathroom outside. I’ve cleaned up after him three times already.”

“Not a problem, Mrs. Markson.” He gives his signature grin and moves down to the floor where Persistence has been wandering around sniffing for food. He begins patting his head and scoops the pup up into his lap.

“You ready, Ruth?” Dad shouts from the hole beside the table.

“Yeah,” Mom gets out of her chair using both her hands to push herself up and makes her way to the hole. She slowly bends down, like all of her joints are in need of some oil. She crawls through, and I hear Dad pick her up on the other side. Carl comes down with his shotgun swung over his shoulder. He was keeping guard duty until he saw Mom come out of the house. I grab my .22 from the table and slide it through the hole ahead of me. I turn and Tom is standing to my left. I hug him and give him my own imitation of his grin, which probably looks ridiculous, and I pat Persistence on the head in his arms.

“We will come back,” I say. Then I crawl out after my mother.

Once we are all out, I look around. Still no zombies in sight, just the pile of corpses in the far corner of the yard. From outside you can smell them. The rot has me gaging, and I am forced to breath through my mouth. Thank God we have a big backyard, I couldn’t imagine living in a house with that stench. Mom pukes up the water she had for breakfast.

We all file into Mom’s SUV. Dad is driving, Mom rides shotgun, Brian and I are in the middle row, and Carl is in the back by himself. This is quite possibly going to be the longest 20-minute car ride of all time.

We dodge around some corpses on our way out of our subdivision. There aren’t too many, about one every 50 yards. Most have a few clean shots in the head and chest thanks to us.

We turn out of our little neighborhood and the scene before us is a never-ending field of death, even more so than the last time I left. The smell in the car is exemplified; the homes and stores look as though they have been vacant for years, ransacked, broken, and smashed. There are no walking zombies in sight, but the corpses litter the streets. There is no way to avoid them all. There are sickening snaps and crunches as Dad drives over them; Brian grabs my hands that I have been wringing together since we exited the subdivision and forces them down on my lap.

Dad is forced to drive slowly over all the human remains speed bumps. I have time to look at the many faces on the road. Given that it is summer, and the days have been around 80 degrees, I can tell which zombies met their second death at the beginning. Their faces are indistinguishable blobs of flesh, some of the freshly fallen I recognize as classmates, neighbors, but mostly just people I’m pretty sure I may have seen in the grocery store at some point in my life.

We see a few active zombies after a couple miles of driving. They are in yards, standing or sitting and swaying, but before they shamble half way to our SUV we are long gone and something else gets their attention. I lurch forward; the seatbelt slams against my neck. Dad slams on the breaks. There is a lone zombie standing up from his last meal dead center in the road. He stands with legs shoulder width apart and screams at us as if to say, “How dare you ruin my peaceful meal?” Dad accelerates and mows him down, cutting off the scream. I look in the mirror; Dad is smiling. We are changing.

The normal twenty-minute car ride has extended a good forty minutes at our slow speed, but we are nearing the hospital; we are out of suburbia and into the outskirts of the city. I see a large van that is swarmed by zombies; something or someone must be inside because they don’t even take notice as we drive slowly by. When the van is just about out of sight I hear rapid gunfire behind us. I turn to see a group of people in all black in the distance. They have surrounded the van on all sides. I watch the zombies fall.

“Holy shit, is that the SWAT team?” asks Carl.

Dad brakes. We all turn to watch now. The black clothing does look bulky enough to be SWAT armor, but at this distance I can’t be 100%. The final zombie goes down. The people in black approach the van and open the sliding door. A small figure comes out, about the size of a short woman. There is a standstill for a moment. Then one of the taller men in black approaches the woman. He holds something to her face. He steps back. The woman starts forward, there is a shot and she goes down.

“Infected,” Brain says. “At least we know there is some sort of organization here. The hospital may actually be up and running.”

“That’s horrible,” Mom says with her face still turned toward the woman that just went down. She looks furious and scared like a wounded dog. I look back. The group must have noticed us now because they are heading our way. As much as a zombie media crazed world I lived in before this, and how much I understand why things must happen, I am horrified at the lack of human compassion I just witnessed. My mouth is dry as I try to swallow down the emotion.

Dad starts to drive.

“What are you doing?” Mom shrieks. “Stop!”

“Uh, Dad, Mom’s right. They are aiming at us now. Maybe we should just try and talk to them,” I say.

Dad leaves the engine running, but puts the SUV in park. We wait in silence while the SWAT team, the lettering clear now as they approach, comes near our vehicle.

They surround us on all sides with guns aimed, and the same tall man approaches the driver’s side door. Dad rolls down his window, and I see Brian move his hand to his holster on his left hip by my leg. This life is getting to him. He used to be very trusting.

“State your business,” says the dark man behind a face shield.

“My wife needs a hospital,” Dad says without breaking eye contact.

“She’s been bitten?” Asks the man, and then the entirety of the troop raises their guns a little higher at the uttering of the words.

“No!” Dad says. “She has stage four colon cancer and she is way behind on treatments. We need a doctor before she gets any sicker.”

The man waves his hand downward, and the guns lower. His dark brown eyes that perfectly match his skin show a hint of compassion at Mom.

“We need to check each of you.”

Then two men on each side open up our doors and beckon for us to step out. My heart is racing. We crawl out of our seats and line up, Mom and Carl stand on the passenger’s side and Dad, Brian, and I on the driver’s side. The man who was talking to Dad pulls out the object he held to the woman’s face just minutes ago before she was shot down. It looks like a modified Geiger counter.

He holds it in front of Dad’s mouth and says, “Breath.”

Dad does so after a short pause and the man moves down the line to Brian, “Breath,” and finally to me, “Breath,” I can hear it making strange clicking noises and crackling sounds.

He moves to the other side and checks Carl and Mom. He pauses for a second after Mom breathes. “Have you been bitten or scratched?” His voice is like ice, and I shiver.

“No,” she says. She looks tired, not even scared, yet there is still an intensity in her eyes, a ‘don’t screw with me’ kind of look. “I have been undergoing radiation and chemotherapy treatment alternating for a couple of years. My last treatment was about two weeks ago.”

After staring at Mom and the reading for a few more seconds he puts his Geiger counter back in a pocket on his left side. I wonder how they managed to create this technology in just a couple short weeks with the odds of many people capable of that sort of technology design either being dead or trapped.

“We can take you to the hospital. It’s up and running more than anything else in this city, but they have their hands full. Not sure what they’ll be able to do for you, Ma’am.” She simply nods then puts a hand to her mouth. She vomits on the man’s nice black shoes before he even has time to realize what is happening.

“I’m sorry,” Mom says, but the man just nods.

Behind his plastic facemask I see his nose crinkle in disgust, but he backs away as if it never happened and motions with his gun for us to move. Dad runs around to the other side of the SUV and helps Mom inside.

The rest of us climb back into the van. Mom has to heave herself in slowly like my grandmother used to do when her hips were going out. Dad’s hands are guiding her by barely touching her. There if she falls.

We drive slowly behind the SWAT team as they march the few blocks to the hospital. The man with vomit on his shoes is leading. The streets seem abandoned, and corpses litter the streets less and less as we near our destination.

Soon the giant complex looms before us out of the darkened apartments and corner stores. The main building is lit up on the first floor, and there is a fiery glow from the massive first parking lot where tents have been set up. There are crowds of people mulling around on the blacktop. Around 1,500 is my guess, quite a small number from a city that held 115,000 people just a couple weeks ago.

The men stop marching at the edge of the parking lot. The man who checked all of us with the Geiger counter approaches Dad’s window again.

He starts speaking when Dad has it rolled halfway down, “The medical tent is the large green one in the center. We keep that area mostly clear. You can park and make camp anywhere in the lot so long as it is at least 50 yards away from that tent.” He nods at a tent in the back of the lot. “The food is rationed; go to the large white tent on the south side of the lot to get your share. Keep away from all marked areas, they are not safe yet.”

Dad nods and pulls the car up into the lot. We can only get about ten feet from the edge because it is so packed with small tents and peoples’ cars that have become temporary homes. Everyone seems happy here, or at least they look happy because they feel secure. I see a few small fires with people talking around them. They have an air of comfort, as though the parking lot is a mother’s womb that will protect them from the new world that has rapidly formed.

“Zoe, why don’t you go get the food rations,” Mom says to me.

“Okay,” I reply.

Dad helps Mom out of the SUV; it looks like the car ride has upset her already sensitive stomach since the last vomiting. Dad and Mom start a slow walk to the green medical tent.

“You guys coming?” I ask.

“Sure,” Brian says to me, stepping out to stand beside me.

“Carl?”

“Naw, I’m going to try and do some unloading, make it more camp-like. I think we may be here for a couple days.” He jumps out of the SUV and walks to the back hatch in two giant strides to start getting the packs out.

I shrug my shoulders in consent. Brian and I turn to the white tent. It is swarming with people. There is a line that wraps all the way around. We join it at the end, where we can look inside the entrance from a full wrap around. There is a mountain of canned and dry goods. It looks like only police are distributing the food, no civilian volunteers.

For the first ten minutes Brian and I stand there in silence like most of the hungry people around us. He shifts and grabs my hand from out of my left jeans pocket.

“Zoe, do you really think we need this food? I mean your mom packed a lot of provisions,” he says so that no one else can over hear.

“She packed enough for a few days, and personally I’m not going to let my family starve in a week because of a few hungry faces around me. One day we will look like that, too.”

He looks at a woman behind us who has dirt smudged all over her face and coral pink sundress. “Okay...So how long do you think this place has been running? Or maybe it never fell?”

A man behind us hears this last line. He has a long gray beard with bits of what appears to be crusty food in it. Oh, I hope it’s food. His piercing blue eyes poke out from underneath bushy gray eyebrows that remind me of Gandalf. He is dressed in ragged green clothes that was once a dress suit and wears a red knit cap. When he opens his mouth to speak, a smell similar to wet cat food wafts out and smacks me in the face.

“Popped up overnight, it did. An airplane went overhead, yes it did, and bam. One day we was all hidin’ in our home defenses and whatnots and the next word got around that overnight the hospital had food and safety. People all over the city came out of the woodworks and came here. Only been about five days, I must say, yes I do say.”

“So you guys didn’t help set it up?” I ask. “No civilian help?”

“Oh no no no. Gov’ment. That’s who dun it. These is all gov’ment nurses and gov’ment doctors, too. Not one of these here people in the tents lived here before. Not one of them will tell nobody their story before the outbreak neither. Miiighty suspicious.” He gives us a bug eyed look. Then smacks his lips together, “Welp, you kids make a mighty nice couple. Uster have a girl looked like you when I was a boy uster look like you,” he grins, and I am surprised to see a full set of straight teeth despite being dirty and yellowed with fuzzy slippers. Then he turns around and begins talking to a young, blonde mother who is standing behind him with three little ones clinging to her gray sweatpants. The look on her face screams abhorrence at his appearance as she listens and pushes her kids, a boy and two girls farther behind her legs.

We are in line for about an hour before we even enter the tent. The man who was behind us has been talking nonstop to anyone and everyone in line. Somehow he ends up ten people ahead of us and gets his food before us. I’m not sure if he is crazy or a conman at this point. It seems no one wants to tell him to go away for fear of starting a scene so he just moves up and up in line, sometimes dropping back a few people before moving up. The crazed man finally trots off to his own little campsite, swinging his little plastic grocery bag. It is only a few more minutes before we reach the food distribution table. An armed officer hands us two plastic bags of food, each one with two cans of vegetables and a Ziploc sandwich bag with a handful of crackers in it.

“There are five of us,” I say.

“Then where are they?” The man asks me. The sarcasm in his voice urges me to punch him in the pale, pointed nose.

“My mom’s in the med tent, my dad is with her, and my brother is setting up camp,” I say, trying to watch my temper.

“Yeah and the last two people in front of you each had three children who were waiting in the car. If they aren’t here they don’t get the food. One ration a person. Now sign your name on the notepad and go.”

“We just got here. We didn’t know!” I say.

The man gives me a dirty look.

“Zoe, we will be fine. Your mom packed enough to get by tonight. Let’s go,” Brian loops his fingers through mine. We scrawl our names on the steno-pad and leave. I also left a giant “Screw you,” scribbled next to my name with a smiley face. At the last second before we leave the tent I turn around and flip the man off just for good measure. He looks up just in time. I smile.

Brian bats my hand down after a couple seconds and we walk back to our car camp spot. He gives me a glare and drops my hand when we are out of sight. “You really do have your mother’s temper, Zoe. It’s going to get you in trouble.”

“I don’t like assholes,” I reply, but I am stung by his comment. My heart feels like he just punched me square in the chest, but I keep my face calm, emotionless.

Dad and Carl are making a makeshift fire out of an old metal trash can they have found and some wood scraps from wherever, I don’t know, when we get back.

“Where’s Mom?” I ask when Dad looks up.

“I’m here, Zoe.”

Mom’s hand goes slowly up from the passenger’s seat where she has it leaned all the way back. Her eyes are shut as her hand goes back down and rests on her lap.

“Oh.” I look away from Mom toward Dad. “This is all they would give us. They only give food to people in line. They wouldn’t believe us when we said there were more of us.”

“That’s frickin’ bullshit,” says Carl with his back turned to me as he scoops up wood bits from the ground.

“I packed enough food,” says Mom, her eyes still closed. She sounds like I hurt her feelings.

“Yeah, for now,” says Carl.

Mom doesn’t say anything. The only thing that moves on her is her chest rising and falling. I think she is asleep already.

“We will be fine tonight. I don’t think we will stay here too long anyways,” says Dad as he takes the bags from Brian and my hands.

“Why?” Then more quietly, “They can’t help Mom?”

“They aren’t set up for anything like that. That’s what the nurses told me. All the equipment is inside the hospital, and it’s being used for research only at this time,” Dad mimics. “They gave her some Vicodin, Motrin 800, and they took her port out from her last treatment. Said that’s all they can do until the hospital is up and running.”

“When is that going to be?” asks Brian. He looks concerned. Can he really care about my mom that much?

“Could be months they said,” Dad throws a stick in the fire.

All I can say is, “Shit.”