Even Cloudy Days Are Beautiful

    It’s been a while since the collapse. The chaos was settled, more or less, from the initial collapse of the metropolitan cities, and the massive undead hordes poured into the countryside. I tallied each day of the end as I lived it in a little notebook, but then one day I stopped. Tallying the days was like getting a high score on a video game that only I play. But zombies are not a game.

    I’m so lucky Grampy survived the collapse too. Almost no one can say they still have grandparents around, even if he does smoke like an old factory as he grills juicy steak on the grill outside. Cooking is one of his passions. And we had a lot of steak.

    We spent a lot of time on our porch these days. We lived out in Nowhere, Mississippi where we have a peaceful existence except every so often when one or two zombies strayed onto the property, sometimes a small pack. The adults always put the zombie out of its misery. They say they don’t want me doing that kind of thing, being a young lady and all. I’m seventeen. I told them I could handle it.

Once the electricity stopped working, outside was cooler than inside, and we couldn’t afford to use the generators. That’s like sending out a mass invitation to the zombies to the human buffet. We were lucky also to have a big house, but out here you were either unimaginably wealthy or so poor the dirt on the ground made fun of you. Mom and Dad went out for supplies a few days ago. I looked longingly at the empty driveway where the imprint of our missing truck was.

    “That radio tower is a while out,” said Grampy. “They won’t be back anytime soon. Stop worrying your pretty little mind, Sylvie.”

    A zombie tangled itself in the barbed wire fence again. Before, the zombie would have been some woman lost in the woods or an injured deer. Now, the woman slumped over the fence was just another zombie like everyone else. The thing slumped over the fence, creating a hole in our defenses for other zombies if there were any others in the area. Grampy volunteered to take care of it.

    “Can you get some seasoning from the pantry while I’m at it?” Grampy pointed at the old storage trailer at the other end of the property where the fence was secure. “Should be in the top cabinet.”

    I shrugged and made my way across the lawn. The lawn was getting long all around, but we dared not take a mower to it. Grampy put the lid on the grill and took his crowbar from under his rocking chair. He put out his cigarette on the homemade ash tray. I turned my back to him and tried to focus on my task. My family was right. I did not want to know what he did at the fence. Murder is wrong according to the good book even if the people being murdered are not people anymore.

    “It’s kind of like what we used to do before,” said Grampy, “Sometimes, we have to slaughter our pigs and wring our chickens. It’s not pretty, but hardly any farm work is pretty.”

    There ended up being a lot of farm chores that were pleasant, I found out. Feeding the chickens, gathering eggs from the henhouse, brushing the goats. One time when I was eleven, Grampy gave me a machete to slaughter the pig for our breakfast bacon. Betsy was my friend, my companion, my pet. I cried and cried for I did not have it in me to kill the poor pig.

    Mom sighed in bed with her husband that night. “She’s definitely her mama’s daughter.”

    “She’s soft,” said Dad. “She won’t even learn to shoot.”

    “Just because she doesn’t want to kill any animals doesn’t mean she’s any less our daughter. Now, you’re going to teach that girl to drive the tractor starting tomorrow, you hear?”

    “She’s too young to—.”

    “Earl, I will not have our daughter growing up to hate her folks because she won’t kill a pig with a rusty machete. Have some father-daughter time.”

    Dad rolled his eyes. “Alright, I will.”

    I cried all night for Betsy.

    I still wouldn’t kill anything, but I could drive the tractor pretty good. Out of the corner of my eye, Grampy used his stance from his baseball days by the fence as he raised the crowbar over his shoulder. I quickly turned away as a thunk of a shattered skull rang out.

    The trailer was more overgrown than the rest of the property as we generally didn’t mow here even before the collapse. The trailer was in the back part of the property. It did not have to look nice for the county. Appearances were everything. The front part of the farmhouse looked like the average rural, Republican family. The back part could look however we wanted to look. With so many chores to do on the farm, clearing out underbrush here often took a back seat. The trailer was dilapidated, the floor falling in at points. Grampy was the only one who ever went out here, especially after the collapse. He called it his workshop.

    I went up the creaky stairs and opened the door. A wave of putrescence invaded my nostrils. I coughed and hacked up some loose mucus. My tonsils twitched. I covered my nose to the best of my ability with my shirt and stepped inside.

On the far end of the mostly empty trailer were two hunks of meat hanging on metal hooks and suspended from the ceiling. A full minute of staring at the slabs forced me to realize the horrible truth. The slabs of meat were people. The mutilation of their corpses made them unrecognizable. One was missing most of their legs and hand. The other’s whole abdomen was gone. They dripped blood all over the floor. The one with the missing hand was wearing Daddy’s overalls.

    “God in Heaven,” I breathed before puking all over the trailer floor.

    My parents hadn’t a chance to get to the radio tower. They hadn’t even left the driveway. Somebody had killed them and harvested their body parts. There was only one other person left in the farmhouse.

    I felt a double dose of sadness and bitter anger. I wanted to hurt Grampy. At the same time, I had known him and loved him my whole life, treasured like my parents told me to. This was the end. The old laws didn’t apply anymore.

    “We don’t know how long we got Grampy for, smoking like that,” Mom had said.

    As soon as the world went downhill, he was the first to start killing our neighbors when they turned into zombies all around us at church. Even Pastor Mike. Grampy was our protector, someone we knew who we could trust.

    After I stopped puking the third time, I doubled down and found the steak spices in the top cabinet like he told me. My hands shook and I knocked over some other jars in the cabinet trying to get my sandwich grabbers on the spices. After I secured the container, I wiped the vomit residue from my mouth and tried to act like I saw nothing as I went out of the trailer.

    Grampy had already finished with securing the fence, the female zombie lying on her back outside the boundary. The fence was straight and new again. He was drying his crowbar on the grass when I handed him the spice container.

    “Ahh, good,” said Grampy. “Nothing goes better with steak than some good spices especially if you sear them over the grill. Come on, I’ll show you.”

    He flipped the lid off the barbeque again. Smoke billowed out of the coals. The meat was starting to brown, a mouthwatering smell emanated from the grill.

    “Just lightly coat them like this,” said Grampy, shaking out the spices onto the meat. “In a few more minutes, we have a delicious meal. Are you OK, sweetie? You’re looking pale.”

    “Y-yeah,” I said unconvincingly, “I’m fine. I’m actually going to lay down for a while.”

    “I’ll call you when it’s ready.”

    I hurried towards the upstairs bathroom. The water wasn’t running anymore, but the mirror still worked. It was nearly too dark to see my reflection. I barely recognized myself from this afternoon. I came to another horrible conclusion I did not want to admit was the truth.

    I kept thinking about Mom and Dad’s missing limbs and the sizzle of the grill. The steak couldn’t have been from a cow. We had no big livestock, and the grocery store was a two hour drive away. Grampy stood there in front of me, dressing up my parents’ meat, flipping it over with tongs like it was Sunday barbeque. Any minute now, Grampy would be calling me from downstairs to cannibalize my own parents.

I cleaned myself up the best I could without water until I looked halfway presentable for dinner. Before I knew it, Grampy was calling me for dinner.

    I sat at the already set place across from Grampy, who sat at the end of the table. Dinner consisted of freshly grilled steak and a tossed salad. Grampy cut a generous amount of the gruesome display and loaded it onto his plate. He took a little salad from the bowl. He offered me the plate of the still dripping meat. I was getting lightheaded.

    “Take some,” said Grampy.

    I have never sat across the table from a monster before. The closest I got to that was watching a documentary about a serial killer before the collapse. Grampy was no better. I had a stray thought of where that killer was now, most likely dead, trapped in a three by five concrete box. Everyone I knew was dead, including my own parents.

    I took a small helping of my daddy’s legs and a generous portion of salad to hide my lack of appetite for Grampy’s cooking. Across the table, Grampy slathered barbeque sauce all over his meat. I picked at my salad while doing a bad job pretending everything was fine. I took the knife to the meat but my hands prevented the knife from slicing.

    “You feeling OK?” said Grampy for the second time that day.

    Unable to bottle everything inside me, I blurted out the first thing that came to mind.

    “I saw the workshop, Grampy,” I say.

    He grimaced. “Oh, that.”

    He said it like it was no big deal to slaughter his own family members, hang them on hooks in a repurposed trailer, and slash their body parts off for food. It was all so wickedly Stone Age.

    “Aren’t you ashamed?” I ask.

    “Why?”

    “You’re a psychopath.”

    Grampy chuckled. “Your pathetic parents thought I was too.”

    “Why did you do it?”

    “We have to survive somehow, Pumpkin. The zombies have surrounded this little compound and taken over the town. I’ve seen it. There is no hope.”

    “And that’s why you killed my parents?”

    Grampy says nothing. His mouth gaped open as if on the verge of revealing something important but decided he thought better of it.

    “Not all farm work is pretty,” he said after a minute of silence.

    “You’re sick. And I’m leaving.”

    Grampy pulled out a gun from under the table and pointed it at my face. “What makes you think that? Where would you run? There’s nothing but death out there.”

    “Death would be better than spending another minute in this place.” My raised voice inflected I meant it.

    “Then maybe I should pull the trigger now and save us the trouble.”

    For the first time since the collapse, I smiled. “Are you really going to kill Grampy’s little girl?”

    A single tear streaked down Grampy’s face. I never noticed his eyes before right this second. They’re blue.

    And it was over before I could think of anything else. A deafening bang. I fell to the floor in a fetal position and clutch my stomach. Blood poured out of my mouth. Another shot and a thump hit the table above me. The gun fell to the dining room floor, Grampy’s wrinkled hand extended above it, unmoving.

    And everything was quiet.

    I squirmed, attempting to move towards the door. I trailed blood all over the dining room where we ate as a family, all over the carpet, where I used to play when relatives came over. Never in a million years did I think then that I would be attempting to escape this house of horrors. I started to feel like I may faint at any moment, but I knew the moment I did, I would succumb to death.

    I woke to two strangers peering at me. Two men in frayed T-shirts. Each of them carried a rifle like the one Grampy used to put down horses. A feeling of movement.

    “She’s awake,” said one of them. I faded in and out of consciousness, trying to be focused on the present. These people were not present physically to me but as two voices in the void, a bit like what I imagined Heaven would be like.

    “For how much longer?” said the other. “That gut shot is deep. Those farm weapons are meant to kill.”

    “Too bad about her family though,” said the first voice. “Seriously, who strings people up in a trailer like that?”

    “I don’t want to know. Here, help me put pressure so I can get the bullet out.”

    Sharp stings stab at me. They brought me back to reality. I was in a cart. It rolled along as the two men dug around for the bullet with their dirty needle nose pliers. I cried out. The sky was overcast and cloudy. I tried to think of everything except for my massacred family on the farm. Anything but.

    “I want to die,” I croaked.

    “No, no,” said the first voice. “We got you. Just hang on.”

    Then, the second voice chimed in. “Look, man. I hate to say it, but we may have to, you know.”

    “How can you say that? She’s not all gone.”

    “She’s bleeding out. The bullet is deep in there. In a few minutes, she’ll be dead anyway. And she’ll turn. You’ve seen it. You don’t need to be infected first to come back. You come back no matter how you die.”

    I kept staring at the sky. The voices asked me if that was what I wanted. I smiled at the sky, wanting to take in this last bit of fresh air.

    The second voice asked me if I really wanted to die, that I meant what I said. I said yes twice. They stopped the cart. They lifted me out and set me at the side of the road. One of the men raises his rifle to my head. I request one last thing. That I look at the sky while they do it. They agree. Even cloudy days are beautiful.

I didn’t see them pull the trigger on me. I didn’t hear the shot. One moment, I saw the sky and the next moment it was gone.