The Forgotten Days

   A zombie who might have once been a ticket seller stared blankly at Shawn from her booth. She knocked her forehead repeatedly into the iron bars separating them. Shawn sighed and turned his back to her in the empty railway station.

    His attention was on the cork board on the opposite wall. The board was covered with old photos and well wishes written on sticky notes like a hopeful mirage.

    We hope to see you soon, Eric.

    Keep fighting the good fight.

    God bless America.

    These were only a few of the messages Shawn took in before his eye caught another photo. This photo was of two happy newlyweds. The redhead woman’s head rested on the groom’s shoulder. They smiled because they had their whole lives ahead of them.

    Who would have figured the world as they knew it wouldn’t be around much longer? He did not remember the photo being taken. The best day of his life, nearly two decades ago and not full of zombies.

    Shawn took the photo off the cork board. He dropped his backpack onto the floor. Then, he collapsed along the wall as a silver tear slid down his cheek.

    “Claire,” he choked.

    He looked at the well-groomed man in the tuxedo holding onto his wife as if being apart for even a minute would kill him. And it nearly did.

    Shawn looked at himself in the photo and felt his now rough hands, scruffy beard, and the scars all over his body made worse by the layer of grime caked on him.

    He remembered the tearful farewell at the airport, right before the dead began to rise.

    He flipped the photo over. Tears he was trying to hold back streamed down his face. Why was he holding this back for twenty years? There’s no one except a zombie to see it. I’ll always love you, Shawn. Everything around him quietened as if the volume control had been adjusted on the world.

    He saw in his mind’s eye a happier time full of love between them. Two children and a dog. That was all he wanted out of living until this horrible catastrophe took all of that away from him. Why couldn’t the world let him have something so simple?

    At the bottom of the scribbled note Claire signed her name and dated it. The date was from three weeks ago. She had been here recently! Shawn’s face flushed hot. He heard his own heart thumping for the first time in years.

    Clinging onto a little hope, Shawn picked himself up, slings his backpack over his shoulder, and made his way towards the door to the wasteland. He turned around one final time to look at the rustic railway station, dilapidated and long abandoned. He nodded to himself and acknowledged this was the turning point. For the first time since the initial outbreak, he was free. He raised his six-shooter at the tortured ticket seller and fired one shot between the eyes. The zombie woman dropped backward like a bowling pin and lays perfectly at peace.

    Shawn walked away reinvigorated with a sense of purpose. He stopped at the spraypainted sign saying Waystation 12, Territory of the United States of America. He had no idea where to go. If Claire were here three weeks ago, what road would she have taken?

    The answer became clear to him after noticing another sign just past the Waystation 12 sign. There was an arrow beneath it pointing west toward the now setting sun. To Freedom.

    Shawn followed the arrow along the path, a crumbling highway with grass growing through the cracks. Rusted out cars sat in the middle of the road, all with flat tires, some of them with drivers turned zombie still strapped into their seat belts. Shawn did not look twice at the cars. The gasoline in them either ran out or oxidized since the outbreak. Shawn was certain he will never see a working car again.

    He thought back to the first sign, Territory of the United States of America. The words were spray painted over the original old world sign, meaning someone else had deliberately come through and done that. Could it have been Claire? Shawn smiled at the thought. The country collapsed into chaos as people abandoned towns. Could it be possible that the original government was still intact? Where were they now?

    As Shawn continued down the stretch of highway, he noticed something following him. It’s a blur at first, but it shaped into the many forms of zombies. They were on his heels again, tracking him like bloodhounds so soon after he shook them off. Five of them were on his trail. Shawn could have double backed and wipe them out. But he only had a couple shots left in his six-shooter. One of those shots he wanted to reserve for himself just in case. He would not give the zombies the satisfaction of him turning into them. He could have used the long knife in his sheath, but he did not have the energy to swing the knife accurately given the current twilight. What if he missed their sweet spot?

He had more important things to do other than exact his wrath on the undead at that moment. He found shelter in a cabin hidden off the road. The door was unlocked, and there were no zombies in the area, a stroke of luck. He hoped the place would confuse the zombies following him and they would disperse. Zombies didn’t exactly have critical thinking skills.

The cabin was unusually organized. There were fresh blankets in the two bedrooms, freshly made. Food was stocked in the kitchen cabinets, mostly ravioli in a can and bottles of water. He took a can and a bottle and laid on the couch in front of the defunct television. Shawn had a vivid image of watching programs in his own home before the zombies came. He remembered basketball. He loved watching and playing basketball before though Claire hated it. He would have given anything for Claire to tell him to turn the game off so they could have dinner one last time.

Those times were so simple back when he did not have to live as if every day were his last.

Muffled voices rustled outside the walls, not zombie croaks of despair but living ones. Shawn panicked. He should have known. How could he have been so stupid? Everything in this place was too perfect. This was a home, and Shawn was trespassing.

    He jerked himself out of his trance of a time nearly forgotten. He had no time to flee out the back door. As he stood, the doorknob on the front door turned. With several quiet steps he ducked into an empty closet in the same room. He shut the door just in time for the front door to open.

    “Get in!” said a brusque voice.

    Shawn peered through the slats in the closet door. It wasn’t a perfect view and he was slightly nearsighted. He made out the figures of two men and a woman. The woman was blindfolded and was forced onto the couch. The man with the gruff voice wore a long, tangled beard while the other man is clean shaven to appear younger than he really was. Both of them wear long coats and rifles. Shawn, always so careful about what he did at all times, knew he messed up big this time. He was trapped in the closet with no way out except through the survivors in the same room. Even his heart felt like it was thumping too loudly.

    The clean faced man, with a softer voice but with an underlying cruelty, says to the prisoner, “You got one chance, girlie. Talk. Where are they?”

    Shawn could only see the back of her head.

    “I don’t know,” she said.

    “Wrong answer, honey.”

    The rough man with the beard grabbed hold of her pinkie and bent it slightly. The woman squeaked in pain.

    “Here’s the deal,” said the clean-shaven man. “Tell us where your government friends are hiding, or Patchy here is going to break all your fingers, one by one.”

    It was at this point, Shawn knows he had to do something. Torturing anyone like that was cruel and unusual. He had two shots left in his gun. Men like these two did not stop until they got what they want. They were the kind of outlaws who put still moving zombie heads on pikes outside their camp to ward off other survivors.

    A pause, and then the woman spoke up. “Shove it.”

    Shawn’s brain went into overdrive as the next few moments blurred together. Shawn hopped out of his hiding place in the closet with his gun drawn. Two bangs from his weapon and several shrieks later, the two outlaws laid on the floor by the couch with a bullet in each of their heads. Shawn’s hand shook as he put his six-shooter away and rushed over to the woman’s side. He had killed before, but this time feels a lot more personal.

    The woman cries out in pain as Shawn removes her blindfold. Her eyes are blue like the sea with nut brown hair. In that instant, he knew.

    “Claire,” he gasped.

    Through her pain, she smiled in mutual recognition. “Oh, Shawny.”

    “Are you hurt?”

    “My finger. They broke it.”

    Shawn taped a hand washing towel from the bathroom around his wife’s crooked hand. After, he sat back and gushed words like a waterfall from a steep cliff. Once he gets rolling, he can’t stop.

    “I’m so sorry,” says Shawn. “I’m so sorry. I didn’t think I’d ever see you again.”

    Claire smiled ear to ear like in the photo. She is speechless. Over the last twenty or so years, the chances of finding each other again continued to dwindle so far they had a better chance of winning the lottery in the old world. Yet here they were, sitting on the same couch together, forever changed by this ruined world.

    Shawn continued, “I’m so sorry about what I said at the airport. They were the last words I said to you and I know it was wrong and–.”

    Claire put a finger from her uninjured hand on his lips.

    “Shut up,” she says. “It doesn’t matter anymore. You have nothing to be sorry about.”

    To have lost each other for so long and then to reunite under these horrible circumstances. Shawn put his arm around Claire and let her lean against him like in the photo. After many minutes, perhaps an hour, Shawn spoke up again.

    “What information were they trying to get?” asked Shawn.

    Claire sighed. “They were looking for our safe zone.”

    “Safe zone? Like a town?”

    “Yeah. Kind of like a town. We got food, shelter, walls, everything we need to live. We almost don’t have to go outside the safe zone anymore.”

    “But you did,” said Shawn.

    “I never stopped looking for you, even when everyone was telling me you were dead.”

    Shawn took out the photo from his jacket. “I found our wedding photo today at the waystation.”

    “That’s our honeymoon,” she giggled. “You don’t remember?”

    “It feels like a lifetime ago.”

    “Everyone’s life expectancy is so short these days, it basically is.”

    “Why were we dressed so formal?”

    They laughed together at something they could not remember. Shawn’s laugh came out garbled, warped by the seriousness of the wasteland. They slept together on the couch with the two dead people on the floor, lost in each other’s embrace.

    Dawn edged them awake. There was no further disturbance during the night, not even of zombies.

    Claire hurried despite her injured hand. “We have to go. The settlement these men are part of are dangerous and they will come looking for these two.”

    Shawn picked himself a new rifle and ammunition from the dead on the floor. Claire filled Shawn’s backpack with several bottles of water from the kitchen cabinet. They left the cabin and jogged at a brisk pace towards the west, away from the morning sun.

    Shawn followed his wife through the brush. They padded quietly through the woods in case of zombies, or worse, were nearby. They followed the stream on their right side the whole day, stopping a couple times to rest and to eat whatever camp made jerky Shawn had left. They made their way out of the woods and onto the broken road towards the end of the day. Claire said they were close and outlaws never came so close to their safe zone.

    “What’s it like, this safe zone?” asked Shawn.

    “Well, it’s kind of how the old world used to be like. It’s not the same, of course, but it’s the closest I ever got in two decades. Think of a rural small town. Kind of like that.”

    “I guess seeing is believing.”

    Midafternoon arrived as Claire led Shawn on the stretch of a man-made dirt road leading to what looked like a metal fort. As they made their way closer, a large piece of faded fabric came into view attached to the gate. It’s the familiar red and white stripes with a blue square of stars in the left quarter. Shawn heard God Bless America playing in his head.

    “Old Glory,” said Shawn.

    “Welcome back,” said Claire, “to America.”