This is the twenty-second chapter of the zombie serial The Dead Life. You can learn more about the story over at the project hub. This series originally ran on Haunted MTL but is being edited and updated in the lead-up to new installments to continue the story.
You can read the prior chapter here.
Day 25
The worst part of the morning for everyone at the camp was the morning constitutional. Unfortunately, with no running water or indoor plumbing, the bathroom arrangement was a horrid shock to the system and probably one of the things Dani hated most about the apocalypse.
Aside from the ravenous cannibalistic corpses, of course.
The camp’s bathroom setup was simple enough: the survivors had cleared out one of the units, and some shelving and boxes enclosed the entrance, with some shower curtains strung across for some privacy. From there, everyone would do their business in an individual bucket that they’d have to empty later through a gap in the fencing at the western end of the lot.
It was the return of the chamberpot. Things really had regressed.
The closed curtain with a hanging air freshener on display indicated occupied space. For good measure, Bob had found a “Pawdon My Mess” sign out of some grandmother’s unit and hung it inside the unit. Dani had begun to despise the cloyingly sweet puppy on the placard. Everyone gave one another a wide berth when it came to ‘shit-central’ as Bob had taken to calling it.
Water was rare. Thankfully, sanitizer and toilet paper were comparatively less rare than water. The group had managed well enough, but soon they would need water beyond what they’d scavenged. Nobody had bathed in weeks; it had been at least a month since any rain had crossed the sky, and there was no luck with water catches beyond the promise they would eventually work when the weather would finally be on their side.
Dani stepped out from shit-central, holding the bucket away from her, glancing around. She hated this. Even worse, however, was the makeshift latrine on the other side of the fence, right next to Bob’s trailer. He’d been kind enough to avert his eyes as she approached with the bucket; she disappeared behind a pair of shelves he had set up as a privacy marker.
She drained the bucket down the pipe that drained into the caustic pit. As the shame sluiced through the pipe, landing with an audible plop, she gazed across the street. Thankfully, the lone ghoul she had spied hadn’t seemed to notice her. She watched it stumble aimlessly across the road. The last thing she wanted was a walking dead man falling into a pit of shit. It would be too much to bear.
“The pool chemicals have helped out quite a bit, keeping the rankness down,” Bob said as she stepped out, bucket lighter but no less traumatizing. “I wish we could have dug a bigger latrine, though,” he added.
Dani placed her bucket on the ground behind the shelf and glanced at the old man. “Please never talk to me if you see me using this spot. Please.”
He saluted her and turned his attention back to his book.
“Doesn’t the smell get to you?” She asked.
“It beats the dead.”
He had a point. Maybe.
“Tell you what, though, there is a reason I don’t open the back window of the trailer.”
Bob’s trailer, the one he lived in as the “security” of the storage business, illegally before the end of the world, had been parked against the metal-barred fence to shore up a portion of it. He hadn’t objected to the decision to dig the latrine next to him.
Hell, he helped dig the thing over the course of a day, dodging ghouls and taking shifts with Dani, Jimmy, and Edgar.
“Danielle. You got nothin’ to worry about. I don’t mind being here at this spot. It’s where all my books are.”
Dani glanced at the bookshelves he had erected for a privacy wall, and sure enough, he seemed to have added to his library, somehow. The shelves rested comfortably beneath the pop-up he designated as a library.
“Truth be told,” he rose from a salvaged recliner, “I have an idea and could use some help with this situation…”
Dani reflexively nudged the bucket further back with her foot as he approached.
Bob put his hands on his hips and stared at his feet, a frequent gesture he made when working toward something. Generally, his instincts were good, and she was already intrigued.
“I didn’t find a shed or nothin’ in any of these units. I know it was a long shot, but I had hoped maybe some taxman or someone had bought one and never assembled it. If I had a shed, I could rig us up an actual head.”
“Head?”
Bob laughed.
“Sorry, old habits. Bathroom. I could rig us up a bathroom that can work with that latrine, especially if we dig it further and get some more of those pool chemicals.”
“No more shit-central?”
“Baby girl, we’re talkin’ shit-palace.”
Dani and Bob laughed a bit at this.
“If you can get me something from the Hardware Depot down the road… one of those sheds, I can repurpose that toilet we found last week, the one that was still boxed up.”
Bob paused and coughed a bit. It was deep and rattling, less of a sign of imminent danger or illness and more of his general age.
“Excuse me. I’d also need some pipes and all the plastic bins we can get our hands on, but… well… I think everyone would feel a hell of a lot better, and once the rains kick in, I think we could be doing pretty well for ourselves.”
Dani nodded. “That sounds doable. We’ll see when Edgar gets back about arranging a trip down the road.”
“Edgar is still out?”
“Yeah, scouting that place across the street.”
“He seems like a good guy. I hope he’s being careful.”
“Me, too. Though…”
“If you’re gonna say something about him having that gun on him, I get it, kid. I do. But you gotta also think about it from his perspective. Most of us here know nothing about one another.”
“I know, and you’re right. That’s why I am not making a big deal of it.” Dani reached into her left pocket and pulled out the copy of Dracula. “By the way, the kid is done with Dracula and wants to borrow something else.”
“Oh god, yeah, absolutely. Has she read The Hobbit?”
“How the hell would I know?”
“Well, take it to her.” Bob walked over to the shelving and scanned the rows until he found a small, silver-colored paperback featuring a mist-shrouded mountain on the cover. He handed it to Dani.
“Thanks, I am sure she’ll love it.”
“You know, you can take a book, too. Don’t think I haven’t noticed you only either working or hiding in that Airstream for the past week.”
Dani took that in for a moment, not registering it entirely until she replayed what he had said. She suddenly found herself on the back foot. It was a sudden, uncomfortable shift to be chastised for not reading given the circumstances, but self-consciousness won out, and she wheeled for an excuse.
“I’ve never been much of a reader.”
“I can’t think of a better time to start. No more Simpsons.”
Dani sighed. “Yeah, okay. What do you recommend?” She paused, then continued, “And if you say anything Amy Tan, I’ll feed you to one of those dead things on the streets.”
“Not a fan?”
“No, just… had a teacher at community college in an English class who kept saying that I was going to love the book, and it was very relatable. Didn’t even understand I was fucking Korean. It was embarrassing.”
“Gotcha.” Bob scanned the shelves and, after a few moments, added, “Okay, well, how about this?”
Dani took the book from Bob. The cover was faded, torn in a corner, and the spine was so cracked that any of the text was now illegible.
She scanned the cover. “Shane? Is this a western?”
“Yeah, not a fan?”
“Didn’t say that… I used to watch True Grit with my dad. A lot of John Wayne movies, actually. He was obsessed with the guy.”
“Yeah, we talked about The Green Berets a few times. Your dad was – is – a good man.”
“Yeah, pretty sure he is dead, honestly,” she replied, almost reflexively.
They were both silent after that. All that broke that stillness was an occasional caw of a carrion bird. They’d been so active the past few weeks, and it wasn’t pleasant to consider why.
“Dani, it’s only been a month.”
“And look how bad things are, everyone is dead, in hiding, or is fucking with everyone else. I know my mom and dad. They wouldn’t make it. He was too trusting of everyone.”
“He was a good man.”
“So are you, but you can be a son of a bitch when you need to, Bob. He never could. Mom walked over him. I got away with all sorts of bad shit. I loved him, loved them, but I’m not holding out hope.”
“I’m sorry, kid; you’re probably right, but damn, I don’t like you going there so easily. The minute you’re broken, I think we’re all screwed.”
She took in a sharp, quick breath. How could she tell Bob that she had been broken before the end of the world? She was relieved to have that AirStream with that locking door so that she could just get away from everyone.
Everyone listened to her, spoke to her, but she refused to speak about what was going on in her head. She didn’t like that so many decisions about the camp had fallen to her when she wasn’t even sure she’d have a reason for living in a state of perpetual fear for much longer.
“I’m fine, really,” she replied.
The scars on her thighs throbbed – a brief instant of dull pain that ebbed into a dopamine flow of some sense of control, albeit briefly. She’d started cutting again; it had started up the day when she had to club her undead neighbors to pulp.
“Well, just give the book a try, okay?”
“Sure.” She wasn’t sure if she would.
A sharp burst of static made her jump, and she looked to the walkie-talkie that Bob had set on a box near his chair. Alicia’s voice rang out, “Dani, are you there? My mom’s leg is really hurting again, and I am not sure what to do.”
Dani walked over and picked up the walkie. “Sure thing. I’ll be there in a moment, okay?”
Another crackle, and Sandy’s voice came through: “I thought these were for emergencies?”
Dani couldn’t help herself. “Yes, we’re dealing with an injury, you’re just being annoying. Over and out.”
Bob snorted.
They’d managed to find four of the devices, and they had been very careful about using them. Come to think of it, Dani remembered, the fourth handset was in her trailer.
“I wasn’t aware Alicia had one. Did Edgar ask for one earlier?”
Bob had slumped down into his chair.
“He didn’t, he said the sound might draw too much attention as he was scouting the place.”
Dani didn’t like that. She had already felt foolish for not using the walkies effectively days ago when Edgar had to make the pied piper run around the block to divert the ghouls. Nobody had remembered that they had them as they waited out the moment, and it was a complete shitshow. Since then, they’d been strategic about who had them… mostly. Sandy protested not having one, so she was ostensibly a “scout” in the second-story apartment above the office.
“He should have taken one. He could have taken mine.”
“Hey, I told him to grab one, and he said he wouldn’t want to risk it.”
“Fuck.”
“Yep.”
Dani shook her head and began to walk toward the back of the yard. Still a shitshow. A shitshow she had been seemingly pushed into managing. She felt lacking.
As though it were a reminder, the couple of spots on her thigh throbbed again. She embraced the pain, briefly, until the sound of three sudden pops in the air caught her attention. Gunfire.
She had turned and seen Bob scramble to his feet, craning his neck to look through holes in the fencing to get an idea of what had happened. Dani jogged up.
“Across the street,” he said. “Sounded like gunshots, right?”
The sounds had erupted across the street where Edgar had been scouting.
“Sounds like he might have found somethin’, Danielle.”
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Aaah, literature as entertainment, what a world! With a simpsons quote