Posted on July 24, 2007

The Hole: Part 22

The man looked over his shoulder at an older fellow who’d come up behind him. This latter farmer, dressed in the same simple but well tended style–though his shirt was torn and his left leg sported a painful gash–had a look of leadership about him. His weathered face, deeply lined and leather dark, wouldn’t have been out of place staring from a Depression era photo of sharecroppers. He nodded at the younger man, who continued.

“She’s fine,” he said. “She’s being taken care of. Evajean got some scrapes and bruises, and she sprained her wrist in the accident, but she’s doing just fine.”

Elliot did start to cry then, dropping the shovel and falling to his knees, heels of his hands pressed into his eyes. She was safe. That’s all he needed to hear, to know everything that’d happened in the hours since the truck hit the boy and he’d come awake upside down at the bottom of the hill hadn’t been wasted effort. Nothing he’d done had helped her, not if these people were telling the truth, but he didn’t care. She was safe.

“The dog’s okay, too,” the man said, and laughed. “In case you were wondering.”

Elliot smiled and coughed on his tears. “I was,” he said. “Thank you.”

“Oh, nothing to it.” And the young man turned again to the elder and they conferred in whispers while Elliot got to his feet and leaned the shovel against the cave wall.

“We should be leaving now,” the man said and put his hand on Elliot’s forearm. “It’s safer back in town than out here. We’ve seen a lot of these things.” He nudged the corpse of a crazy with his boot. “There’s probably more out there and we’ve lost men.” This last he said not with the cracking emotion Elliot expected but matter-of-factly, like a coach admitting his team was down twenty-one points at the half.

“Okay,” Elliot said. “Okay, we should go. Where?”

“Nahom.” He grinned. “Our slice of heaven on earth.”

With that, the men began gathering their dead, while the wounded were tended to and patched enough to make the journey back to the town. The crazies had killed four of their number, a fortunately small amount, Elliot saw, as his rescuers waded around the nearly two dozen corpses they were responsible for.

“You’ve fought them before?” Elliot asked the older man, who’d remained stationary throughout the preparations, arms crossed behind his back. The response to this question was a curt nod and no eye contact and Elliot nodded himself before walking to the mouth of the cave and looking out at the night.

The dense stars and full moon shown white light over the tiny valley. Men dragged corpses into piles while some, armed with torches, set the bodies on fire. Thick smoke rose greasy from the pyres and the smell, much to his disgust, reminded Elliot that he hadn’t eaten in perhaps half a day.

Shortly, the men finished their work. Their dead they carried, by the arms and legs or across the back. Elliot was reminded of that first day he’d spoken with Evajean, when they’d had dinner. Carrying Henry looked much like this. He was tremendously glad he’d get to see Evajean again and he hoped it wouldn’t be too long back to Nahom.

As they walked out of the valley, the one who had spoken to him before approached Elliot, the sadness of loss now visible in his eyes. “These men fought well,” he said, as if Elliot had questioned that. Then he nodded. “They fought with the righteousness of blood atonement.”

That didn’t sound good, Elliot thought. He changed the subject. “I’m Elliot Bishop,” he said, holding his arm out to the man.

“Elder Andrews.” He shook Elliot’s hand. Up close, out of the dim light of the cave and under the bright moon, Elliot figured Andrews couldn’t be more than twenty-eight, and probably three years younger at least.

“And you live out here?” Elliot asked.

“In Nahom.”

“I mean, you live out here in the mountains?”

“Our town’s not very big so–”

“A hundred and forty,” Elliot said.

“You saw the sign? Yes, a hundred and forty. Or so,” he added. “So you could say it’s ‘out here in the mountains,’ I suppose.”

“And you’ve run into them before?”

Andrews made a gesture with his chin, towards the cave. “Do you mean those people back there?”

“The zombies,” Elliot said.

Andrews laughed at this, a bright sound that was startling in the heavy night. “Is that what they’re called? We don’t have a lot of contact with any of the big cities and don’t watch TV, so I don’t know, but is that what people are calling them now?”

Elliot shook his head. “Just what Evajean and I call them. We thought they were like the things in the movies.”

“I don’t know about those,” Andrews said, “but I like that word. Zombies. It does fit.”

Not really, Elliot thought. Not at all. They were crazies and they thought and talked and were smart. Definitely not like zombies. But for some reason he didn’t want to say so to this man. Calling them crazies to Elder Andrews struck him as wrong. He couldn’t come up with a good reason why, though.

Andrews said, “But to answer your question, yes, we’ve had quite a few dealings with the zombies in the last– Oh, I’d say in the last month. A few showed up in Nahom, just walking down our little main street, speaking in tongues. You’ve heard them do that?” he asked. “I assume, with the time you spent–”

“I heard it,” Elliot said. “It’s like another language.”

“Oh, I wouldn’t say that. They’re sick, is what I think, and disease has made them mad. That’s all it is.”

That’s not all it is, Elliot thought. And he knows it. He knows it’s a language and not just babbling but he doesn’t want to say so. He’s lying.