The World Without Crows Read online

  THE WORLD WITHOUT CROWS

  The World Without Crows copyright © 2017 Ben Lyle Bedard

  All Rights Reserved

  Cover by Raphael Koehler-Derrick

  to Matthew and Trina

  who believed in this book

  Table of Contents

  Table of Contents

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  1

  __________

  WOLF CREEK WILDERNESS AREA

  WHEN IT BECAME OBVIOUS the world was ending, Eric thought the worst part would be the people in the streets, screaming or laughing or crying, or how it was impossible to be sure which ones were infected. He thought the worst part would be the sight of great dump trucks full of corpses going down the road. Or the military who showed up toward the end and started shooting people. Or the fires in the distance or the gangs roaming the streets with guns. But it wasn't any of those things.

  "Eric," his mother said, her lips dry and flaky. Her eyes dripped blood. "Come here." He did. Her sweaty hand took him by the collar. "I never loved your father," she told him. "Sometimes I don't love you either. You're so much like him, Eric." She began to cry. "I'm so sorry."

  Everyone thought that the end was the time to tell the truth. As if lies were what brought on the worm. As if lies had doomed them all. The things people said to each other in those last days.

  The worst part about the world ending was honesty.

  _

  His mother was still alive when he started to form the plan. She was locked in her room. Eric left her a plastic jug of water by the bed. She didn't eat, but she drank. That was how it was with the Vaca B.

  The first part of his plan was to get books. In the time before the worm, a time that seemed more and more distant with each passing day, Eric loved the library. On Thursday nights, he and his friends would meet there to play AD&D. Bill, Andy, Jessica, and Glenn. He saw some of them wandering the streets of Athens, Ohio, like the rest of them, wandering until they found a body of water, then throwing themselves in to drink until they drowned. He didn't say anything to them. There was nothing to say and nothing he could do to help.

  Eric went to the library. There was a Zombie there. She had been a librarian once, part time. Andy used to have a crush on her. Her name was Janice. She was thin. She had glasses and her breath stank like coffee and rancid milk. All Janice did now was stand against the wall, scraping the wall with her bloody fingers. She was harmless, waiting to die. Most of them were.

  But there were others.

  In the back of the library, Eric found what he wanted. He took it down from the shelf. "The CALM Wilderness Survival Guide," by Walter Jakes. He wanted to look for more books, but Janice was scraping the wall. The sound of it in the silence terrified him.

  The night after he had gone to the library, he woke up to screams. Someone was screaming, "No! Leave me alone! Leave me alone! Please! No!" Eric ran to the window.

  Outside the moon was bright. There was a man, dragging one leg behind him. He was trying to get away from a cracked Zombie. It came after him slowly. The man must have shot him because the Zombie moved in lurches. It was slow but faster than the man trying to get away. The Zombie had black fluid running out of its mouth. Eric wanted to help the man, but he didn't know what he could do. Mostly he was too scared.

  The Zombie caught up with the man and started tearing apart his legs. The man was screaming. "NO! STOP! PLEASE!" But the cracked Zombie was eating his leg. The man hit the Zombie again and again, but it didn't stop. Finally the man passed out, and the Zombie ate for a while before it collapsed on top of him. By morning, they were both dead.

  Eric decided he needed a gun.

  _

  When the Vaca B broke out, Eric celebrated his birthday. It was August 12, 1989. He was 16 years old. He had a small party in his basement. Glenn was there. Jessica came late. The rest didn't make it. They spent the time eating confetti cake and making characters for their next campaign. Glenn rolled a clean 18 on three dice. They tried to get him to become a magic-user, but he put the 18 on Strength anyway. Glenn was a fighter. He was always a fighter. Jessica said he wanted to be a fighter all the time because he was so skinny. They laughed about that, but Glenn became angry. He tried not show it, but he was angry. It made Eric happy somehow. When they all left, Eric went into the living room where his mother was watching television and eating chips. She was watching the news.

  At the time, the military was fire bombing Houston.

  He sat beside her to watch, eating chips and licking the grease and salt from his fingers.

  _

  When the days seemed to get warm enough, Eric decided to leave. When Eric left Athens, he turned north on Columbus Road. The backpack he carried was very heavy. He hoped he would get stronger. It was a long way to Maine.

  When he got to the edge of downtown, he looked back. Athens was the town he had known most of his life. His mother worked at the University there. Now it was empty except for the Zombies who stumbled among the classical columns. He could still see the curling smoke from his burning house. He was crying. He had poured gasoline on her body and all over the house. He had lit the match. He loved his mother and now she was ashes.

  Eric tried not to cry. He had to grow up. He had to survive.

  The backpack was heavy. After an hour, he had to stop and breathe and take it off. He hadn't even crossed the 33 yet. It was rainy and cloudy and he was wet and miserable. Eric took the backpack off and sat on it.

  He looked at his boots and breathed heavily. He was so fat. Maybe it was a mistake. All of this. He could never make it to Maine.

  He looked at himself.

  Finally, he emptied out his backpack. He looked at what he had brought. He separated the necessary things. The book he had taken from the library said this about the survival pack:

  "Making a wilderness survival pack is fun! If you pack appropriately, there's no reason to fear the outdoors. No matter if you are in the desert or in marshes, in the forest or on the prairie, if you pack right, you'll be able to survive any climate. Then you can sit back, relax, and enjoy God's gift of nature, just as was intended!"

  Eric decided to leave behind some things. Books. Canned food. A hammer. The radio. The extra pair of boots. When he put the backpack on again, it was lighter, but still pretty heavy. The gun he had found in a neighbor’s house, nestled inside an old shoebox, weighed down his pocket, but he would not give it up. He would have to get stronger.

  When he came around a corner, he saw a billboard. He'd seen it many times before, but now it scared him. It was a picture of Jesus on the cross. He was covered in blood. His face was contorted in pain. HE SUFFERED FOR YOU! the sign read. Eric swallowed and put his hand on the gun that he kept at his side.

  Jesus looked like a Zombie.

  _

  The plan was simple.

  When Eric was young and his father had still taken him for a few weeks in the summer, Eric had flown to Portland, Maine. His father met him at the airport and they drove to Rangeley. His father had a cabin there. They would go out in his canoe and fish. Eric couldn't fish well. He didn't like killing worms. It frustrated his father. The skies were always blue like the water. The forests were green. At night, the loons would call over the water. He never wanted to go home. When his father brought him back to the airport, Eric always cried. He tried not to, he knew it irritat
ed his father, but he didn't want to leave. Then his father married another woman. She had two boys of her own. Eric got birthday cards for a while, but then they stopped.

  The plan was simple. He had to get away from the Zombies. He had to go somewhere defensible. Zombies drown themselves in water, so Eric thought he should live on an island. He should live on an island where the winters were so cold, all the Zombies would freeze to death.

  Eric wanted to go back to the lake in Maine. There was an island there. He got a map and, over several weeks, he carefully planned his route. He marked it with a red pen.

  He would have to walk. Having a vehicle was too dangerous. Zombies weren't the only danger. There were gangs now. For a boy like him, Eric thought, it would be best to avoid them. He was not tough. He had seen the gangs from the window in his mother's house. They were young men, mostly, with shotguns and rifles. They acted like the jocks he had known at school. He knew what they were like.

  He would go to Maine, to the lake. There, on his island, he would be safe.

  _

  Eric waddled when he walked. They called him Duck in the locker room, or Fat Fuck or Daffy Fuck, if they were feeling creative. His chin was suspended on a fold of fat. His stomach swelled up around him and drooped down in front of him. The boys in the locker room said he had tits. They grabbed and pinched them until he was black and blue. He wore sweat pants most of the time, and a large, plain sweat shirt.

  He had dark, greasy hair, flecked with lice-white dandruff. He hated to wash. He hated to see his body. He didn't like going in the bathroom because of the mirror. Whenever he saw himself, he felt despair seize him. He didn't know how it had happened. His father said his mother ruined him.

  His skin was pasty white.

  But he had nice blue eyes. He knew that. His mother said so.

  So did Jessica. That confirmed it. "You have such nice eyes, Eric," Jessica told him.

  Jessica was dead now.

  Eric knew that because he had seen her. She was in the street. Someone had shot her. The gangs did that sometimes. They drove through and shot whoever they saw, figuring they were Zombies. Maybe she was.

  Eric had liked Jessica a lot, even if her face was full of red, angry zits, and she was even fatter than he was. He thought maybe some day he would kiss her. It would have been his first kiss.

  Jessica had said he had nice eyes.

  It was the nicest thing a girl had ever said to him.

  _

  The first night, Eric camped north of route 33. He set up his tent about sixty feet away from Route 550, under a tree. He was tired and ached all over. His feet were sore. He boiled some beans, but they were still hard after a long time, so he fell asleep without eating. He'd never been so tired.

  He woke up in the morning to the squeal of tires. He came out of his tent with his gun in his hand and hid behind a tree to watch. On the road, there were two trucks. Men and women came out of the trucks laughing. They chained a Zombie up to the trucks, one arm to the back of each truck. Then the trucks drove away from each other. Eric looked away.

  The trucks came back and everyone got out to inspect what was left of the Zombie. They were laughing and joking and drinking. Then there was an argument. They were too far away to hear, so Eric didn't know about what. Suddenly two of them held a woman and another man took out a knife and stabbed her. She only screamed out once. He stabbed her for a long time. They left the corpses on the road behind them.

  After that Eric didn't walk on the roads.

  _

  On the second day, Eric got lost. He cut across 550 and, using his compass, headed northeast. He thought he would come to the Old Grade Road, but he walked and walked, through fields and forests and across roads and he did not come to the road he wanted. He felt panic in him, but kept moving. His backpack was heavy. His arms and back and legs and feet were in pain. It felt like his body was full of needles and when he walked, he was pierced by them. To lighten his pack, he threw out any extra clothes.

  It was late in the afternoon when he came to the cemetery. It was in a wedge-shaped field. In the distance, he could see the road he was looking for, and the fear of being lost left him. But he couldn't move any longer.

  Eric dropped his backpack at the edge of the cemetery. He was covered with sweat, even though it was only in the sixties, and there was a faint mist of rain falling. He took off his boots and saw that his feet were bleeding.

  Eric lay down for a long time. He cried for a while from the pain and the thought that he could never make it all the way to Maine.

  The rain pattered down on the leaves and on the grass that had grown around the graves. You could hardly see the gravestones anymore.

  Eric groaned, but roused himself. Painfully, he hobbled around and pitched his tent. He ate two granola bars. He wanted to cook more, he was so hungry, but he lay down for a moment. He listened to the quiet rain and the birds in the trees. It was spring, but the trees were still bare. He fell asleep there, outside his tent.

  He woke up in the middle of the night, freezing cold. He was shivering badly. His teeth chattered uncontrollably. He shook so much, he could hardly hold the lighter steady. Somehow Eric started a fire. Soon he sat near it gratefully and then, in the light of the moon, he dried his clothes as best he could before he crawled back into the tent and his sleeping bag to sleep.

  The next day he was so sore he could hardly move.

  _

  In the morning, Eric crawled outside his tent. There was a faint fog over the cemetery. Cold moisture clung to everything. Only the birds were awake. Their singing was all he heard.

  He felt he was the last person in the world.

  Humans in the end were fragile. They vanished in less than a year.

  He listened to the birds and felt the tears come. But he wouldn't let them. He had enough of tears. Instead, he walked to his backpack and brought out a pan. He went to a small pool in the forest and filled it with water before he returned, built a fire, and boiled the water. All water had to be boiled to kill the Vaca B.

  There were humans left, he reminded himself. A few. In gangs. They were dangerous.

  He waited for the water to cool and listened to the birds. He realized he had never paid much attention to birds. Now they were his only companions. The world belonged to them again, the birds, the deer, the creatures of the forest.

  Eric imagined all the cities of the world being reclaimed by animals. Deer in Paris. Bear in New York City. Tigers hunting in New Dehli.

  It was the end of the world and all the birds were singing.

  _

  Avoiding the roads, avoiding drawing any attention to himself, Eric planned to hike from Athens, Ohio to Maine. He would walk from state park to state park. In the forests, he would be safe from attention from gangs and Zombies. They would stay in the cities. Eric would go to Maine to the island. He would build a house there and live in peace and security. Eric thought about his plan much of the time.

  Eric remembered the signs.

  Maine: The Way Life Should Be.

  _

  He thought he could make it to Wolf Creek Wilderness Area by the third day, but he couldn't. It hurt too much to move and he had to stop often. His feet were bleeding now from a dozen blisters. He read somewhere that feet had to be looked after closely. As he limped forward, he understood why. If his feet got much worse, he would be helpless.

  He had to stop at a house. An old, gray clapboard house with a garage attached to it. Eric needed supplies. He had left most of his food behind. He still had beans, which were light, but he cooked them and cooked them, and they were still hard. He needed food and to take care of his feet.

  The house was empty. Already the grasses around the house were encroaching on it. The tame lawn was now feral and devouring its master. Inside a window had been left open, and the water that had come in warped the floor. Eric tried to shut the window, but he couldn't. He sat in the kitchen and took off his boots.

  His socks were r
ed with blood. He washed his feet with boiled water. He found some antibiotic lotion in the bathroom and used it. One blister was so large and painful, he had to skewer it with a needle so he could walk. Clear liquid burst from it. He would have cried out in pain, but what was the use of that? Who would hear? Who would care? He carefully wrapped his feet with bandages. He found some cotton socks in a drawer upstairs and he put them on. It was difficult because he was so fat, it was hard to work on his feet.

  There was not much food there. A can of spinach which he ate raw. It was delicious and he drank down the green water left in the can hungrily. He had never felt hunger like this before. It was not a craving, it was a painful necessity. The hunger made him feel like a ghost.

  On the way out, he saw the Zombie. It was standing in the door to the garage. It was an old man with a red plaid shirt and denim overalls. He had a bloody beard down to his chest. The old man didn't even look toward him as he moved away, quietly as he could. It was hard to tell which ones were dangerous. Some cracked. Most didn't.

  He had almost vanished when he heard the barking. The dogs came down out of the fields. They had scented the Zombie. Zombies had become easy prey to the dogs who were left. There were three of them, recently pets, Eric imagined. Now they fell upon the Zombie and ripped him apart. The Zombie was still moving as the dogs began to eat him.

  _

  Eric pitched his tent in Wolf Creek Wilderness Area near a pond. The weather was cold and wet. When he built a fire, Eric stared into the flames. He wondered if there was any use in living. It was the first time he had thought this so calmly. It did not come from sadness or grief or solitude. He sat quietly and considered suicide.