Faith.
It gives us meaning and purpose. It strengthens and comforts us.
It also blinds us.
Faith means believing in what you can’t see. But sometimes you believe in something so badly, you don’t see the truth that’s right in front of you. Sometimes you don’t want to see. The truth can be a hard thing to face. The truth hurts.
Faith helps us heal.
“Hear my cry, O GOD; attend unto my prayer;
From the end of the Earth will I cry unto Thee, when my heart is overwhelmed;
Lead me to the rock that is higher than I;
For Thou hast been a shelter for me, and a strong tower from the enemy.”
(Psalm 61: 1-3)
Thursday, October 4, 2012
Week Twenty-Four
The Georgia countryside, with its rolling, red hills and thickets of towering cedars and oaks, was a mere reflection in the rearview mirror, and as the pick-up truck rounded a curve in the road, the Atlanta skyline loomed ahead through the dusty windshield.
“Country roooooads… take me hooooome… to the plaaaaace… I belooooong…” Brian crooned along to the John Denver tune blasting out of the truck’s speakers. The song was more than appropriate for their journey; still, he couldn’t help but make a few slight modifications to the lyrics. “’Lanta, Georgia… mountain mama… take me home… country roads…”
“Nick’s rubbing off on you.” Brian looked over at Gretchen, sitting shotgun beside him. She was grinning.
“Nah, if I was like Nick, we’d still be playin’ ‘Thriller,’” he replied. “This stuff is more my speed.”
When Gretchen’s iPod had finally run out of juice, they’d perused the music collection left behind in the glove box by the truck’s former owner. He must have been a good ol’ boy; it was mostly all country and folk music. Gretchen wasn’t a fan, but Brian had enjoyed listening to John Denver, Willie Nelson, James Taylor, and Johnny Cash – artists his Kentucky-born father had listened to, the kind of music he’d grown up with. The words and melodies were familiar, and he’d sung along, his Southern-tinged tenor well-suited to the style of the songs.
It was almost possible to pretend he was going home, even though they wouldn’t make it as far north as Marietta, let alone his native Kentucky. That was okay, though. He never wanted to see Marietta again. There were too many memories there. Even the familiar landscape outside Atlanta was marred by reminders that he could never go home again – abandoned vehicles clogging the freeway, downed road signs and power lines that no one had bothered to repair, animal carcasses that had been savaged by hungry zombies rather than speeding cars. The stench of death was in the air from all the rotting bodies still roaming around; they could smell it even with the windows rolled up.
Brian wouldn’t have thought it possible, but the trip back up to Atlanta seemed to have taken even longer than coming down had. The lanes leading to the city seemed even more jam-packed than the ones coming out of it, a fact which Brian found odd, until Gretchen pointed out, “I bet people were trying to get to the CDC.” The Center for Disease Control… naturally, the sick would have flocked there, once it became clear the virus was an epidemic. Of course, by that point, it was too late for the poor people desperately seeking treatment; they had died on the way there.
But the traffic jams weren’t the only things blocking the roads. They’d also had fallen tree limbs, telephone poles, and power lines to contend with, souvenirs of the powerful storms of hurricane season that had not been removed, for who was left to clean up the damage? Parts of the interstate were impassable, and whenever Brian and Gretchen weren’t able to move the barricades themselves, they’d been forced to backtrack. It had taken days for them to meander through Florida and into Georgia, using good old-fashioned road maps to find alternate routes and back roads when the main ones led to dead ends. They stopped often to stock up on supplies and fuel, loading the truck bed with cans of gasoline and refueling when it was safe. Neither of them wanted to get stranded again, like they had before. They were wiser this time, more cautious, and as a result, the trip had been long, but uneventful.
Driving into the city, they passed a faded billboard advertising a concert that was to have taken place at Philips Arena at the end of April. Over five months ago, Brian thought, feeling dejected as he realized the concert had never happened; the tickets had never been used, and the people who had bought them were probably all dead or undead now, past the point of caring. As he looked again at the date on the towering sign, it occurred to him that he didn’t know the current date. The days had blended together, and somehow, over the course of their trip, he’d lost track. “What day is it?” he asked Gretchen suddenly.
Even she had to consult the road map, on which she’d marked the passing days with tallies. Out of the corner of his eye, he could see her counting on her fingers, just like the children she had once taught. After a minute, she said, “It must be Thursday. October fourth.”
“Kevin’s birthday was yesterday,” Brian realized, feeling guilty for forgetting it. He thought of his cousin, out west with Nick and Riley. “I wonder what they did to celebrate it.” He glanced over at Gretchen again. “You think they’re okay?”
“I hope so. I’m sure they are… Kevin knows what he’s doing, and Nick and Riley are both tough. They’ll be fine,” she said with a confidence Brian didn’t feel. Gretchen had seemed overly optimistic this whole trip, convinced she was going to find either her husband or at least some word from him waiting for her at home. Brian wasn’t so sure.
It was a slow crawl through the city. The undead residents of Atlanta roamed the streets, which were congested with cars. Gretchen set aside her map and tried to navigate by memory, but it wasn’t as easy as knowing which streets to turn on. They had to scope out the streets first, make sure they were passable and not overrun with zombies. Brian was reminded of one of those traffic jam puzzles. One move at a time, they forged a long, zigzagging path to Gretchen’s neighborhood, in an older section of the city. The streets were clear there; most of the cars were lined up neatly at the curb or parked in driveways and under carports. The houses were old and small and spaced close together, and weeds had erupted from the cracked sidewalks and tiny, overgrown lawns, but aside from the zombies shuffling aimlessly about, Brian found the neighborhood rather charming.
Gretchen looked out the window as he drove, her face pressed close to the glass, feeding him directions about where to turn as she searched desperately for signs of life – specifically, signs of Shawn. But as soon as they turned onto the street she said was hers, Brian could tell something was wrong. The houses on one side of the street looked especially ramshackle; siding was peeling off, bricks walls had bowed, roofs were caving in. They looked distinctly burned and blackened around the edges – unmistakable signs of smoke damage. “There’s been a fire here,” Brian said, easing his foot off the gas pedal. He looked out in awe as the truck crept forward.
“Keep going,” Gretchen urged. Her voice sounded quivery. “Our house is a few more down.”
Brian had a bad feeling, but he gave the truck some more gas, and they rolled on. The damage to the homes got worse and worse, until they reached a crumbling bungalow whose roof had been blasted half off. The glass in the windows was completely shattered; the front door was off its hinges. Gretchen drew in a shuddering breath, and with a sinking sensation, Brian realized it had to be hers.
“Oh god… oh my god,” Gretchen whimpered, her breath coming in quick little gasps. “What happened??”
“Lightning, I’d guess,” was Brian’s initial reaction, but then he added, “Looks more like an explosion, though. Maybe the gas line?”
“Oh god,” Gretchen said again, shaking her head in disbelief, as Brian pulled up to the curb.
Letting the truck idle, he turned to her. “Don’t expect Shawn to be here. The house is uninhabitable; it doesn’t look safe. But maybe he’s been back and left you a message. You wanna check it out?”
She nodded quickly, as he’d known she would. He shut off the engine and reached for the two rifles stowed behind the seats. He handed Gretchen one and held onto the other as they got out of the truck. “Take it easy, now,” he warned her. “Don’t forget to look and listen before you go runnin’ in there. For one thing, it’s not structurally sound; I don’t want something collapsing on you and you gettin’ hurt. And some of them could be hidin’ anywhere.”
Gretchen nodded again. She crept ahead of him, leading the way up the crumbled sidewalk to the house, her gun held out in front of her. He followed her up the uneven front steps to the concrete patio, which had a big crack running through its middle. Whatever had happened here, it had been forceful enough to rock the house right off its foundation.
Gretchen rushed ahead to the broken front door, and Brian saw her check behind it, poke around underneath it, fumble with the knob, and trace her finger around the perimeter of the narrow window, which had held a single pane of glass, now shattered at their feet. He knew she was searching for a note. She found nothing, though, so she went on inside.
Brian was nervous about going into the house, worried about the floor beams buckling or the roof falling in on them. But it didn’t seem too hazardous on the inside. The living room furniture was singed, but still in place, as far as he could tell. There was still a tattered book lying on the couch, a partially melted flashlight and an overturned bottle of wine on the coffee table. Gretchen made a slow circle around the room, looking at everything. Brian hung back, keeping watch at the doorway.
When she didn’t find what she was looking for in the living room, Gretchen moved on into the kitchen, which looked like a war zone. The cupboards had been blasted open; the wooden table and chairs had been reduced to mere kindling. The floor tiles were blackened and broken, and there was only a hole where the ceiling had been. There would be nothing from Shawn in this room.
“I’m gonna check the bedrooms,” Gretchen said shakily.
“I’ll stay here and keep a lookout. Be careful,” Brian replied. He waited, watching her walk down the hallway and disappear into the back of the house.
She was gone a long time. For awhile, he could hear her fumbling around, and then, an eerie silence filled the ruins of the house. Brian wasn’t worried about zombies; he knew he would hear their hungry moans if any had gotten in. Still, the longer he stood there, the more apprehensive he felt. “Gretchen?” he finally called softly, following the path she had taken down the short hall.
He found her in the master bedroom, sitting cross-legged on the floor in front of the dresser, her face buried in a navy blue hoodie. She must have heard his footsteps, because she looked up when he stopped in the doorway. Her face was red and tearstained.
“Anything?” Brian asked hesitantly, though he already knew the answer. She wouldn’t be crying if she’d found a message from Shawn.
Gretchen shook her head.
“Well, maybe… maybe he just hasn’t made it back here yet. Or maybe he did, but thought you were gone for good, with the house in the shape it is. Maybe he’s still out there, looking for you,” he suggested. He knew he shouldn’t be encouraging false hope, but he wanted to say something, anything, to console her.
“Do you think so?” Gretchen asked, her voice rising hopefully.
He didn’t answer.
Her face crumpled. “I never should have left …”
“You didn’t have much of a choice, did you?”
She sniffed and wiped her eyes with the sleeve of the sweatshirt. “I didn’t have to go so far away… I could have come back sooner…” Her voice was filled with regret.
Brian shifted his weight awkwardly, wondering if she blamed him for taking her all the way to Tampa. He didn’t regret it; his choice to try the Air Force base had been the right one. That much he was sure of.
“Don’t do that,” he chided Gretchen. “Don’t go back and cycle through all the ‘what ifs.’ You could have done a lot of things differently, but you might not be alive today if you had. You’re alive, Gretchen. Remember that. You survived, against all odds. Don’t you think Shawn, wherever he is, would be happy about that? Don’t you think that’s what he would have wanted?”
He cringed inwardly as he heard himself slip into past tense, but if Gretchen noticed, she didn’t react. She just nodded, staring down at the sweatshirt in her lap. “This was his,” she murmured, holding it up for him to see. He recognized the big yellow M on the front as the University of Michigan’s emblem.
“Go Wolverines,” he said dully. “Did he go to college there?”
She nodded. “Undergrad and med school. That’s when I met him, when he was finishing med school and I was teaching near Ann Arbor. We were so boring our first year of dating; all we did was study – well, he studied, while I graded papers. The only times we went on actual dates were on the weekend, if he wasn’t on call at the hospital. No going out on school nights.” She smiled tearfully. “I miss those days.”
Brian could relate. He thought back longingly to the early years of marriage with Leighanne, before the twins, when life was simple and carefree. They would have celebrated their eight-year anniversary just over a month ago. Instead, he was a widower, at the age of thirty-three. “Me too,” he told Gretchen. “I miss Leighanne and the girls more than anything. But I know they’re in a better place now, a much better place than we are.”
“I wonder where Shawn could be,” Gretchen sighed, missing his point – or perhaps just choosing to ignore it. “I’m going to leave him a message, in case he does come back here. And I want to pack up some things to take back with us. I’m going to take this…” She raised the sweatshirt to her face and inhaled deeply, closing her puffy eyes. “It smells like him.”
To Brian, everything in the house smelled like smoke and soot. “Do you need some help?” he offered.
“No.” Gretchen stood up slowly and looked around. “I’d rather do it myself. If you’d like, you can go out back to our tool shed and look for a can of paint. I want to paint a big message, something that he won’t miss.”
“That’s a good idea,” Brian agreed, thinking not just of Shawn, but of any other survivors. “Maybe we can take it with us and paint other messages on our way back, anywhere we stop along the way. That way, if there are any other survivors we missed, they’ll know where to go.”
Gretchen nodded vaguely, clearly preoccupied with thoughts of how to contact her husband. Brian had a feeling it would require a séance – not that he believed in such things. No, he doubted Gretchen would ever communicate with her husband again in this life, but she would see him on the other side – just as he would see his own wife and children. And Kayleigh. He had faith, once more, that he would see them all again in a place where the undead were not zombies, but resurrected souls at peace.
Leaving Gretchen to pack up her things, with a warning to keep her ears open and her gun handy, Brian snuck back outside and around the house, to the tiny backyard, where a neat little shed stood. The door were not locked, so he opened them wide and let himself in. He kept his gun in one hand while he looked around for paint. The shed was well organized, and it didn’t take him long to spot a few cans sitting on a shelf above the lawnmower, below some plant fertilizer and insecticides. He grabbed the closest one in reach and found a screwdriver to pry the lid open with. The small can was still full of paint, a creamy shade of butter yellow – good enough, he figured, as long as they painted on a dark surface. He found a wide-brimmed paintbrush nearby and slipped it into the pocket of his jeans.
The shed itself had light gray siding and a dark gray shingled roof – the perfect canvas on which to test out the paint. Brian dragged a small ladder out of the shed and set it up next to the exterior. He perched the paint can on top and climbed up carefully, holding his gun in one hand and trying not to look down. Thankfully, the shed wasn’t very tall; he’d always had a fear of heights. He reached for the paintbrush in his pocket and dipped it into the yellow paint, using long, sweeping strokes to spell out a message across one side of the slanted roof.
MACDILL AFB
TAMPA
Just as he put down the paint and leaned back to admire his handiwork, Brian heard an ominous moan. He looked down in time to scramble further up the ladder and out of the way as a lone zombie swiped at his ankles. Clinging frantically to his rifle, he pulled himself up onto the roof and straddled its peak.
His heart was pounding with adrenaline and fear, and his palms were sweating, but he managed to get a good grip on his gun and take off the safety. Aiming was more difficult; his hands shook, and he couldn’t seem to keep the barrel steady. He fired one shot and missed. The zombie scrabbled wildly at the ladder, looking almost agile enough to climb it in its soiled, gray jogging suit, even though it was decomposing badly. Thankfully, it seemed to lack the coordination, not to mention problem-solving skills, to actually do so. Brian took a deep breath to calm his racing heart, steeled himself, and shot again. This time, the zombie collapsed in a heap on the grass, mottled brains showing where the top of its skull had been blown off.
Brian’s relief was short-lived. The sound of gunfire had surely alerted the other neighborhood zombies to their presence, and soon, the whole mob would come stamping into the backyard. It was time to get Gretchen and go. He shimmied back down the ladder, bringing the gun, paint, and brush with him, and jogged up to the house. He took one last look over his shoulder at the shed and was glad to see that his letters were only slightly smeared; the message was still visible. He hoped someone still capable of reading would see it, even if Shawn never did.
“Gretch!” he shouted, as he entered the house. “We gotta go! I just shot one of your zombie neighbors.”
Gretchen emerged from the back of the house, dragging a big suitcase on wheels behind her.
“Got everything you need?” he asked.
She shrugged listlessly. “How do you decide what to take with you when you know you’ll never be back? I packed our photo albums, some clothes, a few of Shawn’s things.”
Brian nodded. “Sounds like you put in just the right stuff.” He wondered what he would pack, if they ventured on to Marietta. It didn’t matter – he didn’t want to go. Having his own family’s albums, mementos of Leighanne and the girls and the good times, would have meant a lot to him, but they weren’t worth the trauma of entering that house again, where he’d left the three of them to rot on the floor. He shuddered, forcing the memory out of his head. “C’mon, let’s get goin’.”
“Wait… I need to leave a message for Shawn…”
“I already did.” Brian explained quickly about the roof of the shed, showing her the can of paint he’d used.
Her eyes filled with a fresh batch of tears as she looked at the label. “Lemon Chiffon… this is the paint we picked out for the baby’s room.”
“Oh…” Brian’s heart sunk. “I’m sorry…”
“No…” Gretchen sniffed, wiping her eyes. “That’s okay. I’m glad it went to some good use. You know, I think I’m still going to write a quick note, just in case he doesn’t look in the backyard…”
Brian forced himself to wait while she found some paper and a pen and scrawled a quick note. She left it on the coffee table, using the wine bottle as a paperweight. She plucked the book off the couch and added it to her box of stuff, saying vaguely, “This was my mom’s favorite.” Then she wandered outside. Brian followed, worrying about the state of denial she seemed to have slipped back into. He blasted a few more zombies out of the way, while Gretchen loaded her box into the back of the truck, almost frighteningly calm.
She was even quieter than usual as he drove them back through the city, the John Denver CD still playing softly on its third or fourth repeat. It wasn’t until they were on the freeway, outside the city limits, that the breakdown Brian had known was coming actually came. “Leaving on a Jet Plane” had come over the speakers, and all of a sudden, Gretchen started to sob.
“He’s never coming back, is she?” she choked, crying so hard she could barely get the words out.
Brian slowed the truck to a stop, right in the middle of the lane, and shifted into park. He took his hand off the gearshift and placed it on Gretchen’s, rubbing his thumb over her knuckles. “No… I don’t think so,” he told her honestly. “But I know you’ll see him again when you get to Heaven. His soul will be there, waiting for you.”
She shook her head, too overcome to speak. The tears poured from her eyes, and this time, she made no attempt to wipe them away. She cried messily, her shoulders shaking, her lips quivering, her face breaking out in red splotches, like hives. And still, the music played on, the folksy voice singing, “So kiss me and smile for me… Tell me that you’ll wait for me… Hold me like you’ll never let me go… ‘Cause I’m leavin’ on a jet plane… Don’t know when I’ll be back again… Oh, babe, I hate to go…”
It alarmed Brian to see her so distraught. Not sure what else to do, he unfastened his seat belt and leaned across the front seat to take her in his arms. He held her close and let her cry against him, running his hand down the side of her head, smoothing her hair, as her tears soaked his t-shirt. And though she never saw them, his eyes brimmed briefly with tears of his own, as together, they took a time out to grieve for the loves they had lost.
