Adoration

worship, love

caring, trusting, venerating

good, wonderful, apathetic, deaf

disinteresting, unfeeling, disdaining

unresponsive, mediocre

Indifferent

Chapter Twenty

Back at the camp everyone is up and moving. Tom is packing away the tent, Carl is skinning a squirrel, Dad is organizing the remaining supplies, Lila is putting out the fire, and even Byron is folding up the blankets and sleeping bags. Dad is the first to look up as we enter our little campsite. His eyes grow wide when he sees the two kids trailing behind me and Persistence.

“Everyone,” I say loudly, “this is Robin and Harris.” No one moves. I continue by pointing to my dad, “Robin, Harris, this is my Dad, Jared, that’s Byron, Carl, who is my brother, Lila, and Tom.” Robin hides behind my legs, but Harris stands his ground.

It is Byron who breaks the silence, “Cute little things ye be,” and he laughs, his perfect teeth showing through his scraggly beard.

“I’m assuming they were alone?” Dad asks.

“Of course they were alone, Dad! I couldn’t just leave them there.”

Carl goes back to skinning the squirrel, “Going to have to shoot a few more.” His voice is blank.

I give the kids a bottle of water and a box of graham crackers. They sit down on a log and eat while I help finish putting the camp away. I see Mom’s box lying on top of a pile of Dad’s shirts.

I go over to where Dad is doing a final sweep to be sure we haven’t left anything behind, “When do you want to do it?”

He sighs, “I don’t know, somewhere she will be happy…I wish we were home. She would love to be in her garden.”

I pause, “Yeah, I know. Maybe when we find a place to settle we can plant one?”

“Yeah, maybe,” and he swings an old, dirty, brown backpack over his shoulders.

We begin our walk. I end up carrying Robin after about an hour. We are still heading west, following the sun overhead. Dad fumbles with a road map he found in the back of a soccer mom van. Avoiding the main roads has worked pretty well thus far, we usually only encounter one or two zombies a day.

I see the first one up ahead. It spots us as we cross a field from one road to another. This one is fast. I hear it let out a shriek. It is definitely a male zombie, loud and booming despite the high frequency. We have to kill it to avoid others coming. I set Robin down, whose hands dug into my shoulders the moment the creature's mouth opened.

I pull my thrower out. I wait and square my feet as the thing stumbles at me over the dry clods of dirt. I wait until it is in range. I wait and breathe. I let her fly. It lands perfectly, blade down, point straight in the forehead. Its shrieks are cut off. I jog over to the corpse and pull my knife out. I stick it in the dirt to absorb the black blood.

I run back to the group that has kept on moving as though nothing has happened. Harris looks at me with a terrified admiration of sorts, which makes me feel guilty. I feel my heart growing heavy. Robin is holding her brother’s hand, tears falling down her dusty, sunburned cheeks. I hadn’t thought before that they might not be used to this sort of thing having been trapped in the house since it began back in May. She looks at me through hidden glances, but not for very long. I hope she will forget.

The days carry on much in the same way until one day in late September, I assume, we reach the shores of Lake Michigan.

It’s midday, the high noon sun is warm through my jeans and stretched out blue tee. All this walking in the sun has me sweating just a bit, but there is a breeze coming from the west that has a cold tinge to it. I watch the top of the cottonwood and pine trees sway in the wind. Fuzz from one of the many cottonwoods passes under my nose.

If things were normal my mom would probably still be alive, clinging, but alive with modern medicine in her, and I would be entering my freshman year at college to study business. I would be lugging furniture up to a tiny dorm and trying to make new friends with corny jokes on the first day instead of lugging around a backpack and machete.

The land around us is rolling hills, the dune grass has gradually been getting longer and I can feel it stick to my jeans, almost like little razors. There are pines scattered in the hills with half their roots sticking above ground making little mazes of dirt and shadow, and I can see where the land turns to sand and soil again. The sky is dotted with wispy clouds far between each other with beautiful blue in between. I look at the blue lake and sky. I am reminded of Mom. It was her favorite color, and I think Carl was right. This is why. It is so open and calming and new. Maybe it reminded her of Heaven, but today I make a silent promise to myself to let it remind me of a new life.

Robin and Harris are tired, having been walking over the hills all day. Tom carries Harris over his shoulders and I carry Robin. Given her shift in weight I think she has fallen asleep up there. We climb one more hill and at the top I see the sunlight glinting off the water right at the bottom of the dune. I look at Tom to my left, who is already smiling from ear to ear; I break into a small laugh looking at him. To my right I hear my dad let out a sigh of relief.

My laugh wakes Robin up. I feel her wiggle with excitement. This is what we have been looking for. I set the wiggly Robin down and she takes off running down the sand hill towards the water. Tom takes Harris down who bolts after his sister. I can’t take the anticipation anymore and I run down after them. I feel the sun beating on the top of my head, but the breeze from the lake cools me.

We play in the water, heated to a decent temperature this late in the summer, yet still cold as Lake Michigan always is. Robin and Harris begin digging in the sand with an old green flip-flop that has washed up on shore. Persistence digs a hole twice as fast next to theirs, tail wagging with all this enthusiasm for once.

I look down the shoreline where Tom and Carl are looking through the tough grass for driftwood. Farther ahead of them, Byron is kicking sand up in the air as he walks a zigzag line for some unknown reason. I turn my head and see Dad behind me. He is just standing with his hands behind his back. He looks reminiscent, and I can only imagine he is thinking of Mom and how she should be here with us safe and sound. I’ll leave him alone to his thoughts. I run over to the kids and help them dig their hole deeper.

By the time the sun begins to set we have set up a fire, backed on one side by a sand dune that has eroded so that it is straight up and down. On the other side of us we have the lake. We arrange our tents to be against the sand wall.

“We can probably find some vacation rental cabins a few miles down the shoreline and I can guarantee there will be fishing poles in one of them,” Dad says as we all sit by the fire in the dark.

“Fishing? I love fishing!” Harris shouts.

“Oh yeah?” I ask, “When have you gone fishing before?”

“We haven’t,” says Robin matter of fact.

Harris gives her a glare and tries to roll the log they are sitting on so she loses her balance. “I haven’t done it, but I’ve seen it on T.V. and I did it on the Wii. So I know I like it.”

“Ok, well then you will be the first person I take with me, Harris,” Tom says from next to me. It isn’t long after this that Robin and Harris fall asleep leaning on each other. Dad offers to take the first watch tonight. So Carl heads off to the tent he and dad shares and Tom and I carry the kids into a bigger tent we four share. I zip up the tent and watch Persistence sit right by Dad’s side as they both stare at the full moon over the lake before I zip the sight closed.

The tent is just getting hot enough that my eyelids flutter open. I stay there next to Tom, who is still out like a light, listening. In the early morning I hear gulls and songbirds mixed together. Louder than the birds I hear a body slump into the soft sand outside my tent. I rush to the zipper door and step out to see Dad wiping off an old buck knife. A zombie lay at his feet.

“Only one I’ve seen all this time,” he smiles and slides the knife into his back pocket.

“Well then I guess we can call this place home, Dad,” I say. I bend down to grab the zombie by the ankles and begin to drag him away. My plan is to take him around and over the sand dune to burn. We have to start picking up our trash if this is to be our home.

The smell of the burning rotten flesh fades from my senses as I walk back down the hill, but it doesn’t fade from my memory. The last time I smelled this was back at the farm. I thought the more I had to do, the more I took on in our family after, taking care of the kids, going out looking for more food, that maybe, just maybe, Mom would leave my head more and more, but it is just the opposite. So far time isn’t healing this wound.

We spend all day playing in the sun. Robin and Harris have never been to Lake Michigan before, and they run away from the cold water multiple times screaming before running all the way in. As we play, I observe. We must have walked up on state land because there are no houses dotting the shore for a good distance. Farther down I see a few lake homes. We will have to check them out tomorrow, maybe we can even stay in one, and perhaps tonight will be our last night of camping. We fall asleep, our faces red with sunburn.