Rare Air
Part Six
"As for me, I did what I had been doing ever since that guy on the trail, ever since Sadie. I participated in people’s deaths."
"Type ones were obviously easier to deal with. Someone from our camp or another one of the smaller camps nearby would come along and list the usual symptoms and I would show up with my mostly worthless, ad hock bag full of medicines and distractions. Type ones hardly needed sedating, it was mostly just keeping watch over them and keeping them comfortable until their flu started to turn, then watching as they sat down and just, gave up the ghost."
"Type twos were the hard part but most folk kept coming to me as though I were some sort of expert on the issue. You sedate them, you restrain them sure, but mostly you sit down and play the extras in their fever demented plays, and you wait for that fever to burn them up until there’s nothing left."
"Still though, there were the people who just didn’t know better, or didn’t want anyone else to know. The ones who didn’t come to us at our little HQ until the screams and the shots and the fires had already started. Drew didn’t have it, that’s not calling him a coward or saying he was somehow lesser of a person, but he just didn’t have it. Kelly could go toe to toe with anyone of a right mind who wanted to start some shit, but she also didn’t have it.
Everyone called me because I had it."
"Eight or eighty, male, female, firm and most certainly infirm, I would come along and do what the loved ones and the friends, the next of kin, couldn’t bring themselves to do. I got so fucking tired of watching, so tired of standing still for so many years and just observing so I made the choice to always do something."
"Sometimes playing the extras in those demented fever plays means coming in to be the bad guy who wins in the end."
"Back when we were on the road before finding the campground, that had been my job. The ability to calmly watch over and rationalize with crazy, the ability to knock a gun out of someone’s hand and stick a knife in their throat. The need to distract with one hand and kill with the other, so be it."
"Distractions and the means to escape reality seem simple fair and an easy game to come by but the three of us never really did much of that, on the road or after we became part of that first camp. Folk would take this, snort that, smoke this, drink that. It just wasn’t our game as a little group but we did have a rare fire side drink and during one of those Kelly leaned in and leered at me while we all laughed and told our shitty stories."
“You have a real knack for killing. If it wasn’t for you, I don’t think any of us would have made it this far.”
"Kelly stopped and turned away just as soon as she got started and Drew was quick to downplay it all. “We all had to do what we did, out there. I’m just glad we’re here now.”
"I was speechless, for a few minutes, before I began to stutter out the time I watched her kill two armed looters who had sized us up as we tried to collect gear from a big box store. That was different though, she and I both knew it. Kelly was pointing out my penchant for killing and I was rising to the defense, of what? It was fact. We had all killed, even Drew. We were survivors and by then murderer was synonymous with that word. Only I was different and there was no point in arguing or denying it. I thought about being funny, or trying to be, maybe replying with something like “At least you know I’ll be around to take care of you.”
"I’m glad I never said that, glad I chose to nod at Drew’s bland acknowledgement of the obvious. Yes, we had all killed, but no, we weren’t all killers."
"I didn’t enjoy it; it wasn’t a kick or a hit for me. It just, made sense. Type twos were disabled and mind baked real-life zombies, they were stabbing, shooting, burning single minded creatures trying to put an end to everyone around them. Killing them made sense to me, like a public service that no one speaks about or takes much pride in, yet one that needs doing all the same. I convinced myself that I wasn’t a serial killer, I was animal control. The kindly old father who shows up to put Old Yeller down before he bites the kids."
"Kelly knew though, she shyly nodded at me, drunk as she was. Leering, judging, yet thanking me all at the same time."