Zombies Earning Their Hunger Read online

  Chapter 3 - Ruin in the Freezer, Ruin in the Pantry

  “I’ve forgiven you of your many faults, Connor. I’ve even forgiven you for dying. But I’ll not forgive you for failing to repair these steps’ railing before you went up and died on me.”

  Rose carefully considered her path down the basement steps, knowing the lack of a hardy breakfast left her light-headed. Laundry baskets, teeming with video tape sermons and plastic utensils, turned that descending path into a maze, and the missing railing would make the efforts to navigate those steps without falling no easier for her. Rose did not enjoy going to the basement to retrieve something to eat. The basement had been Connor’s realm, and she had tried to be a considerate, caring wife during their marriage, one who recognized that a man deserved a place of his own within a home. Connor had been dead almost fifteen years, and still, Rose felt she trespassed on her husband every time she grunted and grimaced her way into that basement.

  Machinery, some working but most broken, spread across the basement’s space. A naked lightbulb suspended by an orange extension cord illuminated all the hard and jagged angles of Connor’s old equipment. The basement had never been very organized, nor very clean, but the space had once hummed as Connor’s workshop when he had attempted to supplement his modest pension from the powerhouse by doing odd vacuum and small motor repairs for Beckmire. Rose had never been able to name all the machines. She wouldn’t know how to use the table saws and the planers, the lathes and the drill presses, the band saws and the air compressors that attracted spiderwebs and dust. Rose doubted that Connor had ever needed half of that equipment, and she was smart enough in the way of tools to notice that Connor’s basement held duplicates of many machines. Only, Connor could never curb his curiosity for the estate auctions often conducted about town. He always visited some auction or garage sale on Saturday mornings, and he always returned with at least one new cardboard box of drill-bits and files to satisfy his interest. Connor always enjoyed a good sale, but Rose never shared his enthusiasm. To her, such sales ever felt like the earliest symptoms of the ailment that eventually killed Beckmire’s soul.

  She wasn’t interested to scavenge among the screwdrivers and bolts strewn about the floor. She was too afraid of the circular saws that might cut her hands if she tried moving anything off of the concrete.

  Rose did her best to inch towards the only freezer still humming out of the six held within her home’s basement. The others had long ago ceased operating, and Rose had never opened a freezer once it fell into disrepair, always thinking it wiser to let those freezers turn into tombs, wiser to keep them closed than open them and jeopardize a smell of the stench, or worse, a sight of the rot that must have naturally befallen the pork chops and salmon fillets first set into those coolers a decade ago.

  “I think I’ll cook up some liver and onions,” Rose lifted more boxes of cardboard off of the freezer. “How long has it been since I last had liver and onions? It must’ve been before you died, Connor. I remember setting a package of liver in this freezer from the old butcher shop that used to be on Fairfax Street here in town.”

  Rose gasped when she lifted the freezer’s lid. The frost that customarily caked the inner walls of that appliance Rose never defrosted had vanished, and something pungent slapped her face. Rose scowled at the machine. Her heart sank. The cooler still hummed; it still sounded as if it was functioning properly. The orange light at the bottom of the appliance still glowed as it always did when it worked. Panic rose into her throat as Rose plunged her hand into the freezer crowded with white paper packets. Her skin perceived not the slightest drop in temperature.

  “I told you buy a new freezer, Connor. I told you that the freezers you brought home from those auctions were always clunkers. I told you none of them would last. But you kept looting through those estate sales. You always saved a nickel so you could spend a dime, and now it’s going to be the ruin of me.”

  Rose started to gag at the smell lifting from the freezer. Frantically, her hands felt among the paper packages. She felt the slick, red ooze upon her fingers, felt the terrible ruin that seeped from her last reserves of sirloins, hamburgers, and hot dogs. She had hoped to make all of that food last for at least a few more seasons, if not last for the remainder of her time in the home before she would be reunited with her deceased husband. There would be no liver to fry with onions. There would be no summer sausage to slice onto a cracker. Everything was ruined. Rose’s eyes blurred for her forming tears. She dreaded to think of the pecan pies, the plastic cartons of cherry cobbler, she had set into that cooler to enjoy at a future time.

  “Breath, Rose. Get a grip.” Rose slammed the freezer closed, doing her best to ignore the red taint upon her hands as she piled more cardboard boxes filled with Christmas ornaments and picture frames onto the freezer. “It’s not the ruin of you. Not yet. So your diet will not enjoy chicken breasts or lamb legs, but you’ve been cutting meats out of your diet for years, Rose. You’re not ruined. Not yet.”

  She squeezed through the basement to reach the far wall, pushing aside stacks of toolboxes and wet and dry vacuums. Did she not move those relics of her lost life aside each time she descended into the basement? Why did it always feel like those steamer trunks filled with photography equipment and those cases filled with heavy, old typewriters always returned to their first locations to hamper Rose’s way? She cursed old ghosts for treating her so poorly. Ghosts should be more considerate. If they did not have the courage to materialize and show their faces to her, then those ghosts had no right to sneak down into her basement and topple so much property into her path to her pantry.

  She felt better when she squeezed through a open doorway and ducked her head into a basement pantry. The pantry always felt cooler than any other location in her home, and she gathered her breath in those cool shadows, paid no attention to the spider that crawled into a corner, nor to the dark cricket that leaped across the floor to find a peaceful container.

  On the wall in front of her were rows upon rows of glass mason jars filled with pickled beets and cucumbers, with strawberry preserves and delicious marmalades, with apple butter and canned tomatoes from her old garden. She ran her finger along the jars’ glass to assure herself that no magic had replaced them with mirage. The glass looked clear and fine. None of the cans had fallen to shatter across the floor. Her pantry was very well stocked, and Rose chided herself for immediately thinking the worst of outcomes upon finding her last freezer broken.

  “So I won’t have liver and onions. What sane person looks forward to liver and onions? I’ll just have some of the grape jelly Nancy Altadonna gave me the last time I invited her over for tea. How long ago was that? Years. Decades. An eon ago. I’ll eat it straight from a spoon. I deserve to eat whatever, and however, I want in my advanced years.”

  Rose ripped the top of the jar off of the glass. She brought the mason jar to her nose, ready to smile in the scent of lost, summer days chasing bumblebees as a girl. Even the bees had abandoned Beckmire. She inhaled, and then she recoiled. She stiffened. She stumbled back a step before setting the jar down atop another cardboard box.

  “That jar must’ve been bad the moment we twisted the lid onto it.” Rose spoke to calm herself, but she couldn’t avoid feeling a bit of the fear follow her from the broken freezer into her pantry. “It was just a bad batch. That’s it. Don’t you dare panic down here in the basement, Rose. It’s too difficult to climb back out.”

  Rose clutched one mason jar after another. She wrenched each one open, and every jar smelled sour. All of it was ruined, all of the preserved peaches, all of the beets, all of the pickles, all of it gone to decay. She tried to distrust her nose, but the green beans sent such a shock through her body when she touched one with her tongue that Rose was forced to face the hard truth of her loss. She was desperate to find a single jar that was not ruined. She could not find a single, good can of vegetables or of fruits. She grunted as she broke the jars upon the concrete floor. Had
she not examined her pantry less than a week ago? How had she not seen the signs of purification when there may have been time to save something? Had she turned senile in her age? Had she been eating festering food for far longer than she knew?

  “There’s nothing,” sobbed Rose. “Nothing at all.”

  She stood in the basement, amid all the shards of broken mason jars, for a very long time. For a moment, she considered standing frozen and still in that basement while she waited for that naked lightbulb dangling from the orange extension cord to finally go dark.

  Only, her stomach grumbled too much for her to stand still.

  “There’s still tins of tuna and cat food,” Rose reminded herself. “I’m sure I’ll find a box or two of macaroni if I only look hard enough beneath the plastic grocery sacks. You’d scold me, Connor, for being such a jumpy, old woman. I panic at everything anymore these days. You’d think I had no more backbone than those zombies who shuffle down our street every morning.”

  Rose lifted her chin. She was not like those zombies. She was stronger. She didn’t surrender at the first difficult bump. She didn’t quit when things looked rough.

  So Rose trudged her way back through the jigsaws and the spools of electrical wire and weed-eater string. She reached the ascending stair without tripping into rusting handsaws. Eventually, her aching and shaking knees navigated the clutter upon the steps to return to her home’s ground floor.

  The cats hurried back to her ankles as Rose reclined her rear end onto a pile of phonebooks stacked upon one of the parlor’s recliners. The cats sat on Rose’s shoulder and pilfered what they could from her tin of tuna.

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