Steampunk Zombie

Adrian awoke to a beam of heat sliding across his face. His neck ached from having fallen asleep with his head arched back against the brass frame of the headboard. His cousin’s body had sunk into his lap. She felt heavy. Adrian lightly shook her until her hazel eyes opened. The left side of her face was wrinkled in a pattern that matched his pants.

He let out a quick smirk. “God, you could have used a few more hours.”

Rebecca scoffed, slapping her cousin in the kneecap. The bed creaked as she pushed herself upright. She rubbed her eyelids, the black paint outlining her eyes smudging as she did so. “You elbowed me twice,” she yawned.

“Well you farted,” Adrian shrugged.

Rebecca’s eyes grew wide and her face turned white. Adrian let out a short laugh. “Kidding,” he admitted. Rebecca scowled, punching him again in the knee.

“Did you sleep any?” she wondered.

“I got maybe an hour or two. So not really.”

“Same here.”

A cool morning breeze moved the long white curtains of the window. The ends danced over the wooden floor. The rooster didn’t crow that morning. The cattle weren’t crying for breakfast. A bird chirped in the distance, but none responded back.

“We should eat something before we go. And change, too. Did you bring anything with you? I know you only planned to stay for dinner…” Adrian trailed off.

Rebecca nodded. “I do. In the saddlebag on Gizmo.”

“I’ll go get it,” Adrian said. He made to stand but Rebecca pushed him back.

“No,” she muttered. “I can get it.”

“You sure?”

Rebecca smiled. “I’m sure. Besides, I can’t rely on you always…At least not anymore.”

Adrian watched his cousin leave the room. He listened to her foot hit each step with caution. He heard her open the front door and move past the two rotted beings. He heard that familiar whistle followed by a thunder of hooves. And once he knew Rebecca was back in the house and the door was locked behind her, Adrian stood to walk into the bathroom across the hall.

He looked down at the white claw foot tub. It had been the most recent large purchase his mother had made and had been the last arduous project that he had been ordered to work on. The silver feet of the tub were shaped like massive lion paws, each nail sticking out as though the lion were getting ready to attack. It had brought so much frustration upon Adrian as he had tried to connect all of the water pipes. This room was now another cage for another memory.

Adrian turned the glass knob until water began to pour from the silver faucet. He waited for steam to rise from the water before knowing that it was hot. As the tub filled, he went to remove the white dress shirt. Pieces were glued to the parts of his body that were covered in blood. He caught a look at himself in the reflection of the mirror. His hair was a dark brown, black almost, like his father’s. It had a slight curl to it, so he preferred to keep it short. His eyes were a dark brown, like hot chocolate freshly melted over the fire, and surrounded by long lashes. His cheekbones were high and sharp, his most prominent features. Beneath all of his clothes were mountains of muscle that had been built up overtime working years on his mother’s farm.

But now the suntanned skin that covered those muscles held layers of mud and blood. He peeled the pants from his body and threw them into the corner with the stained shirt. He removed his boots and wool socks before sliding down into the warm water. He closed his eyes, inhaling loudly as the warm liquid washed over his body. The water turned a deep red. Adrian reached for the bar of rosemary soap. His mother had loved the smell of that herb while it has always given Adrian a headache. He spread it across his body, pressing firmly to rid himself of the mess that covered it.

Adrian stayed in the water long after it had gotten cold. By the time he stood to get out, his fingers and toes were wrinkled. He grabbed a towel and used the white and yellow-stripped material to dry his body. He then pulled on his black vigilante pants, followed by a white viceroy dress shirt. It had a pleated bib front, full gathered back, and three-inch high stand collar. He completed the look with a black-brushed cotton five-button vest and matching sleeve garters. Feeling especially content with his look, he managed to let loose a rare genuine smile.

Adrian opened the bathroom door to see Rebecca standing across the hallway. She stuck her bottom lip out in an approving manner as she looked over her cousin. “Is there a certain someone you’re hoping to impress on our trip into town?” she mocked.

Adrian sidestepped her. “No. But if we don’t make it back to the house, I want to at least go down looking dapper,” the man stated.

Rebecca’s face dropped into a hard glare. “Don’t say that,” she seethed before slamming the bathroom door behind her.

Adrian sighed, running his fingers through his damp hair. He had always been more of a realist than his daydreaming and dramatic cousin. It often came off disrespectful and shallow, which was only his intention on very rare occasions. This had not been one of them. He struggled with finding a way to assure his cousin that they would get through this, but putting together the right words had never been his gift and that would more or less be a lie.

The floorboards creaked as Adrian walked across them. He made his way down the stairs and stopped at the front door to look out through the broken glass. He saw Gizmo and his horse grazing several yards away. They seemed calm, which made Adrian feel a bit better. A haunting shutter scrambled up his spine as he walked into the dinning area. The room reeked with a cornucopia of unpleasant smells. Adrian gaged a little as he crossed into the kitchen. He picked at a basket of rolls. They weren’t completely hard yet so he started to munch on some. He began throwing whatever salvageable food he could find into a brown satchel.

Adrian carefully stepped over the corpse of his mother as he entered back into the living room. He picked up the shotgun and slung it over his shoulder before putting a box of rounds into the satchel. He went back to the chest where he moved the bottom layer of books around until his hand came in contact with a black rectangular wooden box. He opened it to reveal a long dagger that’s handle was composed of gold pieces of clockwork. It had been a gift from his father after a trip to Tuscaloosa just months before his death. Adrian’s mother had kept it buried in the chest, away from her son. But now Adrian wanted it, and his mother wasn’t there to stop him from taking it.

“I’m ready.”

Adrian quickly shoved the knife into the inside pocket of his vest. He stood and turned to see his cousin standing by the archway into the living room. Her hair was curly again, this time pulled to the side and resting across her right shoulder. She was wearing a brown distressed cotton skirt with flounces and black grosgrain ribbon with buckle detail. Her top was a black cotton and stripe copper taffeta bustier with buttons along the center front and copper braided trim on the sides. Black braid trimmed the neckline and front with long stripe copper taffeta tails in the back.

“Don’t look at me like that,” huffed Rebecca. “We didn’t all get to pick what we wore today, Adrian Holt.”

The man rolled his eyes while walking towards her. “You look fine, Rebecca Snapp.”

He walked past her and down the hallway leading to the foyer. He undid the locks before walking onto the porch. His attention first went to the corral where the Hereford bull was. It was now laying in the dirt, a pile of red wiry bristles and protruding bone. It had been a large, thick animal, the prize of their farm. The male calves that were born from his seed always sold for high prices on the market. They were what had gotten Adrian’s mother’s house so nicely furnished. Now, his lineage would be over. There was nothing left of him to salvage, not even to eat.

The horses hadn’t wandered far. Adrian and Rebecca were able to get to them on foot in less than a minute. They were grazing along the tree line that followed the dirt path crossing the front of the yard. Rebecca hastily pulled herself onto Gizmo while Adrian took his time attaching a few bags to the back of his thoroughbred’s saddle.

“How should we do this?” Rebecca asked as she watched her cousin get situated.

“What do you mean?” he said.

“Those things could be lurking anywhere. Should we take our time to get to town or should we try to race them?” the woman elaborated.

“We can take our time. The trail is wide enough that we should see one coming before they break through the trees,” stated Adrian. He clicked his heels along the side of the horse before turning the reigns so that the animal was moving in the correct direction.

This time into town Rebecca had nothing to say. Had she decided to pair gloves with her outfit, they would have already been soaked with sweat with how much fear was radiating through her. She continuously changed the position of her grip on Gizmo’s reigns and was constantly turning her neck to scan the edges of the trees. Even the sudden jump from a squirrel would cause her to panic.

It wasn’t long before such fear was justified. Adrian’s horse was slightly ahead, it’s black tail occasionally swatting the Appaloosa in the nose. Gizmo let out a frustrated whinny before shaking his head and stepping back. An abrupt hiss caused the animal to rear up. Rebecca held on tight, her heartbeat matching the beat of the startled animal. The hiss turned into an elongated scream. Adrian looked back to see a black man running from the woods. His hands were stretched out, his nails long and sharp. There was a divot in the right side of his skull. The sun reflected off of the glistening stream of blood that fell into his now yellow eyes. His once chocolate brown skin was now peppered with bulging purple veins. His nostrils flared not from a deep exhale of breath but from the heavy release of screams from inside.

“Adrian!” Rebecca yelled.

Adrian ushered his horse into a gallop. He pulled his father’s knife from the vest and brought it down into the man’s head. The infected being squealed before falling into a clump between the two horses. Adrian wiped the blade on the burnt orange saddle blanket. He tucked it back into the vest.

“His name was Charles. He made some of the best damn honey wheat bread I had ever tasted,” was all Adrian said before turning back down the trail.

Rebecca was in a state of shock. Gizmo carried on without any coaxing. The woman craned her neck and placed her right hand on the back of the saddle. Her hazel eyes focused on the corpse until it was out of sight. A curl had fallen across her brow. She sighed, pushing it from her eyes.

“We’ll get you something to protect yourself with when we get to town,” Adrian said once his cousin had caught up to him.

“The knife seems easy. And there were some guns we used in the shows,” she said.

“You have to get close with a knife. Are you sure you can handle that?” Adrian looked at her with a wrinkled brow.

Rebecca waited a moment. “I don’t have much of a choice, do I?”

In just a few more minutes the cousins were standing at the edge of the tall grass field just outside of the town. Nothing moved at first. Bodies were still scattered across the dirt road in between the two rows of shops. They watched an infected figure move from a shop porch. It dragged its feet towards the yellow grass. His cries were muddled, as though big globs of blood were blocking his air passage.

Adrian ushered his horse forward first. Rebecca slowly followed. Adrian guided the thoroughbred across the field and towards the gargling being. He casually leaned downward to slash at the neck of the wrinkled man. His neck cut like tough leather. Blood sprinkled across Adrian’s boot as the man crashed onto the ground. Again, he wiped the blade clean and tucked it into the lined interior pocket of his vest. Rebecca’s nose scrunched up in disgust.

Adrian slid down from the saddle and made his way towards the stagecoach on foot. Rebecca followed suit. While Adrian’s focus was on the objects tossed about inside the coach, Rebecca looked around at all the corpses that surrounded it. The two horses had been stripped clean, their bones leaning against the wood rail of the porch. A few scraps of muscle and tissue were still hanging off of some. The skin of the dead humans looked heavily decomposed, as though their remains had been there for months and not just a day. The lips of one had been torn off, leaving a gaping jaw of blackened teeth. His nose was nothing more than two slits across a shattered skull. The smell made the woman’s eyes water.

The inside of the stagecoach was rather plain, a bench on either side of the front and back. A thin red cushion lined the seats. The window to one door was fragmented while the other door’s window was half covered with a tattered golden fabric. Adrian poked at the bloody eyeball that sat on the floorboards. The iris was clouded.

Finding nothing inside the coach, Adrian pulled himself up the ladder on the back until he was standing on the roof. He began cutting the rope that held the travel bags and suitcase attached to the top. He threw each one down into the dirt at his cousin’s feet.

“Start going through them. See if there’s anything that will tell us where they are from,” he instructed.

Rebecca hesitated. She crossed her arms across her stomach. Her biceps were small but strong. They grew more defined as she closed her fingers around her forearms. “Adrian,” she muttered. “This is wrong. What if there’s just something wrong with this town. Those are people’s private belongings. We shouldn’t be going through them.”

Adrian erected himself so that he was looming over his cousin. His shadow made her face look dark. He jumped down right in front of the woman. She took a quick step back.

“They’re dead, Rebecca. I don’t think they are going to mind,” he said, coldly.

Adrian dropped down so that he was hovering over a brown leather bag. He unclasped the brass clips before digging around inside. He threw out a brush, broken mirror, and a powder bag before moving onto the next. Rebecca shuffled back and forth. She shook her head, feeling uncomfortable and started to walk away.
She stepped up onto the porch of the general market. The window had been smashed so her boots crunched with each footstep. She continued to walk down and assess both the interior and exterior of each shop that she had once bartered in every time she was in town.

A crash made her head snap down the walkway. The noise had been too dull for Adrian to hear. He continued to shuffle through the bags while Rebecca dared to walk onward. She continued towards the far building that faced the town’s water well in the center. The swinging doors to Lavina’s Saloon were swaying slightly as though someone had just passed through them. Each door was vented, standing from a man’s knee to his chest. The top came to a point carved like a boar’s head. Rebecca had never gone in there before, but now she found herself curious with nothing else to do.

As she neared the doors, a low murmur drifted towards her ears. It sounded human and was singing horribly. Rebecca cautiously pushed the right door inward and was very taken back to see an old man sitting at the middle circular table. His hair had once been black and was now showered with several gray strands. His white Sinclair club collar shirt was covered in multicolor stains and his beige suspenders matched his cotton knickers. Rebecca felt as though the gray newsboy cap that sat crooked on his curly pile of hair had not been his.

The man was singing. His voice was squeaky, influenced by the alcohol that he had been consuming. While many of the mason jars and mugs on the table were empty, there were a few full ones. Glass covered the floor, liquid leaking from the bottles that had been dropped, kicked, and abandoned. The white hairs surrounding his upper lip and chin had a golden hue to them. The amber liquid sloshed in the glass cup that he held as he sang.

“Hockenberry. What’s a fuck like you still doing alive?” Adrian’s voice filled the saloon as he walked up beside his cousin.

The man stopped singing. He opened his blue eyes to see who had spoken to him. He grinned, sloppily placing the cup back on the table. His wrist landed on a shard of glass, but he was too far-gone to care. “Have you ever seen one of these drunk?” Hockenberry chuckled. He grabbed a back chunk of hair from the man whose face had been resting on the table. His hands were dangling at its side, its sockets free of eyeballs. His neck look broke and its jaw seemed loose. Hockenberry let it fall back onto the table with a rattling thud. “If you stay in here long enough you will!”

The man threw his head back to accommodate the rest of his drink. He then chucked the empty glass back behind him, laughing when it broke into pieces across the floor. Adrian tugged at the posterior buckle of his cousin’s Cimarron skirt so that she was pulled back enough for the doors to swing back together. He jumped down from the elevated walkway and headed back in the direction of the stagecoach. Rebecca quickly followed.

“Who was that?” she asked.

“Edward Hockenberry, the town’s drunk and occasional creeper,” Adrian informed her, his eyes concentrating on a particular body laying several yards in front of them.

“Are you just going to leave him there?” Rebecca asked with wide eyes.

“Yep.”

“But…he’s still alive!”

Adrian stopped shortly. Rebecca ran into his back. He turned to face her. “He died a long time ago, Rebecca.”

Adrian continued towards the corpse whose hand was nested over a short-barrel pistol. He bent down to look it over. Before searching through the compartments of the body’s jacket, he lifted a silver pocket watch towards his cousin. Rebecca took it, a long chain falling against her fingertips. She opened it. The top half of the glass had fallen out and the hands were still.

“What is this for?” she wondered.

“Look at the back. It has an inscribing,” Adrian stated.

Rebecca did as she was told. A few words were finely imprinted in cursive along the back of the watch. “Never forget where your heart is. Savannah, GA,” Rebecca read aloud. “So they came from Georgia?”

“At least one of them did,” Adrian said as he turned the belt pistol over in his hands.

“But that is a solid week, if not more, away from here. Those things change in mere seconds. There is no way they carried it that far for that long,” Rebecca stated.

Adrian stood. “Unless there is more than one way for the impurity to spread and they all carry different rates of infection,” he shrugged. “Regardless, that is where we are headed.”

Rebecca looked down at the object in her cousin’s hands. The walnut stock of the pistol had a grain that followed the curve of the grip. Steel and silver embellishments adorned the handle and underneath of the barrel.

“Is that for me to use?” she wondered.

“All this shit is flintlock,” Adrian huffed.

“What is wrong with flintlock?” Rebecca felt small asking.

“What’s not wrong with flintlock.” Adrian sighed. “It can misfire at any second. It takes too long to reload. We don’t have that kind of time to put towards accurately loading it should a dozen of these things come after us.” Adrian gestured to the rotting townsfolk scattered at their feet.

“We should go to Cahaba,” Rebecca said. “If we leave now, we can get there by tomorrow morning.”

“No,” Adrian stated. His voice was deep and stern. He gently laid the flintlock pistol across the drummed chest of the dead man.

“Adrian, we don’t have much of a choice,” the woman muttered.

“There are many, many other places that we can go to find what we need,” Adrian spoke in an icy tone.

Rebecca watched her cousin’s back as he turned to walk towards the horses. She balled her fists up. “Fine,” she huffed. “Then you go to those places. I’m going to Cahaba.”

The man clenched his jaw tight as his cousin shoved past him. He watched her with darkened eyes as she grabbed the horn of her saddle to lift herself onto Gizmo. She cast her cousin a glare before clicking her tongue. Gizmo broke out into a heavy gallop.

If there was one thing that every member of his family excelled in, it was being stubborn. While Adrian had his own reasoning for not wanting to travel to the dreaded town of Cahaba, Alabama’s old capitol, there was a pretty good reason for why Rebecca wanted to and Adrian was very aware of what it was. Huffing in frustration, Adrian threw himself onto his horse before riding after his brooding cousin. The next few hours would be ones full of spiteful looks and malicious silence.