The Ghost of Us

A novel excerpt by Daniel DeRock

Photo by Peter Herrmann on Unsplash

Chapter 1 of The Ghost of Us

(This is an excerpt from a currently unpublished manuscript.)

Me and Ryan went digging through piles of stuff in the house of a dead family. The back half of the house had been crushed by a tree fallen in a storm. The family wasn’t home for that. They died in last winter’s flu, and that’s all I knew about them. The flu wiped out half the settlement and left the rest shorthanded on the necessary tasks of survival, like tending the farms and making water safe to drink.

It was morning and darker than it should have been when we got there. Gloomy with rain clouds getting heavier like gray sponges, making me sweat.

Ryan creaked open the door and dust poured out. I coughed. He pushed his head in, peered around. His long hair flipped dark across his eyes when he looked back at me with his tongue poking through the two-tooth gap in his smile like he always did. “You ready?” he asked, and I nodded.

It was dim in the house with no lanterns on. Messy and it smelled like chalk and piss. An old carpet in the big front room stained with dry, coughed-up blood. A stuffed bear toy propped on the yellow couch, like it was waiting for something. Ryan tossed a blanket over the bear because the eyes were too real.

The dead family had framed drawings of themselves hung on the walls. A busted, useless television in the corner. Plaster painted fresh white but only halfway done, old paint cans lined up orderly along an unfinished wall. There was a table where they must’ve sat each night for dinner. I hadn’t known them. Aside from Ryan and his family, I mostly stayed clear of the settlement people. But there was no mistaking it: this house was one of the clingy ones. Clingy because the people tried to hang on to the before-times. To the deadworld. Families like that could be dangerous. They were jumpy and quick to defend something that was already gone. 

I took the house in slowly, adjusting myself to the shadows of the family. A warmth rushed through me as I ran my fingertips along the frayed edge of a quilt slung over a chair. Ryan was up the stairs, zipping around from room to room yelling noises like bam pow zoom and knocking stuff over.

“Hey, Ryan,” I yelled. “Anything good up there?”

“Just trash,” he said. A door slammed and metal clanged. “These people were boring as hell.”

It was true. It had been abandoned for months. Most people who were going to scavenge it had done so already, so we wouldn’t get stuck with competition. Once, a few years before, a whole family died in the house behind Ryan’s. We had gotten there first but weren’t alone for long. The living room was stacked floor to ceiling with hospital equipment. From a closet, we listened to two guys stab each other’s guts over a box of expired painkillers.

“Careful up there,” I said to Ryan. “You don’t know what the tree did to the floors.”

Ryan didn’t answer.

My steps left footprints in the dust across the creaking floorboards. The back of the house was darker, quieter. From somewhere came a dull buzzing. The buzz dug itself into my ears and I followed it down the hallway. The room I stepped into looked to be a bedroom. The toppled oak took up half the room now. One wall was busted open where the massive tree trunk leaned through at an angle from a knot of ripped-up roots in the backyard. The ceiling had collapsed, the roof above it too. A little sunlight broke through the clouds and splashed the purple flowers of the moldy wallpaper. On the warped floor lay three straw beds matted with rainwater and crawling with little beetles.

The buzzing sound came from a drawer of a pink wooden dresser, tilting on three stubby legs in the corner of the room. Pink paint chips crumbled to the floor when I pulled the shelf open slowly, blood throbbing in my fingertips. A wasp flitted out, then another, then a hundred. They swarmed into a cloud with me in the middle, my lips sealed to keep them from piercing down my throat.

“Ghostly hell!” A few of the stingy fuckers got me before I shut the dresser drawer on them. Itchy little stings swelled on my neck and my wrist. I ran out, slammed the bedroom door closed. It wobbled on its hinges.

“You good?” Ryan yelled down.

“No,” I said. “Nope, nope, nope. This house is cursed.”

Glass broke and Ryan ran down the stairs. He grinned wide, dimples forming on his dirt-smeared cheeks, and didn’t bother to ask why I was hopping up and down, scratching my neck. He held a hand behind his back and stood with one leg pretzeled around the other. Whenever he stood like that, tangled up and swaying, he seemed so much younger than his actual fourteen years. Despite everything he’d gone through, he remained warm and glowing, and in that moment I felt pulled into his irresistible orbit.  

“Got something,” he said, all giggly. “But you gotta promise you won’t laugh.”

“I can’t promise that.”

“Trevor, I’m serious. Don’t make fun of me again.”

“Okay, okay,” I said, forcing my face not to give me away.

From behind his back, he passed something plastic between his hands. A toy space helmet, probably from an old deadworld kid’s costume. It was filthy and cracked but I had to admit it did look like the real ones I’d seen in my books.

“Cool, right?”

I reached for it and he jerked it back. Ryan had always had this fixation with outer space. He really thought he was going to go up there one day. After all, he would say, there’s still space stations floating around, and I just gotta get up there somehow. And I would say, Ryan, you haven’t even gone as far as Lake Michigan, so how you gonna get all the way higher than the clouds? One time, what I actually said was, Ryan, you don’t know anyone who left Chicago and came back alive. I knew right away that I shouldn’t have. Ryan’s mom was one of those people who set out on a scouting trip and never returned.

“Just let me look,” I said. He handed the helmet to me slowly. It was heavier than I’d expected. I took it and tossed it up as high as I could, and it got stuck on a piece of wood in the busted roof. Ryan’s jaw jutted out in disbelief. “Come on, spaceman,” I said. “Fly up there and get it.”

He pushed me. Not hard, but hard enough I fell on my back, my head right next to the wasps. Next thing I knew, he was climbing the fallen tree, which was tilted, so Ryan scrambled up pretty easy and almost reached the roof. The leaves had all died off. Jagged branches hung broken from strips of bark. Ryan made it to the highest point possible, where the oak tree came to rest against the intact part of the roof at the edge of the bedroom. He stretched an arm up and lifted onto tiptoes. His back foot scrambled against the bark.

“Get down, dumbass.”

He got himself balanced, holding onto a wiry branch. Then he jumped, reached for the helmet.

“I said get down. Please.”

He snapped off a piece of the branch and reached it up to wiggle the helmet. The helmet shook loose and tumbled down. So did Ryan.

The branches slowed his fall. He grabbed hold of one on his way down and hung there, panting and sweating, then dropped the rest of the way and made it all look casual. We both stood there quiet for a moment, just looking at each other. Then he picked up the helmet, put it on, and stuck a middle finger in my face. His own face was squished into the helmet and scratched from the branches.

He limped out of the bedroom and winced in pain. His pants were ripped where a branch had pierced through. A thin ribbon of blood glistened but I couldn’t see how bad it was.

“Does it hurt?” I asked.

“I’m fine,” Ryan said.

“I’m really sorry.”

“I’m fine.”

“Stop,” I said. “We gotta get you cleaned up right away.”

He turned around to glare at me. Squeezed into the too-small helmet, his face was scrunched up and annoyed. “You want to search this house or not? Quit acting like I’m some kind of baby. It’s just a scratch.”

I followed him into the kitchen, where he wrapped a dirty old towel around his leg. He opened up all the cabinets. I didn’t know what to say, so I did the same thing.

It felt good in the cool, dark kitchen after being out in the hot morning. I’d slept awfully the night before, all tangled up in sweaty nightmares and mosquitos.

With my head in a musky cupboard, I asked Ryan if he was looking for anything special. My voice echoed in the dark space. I strained my eyes to check the faded labels of spice jars.

“Vinegar would be nice,” he said. “Dad uses it for everything.”

“That’s it?”

“Maybe some candy.”

“Wouldn’t that be great,” I said.

“What about you?”

“Anything. Everything. Me and Sarah are running out of everything we can’t grow or kill.”

“Don’t you have stuff to trade?” he asked. He shut a cabinet and hopped down from the countertop.

I shrugged. Our meat was running low, and that was all we had to offer in the trade district. I scooched over on the black and white swirls of the marble countertop and tried a new cabinet. Empty again. “I’m trying to find a battery for Sarah’s music machine. Last time we found one that worked was years ago.”

I tried one final cabinet. The handle was busted off and I had to pry the wood ajar with my hunting knife. It splintered open. “Bingo,” I said.

“What is it?”

I tossed him the little black flashlight. He caught it.

“Solar powered and wind-up. Incredible.” He turned a crank and the light shone white, weakly.

Dark blood crept around the front of his pants. I cringed. “You can keep it,” I said.

“For real?”

“For real.”

Ryan splayed himself out on the floor and played with the flashlight’s crank. While it hummed, I peered again through the cabinet’s cobwebs. Something else was sulking in the back. I reached in and felt smooth, cold glass. I pulled it out. A bottle of homemade whiskey.

I glanced down at Ryan. He was busy fiddling with the flashlight. I dropped the bottle into my bag and hopped down.

***

The rain started soon as we left the house. Riddly was hitched under a tree stamping his hooves.

“You want a ride home?” I asked Ryan.

“I’m good,” he said. He looked up at the darkening sky. “I gotta pick up Blue at the farm, anyway.” Ryan’s little sister was young enough that she would get food rations even if she didn’t work, but she loved the farm so much she spent entire days out there. When she wasn’t helping at the stable or wasting bullets shooting soup cans in the woods, she had her hands in the dirt.

I paused before jumping into the saddle, brushed my hand across Riddly’s speckled gray nose. “You wanna come to my house later?”

He looked down at his feet. “Yeah. Maybe. Depends on how much work there is to do, you know?”

***

Globs of rain splashed my face on the ride out of Creekfield. Riddly leaped over puddles forming in the dirt roads. Near the edge of the settlement, one of the farms appeared through the downpour. Around here, the empty houses were in bad shape, some of them just mounds of wood, but there was no open land. The farms were set up in the sports fields of the four deadworld schools in and around the settlement. The farms spilled out beyond the fields because where no one lived, there were no streets to mark the edges of things. The people working the farm were blurry dots running for shelter. I rode on.

When I was almost out of the settlement, I heard faint music and the rumble of an electric generator. It got louder with each step until we reached its source at the old fire station. Here at the west end of the settlement, the street was wide and neglected, carpeted with soft grass up to my knees. Thin saplings waved in the wind. The rain tore at their small leaves. Through the saplings, the brick fire station hunched squat and wide, scraps of a red truck piled before the big open garage. Shit, I thought. I’d taken a wrong turn. The fire station was where Fireman lived, and I had no interest in meeting that weird son of a bitch.

A busted motorcycle sat in Riddly’s path. He tensed up and wouldn’t budge. I hopped off and guided him around the obstacle. He snorted and walked stubbornly beside me.

From there I got a good look inside the garage. The generator was hooked up to a music machine playing some dance song I’d never heard. In the middle of the garage, a girl in a yellow bathing suit dipped her hand into paint cans. She flung the bright colors against a big sheet of plywood propped up against a table. The girl was a few years older than me, I guessed. Her bathing suit was speckled with paint, blues and greens and reds, and her honey blonde hair hung in two stiff braids.

Riddly neighed loudly, spooked between the motorcycle on his left and the music on his right. The girl turned and stared. I crouched behind Riddly, nudged at his ribs. From over the saddle, I watched the girl watching me. Even from the street, I could see her green eyes. I couldn’t stop blinking. Behind the girl, dozens of paintings stood stacked against the back wall. Each one a variation of the same thing: a boy with his arms outstretched to the heavens. In some, the boy had wings.

A new song came on. The girl pointed at me, two fingers outstretched like a pistol. I held my breath and tried to make myself invisible. The girl buckled over in laughter. She danced to the music, danced and laughed and pointed her pistol fingers.

Finally, I got Riddly moving. The leather of his reins slid across my palm as he turned his long neck to look at me before moving on. I kept my eyes fixed on the intersection ahead, the road home. Warm rain spilled down my face.

“Hey, boy!”

A low, gravelly voice. Not the girl’s. I kept walking.

“Boy,” he yelled again.

I glanced back. The girl still danced. A man stood in the opening of the garage, his arms reaching like the child in the paintings behind him. He was tall, thin, pale. His dark beard reached his belly and his head was shiny bald. He wore an open blue bathrobe. Nothing underneath. In the haze of the storm, I imagined dark wings stretching from his back. That was the first time I saw Fireman.

“May the light of the ascended grant you mercy,” he yelled. 

“Let’s go, Riddly,” I said, pulling myself onto the saddle. My boot slipped against the metal of the stirrup. I got my balance, and Riddly took us out of there at a gallop.

The girl’s voice chased me down. “May the light of the ascended grant you mercy!”

---

Daniel DeRock is a writer from the U.S. living in the Netherlands. His fiction has appeared, among other outlets, in Pithead Chapel, Gone Lawn, Rejection Letters, and Ligeia Magazine. He is the co-founder and fiction editor of Icebreakers Lit. In addition to THE GHOSTS OF US, he's one of 3 authors of the novel, SPARK BIRD, coming out this June as part of #antiwrimo “The Ternion” through Thirty West Publishing.