WILLA

by Jennifer Reynolds

  “What? What’s wrong?” he said back, but he was whispering.

  “I think I’ve gone blind,” I said through my tears.

  There was a long silence, and I worried that my loud mouth had gotten him discovered by zombies or humans.

  “Why do you think that?” he asked, sounding calm.

  “I can’t see...anything. Not even my hand.”

  “Shit,” he said, and I started to panic all over again. “Willa, calm down. You aren’t going blind. Willa,” he whisper-shouted in an attempt to get my attention through my rambling.

  “Yeah.”

  “You’re not blind.”

  “I’m not.”

  “No.”

  “Then what’s happening to me? What did you do to me?”

  “I didn’t do anything aside from shutting you in the stock room. I sealed it so that passersby couldn’t see inside. I’m sorry. When I turned out all of the lanterns, it must have made it too dark inside. You’re fine as far as I know. I’ll be back in a bit. Just calm down. You should have a flashlight near your right side where the radio was. Do you feel it?”

  A flashlight. Damn it. How was I supposed to know?

  I felt around on the ground beside me until I had the object in hand. I flipped it on with a sigh of relief.

  “I found it,” I said, feeling ashamed. “I’m sorry. I feel like an idiot. When I woke, I couldn’t see a thing—and I mean nothing. I thought I’d turned or that something had happened to my sight. I was terrified. I’m sorry.”

  “It’s okay. I’m on my way back. Breathe.”

  The radio went silent. I crossed my arms over my head and cried. How stupid was I? Tanner was going to leave me for this. I just knew it. He probably thought I was too dumb to function on my own and was going to be more of a burden than he could deal with, and I couldn’t blame him.

  I let myself cry out my fear, frustration, and stupidity before getting up and shining the light around in search of the lanterns he had scattered throughout the room. I only flipped on two, not wanting Tanner’s efforts to make the place look unoccupied go to waste.

  In all fairness, he probably should’ve waited until I woke to leave or got me up to tell me he was going. I was a stranger to the place, after all.

  Using the bit of illumination in the room, I made my way to the bathroom. After relieving myself and using water from the bucket beside the toilet to make the commode flush, I did my best to wash my face, pull back my hair, and brush my teeth in the dim room.

  I’d only just made it back to my pallet on the floor with a protein bar and a bottle of water when Tanner returned. He slipped in through a door in the back of the stock room, not through the front of the store. He looked flushed and out of breath, but not as if he’d been in a fight with anyone.

  “Good, you found it,” he said, nodding at the food he’d left out for me.

  “I did. Thank you. I’m sorry. I feel like the world’s biggest idiot for freaking out like that.”

  “Stop. You woke in pitch black in a new place. Very few people wouldn’t have been scared. I should’ve waited until you woke or put the radio and flashlight in your hands before I left. Hell, for that matter, I could’ve told you what I thought I might do this morning before we fell asleep last night. Any decent person wouldn’t have left you alone so soon anyway.”

  “This isn’t your fault. It’s mine for being a baby. Just because I’ve come along doesn’t mean your daily routine has to stop. You told me you’d been scouting your grandfather’s neighborhood. If I’d been thinking straight, I’d have understood that’s what you were doing. It was waking in the dark. That’s all. I didn’t give myself time to adjust to it before freaking out. The panicking didn’t help the situation in the slightest. I’m trying. I am. I know it doesn’t seem like it, but I am. Nothing about my life before prepared me for this world.”

  “Willa, no one was prepared for this. Most of us alive right now have made it this far by sheer dumb luck. I’ve met prepper groups who spent their entire lives planning and preparing for all types of end of the world situations who’ve fallen. I’m sure some are still holding strong. A few might even hold out until the end, but most will fall. The sad and worst part about that fact is that their end will come because of something a fellow human does and not one of those things.”

  “You are mad at me,” I said, thinking he was hinting that I would be his downfall.

  “I’m not. The situation just got me thinking. We have to be more mindful of what we’re doing. We have to think and stop reacting. Having you here made me want to rush to find us a place. That caused me to leave you alone when I shouldn’t have, which in turn left you to wake in a panic. We have to start thinking things through more. It might not matter in the end, but it may buy us a bit more time.”

  “I’m sorry,” was all I could think to say. I understood what Tanner was saying. I still felt like an idiot.

  “Stop apologizing. Eat your breakfast?”

  I held up my half-empty water bottle and protein bar package.

  “Good,” he said in acknowledgment that I was eating, but not offering me more.

  Good? I was still hungry. I’d showed him my empty pack again, thinking he would give me another one. I knew there was more. We were in a stock room full of more, but...

  You have to ration, idiot. This food will have to last a long time.

  “I think I’ve figured out what streets in Grandpa’s neighborhood would be best for us to stay in for a while. While your arm heals, I’ll scout the neighborhood to make sure. I think a horde came through in the night. The south side of town is a wreck, but those homes near Grandpa’s look fine,” he said, cutting through my thoughts.

  It still hadn’t occurred to him that I was asking for more food. That was probably for the best.

  “What can I do to help?” I asked before finishing my water.

  “Let’s see,” he said, making himself comfortable at a desk and pulling out a notebook. “On Grandpa’s street, there were five houses on one side of the road and six on the other. There are five houses on one side and four that line the river on the block behind him, which sits on the river. I’m just going from stop sign to stop sign here, not the entire length of the road or river’s edge. If we’re there more than a month and no one shows, we could start settling. For now, we don’t want it to look like anyone is making a home in the neighborhood. We can’t take the chance of anyone stealing our supplies.”

  Tanner was speaking aloud, but he was talking more to himself than he was to me. That didn’t hurt my feelings. I didn’t know the area, and he seemed to have a half-decent plan in his head already.

  “That gives us twenty houses in all.” He continued. “We could start splitting up the supplies between each house. We’ll stay in one until what we have there runs out, then move to the next, although we could just stay here until the food runs out. This place has lasted this long. What’re the chances of someone finding it now?”

  By that point, I think he’d forgotten I was in the room, but again, I was all right with that. I knew I would need to step up at some point and start making decisions, but right then, with my arm throbbing, wasn’t the time. He talked through his plans and ideas and jotted down notes for a good half hour before realizing I hadn’t said a word.

  He turned to me, sheepishly and said, “Sorry.”

  “Don’t be. I’ve been listening to you. I think your last thought to have bugout bags in each house is a good one, especially for now. Chances are high we’ll need to leave a place in a hurry. You get me the backpacks, and I’ll start filling them while you’re scouting.”

  “Thanks. Hopefully, we won’t need them. I’d like to stay in one spot finally, but...”

  “But we have to prepare for everything. I know. I’ll have something for you to take to each home every day while my arm heals. I promise. I can carry my part.”

  “I know you can.”

  30.

  The wound in my arm
took longer than either one of us expected to heal. Tanner assumed that was due to the lack of proper medicine and a balanced diet. I was scared it was because it was a zombie bite, and I was slowly turning. Of course, I didn’t tell him of my fears. He would’ve laughed at me and tried to reassure me that that wasn’t the case. I would’ve gotten mad at his first reaction and thought the second was a lie.

  “It’s not going to heal if you keep messing with it,” Tanner said, catching me prodding the side of the wound with my finger.

  “I’m not poking it for no reason. I’m checking for pus. It’s still a little red, and I want to make sure the infection is going away,” I said, looking over my shoulder at where Tanner was leaning against the bathroom door.

  “Have you been taking your meds?” he asked, moving to my side.

  Tanner’s expression had turned serious. He took my arm and twisted it in different ways in the light of the lantern we kept in the bathroom.

  “I have,” I said, wanting to jerk my arm away but also needing his opinion on whether he thought the wound was severely infected or not.

  We’d known each other only a few weeks by that point, and he wasn’t much older than I was, so his medical knowledge wouldn’t be any better than mine, but I still wanted his thoughts on it.

  “You’ve been cleaning it every day?” he asked.

  Tanner’s facial expression told me nothing of his thoughts, and that was infuriating.

  “I have,” I said, pointing to the medical kit spread out on the short counter.

  “The redness doesn’t look too bad,” he said, letting my arm drop. “Probably agitation from you messing with it more than anything. I don’t think you should go out with me today, though. I only have a few more houses to check along the river bank. You stay here and rest. Heal.”

  “Please don’t make me. I’m bored. I’ve had the bugout bags done for days. I’ve also finished the first boxes of rations to go into the houses. I can’t stay cooped up here any longer. I promise not to touch the dead when you start clearing the bodies along the bank. Have you decided what you want to do with them yet?”

  “When I first got here, I saw where the National Guard had burned the zombies on the north side of town, but I don’t think I could carry the bodies that far on my own unnoticed.”

  Tanner allowed my change in the subject without argument, but I didn’t know if that meant I could go or not, so I had to ask. “I...”

  “Willa, no. You aren’t risking hurting your arm any more than it already is by dragging bodies. So get that thought out of your head.”

  “I could drive the dead to the dump,” I offered.

  “A truck would be too loud. Anything else would take too long, and we’d get someone’s attention. I don’t want to burn near the houses, though,” Tanner said as an afterthought. “That’d be a sure signal to anyone in the area that we were around and possibly staying.”

  “We could store them in a nearby house or pool house if one of the homes has one,” I suggested.

  “That’s a great idea,” he said, not acknowledging my “we.” “I’m sure there are several boathouses around that area. Though, we don’t want the dead in or near the water. That could cause contamination.”

  “Surely, there’ll be a place to store them. Are there a lot of bodies?”

  “More than normal. It looks like a few parties were going on when the outbreak happened. Remember, it was mid-summer when the zombies reached this area, so there were plenty of people on the water.”

  “It’s hard to imagine not knowing about the zombies beforehand. If those people had received any kind of warning, some might have survived.”

  “None of us had an early enough warning. Not even those on the west coast. Most people only had hours, if that. Even those who had heard about the outbreak had nowhere to go, and probably didn’t believe it was happening.”

  “My mom sure didn’t, not even when my uncles came to get us. She sat in front of the television for hours, saying, ‘This can’t be,’ although she couldn’t deny it either. For the outbreak to completely blindside someone has to be the worst. Do you think more died early on or were turned because the creatures weren’t as hungry or were slow?”

  “I don’t know. I know there are a lot of bodies on the river bank, but probably not near the number of people who were out there that day.”

  Tanner went quiet for a bit, sighed, and then said, “If you’re coming with me, make sure you bandage that tight and wear the clothes I brought you. They aren’t flattering, but they’ll keep you protected.”

  I stared at him for a long moment, taking in what he’d said.

  “Thank you so much,” I said, pulling him to me for a hug. “I’m so tired of being in here all by myself most of the day.”

  “I’d rather have you in here than out there, but I can see how this would get tiresome,” he said, pointing around at the dark stock room.

  Tanner helped me bandage my arm and dress. I didn’t complain about the long-sleeved shirt, tight blue jeans, gloves, and cap that held my hair up. If that were the price I had to pay for going outside, I would take it.

  The sun was bright, the air crisp, and the area was free of zombies when we stepped out of the store’s back door.

  “When was the last time a horde came through?” I asked in a voice just above a whisper.

  “A few days. I don’t think it sensed any humans because it moved through rather quickly. That’s a good sign for us. It means we won’t have to fight anyone for our stash.”

  “Do you think someone would just steal it?” I asked, though his words didn’t surprise me. I knew how desperate people could get, but for them to outright steal from someone else was still a foreign concept to me.

  “If we aren’t there to protect it, yeah. For one, the person won’t know it belongs to us. Two, if they are hungry enough, they won’t care. Despite our stuff scattered around the room, the place looks as if its occupants had left and never returned. At least, that’s how the person could justify things in their head.”

  “We won’t kill them for that, will we?”

  “No, but if they try to take it all or keep us from it, we might have to. The world isn’t safe enough to settle down anywhere permanently, and won’t be for a while. We have to rely on the food that’s left for sustenance.”

  I didn’t ask any more questions as we left the confines of the grocery store parking lot and ventured out into the world. The few zombies we saw, we managed to dodge.

  We didn’t encounter any humans.

  The neighborhood that Tanner picked for us was upper-middle class. Most yards had privacy fences surrounding clubhouses and pools. We slipped in and out of the maze to avoid detection by either zombies or humans. Judging by the quiet that filled the air around us, neither were in our general area.

  The bugout bags that we carried we stored in the first two houses along the lake in the section of the neighborhood that we decided were ours. The homes were empty. Most usually were aside from the dead—I mean the dead, not the undead.

  Every once in a while, Tanner said he would find a zombie hiding in a room or closet, but they were so starved that they were easy to kill. I didn’t care that they would be simple kills. I did not look forward to killing any more of those creatures.

  We stored the bags in whichever closet was nearest an exit in each house before heading to the river bank to see what we had to deal with in the way of bodies.

  Behind the third house, we found the remnants of a massacre and what might have been a luau-themed birthday party. Twinkle lights were wrapped around tree limbs as were remains of pastel-colored pompoms. Someone had covered the tables in grass skirts and what used to be bright tablecloths scattered the yard. I found a sweet sixteen birthday card half-buried under a chair. Other party debris covered the yard and the bank.

  “Someone was having a sixteenth birthday party when the zombies attacked,” I said, holding up the card.

  “Fuck. That suck
s,” Tanner said, righting a table.

  “This had to have happened in the first days. No one would’ve had a party, let alone one out in the open like this if they’d known about the zombies.”

  “Oh yeah. Almost day one early,” he said, picking up a leg that was mostly bone and dropping it onto the table.

  “The poor birthday girl,” I said, picking up another card pinned between the head of a teenage girl and a chair. I didn’t know if I referred to the girl at my feet or the girl who’d most likely died on her birthday.

  “There are a lot of bodies here. I don’t think very many people made it out alive,” Tanner said, picking up another body part.

  “If they did, they didn’t make it very far,” I said, nodding downriver at the scattered bodies that dotted the shoreline.

  “I’m not sure what to do with them all,” Tanner said, wandering off a bit down the river.

  I busied myself with turning the bodies over out of morbid curiosity to find out who the birthday girl might have been. A number of the dead were teenage girls, but I’d narrowed my suspicions down to three. The one buried under a man who looked like he died trying to protect her was high on my list, though that didn’t mean she was the one.

  “There’s a storage shed about three houses down,” Tanner said, returning with a wheelbarrow. “If I empty it, the bodies can go in there. Will you help me put the parts in this,” he pointed to the wheelbarrow, “it’ll make transport easier. Mind your bad arm, though.”

  “I will,” I said, grabbing the nearest limb—a young girl’s arm. I almost dropped it once I realized how small the child had to have been.

  31.

  Two hours, and I don’t know how many trips to the storage shed later, Tanner and I were down to a few hands’ full of the dead left along the shoreline. Those bodies were intact and not easy to move even with many of them picked clean by scavenging animals. With my damaged arm, I wasn’t able to assist him in moving them.