by Lilly Black
"Help me!" Dani demanded of the young man who had frozen in shock, and robotically, he obeyed. He helped her try to pull his mother to safety, but even as blood poured from the hole in her face, she fought them, choosing instead to give in to her fate, lying down beside the monster that was once her beloved husband as he chewed and swallowed her flesh. For a second, time seemed to stand still as Dani watched the scene, realizing something about the infected that she hadn't before. They weren't attacking people because they were out of their minds with violent rage. They were hungry, and they saw people as their food source.
June grabbed Dani by the back of her shirt, jolting her from her daze as she pushed everyone out of the backroom and slammed the door.
"But my mother," Ravi said weakly because even as the words came out of his mouth, he knew there was no saving her. He just didn't know what would happen next, that his mother would be infected and come for him if he opened that door. They explained what they had seen in Pittsburgh and what had happened to Mitch, then using the latest evidence they had gathered from the death of Ravi's father, they extrapolated that these blank-eyed cannibals were not actually infected at all. They were dead. Mitch had no pulse before he woke up and tried to take a bite out of June, and while they didn't have definitive proof that Ravi's father had been dead, his resurrection seemed identical to the last one they witnessed. And if he was dead, there was no reason to worry about hurting him or anyone else who might cross their path. There would never be a cure. They would never return to normal. There was only one thing to do. Kill them again.
But if death didn't stop them the first time, what would?
"You should close this place and go be with your family," Dani said to Ravi as he stood looking overwhelmed.
"That was my family. Now I have only my brothers and a promised wife in Kolkata," he said, returning to the register out of habit just as Olivia took out her card to pay him for all of the items she had piled up on the counter. "Put your money away. Take whatever you need."
"Come with us," Olivia offered. "You'll be safer with a group."
Ravi looked around and sighed. He had no reason to stay now that his parents were gone, and he felt a strong compulsion to take Olivia's offer. Suddenly mission oriented, he pulled out a grocery bag and started stuffing it with cigarettes, encouraging the others to fill bags as well.
"If society is falling, these will be valuable," he said. "Get the wine too. Don't bother with the beer. It takes up too much space."
"Yes, sir," Olivia said with a smile, impressed. Ravi was younger than her and her friends, maybe in his early twenties, but seeing how he dealt with this situation, she felt like he would be a good addition to their group, especially considering she was beginning to fear that they would be building a long term solution. It was bad enough when they thought this plague could only be transmitted by some sort of contact, but Ravi's father hadn't come in contact with anyone infected. He had died of a heart attack, then he woke up and bit his wife. This was going to be much harder to contain that they had originally hoped. Ravi scrawled a warning on a piece of paper and taped it to the storage room door, then he grabbed his bags of cigarettes and left without locking up the store.
"Why are you bringing him with us?" June hissed under her breath as she and Olivia walked to the limo. "He's a Muslim."
"He's..." She started to say he's probably Hindu based on the statue of Ganesha behind the counter in the store, but she stopped herself. That wasn't the part that mattered. She turned to June with a scowl on her face and daggers in her eyes. "He's a human being who just watched his mother die horribly. We're taking him with us, and if I hear one more bigoted comment out of your mouth, I swear to Yahweh, Shiva, Allah, and Aphro-fucking-dite, I'll feed you to the next hungry corpse I see. Are we clear?"
June narrowed her eyes and got in the back of the car without saying anything. Yes, she understood, but she didn't agree. She also didn't vote for Olivia to be in charge, and as soon as the car was rolling, she started whispering in Liana's ear.
Ravi rode up front with Olivia and Alek, and the back of the limo was getting cramped with all the bags. In order to put the gas cans in the trunk, they moved Dani's suitcases and the extra guns and ammo into the back, creating an unintentional barrier between the long side seat and the very back seat where she and Jax sat together. The whole world had gone to shit all around them, but they were lost in an intense connection that would have drawn them back into each other's arms even if the plague hadn't happened.
It would have driven Jax mad to have waited until Indianapolis to see her again, and from the moment he first made eye contact from the stage, all other women had become invisible. Penny, a young redhead with large breasts and a very liberated sexual attitude had been passed around by nearly the entire band since they picked her up in Syracuse, but earlier tonight, when she practically bent over and presented to him like an animal in heat, all he could think about was what happened with Dani in the bar. Though good in bed - all the groupie websites said so - Jax had never had a woman whose body responded to his touch quite like Dani. Lots of women pretended he could do that to them. There were even some who claimed he could give them an orgasm with a look, but he could tell it was just an act to get him to pick one groupie over the next. It was tired and boring. Dani was anything but.
What he did to her in that bar made his heart race, and even through the worst of tonight's events, his thoughts always drifted back to that moment. He tried to feel guilty for it, but something about the horror that surrounded them made it even more important to free himself from the negativity and dive headfirst into his infatuation. He looked into her eyes and knew she was his, and Dani saw the same reflected as he laid her back on the seat behind the wall of Army-Navy Surplus shopping bags.
He brushed her hair behind her ear and kissed her softly at first, but as their intensity escalated, Dani's mind toggled between being acutely aware of the other passengers very nearby and forgetting that anyone in the world existed other than Jax and her. He was unaffected. He had spent the entirety of his adult life in a world where it was not out of the ordinary to see his friends or have them see him having sex, and besides, except for Alek and Ravi, who were in the front with Olivia, there were only women in the back, two of which he'd seen blow his band mates on the tour bus earlier tonight.
Moving his lips to her neck, he slid his hand between her legs, touching her through her jeans as he lamented the loss of the skirt that would have offered him such easy access, and Dani locked her jaw to keep the sound inside as he traced his fingernails over the denim, finding her clit and awakening it even through two layers of fabric. She wrapped her leg around him, pulling him into her, and when she felt him hard as a rock against the crotch of her jeans, it took every bit of will power she had not to tear his clothes off right then and there.
Dry humping wasn't going to get it for her this time. She needed more. As she contemplated what she and Jax could get away with back there, Alek sat closer to Olivia on the front seat now that Ravi had joined them, and when she looked in the rearview and saw Dani and Jax reflected in the back window, she felt an intense flash of jealousy.
You've got to be fucking kidding me! she thought, irritated with the entire situation. She was experiencing the same urge to feel alive amid the death they had witnessed, to find escape in the rush of endorphins a quick fuck could provide, but she didn't have that luxury. She had a husband and a child, and that child was not with her at the onset of one of her worst case scenarios. She had to get home to Savannah.
"Where's the sat phone?" she asked Alek.
"Back in the glove box," he said. He had put it there for safe keeping when they stopped. She wanted it with her from now on in case Savannah needed her, but it was more of an excuse because as she reached across Alek and opened the glove box, the car swerved quickly into the other lane and back, causing part of Dani and Jax's barrier to fall over, putting a damper on their plans.
Embarra
ssed, Dani sat up abruptly as her friends in the back giggled, and even in the darkness with her deep, rich skin tone, Olivia could have sworn she saw a blush on Dani's cheeks. Jax, of course, handled it with his usual finesse, winking and pursing his lips at June, chasing her eyes away, and as Olivia watched in the rearview with amusement, her mind taken off their dire circumstances if only for a moment, the satellite phone rang. It was Savannah, interrupting the light moment with crucial information her mother had yet to discover out in the dark, terrible world.
In the panic room, Savannah and Rey had set the boys up to play video games to distract them while they watched the news, but there was nothing new other than the fact that more cities were reporting incidents involving similar outbreaks. Their parents knew now that the infected people were not actually alive, but no one had told the kids that and the news seemed reticent when it came to specific details. Maybe the government was making them hold back in an attempt to keep order in areas not already descended into chaos like Pittsburgh, or maybe they didn't want to scare the populous into committing mass suicide because there were a lot of people out there who wouldn't want to live in a world where the dead rose up against the living. Regardless, for Savannah, Rey, and the boys, ignorance should have been bliss because on their mountaintop, they should not have had to worry about it until their parents came home. Unfortunately, the worst of humanity has a way of spreading its disease to even the most secluded paradise.
Behind Savannah's head, on the monitor fed by the camera aimed at the front yard of the lodge, June's six-year-old son Elijah noticed someone walking toward the porch.
"The bad man is back," he said, and Savannah and Rey followed his gaze to see that the intruder they thought Evil had killed earlier was up and staggering around.
"What do we do?" she asked Rey.
"Can't we just ignore him? I mean, look at him. His throat is torn out. I don't think he can do much."
"Maybe you're right."
"Let's just keep track of him on the monitors," he said. "We'll let your mom know about him, and if he's still alive when they get here, they can deal with him."
It seemed like a sound plan, but they were scared none-the-less. With their eyes glued to the screen, they watched him so they would be able to tell their mothers where he was before they came through the gate. He staggered forward, stumbling at the bottom of the stairs, then climbing them clumsily. Now he was on the camera at the front door. They couldn't see his face as he held his head awkwardly, and Savannah grabbed the toggle to move the camera in for a better look. His eyes were cloudy and vacant, he was covered in his own blood, and most disconcertingly, the entire right side of his throat was gone. He shouldn't have been alive, let alone walking around, yet he was walking, seeing and listening, honing in on the faint sound of the camera moving. It seemed to excite or enrage him. He started banging on the door, clawing as he reached for the camera.
"What's he doing?" Noah asked.
"I don't know," Savannah said. "Maybe he's afraid of us recording him?"
"Wouldn't it be better to just move out of range?" Rey asked.
"Is he going to get in here?" Isaiah wondered, his eyes wide and terrified.
"No, sweetie," Savannah said. "That door is strong. He can't break it down."
"But maybe they can," Rey said, and Savannah looked up at the monitor fed by the night vision camera aimed at the front gate. This was the inner gate, the third and last, and there were three men and a woman standing there. Actually they weren't standing. They were more like lackadaisically crashing into the gate with their bodies as if they expected it to yield to them, but it didn't and wouldn't no matter how hard they rammed it. All three gates were extremely sturdy, and without a straight shot of road to pick up speed, a car wouldn't even be able to take the inner gate down from the outside.
Savannah pointed to the microphone button by the monitor and asked Rey to speak in a "deep, grown-up" voice to tell the people they were trespassing, hoping to scare them off, and Rey did a good job of sounding authoritative as he threatened to shoot them if they weren't gone in thirty seconds, but while they all reacted to his voice, lunging at the speaker, they didn't seem to understand.
"Tell them you'll turn on the electricity," Savannah said.
"What?"
"I can flip a switch and electrify the gate. Tell them!" she urged, and though he delivered her threat, when it fell on deaf ears, Savannah hit the juice. On the monitor, they could see the bodies twitching as they leaned against the gate, yet it did not seem to consciously faze them. She turned it up higher, and though their limbs jerked and jolted, they made no attempt to move away, even when they began smoldering.
"Oh, fuck!" Rey said because he realized something that Savannah hadn't figured out yet...or maybe her mind just wouldn't let her process it.
"What?" she asked, and Rey came close and whispered in her ear.
"They're dead," he said. "They're fucking dead and they're coming for the living."
"That's impossible," she protested, but it was hard to argue while they watched four people completely undeterred as they were fried by an electric gate on one monitor and a man with his throat ripped out banging against the front door on another. Then as Savannah turned off the current, afraid it might overload the system, they saw a fifth stranger approach the gate.
"Shit," she sighed because she realized they had to do something. The noise was attracting more of them. "We need to take out the one at the door."
Rey agreed, and they decided the best way to do that would be to slip out the side of the lodge and sneak up on him since opening the front door would put them in hand to hand combat.
They closed the boys in, leaving Evil right outside to guard them, made sure their guns were not on safety, and crept downstairs and across the lobby floor to the side door. They opened it as quietly as possible, and they were able to get around to the front without drawing the attention of an intruder, whose own banging drowned out the sound of their footsteps as fall leaves crunched beneath them. They walked up the stairs on the side of the porch, and Rey raised his gun, aiming for the intruder's midsection.
He pulled the trigger, and the first bullet hit the man in the side of his ribcage. It should have taken him down, but it didn't. Rey fired again and again, each shot causing him to stammer as he walked toward them.
"What the fuck?" Rey cried, panicked. Though the porch was long, the intruder full of bullet holes was closing the gap when Savannah raised her gun. She'd been an expert at target practice since she was ten, but she had never killed anything in her life and whether taking down this dead man was indeed killing or not, it felt like it. Terrified, she aimed, took a deep breath, and squeezed the trigger, putting her bullet right through his open, groaning mouth. He fell to the ground.
"Nice!" Rey said.
"Is he really dead this time?" she asked as they approached with caution, first kicking at him before Rey knelt and touched him to confirm that the body was utterly lifeless.
"We should get him on the other side of the fence just in case he might come back again," Rey suggested, but while Savannah was willing to drag him over there, she was scared of trying to lift him, afraid he might wake up while in the process and grab them.
"I have a safer idea," she said, and with Rey's help, she pulled him by his legs off the porch to a spot where there would be a camera aimed at him. Then she took out her pocket knife and sliced his Achilles tendons.
"Now," she said, "if he comes back, he won't be able to walk."
"Damn, girl," Rey said with a dropped jaw. He was impressed with her resourcefulness and a little freaked out as Savannah opened the door to go back inside, but she stopped dead when she realized she could hear the crowd at the gate. It sounded like it was growing.
Frustrated, they knew they had to do something about it, and they quickly walked down the gravel drive until they could see that it had, indeed, grown. There were seven of them now, and though they surmised that it was pr
obably the gunshots that had lured the last two, they really had no choice but to use the guns to put them down. If they didn't, it could pose a problem for their parents when they returned or for vacation home owners coming to the middle ring.
The upper ring was near the mountaintop with the lodge and the cabins her parents owned and rented out. The middle ring was for vacation cabins with private owners that the Anders family rented for them, but they had only begun selling those units a little over a year ago. There were a few cabins that were already in use along with another ten in various states of completion. The same was true of the lower ring, which was to be occupied by residents who lived full time in their green, solar powered structures. So far only two families lived there, but the entire acreage had been parceled out into forty home sites with more than a dozen in progress.
Savannah guessed that it had to be someone heading for the middle ring who inadvertently helped the dead through the outer gates. Either that or they could have fallen over the fences because the middle and lower rings were so large that in some areas, there was just a series of wires held in place by existing trees. Though all of the gates were thick, heavy-duty steel, only the upper ring was protected by an eight foot chain link fence that would eventually be replaced by a stone wall, the foundation of which had already been poured, but as it stood now, the gate didn't seem as safe as it once had.
As Savannah and Rey came closer, the dead grew more and more excited, thrusting their bodies against the steel as they reached through gaps between the slats, and Savannah wondered how long it would take before they figured out how to get over or under it. Then she recognized two of them - the Wootens from the lower ring. They were an older couple who lived on the edge of Anders property and made an agreement with Reid for their ranch to become a part of the lower ring when the fences and gates were installed. They owned several acres with an apple orchard, and this was the time of year when they should have been at this gate with a basket full of homemade apple butter to sell in the lodge, not...like this.