“No, but you can help me for a moment if you don’t mind.”
She held out the thin blanket she’d had Rose wrapped in.
“I’m going to wrap Rose onto me. That way my hands can be free while we’re on the move. I don’t want to get caught like I did earlier unable to use both hands.”
“I’ll help however I can.”
“Just help me get her wrapped securely to my back like a baby carrier. Pull the fabric around us both, I’ll guide you which way to wrap it and then tie it securely at my waist.”
We maneuvered surprisingly well seeing as I had no clue how a baby wrap was supposed to work. However, Maria did, and after a moment the baby was strapped snugly onto her back. I finished up tying the long fabric around Maria’s waist.
“Rose doesn’t mind traveling like this?”
“I think she rather enjoys it,” Maria said.
“She feels comforted and safe like this, and I think she remembers all those months that we were on our own. I wore her a lot like this then. Of course, she was a lot smaller then so it was easier for me to wrap her myself and I usually wore her in front.”
I tugged on the knot that I’d made and then ran my hands along the baby and Maria, making sure they were completely secure. My hand came up to the straps on Maria’s shoulder and she put a hand on mine, stilling my perusal.
“Tex,” she stated, “we’re good, I promise.”
I took a deep breath. I had to get them to the base as quickly as possible. I couldn’t let anything stop me. Maria’s eyes searched mine, hers confused and then wide.
“I’m going to get you there safely,” I said gruffly.
“Whatever happens, we made the right choice leaving Camp Victory,” Maria said.
“It was my choice, not yours. If we….”
I shook my head and tried to pull away, but Maria held tightly to my hand on her shoulder.
“If we die, Tex, you are not allowed to feel guilty about it.”
She had no idea. I already felt that guilt, that burden.
“Tex, you’re a good man and you deserve peace. Whether you die today or are the last man standing, you need to know that none of the stuff that has happened is your fault.”
I glanced away. Maria put a hand on my cheek and moved my face toward hers, making me meet her gaze.
“You don’t know me, Maria.”
She smiled sadly, her eyes showing the pain and the uncertainty she had felt, that all of us had felt since that first day over two years ago. She reached up on her tiptoes and placed a gentle kiss on my lips. I closed my eyes and kissed her back. Not out of passion, not even out of love really. Mostly out of a mutual need to feel like we weren’t alone, to feel alive, and to feel hope.
“Ma-ma,” Rose cooed. I pulled back and gazed over into Rose’s perfect little face.
“Don’t worry, niña, you’ll always be mama’s number one,” Maria cooed to her daughter.
I placed a gentle hand on Rose’s head. She glanced up at me and giggled.
The pain around my heart chipped away just a bit.
“Well, ladies, shall we?” I asked.
“Yes,” Maria said as we turned to the door.
With our bags thrown in the back seat and Maria and Rose sitting next to them, we set off from Pineville, planning to reach the Army base in a few hours.
Hoping to leave Pineville, Camp Victory, and Michael Hatten far behind us.
Hoping for a future for Rose.
A future worth surviving for.
Chapter Fifteen
It Could Be Worse, Right?
The roads were even worse than the last time I’d driven down them. Vehicles littered the highway and zombies lurched in groups throughout all the wreckage. I didn’t dare turn off on side roads. Not only did I not know the area very well, but odds were the narrower roads would have led to small towns, and I’d been in small towns alone the past several weeks. They were little pockets of zombie lairs.
It seemed that everyone there thought they could just hunker down and wait out the apocalypse. And that made for entire towns that were wiped out and infested with the undead.
Not an hour later of thirty mile per hour driving, we had to pull off of the side of the road. Too much debris and two overturned semis made passage by vehicle impossible.
I glanced back into the rearview mirror and caught Maria’s worried gaze.
“We can do this,” I reassured her. She lifted her chin.
“We have to,” she affirmed.
I took everything out of Maria’s backpack and added it to my bag. I discarded anything that wasn’t absolutely essential and exited the car, pulling on the one and only bag we were taking with us.
Maria followed. She pulled her knife and a gun she’d brought from the camp.
Several zombies were already headed our way. Without a word, Maria and I started off, cutting down every corpse that got in our path. Maria was surprisingly effective and quick, even with Rose strapped to her back.
Rose was quiet, as if she knew how important it was and how much danger we were all in.
“Tex?” Maria asked as we walked down a particularly quiet part of the highway.
“Hmm?”
“Why were you out on your own when Uncle Gus found you if you knew where a safe haven could be found?” I searched the highway, making sure I stayed alert. Zombies had way too many places they could be lurking. Letting our guard down would have been a big mistake.
“There were a lot of reasons,” I said after a moment.
“Like?” Maria insisted with a questioning gaze.
I sighed deeply. How much did I want to share with her? Would she second guess her decision to come with me if I told her the truth?
“For one thing, I couldn’t stay at the base because there was this girl….”
Maria smiled widely.
“Isn’t there always? Every good story begins with a girl and a boy,” she said with a soft sigh.
“So does every tragedy,” I muttered.
Maria rolled her eyes.
“And this girl… she broke your heart?”
“No and yes…”
Maria walked and waited, letting me gather my thoughts.
“I didn’t really know Melody enough to say that I loved her. So, really there was no way she could have broken my heart.”
“And yet…?” Maria prompted.
“And yet my heart was broken when I left. Not really because I knew I had no chance with her or because I realized she was in love with someone else,” I said.
“It was because I had let myself hope for and fall in love with what might have been. Even though the world was shit, my dreams haunted me, and I blamed myself for my wife’s death, I had let myself believe that it was possible to have all the things I’d once had and never truly appreciated. Hope. Love. Happiness.”
I shook my head and walked up to a zombie that had stumbled onto the road from the woods ahead of us. My knife cut through its skull like a hot knife through butter.
“And now? Maria asked when I joined her on the highway again.
“Do you still not believe it is possible to have all those things once again? To have love and hope and happiness in the world the way it is?”
“I believe it’s possible to have those things,” I said carefully.
“But?” Maria wasn’t going to let it go. She was going to make me say it.
“But I think it’s fleeting, the feeling of love and contentment. The illusion of happiness and hope. Here for a moment, gone the next. Snuffed out as easily as a life is in this new, terrible world of ours.”
We walked in silence for a moment before Maria spoke again.
“I guess that’s all the more reason to hold onto love and hope and the things that make us happy while we can. To cherish it all, even the little things, more than ever.”
Her eyes met mine.
“Now, more than ever, those things matter.”
I glanced back at the baby
on Maria’s back. She’d fallen back to sleep, content to be carried like a sack of potatoes while her mother and I walked and talked and killed. I turned to keep a vigilant look out as we moved.
Maria was right and I didn’t want to admit it.
Not to her, and especially not to myself.
I breathed a sigh of relief when the toy store came into view. I’d been there before, weeks ago with the group that had left the Charlotte Army Base. I knew it would be relatively safe, knew that we’d fortified it for an overnight stay at one time.
Hopefully not much had changed since I’d been there.
“Head for that toy store,” I said to Maria.
She pulled her blade free from the top of a zombie’s head and glanced over at the building, panting from the exertion of our walk and fighting her way through several tight groups of the dead. Fueled by our need for a rest and to get out of the open with the baby, who must have been hungry and tired as well, we moved out.
The inside of the building was darker than the outside where the sun was shining right down on us. It took a moment for our eyes to adjust to the semidarkness. The store looked much the same as it had when I’d last been there, but it looked dirtier and a stench that also hadn’t been there previously permeated the space.
After bolting the door, I stiffened, aware instantly that there was at least one zombie in the room with us. I grasped my blade, flexing my fingers, ready for whatever came around the corner of the toy store shelving.
A single zombie, a woman missing most of her torso and wearing filthy, ripped yoga pants, struggled around the corner, dragging a leg behind that was missing the majority of a foot. Maria and I both moved forward, glad we’d lucked out and only found the one zombie in the store.
I moved a little more quickly than Maria, intending to take care of the limping zombie myself. Just then, a flash of movement from the far side of the room drew my eye.
The second I took my eyes off of the zombie I’d moved in on, she found her footing and heaved herself, teeth snapping, toward me, knocking me off balance. I landed on my back with the surprisingly strong zombie on top of me, her rot filling my nostrils at close proximity and her hands clawing at me. My knife bounced off of the tile floor next to me right out of reach. And then I heard Maria cry out, her voice pure agony as she muttered the same Spanish phrase over and over again. Madre de Dios, por favor… no.
I reached out a hand and struggled to reach the hilt of my knife, holding the zombie away from my neck. I grabbed the corpse’s hair and yanked as hard as I could to dislodge it from on top of me.
Instead of jerking her back, the hair and a large portion of the dead woman’s scalp ripped away from her head, leaving me holding the wad of matted hair and rotted flesh in my palm and bringing the zombie’s face terrifyingly close to sinking her rotten teeth into my chest.
I held her only inches away with my left hand as my fingers finally found my knife.
A scream from Maria nearly stopped my heart and I shoved my blade beneath the zombie’s chin, the tip exiting the top of her skull. I didn’t even have time to register the gunk that instantly drenched my neck and chest.
I shoved the body off of me and leapt up from the ground. I swung around to where Maria was with Rose still strapped to her back. They were in a far corner of the room.
What had them cornered was a thing out of a person’s worst nightmares.
Maria had her knife in one hand and I could tell it was shaking before I even started running toward them. In her other hand, Maria held onto a fist full of dirty, pink tee shirt.
Gnashing its tiny teeth inches away from Maria was an undead toddler. No older than three when it had died, it was one of the smallest and most terrifying zombies I had ever seen and it was just as ferocious and deadly as its much larger adult counterpart.
Maria was crying, her hand out to make the kill, but she just couldn’t do it. I reached her right as her grip on the miniature demon loosened. My knife sunk into the small skull just as the zombie lunged.
Maria sunk to her knees, tears streaming down her cheeks and her eyes wide, staring at the lifeless body of the toddler between us.
I put a hand on her shoulder.
“It’s okay,” I murmured.
Her eyes, red and wide, met mine… they told me she knew I was lying.
Nothing about having to put down a toddler, a once-innocent child, was okay.
Nothing about the world we lived in was okay. And maybe it never would be again. I took both of the bodies out of the toy store and laid them out near the back. I placed a dirty blanket over them. I imagined the mom had been staying in the toy store with her little girl when the child had probably turned.
The toddler had killed her mom and then both were there waiting for us when we’d arrived. I walked the perimeter of the building, making sure it was still secure and then headed back inside to see how Maria and Rose were holding up.
“Do you think life will ever return to normal?” Maria asked when I came up to her and Rose. Her hands were working the knots I’d tied at her waist for the wrap. I stepped closer and gently pushed her still trembling fingers away.
I began loosening the knot as I spoke.
“Normal?” I asked.
“No, I don’t think it will ever return to the normal we knew.”
Maria stilled and lifted her face to look at me. I shrugged beneath her gaze.
“So you think the world will always be like this? Death and killing. Running and dying.”
The knot finally came undone and I helped Maria unwrap the fabric from her and Rose. She pulled the baby to her hip and placed a gentle kiss on her cheek.
“I believe that one day things will get better. I think there will come a day when people won’t be living in constant fear and that there won’t be death on every street corner.”
She rocked the baby back and forth and Rose wound her tiny fingers into her mom’s hair.
“I don’t think the world will ever be quite the same as it used to be, and yet I hope and pray it will be the kind of place where Rose can grow up safely.”
I smiled down into the big brown eyes of the toddler that had already changed my life and smiled.
“I pray that when she is all grown up, the world will be a better, safer place and that she’ll only be reading about all the death and devastation in her history books.”
And that was where I’d placed all my hopes. On the head of this tiny child who wasn’t even mine. On the promise of new life and new beginnings and what the future could possibly hold for her.
“Me too, Tex,” Maria said.
“We can rest here for a while. There are things we can use to sleep on and we are relatively safe. Once we get a little shut-eye and Rose is fed and rested, we’ll move again. The base isn’t far from here. If we can find another vehicle, we’ll be there in a few hours.”
We ate in silence, the only sound was Rose’s nonsensical chattering filling the space. A little while later Rose was yawning, and Maria was nodding off.
They snuggled into a pile of stuffed animals and cloth kindergarten mats and fell asleep together. I sat there for a while watching them sleep. Eventually I got up and walked through the building, too restless to sit down for long.
I wandered up and down what was left of the original aisles of the store. A place that normally would have been overflowing with cheer and laughter was only a macabre reminder of all that we would never have again.
I walked down another aisle and found the shelves completely empty—except for a single toy at the end of the long shelf. I reached out and picked up the stuffed elephant with large, embroidered eyes.
It was made of some super soft, light gray material, its ears huge and floppy. The inside of its ears were made from a silvery, satiny material.
I noticed the logo on the tags of the elephant and smiled.
A tiny, yellow rose.
I stuffed the elephant in my pocket and went back to watch over Maria and
Rose.
Chapter Sixteen
We Do What We Have To Do
“Maria, wake up.” She groaned and after a moment her eyelids fluttered open.
Her eyes widened. “What time is it? Did I sleep too long?”
“No. I hated to bother you. You both looked so comfortable,” I said, waving over to the baby snuggled into Maria’s side.
“We need to be going, right?”
I nodded and stood back up.
“If we want to get to the base by nightfall, then yes, we need to go soon.”
Maria sat up, moving away from the baby gently, careful not to wake her. She stood and stretched.
“Tell me something about you,” I said.
Maria took a drink from her water bottle, eyeing me over the rim.
“Like what?” she asked.
“I don’t know. Anything. There are so few moments left where we just get to know people anymore,” I replied.
“I’d like to know you better. You and Rose.”
She came over and sat back down near the baby.
“There’s not a lot to tell really. I wasn’t anything special. A normal woman living a normal, boring life.”
“What I wouldn’t give for a normal, boring life right about now,” I murmured.
“I guess you’re right about that. Okay. Well, I lived in Miami most of my life. My parents owned a Mexican restaurant there for years.” She smiled, lost in her memories.
“Best homemade salsa in the state. I have three brothers, all older than me. They were overprotective jerks, but I loved them, and they’d have loved to have met Rose.”
“Sounds wonderful,” I said.
“What about your life? What were you doing when everything happened?”
She sighed.
“I was working full time as a waitress in a fancy restaurant trying to pay my way through art school.”
“Really?” I said, surprised. “What kind of art?”
Maria pulled a sketchpad out of her bag.
“Pencil sketching mostly. I enjoyed painting too.”
I flipped open the book she placed in my lap. There were all types of sketches. Some of random people from Camp Victory, some of places that had been bombed or burned out after the dead began to walk, and some of Rose.
State of | Book 2 | State of Ruin Page 9