by Guy James
Lorie’s mom didn’t respond, and Lorie looked over her shoulder for Evan. He was standing at the entryway to the living room, unmoving, as if under a spell. Lorie saw that he wasn’t covering his nose like she was. She pointed sternly at her own clamped nose, but he made no response, as if he didn’t see her or what was happening in the living room.
“Mom?” Lorie shook her mom by the arm, hoping for a response, but there was none. Her mom’s other hand lay still on the shaft of a shattered lamp.
She must have pulled it down when she fell, Lorie thought. Looking at her mom’s face, Lorie couldn’t believe how pale she was, and how loosely her eyelids hung open, as if her eyes had gotten smaller and retreated further into the back of her head. Lorie pulled on the forearm again, and there came a tearing, popping sound from her mom’s shoulder that made Lorie stop, aghast.
“We have to get help,” Lorie said in panic, looking over her shoulder at Evan.
Seeing that he wasn’t moving, Lorie began to get up to call an ambulance. There was something very wrong and Lorie needed to get help. As she was getting up from her crouch, she felt something cold. It grabbed and squeezed her wrist hard, very hard.
Surprised, Lorie took her fingers off her nose for a second, then replaced them as soon as she could smell that foul, too-sweet odor again. Feeling suddenly disoriented again and turning back to her mom, Lorie saw that it was her mom that had grabbed her wrist and was holding it tight, and...her eyes, her mom’s eyes, they weren’t right in their sockets anymore, they weren’t her mom’s eyes, they were…they were all dark, dull black, like dusty marbles, and they were wrong. They were so wrong.
Horrified, Lorie struggled to free herself from the ice-cold grip, but she wasn’t strong enough. She wanted to use her other hand, but she was too afraid of the smell in the air to take her hand away from her nose. So she dug in with her feet against the floor and tried to wrench her hand free, but it was no use against that grip. Then Evan’s dad was there, stumbling in from the balcony, and, and his eyes were black too, and he was so pale, and so uncoordinated. What was happening? It was like a nightmare, like her and Evan’s parents had become monsters.
This has to be a dream, Lorie told herself. What else could it be? She thought about uncovering her nose and taking a deep breath. Then she would certainly wake up. But something kept her from doing it. It all seemed too real to be a dream, and her wrist hurt so much—that was too real to be a dream.
Lorie’s mom began to pull on Lorie’s wrist, and Lorie wasn’t strong enough to resist. The mouth under the dull black eyes fell open, and Lorie understood what was to happen to next if she didn’t get away.
She began to struggle fiercely, kicking her legs and trying to pull her wrist free, but keeping the fingers of her other hand firm over her nose. It was no use. She was being pulled closer, and the muscles in her arm, shoulder, and back were burning, beginning to give out. She wasn’t strong enough.
Lorie looked up as her mom was pulling her hand into her mouth and saw Evan’s dad, now standing over her and reaching with two stiff arms for her, mouth agape. His hands brushed against her hair, grabbing, but not catching hold.
This is it, Lorie thought, not a dream and no way out.
Then she had an idea, and with the last of her failing strength, she resolved not to breathe and took her right hand away from her nose. With it she reached across her mom’s legs, grabbed the detached top of the fallen lamp, picked it up, and brought it around in an arc, smashing it on top of her mom’s head. The ice-cold grip loosened at the moment of impact. Lorie fell backward, and began frantically crawling away on her back.
Feeling her own body lurch violently into confusion, Lorie pinched her nose again, scrambled up, and tackled Evan, knocking him over and into the dining room.
“Wake up!” Lorie yelled. She took her hand away from her nose and began rubbing her bruised left wrist, which she now saw was beginning to swell up.
“We have to get out of here! Evan, come on, snap out of it. Something’s wrong, we have to go.”
Lorie shook Evan with her good hand, and he blinked.
“What happened?” Evan asked. “It was like I got lost and forgot—”
Evan stopped mid-sentence and his jaw dropped, face suddenly rigid with shock and terror. Lorie turned around to see what it was that had Evan speechless, though she had a feeling she knew what she would see.
Lorie’s mom and Evan’s dad were both at the dining room’s threshold. Lorie’s mom was on her hands and knees, staring up at Lorie, her head tilted up and back much too far. Evan’s dad was standing, his arms outstretched and lips parted to show a stiff, protruded, bloodless tongue.
Then both parents began to move into the dining room, and the foul odor hit Lorie and she was moving backward, stumbling, and falling over herself to get away from it. She grabbed Evan’s arm and pulled him with her. He let out a squeak and then they both turned and were running to the front door.
Lorie grabbed for her backpack and she and Evan went out the front door, and the daylight hit Lorie and she saw her street, and her apartment complex, and there were people running, and she began to hear screams, and the panic was tightening her chest, and—
Lorie took Evan’s hand, and they began to run.
Chapter 31
Sven sniffed at the air and considered asking Jane if she’d been drinking. Thinking better of it, he pulled out into the road.
When he was most of the way to Alderman Road, his phone rang. Sven picked it up out of the cup holder and looked at it in astonishment, surprised that it was working. His mom was calling.
Sven picked up and looked at Jane. She had drawn her knees in to her chest and was looking down at Ivan.
“Hello?” Sven said.
“Sven! Sven are you okay?”
“I…yeah, I guess. I’ve got Ivan and Jane in the car. We’re—” Sven hesitated as he pushed a button to put the call on speaker. “Mom? Do you know what’s going on down here?”
There were a few clicks of static, then Sven’s mom’s voice was back.
“Sven I’m so glad you’re okay. I’m so glad you’re safe. I just about died when we heard what was happening.”
“We’re okay at the moment. Are you okay where you are?”
“Yeah, New York is fine, we’re not affected by this thing, so don’t worry about me. Just make sure you—”
There was a click of static.
“Mom? Hello? Mom?”
Sven was turning out of Lewis Mountain Road now, taking a right onto Alderman. He pulled over onto the sidewalk, hoping for better reception.
“Mom? Hello?”
The phone clicked. “Yeah,” Sven’s mom said. “Are—there?”
“I’m here mom, what were you saying?”
“Sven, this—really important, can—hear me?”
“Yeah, what’s important?”
“Sven, listen—only Virginia—affected, you have—stay away from—”
Static took over the line again.
“Mom? Damn. Can you hear me?”
Some garbled noises came out of the speaker.
“What?” Sven asked.
“You—to stay away from—”
“Mom?”
“—stay away—”
“What?”
“—don’t—”
The line went dead.
Sven picked up the phone and tried to reestablish the connection. After six tries, Ivan whimpered, and Sven gave up.
“We’re gonna die,” Jane said. Her voice was calm.
Chapter 32
Milt wiped at his mouth and tearing eyes with a trembling, pudgy hand. His stomach contents were on top of the zombie now, obscuring its nasty head fissure and helping to contain the strange, sweet and sour smell emanating from the insides of the dead creature.
Glancing about the disarray at his battle station as he shook the Star Wars chess fragments out of his back, Milt felt a powerful sense of pride filling him.
If he was not now standing in the abode of a mighty warrior, there was no such abode.
The shop floor was covered with blood, sweat, Coca-Cola, tears, half-digested Snickers candy bars, raspberry potpourri, non-mint condition themed chess piece fragments, urine, and zombie—although there was hardly any blood involved—all of the aforesaid components chilling by virtue of ice cubes strewn at random, artistic counterpoints throughout the muck. It was a scene worthy of any comic book, and Milt had achieved it in reality, in real-time.
Milt stood up. His right foot sloshed into the main collection of urine in a depression in the carpet, but he paid little attention to the furry slipper that was now soaking up his reprocessed Coca-Cola. Milt found the hilt of his sword and pulled it up out of the filth-covered zombie. The sword must have dislodged when the zombie fell, or maybe I’m getting stronger, Milt told himself, and settled on the latter.
The sword was in desperate need of wiping. When Milt looked at it, he had to fight to suppress a renewed urge to hurl. This wasn’t a day to spend dry heaving. For one thing, he suddenly felt hungry—probably because his stomach was now empty for the first time in who knew how long—and for another, he was bursting to see how far the zombie infestation had gone.
Milt took ginger, dainty steps over the decommissioned zombie and tiptoed to the back of the store, as if the usual slipper-stifled thunderclaps that were Milt’s footfalls might wake the dead zombie in the battle station. The usual thunderclap series was absent today anyway, as Milt’s tip-toeing now went: thunderclap, slosh, thunderclap, slosh, and so on.
Milt almost dropped his sword when he saw what that damned zombie buffoon had done. The back of the store, which served as the entrance to Milt’s underground lair, was in a pitiful state of destruction.
An aisle of priceless, vintage video games on 5.25 inch floppy disks was knocked on its side. The rare disks were everywhere. Milt let out a panicky belch when he took this in—the disks were so priceless, no one had even dared purchase one yet, and now Milt might not be able to save them.
There were Xena: Warrior Princess DVDs strewn all about the floor, mixed in with the floppy disks, and—
“No!” Milt shrieked, and put a pudgy palm to his right temple to steady himself.
The Commodore 64—Milt’s prized Commodore 64—was in shattered ruins all over the floor. The zombie had destroyed one of Milt’s most-cherished possessions. Milt cursed the grotesque, mindless beast. He patted a piece of the Commodore 64 and said, “I am truly sorry that this is how you have met your end. We have shared some magnificent times together, have we not?”
The Commodore 64 didn’t respond.
Milt tried to choke back a sob, looking away from his destroyed friend. As the thunderous sob shook out of his body, beating Milt’s efforts to stifle it, something else came in to replace it.
It was the want—the need—for revenge.
Chapter 33
Sven and Jane drove for a while and said nothing. They were too shocked to speak.
The roads were littered with cars—cars and the shambling infected. Sven was forced to drive slowly because of all the cars, and milling infected people, stumbling and reaching for Sven’s car when it passed.
The infected people’s resemblance to television zombies was striking, too strong for Sven to ignore. They were in a plague movie, he was sure of it.
He drove on the shoulder most of the time, and even that part of the road was interspersed with cars facing in all directions, making it necessary to zigzag all over the road to make progress in a single direction. The fastest Sven was able to drive was 25 miles per hour, and he could only maintain that speed for short stretches at a time.
Most of the infected that Sven passed were still in their cars. They sat there, bumping against their doors, ostensibly attempting an escape, and apparently having forgotten how car doors work. When Sven drove past, the trapped infected stirred, becoming more animated in their struggling, as if Sven’s passage had given them greater purpose to escape—to pass along their illness to Sven.
The infected that were in the road, out of cars, staggered and lurched in no ascertainable direction, at least until Sven drove closer. When he passed them, they too reacted to the car, beginning to follow after it until they vanished in Sven’s rearview mirror.
Jane broke the silence.
“What the hell is going on here? I mean what the hell?”
Sven looked over at her, then turned back to the road. He knew exactly what was going on.
“They’re zombies,” Sven said, as if it were the plainest thing in the world.
“What?”
“Zombies, you know, like in the movies. They’re undead, walking dead, you know, zombies, monsters, trying to get us.”
“What? Zombies? Are you crazy? There’s no such thing as zombies. What is wrong with you? That was—that was my friend and she…she’s sick, that’s all, and…”
“Calm down. I’m not trying to make light of it or anything. That’s just what’s going on. I don’t know why, but they’re trying to get us, and I’m going to stay alive.”
For a few minutes, Jane said nothing. Then she said, “There’s gotta be a better explanation than that.”
She reached for the radio and tried to tune it. She couldn’t find any stations that weren’t static, but went on fiddling with the knob anyway.
“I mean,” Sven said, “it’s probably some kind of virus, a disease. It’s spreading and making people sick and rabid or something. How else do you explain the attempted biting?”
“Why don’t we have it? Do we have it?”
“I don’t know. We haven’t been bitten for one thing, right?”
“Right.”
Sven was relieved Jane’s flesh was still intact. “Beyond that, I don’t know. It might be in the air for all we know, or radiation or something. If we can outrun it, get away from it, hide from it, that’s what we need to do.”
Jane pointed to the other side of the road. “Look.” Sven followed her finger and saw there was a car moving there—not just moving, but being driven. Sven slowed and rolled his window down. He honked the horn and waved at the other car. The car didn’t stop, or even slow down.
“Maybe they’re in a bad mood,” Sven said. “We’re better off on our own anyway.” Sven sped the car up again, and was driving as fast as he could while avoiding the stopped cars and walking infected.
Ivan meowed and looked up at Jane. “He remembers you,” Sven said.
As if on cue, the cat jumped into Jane’s lap and purred. Sven looked over as Jane scratched Ivan behind the ears.
“Yeah,” Jane said. “I remember him too.” She wiped at her face. “Sven? Where are we going?”
“We need to stock up on supplies—food, water, weapons, gas—and then we need to find a place where we’ll be safe. Somewhere not very residential. I figure the worst place is around the University, with all the kids that live close to it. We’ll drive north on 29, get supplies, and find somewhere to hole up until this whole thing blows over.”
Jane seemed to consider this for a while. “Why did you say we’ll do better on our own?”
Then a loud, shrill noise pierced through the car, and Jane screamed.
Chapter 34
Lorie was running hard, feeling her lungs filling with power and propelling her away from the terrible scene she’d just witnessed.
Lorie knew she was a great runner for her age. Or at least she knew that was what the track coaches always told her. She did feel like a great runner when she ran—the sense of surroundings flashing past, the air rushing against her, and her body working at its hardest all made her feel so alive. Whether or not she was as great as they said, she loved it.
Glancing over her shoulder, Lorie saw that Evan was far behind her, clearly having trouble keeping up with her pace.
“Come on,” Lorie said, glancing back at Evan. “You have to run a little faster. You can do it. We’re almost there.”
Lorie slowed down to let Evan catch up, and then he was alongside her, panting hard and flailing his arms inefficiently as he ran.
He barely managed to choke a few words out in between gasps and gulps for air. “I can’t keep up. I need to stop.”
“We’ll rest when we’re somewhere safe. We’re almost there, we just have to get away. Come on Evan.”
“I’m trying.”
They kept running down Barracks Road toward Route 29. There were stopped cars everywhere, and—and the sick people were in them, moving and wriggling like snakes trying to get out. It was like they didn’t remember how to get out, though, and once Lorie had realized that she felt a lot safer, though still not very safe. Most of the people who would be out would be in their cars—Charlottesville was a driving town. A few of the sick people were on the street, but they were so slow that Lorie and Evan could easily run around them, and Lorie realized they would be alright so long as they stayed far away from the sick people and didn’t run into a big group of them…or became disoriented like what had happened earlier.
Lorie didn’t know what was happening, but she thought she knew a safe place that she and Evan could go.
They were almost there.
Chapter 35
Ivan got up on his hind legs and licked Jane’s face. Sven hit a button on his watch, turning the alarm off.
“Can that thing be any louder?” Jane asked, visibly irritated. She was rubbing her eyes and petting Ivan at the same time. “You late to an appointment or something?”
“Sorry,” Sven said. “That’s my protein alarm. It rings every two hours.”
“Your what? I don’t remember you having a protein alarm.”
“Yeah, I didn’t back then. I’m more serious now. The alarm goes off every two hours, to remind me to have protein.”
Jane let out an exasperated sigh and stopped petting Ivan. “Are you serious? Stuff like that is why we didn’t work out. What kind of person thinks about protein when the world is ending? And why do you need reminding about protein? Isn’t that all you eat anyway?”
“I eat other things. It’s a reminder to have protein at regular intervals, so that my muscles don’t start to break down. Otherwise my body will eat its own muscle, you know that...it’s how I get work. And what’s wrong with thinking about that, even now? I don’t plan on dying, and eating at regular intervals can only increase our chances of making it through, keeping our energy up.”