by Guy James
“I think there are bigger things to think about than protein and muscle right now, that’s all.”
Sven sighed and didn’t answer. He looked at the road and tried to gather his thoughts. Taking one hand off the steering wheel, he reached over to pet Ivan. The simple movement sent a stretching, burning sensation across Sven’s chest and up his neck. He drew his hand back and put a tentative finger to his wound. He flinched. It hurt worse than before.
After a few minutes, Jane said, “I’m sorry, I know you just saved my life, I guess I’m freaking out, and it’s you and me, and all these things.”
“I know,” Sven said. “Can you hand me a protein bar? They’re in the backpack.”
“Sure,” Jane said. Her voice was calmer now, sweeter, obviously trying to make up for her previous outburst. She found the protein bar in the backpack, opened it, and handed it to Sven, who was waving his hand around toward her, grasping for the bar.
“I need to try to eat. I got hurt kinda bad this morning when…well, I think we’ve had similar enough mornings. It’s not a good day to start off injured.”
Sven took a bite. The chocolate peanut butter bar was chewy and filling, and unusually tasteless.
Jane looked over at him. “Are you alright?”
The pain was getting worse, and Sven wondered when he’d next be able to see a doctor about it. “I’ll be fine.”
Jane went back to petting Ivan, whose happy purring filled the car. If it weren’t for the gruesome, unambiguously apocalyptic scene through which they were driving, Sven and Jane could’ve been mistaken for a happy couple driving to a happy picnic, with a happy cat in tow.
Chapter 36
She had to run away, what else could she do? It was run away or get bitten. Lorie wasn’t even sure if the people back in the house were still her parents, if the people around her were still people. They looked more like movie monsters than people now. They were saggy, deflated, and lifeless…and where were the ambulances and police? Where were the authorities to help?
Evan was with her, so that helped. She knew they were doing the right thing by getting away.
Then Evan was tugging at her arm, trying to get her to slow down again. Lorie looked at him. He looked so pale and out of breath. Obliging him, she slowed down to a walk and Evan gave her some grateful nods in between his gulps for air. They were close to Route 29 now, and none of the sick people were in sight, so Lorie figured it might be alright to walk for a bit and let Evan recover.
“Where are we going?” Evan asked when his breathing had become less ragged.
“To my coach’s house. She’ll know what to do. She always knows what to do. She’s just across 29. We’re almost there.”
“Why do you think she’ll know what to do? What if—what if she’s just like the others now?”
Lorie shook her head violently. “No, she’s fine. She wouldn’t be like that. I know she’s fine, okay? We’ll be safe there.”
“I don’t know. Maybe we should try to find some police. Or hide. Yeah, maybe we should hide until people come to help.”
“No. We can’t hide. Don’t you see how the…how they come after us when we pass, they’re gonna get us if we hide. I know it. We have to get to my coach’s house, she’ll know what to do, and she’ll keep us safe.”
Evan coughed. “What’s happening? Do you think it’s like a cold or something and they’ll get better?”
“I don’t know. I hope so.”
Lorie and Evan walked the rest of the way to the intersection of Barracks Road and Route 29 in silence.
“We just have to cross now,” Lorie said, “and then it’s a little bit farther, and we’re there.”
“I don’t know,” Evan said. “Look at all those cars stopped in the road, and the people inside them and wandering around. I still think we should try to find somewhere quiet and hide until help comes.”
“No. Help might never come. We’re going to have to cross. Come on.”
Lorie looked out across the street. She was searching for a safe route across through the tangle of stopped cars and wandering sick people. It didn’t look good.
Then there was a loud crash close behind them.
Lorie turned, took it in, and froze.
In her mind, she grabbed Evan, jerked him from the sidewalk and onto the street, then she started to run, pulling him along through the gaps between the cars.
In reality, the sight before her was so chilling that her insides seemed to congeal into a solid, immovable lump.
She stared at the car whose front end was now wrapped around a tree. Were it not for the tree, the car would have mowed her and Evan down, and that would’ve been the end. Lorie cursed herself for being so unaware of her surroundings as not to spot a car barreling down at them.
The driver was probably sick, she thought. The driver—
He had been thrown through the windshield toward Lorie. His body…what was left of it…it…Lorie found herself unable to look away from the destroyed man.
Both of the driver’s legs were mostly torn off below the knee, and what remained there hung by thin strands of skin and sinew. The rest of his body was more or less intact, but scraped and cut with shards of glass sticking out in the worst possible places. Lorie was focused on the shard of glass sticking out of his eye, an injury that seemed not to bother the driver at all.
Then the driver began to drag himself toward Lorie and Evan, rumbling out moans as he went. Lorie cringed as she watched the strings that connected his partially severed legs stretch thinner.
Lorie found herself becoming lightheaded as she watched, found herself becoming oddly numb, in addition to her feeling of being frozen by the carnage.
Evan nudged her, then forcibly turned her around.
Lorie snapped out of it.
“Run! Come on, we have to get across now!” she yelled, but she could still just barely make herself move.
Then she noticed that Evan too was stopped, standing there, staring at the crawling, ruined man. He stammered something that Lorie couldn’t make out.
“Come on, we have to go,” Lorie said, as she pushed Evan in the direction of Route 29. “Come on.” Why was he frozen now, after having snapped her out of it?
Then the driver—the once-human now who-knew-what—was too close. His lower legs were gone, left behind, the thinning strings having finally snapped. Lorie saw practically no blood, and no recognition in the driver’s face of the fact that big parts of his body had just come off.
The driver reached up, trying to grab Evan, who still stood stubbornly in place, ignoring, or not hearing Lorie’s shouts. The driver touched Evan’s sneaker, giving the laces a clumsy fumble, then withdrew its pale, shriveled hand. All this time Lorie was tugging at Evan’s arm, trying to drag him away, but he was bigger than she was, and his body, set on staying in place, along with Lorie’s sudden lack of coordination, made it a losing battle.
The driver reached out again, grasping for Evan’s ankle.
Then Evan must have snapped out of it, because he started to run, and Lorie, relieved that he was finally moving, ran after him.
They ran into the street. Evan was frantic in his clumsy run, and Lorie was trying to keep up with him and rein him in at the same time, so he didn’t run into something…or someone. They were now in dangerous territory.
“Slow down,” she said. “We have to be careful here.”
Everything looked so wrong. There were stopped cars everywhere, and there were no people out, except for the sick ones staggering about or sitting in their cars.
The ones that sat in their stopped cars, trying to walk out of the closed doors—trying to get out, to grab Lorie and Evan, they came alive as Lorie and Evan passed by, and then slumped back in their seats when Lorie and Evan got farther away. How could any of this be happening? How could this be real?
They were in the middle of the road and Evan was beginning to climb over the divider, when Lorie saw a group of the sick people
staggering in her and Evan’s direction. There were six of them.
“Hurry up,” she said, starting to climb over the divider behind Evan. “We’ll have to run for it.”
The sick people were slow, but they weren’t slow enough that getting around them was easy. They tried to grab and their movements were unpredictable. Lorie understood that it was best to keep as far away from the sick people as possible. She wondered how far away a safe distance was. She decided that she didn’t know, but that she and Evan weren’t far enough.
“There’s a whole group of them over there,” Evan said, pointing to a different group of the sick people that Lorie hadn’t noticed.
“They’re still far away,” Lorie said. “We’ll walk up the road a little, and then come back once we’re across. I think we can make it. Just make sure to stay away from the car doors.”
Lorie began to cross the northbound side of the road, with Evan alongside her.
She kept the two groups of sick people in her sights.
Chapter 37
“Can I have one more?” Sven asked.
He had finished the first protein bar and his amino acid tank wasn’t quite full. Sven knew that his wound healing would require more amino acids than he needed when he was uninjured, and he wanted to be as close to one hundred percent as he could get. He needed to be one hundred percent.
“I still don’t know how you can eat right now,” Jane said. She ripped open another protein bar and handed it to Sven.
Taking it from her, Sven thought he saw her suppress a smile.
“You remember?” Sven asked. “I was eating this flavor of protein bar when we met.” Sven smiled. “You looked very cute trying to do your stability ball chest presses or whatever that was supposed to be.”
“Of course I remember.” Jane smiled back. “You came over to me dribbling protein bar down the side of your mouth, offering to show me how to do a real exercise.”
“I wasn’t dribbling.”
“Yes, you were.”
“Well you didn’t let that stop you from seducing me now did you?”
“Me? Seduce you? Ha! You were all over me with your cheesy trainer come-ons.” Jane deepened her voice in imitation. “How about a free assessment? And I’ll throw in some free sessions too. How about it? You won’t regret it. I’ll put some muscle on that body, tighten it up some, yeah.” Jane resumed her normal tone of voice. “Like I needed any tightening up.”
“We can all use some tightening once in a while,” Sven said, a little hurt. “Was I really that awkward? I mean you did sign up, didn’t you?”
“Yeah, I did, didn’t I? Oh don’t worry about it, it was a cute awkward, and you know you’re a good trainer, I’m just teasing anyway.”
“Well, I wish I was back at the gym right now. In fact, I’m supposed to be training a client right now. He needs it, he’s tiny.”
“Let me guess, you put him on a squat routine?”
“I tried to, but the guy refuses to cooperate. He says squats are dangerous, says he read it in a lawyer magazine somewhere. Oh yeah, he’s a lawyer.”
Jane laughed. “Figures.”
“I don’t understand how anyone would hire a guy like that, you know? He looks like he’d blow over in a strong wind. No, not even a strong wind, any wind. He won’t listen to me either, but I guess as long as he keeps paying me I should be happy.”
“He hasn’t made any progress at all?”
“He’s put on maybe two, three pounds of muscle all year. It’s something, but he’s also gotten pudgier. He keeps telling me that he can eat more now that he works out so much. He read that in some lawyer magazine too. He doesn’t listen to me when I tell him to watch what he eats. Maybe I should—”
“Hey!” Jane said, interrupting Sven’s musings. “There are kids in the road!”
Jane pointed at two teenagers who were running down the side of the road, the same way that Sven was driving. The kids looked frantic, and the boy was having a hard time keeping up with the girl.
There were two groups of infected converging on the kids.
Sven nodded. “We have room…” He began to slow down, then hesitated. “Do you think we should pick them up?”
“What? Of course we should pick them up, why wouldn’t we?”
“Well...in movies like this, what usually—”
“In movies like this?” Jane interrupted harshly. “In movies like this? This is not a movie, Sven, what is with you, they’re just young kids! We have to help them.”
“Right, but they’ll slow us down, and lower our own chances of surviving. Like I was saying, in movies like this, the larger the group gets, the worse it becomes. The problems start, there’s infighting. Someone always ends up getting bitten. It gets bad. I just think we should be careful about picking people up. We can’t fit everyone in the car.”
Jane glared at him.
Sven sighed. “But you’re right, they’re just kids. We can’t leave them out here like this.”
“Damn right we can’t, pull over and let them in.”
Looking at the teenagers in the road ahead, Sven wanted to help them, but he had a bad feeling about taking them on, about opening his doors to outsiders, about having more people to worry about. There were so many possibilities, so many things that could go terribly wrong, and Sven was certain that the number of potential disasters increased in direct proportion to the number of people who clumped together to try to survive.
It was a thought worthy of an actuary, and though it was based on Hollywood-inspired premonitions, it held firm to Sven’s nerves, with no hint of release.
Now resolved to let the kids into his car, Sven felt the events of the day spiraling out of control. He thought it curious that an event as seemingly minor as taking on a couple of refugee teenagers caught in this strange plague could feel so off-putting. He tried to see the problems that the act presented in relation to the greater problem of the general zombie infestation, to convince himself that opening his doors to them was the right thing to do, but that didn’t work to ease his mind.
The events of the day seemed to be having a cumulative effect on Sven’s stress level, and he suspected that the day’s events would only get worse.
Chapter 38
“Hey,” Evan said weakly, “look.”
He pointed to the road behind Lorie and she turned around. There was a car coming up the road, zigzagging its way around the stopped cars. Lorie could see two people in the front, and it looked like one of them was pointing to her and Evan. Instantly anxious, Lorie bit her lip.
“Well,” Evan said, “let’s go wave them down, they can help us.”
Lore hesitated. “I don’t know. We don’t know them, what if they’re not here to help? I think we should keep going. We can’t stand around here anyway, those things are getting closer.”
Both groups of sick people were closing in, dragging themselves toward her and Evan.
Evan nodded, and Lorie could see that he was still out of breath. Poor guy, she thought, why didn’t his dad make him exercise ever? Maybe he has asthma, yeah, it might not be his fault, or his dad’s fault, maybe he was just born that way. Lorie promised herself that at the end of all this, she would take Evan to the track and make him get some exercise. It would do him and his pale skin some good, that’s what her coach would say. Lorie hoped her coach was alright, but had begun to doubt that she was.
“I’d rather be with them,” Evan said, pointing at the car, “than on our own. They’re adults, and driving, they’ll help us.”
Lorie looked at the approaching car. The man and woman in it looked like they were arguing about something. That made them look more adult-like.
Lorie wasn’t sure what to do, but she understood that Evan had decided to try his luck with the car and the people in it. She didn’t want to leave Evan alone, so she stood with him while he waved the car over.
As it got closer, Lorie could see that a very large man was driving it. He wasn’t
fat. He was like those people on TV, like a wrestler or something. The woman next to him was very pretty, though she looked as if she’d been crying. The woman smiled at Lorie as the car stopped in the middle of the road alongside Lorie and Evan. The big man couldn’t get the car any closer to the curb because of all the stopped cars lined up along the narrow sidewalk.
The woman in the car rolled her window down, and that’s when Lorie saw the cat, and thought maybe these people could be trusted.
“Come on,” Evan said, and ran eagerly up to the car.
Lorie followed, keeping her distance.
Chapter 39
Jane couldn’t believe what Sven had just said about the kids slowing them down. He could be so cold and heartless sometimes. Of course it was true, but it wasn’t something to be said out loud. They were kids.
“Hi,” Jane called out to the boy, who had run up to the car. “Come on, get in, we’re going somewhere where we’ll be safe.” Wait, Jane thought, where are we going? That was an important thing to discuss at some point. She was sure Sven was taking them somewhere safe though—or at least he was trying to take them somewhere safe—and if he wasn’t she would make him.
The boy looked relieved and turned around. “Come on,” he said to the girl, who was still standing a few car widths away, “they’re gonna help us, see?”
The girl was hesitant, and she looked suspiciously at Jane and beyond her, at Sven. Jane couldn’t blame her, but there were two packs of infected people approaching, and there wasn’t time for too much suspicion.
“Hi,” Jane called to the girl. “We’re trying to get away too, maybe we can all help each other. How does that sound?”
The girl walked closer to the car and looked Jane in the eye. She looked like she was considering Jane’s offer, but she still said nothing. Jane could see the girl was in shape, like she was on a sports team, and she had a certain resolve in her eyes, like she was set on something, maybe just on getting through the day, and that was no small resolution.