Shore Haven (Short Story): Leaving Liberty

by Reynolds, Jennifer

  Maddie wasn’t a child. She was a grown woman in her mid-twenties, but Samantha was her only family. Her big sister. She would let Samantha take the lead, but only so far. I think Maddie’s reasons for not pushing Samantha were more for Samantha’s safety than her own. She knew her sister didn’t need to be out fighting zombies. She wouldn’t live long if she were.

  As much as I wanted to show Maddie the island, most of the time I was thankful she wasn’t with me. Alone I could visit the warehouse without trying to come up with an excuse to do so. Any time the three of us ventured outside of the hotel and I made even the slightest move toward the bridge, Samantha would make up some excuse as to why we shouldn’t go in that direction.

  I would sigh, but that was it. I didn’t have the energy to fight with Samantha anymore. She’d made it clear she didn’t want to go anywhere near the East Harbor Bridge or any of the four bridges for that matter, which made it easier for her not to notice that I no longer talked about the other bridges or of finding a way off the island.

  Whenever I did go out, I spent a great deal of time making sure Maddie had plenty of ammunition for the guns I was leaving her. We tried to use swords and other handheld weapons as often as we could because most of our encounters with the zombies were in close quarters in a grocery store or apartment building, and we’d risk shooting one another.

  I did my best to make my runs a daily occurrence. We wouldn’t always need supplies, but I would make up some random thing I thought we needed for the hotel as an excuse to leave. At least twice a week, I could talk Samantha into going with me. Most of the time, though, we didn’t do anything but wander around killing zombies. Maddie didn’t see that as a waste of time and seemed to relish in the kill. Samantha did. She thought it was a good way to get ourselves killed, but she came anyway because Maddie would beg and plead until she relented.

  I wasn’t military. I didn’t come from a military family. I had learned basic self-defense when I first started working on the island. Our world wasn’t as violent as it was before the quakes and tsunamis that destroyed the planet and formed Liberty Island, but we still had murderers, rapists, gangs, thieves, and the like, and the larger the city, the more rampant the crime rate. I was surprised to learn that Samantha and Maddie hadn’t considered that and been more prepared when they came to the island. To be honest, I think if the higher crime rate on the island had occurred to Samantha, the two wouldn’t have even come, which in hindsight, would have been a good thing.

  Neither one of them found it odd that I insisted on teaching them what I remember from those classes. I guess the lessons weren’t unusual for our situation. We even searched the library for instructional books about weapons, fighting, and surviving in a world without electricity.

  Being stuck on the island was a blessing in so many ways. No matter how much we scrubbed our clothes, they seldom came clean, especially after a run-in with a turned (the turned were always dirty, even after a big rainstorm) or a night of burning bodies. The smell of smoke and death never came out of our clothes. Fortunately, for the time being, clothes were in abundance. So were shoes, blankets, soap, canned soup, and weapons.

  Some days, due to Samantha’s arguing, the three of us didn’t venture out much past the block or so that surrounded the hotel, which was fine. We could make enough noise to bring the zombies to us, and Maddie and I did. Samantha initially got pissed at us when she realized what we were doing, but after a while, she merely scowled and killed the nearest zombie.

  I wanted to yell at her. To tell her I was doing it for her. The fewer zombies left on the island with her the better, but I couldn’t.

  On the days that I wasn’t able to get far from the hotel on my own, I’d sneak out at night to go to the warehouse. I didn’t have to go there every day for any specific reason, but I felt I had to reassure myself that the group was still there, that they hadn’t abandoned me, and that they were still working on a way off the island.

  I tried to wait until I was sure Maddie and Samantha were asleep before I left the hotel but still had enough time to get to the warehouse and back before anyone woke. Samantha wasn’t stupid. Maddie might be oblivious, but Samantha had to have noticed those excursions if she noticed nothing else because I was always exhausted the next morning and sometimes I would stumble out of my room wearing the same clothes I’d had on the day before. She never asked questions though.

  Every time I’d visit the warehouse, the group was always there. All of them were usually there. They didn’t seem to go on supply runs. They didn’t go hunting the zombies the way Maddie and I did. They stayed in or around the warehouse. I didn’t dare comment about that fact for fear of offending them.

  Each time I asked if they were making any progress with getting us off the island, they gave me the same answer. No. They hadn’t found a way yet. Chuck knew some of the basics of the drawbridge, but without power, he wasn’t sure how to lower it or get electricity to it. Radio contact with the other side wasn’t reliable either. Dominic’s people seemed to have a hard time finding enough electricity to run their radio.

  Dominic was sure there was a way to lower the bridge manually. In our world, things like drawbridges didn’t rely solely on electricity for fear of losing said electricity. The problem was that neither control station had a manual that told them how to do such a thing.

  Chuck spent most of his time researching the problem. He’d been to every public building that he could think of to find the information and so far had only found a way to use solar power to operate it. The hordes on both sides had inadvertently destroyed those panels attached to the bridge and many other places as well, which was why the entire island was without electricity.

  Weeks passed, and just when I was beginning to give up on the bridge, I returned to the warehouse to discover that Chuck had finally found the information he was looking for in a book he’d gotten from the library, and they were planning to lower the bridge and cross the next day. The news had floored me. I’d arrived expecting to get the same answers I’d been getting day after day.

  From the looks of their packing and making plans, no one had intended on finding me to tell me, which pissed me off a bit. No one appeared apologetic about the fact either.

  Samantha got aggravated with me, but she would have come and gotten me. At the very least Maddie would have made her.

  Before I said anything though, I remembered that I’d opted not to stay with them. I visited nearly every day, but only for an hour or so. They didn’t know me nor I them. We weren’t family. Maddie, Samantha, and I weren’t either, but we had formed a bond over the last few months. The warehouse group felt no obligations toward me. Hell, I hadn’t contributed to their survival in any way. In all of my excursions, it never once crossed my mind that I could research information on the bridge or that I could bring them food and supplies. I’d merely gone there, asked if the bridge was coming down that day, and left. I couldn’t blame them for not wasting time worrying about me.

  Instead of rejoicing in the fact that I was getting off the island, I spent the entire trek back to the hotel thinking about the two sisters that I planned to leave behind. I argued with myself about whether or not I should tell them to the point that that night at supper, I almost did a hundred times.

  I watched the two women eat, laugh, and talk about their life before the outbreak, and I wanted to tell them that come tomorrow afternoon they’d be able to cross the bridge and head home if they wanted to do so. After we found my family, we could find theirs. But the more Samantha talked about the type of person she’d been, the easier it was to decide not to tell them. She wasn’t cut out for that kind of journey, and I wasn’t the one who could or wanted to care for her for however long the apocalypse lasted.

  I had to go alone for my survival. The bridge was coming down the next day. Samantha and Maddie could choose to cross it if they wanted, but they would be alone. Our group…well, the other group I’d be traveling with couldn’t help them. What was
on the other side of the bridge was unknown, and we couldn’t have someone like Samantha slowing us down, second-guessing our decisions, or getting us killed trying to save her.

  Samantha and Maddie could wait in the hotel until help reached them. Maddie would try to convince Samantha to cross, but I’d put money on Samantha staying. She’d take the bridge lowering as a sign that help was on its way and make Maddie stay in the hotel and wait for it to come.

  For all I knew, once the bridge was down, help would come. Dominic hadn’t said he was working with anyone, nor had he mentioned joining us on the island. Everyone in the warehouse group kept saying they were leaving for good. Perhaps with the option of moving on and off the island, the others would be willing to come back once they knew their families were all right and discovered what was going on and if there was a cure or vaccine to protect us from catching the virus. I’d already told them about Samantha and Maddie, so maybe in a few months, if help wasn’t coming, we could come back for them.

  I joined in on Samantha and Maddie’s chatter the best I could as we ate, but I’d never been a big talker, and I wasn’t a member of their family, so neither noticed if my behavior was off or not. I’d tried to act natural, but Samantha usually had a way of seeing through that when she was paying attention.

  Clean up was quick, and I sat with the two women for a bit longer since the conversation had turned to movies they had and hadn’t watched. That conversation was one in which I could contribute.

  When I knew I could safely get away without drawing suspicion, I said my goodnights and went to my room to finish packing. I’d been doing that slowly over the last few weeks, picking out what I felt was essential to my survival, so that neither woman would know what I was doing. All three of us kept a supply pack for runs outside of the hotel. I used that pack to avoid suspicion. That night it would be bulkier than normal, but it would be something familiar if one of the women caught me. I never came up with a believable lie to tell them to explain my leaving, but luckily, I didn’t need one.

  6

  By dawn of that morning, I was at the warehouse. Chuck and one other man—I couldn’t remember his name—were gone, but the others were in the main lobby waiting for the sound of the lowering bridge before exiting. I thought we should be closer in case the sound lured the zombies to us, but the group had decided that waiting at the warehouse was safer on the off-chance Chuck didn’t bring down the bridge.

  “Where’s Chuck?” I asked when no one acknowledged my presence.

  “At the bridge,” Diana said. “He and Simon are going to lower it manually. I’m not sure how, but Chuck found a book on drawbridges made after the quakes, so he thinks he can use it to figure out how. The two men have been at the bridge all night. They told us to stay here until we heard the bridge start coming down. They said we’d know the sound when we heard it.”

  I was both thankful I hadn’t been too late and peeved that they’d made no plans to wait for me.

  Chuck was right. We knew the second the bridge started coming down. Two hours after I arrived, we heard a noise, almost like a mechanical humming. I expected something louder, not that the sound was quiet or anything, though, without the ding-ding of the sirens that usually went off with it to indicate further that the bridge was going up or down, it was quiet.

  We left the building. The sound of the bridge lowering was drawing zombies, as I knew it would, and the group wanted to be able to get back to the warehouse quickly if something went wrong. Nothing did though. We got to the bridge before the turned could outnumber us, and those closest to us, we were able to dispatch easily enough.

  The bridge was almost completely down when we reached its mouth and started to cross. We’d expected to see Dominic or some of his people on the other side, but all that was there was a large metal barrier of some kind blocking the exit.

  “What’s that?” I asked, swinging my sword to decapitate a zombie that had stumbled onto the bridge behind me.

  “It’s a blockade to keep zombies from leaving the island,” Chuck said. “Dominic warned us that they’d erected it to keep a swarm of zombies from crossing the bridge and attacking them.”

  I looked behind me, and though I didn’t see a swarm of zombies, I saw enough to understand Dominic’s worry.

  “Surely they can see that there are only us and a handful of the turned on the bridge,” Lucas said. “And those following us won’t be a problem.

  “For now they won’t be, no, but their numbers can grow. You’re not looking at things from their point of view. We’re just as unknown to them as they are to us. They have no idea what’s on this island, just as we can’t know what’s on the other side of that wall. Both sides are going on faith that the other is telling the truth.”

  “What if they plan to kill us once we’re over there?” I asked, fearing, for the first time, what lay ahead of us.

  “Why would they? They’re survivors as well. As long as we don’t pose a threat to them, they shouldn’t be a threat to us,” Chuck said.

  I hoped he was right, but the memory of what Samantha had said about people taking advantage of the situation surfaced and had me worried we were walking into a trap. I could turn back. The warehouse group wouldn’t care. I couldn’t make myself turn around though. I had come too far to give up.

  Once we were on the other side, we stood and waited at the entrance to the metal door. We heard noises on the other side. Some of it sounded like zombie moaning and shuffling, but we couldn’t be sure we weren’t just hearing echoes of those stumbling toward us from behind. Those numbers were still low and would be easy to handle, but that might not last long.

  “We’re here,” Chuck said into his radio.

  A door that I didn’t even know was there opened on the left side of the barricade. A man with a rifle aimed our way stepped through. For a brief second, I thought about going for one of my guns but didn’t. We were the unknown stepping into their world. We would have to play nice until we knew what kind of people we were dealing with.

  “Follow me,” the man said, motioning us toward the door. He didn’t look frightened of the zombies coming up behind us, but he was just as eager to get away from them as we were.

  We did. We had to do it one at a time because the area behind the door was narrow and long. It was a makeshift corridor of some kind, made of metal sheeting, not an actual building. Dominic’s people must have built it, whatever it was, when they created the blockade. A second man stood at the other end in front of another door.

  Once we were all inside, the first man closed the door behind us. I barely had room to stretch my arms out to my side; that’s how narrow the space we were in was, and it was barely long enough to hold us all. I gripped my gun in fear but didn’t say or do anything else.

  Our group watched the two men, and they watched us. We all flinched when a zombie threw itself at the door. A second later, we heard a few gunshots. They had snipers scoping the bridge. That was a good thing, wasn’t it? Those people hadn’t shot us as we crossed, so chances were they weren’t planning to kill us now.

  No one spoke. We remained quiet long after the sound of gunfire ceased. No one even commented on the odd fact that the metal box we were in had electricity. Even though Dominic claimed they had a hard time keeping the radio working, two dim lights were hanging from the ceiling.

  After a long moment, the second man spoke.

  “You’ll enter one at a time. You’ll relinquish your weapons and packs and allow one of our doctors to examine you for bite marks, scratches, and any other signs of infection,” he said.

  A few from our group tried asking questions, tried telling the men that they wouldn’t give up their things, or questioned the reason behind what they were doing, but the first man shouted for them to shut up.

  Stunned by the command in his voice, they did as he ordered. I knew then that we’d made a mistake. We couldn’t have known what was going to happen to us, but we should have been better prepared somehow fo
r the type of situation in which we found ourselves.

  “All right. As I said. One at a time. I’ll shoot anyone who tries to go against our rules. There are plenty of hungry zombies in the world we can feed your body to, so do as I say.”

  Sayo was at the head of the group. She nodded her head and stepped to the second man. No one else made a move. Once the man was satisfied we were going to obey, he opened the door behind him and let the woman through.

  I couldn’t hear what was happening on the other side of the door. Sayo obviously wasn’t fighting with anyone. That kind of noise would echo…wouldn’t it?

  Not five minutes later, a knock came at the door, and the second man let the next person in line through. I was trembling so hard when it was my turn that I thought I would piss myself.

  The room on the other side was a bit wider than the last one was and made out of the same metal sheeting. The same dangling light bulb hung from the ceiling, but the room also had a table, a chair, a box of medical gloves, and a trash can.

  A woman waited in that room. She was sitting at the table putting on a fresh pair of gloves. I dreaded finding out how invasive the exam was going to be.

  The woman asked me to set my pack and all weapons on the table and to take off my clothes so that she could examine me.

  Reluctantly, I did so.

  She turned me around in front of her, lifted my arms, felt around in my hair, and looked at the bottoms of my feet. That was it. The examination wasn’t in-depth, and the lighting in the room wasn’t bright enough for her to see every inch of me properly, but I said nothing.

  Finding no signs of infection, she gave me back my clothes but told me I would get everything else once I spent three days in quarantine.

  “But you just said you didn’t find any signs of infection,” I argued.

  “I didn’t, but that still doesn’t mean you haven’t been exposed somehow. We’ve spent months fortifying ourselves against the zombies. We aren’t taking any chances,” she said, knocking on a door to her right. A large window opened, and the woman handed my things to another woman on the other side. After that, she opened the door behind her and motioned for me to go through it.