by M. D. Massey
“Nada. Knowing them, they’ll be scouring the valley at first light. As a rule, they don’t go out at night,” Zac said.
“Jeez, I forgot to close those blinds.” It was night; she always closed the plastic blinds before sunset, not wanting to risk a light flickering in the forest.
“No one’s made it back yet?” Zac seemed concerned.
“Huh?” she said, not understanding.
“I’m surprised your people haven’t made it back. Do they have a habit of leaving you alone?”
“Oh, they went on a supply run. We have other hideouts. They’re probably hiding from the Ravers,” she added, hoping she sounded convincing.
“If I were you, I wouldn’t leave the safehouse for a couple of days. Don’t risk it. They’ll give up in a day or two—looking for me. Then, I recommend getting the hell out of here. Or you’ll be stuck here till after the harvest. This forest is backed by the Hutton’s walnut orchard. And across from that is a pear orchard, and on both sides of you are apple orchards. You’re smack-dab in the middle of orchards with only the river and a strip of National Forest land as a buffer.”
“Don’t they have trackers?” She worried.
“They do. But they aren’t too good at it. That’s how I got away.” He took another slab of smoked fish. “At dawn, I’ll create a false trail by the river leading them downstream. In a couple of days, follow the river up the Sierras. If you come across a horse ranch, that’s my Uncle Mario’s place. Tell him you’re a friend of mine, and he’ll let your group campout for a while. He’ll probably even feed you, knowing him.”
“Great,” Scarlett said.
“So, what did you do back in the good ole days?” Zac asked.
“I was an elementary school teacher. Taught math and physical education.”
“I got shot by a gorgeous, school teacher? At least you aren’t an English teacher. My brothers would never let me live that one down. It would be the absolute worst—” His eyes flirted.
She giggled, but quickly stifled it and covered her mouth, self-conscious of her dimples. They ate the rest of their dinner in silence. It had been a long, adventurous day, and she was exhausted. And, she was somewhat perplexed, for she seemed to have a crush on a complete stranger, a man with a mysterious face. She could only imagine what he looked like. She packed the remains of the dinner while he rearranged the plastic tub into a room divider, conveniently positioning it between their two sleeping bags—a great relief to her.
“You look exhausted. I’ll take the first watch while you get some sleep,” Zac offered.
“Sounds great.” Scarlett yawned and decided to dream about what he might look like under the camo-paint. The thought made her smile.
Scarlett bolted out of the sleeping bag, alarmed. It took her a second to realize she wasn’t in her bed, but in the storage level, nestled amongst several sleeping bags. Then she saw the little girl, Twila, sitting in the corner, brushing her hair. Zac wasn’t there. She remembered him saying something about making a false trail in the morning.
“Good morning, sweetie,” Scarlett said, checking her watch. It was only six o’clock in the morning.
“I’m hungry,” Twila said cheerfully.
“I bet you are. Better get my lazy bones moving and get us breakfast.”
“Do you like cereal?” Scarlett asked.
“What kind?” the girl squeaked.
“Hmm, let’s go up to our secret room, and you can pick one out before Zac gets back.”
“He left,” Twila said.
“Good for us. The last one up the ladder’s a rotten egg.” Scarlett chased her up the ladder.
“Fruit Loops! I love Fruit Loops.” The girl pointed to the box in the pantry.
By mid-morning, Scarlett was beyond worried. “I better check on Zac. Will you be all right if I leave you for a few minutes?” She looked around the room and noticed one of his guns on the blue plastic tub.
“He’s not coming back,” the little girl replied, her voice distant.
Sometimes Twila exhibited strange behavior. “I need to find him.” Scarlett began gearing up.
“No!” Twila yelled. “It’s not safe. He made me promise. You can’t leave for two days,” Twila said frantically.
It was the most animated Twila had been since the moment she thought the girl was a bush. Scarlett ran up to the little girl and gently held her cheeks in her hands. “Twila, did Zac talk to you this morning?” Scarlett pleaded, looking straight into her golden-flecked eyes.
Twila nodded her head yes.
“Think, what did he say?”
“He said he had to go away.”
“What? He left you here—with me?”
Twila nodded again.
Scarlett was beside herself. She checked his sleeping bag, and that’s when she noticed the note. It was tucked under his 9mm (complete with a silencer) along with a small ammo box on the plastic tub.
Dear Scarlett,
Thank you for your hospitality. Not the part where you shot me, LOL. I look forward to seeing you again under different circumstances. Twila is convinced you are her new mommy. So, good luck with that. I left you my best weapon. Try it out for size. It’s more efficient.
P.S. I took the leftover fish—next time dinner’s on me!
Yours truly,
Zac
“Impossible! I can’t—” Scarlett bit her tongue, not wanting to scare the girl. How on earth can I take care of a child?
The little girl came up to her and gave her a hug. “Now do you believe me?” Twila nuzzled up to her. “You are my new mommy.”
“Did he say that? The nerve of that man!” She was really pissed. That conniving, egotistical, son of a bitch—why the next time I see him, I’m really gonna let him have it!
“The Silver Lady told me,” Twila whispered, completely out of the blue.
Scarlett was speechless. Either the girl had an incredibly vivid imagination, or this was some bizarre coincidence, for Scarlett had been having peculiar dreams with a silver-haired lady as well.
“Well then, sweetie, you’re taking a three-hour bath to get rid of all that dirt, you little ragamuffin, you,” Scarlett said playfully.
For a brief instant, Scarlett was the happiest she had ever been in her entire life: she finally had a little girl. She didn’t know how, but she knew—some way—against all the odds, she would find a way to take care of this adorable, precocious, loving child . . .
The Beginning
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100 Days in Deadland
Rachel Aukes
Copyright 2013 Rachel Aukes
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Surprisingly Adequate Publishing
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. All rights reserved.
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Ebook Edition: August 2013
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Edited by Stephanie Riva – RivaReading.com
Cover image © shockfactor – Fotolia.com
Cover font © Chepi Devosi – ChepiDev.com
For the Half Fast crew.
Because if anyone can turn the zombie apocalypse into a good time, it’d be you.
LIMBO
The First Circle of Hell
1
I paused on the way to my two o’clock meeting, and watched the woman standing outside the restroom with her forehead against the wall, cl
awing at the paint. After a long moment, I hesitantly reached out. “Excuse me, are you all right?”
At the sound of my voice, Melanie from Accounting turned her head. Her skin had a sickly jaundiced pallor to it, her eyes glazed over. She stared, swaying from side to side in a stilted trance-like manner.
I winced. “Christ, you look like shit.”
She groaned, the jerky motion causing the line of drool hanging from her mouth to swing from side to side. She cocked her head as though trying to figure me out.
I took a cautious step back, not wanting to catch whatever bug was taking my coworkers and half of the Midwest by storm today. Ever since lunch, people had started complaining of indigestion. The cafeteria’s daily special had been known to bring on afternoon bouts of heartburn, but this was crazy. “You had the taco salad, too, huh?”
The door to the women’s restroom swung open and a blur ran past us, startling me and knocking Melanie out of her stupor. Her lips curled in a snarl. Then she lunged at me, her jaws snapping.
“Shit!” Lucky for me, she moved slowly and I sidestepped to the left, leaving her to stumble clumsily onto her stomach. My papers fluttered to the floor while she floundered around. I threw out my hands. “What the fuck, Mel!”
She glared up at me, this time vocalizing a guttural growl that sent shivers up my neck. She jerkily dragged herself up. Fear crept into my nerves. I edged around her, careful to keep my distance, and pulled the bathroom door open and jumped inside.
I put all my weight into pushing the door closed, but Melanie was over twice my size. She heaved the door open, tumbled inside, and took me down. The air whooshed from my lungs. She pressed against me, her jaws snapping like she wanted to swear-to-God eat me.
Holy fuck, I’d been scared in my life before, but this went beyond terror. When folks talk about fight or flight instincts, it’s really fight and flight instincts. Everything I’d learned from self-defense classes was forgotten as I held my forearm against her neck while kicking and pushing with everything I had to get out from under her.
My arm shook under the weight. With a surge, I rolled her off me and shoved away. She grabbed at me, her fingers snagging my shirt and taking most of a sleeve with her with a loud rip. With nothing left to pull, the back of her head collided into the wall with a solid smack.
The bathroom door opened, and a high-pitched shriek pierced the air.
“Help!” I yelled while kicking away from Melanie, my Doc Martens squeaking across the floor, but whoever had opened the door had already disappeared.
A staccato pounding erupted from one of the bathroom stalls, matching the beating of my heart.
Knocking her head against the wall didn’t slow down Melanie in the least. If anything, she was more pissed off than ever, now crawling at me like a clumsy, rabid dog. Out of the corner of my eye, I caught the yellow “caution: wet floor” sign propped in the corner. I grabbed it and swung just as she closed the distance, nailing her across the cheek.
Snarling, she charged and I swung again, this time breaking her nose. Thick brown blood sprayed out with every snort and hiss. She came back at me like I hadn’t even hit her. With no time to swing, I shoved the hinged end of the plastic sign forward as hard as I could, karate-chopping her in the throat. The force knocked her back just enough for me to get solidly onto the balls of my feet.
Having her windpipe crushed put an end to the animal sounds and stopped her from spraying any more blood. Yet, even though she clearly couldn’t breathe, she came at me again like she didn’t even need air.
Terror froze my muscles.
My instructor had said a throat chop would take down an assailant in mere seconds. Yet, it had done nothing to stop a desk jockey from Accounting.
With the pounding and growling escalating from the bathroom stall a few feet away, I started swinging the sign relentlessly at Melanie’s head. My heart pounded and my breaths came in gulps, yet Melanie kept on coming at me.
When she moved to pounce, I slammed the sign into her temple, causing her to misjudge her attack, and she head butted the wall instead. She turned around. Her forehead was a bloody mess, and she still didn’t seem fazed.
“What the hell?” I asked breathlessly and swung again. The now-bloody sign’s corner nailed her in the eye, knocking an eyeball out of its socket. Another hit made her eyeball swing until it finally flew free and bounced off the wall. I swung again and again and again, my blows echoed by whoever was pounding on the stall door.
Bones crunched, and Melanie collapsed face-forward onto the floor.
More of that gelatinous coffee-colored blood trickled from her head and pooled on the floor. I hit her with the sign one more time to make sure she wasn’t playing possum, and I was about to kick her when the stall door swung open and Julie, the new girl, tumbled onto the floor. She looked up at me with that same sickly, ravenous look.
“Agh!” I smacked her in the face with the sign, and ran out of the bathroom, throwing the sign at her before I yanked the door open.
And I found myself in utter chaos.
I flattened against the wall in the corner where I’d come across Melanie earlier. Copies of my meeting agenda still littered the floor. Cubicle city was generally a quiet place except for the white noise piped in, but now people were running, shouting, and screaming. The pounding of work shoes across hollow floors echoed around me. Over a nearby cubicle wall, I watched as one man tackled another to the ground, his mouth clamping onto his victim’s throat. The other man screamed. Red dots splattered the beige fabric walls.
I’d like to think that it was because I was in shock that I didn’t run to help. But to be honest, I was scared shitless. Still watching the wall where the men went down, I ducked and crabbed down the hall, trying to ignore the anguished screams, focused only on avoiding the crazies. When the man’s screams abruptly stopped, something in my brain kicked me into gear, and I took off running toward my cubicle.
A hand reached out for me, and I twisted away. The work alarms blared. Phones were ringing everywhere. There were more screams and shouts in every direction. Some were begging for help, others were crying.
“Calm down! It will be okay!” a woman yelled from her desk. The next second, bloodied hands grabbed her and yanked her down as she let out an earsplitting scream.
Someone ran into me and I jumped back to find Alan from my team. He looked behind him before looking at me, his eyes wide. “This shit’s fucked up. I’m outta here,” he said under his breath as he headed past me.
Biting my lip, I glanced down the direction of my cube a dozen long feet away, where my bag and car keys waited in a drawer, and then turned back to Alan. “Wait up,” I called out. “I’m coming, too.”
He kept moving, and I sprinted to catch up. He slowed down, looking to the right, and I tugged him to the left. “This way.”
We ran in the opposite direction of the mass exodus heading toward the main elevators. Alan hit the down button at the rarely used back bay of elevators. While we waited, a terrifying image shot through my mind of Melanie jumping out from the small six-by-six compartment.
Just as the elevator dinged, I grabbed Alan’s elbow and tugged. “Stairs.”
“Why?” he asked but followed me around the corner to the back stairs.
There were several others already heading down the steps. Alan pushed ahead of me, and I stayed at his back as he shoved past others, followed by a chorus of “hey” and “watch it.”
We were only on floor eight, so we made it down the stairs fairly quickly. I paused at the third floor landing when I saw two men tackle a third man. One bit a chunk out of the guy’s face while the other went for the screamer’s throat. My adrenaline had already taken over, and my feet kept moving despite my shock. A gunshot rang out somewhere on the first floor. It was kind of like watching disasters on TV. It’s so horrendously surreal that it doesn’t fully register in the brain as reality. The whole Prima Insurance building had turned into the set of a slasher film
, and unwillingness to face reality was the only reason I hadn’t frozen.
Alan flung open the large glass doors. I rushed outside, shading my eyes against the afternoon sun, and scanned the parking lot. Some spaces were empty, some cars were tearing out of the lot, but most were still peacefully parked, waiting for their owners.
Gunfire erupted somewhere in the distance.
“Where’s your car?” I asked breathlessly.
He turned around and looked at me like he’d forgotten I was still there. “Uh.” He looked around. “Over there.” He pointed to Lot C and took off toward it.
We were panting, but we sprinted all the way to his car, making wide arcs around other people running to their cars. It was a warm spring day, and my clothes clung to my sweaty skin.
Alan was an early-morning person, so his small Mitsubishi was parked only a few cars down the second row. He fumbled with his keys before holding out the fob. The lights flashed, and I yanked open the passenger door.
I swept the papers and CDs off the seat with a brisk move and fell onto the hot black leather. I had my door locked before Alan had the key in the ignition. The engine roared to life, and he squealed the tires in reverse, throwing me against the dash.
I hastily fastened my seatbelt and held on.
“What the hell is going on around here?” he muttered, throwing the car into gear and squealing the tires again.
I swallowed. “No idea.”
For the past two weeks, there’d been talk about a fast-spreading epidemic in South America that had been quickly moving northward, though I hadn’t worried. The Midwest was a long distance from South America, and we’d closed our borders to Mexico over a week ago. And most of the military stood between us and them to make sure the borders stayed closed.