by Siara Brandt
There was no glass in one of the windows near Sidra. There were just boards with wide cracks that the moonlight sifted through. As she thought about what he had just said to her, she heard the rustling of leaves and the snapping of branches. A dark shadow passed by the cracks in the window. A familiar snarling sound made her step back away from the window.
Peering carefully through openings in the boards, Sidra saw a single undead shuffling around outside. It was dragging an injured leg. She saw the hideously-scarred, pale face very clearly. The gaping mouth had a string of dark blood or saliva dripping from one corner. And there was something else. A sprout of some kind, a long one, was growing out of one eye socket even though the whitish eye was still intact.
She had never been this close to one of the undead. At least without having to immediately run away. From the open mouth came a continuous flow of sound, a deep groaning that was accentuated every now and then with a rattling growl. Some portion of the decaying brain was obviously still functioning. It was casting back and forth glances, even with the sprout, as if searching for something. Probably a meal. Hunger seemed to motivate them at all times. At least that’s what everyone said. It was generally thought that the virus or bacteria that infected them, if that’s what it really was, made them have a need to feed at all times.
She saw it stop and stand before the window. Had it seen her? Sidra flinched when it lurched suddenly towards the window where she was standing. She heard it thump against the outside wall. Swallowing hard, she backed up even further, decided then and there that there was no chance of her going outside by herself tonight.
“We’re lucky there’s just one of them,” she heard a low voice from behind her. “We’ll keep quiet. You should lay down and keep out of sight. If it can’t hear or see us, it’ll eventually wander off.”
Shortly after that, Law watched her creep over to one of the cots, the one farthest away from him. After she carefully checked for any more bugs. She even pulled the blanket back and stared at what was under it for a while.
He noted how pale her face looked in the moonlight as she stiffly sank down to the edge of the cot. She didn’t lay down right away. She sagged down, leaning forward a little, just like a balloon that the air had suddenly been let out of. He tried to ignore her and get some sleep. The pain pills were finally kicking in. He reminded himself that he didn’t really want to hear her story. Everyone had a sad story. Everyone had losses. The last thing he wanted was to hear hers or to be responsible for her. He didn’t want to have to worry about her, or include her in his plans, which technically, admittedly, were pretty much up in the air at this point.
Yeah, it was best to ignore her. Just put her out of his mind. And he tried to do that. He really did.
Across the room, Sidra loosened the laces on her boots, but she didn’t take them off. Just in case she had to run in the middle of the night. She wouldn’t get very far in her bare feet. She’d be as slow as that undead outside. Not that the dead could ever be slow enough.
As the night wore on, she grew more and more weary, but she didn’t want to chance falling asleep, so she sat on the cot for a while and tried to keep her eyes open. He could do anything to her in her sleep. She would rest, but she would make sure she stayed awake. She would be tired tomorrow, but it would be better than being dead tonight.
I’ll be all right if I don’t fall asleep, she told herself as she finally laid down on the cot. Things will be different in the morning. Maybe everything will look a lot better. She was exhausted right now and things never looked good when you were exhausted.
She lay there for a long time, jerking awake every time she felt herself nodding off. She watched the moon change its position in the sky. She was still fighting sleep as a solitary bird began twittering in a nearby tree. She finally closed her eyes as a smear of intense magenta, the first faint harbinger of dawn, suffused the eastern sky . . .
Chapter 5
Thayer drew a deep breath of cold morning air into his lungs. He released it abruptly in a sigh that had a fair amount of frustration and worry in it. He crouched down on one knee and examined the dark bundle that was lying in the road. From a distance he couldn’t tell what it was. Up close, it turned out to be nothing. Just a torn, faded T-shirt with what looked like blood stains on it and some candy wrappers wadded up inside. There was no way of knowing who had put the T-shirt there or why, but it obviously had been lying there for a long time.
He got back to his feet, his gaze narrowing as he scanned the dense woods on both sides of the road. He took a chance and called out.
“Seth. Kesi.”
He had been following the small tracks since the sun had come up and there was light enough for him to see them. The tracks had eventually led to a paved road. From that point, he’d lost all trace of the tracks. He knew the kids could have gotten off the road anywhere.
He didn’t know what to do now. But he couldn’t give up, either. He was prepared for almost anything this world might throw at him. He had learned how to forage for food in the wild. And to fight the living as well as the undead. He was well armed. There was a bow on his back, and guns in various holsters strapped to his body. There were knives and other weapons hidden in his boots and in his coat. But there was one thing he wasn’t prepared for. He wasn’t prepared to give up his search. He wasn’t nearly prepared for that.
He stared at the deserted, leaf-littered stretch of road ahead of him, trying not to give in to a feeling of helplessness. Of hopelessness. The harsh truth was that people often got lost in this world. And they stayed lost.
Lendel drove up beside him on the four wheeler and Thayer said to him, “I’ll walk up the road for a ways. You go on ahead. Maybe they’ve gone into the woods somewhere. Maybe they’ll hear us.”
Yeah. They hadn’t answered his call, but maybe they would hear the four wheeler. They were on foot. They were small. They couldn’t have gone that far.
Dust motes floated all around him in the early sunlight. The drifting particles sparkled as they passed through the rays of sunlight slanting down from the loft. They lost their cleanness and became more dun-colored, more shadowy as they settled soundlessly on the dirt floor. They were a potent combination of old hay, pollen-laced dust and bird droppings. And virulent contagion. It was just one of many mutations in a world brought to its knees by a sweeping, lethal pandemic.
Galton Clune sat long in the silence of the barn while his seething emotions churned like some dark, oppressive whirlpool that threatened to pull him downward into its murky depths. In that spiraling vortex of chaotic images, he envisioned yielding to the violent impulses that threatened to consume him. He could not stop them. They came like demons rushing at him out of the darkness that was his subconscious.
Pent-up sexual energy and jealousy were the dominant passions. They fueled another strong emotion. Hatred. A burgeoning hatred for the man who had stepped back into his life and was threatening to take everything away from him. Logan Wade.
Galton sat unmoving, but his muscles strained against his sweat-stained shirt. His nerves were wound so tightly that both of his hands were clenched into tight fists at his sides. His chest rose and fell with his deep breaths. Flecks of foam dotted his lips but he was unaware of them. He knew something was happening to him, but he wasn’t able to stop it. He might have fought it, but he had no will to do so, and he wondered abstractedly when whatever it was would overtake him completely.
His brain had been fighting the infection for some time now, since the first moments after he had kicked the door in and entered the barn under a choking cloud of dust and sifting debris. Since those first few unclean breaths had entered his lungs. The infection had remained under control. Until now. Until the primal drivers of rage and lust and hatred had taken over. They started chain-reactions within him. Massive surges of hormones from his adrenal system flooded his body and his brain. Then this particular, mutated strain of the organism found an environment where it could flourish an
d ultimately destroy. Then he started to die.
He was only half aware that each day he lost a little more of himself. Loss came in unrelenting waves that became stronger with each passing day. There were moments when he yielded to a kind of madness that came over him because there was so much satisfaction in the yielding. He could give himself over completely to the hatred and the rage then. He could release it all and after each episode, he could not help but think of it as a cleansing. It became almost an addiction.
The natural order of things had reversed itself long ago. Was this not where he was supposed to go? Into this animal-like state, where it was easy to be ruled by such things as rage and dominance and negative emotions? He had broken most of the old commandments. He had killed and stolen and lied. And he had coveted. And worshipped. Another man’s wife.
And he was on the verge of losing her again. If he let it happen.
“Goddamn you, Logan,” he hissed, breaking yet another rule as his pupils congealed into black pinpoints of hate. “Why didn’t you stay dead?”
Sidra woke to the sunlight in her face. And a hand on her shoulder shaking her awake, though her foggy brain was able to register that the presence behind that hand was already backing away from her. Or maybe the faint rustling of clothing gave her that impression.
“Time to wake up,” she heard. She knew who the owner of that voice was. She had been dreaming about him. How could she forget that deep, almost husky voice or the man that it belonged to? Still, at first she couldn’t remember where they were. Recollection seeped very slowly through her consciousness.
She tried to open her eyes, but the sunlight filtering in through the cracks in the boards made it difficult. She wasn’t sure, but it seemed to her that she had been snoring. Had she really fallen into that deep a sleep? And if so, had he heard her snoring?
Her eyelashes flickered again as she made another attempt to lift her eyelids. The first thing in her line of vision was a pair of black combat boots. Slowly, she lifted her gaze and saw military-style pants adorned with black holsters that were strapped to two powerful, camouflaged-covered thighs. Her gaze continued upwards. There was the camouflage again, stretching across a broad male chest and even wider shoulders. As her half-open, sleepy gaze moved even further upwards, Sidra saw the same strong, beard-shadowed jaw she remembered from last night. No face cloth this morning. Finally she encountered the familiar pair of unwavering, almost-challenging eyes that had seemed so intimidating in the darkness. They were still intimidating, even in the broad daylight.
She pushed herself up on one elbow, and saw that beyond the window, wide bands of deep magenta were alternating with varying shades of blue and gold. The sun was already up. Far up. The birds were busy in the trees all around the cabin. In spite of last night’s determination to stay awake, she realized she must have slept for hours.
The man was obviously already wide awake, but he seemed like the type of man who would be awake at the first crack of dawn. She got the impression that he had been waiting for her to wake up, and that he had been watching her while she slept. And probably sat there listening to her snore.
Still sleepy-eyed, she sat up and pushed her hair back from her face as she glanced around at the interior of the cabin. She tried to look anywhere but at him. She still couldn’t believe that she had slept so soundly. She realized that, for a change, her sleep had not been interrupted by terrifying dreams, the recurrent ones that stemmed from the primitive fear of being eaten alive. The same ones everyone had. She’d had her share of them, too. But not last night. Last night had been the best night of sleep she’d had in a long time.
She tried to look on the bright side. She was still alive and in one piece and she had rested well. Those were things to be thankful for. She glanced up at the writing on the wall, the same writing she hadn’t been able to read in the dark last night.
Camlin, don’t go home. We’ll wait for you at Dad’s house. We love you. Please be careful.
Seated across the room, Law watched the woman read what was written on the wall. He was still wondering why she was out here on her own. He didn’t know how she thought that she was going to survive out there all alone. She didn’t seem even remotely prepared. For anything. She wasn’t even armed with a gun. He shook his head slightly as he continued to regard her. He was well aware of the tense set of her shoulders as she sat on the cot across from him. He also knew she was trying her hardest to avoid looking at him. He saw something else now that she was sitting up, something he hadn’t seen in the darkness last night. Her torn, bloody sleeve. She’d obviously been grazed by a bullet.
She hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t given any indication that she’d been hurt at all. His frown deepened. The more he looked at her, the more he realized she didn’t have a chance in hell of making it out there by herself. So why was she foolishly attempting something so dangerous? He silently answered his own question. Probably because she didn’t have any choice. Probably because there was no one left to look after her. Unfortunately, that happened all too often. He had already noticed that she didn’t have a ring on her finger. Which meant she probably didn’t have a husband, alive or dead.
His chest rose then contracted as he released a deep sigh. The more she came awake, the more those intensely-green eyes were clouded with worry. And the more the early sunlight made her soft-looking hair gleam like a golden halo around her. Where had that thought come from? He wondered with an inward snort. He shouldn’t be thinking of her as angelic, or any other way. She’d be trouble, no doubt about it. If he let her be.
His frown remained in place as his gaze lowered and he looked at her torn, mud-caked shirt and jeans. Her worn boots. She definitely needed some better footwear. He clamped his teeth tightly together as he admonished himself: Don’t start feeling sorry for her. She’s not your problem.
The truth was that since this whole zombie apocalypse had started, he’d had more to worry about than he ever wanted. He sure as hell didn’t want to take on one more problem.
But-
But he had a bad feeling he was going to make her his problem.
He’d fought the idea the whole time she’d been laying there sleeping, but he had already considered taking her home, wherever that was. He had already told himself that was as far as he was going to go, however. He sure as hell wasn’t going to become some long-term savior. He was definitely no knight in shining armor. She needed to understand that. Not that she was asking for his help. He knew this was all on him.
He released another sigh. A shorter one that had even more frustration, and maybe a little bit of resignation, behind it. Yeah, give her one quick adios and then send her on her way alone? Into a dangerous, zombie-infested landscape? All by herself? He knew he wasn’t going to be able to do that. Either he escorted her personally to wherever it was she needed to go, or she was going to get herself killed. That was almost a given. And that would be on him, too.
She was wide awake now and she was taking in every detail of her surroundings, he knew. She sat there as stiff as a ramrod with her shoulders squared, as if she was expecting him to leap on her at any moment like some crazed wild animal. Even though she was making a good attempt to act natural and not show any fear.
But she was afraid. There was no doubt about that.
What was she doing now?
She slowly and carefully tore a few pages out of a book that was lying on the upturned crate next to her. Then with her face half averted, she carefully laid the paper down on the floor, covering the flattened spider body that was still stuck to the floorboards. Then she put one hand to her chest and, he was sure, did her best to control a suppressed gag reflex.
She looked over at him when she realized he was watching her. “I don’t like spiders,” she explained, just as if she was being perfectly reasonable covering it like that.
“Then you might want to move,” he said, still watching her with a mild curiosity. “There’s another one on the blanket behind you.”
Law had never seen anyone move so fast. She brought the book down violently at least half a dozen times. It took that many times for the spider to stop twitching. At least she had good reflexes, he thought. She left the entire book covering that one. And she didn’t sit on the cot again. She backed away from it and paced across the room. Then, with her arms crossed over her chest, she stood before the crude book case. Probably because she didn’t know what else to do.
Sidra was trying to concentrate on the titles of the books on the shelves that lined the wall in front of her. She had to force herself not to think about the spider any more. About how it might have crawled right over her while she slept . . .
She closed her eyes tightly. She knew there were more pressing problems right now than spiders. Like how badly her arm was throbbing. She didn’t know what to do about that. She wasn’t about to take her shirt off and inspect the wound. Even if that were an option, she didn’t have any first aid supplies. Unless there were some here.
She gazed about her. The interior of the cabin was small and sparsely furnished. There were two chairs a table. And the three cots. The cabin was so old that plaster was peeling off the walls. The water-stained ceiling was in bad shape, too. Several books gathered dust on the rough-hewn shelves before her. How long had it been since she’d had time to actually read a book? she wondered. Too long. Once, long ago in her previous life, she had been in the habit of reading everything she could get her hands on. Not anymore. The world had fallen far from the civilized existence they had once known. Not in their wildest imagination would anyone have guessed that all their dreams would be so abruptly shattered and completely obliterated. That everyday life would become a living hell where survival loomed above any and all other considerations and reading would become a rare luxury that was almost never indulged in.