by Rich Baker
“That sounds way too dangerous,” Kyle says. “These things are too fast, too strong, and too unpredictable. Bad combination. I don’t like it.”
“They’re not all like that. Some are really slow now,” Stephenie says.
“She’s right, Kyle,” Annie continues. “The ones that linger in the alley are the ones that can’t keep up with the fast ones. They get left behind and then I guess they just lose interest in following the herd. They mill around until something else catches their eye, or whatever. We can lure one of those into one of the garages, drop it, shut the door quick, and then we can string it up and drain that goop out.”
“And do what with it? We don’t know anything about what it is. I’m pretty sure whatever’s so contagious about them is in their blood and saliva, like rabies,” Kyle says. He points at the door to the back bedroom where their new guest is resting. “I don’t know how she didn’t get infected with it, covered by as much of it as she was.”
“We’ll pour it on some clothes, or a poncho. Let it soak in and dry out,” Annie says. “We can leave it in the sun long enough to let the UV kill any viruses.”
“If it’s a virus,” Kyle says. “It could be bacterial. What if it’s like anthrax and it can go dormant for years until the conditions are right for it to spring to life? This is a potentially fatal risk you want to take.”
“It’s potentially fatal every time we go out for supplies,” Stephenie signs while Annie translates. “If this works and it buys us a second or two every time we come in contact with one of those things like it did for that lady in there, it could save our lives.”
Kyle sighs. “If you’re right and if this works, who’s going to test it? Who’s going to volunteer to put on clothes soaked in zed blood with no idea whether or not it’s even going to work, let alone if it’s going to infect and kill them?”
A voice startles them. They all turn toward the doorway to the back bedroom where the woman they rescued now stands, leaning against the doorjamb.
“I’ll do it,” she says. “I’ll be your guinea pig.”
Nine
“You startled me!” Kyle says. “Shouldn’t you be resting?”
“I’ve rested enough,” she says. “I heard you talking, and if your – what did you call it? Scented camouflage? – works, then I can use it to get back to my house.”
“Where is your house? Who are you? We have a lot of questions, actually.”
“Do you have some food? I’m starving.”
“Is soup okay?” Annie asks.
The woman makes a face and says “Why would you ask such a question?”
“It’s easiest to fix.”
“Soup would be amazing, thank you.”
“Please, sit down,” Kyle says.
The woman walks across the room to the round table and takes a seat opposite Kyle. She’s tense as she watches Annie opening the can of chunky style soup, but relaxes when the pull tab breaks the seal on the can.
“I guess I should start by saying thanks for saving me. I – well, I don’t know what I was doing. I was in shock. I have a couple of questions I’d like to have answered first if you don’t mind. Then I’ll tell you what happened.”
“Okay, go ahead,” Kyle says.
“First, what day is it?”
He looks at his watch. “Friday, June seventh.”
She nods but doesn’t say anything for a few seconds.
“So I’ve been here for less than a day?”
Kyle nods.
“And where is ‘here’?” she asks.
“You’re in the Red Fox subdivision, off of Deer Trail Drive. Sorry, until we know more about what your story is, I can’t be more specific than that. We have some potentially unsavory people prowling the neighborhood.”
“You have no idea,” she says. “My name is Amanda Stevens. What are your names? I remember yours is Kyle, right? It’s not really Kyle Reese, is it?”
He smiles. “No, it’s not. I’m Kyle, but the last name’s Puckett. Two T’s,” he says, then points at the girls in turn. “This is Stephenie and Annie Sims.”
“One M,” Annie says from the kitchenette.
“And there are more of you?” Amanda asks.
“There are others, yes,” Kyle says. “They’re watching the neighborhood right now.”
“Alright. Well, I guess I may as well tell you what happened.
“I live over on Eagle’s Claw Court, off Deer Trail, so not far from this subdivision. After the, well, after IT happened, the turn, or whatever you folks call it, we followed the advice of all the people on TV and the radio and we ‘sheltered in place.’ We – um, me and my husband and two daughters,” she says, her voice cracking when she mentions her daughters. “We stayed up all night that Friday night, watching the news in the attic because we could have the TV on and there are no windows to show the light. Steve – my husband – ran power and cable for the TV and the internet up there a while ago, and he has it mostly finished. It’s his man cave. Anyway, by eight or so the next morning we decided to get out of town, but it was insanity out there. The rules of the road were gone. Accidents everywhere, people deliberately running people over whether they were infected or not, smashing into other cars, jumping the curbs, driving on the sidewalks, and everywhere the dead were taking more lives. It was total pandemonium. We didn’t get more than a mile from the house, and we turned around and came back home. We barely made it.
“We had led a group of the zombies to our house, and we could hear them pounding on the garage door before we had even gotten out of the car. We went inside, and I must have set the alarm out of habit. That’s important later. Anyway, we took our backpacks and the rest of the food and all the water we could carry and went up into the attic again.
“We stayed up there for a few days, listening to the dead moan in the streets, hearing gunfire far away, nearby, hearing cars driving, crashing. And the screams. They were horrible. My youngest, Kate, was twelve. She cried herself to sleep every night.”
Kyle picks up on the past-tense ‘was twelve’ in her story, and he feels like he knows where this is headed.
“So this went on for three weeks,” she continues. “Though the worst of it was that first two or three days. After that, I think the people still alive were resigned to the reality that they had no place to go, so they stayed hidden.
“Steve used to read stuff to me from Facebook, from this survivalist group. He had all these factoids, like ninety percent of people, didn’t have enough food on hand to last for three days in the event of a disaster. So he started buying supplies for a ‘what if.’ ‘What if there’s a blizzard?’ he’d say. ‘What if there’s an EMP?’ We had food and water on reserve for fourteen days, plus the standard food in the fridge and cupboards. We were lucky. I think it was hunger that started driving people out. It was about a week and a half into the end of the world that we started hearing our neighbors try to get out. Sometimes, the sounds of the cars would make it out of earshot, but most of the time they didn’t. We’d hear a crash and then the screams. I lost count of how many people we heard die.
“We ate pretty normally the first couple of days, thinking that rescue would be coming. But after the power went out, and never came back, we started doubting if help was going to come, ever. Even though we started rationing food and water, we ran low on both after the first three weeks. Steve and I started taking turns skipping our rations so the girls could eat. We would wait until they were asleep and talk about what we were going to do when the food ran out completely. We didn’t want to risk going out, but didn’t see any choice.”
She heaves a heavy sigh, and her eyes get watery.
“Speaking of which, do you have any water?” she asks. Annie gets a glass and fills it from the sink. She hands it and a bowl of soup to Amanda, who takes a drink of water and sets the glass down. She contemplates the soup, then grabs the spoon and takes a bite.
“If this is too hard we can talk later,” Kyle says. “I d
on’t want to pry so hard right after you’ve woken up.”
“It’s okay. It’s not like it’s going to hurt less in an hour. Can I eat the soup first though? Maybe you can tell me a little about you guys. You seem pretty well set up here. You still have water from a faucet, a working stove, and you have lights. It’s like you’re missing the apocalypse.”
Kyle tells her about his experience running from the zombie before the town had woken up to the realization that the riots weren’t riots, but were in fact zombie outbreaks and the people in the street wanted to eat them. He tells her about the kids exodus from Fort Collins, and about Danny’s offer to use his basement. He describes Danny as an extreme prepper, hoping that will cover the tunnels and steel doors without raising suspicion. He leaves out the fact that Danny is a gunsmith and has an arsenal in a hidden underground workshop. He doesn’t know why, exactly, but he doesn’t want to divulge too much information to her yet.
She finishes the soup and takes another long drink of water. Annie takes the soup bowl and washes it in the sink. Amanda sighs again, her face sad.
“Okay, so, yesterday, we heard a car door shut, and voices outside. We had been spending some time downstairs during the days just to get some sunlight, and see what the Deadites were up to. Steve was a massive movie guy, and he can tie everything back to some movie or another. This world is tailor made for Evil Dead references – at least that’s what he said. Anyway, Steve and I ran to the front window to see what was going on. A white car was in our driveway, and two guys were heading for the front door. Like idiots, we left our guns upstairs in the attic. They started kicking the door, and when it gave way, the alarm went off. We totally forgot that we had set it way back on that first night like we always did when we came home for the night. We didn’t have time to shut it off and get to the attic before these guys would have been on us, so we made for the stairs and hoped they wouldn’t see us.
“But they did, and they pulled the release for the attic stairs before we could get them locked. The whole time they were calling out ‘wait, we don’t want to hurt you’ and ‘don’t run, we need help!’
“The alarm brought the dead. We could hear them coming in downstairs, stumbling over the step into the house, shuffling in the hallway. Before we could do anything, the two guys were at the top of the stairs. We told them to pull them shut before the dead found us, but they didn’t know how to, so Kelly, my oldest, ran over and pulled the cable to fold them up, then she pushed the metal bar through the latch so they couldn’t open them from below.
“By this time, Steve had his pistol trained on these two and told them to get their hands up. I thought one of them was going to make a move to grab Kelly, but she’s fast and side-stepped him.
“One of them was Mexican – er – Hispanic, and he went by Lucky, though I’m pretty sure that’s not his given name. The other one was white, and he went by Little Nicky. He said he suffered a throat injury, and it left him sounding like Adam Sandler in that shitty movie. He was right; he sounded just like him.
“Anyway, they told us this story that they were just trying to survive. They were looking for houses that looked like no one was home, and they were looking for food, mostly, but anything else that had value. We asked them why they picked our house, and not one of the neighbors, and they said they’d already been through them. It didn’t quite add up.
“I won’t go through the whole conversation. We were struggling to hear each other because of the alarm, but after a while, the battery began to die. The system is backed up by one of those big square six-volt batteries, and I don’t know if we had ever changed it the whole time we lived there. Anyway, they had a bunch of food in their packs and given our situation food-wise, we thought it might be good to take advantage of the situation and get a few meals out of it. They agreed to give us a few cans of food if we’d let them stay in the attic until enough of the dead had wandered off to let them escape. Steve fired up his tailgating stove – one of those fold-up jobs with wheels on it – to heat up the soup. We’d been eating soup cold to save the propane, but this seemed like a special occasion. The two guys even had a thermos of hot coffee, which they offered to share. We hadn’t had coffee for weeks – not since the power went out – so we gladly accepted. I had drunk most of mine when I noticed that the two guys weren’t drinking theirs. I thought that odd when Kelly said she felt funny. It clicked in my head that they’d drugged the coffee, but as I reached for my pistol, my hand didn’t work right. I looked over at Steve, and he was almost passed out. Everything seemed like it was an extra four feet away from me. I managed to get my hand on the handle of my pistol, but Lucky grabbed Kelly and told me to think twice about drawing my gun. He said I was probably seeing double and was just as likely to hit my daughter as hit him, and he was right. So, I never drew the gun. Little Nicky punched Steve hard in the face, knocking him out. He collapsed on the floor. I looked up in time to see Lucky’s fist just before it hit me.”
She is fighting back the tears now, but before Kyle can say anything she continues.
“I woke up to the sound of gunfire. At first, I had no idea where I was. My face hurt, my – well, other parts hurt, and it was dark, except for the light coming in from the open stairs leading out of the attic. That’s when I remembered where we were.
“I reached for my pistol, but not only was it not there in its holster, I wasn’t even wearing pants. I heard another gunshot, and it woke me up a little more. I moved toward the stairs, toward the light and I tripped on something.”
She starts sobbing, overcome with emotion. Annie puts a hand on her shoulder, and Amanda looks at her through tear filled eyes, a look of gratitude for the kind gesture showing through the tears.
“It was Katie. Her body, anyway. She wasn’t attacked or bitten, but she was dead. Her face was blue and her eyes bloodshot. She’d been strangled. I remember pushing back from her, horrified, and crawled into another body. This one was a Deadite, shot in the head. I think I screamed, and I heard someone say ‘shhh!!’ It was Steve.
“He was lying on the floor by the stairs. Kelly was sprawled across his legs; only it wasn’t Kelly. She was naked and covered with black veins. I could see bites on her shoulders and arms. My daughter had been turned into a Deadi – one of those things.
“Steve was trying to say something, but I couldn’t understand him. I moved closer and then I saw it – the bite wound on his neck. Kelly had bitten him, and he had to shoot her. I could see the black lines spreading through his neck, and he was racked with pain. He held out the pistol to me. I took it from him. He managed to say ‘I’m sorry!’ before a spasm of pain shook him. Then he said ‘Go!’
“Something in me just shut down then. I stared at him. I knew he was dead, and I knew what was coming, but I couldn’t get my feet to move. When his feet started moving, I started crying, and when his hands reached out to me, I almost just let him pull me in for a hug that I knew would end with my death. But I didn’t care. I remember thinking that, I don’t care. I just want to die. I’ve lost everyone; I want to die. We were lucky to make it this far.
“And that did it. Lucky. It clicked in my head, and I remembered, Lucky. Little Nicky. They had done this. They stripped me naked and did - whatever they did. They strangled my youngest girl and raped the older one. Older. She was only 17! Steve and I had let the girls down. We were supposed to protect them, and we failed! I know why Steve said he was sorry – he wasn’t able to save us. I raised the pistol and shot him in the face. Can you believe that? Just like that. Bang! And his possessed corpse dropped to the floor.
“I didn’t even notice the Deadite that was making its way up the stairs until it blocked the light. I fired three shots; I think it was three, maybe it was more, and it dropped on top of me, that foul smelling stuff spilling out of it and all over me. I pushed it off of me and tried to get up. I slipped in the mess that had leaked out of my husband and daughter, and I just kind of snapped. The rest of it is like I was watching some
one else do it.
“I went down the attic stairs and found another Deadite. It turned toward me but didn’t attack, so I just kept walking. I went down to the first floor, hoping to find the reanimated corpses of Lucky and Little Nicky, but they weren’t there. I went outside, and their car was gone. I know I was hoping to find those bastards, and when I didn’t, I just kept walking. I passed a few more of the Deadites, and they also turned toward me but didn’t come after me. It wasn’t until I got into the field that one of them tried to attack, so I shot it. The noise, of course, brought more. So I kept shooting them.
“I don’t remember what the pistols are that Steve got us. Something-Tec or Tec something. I just remember they’re .22 caliber and hold thirty bullets. I was always one of those ‘why do you need thirty bullets’ kind of people, but in that field, I was glad to have them. When I ran out of bullets, I was sure I was dead, but then you guys showed up.
“It’s all kind of foggy though. I think that’s the way it happened, but I can’t be sure. I know it probably doesn’t make sense, but it’s almost like I’m watching the movie of it happening to someone else, and I can’t be sure if that’s how it really happened or if that’s what my mind is filling the gaps with. Thank you, by the way, for saving me. I know you risked your lives to do it. You probably thought I was crazy. Maybe I am, I don’t know. I just – it hurts, and there’s nothing I can do to change it. I lost my babies!”
She starts crying harder, her body convulsing with each sob. Annie puts an arm around her and hugs her, and Amanda turns and buries her face in Annie’s shoulder, wailing a sound that Kyle hopes he never hears again.
Ten
Amanda is sleeping again, exhausted from both her ordeal and from giving her accounting of it.
“I can’t even imagine,” Annie says. “I mean, dealing with my aunt and uncle was bad, but getting roofied, raped, your kids get killed, and you have to kill your husband? That’s just…”