The Awakened

by Sara Elizabeth Santana

  I raced back upstairs, yanking my duffel bag from underneath my bed and throwing it on top of the covers. It was my travel bag, the one I always used when I was forced out to Nebraska to visit my mom, every other Christmas and for half of Spring Break. It already had several pairs of socks and underwear tucked inside and toiletries like a toothbrush, deodorant and shampoo.

  I took the gun holster off (why had I strapped it on over my pajamas?) and threw the pajamas I was wearing in my bag. I slipped on a pair of slim black jeans and a tight black shirt. I crawled into my closet briefly and yanked on my sturdy black boots. I caught my reflection in the mirror for a moment and noted how I looked like a heroine from a Resident Evil video game or something. I looked like I was trying way too hard, but what else did you wear when you were running away from zombies?

  I yanked my hair back into its usual ponytail and strapped the holster back around my waist. I proceeded to grab as many clothes as I could find and shoved them in the bag. I looked around my room, wondering what I should grab. Eighteen years I had lived in this room, eighteen years of memories and accumulating a ton of stuff, and I had no idea what to bring with me.

  I pulled a picture of my dad, Madison and I at the Mets game off my mirror. It seemed so small, like it was nothing compared to so many other things in this room. Should I grab the medals I got from playing soccer as a kid or the Honor Society certificates? Should I grab the diary I kept all through my preteen years, filled with a ton of hate words about Ash, and my middle school crush, and eventual boyfriend, Joel?

  “Zoey! Let’s go!”

  I shook my head, dismissing memories and settled on the photo, my extremely worn and loved copy of Marion Zimmer Bradley’s The Mists of Avalon, my Mets hat and, superficially, my iPod. I slung the bag over my shoulder and ran down the stairs. “Okay, let’s go.” I turned to Bandit. “Let’s go, Bandit.”

  “Zoey, I don’t think…” my dad said, looking stricken.

  I looked back and forth between him and Ash, and I started to feel panicked. “No. No, you’re not thinking. You can’t be thinking…”

  “It doesn’t make sense to bring him,” Dad said, softly. “I can’t worry about Bandit. I need to worry about you, and Ash.”

  My fingers were lost in the shaggy fur of Bandit’s head. “I can’t…” my voice was caught on a sob. “I can’t leave him, Dad. He won’t understand. I can’t just…”

  Bandit could sense the tension in the room and barked softly, pacing in place. He was only six years old and still acted like an overgrown pup sometimes. I looked appealingly at Ash and Dad, but I knew it was a lost cause. My dad’s face was full of defeat and sorrow, and Ash avoided my eyes completely.

  I fell to my knees in front of Bandit and pulled him into my arms, burying my face into his warm, smelly fur. “I’m so sorry,” I whispered to him. “I’m so sorry, Bandit. I love you so much.”

  I pulled back, leaving a damp spot on his fur. He was looking up at me, confused, and licked the tears from my face. I led him to the basement and shut the door. I couldn’t bear to look at him as we abandoned him. I couldn’t do it.

  “Let’s go,” I said, sharply, refusing to look at either of them.

  My dad was staring out the window. “There’s a group of them about a block up. If we move swiftly and quietly, we can probably make it to the car before they notice.”

  “Brilliant,” I said. I looked over at Ash, who was hoisting a backpack over his shoulder. He was pale, and he looked terrible. His hair was hanging in his face, and there was a slight tremble in the grip that he had on his own handgun. “Are we going?”

  My dad looked around the brownstone, and I knew he was thinking similar things that I had been thinking upstairs. Like me, my dad had grown up in this house as a child, had lived in it his entire life. When my parents had gotten married so young and had no place to go, they moved into the basement and my grandparents had taken care of them. We had both taken our first steps here, had birthday parties and lived our lives here. I had my very first kiss on that porch step, had watched millions of Mets games and cooked too many dinners in that kitchen.

  Bandit was whining behind the basement door; he always hated being locked up down there. My dad closed his eyes for a moment and then sighed. “Yeah. Let’s go.”

  HE EASED THE FRONT DOOR open slowly, pausing every time it made even the smallest sound. He checked outside, his gun held out in front of him, before he motioned for the two of us to follow him. I thought of the many times that I had tripped down these stupid steps and hoped to god that I would not do that now. There was a heavy stench in the air, of blood and rotting flesh and death, and I tried so hard to keep myself from throwing up.

  We had nearly made it to the car when there was a crack. My dad and I looked behind us where Ash’s eyes and mouth were open wide, his foot on a stick that had cracked in half when he’d stepped on it. All three of us looked in the direction of the Awakened, whose scary black eyes were all focused on us.

  “Shit,” my dad hissed. “Get in the car. Get in the car now!”

  We dropped all pretenses of silence and sprinted to the car, flinging ourselves into the car. I had barely strapped myself in when my dad peeled out, taking out a few bodies that had thrown themselves in our path.

  “They can’t slow us down.” Dad shouted at me as he sped down our street. “We only have two hours to be a safe distance away from the city.”

  “Safe from what?”

  “They’re nuking New York City and the surrounding areas. Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, all of it. They’re doing it to all the major cities,” he said, taking a swift left, throwing me into the window.

  “What?” I shrieked and then clapped my hand over my mouth as the sound echoed through the car.

  “They’re just giving up? It’s only been three days,” Ash shouted from the backseat.

  “They figured it would be better to just neutralize the problem off the bat,” he explained, taking sharp turns and speeding to the exit out of the city. “They’re nuking the other major cities too, the ones I was mentioning before, any area that has a huge population with the virus.”

  “Jesus,” I said, paralyzing fear ripping through my body. They were going to blow up my city, the city I had grown up in my entire life. I looked behind me at Ash, who looked as shocked as me. “How do you know?”

  He slammed on his brakes when we came up to several other vehicles before taking another right to go around them. “It was an accident.” He didn’t say more than that.

  “How much time do we have?” I said. I felt the frozen pizza that Ash and I had cooked over the stove churn in my stomach, as we screeched through an alley, barely fitting.

  “Two hours. Hopefully we can get as far away from the city as possible, and then we can regroup and find some supplies. I have some stuff, since we were supposed to leave anyway, but not everything. And Ash needs clothes.” He glanced over at me as we went sailing out of the city. “And we need to stock up on ammunition, maybe grab a couple more guns.”

  “They’re blowing up my city,” I whimpered, turning around in my seat. “And we left Bandit.” Tears filled up my eyes again, and my dad leaned over and squeezed my thigh briefly before returning to his tear down the highway.

  There were cars everywhere, people everywhere, and there was a state of panic. The blue tone of the Awakened seemed to outnumber the regular, normal skin tones of people who weren’t sick. I felt helpless strapped in this car as we barreled through. We were getting out, but none of these people knew. There was already so much chaos.

  “Dad, why can’t we tell anyone?” I said softly, pressing my hands over my eyes, shutting out the destruction, trying to ignore the raspy breaths and the screams. The air around me was filled with screams of pain and the screams of people calling out for help.

  He shook his head, pained. “No, we can’t do that.”

  “Dad!” I yelled. “What is wrong with you? All these people…they’re going to die! W
e can’t…we can’t just let them die.”

  “Zoey…”

  “No, don’t. Just don’t. We have to tell someone, anyone.” I recognized dimly that I was having a breakdown, only my third of the week, in front of Ash. Again. One day, one day in this crazy messed up world, I would be composed and carefree and awesome in front of Ash Matthews.

  He slammed on the breaks, causing me to fly forward. “I’m sorry, okay? I know, I know.” His voice broke, and he looked over at me. I felt all of the fight go out of me. I had never seen my dad cry before. “I want to stop and save every single person back there, okay? I want to save all of the millions of people in Brooklyn and Manhattan and Queens, but I can’t. And I just want to get you and Ash out of this city and to safety because that’s the one thing I can do.”

  The car was quiet for a moment. Cars were honking at us, turmoil of the city was still all around us but the silence in the car was deafening.

  “Some people will get out, okay?” He looked away and started driving again. “People are getting out already, trying to get away from…everything. But we can’t save everyone.”

  We drove the rest of the way out of the city in silence. Staring out the window, I wondered how on earth we got to this point.

  We had been on the road for about an hour when it happened. We weren’t the only cars on the road, but no one had the same urgency that we did. They felt safe; they were outside of the city. But what was safety anymore? Was anyone actually safe anymore?

  We were too far away to see anything, to hear anything, but when the clock flashed over, we knew. We continued to drive in silence before my dad pulled off to the side of the road and held me. I kept waiting for the tears to fall, but they wouldn’t. I just stared, stared at the woven patterns in the seat. I could see Ash through a crack in our entwined arms and saw his fist pressed firmly against his mouth, tears streaming down his face.

  I don’t know how much time passed while we all mourned the loss of our city before my dad pulled away and put the keys back in the ignition. “We need to get supplies,” he said hoarsely, starting the car and driving again. It wasn’t long before he turned off the main highway. He pulled a map out of the glove compartment. “I think we should stay off the main roads. It might take us a little longer, but I just think it’s better.”

  I nodded, afraid that, if I said a word, I would burst into tears and never stop.

  “There will be less people out on the back roads,” Ash spoke up from the backseat. “Do we know how many zomb…Awakened are outside of the major cities?”

  Dad shook his head. “They’ve only been awake for a few days. We have no idea how many there are or where they are. The major cities reported that they were in the street and attacking, like in Manhattan, but they could be anywhere. We just…we don’t know.” He pulled off the side of the road and drove through a thicket of trees. I glanced back at Ash as the car bumped over the uneven floor of forest, branches scratching at the side of the car.

  “Dad, where are you going?”

  “There’s a town up ahead, only a few miles; I want to run in there and get supplies. But I don’t want to put you in danger, and I don’t want to risk our only mode of transportation.” We were about a half-mile away from the road hidden enough that no one could see us. “You guys will stay here while I go ahead.”

  “Yeah, that’s a terrible idea,” I said immediately. “I’m going with you.”

  “Yeah, Mr. Valentine, I don’t think…” Ash started.

  “Frank,” Dad interrupted. “Call me Frank. This is not the world to be bothering with misters.”

  “Frank, right,” Ash said trying it out. “I just don’t understand what the plan is.”

  He looked back and forth between us. “We’re going to Nebraska. Last I talked to Jennifer, Zoey’s mom, there was no virus there. Which hopefully means no Awakened either.”

  “Nebraska,” I said, softly, feeling my shoulders sag. “With Mom, and Caspar.”

  “Casper? Like the friendly ghost?” Ash asked, his eyebrows furrowed. I picked up an empty water bottle from the console and tossed it at him.

  “No. My stepfather,” I answered, glancing at my dad, who usually developed a slight tick when Caspar’s name was mentioned. Not that I could blame him. “So that’s the plan?”

  Dad unbuckled his seatbelt, and reached for the bag that he had stowed at my feet and pulled out two handguns. “Yeah, that’s the plan.” He met my eyes. “I’ll be gone a couple hours, max. Stay down; stay low. Don’t get out of the car for anything.”

  “Dad, I just…”

  “No, Zoey,” he said, firmly. “I’m going. We need to get to Nebraska. And don’t think I’m happy about this, Zoey. I’m not excited for it either. But she’s your mother, and we’re going to be safe.” He slammed the door behind him and started walking away, trudging through the forest.

  “Yeah, we’ll be safe. Just you, me, Mom, the man who ruined my family and the boy who spends most of his days making my life miserable. No problem,” I muttered as he walked away.

  “Z?”

  I closed my eyes, briefly. It was the end of the world, or at least it felt like that, and yet I could still feel the pang of annoyance rip through me. There was something seriously wrong with me that I couldn’t keep a hold of my perspective. “What, Ash?”

  “You should get in the backseat with me.”

  I whirled around to face him. “You’ve got to be kidding me.”

  A small smirk appeared on his face. “That’s not what I meant. But I’m interested in seeing where your mind was going with that.” I stared at him for a moment not blinking, and he relented. “I just meant that it’s probably much safer here in the backseat, where there are tinted windows, and you’re not so obvious.”

  I squirmed, trying to work through this surprising logic. “Fine,” I said, giving in. “But don’t touch me.” I climbed over the passenger seat, my gun firmly strapped around my waist, and flopped into the seat next to Ash.

  There were at least fifteen minutes of silence before Ash spoke up. There was only so long he could stay still. I could already see his knees bouncing up and down, his fingers tapping on his legs. “So what’s the deal with your mom?”

  “What do you mean?” I said, looking out the window. I was amazed at the quiet of the forest. You could hear the cars driving by; a very faint sound in the distance but there was no other movement. No animal sounds, nothing. It was very weird.

  “You have fought tooth and nail NOT to go to Nebraska, even though it is honestly the safest place for us to be, and I just want to know why.” Ash shrugged, stretching his legs out in front of him and encroaching on what little space I had in front of me.

  “Yeah, it’s not really your business, is it?” I said, kicking his legs out of my way. They didn’t budge an inch.

  “Come on, Z. We’re stuck in this car, okay? We can’t go anywhere, and we can’t talk to anyone but each other. I don’t want to think about what just happened back home, and I know you don’t want to think about your dad out there alone,” Ash said. “I’m bored, and I’m going out of my mind. I need a distraction.”

  I blew out a raspberry, content in the sound that it made echoing in the car. “Agh, all right, fine.” I turned to face him, flinging my outstretched legs over his lap. If he was going to take up this entire car, then so was I. “My parents separated when I was ten years old and were divorced by the time I was eleven.”

  “Yeah, I remember that,” Ash said. “That’s not new information.”

  “You asked me a question and I’m trying to answer it, okay? Can you maybe not interrupt me?” I said, throwing my hands up.

  “Okay, okay, sorry,” he said, calmly, smiling a little.

  “As I was saying,” I continued, giving him a pointed look. “My parents separated when I was ten. And I don’t know, they sat me down like they had watched some parenting videos that taught them how to break the news to their kid. It was all staged, nothing like m
y parents at all. I had kind of known for a while that things weren’t right. After my granddad died when I was about eight, my dad threw himself into work. He was gone all the time, and then my mom started being gone all the time.”

  “But I didn’t notice. I was a kid so I just didn’t even see it. I was so wrapped up in my stupid books that I couldn’t look up for a moment to see that there was something wrong. So when they told me they had ‘grown apart’ and that they still ‘loved me very much no matter what,’ I just thought, I don’t know, I thought it was my fault.” I paused for a moment, swallowing hard.

  “Zoey, it wasn’t your fault,” he said, scooting closer to me.

  I glared at him and continued on. “Then my mom decides that she’s going to move back to Nebraska, back to the house that she grew up in. Her parents had died in a car accident when I was about four, and the house just sat there while she was here in New York. And then began the battle of ‘who gets Zoey.’”

  I laughed, but there was no real humor in it. I wasn’t sure when I would laugh again, for real. “And it was a battle, no lie. When they weren’t fighting with me on the merits of Nebraska versus New York or the schools or the neighborhood, they would try to win my favor. My dad would take me to Mets games or take me to the Natural History Museum or buy me ‘real New York pizza.’” I made air quotes sarcastically. “Did you know that’s why I got Bandit? My mom thought New York was a terrible place for a dog, so she tried to convince me that a dog was worth moving to Nebraska. God, it was awful.”

  Ash’s eyes met mine as he inched slowly over to me, like I wouldn’t notice that I felt warmer the closer in proximity he came to me. He didn’t say anything, kept silent. Ash had an interrupting problem, so this surprised me, but I went on.

  “But the worst part is that it was both of them. No matter what happened later, it was both of them. They continued to do it for quite a few years after I decided to live in Manhattan. They played little games, and I was still young, and I didn’t know who to please and who to listen to. They asked me to lie for each other, and it just got confusing. I felt like they were just constantly mad, mad at each other, mad at me.”