The Awakened

by Sara Elizabeth Santana

  I took a deep breath, and when it came out, it was shaky. Ash was right next to me, my shoulder pressing right into his arm.

  “Then all the truth came out. My mom started seeing this guy Caspar, Caspar with an ‘A’ which matched his super pretentious personality. This was before she left to Nebraska. She was renting some shabby thing in Brooklyn. And when I was there, he was just always there. When we went to the movies or the park or when she took me shopping, he was always there. She called him a friend, but I wasn’t allowed to tell my dad about him. And I hated having to lie to my dad. I mean, okay, I lie to him about things all the time, like spending the night at Madison’s house when I’m really going to midnight showings of Rocky Horror Picture Show, but this was just too much.” My fists balled up as the memories came back to me. “My mom finally was making the move to Nebraska; she was leaving in a week, and she was still hoping to convince me to come.”

  “We were at a diner with my dad, and they were talking, but it was just, god, all kinds of awkward. My mom kept talking like my dad was just going to send me on the plane in a week, and I just…I don’t know what happened.” I broke off, and looked up at him. “I just got confused. It was so hard to keep everyone’s stories separate, and the lies and the truth and the half-truths. I asked my mom whether Caspar was going with her to Nebraska.”

  “I knew immediately that I had something wrong, and not just because my mom had told me not to say anything. She looked horrified, angry, upset, and I had never seen her so red in my life. My dad…to this day, I still have never seen him as upset and angry as he was that day. What we’ve seen in the past few weeks, it’s nothing. He started yelling, and she started yelling back. He was screaming ‘how could you let him around our child?’ and she was trying to calm him down. I didn’t even really understand what was going on.”

  “Turns out, Caspar was my mom’s boyfriend, and he had been my mom’s boyfriend for quite a while. From what I gathered, Caspar had been around for about a year before my parents had officially announced their separation,” I said, feeling the anger, the confusion, the frustration all piling back into my voice. “And I couldn’t handle it. Before, I was angry at both of them, but suddenly I forgot about all the things I’d been mad about before.”

  I saw Ash’s hand on his lap, inching closer to mine, and I found myself wanting to reach for it. I took a deep breath and clasped my hands together to keep myself from doing anything incredibly stupid. “And so I chose to live in New York, with my dad. She moved to Nebraska, and she married Caspar about six months later, where I was lovingly forced to be her maid of honor in a small casino chapel in Vegas, complete with a fat Elvis. I get to see the two of them twice a year, for either Christmas or Thanksgiving, and half of spring break.”

  I turned back to Ash and was surprised when his face was mere inches away from me, a hair’s breadth away. His breath was hot on my cheek, and I felt my heart slamming in my chest at how close he was. There was a very serious expression on his face, not like any one that I had seen before, and I felt my breath catch in my throat as he moved closer.

  Shit. Ash was going to kiss me.

  HE WAS SO CLOSE; I could see every single stupid, thick, black eyelash and every white vein spreading like lightning through his blue eyes. His lips came closer; they were so close. I wanted to pull him toward me and forget everything. I wanted to forget about my mom and Caspar and the fact that I had to be there out of all places in the world. I wanted to forget Madison and Bandit and my beautiful city. I wanted to lose myself in him, and feel anything besides fear or pain or heartbreak.

  I couldn’t believe how close he was and how I wanted to close the minuscule distance between us and feel something, anything but the pain of the past 72 hours. I wondered for a moment what Madison would have thought of this situation.

  Just then, there was a loud snap, jerking the two of us away from each other. I grabbed my gun, clutching it tight in my hand. I scanned the area around us, looking for any hint of blue.

  “It was probably an animal or something,” Ash said, pulling me closer to him.

  The spell was broken though, as if the loud noise had pulled me out of a dream. I laughed shakily and pulled away from him, putting distance between us. I leaned against the window and faced him, my bent knees a barrier. “I hope so.”

  Ash stared at me for a moment but thankfully let it go. I was grateful for this. “I’m sorry.”

  I looked up at him surprised. My face immediately flushed. Sorry for what? For almost kissing me? “For what?” I asked.

  “Your parents. It sounds rough,” he said, leaning back and closing his eyes for a moment.

  “Oh,” I paused. “Thank you.”

  It stayed silent for a moment before he spoke again. “If it’s any consolation, I think that you’re lucky. Your dad is an amazing guy. And your mom, despite her faults, probably loves you just as much.” He sighed. “The last few days that I saw my parents was the most time I had spent with them in years, and they were dying.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked. In the confusion and chaos of escaping the city, I had to admit that I had forgotten all about Ash’s parents. There was no question about it now; they were dead, and I had not stopped at all to even give it a thought.

  He smiled slightly, looking a little surprised at my interest. “I love my parents. They’re great, honestly. They give me anything and everything I could possibly want or need. But…” he sighed, almost angrily. “They’re never around. They’re so busy.”

  “Doing what?” I asked, thinking of Madison’s parents and the society events they were always attending that kept them out often.

  “My parents are…were lawyers,” Ash explained. “And they were insanely dedicated to their job, and they were really good at it too. But it kept them out all the time, and when they were home, they were always on laptops, typing away into all hours of the night.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said, meaning it. My dad was often out of the house, but when he was there, he was there 100%. We ate out, went to see movies and constantly went to the Natural History Museum. We had season tickets to the Mets. We saw and watched trashy cop shows (for my dad) and cheesy sci-fi movies (for me) all the time. I couldn’t imagine being in the brownstone by myself all the time.

  “It’s fine. I just sometimes wish they would have made it to a football game, or watched me pitch.” I opened my mouth to say something, but he immediately spoke. “Hey, you should sleep. I’ll stay up and wait for your dad.”

  “Are you sure?” I asked. He nodded, not meeting my eyes. I turned away from him and curled up in a ball against the door. I didn’t think I would be able to fall asleep, in a car, in the middle of a forest, with Awakened everywhere, capable of ripping me apart. But my eyes eventually got heavy as I slipped into a deep sleep, with my cheek pressed to the cold glass and my arms wrapped tightly around my knees.

  It started off so normal. I was back in the quad at school, under the twinkling lights, in the same red dress I had worn only a few months before at the fall dance. Things were different though. It was colder, darker and the music was harsher than the kind of music that St. Joseph’s Prep usually played. It was the kind of music that I would listen to on my stereo and dance around my room, feeling the aggressive beats move through my body.

  I wandered under the vines that had been draped around, my fingers gliding over the thick branches and across the tough red skin of the apples that hung from them. It didn’t make sense to me, and I vaguely had a memory of telling Madison that apples grew on trees and not vines.

  I felt a sudden pang of hunger and wanted to rip all the apples off the vines and bite into their skin and rip them apart. I wanted to sink my teeth into them, and my hands grabbed at them, yanking them down, vines scattering around me, branches in my hair.

  Everyone on the dance floor was standing still, facing partners, as if waiting for something. I made my way through the crowd, distracted for a moment at how graceful and sil
ent my movements were. I stopped in the middle, spinning around, spinning and twirling, until I came to a halt and Ash was standing in front of me.

  He looked beautiful, perfectly and achingly beautiful, and he was gaping at me, horrified. Despite his fear, he reached for my hands, pulled me closer and led me in a dance. It was formal, calculated, completely mismatching the violent music filling the air. His eyes never left mine, and I could almost see myself reflected in the empty pools of blue.

  “You’re beautiful,” he said, his voice loud enough to hear over the music. “You’re so terrifying but so beautiful.” The world beautiful echoed off the walls, and went bouncing through the secluded area.

  The unmoving people surrounding us started whispering “beautiful, beautiful, beautiful” over and over again, and I felt a shiver run up my spine.

  “Terrifying?” I asked, confused. My voice sounded different, deeper. The rest of the dancers started moving, a slow waltz, slower than the two of us. They continued to repeat the word “beautiful” as if in a trance.

  “Terrifying,” Ash repeated, a distorted smile on his face. “And beautiful.” He stopped for a moment and brought my hand to his face, pressing his full lips against a small blue hand.

  I gasped, pulling backward, and stared, horrified, at the small blue hands that seemed to be attached to my own arms, blue, blue, blue. I wrapped my arms tight around my stomach, the sudden urge to vomit so strong, so immediate. I met Ash’s smiling face and turned heel. I ran away, ran through the slow dancers, through the branches that I had left scattered on the floor, through the echoing hallways of the school and into the girls’ restroom.

  I stopped in front of the mirror and leaned over the sink, scared to look up. My heart was pounding in my chest, my ears, and my head, all the way down to my toes. I lifted my eyes and stared at the blue monster glaring at me in the mirror. Her hair was wild, covered in vines, her eyes were pure black, and there was no mistaking the blueness of her skin. I opened my mouth to scream and immediately saw the razor sharp teeth.

  I woke up screaming.

  A hand immediately went to my mouth, shutting off my screams. I went into a panic mode and clawed at the hand pressed against my mouth.

  “Z, hey, it’s me. It’s okay,” Ash said softly. “It’s fine. It’s okay. You had a nightmare but it’s okay. I just didn’t want you screaming. I’m going to lower my hand now, all right?”

  I nodded, my heart pounding. He lowered his hand, and I let out a breath.

  “Do you want to talk about it?” he asked, reaching to brush a loose strand of hair behind my ear. His face was only a few inches away from me, looking at me carefully. There was so much concern on that beautiful face, and I found myself straining toward it. I wanted to be held, rocked back to sleep when it would only be happy dreams. I may have left the nightmare of my dream, but the nightmare still existed in reality.

  I shook my head, trying to reorient myself. I reached for Ash, to stop the spinning of the world around me, to stop the pounding in my head. I felt a slight relief that my hands were the normal olive tone that I was used to, and not blue. I had a sudden urge to look in the mirror to make sure that my eyes were still normal.

  “Is she okay?”

  I straightened up, finally noticing that my dad was sitting in the front seat. I met his eyes and I felt my heart squeeze again. What was wrong with me? I spent eighteen years keeping complete control of my emotions, and now I felt them threatening to pour over. “I’m fine, Dad. I’m glad you’re back. Did you get…what you needed?”

  He sighed, leaning his head back against the headrest. The keys sat in the ignition of the car, but he showed no signs of wanting to turn the car on. “I grabbed a few things that I hadn’t been able to grab before. We have a lot of things in the back. I also got clothes for Ash.” He nodded toward the trunk. “We have gas. I couldn’t take chances that gas stations would remain open. There’s food, but not a lot of it. There’s plenty of weapons and ammunition back there.”

  He reached forward, turning the car on. The sound of the car starting in the middle of the darkened forest was loud, almost startling. “We should go.”

  “Wait,” I said, clamoring over the seat to take my place in the passenger seat. “Dad, I need to know what’s going on. Ah, no,” I continued as he started to interrupt him. “It’s unfair to me, to both of us, for you to hide it. I need to know.”

  Dad’s hands gripped the steering wheel, his knuckles white. He looked back at Ash. “And you?”

  I glanced back at Ash, who looked nervous. “I want to know. My parents were there, and they were sick. The same people who took Madison came and took them, and I don’t know why, and I don’t know what’s going on.”

  Our eyes met, and I gave him a small smile, probably one of the first genuine smiles that I had ever given him. He answered with a smile of his own, and I realized again how ridiculously beautiful he was when he smiled. We both turned back to my dad.

  He stayed quiet for a long moment, so long that I thought he was going to refuse, that he would put the car in “drive” and that would be it. Instead, he turned the car off. “What do you want to know?”

  “EVERYTHING,” I BLURTED OUT. “WHERE did they come from? What is going on? Where are we going? What are we going to do?”

  “Yeah, everything,” Ash echoed, scooting forward on the seat to get closer. His eyes were intent on both of us.

  Dad ran a hand through his hair, and I noticed for the first time that there were streaks of gray there that hadn’t been there before. My dad was not even forty, yet the world had given him gray hairs.

  “They estimate about a third of the population has gotten the Z virus…”

  “Wait, the Z virus?” I immediately interrupted. “What…the Z virus?”

  A corner of his mouth turned up. “It’s what they called the virus, or at least what they call it because they have all awakened as zombies…hence the “Z” part of the Z virus.”

  I really hoped that Ash would now stop calling me “Z.”

  “But they call them Awakened?” Ash said, voicing my own confusion before I had a chance to.

  “It’s confusing. I know. The virus is called the Z virus. The victims that are awake and walking around are called Awakened. I didn’t make it up,” he said roughly.

  “I’m just saying, the name ‘Z virus’ isn’t very original,” I muttered. My dad shot me an impatient look, so I shut my mouth and motioned for him to continue.

  “Like, I was saying, they’re saying that it’s affected about a third of the population, maybe more. It’s mostly congregated in the areas with a bigger population, the cities they ultimately decided to eliminate. There’s no way to tell how many of them have been awakened, but it seems to be about 90% of them. They have completely overrun the urban areas.”

  He sighed. “With about 100 million people out there with the ability to run faster than a normal human being and the desire to use their new razor sharp teeth to tear through human flesh, they obviously felt that it was a decision they had to make.”

  With the pain and shock of the recent demolition of the city I had grown up in, I didn’t necessarily agree with that assessment. However, I kept my mouth shut so that he could continue.

  “Everyone is insanely concerned about the fact they all seemed to awaken at the same time. Of course, that means when they got sick or when they died doesn’t give us any clue to why or how this happened.”

  He sighed again, frustrated, and it sounded loud in the nearly silent car. “We were at the station, normal day. I was trying to keep up with the numbers, trying to see how badly this had affected our city when we started getting the phone calls. I immediately turned on the TV, and there was coverage everywhere, showing the Awakened. I was so…caught off guard. I’ve seen my fair share of shit here in New York but I’ve never seen this before and I couldn’t think.”

  “Then you called me. I was so relieved. You told me about Madison, and I knew immediately wha
t the media hadn’t quite figured out yet. The Awakened were the virus victims, and they had somehow come alive again. I knew that we had to go; we had to go now, and that’s when they hit the station.”

  “It was like it was planned. A group of them came in, quiet, nearly hidden. They were on us before we even knew they were there. They’re so fast, sneaky, and they took down Briggs before we could even react. And we just started shooting, trying to take them out.”

  He stopped and looked at both of us, and his tone shifted. He slipped into a sterner voice, dropping the slower lilt of a storyteller. “This is important. If we had known, if we had figured it out sooner, we wouldn’t have lost so many people at the station. Are you listening?”

  We both nodded, looking like bobble heads. I felt a sudden urge to giggle at this and had to stamp it down.

  “You need to be specific when you kill them. The head or the back of the neck. Every time,” he explained.

  “Okay, the head makes sense,” I said quickly.

  “But the back of the neck? How does that even make sense?” Ash chirped in.

  “Yeah, I know,” my dad said, shaking his head. “It was an accident. We just started shooting, and we were hitting their arms and their legs, their chests or their backs, and they just weren’t going down unless we hit them in the head, directly in the head. We discovered the back of the neck on accident. Dolan was engaged in a kind of hand-to-hand scuffle with one of them, and he had another one creeping up behind him. I shot him, but I wasn’t aiming well and hit him right in the back of the neck, and he went straight down.”

  “Are you sure though?” I asked. “That was one case. And does it have to be a gun?”

  “I tried it a few more times on the way to the brownstone to get you and Ash. The head and the back of the neck. There’s no other way, not that I know of. As far as whether it has to be a gun, I don’t think so.”