The Survival Pact

by Christy Sloat

  I took a deep breath and got my nerves under control. I didn’t want to think about what would happen if he woke up and caught me, so I didn’t.

  In my mind this would work. I would unlock the auto shop garage and pull the SUV inside the school. Our walk would be shorter and we could roll the food right up to the SUV with no sweat. It was located opposite Snorey here, so he wouldn’t be able to hear it and we would be on our merry little way.

  I made my way inside the lounge while he snored happily and crawled right up to him with no problems. Now came the part where I reached toward his keys.

  I stayed positive the whole time, all while reaching across. I touched them, and unclipped them even, but when his hand came down on mine, my stomach dropped.

  “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Missy?” he asked gruffly. His grip was strong and I cried out in pain as he grabbed my bad arm causing it to bleed once again.

  “Listen, we just need these keys. Please.” I wasn’t against begging at this point. I didn’t want to have to hurt this old guy.

  “You want my keys? You think that batting your pretty eyes at me is gonna get you them? How’d you get in here?”

  “I can’t explain that right now. I’d do anything to spare an innocent life. Just give me the keys,” I asked again.

  He looked like an okay guy. He had a bald head and he was sporting tattoos from the Army, so I assumed he was a veteran. He had to be a nice guy if he worked in the school, right?

  “Most girls do me a little favor before I give them my keys, Missy. So what are you gonna do for ole Bucky, huh?” He held me tight with one arm while unbuckling his belt with the other.

  I was so wrong about him being nice. Eww. Ole Bucky was a fucking pervert.

  “Get your hands off of me, dude. You don’t want to die do you?” I asked, grabbing the gun on my thigh. I didn’t even think twice before I held it to his sweaty head.

  I didn’t fear this gun when it came to being raped by this old perv. It was my life or his right now and I may have surprised myself by being so comfortable with it at that moment. I didn’t think, I just held the gun.

  He looked at the gun and let go of my arm and backed away from me, slowly scrambling out of his chair.

  “I’ll give you these keys if you want. But we both know you won’t shoot me when I do,” he said, as he unclipped the keys. “You’re a nice girl and you haven’t ever killed anyone before. I can see it in your eyes.”

  He was right. After I got the keys from him I didn’t plan on killing him. I couldn’t leave him be either because he’d either hurt me or call the cops.

  “Give me the keys, Bucky, and no one gets hurt.”

  “You want the keys? Get ‘em,” he said as he threw them up in the air. Time stood still for a second as I tried to figure out what the hell was going on. But I did just what he wanted me to, I reached for the keys and he ran at me as I did. Upon impact I flew across the hallway and my gun dropped to the ground out of reach.

  So much for heartless killer, I was pathetic.

  He overpowered me and I knew it when he was crawling on top of me. His sweaty fat body pinned me down as his hands ran over me making me almost vomit.

  “You are so fine. Where’d you come from?” he asked, as his rancid breath caused me to gag.

  “Please, don’t.”

  “Oh I’m gonna do it girlie. I’m gonna do it good too. Real slow so you feel all of ole Bucky. You’re gonna love it,” he promised as I cringed. I was royally fucked and he knew it. I fought against him, punching him and kicking when I could, but it didn’t help. He was larger than me and stronger and no matter what I did, he would win this war between us. I had never been in this situation before and all I could do was panic. I tried to reach for the knife but he kept slamming my hands down with his.

  He ran his free hand across my breasts and I knew I needed Lou. If I screamed for her would she hear me inside the stock room?

  Bucky started unbuttoning my pants while he held me down with one arm across my throat. I choked as he ripped them down.

  The last thought that went through my head as he went for my panties was that I was never going to survive this world if this was who we would be fighting. I would rather fight a Lifeless than this fucker. I remembered the conversation in the car with Lou about this guy not dying tonight. Boy how I wished I would have just killed him as he slept. If I had, I wouldn’t be getting assaulted like this.

  As he pulled off his underwear I heard a sound down the hallway and prayed to God that it was Lou.

  “Get off my friend, right now!”

  I looked to the side and saw Lou standing in the hallway holding a gun pointed right at Bucky. She didn’t even wait for him to do as she asked before she shot him. The bullet hit him in the shoulder and he fell off of me and to the side.

  “You bitch!” he yelled at Lou, as blood poured down his shirt. “You’re gonna get it next.”

  He got up onto his legs and staggered forward with his pants still down around his ankles. God this guy was vile. Who the hell would hire him to work with kids? I wondered who else Bucky had raped or hurt in his lifetime, and that was cause enough to get me moving. I pulled up my underwear thanking God he didn’t rape me.

  “I’m warning you asswipe, touch her again and it’s your head next,” Lou said, with venom in her voice.

  I had to do something instead of laying here as the helpless victim. I was no damsel in distress. I was a badass and I wouldn’t let someone hurt me ever again. I kicked his legs as hard as I could and slid over to get my gun. Once I had it in my hands I pointed and pulled the trigger. I did it for the girls he’d hurt before me.

  Bucky went down instantly, falling face first into the mop bucket he left in the hallway. The water quickly turned red and he didn’t move again. I had killed him and I didn’t even care. I didn’t cry, nor did I feel regret. It was me or him, just like Lou said, and I chose myself.

  I looked at Lou and she nodded and picked up the keys that lay on the ground.

  “You all right?” she asked.

  I nodded, trying to put the pieces together of what had just happened.

  “He almost…” I couldn’t say it out loud, but she understood what I was going to say. “If you didn’t come help, he would have gotten away with it.”

  “Well, I came in time and he didn’t,” she said calmly. “What was your whole purpose here anyway? What was the big idea?”

  I motioned for the keys and she flung them toward me. “I’m gonna pull the SUV into the garage for the auto mechanics class. And that way we just have to wheel the carts into there.”

  She nodded and said, “Sounds good, but what about the cameras?”

  “Taken care of. Just keep filling carts and I’ll meet you in ten.”

  Once the SUV was filled to the roof we locked up the auto mechanics department and hit the road. I never wanted to think about what happened inside there again. I made a vow that I wouldn’t ever let anything like that happen to me again. I would be smart and safe. And next time, I would be prepared to take a life without second guessing anything. If I had just shot him in the first place and took the keys, that wouldn’t have happened to me. I could live with killing a man like that any day.

  Lou and I hardly spoke after I shot him. We’d filled up the back and did our job the best we could. Working in silence helped me think about my mistakes and what I would do different.

  I turned on the radio as we made our way back to Ida’s, hoping to drown out the tension in the car.

  “Holy shit!” Lou said, as she slowed the car down. I followed her gaze toward a large park. We were shrouded in darkness but the lights in the park showed something I was hoping not to see.

  Lifeless. Lots of them.

  It wasn’t until I saw one crawl out of a building that I realized it wasn’t a building
at all, but a mausoleum. And the park wasn’t a park, it was a cemetery.

  Lou and I said nothing as we watched the lifeless crawl out of the graves, some even two at a time. Their hands reaching up out of the ground searching for something that wasn’t there. Some were men and some were women; some were children which made it even more unbearable to watch. They twitched and shuffled around the cemetery making my heart pound with fear.

  My throat dried as I watched them walk out of the open gates of the cemetery. A few of them were faster than others and some lagged behind. Some of them had bodies that were more rotten than others.

  “What are they doing?” I asked Lou, as I studied their odd behavior. They looked like they were confused.

  “I think they’re looking for something.”

  A Lifeless woman’s head snapped to the side and she took off in the direction of a lady walking her dog, totally oblivious to the cemeteries’ over active dead.

  The lifeless slammed into her faster than I could even imagine and she began beating her head into the ground until the lady lay completely still. The Lifeless got up and moved on to the dog who barked at it in defense of it’s now dead owner. The lifeless pushed the dog away with its foot but didn’t hurt it. It was like the dog didn’t matter to it. Their goal wasn’t to kill animals, but to kill humans.

  “We have to do something,” I said quietly, as the dead poured out of the cemetery and crawled up from more gravesites.

  Lou looked at me and squeezed my hand. “We will only study them from here. We are not going to be able to fight that many off with two guns, Kami.”

  “What do you mean?” I asked, even though I knew what she meant. She wanted to observe their behavior. If we knew more about them and how they worked then we could better protect ourselves. If we went in there guns blazing we would surely die. There were hundreds of them now pouring out of the gates and out of the ground. It was like watching ants come out of their nest; they crawled fast and with a mission.

  And that mission was to kill.

  We were parked far enough away that they hadn’t seemed to notice us yet. I pulled out my notebook and began documenting what I was seeing instead of actually feeling anything about it. I was a writer and this was what I did.

  I watched them as they tried to get into cars, causing people to speed up and some to crash their cars in the panic. I watched them attack people until they either hurt them or killed them. Those that were hurt were often swarmed by other Lifeless until they met their end. No one that was attacked got away, except those who drove away. They had a mission to kill, and if one didn’t succeed, then they came together as a team to finish the job. They didn’t chase the cars that drove away, instead they lost interest and moved on to another target.

  When I looked up and saw a Lifeless man walking toward our car I stopped writing.

  “Lou, we have company,” I said, as I tapped her arm.

  She put the car into drive and sped off. We drove away from the chaos without really leaving it behind. Instead it played in our heads.

  “What did we learn?” I asked, distracting ourselves.

  Lou’s hands shook as she turned down her street and into her driveway. She put the car into Park and turned off the ignition.

  “They attack fast without giving the victim a chance to think. They catch you off guard,” she said.

  “Yes. They don’t make a lot of noise do they?” She shook her head. “And they don’t attack in groups, but separate, unless they fail. It’s like they have a mission and they don’t stop until that mission is carried out. They don’t mess with animals.”

  She nodded and bit her lip.

  “It seems the fresher the meat the faster the Lifeless, too,” she said, as I wrote it down. It was funny how she began calling them that. “We need to move. There are at least three cemeteries here and one at the church just up my street. I’ll get our bug out bags and we can leave tonight. Did you map out our ride?”

  I nodded, feeling sick to my stomach. I thought we would have more time to prepare before the lifeless came to town, but I was wrong.

  We hadn’t heard from Emma yet, and once we got on the road there would be no stopping to catch up with her. We would be away from here in no time and leaving her behind to die. Unless she was already attacked, lying dead in the forest all alone.

  Emma was tough though, a Marine, and she could survive this. She didn’t need us to survive.

  We pulled into the driveway and I noticed Lou’s neighbor was still partying by the bonfire. That fire was a beacon for the dead and I didn’t want to be here when the lifeless saw it.

  I got out of the SUV and helped Lou pull the food out of the back and onto the ground. Supposedly she had a car in the garage that would hold it and it was better on rough terrain. I had only known her to have one car, the SUV, and when she pulled out this massive Jeep from the garage, my mouth hit the floor.

  “Like it?” she asked, as she hopped out to fill the trunk.

  “It’s like it was built for this,” I told her, as I heaved the packets of soup mix into the back.

  “I’ve been planning this for a while now, Kami. Emma and I are what you would call Preppers. We have been talking about this for a long time. Not the dead but the end of the world,” she confessed. “I’m sorry we didn’t tell you sooner but we agreed that it was best to keep it just us two planning it for now.”

  I felt instantly left out. Why wouldn’t my two best friends tell me about this? I wouldn’t judge them for their plans. I could have contributed somehow. It was me who signed the pact with them. It was me who wrote it.

  I stopped packing the Jeep and looked at Lou and said, “Why didn’t you include me? Was I not good enough to know about this, too?”

  “No, that’s not it, Kami, it’s just that you were busy with your career and your marriage. And when we wanted to tell you, you told us about Sam’s affair. We decided that it was best if we planned it and then when shit hit the fan we would just tell you to get your ass out and down here.”

  And that’s pretty much how it happened.

  “I guess I can see why you didn’t tell me,” I said, as I took a drink from my water bottle. “I’m just really tired and after dealing with that jerkwad at the school, I’m a little emotional.”

  Lou put her hand on my shoulder and squeezed.

  “We never have to talk about that again if you don’t want to,” she offered.

  I never wanted to talk about him again or even think about it again. I would put it behind me, bury it deep inside and never think about it. I did that often with things in my life that went bad. I was very good at hiding my feelings.

  I picked up another load of food, drug it over to the Jeep, and shoved it inside. We had more food than I thought when Lou loaded the last item and closed the back up.

  “We need to get some sleep because tomorrow we hit the road before the cemetery inhabitants make their way here. I think we should get as much sleep as we can, if we can. I don’t know when we will be able to sleep again.”

  The thought of not sleeping in a cozy bed again hurt my heart, but we had to sacrifice the comforts of home for a while.

  9

  Lou and I shared her bed, too scared to sleep alone, and tried to sleep. I found myself drifting in and out between dreams and nightmares. I listened to every little sound, wondering if it was one of the lifeless outside the house. I closed my eyes and saw Bucky’s dead body in the mop bucket. Until finally sleep came.

  Lou left the bed sometime in the early morning hours when the sun was still sleeping. I rolled over and fell back asleep, too tired to care that she left.

  I woke finally to the sounds of talking in the living room. I sat up with a stuffy head and blurry eyes. I wanted to go back to bed but I knew that it was time to get up and get ready to go.

  I pulled my bag into the b
athroom and started the shower. I tore off my bandage and washed the wound carefully when the water was nice and warm. I washed away the filth that covered me from last night wondering why I didn’t wash this off the night before.

  It didn’t matter, I was clean now and ready to begin the rest of my life on the run. I wondered if we would be living on the road for a long time or if things would be contained soon.

  I washed my hair and thought about Sam and whether he was alive or not. When I started to cry I didn’t stop myself, instead I let the tears fall. I cried about my failed marriage and about how I wasted my life all those years I spent with Sam.

  I should have stayed away from him instead of getting involved. I should have been included in the plans with my best friends while they prepped for the end of the world instead of drowning in my sorrows.

  I cried away the events of last night and let them fall. I was done being walked over and I emerged from the shower stronger and ready to face the day. If I had to cry every morning I would, but I wouldn’t cry during the day. I would get it out of my system early and pull my crap together afterwards.

  This world wasn’t forgiving before this happened and it certainly wasn’t going to get any better.

  I got dressed in my old beat up jeans that Sam hated and a soft T-shirt. I pulled on my favorite pair of Converse and threw my hair into a quick bun.

  Looking down at my arm I realized it was healing nicely. Scabs replaced all the holes where the shards of glass were before.

  I grabbed the gun and the knife that now lay on the sink, a part of my morning routine now I suppose, and strapped them both to my leg and nodded. I was ready to kill some shit and survive this day.

  Lou sat with her mom quietly talking and going over things as Ida ran her hand over Lou’s head gently. It broke my heart to see them, knowing we were leaving Ida alone here to die.

  The ground began to tremor and shake under my feet. I looked up to Lou and Ida and shouted, “Earthquake!”

  Ida held onto the rails of her hospital bed that was now moved into the living room space. Lou clung to Ida, as if protecting her from any falling debris. I hung onto the wall and slowly lowered myself to the ground. It shook violently, and the windows held even though the house shook harder than it was built for. I could hear dishes crashing to the floor in the kitchen and watched as all of Ida’s pictures fell off the wall. The house was in disarray in a matter of seconds. I was sure people were freaking out just like I had the first time I went through this. Luckily, when it was over we were safe and the ceiling didn’t cave in.