by Guy James
“Okay,” Lorie said, sounding reluctant.
Jane tried to ignore the retching sounds from behind her and went on. “So it’s some kind of illness? That’s what it seems like to me, my roommate was very sick before she…well…you know.”
“It’s a virus,” Lorie said, with a note of eagerness that Jane thought was a little odd considering the girl was holding Evan’s vomit bag. “But we didn’t get it, and so long as we stay away from the zombies, we won’t get it. Right Sven?”
“I think she’s right,” Sven said, “exactly right. As unlikely as all of this is, it’s happening, and it’s just like in the movies, more or less.”
“Yeah,” Lorie said. “You have to get ‘em in the head and everything.”
“If it’s just like the movies,” Sven added, “getting the spine might work too.”
As ridiculous as all of this sounded to Jane the accountant, she had to admit, “It is too much like the movies. And they are trying to bite—maybe that’s what spreads the infection.”
They all sat in silence for a while. Evan’s vomiting let up, and Jane saw Lorie roll down her window and carefully toss out Evan’s bag.
“So we have to not get bitten,” Lorie said, “get weapons and food and go somewhere safe.”
Jane heard a voice ring out in her head, and knew it was referring to the girl: “Some people are built to survive.” She was a strong one, like Sven. They were so much alike it almost seemed too much of a coincidence that they should have ended up together like this.
“We’re going to do just that,” Sven said, and Jane saw him begin to rustle in his duffel bag under the seat.
Ivan meowed.
“I know,” Sven said. “I’m hungry too,” and he got something for Ivan and something for himself. Jane glanced over to see that Ivan was wolfing down something crunchy, and Sven was starting on a new protein bar.
“Hey,” Jane said, “what was it your mom said? When we were just starting out?”
“I don’t know,” Sven said, “there was too much static.”
“Right, but she was telling us to stay away from something, she said stay away from, and then the static would come on. Stay away from, and then nothing. What goes in the blank?”
“Probably the zombies. Stay away from the zombies, don’t get bitten. That makes sense with the smell too, so stay away from the zombies to keep from their stench, and stay away to avoid getting bitten.”
“Yeah…” Jane said, “I don’t know. I think there was something else to it. It was in the way she said it. To me, it sounded like even though she was saying, stay away from blank, the way she was saying it, I heard it as her telling us not to do something, something internal to us, and not the zombies.”
“What?” Sven asked. “I don’t get it.”
“I’m not sure I do either,” Jane said. “It’s just a feeling anyway, probably nothing, but it keeps coming back to me as something that’s important. I don’t know, maybe it’s just the stress.”
“What if it has something to do with protecting ourselves?” Lorie asked. “Like garlic and crosses against vampires. Wait no, I mean protecting ourselves by not touching the infection. Maybe it’s something around us. Maybe people are getting it from doing something.”
“That could’ve been what my mom was trying to say,” Sven said. “But I don’t know.”
Out of the corner of her eye, Jane saw that Sven was gobbling down the rest of his protein bar and fiddling with his cell phone, while Ivan sat in Sven’s lap and looked on. “My phone still isn’t getting a signal. Probably everyone is trying to call everyone and tell them what to do. You’d think at least the radio would work. I don’t know enough about these things.”
“Me neither,” Jane said. “So what if you’re right Lorie, what if it is something that we have to stay away from, besides getting bitten? What if it’s like pollution or cell phones or a TV program or something?”
“The cell phones aren’t working,” Sven said.
“And there’s no TV to watch right now,” Lorie said. “Then again, my mom and Evan’s dad, they…they weren’t doing anything like that. They were just on the balcony, and then—hey! Maybe it’s the leaves or pollen or something, like hay fever. My mom gets hay fever every year, and...” Lorie trailed off.
“I don’t know,” Jane said. “My roommate had taken sick all of a sudden, and then she turned.”
“Lars,” Sven said, “the first one I encountered, my friend, he was sniffling, but he wasn’t that sick before he became a zombie.”
“Vicky was really, really sick,” Jane said.
“Neither my mom nor Evan’s dad looked sick at all.”
“What does that mean?” Jane asked.
“Maybe not a whole lot,” Sven said, “just that the virus—if it is a virus—moves at different speeds in different people, or has different effects in different people. I guess that’s possible, but it doesn’t help us much.”
Jane turned onto Route 29. They weren’t far from the gun store now. She was trying to make sense of all of this, to fit it into a neat mental box. But zombies weren’t that easily categorized. She didn’t have a box to put them in at all. She tried to stuff them into the diseases box, but it didn’t quite fit. Jane had a feeling there was more to them than just a plague. It was as if they were bad, the worst thing in the world so far. She wanted to talk to Sven about it, but she didn’t want to bring it up in front of Lorie and Evan—Evan…she hoped the kid got better soon. He had been better for a little while, but now he looked bad again. Jane recalled some of the movies she had watched with Sven, but she still didn’t know how to deal with the boy. She didn’t want to think about it, but it had to be brought up.
When we get to the gun store, she told herself, I’ll pull Sven aside—but not too far away from Evan and Lorie—and raise my concerns.
“Sven, look,” Lorie said. “You were right.” Jane glanced in her mirror and saw the wave of zombies that was shambling north up 29. They were moving slowly, but in another half hour or so, it looked like they would be blocking the inflow road that Jane had just taken. It was good that she had listened to Sven, and that they hadn’t remained in the field to hash out their understanding of what was going on.
“Are they anticipating where we’re going or something?” Jane asked. She was feeling paranoid all of a sudden as she weaved in and out of stopped cars and avoided the shambling zombies in the road. Every now and then, Jane glanced back at the mass of zombies that was slowly disappearing from sight. She was glad of that.
“I think there’s something else,” Lorie said, “something we’re forgetting.” The girl paused, as if waiting for her words to sink in. “Why do they get so dry? Some of them are like burnt wood or something, all crackly, and—I guess just dry, that’s the best way I can think to put it.”
“Yeah,” Sven said. “We’ve seen a lot like that, some don’t bleed much. Some don’t bleed at all. Maybe that means something.”
“Vicky wasn’t like that,” Jane said, remembering the spittle and leaky nose of her former roommate.
“Neither was Lars,” Sven said.
“But Vicky was kind of dry,” Jane said, reconsidering a little. “I mean I got her pretty good with the knife and fork I had...that I was defending myself with, and she didn’t really bleed like a person would. Her blood just kind of oozed a little and then stopped.”
“I bet,” Lorie said, “I bet it goes in stages. They start like us, then they start to dry out for some reason. And I bet some take longer than others, just like some take longer than others to catch the virus.”
Or to succumb to its effects, Jane thought, and stole a glance at the rearview mirror at the prostrate boy.
“Hey,” Sven said. “Maybe there’s a way we can turn that to our advantage—the dryness I mean. It certainly makes using blunt weapons against them easier. Their heads and limbs pop right off without the wet stuff holding them together. Maybe that’s not the best term for it, but t
hey are less held-together than we are.”
Jane nodded. “Yeah, it’s true. I wonder if they’ll just dry up and go away. They might just turn to dust if we can stay away from them long enough, and then we’ll be in the clear, we’ll have made it.”
The prospect of survival didn’t exactly fill Jane with hope. There was a dread to it, asking what would come later. What would there be left with all of these people gone? With all of her friends—she wondered how many of them were still alright—gone? It was like those old black and white movies, where all the people die except for two or three, and then at first they’re excited to inherit an empty world, but then they go crazy, kill each other a little, and then go crazy some more. It all just felt so bleak, like Jane was sinking into an inescapable depression.
“I think,” Sven said, “that we’ve covered just about everything. There’s so much we don’t know, that we should focus on the things we can control.”
Always the pragmatist, Jane thought. He was always focused on things he could control, always cold and calculating. She didn’t know why, but what he had just said reminded her of how much Sven cared for Ivan, and Jane had always felt, back when she and Sven were dating, that he loved the cat more than he loved her. It was a strange thing to remember at that moment, but that was what Sven’s statement made her think of.
“There are things,” Sven went on, “that we can have planned out, so we know how to react when they happen, when things go wrong, and the way things are going, I’m sure we’ll be coming up against more problems.”
“Yeah!” Lorie said, bouncing off her seat violently enough for Jane to notice. “We have to plan for things going wrong, that’s the best way to stay ahead of those things.”
“For one thing, we have to know what we’re gonna do if we get separated, like we almost did back there in the field. We have to have a plan for that, for a meeting point or…”
Jane thought she heard hesitation in Sven’s voice.
“You know,” Sven went on, “the meeting boint.”
When Jane heard that, there, driving through the human hell that her city had become, there in that car with the silly man she had never stopped loving, with his cat, and with the two teenagers she now felt responsible for, when she heard that, it all came back, and she had to look over and smile at him. In spite of everything, she felt pulled back to a different time, before all of this had happened—a hopeful time.
Years ago, when they were still dating, Jane and Sven had gone on a trip to Egypt together. She loved to travel, and though Sven hated flying, he capitulated, and they picked Egypt. She remembered how Sven had told her that he had wanted to go to Egypt ever since he was a little boy, fascinated by the pyramids. She wanted to go just about everywhere in the world, and Egypt was close to the top of her list. So they had gone.
Their tour guide there was a man named Mahmoud. Jane wondered if he was still alive, or if he was like them, one of the dry infected. He was a great tour guide, a really nice guy, and when he gave Jane and Sven and the three Australians that made up their tour group free time to explore, Mahmoud would always set a meeting “boint” for the group to return to, after a designated amount of wandering time. Mahmoud seemed to be unable to pronounce the letter “p” in general, substituting it with the letter “b.” Not that she was taking issue with Mahmoud’s English, which was close to impeccable. It wasn’t like she could ever learn to speak Arabic.
Ever since that trip, Sven sometimes had “meeting boint” episodes where he would imitate the way Mahmoud spoke. Sven really went overboard, he could be childish at times, and it took him an unreasonable amount of time to become bored with a joke that he particularly enjoyed. Though it had been annoying on more than one occasion, Jane wished she could go back to that place of annoyance—simple annoyance, simple, zombie-free annoyance.
“Why did you say boint?” Lorie asked.
“Yeah,” Jane said, ignoring the girl. “We need to have a plan for that, but we should try to avoid getting separated at all costs.”
“Why boint?” Lorie insisted.
“It’s one of Jane’s favorite accents,” Sven said. “My imitation of Egyptian English. I’ll tell you the story some other time. For now let’s figure out this separation thing.”
“We all need to be able to go on our own,” Lorie said. “So we each need masks against the smell, and we have those now, and we need water and a little bit of food, and weapons…definitely weapons.”
Jane glanced back to make sure that Evan was still asleep, then she said, “Yeah, that’s good in theory and all, but one of us has to stay with Evan, so the separation thing kind of falls through, we can’t leave him alone.”
“And,” Sven began, “what the hell is a safe place with zombies roaming the streets? When we find a safe place like that, you can bet we shouldn’t be leaving it. But if something happens, I mean, maybe…” Sven trailed off.
Jane sighed. Everyone was trailing off. Everyone else must have been thinking dark thoughts too, of getting separated, of no safe meeting boints, of being surrounded and overwhelmed, slowly bitten to death by those flesh-hungry, unashamed monsters.
“We stick together until Evan is better,” Lorie said firmly.
Then Jane saw Woodbrook Drive in front of her, and began to look for somewhere to turn in.
“We’re here,” Jane said.
She spotted the familiar gun store’s parking lot and drove into it, very slowly. “Look safe to you guys?”
“Looks quiet,” Sven said.
“Yeah,” Lorie said.
It did look quiet.
Jane parked in front of the store, then reconsidered, pulled out, and backed up to the store’s entrance. It wasn’t a parking spot, but she didn’t think anyone would mind that day.
75
Sven put Ivan into his backpack. The cat gave Sven an unhappy meow, but didn’t try to jump out. Sven wasn’t going to leave Ivan in the car, not now, and not anymore. There would not be any more separation among the group members.
Sven saw Jane watching him as he packed up Ivan and a water bottle.
“We’re all gonna stick together from now on,” he said, then jerked a thumb at the back seat. “The kids too. And we can’t leave the car running, or unlocked either. We can’t have someone come along and steal it, leaving us stranded. That’d be game over.”
“Okay,” Jane said. She turned the car off and pocketed the keys. Was Sven comfortable with that? With her having the keys? He told himself that he was. Then he turned around to look at Lorie and Evan. Lorie looked chipper, and Sven was sure she was excited to get into the gun store. She would probably try to make off with half of the weapons in there. Evan looked pale and sleepy, but at least he wasn’t throwing up anymore.
“Now don’t go grabbing any guns,” Jane said to Lorie. Her shoulders slumped and her gaze fell to the floor, looking beaten.
“But how am I supposed to defend myself?” Lorie asked. “From the zombies?”
“Guns are very dangerous, Lorie,” Jane said.
“So how come you’re getting some for yourself?” Lorie asked.
“I’ve had training,” Jane said. “I’ve been shooting for a long time.”
“Training?” Lorie asked, excitement creeping back into her voice. “Then you can train me, right?”
Sven wasn’t sure how to deal with this situation. Yes, there were zombies about, but did that mean they should let high school kids arm themselves with guns?
“Let’s stick to blunt objects for now,” Sven said. “You were really good back there with the pan, and with the sledgehammer too.”
“I was better with the knives,” Lorie said. “And I’m not going to give up this one.” She reached down for her butcher knife. Sven saw that she had been resting it on the floor, with one of her feet pressing down onto the blade. She was being careful, he had to give her that.
“I’m not gonna fight you for it, that’s for sure,” Sven said.
Jane lo
oked like she was on the verge of saying something, then didn’t.
“Evan,” Lorie said, “are you well enough to come out with us? We’re just going into the store to stock up on things.”
Evan looked unsure of himself but nodded. He seemed to be turning greener with each nod. “Yeah...I’ll come. I’m okay.”
“Let’s go then,” Sven said. “Before all those zombies behind us catch up. Any sign of those things?” Sven surveyed the parking lot in front of him and turned back to look through the dimmed rear window toward the gun store. It was hard to make things out back there.
“The undead?” Lorie asked. “I don’t see any around here. The store entrance looks all clear, but I can’t tell if any are inside.”
“We look good from what I can see,” Jane said. “Just don’t get too close to any of the cars. They could be under the cars too.”
“Ready?” Sven asked.
“Ready,” Jane, Lorie, and Evan said. Ivan meowed, and if Sven had to interpret it, he would’ve interpreted the meow as, “Not ready, I don’t wanna go.” But it wasn’t up to the cat.
“Sorry,” Sven said to Ivan. “It’ll be okay soon. Lots of fish treats, I promise.”
Sven gripped the straps of the backpack from which Ivan’s head peeked out. He opened his door, and stepped slowly out of the car. His troupe followed, all moving carefully, to the gun store’s entrance. Sven realized they must have looked odd—two adults, a cat, and two teenagers, sneaking into a gun store in the middle of the day. The thought made Sven look up. Actually, it didn’t look much like the middle of the day anymore. The clouds were coming in strong.
“Let’s make this as quick as possible,” Sven said. “The zombies are coming, and it looks like a storm is too.”
“It just keeps getting better,” Jane said, and gave Sven a wry smile. She put on her mask, and Sven, Lorie, and Evan followed suit. Then she pulled open the door and went inside.