by Ward, Tracey
Chapter Eight
Trent
This is stupid. It’s a stupid mistake and Dad was so convinced I don’t make stupid mistakes, but this is a big one. Running into the woods in the dark without a light or a plan is the dumbest thing I’ve ever done, but I can’t avoid it. I can’t sit in the cabin and wait with the screaming for the sun to come up, a sun that might never rise. This feels like the longest night of my life as I sprint across the mud, through the rain, and into the heavy darkness to look for my dad or what might be left of him. Every shadow is a threat or a heartbreak, a zombie or a body, and if there’s one thing I understand about tonight it’s this: nothing good will come of it.
I follow the road that winds around the trees instead of running straight through them toward the Farm. Going through the woods would be faster but Dad took the truck and if he comes up the road heading home I don’t want to miss him. I lose my sense of time as I run, landmarks lost in the wet and the dark and I can’t tell how close or far I am from the dirt path leading up to the gates of the colony. Then suddenly there’s a light. It’s too soon to be a light from the Farm, I know that much, and I almost drop to the ground in relief when I realize what it is.
The single headlight of our beat up pickup truck.
I run harder, digging my feet into the slippery mud and nearly losing my balance twice. I keep upright and rush to the rusting blue bucket, crashing into the hood and searching through the windshield into the cabin. My eyes try to adjust to being out of the light, but I can’t see anything. It’s pure black inside the cabin. It’s empty.
“Trent?”
My dad steps around from behind the truck and comes up the side, his face surprised and confused.
“Dad,” I breathe in relief. “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. What are you doing out here?”
“You took forever getting back. I got worried.”
“You should have stayed home like I told you.”
“The Farm is dead.”
He pauses, watching me. “You went to the Farm too?”
“No. Someone called on the radio. I could hardly understand them but they were under attack.”
“What’d they say?”
“They said Death was there. Death and the Devil.”
“What?”
“That’s what they said.” I swallow hard, not eager to remember the sound that’s still ringing in my ears. “Then they screamed. It was… they’re dead.”
Dad reaches out and hugs me to him. He holds me tightly and it feels desperate. He feels afraid. “We’ll go there tomorrow,” he tells me, but it sounds like he’s really telling himself. “We’ll bury the bodies.”
I pull back from the hug and shake my head. “What if there are still zombies?”
“They aren’t zombies, Trent.”
“You keep saying that but you don’t know.”
“If there are Fever victims still there then we’ll… we’ll…”
“Kill them?”
He scowls. “No.”
“Then what will we do?”
He shakes his head for a long time. Too long. So long it seems more like convulsing or a nervous tick. “I don’t know,” he finally mutters.
More gray area. More doubt and hesitation. It sits on my skin hot and angry, itching like a rash I’m not supposed to touch.
“What’s wrong with the truck?” I ask, changing the subject. “Should we just leave it? We should get inside, right?”
“Yeah. Yeah, you’re right. We need to get inside,” he agrees hurriedly, eager to be on solid footing again. He motions for me to follow him around to the back where he was when I found him. “It’s stuck in the mud. Help me push it out and we’ll head home.”
I go to join him at the back and we each crouch down, our shoulders pressed against the tailgate. He counts to three and we push. We sink and we slip, but we’re the only thing moving. The truck stays stuck. Dad counts again and we push, both of us growling and grunting. Still nothing.
“Alright, one more try and then we’ll leave it for tonight,” he tells me. “One, two—“
“Stop.”
He pauses, looking at me with a frown. “What’s wrong?”
I scan the darkness, my eyes coming up empty. “Do you hear that?”
“Hear what?”
“It sounds like a moan.”
“We were grunting from pushing.”
It’s in the trees behind him. It’s close.
“It wasn’t us. Dad, get away from the truck.”
“What?”
“Get away from the truck!”
I reach out to grab him, pulling him forward just as an eerie white figure bursts from the shadows. It lumbers toward us, clumsy but quick, and Dad slips through the mud toward me just in time to escape its hands. He falls forward at my feet and I step over him with my knife in my hand. I slash at the figure quickly, trying to fend it off. I make contact with its hand, my blade sinking deep, but it doesn’t care. It groans and howls and keeps coming at me. I’m distracted when another comes out of the shadows, taller and darker but much slower. As it comes toward us I feel my dad stand up behind me. He gets his bearings just as it makes it to the road. Just as the white figure jumps and topples me to the ground.
I land on my back with the monster on top of me, growling and snapping at my face. I push up against its chest, and it’s messed up but I notice that it’s a girl. I’m groping it as I try to force it off me and something about that strikes me so deep I want to scream. Something about the sweater under my hands and the body buried under its material… the knotted nasty hair in a messy braid that’s dangling down over my face…
Zoe.
A little bit of the fight goes out of me. My arms sag, letting her closer, and I should be terrified but I’m too sad. I’m too destroyed by the pale skin, dry crusted mouth, and bleeding black eyes that hover over me to feel fear. What I feel instead is remorse and a sense of loss more solid and real than anything I’ve ever felt before. It weighs on me, on her, and it pushes her once beautiful body down on top of me, bringing her mouth closer until she nearly has me.
Then she’s tossed to the side like a ragdoll. She flies through the air and slides across the mud soaked earth, releasing a scream that’s all rage and no pain. She staggers to get up and lunges forward, latching onto Dad’s leg – the same leg that kicked her off of me and sent her flying. He cries out, bringing a long metal bar down onto her back. It sends her face into the mud and he brings it down again and again on the back of her skull until she’s either drowned or her brain is soup. Either way, she stops moving. She’s dead.
The other figure is down as well. The body is tall and covered in dark clothing and I have no idea who it is. No part of me wants to ask. Instead I stand up quickly, make eye contact with my dad for a long lasting second, and we both run.
We make it to the house in record time. We careen through the gate and head for the back door in a jumbled mash, both of us trying to push the other ahead. I make it to the door first and throw it open, waiting for him to go inside ahead of me, but he hesitates. He stands back in the shadows at the edge of the light spilling from the cabin and he stares at the open door.
“Dad?”
“Go inside, Trent,” he tells me, his voice rough and breathless. “I’ll be in in a minute.”
“What are you going to do?”
“I want to check the fence. Walk the perimeter and make sure it’s solid. You… you try to get on the radio with the Farm again, okay?”
“I’ll help you.”
“No. What’d we talk about earlier?”
My shoulders slump in annoyance. “About me listening.”
“Yes. Now go inside. I’ll be right in.”
I do what he says reluctantly. I go inside and close the door behind me, but I stay and watch through the small window as he turns and goes to the fence. He stands for a long time at the gate and I assume he’s locking it, but then he opens it and passes q
uickly through.
I throw open the door and run after him. “Dad!”
“Go inside!” he shouts back, rushing into the trees.
“Dad!”
I burst through the gate and run after him. I’m fast but not fast enough. He’s disappeared in the darkness. I stop to listen for his feet in the brush, snapping a twig or crunching leaves, but he taught me the silence. He taught me how to hide and if he doesn’t want me to hear him, I won’t.
“Dad!”
No answer. I take a step farther into the trees. Into the night and the dark and the unknown, and the image of Zoe’s eyes burns in my brain, making me shake. I grip my knife tightly in my hand as I take another step. Then another. I walk until I can’t see the light of the house behind me. I’m going in deep, deeper than I’m supposed to without a pack on my shoulders, and I worry I’ll never find him.
“Dad!”
“Go back, Trent.”
His voice is gruff and low. Not low in pitch, but low to the ground. I search the brush at my feet and catch sight of something shining. Maybe it’s a reflector on his tennis shoes or the zipper on his coat or the wedding ring he never took off even after it was clear she was never coming back. I follow the sound of his voice and the shine and I find him slumped down in the moss at the base of a tall tree.
“No,” he says when he sees me start to kneel down next to him.
I pause, half crouched. “Why?”
“Don’t come any closer.”
My breath is tight in my chest. “What’s wrong?”
“You need to go back inside.”
“No.”
“Trent, I said—.”
“No,” I repeat. I slip down into the dirt. “You were bitten.”
He nods slowly, avoiding my eyes. “Yeah.”
“By which one?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It was Zoe, wasn’t it?”
“She was a wonderful girl,” he tells me, his voice constricted. “She liked you. She got you, didn’t she?”
“She killed you,” I spit angrily.
“No, she didn’t. She died at the Farm. What bit me… it wasn’t her.”
“Then what was it?”
He surprises me when he laughs, but it’s tight. The sound wheezes through his lungs, struggling to arrive. “You can’t let that question go, can you?”
I don’t answer him. I watch and I wait and eventually he nods again, his eyes falling half closed. “They’re zombies,” he tells me. “They’re risen dead. They’re not living people.”
“So we kill them.”
He meets my eyes. “Yes. You kill them before they kill you. You don’t hesitate.”
“I’m not going to kill you,” I tell him, reading between the lines.
“I would never expect you to. I’m going to do it myself.”
“No.”
“It has to happen. And you can’t be here to see it when it does.” Dad reaches inside his coat and his hand comes out sagging heavily with the weight of the darkness resting inside it. He spins the matte black metal in his hand and holds the butt of the gun out to me, gesturing for me to take it. “I want you to take this. I’ll keep my knife. Take the rifle in the house too. Get your pack and your gear and run.”
I take the gun from him reluctantly, my fingers brushing his and my throat closing in on itself until I think I’ll vomit. “Run where?” I choke.
“Into the woods. Deep into the mountains. Stay away from the city and people. Go where the animals go. Follow them. Run when they run. Hide when they hide.”
My nose is running. I swipe it with the back of my hand, the hand holding the gun, and the weight of it almost pulls me forward into the mud. “Come with me,” I plead, my voice cracking.
“I can’t.”
“Yes, you can. The virus is mutated, remember? It doesn’t work as fast as it used to. You could be fine for days.”
“Trent, it’s not—“
“We’ll figure it out!” I cry desperately, tears streaming down my face. “You’re always saying I’m smart so let me figure this out. Just give me a few days!”
“Buddy,” Dad says quietly, calmly. “I don’t have a few days.”
I brush the tears from my eyes, my fingers leaving streaks of mud on my face, and I look at him. I really look at him, and I know he’s right.
His face is pale and sweating. Not wet from the rain. It’s feverish and clammy. His chest is heaving with labored breath that has nothing to do with the run from the car. His eyes are going dimmer, turning a shade of black that has everything to do with this night. With the darkness that’s coming.
My grip tightens on the gun in my hand. “Tell me again,” I whisper fervently.
“Tell you what again?” he mutters tiredly. His eyes are falling shut and his head has lolled to the side.
“Tell me what to do. Tell me how to stay alive.”
“Go to the woods. Stay clear of people. Hide with the animals.”
“Again.”
“Trent,”
“Tell it to me again, please?!”
He licks his lips. He’s barely hanging on. “Go to the woods,” he mutters. “Stay clear of people. H-hide with the an—“
My dad falls to the side, his face burrowing into the mud and his entire body clenching. It’s agonizing to see. He screams in pain that’s muffled by the wet earth. His hands claw at it, sinking in and tearing at it like he’s trying to bury himself below it, but the earth won’t take him. It knows what he is. What he’s becoming.
I wait for it to happen. I listen as he curses loudly, barking in pain and anger. He doesn’t go quietly. He fights it every step of the way and it’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen in my life, something I’ll never forget, something that will wake me in a sweat even when I’m ninety years old and a million miles away from this moment, but as much as I hate it, it makes me proud. And I never once think about leaving him.
I know when it’s over. I can feel it in the air, in the way the rain falls around him. I can see it in the shudder of his breath that bursts out of his lungs one last time and then stills. The entire world and everything in it pauses for a half a heartbeat. One breathless moment that makes my hair stand on end.
And then it explodes in movement and light, in a crack! that fractures the night and bleeds black over everything until I can’t see and I’m trembling with fear.
I’ll never remember the exact moment I fired that gun. I won’t remember what made me do it, what move he made that told me it was time, but I will forever be haunted by the one image my brain captured in the light of the gunfire. It was my dad, my family, my hero, covered in mud and blood, his eyes burnt stone, his mouth open and hungry. Hungry for me.
But then I’m alone. I’m blinded by the flash, lost in the dark, and I’m completely and utterly alone with nowhere to go and no one to help me.
No one but my dad.
“Go to the woods. Stay clear of people. Hide with the animals.”
My mouth is moving, forming the words without me knowing it. I can hear the deep vibration of my own voice in my ears and I don’t recognize it, but I recognize the words so I latch onto them and I follow them.
“Go to the woods. Stay clear of people. Hide with the animals.”
I rise slowly.
“Go to the woods.”
I stumble toward the cabin.
“Stay clear of people.”
I take my dad and his words with me.
“Hide with the animals.”
Chapter Nine
Vin
The streets are a horror movie. There are bodies everywhere. On the sidewalk, in cars, face down in front lawns. Some are obviously people caught and eaten by infected, but a lot look totally human and healthy except for the gunshot in their chest. And there are pieces of people flung everywhere. I’ve tripped over fingers twice already. I guess the dead don’t like them. Maybe fingers are their grape jelly.
The deeper I get into town,
the more the world is painted in blood. Red and black, fresh and old, wet and dry. Cars line the streets, some burned out and others parked at odd angles or stuck in an endless traffic jam that will never go anywhere. Not with the dead at the wheel. So many cars have infected inside, trapped by unlocked doors and the strength of the safety glass. They pound against it when I walk by, scaring the shit out of me every single time. Even when I roll up on a car and tell myself to expect someone inside it still makes me piss myself a little when some gray skinned ghoul slams its face against the window and starts growling. They claw at it leaving streaks of black blood and skin that looks like putty, and I can’t help but stop and stare at one stuck alone inside a minivan, the bloody remains of what was probably his family coating the inside of the car.
I lean in close as he moans and writhes, and I get my first good look at the infection.
His skin is sagging from his face like the muscles that held it up have gone slack or straight up disappeared. He could be forty years old or four hundred, I wouldn’t know the difference. Not with that yellow color to his skin and the hair falling out of his scalp.
I pull the gun from my belt and I press it to the glass. I aim for the center of his face.
I hesitate just for a second, a shadow of a doubt filling my mind and making me wonder. Are zombies real? Are they dead? Are they still people? Is this murder? He doesn’t flinch away from my gun the way Sienna did when I pointed it at her. He doesn’t acknowledge it at all. The only reaction I get out of him is an excited groan as he gropes for my hand kept safe behind the window. As he pushes his face so hard against the glass that the rubbery skin on his forehead rips off in a strip and dangles above his black eyes.
And that’s all it takes to tell me he’s gone. One look in his eyes and I can see how empty they are.
I turn my head and pull the trigger.
The night and his face explode, glass shattering and falling to the ground with a weirdly sweet sound as I put one between his eyes.
I stand there staring at him as the ringing slowly leaves my ears and the black sludge that was his blood leaves his body. I expect to feel something. Remorse or guilt, maybe even a psychotic thrill, but I’ve got nothin’. I don’t even feel relief that he’s gone for good. It’s not what I expected and that worries me more than anything else has so far.