We Are The Survivors

by Vanessa Marie

  “What is it?” I ask.

  He is nervous. “I’ll show you, then we make a move.”

  He parks at a building across from the community. He tells me to follow him to the roof. We leave Zane in the store in the wheelchair. He is very mad that Dave isn’t telling us what is going on. We climb the ladder and he picks up a pair of binoculars. He gives them to me and tells me to look through them.

  The gate’s lock is on the ground. There is a group of people standing to the left of the gate. Some are adults and others are teenagers or younger. “They took it,” I say.

  He runs his fingers through his hair. “Yeah.”

  I lower the binoculars to face him. “We don’t need this place anyway,” I say.

  “We need the weapons, I know we left it, but we need our stuff.”

  I look through the binoculars. A group of people takes guns from where Cassandra used to live. “They found it,” I say.

  “Shit!” He kicks the sleeping bag on the roof.

  “What’s going on down there?” Zane asks.

  “Some people took our home,” I say.

  He looks up through the hatch. “What do you want to do?” he asks.

  I look at Dave. “I know that there are a ton of guns in there. There is twenty or more people. We don’t know if they are good or bad people. It’s going to be a huge loss but we can get weaponry anywhere. Let’s walk away,” I say.

  “Do you think they could be Blake’s people? It’s been four months but…”

  I use the binoculars. They aren’t wearing leather jackets with red letters. “No, it’s not likely.”

  “We can’t take them there is twenty of them,” he says.

  “Let’s go…” what I see makes me stop talking.

  Jessie is talking to a group of people that have formed a circle around her. I can’t believe it’s her. Her light brown hair is longer. Her face has dirt on it. Her red tank top is and jeans are dirty and ripped. She looks like the kids when they came here.

  She must have just found this group.

  I can’t leave her. She lost her mom too. Will she recognize me after all these months? My style has changed along with my appearance. My hair is longer than before in curls around my face. I need to talk to her. I need to know why she is living with those people.

  “That’s my friend in there. We need to take her back with us,” I say.

  “Okay. We’ll get your friend, then we talk about weapons,” he says.

  I’m using the binoculars still. Jessie is waving her hands like she is saying no about something. A man in an orange jacket steps forward. He punches Jessie in the face. She goes down instantly.

  “They’re beating her, we have to stop this,” I say.

  Zane screams. Dave and I climb down the ladder. A zombie is over Zane trying to eat him. Dave pulls the zombie off him. Another comes in the door. Music outside of the store is blasting rock loudly. A small group of zombies walk in. The zombies stumble inside. Zane rolls his wheelchair backwards until he hits the wall.

  I grab a machete from the counter. I slash a zombie’s face cutting his nose off. I stab it in the head. I stab another one in the arm. Dave kicks it in the ankle. It falls to the left side of me and I stab it in the head.

  The other ones are grabbing me. Dave kicks and punches them away from him. He uses his pocket knife to stab them in the eyes. He falls when one dead on the floor trips him. He gets his knife in one of the zombie’s knees. It’s stuck in its knee cap.

  A zombie trips me and I fall on the floor. Zane starts shooting with his handgun. He misses them a few times. He empties his clip before they are all dead.

  I scoot backwards. I grab a wooden spoon. I stab one zombie in the eye pushing it into its brain. I push the body off me. Dave helps me to my feet. I grab Zane’s wheelchair and wheel him out the back door.

  I shut it behind us. A man walks up with an orange jacket. He is an African-American. He has a frizzy black afro and brown eyes. He is holding one of our rifles.

  “Need help?” he asks.

  “Yeah. That community is ours, you took it from us. She needs to get her friend,” Dave says pointing to me.

  “Jessie? You don’t want her with you unless she was always this way,” he says.

  “What way?” I ask.

  Dave extends his hand attempting to be friendly.

  “You guys live there? I find that hard to believe,” he says.

  Dave’s face is red with anger. “Well, we do. That is our gun.” He points to the rifle.

  The man moves the gun away. “Our leader isn’t going to be happy about that. We’ve traveled for days to get here.”

  “That’s our community and our weapons. I’ll prove it to you. A girl’s mom used to live here. She’ll have pictures,” Dave says.

  “Until then this place is ours. If you want that Jessie girl too, take her, she’s trouble though,” he says then walks away.

  I have no clue why he is so eager to get rid of her. She’s my best friend. She’s caring and kind. The only explanation is that they are the bad ones and Jessie’s speaking up.

  I can’t imagine that she would do anything bad. I can’t ignore the fact that people change though. I’ve changed so much.

  Will she have acceptance for who I am? Will she be the same person I knew?

  So many questions I wish I could answer by not meeting these strangers. They could be worse than Blake’s people.

  “What are we doing?” I ask.

  “We’re going to get you friend,” Dave says.

  We follow the man into the gate. The people stare at us as if they are staring at the dead. They don’t say anything. They look at me. They have the appearance of normal people. I know normalcy on the surface can hide someone’s true character, I know that better than anyone.

  Jessie is standing to the left of me with her head down. What is going to happen here? Will they let me take her? Does she want to be taken?

  Wonderful. We have no weapons and our home was taken and my friend could not be coming home with me. I’m not letting the leader take it away from us. We earned these weapons. We found this. Oakland died protecting this. My mom and friends are buried here.

  “Do you have a leader we could speak to,” I ask everyone. I feel so awkward asking that question.

  The African American guy shakes his head then walks into the main house where I was sleeping on the couch. He comes back with a boy who is about sixteen.

  He has brown hair and blue eyes. He has a leather jacket on with jeans, which makes me step back.

  He crosses his arms.

  “Where is the leader?” I ask.

  The boy steps forward. “I am the leader.”

  Zane rolls to him. “Bullshit.”

  The boy bends down to get eye level with him. “I couldn’t hear you. I know you didn’t insult me. This is your place obviously. If you want it back, you better play nice.”

  The boy turns around to speak with the African American man. His leather jacket doesn’t have any letters on it. I exhale, relieved that he isn’t apart of them.

  I still don’t like him.

  He turns to us crossing his arms again. “Well, I hear you want to take Jessie. I don’t care about her much. She just joined us. She’s your friend so take her with you.”

  He goes to walk back in the house.

  “Wait, we want some stuff you took from us. That armory is ours. We need those guns,” I say.

  “Everybody needs guns these days. I have trouble believing your story about you living here. There were barely any clothes. No pictures of you hung on the walls. Nothing to tie you guys to this house,” the boy says.

  “We have a girl that lived here. There are pictures of her and her mom,” I reply.

  He rolls his eyes. “Why leave? This is a nice place. Where you going?”

  “It’s a long story. Mind if I ask why you’re the leader?”

  He gets real close to me. I see Zane tighten his grip on his gun. I
step back. The whole group just stares at him.

  “I keep people safe. They lost a leader so I took over. My name is Angel by the way. That guy I was talking to is Payton.” He extends his hand.

  “He isn’t much of an angel,” Payton mutters.

  I don’t shake his hand. He gives me a bad feeling. I’m going with what Payton said. We’re in no shape to take on another group of people. I don’t want trouble.

  I motion to Dave to talk to him in private. We face the brick wall to the left of us.

  “Dave, we have no choice. We need to leave. We can get guns someplace else.”

  He shakes his head slowly. “I get it. I don’t care about the place just the weapons but if Angel is going to be a jerk, we leave and don’t come anywhere near here.”

  “Agreed.”

  We tell the leader that he can have this community. We’ll take Jessie and leave them alone. I hold my hand out to Jessie. She walks past me to the car. The whole drive there she doesn’t say anything to us. She mutters to herself. I try asking her questions, it doesn’t work. She won’t answer me.

  Sometimes she’ll turn to me, with her hazel eyes just staring at me, then she turns to the window.

  What isn’t she telling me? The last time I talked to her was on the phone about four months ago. She said that They killed her mom. Who is They? Was it the group we just left?

  I put my hand on her shoulder. “It’s going to be okay. We live in a nice store with a ton of food and we have water. You’ll like it there.”

  She doesn’t respond.

  Gavin is standing at the gate. He is holding open the door that opens in now that the track was broken.

  I get out first. Gavin locks the gate. Jessie jumps out of the car.

  “Hey, Jess, how have you been?” he asks.

  Jessie walks inside without saying a word.

  “What’s wrong?” he asks.

  “I called her the first day. She lost her mom. She was with another group that just stole our weapons and community.”

  His eyes widen. “What? We need to take it back.”

  “Let’s just relax, we don’t need to get involved. They don’t seem like they are willing to let it go.”

  I walk inside. Jessie is sitting at a table in the middle of the store where everyone eats. Her nose is bleeding. She wipes the blood on her shirt sleeve. I sit next to her.

  “What happened to your mom?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

  “That’s fine. How did you end up with them?”

  She pulls on a thread from her shirt. “They got me out of a bad situation. I had no choice but to go with them. Is there a bathroom here?”

  “Yeah, it’s all the way in the back.”

  She runs to it.

  Oliver sits at the table. “How have you been doing?”

  “I just found my best friend.”

  “That’s good. While you were gone, me and Sierra…” he trails off.

  I smile. “I knew she would come around. That’s good. The only thing is, does she know about your criminal record?”

  He laughs. “No, not the kind of thing to tell a girl you like. I’m going to have to wait that out.”

  “I don’t think she would care, honestly,” I reply.

  I hear a shot. I run to the back where I heard it. I get to the bathroom. It came from there. I walk into the entrance slowly. Oliver meets up with me. Jessie is lying on the floor. Blood is pooling around her head. There is a pistol next to her body. There is also a note on the counter. I take the note outside with me.

  Wilson is standing by me. “She asked for a pen and paper. She must have had a gun on her. I’m sorry. I had no idea.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m sorry Rain. Just…Jesus,” Oliver says.

  I read her note:

  Rain, I apologize for this. I don’t blame you for not coming to find me. You had people to worry about. I did this because of them. I can’t live with what happened. My mom was killed in front of me, I can’t live with seeing it over and over. Please understand that I had to do this. I escaped but they won’t let me go. They never let anyone go. They will come back for me. They will come here. Prepare. You’re a fighter Rain. You always were. Fight them, fight them for me.

  Jessie

  I slide down the wall. I start crying. She went through the same thing that I did. She was taken. She just couldn’t live with what she had seen. I’m going to miss her so much. I’ve already lost everyone.

  Gavin comes up to me. Oliver sits next to me.

  “She killed herself. Her note says that we should prepare for people coming here. The group in the community, I think they are the ones who drove her to this. We need to fight them,” I say.

  “We will.”

  Those people are going down. They won’t get away with doing this to Jessie. They can’t get away with it. We need to take the community back.

  It’s been four months since we were in a situation like this. I don’t want to do this all over again. We won’t have to kill. I just want to ask questions. I need to know why he is the leader and why people seemed afraid of him.

  If this is the road to eventually living in peace with everyone I love, then I want to fight. I want to live like I was before. I’m almost there. We’re all almost there.

  Live happily, pain is a distant memory. We can just be happy. Alex was right. We can reach that state. It just takes time.

  So, what do I do today? I stand up and I get ready to protect my loved ones.

  First she needs to be buried. We’ll have a service for her then head there.

  The only thing I can do is make sure that she didn’t die for nothing. Her final wishes get fulfilled. She picked the right group to do this.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  I would like to thank my parents and my sister Jenna for supporting me, giving me ideas and feedback for this novel. I thank my dad for telling me to find a job that I love doing every day. I thank my mom for telling me to never give up and for believing in me when sometimes I didn’t believe in myself. I would also like to thank my family for helping me create the characters Cassandra, Craven and Claire. I thank Jenna for creating Earl the magician and Jimmy Grits for me. I also thank my mom for giving me the cause of the apocalypse. I also thank family friends for reading this book and giving feedback and thanks to all my readers.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  I live in a small town in Nevada. I have loved zombie movies and everything zombie related all my life. I live with a family that enjoys dark humor and great stories which influences the things I write. I enjoy spending time with my family and reading and writing in my spare time. If you would like to learn more about this book, follow me on Facebook at WE ARE THE SURVIVORS.