by Raymond Lee
“We have a limited amount of food and water. We should not be going off course. This is —”
“I lost my entire family,” Raven cut in, pausing as she received a shoulder squeeze from Damian, who appeared to have already known this. “My parents died before all this happened, leaving me to raise my little sister. When the outbreak started, we were in California. Hollywood. Sky was so excited. She’d won a contest to meet her favorite actress, some little blonde girl on all the Disney shows and movies. She never got to meet her because the event was canceled when news of what was happening aired, then … you know the rest. Everyone was running for their lives, including us. We were in a hotel and they got in. I left my cell phone wherever I’d left it in the hotel room as I tried to escape with my little sister. We jumped off a balcony and into a pool, managed to survive that without breaking any limbs.”
Tears spilled down Raven’s face and she wiped them with her sleeve as Damian pulled her into his side. Cruz sat on the edge of the truck, watching helplessly.
“We made it to a room on the first floor off the lobby, a kitchen but there weren’t any sharp knives or anything we could use to defend ourselves. They were at one of the doors and I knew they’d eventually get in or else more would come and we’d be stuck in there. We left out the other door and made a run for the lobby doors but they were blocked by more infected people. I pulled Sky into a closet but I couldn’t close the door. They were pulling on the door to get to us and I wasn’t strong enough. There were sweepers and mops in the closet. I told Sky to grab the shortest sweeper for a weapon and to run out. She didn’t want to, but I ordered her to.” Raven heaved out a sob and wiped her eyes before continuing. “I thought they would kill me. I was bigger, meatier. The plan was for her to run and find somewhere safe while I offered them up a meal and bought her time. I heard her scream the moment she left the hotel and the plan went to shit. I didn’t die. She did. I sent her into their waiting jaws and I got her killed and now I have nothing. My cell phone is back in that hotel and all of our other pictures are at home in Kentucky. I’m a long way from both but you better believe, if I was anywhere near that hotel or my home, nothing would stop me from getting there. I don’t know what happened the night Elijah lost his mother, or you lost your wife, what nightmare images you don’t want to relive, but I know what it’s like to lay awake at night holding the image of your loved ones in your mind because you’re scared to death you’re going to lose that too. I would give up a kidney right here right now to have a picture of my family.”
The garage fell silent, with exception to a slight sniffling inside the truck coming from Pimjai. Carlos’s shoulders sagged, defeated. He didn’t say anything as he turned and bent down to roll up his sleeping bag, but he didn’t put up a fight either, which was a victory in itself.
“We do this the smart way then,” Hal said, breaking the silence. “We go together, and we go after we check this garage for additional supplies. It’s light enough in here now to see and we don’t know when we’ll come across another place like Wally’s Club, if we even will come across such a place. Agreed?”
Elijah nodded, unzipping his coat. “Thanks.”
“Thank Raven. I wouldn’t have offered to help, not after I trusted you to stand guard and you took advantage of that trust to attempt to sneak out.” Hal turned his back on him and gathered up the sleeping bag he’d barely used.
Elijah looked at Raven, and found disapproval in her eyes too. Despite speaking on his behalf and understanding his need to go home, she wasn’t pleased with the way he’d went about it either. Damian gave him the stink eye as he rolled his sleeping bag tight with more force than necessary. Cruz didn’t even look his way as he shrugged into his coat and jumped down from the truck bed.
“I’m gonna use the bathroom. I’ll check the area for any threats,” he said as he left out the side door.
“Should we take the sleeping bags?” Damian asked. “There’s drawstrings on the bags. We can tie them to our packs.”
“Might as well,” Hal answered, “as long as attaching them doesn’t hinder anyone’s movement. Who knows how many times we’re going to have to bunk in garages again, or even worse shelters.”
“Hal,” Janjai called out to him. She’d opened one of the boxes stacked against the back wall. “What are these?”
Hal laughed as she held up a brown packet. “The Lord provides!”
“Are those MRE’s?” Raven asked.
“Yes, they are,” he answered, looking in the box. “There’s a whole box of them.”
“Greg was military and a real survivalist,” Carlos advised. “There may be more than that one box.”
“We’ll eat hearty this morning and then take what we can pack,” Hal told him. “We already packed can goods and other non-perishables which are taking up space in our packs. Besides, this garage saved our lives last night. It could save someone else’s.”
“Man, those MRE’s could be the only food we find for weeks,” Damian argued.
“Weighing ourselves down will not help us travel faster,” Hal replied, “and the Lord will provide for us on this journey as He provided this shelter and food when needed.”
Damian rolled his eyes. “Well, if the Lord provided this food I say we taketh all of it.”
“And what if someone else found this garage before us?” Raven asked. “What if they burned all the firewood and took all the food? What if children find this garage after us? Should they starve to death because of our greed?”
“Fine” Damian held up his hands, surrendering, “but if I can’t take it all I’m telling you right now I’m hella feasting before we go.”
Cruz poked his head through the door, his nose already pink from the short time he’d spent outside. “Uh, guys? Come check this out.”
Donning their coats, all but the twins stepped outside. Elijah braced himself for what he knew was coming.
“You planned on leaving on your own in this?” Carlos asked, his voice nearly a shout, as he extended his arm, gesturing toward the expanse of snow blanketing the area. The area under the carport hadn’t accumulated a lot, allowing them to exit the garage without issues, but beyond the protected area, a hedge of snow taunted them.
“This has to be at least two feet, maybe two and a half,” Hal said, “which wouldn’t be so bad if the streets were clear.”
“There’s no way we’re driving the truck out,” Raven muttered, her hands firmly shoved inside her coat pockets. Her hood hid most of her face from Elijah’s view, but he could hear the concern in her tone. “How the hell do we make it down this hill?”
“It looks like two feet of snow in the streets, but I think it’s deeper at the base of the hill,” Cruz said. His jeans were dusted with snow beneath the knees and they could see two tracks in the snow where he’d waded through to peek down the hill.
“Do we have to go downhill?” Hal asked.
“We have to,” Elijah answered. “Any other way would take much longer and there would be less shelters.”
“This is dangerous,” Carlos grumbled, his irritation growing. “The snow up here is up to our knees. It will be deeper going down the hill. We can’t go that way.”
“You already know I don’t want to go down this damn hill,” Damian said, “but I think we have to whether we go to Elijah’s house or not.” He pointed a gloved finger down the hill.
They looked in the direction he pointed, their gazes landing on a house at the bottom of the hill. Someone leaned out of a small window on the top floor, waving their arms.
“What the hell is that?” Cruz asked.
Elijah strained to see but with the distance between them he could not tell whether the person was a man or a woman. Based off height, it appeared to be an adult, and he’d never seen a zombie wave its arms like that. Speaking of which… “Where are all the zombies?”
“Oh, that’s another thing,” Cruz said. “You can’t see them from right here but there are some down the hill. �
�I think they slid down there.”
“And the snow is deeper there?” Raven questioned.
“Yep.”
“So they could be under the snow, waiting to grab us.”
“Bingo.”
“Why haven’t they froze?” Elijah asked. “We would have died out here last night. Why aren’t they popsicles?”
“They’re getting there,” Cruz assured him. “The ones I saw moving were way slower than usual.”
“If they all freeze, is it all over?” Damian asked. “We all freeze for one winter and then goodbye zombie apocalypse?”
“It isn’t cold everywhere,” Raven reminded him. “We still would have the ones on the west coast to deal with, and since the only way to permanently put one of them down is to destroy their brain, I don’t even think freezing will permanently stop them.”
“Damn,” Damian grumbled. “You just pissed all over my silver lining.”
“I don’t make the rules,” she replied. “Are we going to help that person?”
“It wouldn’t be right not to,” Hal said, holding his hand over his eyes as he attempted to get a better look. “Poor soul might just be the only person left in this area. I don’t see any smoke coming out of any chimneys.”
“Including that one,” Raven advised. “So there very well may be more people. Maybe all these houses are full of people just waiting to ambush us.”
“We can’t leave someone who needs our help.”
“The last time I helped people, I ended up losing everything,” Carlos reminded them.
Anger warmed Elijah far more efficiently than the coat he wore as he turned toward him. “You lost everything the time you didn’t help someone,” he said and stepped back into the garage before his father could say anything to provoke him.
He heard them scuffling outside as he pulled the door closed behind him, but didn’t bother to see who was holding his father back from coming after him. Any one of them had the sense to know any argument between them right now would only escalate to a physical bout. He had been raised to respect his parents, but any respect he had for his father left the moment he saw an infected person bite into his mother. Hal, Raven, even Cruz could defend the man as much as they wanted but he couldn’t move past what had happened, not when his father continued to play the coward at every turn.
Elijah moved past the two Asian women who’d stayed in the garage to go through the box of MRE’s and started searching around the boxes lining the wall, looking for anything that would help him get them down the hill without the possibility of stepping knee-high into snow that could be hiding a hungry zombie. He came across the metal lid to the trashcan that had been set aside the night before when they started the fire and studied it. It could be used to slide down the hill on, working similarly to a sled, but they couldn’t all get on it at once and returning it to the top of the hill after sliding down didn’t seem possible.
The door opened again and the others came through. Hal rushed over to stoke the fire as Carlos quietly trudged over to where he’d left his sleeping bag and continued stuffing it into the sack it came in. Damian and Cruz talked animatedly about how best to get down the hill while Raven took her coat off and shook off the snow.
“Why didn’t y’all come outside?” she asked the twins, wearing a small grin.
“Too cold,” Janjai answered, shivering for effect.
“We miss Thailand,” Pimjai added.
“I miss Thailand,” Damian said, approaching them, “and I’ve never even been there. Did you two get breakfast together? I’m ready to get my feast on before we have to go out there again.”
“You can get your own breakfast,” Hal told him. “We’re eating from the MRE’s. They are all easy to prepare single meals. Get your fill and let’s go through everything for whatever we need. We don’t know when the last time that person ate was so we shouldn’t take too long eating and figuring out a way to get downhill.”
“I think we can sled down,” Elijah told them, holding up the garbage can lid.
“We can’t all fit on that thing,” Damian said, holding six MRE’s and still looking through the box for more.
“No, but one of us can go down the hill on this and make sure it’s safe for the others to walk down.”
The twins shuddered. “How long will it take to walk down the hill?”
“Too damn long,” Damian answered. “And something can still be up under the snow, waiting to grab us.”
Elijah thought about this. Sledding downhill was the best way to make it down but he didn’t see anything else they could slide down on. “Whoever slides down on the lid will make tracks, a path. Everyone else can probably just slide down the path on their butts.”
“My butt ain’t touching no damn snow,” Damian said. “Shit, we’d spend the rest of the day walking around with soggy bottoms like we pissed ourselves and then we will literally freeze our asses off.”
“Well then, come up with something better because I don’t see any other way we’re going to get down that hill without walking it.”
“Didn’t think of that before trying to sneak out,” Carlos muttered under his breath as he tore open an MRE and poked around inside it.
“The kid has a good idea with the sled concept,” Hal acknowledged, opening up the heating element in one of the MRE’s. “We need to find something big enough for all of us though or figure out a way we can all slide down without dampening our clothes. We have no idea what we’ll find once we’re down there or how long before we can get warm again.”
“We might not be able to drive out of here in this snow, but the truck might not be so useless to us after all,” Cruz said, his hand on the hood.
“I know your crazy ass isn’t about to say we all pile in and slide down the hill in that thing,” Damian said before turning toward Hal and speaking lower. “I told you his ass is crazy.”
“Not the whole truck,” Cruz told him. “Just the hood.”
The others paused in various stages of eating and gathered around the front of the truck, squeezing in to study it.
“You can get it off?” Raven asked.
“With a little help, yeah. Just because I’m an actor doesn’t mean I’m completely useless.”
“I never said you were completely useless,” Raven replied, grinning. “I think we could all fit, and somebody else can still use the lid.”
“I think it’ll work,” Hal agreed, rubbing his chin.
“Well, yeah, I mean of course that’ll work if you can take it off,” Elijah mumbled.
“Hey, sledding was your idea,” Damian said, tapping his arm. “It just takes somebody batshit crazy to think up taking apart a truck and using the hood, and Cruz is our resident batshit crazy bastard.”
“Yeah,” Cruz said, giving Damian serious side eye. “Good job thinking up the sled idea.”
“There,” Damian said. “Now that we got a travel plan and everybody’s feelings have been assuaged, let’s feast up and get ready to slide on out.”
“Slow it down!” Raven yelled as they slid down the hill, the makeshift sled picking up more speed than she’d anticipated.
“I can’t,” Cruz yelled back despite being right in front of her, actually sandwiched between her legs with his back to her chest.
He grimaced, whether from her death grip on his shoulders or the high-pitched noises coming from Damian and the twins, she wasn’t sure. They’d found rope in the garage and had used it to lasso themselves together and make a handle of sorts for the person in front to hold on to. That person was Cruz. Everyone else squeezed in tight to him, with the exception of Hal, who rode the garbage can lid down the hill. Their packs were tied down to the back of the hood, allowing them to hold on to one another as they performed the daredevil stunt.
Raven tried to turn her head and see how he was faring, but the others obstructed her view.
“Look out!” Damian shrieked as they neared the bottom of the hill and careened straight toward a house. “Tur
n it! Turn it!”
“Pivot! Pivot!” Raven instinctively yelled, throwing out the Friends reference that came to her whenever she found herself in a situation in which she needed to tell someone to turn.
“What the hell is pivot?” Damian asked a second before Cruz threw all his weight to the left, the rope handle gripped tight in his hands. The maneuver worked, effectively angling them just enough to avoid hitting the corner of the house next to the one they’d seen the survivor in, but unfortunately the move sent them in the direction of a toolshed.
“Why isn’t this thing stopping?” Damian asked, his voice reaching shrill decibels Raven had never heard come from a man. “We’re gonna crash!”
“No shit!” Cruz snapped. “Everyone hold on tight to whoever is in front of you or nearest to the center and fling yourself back when I say to!”
Raven had barely managed to wrap her arms around Cruz’s back, clasping onto his chest for dear life before he shouted “Now!”
Everyone flung themselves backward as Cruz pulled back on the rope loop they’d made for him to hold on to at the front of the hood. The combined effort pulled the front of the hood off the ground, a sled version of popping a wheelie, and caused the bottom of the hood to hit the shed as they all fell backward into the snow.
“That was the brilliant plan?” Damian asked, groaning.
“We were going to crash either way it went,” Cruz answered as he untied the rope lassoing them all together. “This saved us some broken noses.”
He tossed the untied ends of rope aside and stood, offering Raven his hand. “How are you doing, Pimjai?”
The pregnant woman held her hand protectively over her middle as her sister and Carlos helped her to her feet. “I am good, I think.”
Hal appeared from between the houses, holding his side with one hand, carrying the metal lid with the other. “Everyone OK?”
“Yeah,” Raven answered. “How was your ride?”
“Hit a porch,” he said, grimacing as he flung the lid aside. “Let’s not do that again.”