The Things We Cannot Change: A Zombie Apocalypse Love Story

by Kate L. Mary

  “Don’t think about that now,” I told him. “Just think about getting to the garage safely, and then out of the city. We’ll worry about the rest of it later.”

  His gaze moved to the canvas bag in my hand like he was connecting the dots between the wine and what I did to chase away the ghosts from my past. My shoulders stiffened, but he pulled the door open without saying anything about it. Thankfully.

  “Let’s go.”

  I was huffing by the time I made it to the first floor, and Trevor wasn’t much better. We paused in the lobby, him looking out through the front door like he was trying to figure out the best route while I stood awkwardly, feeling the absence of Robert in a way I’d never experienced before. I had barely known the doorman, but he had been a constant presence in the building since the day Nathaniel and I moved in, and having him gone felt wrong.

  “Ready?” Trevor whispered, but the lobby was so empty it felt like he was shouting and I jumped.

  I nodded; ignoring the way my heart thumped in my chest, and a second later the door was pulled open. We stepped out and my stomach convulsed. The air was thick with the scent of decay, something I hadn’t even considered, and before we’d even taken two steps I had to pull my shirt up over my nose. It didn’t help.

  Trevor moved down the sidewalk, keeping close to the buildings. I followed, but my gaze was on the people we passed. They were so obviously dead that it sent a shiver down my spine. Gray skin and blank, milky eyes. Arms that were slack at their sides and feet that dragged against the ground with every step they took. Only they were up and moving around when they shouldn’t have been, making me want to reach out and shake the nearest one and scream at the woman to wake up.

  They didn’t seem to notice us, and we made it to the end of the block with no issue. My legs were shaking enough to make me wonder if they were going to give out, but in front of me Trevor looked oddly secure. The knife in his hand didn’t even shake.

  The parking garage was in sight when I stumbled on a crack in the sidewalk. My feet tripped over each other as I barely stopped my body from plunging forward and slamming into the cement. The bottles clinked together and several of the zombies closest to us turned. Their eyes seemed to focus behind the milky glaze covering their irises, and they opened their mouths like they were chomping at the air.

  “Shit,” Trevor said from behind me. “We have to move. Now. Run!”

  His words were hushed, but his tone urgent. He didn’t wait for me before taking off, but I was right on his heels. We ran down the sidewalk as more and more of the zombies noticed our existence, each of them turning our way and several of them lunging at us with their mouths open. The sight of them sent fear shooting through me, but the adrenaline coursing through my veins made it easier to run with the bottles of booze weighing me down. They clanged against one another with every step I took, but it no longer mattered if we were quiet because the street was alive with the dead, and they all wanted us.

  “There!” I called when we reached the entrance to the parking garage. “Third floor.”

  Trevor dashed inside, and then slowed enough to allow me to get in front of him. I already had my keys out and ready, and as I ran for the stairs, I squeezed them until the metal dug into my palm. Behind me I could hear Trevor’s heavy breathing, letting me know that he was still with me, and as we dashed up the first flight of stairs and then the next, our footsteps echoed through the empty parking garage.

  A moan bounced off the walls just as we made it to the third floor, but I couldn’t figure out if it was behind us or in front of us, so I kept moving. My car was at the end of the second row, a black BMW that Nathaniel had bought me when I finished my residency. I hit the unlock button on my key and the beep echoed through the garage in response, followed by yet another moan. It was closer this time, and for some insane reason I found myself stopping so I could look around instead of getting in the car.

  I spotted the zombie only a few cars down just as Trevor ripped the keys out of my hand and yelled, “Get in!”

  It was a teenage boy, his gray skin forever marred by the acne that had plagued him in life and a pair of broken glasses barely clinging to his face. My eyes were still on him when I yanked open the back door, and when I dropped the bag of wine in, the glass clinked together so hard that I wouldn’t have been shocked if one of the bottles had broken. Trevor was already in the driver’s seat and the engine roared to life just as I slammed the door shut. The boy moaned again, now close enough that I was able to see the uvula hanging at the back of his throat. I yanked the front door open and jumped in, slamming it shut while my body shook. A second later, the zombie banged his body against the window at my side, but Trevor already had the car in reverse. He hit the gas and the car lurched back, sending me flying forward since I hadn’t had time to buckle up yet. Outside my window, the zombie teen didn’t register that a moving vehicle was enough to take him out, and he threw himself against the car again. This time he was on the hood, but he went flying when Trevor hit the brakes. His body landed on the ground in front of us, and he’d just gotten to his feet when Trevor threw the car in drive and took off again. The sickening thud of the car slamming into the zombie made me squeeze my eyes shut, but it wasn’t enough to block out the crunch of bones as the wheels rolled over the boy.

  “You okay?” Trevor asked after a few seconds of silence.

  “No.”

  I opened my eyes and twisted in my seat so I was facing the back, keeping my eyes down just in case the zombie’s mangled body was still behind us. The wine was on the floor behind me, and it took some careful maneuvering to reach it, but in no time I had a bottle and had turned back to face the front. It had a screw cap, which I was thankful for, and the second I had the thing open I put it to my lips and sucked down a mouthful, followed by another. The wine was like a soothing balm on my damaged soul.

  “Where to now?” I asked when I’d managed to calm myself.

  We’d made it out of the parking garage and were now driving through the city, only not very quickly. The streets were crowded with the dead and Trevor slowed to maneuver around them, which I was thankful for. The crunch of bones from our encounter with the zombie teen was still echoing in my ears.

  “Upstate.” He kept his eyes on the road. “Should take us a little over five hours to get to Lake Placid. Less if the road stays clear since I can drive as fast as I want.”

  “Just don’t kill us,” I said, taking another drink.

  Trevor’s eyes darted my way, focusing on the bottle. “If anyone is going to kill us it’s going to be you and your wine.”

  I ignored him and turned so I could stare out the window, remembering for the first time since he showed up at my apartment that I didn’t like him. Yet I’d gone with him anyway, no questions asked, and I felt with almost certainty that he was going to be my only companion for a long time to come. Nothing to keep me company but wine and a man I didn’t care for. It sounded more depressing than anything else I’d been through in my entire life, and that was saying a lot.

  Chapter 6

  I slept most of the drive. My arms were wrapped around my bottle of wine, and my brain was once again engulfed in a cocoon of alcohol and warmth. The booze, combined with the gentle vibration of the car, made it impossible to stay awake. Trevor didn’t seem to care, or if he did, he didn’t say anything about it the few times I did wake up so I could take another drink. He was driving fast, the speedometer hovering just above ninety miles an hour, and probably more focused on what he was about to face than what I was doing. I had no illusions that he wouldn’t soon bring up the elephant hanging over our heads, but for the time being I was happy to drown myself in alcohol and pretend he didn’t notice how much I was drinking.

  When the car slowed, it nudged me from sleep. Even through my sleepy eyes the surrounding landscape was beautiful, the trees glowing with leaves that were slowly turning from green to yellow and would soon be alight with color, and it was all so breathtaki
ng that for a brief moment I forgot what was really happening. Then a figure caught my eye, stumbling across an open field, and it all came slamming back me. All I could do was swallow the last bit of wine in my bottle, but it didn’t help. My buzz had worn off hours ago.

  “We’re almost there,” Trevor said when I turned to face him. His gaze moved over me and heat crept up my cheeks, but I kept my shoulders straight so he wouldn’t know the penetrating look bugged me. “Are you sober?”

  “Yeah.” Even I was shocked by how much bitterness was in that one word.

  He nodded and I could tell he wanted to say something else, but he hesitated, keeping his eyes on the road in front of us. I stayed silent, letting him work up to it, and when he finally let out a deep breath and uttered the words I’d been waiting for, I couldn’t have been more shocked if he’d told me he was a zombie masquerading as a human.

  “Do you think you can go in for me? It’s just that I don’t want to see them, not if they’re—” His voice shook and despite the dislike I felt for him, I found my heart going out to the man at my side. I couldn’t even imagine how I would feel if Nathaniel had lived and I’d had to see him as some kind of monster. It seemed worse than seeing him in the morgue the day I identified his body, worse than when I’d seen him in the coffin.

  “Yeah, I can do that.”

  Trevor only nodded in response.

  Less than ten minutes later we turned into a cute little neighborhood full of upper middle class houses that were modest but well kept. A few of the yards were overgrown, but I imagined it was the first time that had ever happened on this street, because there was nothing else about the houses to indicate that they hadn’t been lovingly maintained before their occupants started wandering the earth in search of brains to feast on.

  Trevor pulled to a stop outside a one-story ranch home, but didn’t turn the car off. He stared at it with an expression on his face that got lost somewhere between misery and self-hatred.

  “Let me have the knife,” I said, holding my hand out.

  He set the only weapon we had in my hand and I realized too late that I should have taken one from my kitchen as well. Call it a rookie mistake, because I’d never had to worry about defending myself from flesh-eating monsters before, but it hadn’t even occurred to me that we might need any weapons, let alone two. Now though, I was brutally aware of the fact that I was leaving him totally unarmed.

  I reached for the door handle and Trevor followed my lead, stepping out of the car at the same time that I did. The air was cool; the slight bite to it letting me know that fall was going to be early and harsh this year.

  “There’s a key,” Trevor said as we headed to the porch.

  I flexed my fingers around the handle of the knife, suddenly questioning whether or not I would have the ability to kill his zombie children if they were inside and tried to attack me. My survival instincts hadn’t been all that high since Nathaniel’s death. I had run from the zombies when they’d tried to attack me, and I’d left the city with Trevor, so that had to mean I wasn’t ready to throw in the towel just yet. Not that I felt all that excited by the prospect of the future at the moment.

  Trevor knelt next to a bush and dug around until he found a fake rock, then slid the bottom open. The silver key gleamed in the sunlight when he pulled it out. I took it, hating that my hands shook and that I’d broken out in a cold sweat. Dreading what I was about to do and see and how it would affect Trevor, but more importantly how it would affect me. The bottles of wine were already calling my name, and I knew that tonight I wouldn’t be able to sleep without downing another one.

  “I’ll wait here,” Trevor said, stepping back as I took a step toward the door.

  “Should I knock first?” I asked, my eyes on the doorknob. In my palm, the key felt impossibly heavy for such a tiny object.

  “I guess.”

  I didn’t look back at him when I rapped my knuckles against the door. The sound echoed through the silence and my heart beat faster. I held my breath and waited, but the house was silent. No footsteps, no moans, no sound at all. Before unlocking the door though, I took a moment to peer in through the front window. The house was dark and there was no movement. Maybe they weren’t here.

  I slid the key into the lock and turned it, and then took a deep breath before pushing the door open. The house was stuffy and the air thick with dust. In the living room everything was covered in a thin layer of dust like the place had been abandoned for weeks. The house felt empty, but I stayed on alert as I moved deeper, passing the kitchen and heading down the hall. Every room I passed had the doors open, and like the living room they all looked abandoned.

  Something scratched against the floor behind me and I spun around, the knife up and my legs shaking.

  Trevor, less than four feet in front of me, put his hands up. “Easy.”

  “I thought you were waiting outside,” I muttered, lowering the knife while my heart beat twice as fast as usual.

  “It seemed quiet, so I came in.”

  He looked around, past me to the master bedroom, then to the door at my side. That room was painted purple and would have looked much too young for a thirteen-year-old girl if it weren’t for the posters of boy bands decorating the walls.

  “No one’s here,” I said.

  “I wonder where they went.”

  Trevor turned away and headed back down the hall to the living room, then moved to the kitchen. I followed, the knife still in my hand just in case the zombies had set out a trap for us and were waiting until we’d lowered our guard to jump out. In the kitchen, there was a corkboard on the wall, and above that a dry erase calendar. Events were written in neat script, things like baseball practice and swim team. The days at the beginning of the month were marked off one by one, but had stopped a little over two weeks ago. Then nothing.

  I stared at it as Trevor leafed through the papers tacked up on the corkboard. There were a couple invitations, a school lunch menu, as well as a report card boasting all A’s, but nothing that told us where the people who lived in this house had gone.

  When he’d looked through it all, Trevor moved deeper into the kitchen, stopping in front of the fridge. The handwritten note caught my eye just before he pulled it out from under a magnet, and he was reading it when I stopped at his side.

  Julie-

  The kids and I went to the hospital. We’re all sick and I don’t know what to do. Come find us if you get this note. If not, I love you.

  Melissa

  “Is Melissa your ex-wife?” I asked, and he nodded without looking away from the note. “Who’s Julie?”

  “Her sister.” Trevor crumbled the note up and tossed it aside. “They’re dead.”

  I wanted to tell him he didn’t know that for sure, but I’d been at the hospital and I’d seen the sick. He was right and lying to him would have been wrong.

  “I’m sorry,” I said instead.

  He nodded, and then looked around. “We should raid the pantry and see what they have that might be useful. We don’t exactly have a lot of supplies and we both know running to the grocery store is going to be a risk.”

  “Then what?” I asked. “Where do we go from here?”

  “I know the perfect place.”

  Trevor was right, I thought as I stood in the living room and looked around. The house was secluded, surrounded by trees on three sides and backed up to Lake Placid. On top of that, the driveway had to be a half a mile long. There were no neighbors, meaning there wouldn’t be many zombies.

  The house was perfect.

  On top of that, it was the very definition of luxurious. A massive living room with a wall of windows that looked out over the lake, wall to wall hardwood floors, a gourmet kitchen, enormous bedrooms. Even before I saw the owners’ extensive wine collection, I knew we’d found the right place.

  “Did you know the people who lived here?” I asked Trevor as I studied the pictures on the wall.

  A fiftyish couple smiled back
at me from each one, and even though the background changed from image to image, the happiness in their expressions didn’t. The beach, Paris, a mountain, a ski slope. These people liked to travel.

  “No.” Trevor stopped at my side. “I used to take the kids to feed the ducks when they were little and we could see the house from across the lake.”

  “Good thing you knew about it.”

  I was already moving away from the pictures. The far wall in the kitchen sported a built-in wine rack that went from floor to ceiling. There must have been hundreds of bottles, and just looking at them made my mouth fill with saliva. I could already taste the wine.

  I slide a bottle out and glanced at the label. Bordeaux. Based on this house, I had no doubt that it was expensive, but at the moment I wouldn’t have cared if it were a bottle of two buck Chuck. Anything to dull reality.

  It only took a little bit of digging to find the corkscrew, and I’d just gotten the bottle open when Trevor came into the kitchen behind me. My shoulders tensed, preparing for a lecture. There was no doubt in my mind that it was coming. Even in the midst of a zombie apocalypse it wasn’t socially acceptable to drown yourself in booze.

  “Pour me a glass,” Trevor said instead.

  A breath I hadn’t known I was holding whooshed out of me. I pulled another glass from the kitchen cabinet, but I didn’t look at him as I filled it, or when I pushed it toward him. My gaze was too focused on my own glass as I lifted it to my lips. The first sip, as predicted, was as soothing as a hot bath after a long day. I closed my eyes and exhaled, then took another much bigger drink. In minutes the glass was empty. I refilled it before heading out into the living room where Trevor had already settled onto the couch.

  We didn’t talk as we drank, which was okay with me. My opinion of him hadn’t really changed, and I had no delusions that he felt differently about me. We were two strangers who had been forced together by circumstance, but we didn’t like each other. Still, I had to admit that being with someone I disliked was better than being alone.