Alice then remembered how dangerous broken glass could be. She remembered how Kara had hurt her hand on some and now she was surrounded by it. Carefully, she made her way away from it. She held onto a shelf just to make sure she didn’t fall.
Candy came back to mind, so Alice went back to the candy shelf. She decided it didn’t matter which one she ate first, because she could eat all of them. In fact, she could eat just one bite of all of them if she wanted. There was no one around to get her into trouble for being wasteful. She could do whatever she felt like. She picked a Kit-Kat bar first, peeling off the wrapper and taking a bite. It was very yummy. She then picked up a Reese peanut butter cup and ate only one of the three cups. As she ate bite after bite of the chocolate bars, she realized that some of them weren’t very yummy. They had gross stuff inside. She committed the names of those to memory so that she wouldn’t eat them again.
The sound of the front door opening stopped Alice in mid-binge. One of the grown-ups must have woken up. If they saw that she had made this mess, she was going to be in trouble.
She went to the end of the aisle and peered down it. A man shuffled through the glass she had broken, bits of it making popping sounds beneath his feet. Alice didn’t recognize the man. It was possible he was a bad man.
Alice started to make her way toward the door slowly. She wasn’t watching where she was going though and she stepped on another super ball. Her foot skidded out from under her, and although she managed to catch herself, her shoe made a loud screechy noise against the floor.
The man wheeled around and looked at her. A large piece of skin was missing over one eye and Alice could see bone. He charged at her, smashing his way into a shelf and knocking it over.
Alice ran for the door, screaming the whole way. She pushed it open and turned. She remembered the gate that had been across the door the night before and pulled it shut behind her. The man slammed into the gate. He reached through the bars and grabbed Alice’s arm. He bit down hard.
Alice really began to scream then. She shrieked at such a high pitch that it was almost out of human hearing range.
Alice fought to get her arm free. She kicked at the gate, tugging her arm, but the man’s teeth held tight. She punched him in the head, where she saw bone, but it only hurt her hand.
Finally, the man let go. He tried to pull more of Alice through the bars, but his suddenly loosened grip allowed Alice to pull herself free. The man pressed himself into the gate, trying to get her, trying to reach her.
Alice was briefly reminded of when she was in that basement with Kara. Only then the monster man had been outside the cage and they had been inside it.
She ran then. She had never been so scared or so hurt before in her life. She ran into the woods and hid in some bushes. Her arm really, really hurt and it was bleeding. It was bleeding really bad. Alice didn’t know what to do. She tugged up the hem of her dress and wrapped her arm in it, but it still really hurt.
* * *
Alice cried. She wanted her Daddy. She wanted to be back home with him where no one could hurt her. She wished none of this had happened. She wished she was just asleep at day-care and Mrs. Lou would wake her up at any moment. She would wake her up and tell her that she was just having a bad dream; it was only a bad dream. Monsters didn’t exist, and they certainly didn’t look like people. She wished, and wished, and wished.
Her arm felt very hot. It felt like she was holding it close to a fire, much closer than she had ever been before. It was spreading up her arm too. It hurt so bad. She couldn’t do anything though, she just kept crying. She curled up in leaves, sobbing and cradling her arm. The heat was in her chest now. It hurt even more than it did when it was in her arm. She wasn’t just near the fire, she was in it. Alice was burning. She had the flu once before, but that fever didn’t feel like this. Her Daddy had told her that the fever was burning her up but she had felt cold. This time she did not feel cold; she felt like she must be on the sun. The sun was a very hot place and Alice didn’t want to be there anymore.
As it spread through the rest of her body, Alice started to become confused. She saw shapes and colours in the woods she hadn’t seen before. She saw impossible creatures, fairies, and people she thought were dead. She saw someone that she was sure was her Mommy.
“Mommy?” Alice called out very weakly, very faintly. “Mommy, I’m here. Why did you leave us, Mommy? I never got to know you. You never got to know me. Do you want to know about me now, Mommy? Okay. My name is Alice Genevieve Carter. I live at 38 Buttermilk Ave. My Daddy is named Sam Carter, he’s a police officer. Mommy? I can’t remember my phone number. Okay. I have a dog named Shoes, but not like shoes on your feet. My feet are itchy, my shoes aren’t comfy. I wish upon stars and collect them in jars. Beetles are in my hair. My hair is falling out. I hope the spiders will make a nice web of it. Catch a yummy fly, feed it to my shoes. Mommy? I can’t see you anymore. I cannot see. There’s darkness, Mommy. Is Daddy with you? Okay, I’ll come see you then. Please wait for me. I need to change my dress. This one has cake on it.”
Alice couldn’t speak anymore. She muttered words but none of them were real. She had forgotten real words. She knew sounds, but not what they meant. She knew smells and sights but not what they were. She thought she slept.
* * *
When Alice awoke once more, she was hungry, so very hungry. Her body was still in the fire but she didn’t care. That was unimportant. The hunger though, that was everything. People were nearby. She would go to the people. The people were chocolate, and she wanted a bite.
35:
Mackenzie
Tobias slowly opened his eyes, surprised that he had managed to sleep. He was extremely cramped and uncomfortable and couldn’t stretch out, but somehow he had slept. He hadn’t realized just how tired he was.
They had driven a good portion of the night, but they almost ran out of gas. Although the vehicle was a hybrid, which gave them good mileage, the battery could only get them so far on its own. They had decided to pull off on a side road and stop for the night. All three of them, Tobias, Cender, and Abby, lay in the back. They had figured out how to fold the back seats down flat. With the three of them lying there though, it was a tight fit. None of them had wanted to stay in the front seats; they had felt too exposed. After some decision-making, they pulled out all the winter clothing that had been packed in the bags and slept underneath them, hidden from view. The bags themselves were put on the front seats and on top of their sleeping forms as well. If anyone looked in, like perhaps a zombie, none of them could be seen. This meant that Tobias was also extremely hot as well as cramped. His height was a disadvantage.
He lay in the semi darkness staring at the carpet that covered the back of the seats. The sun had risen and found its way into the car. It was bright enough to reach down through the spaces in his blanket of clothes. Soon, the car would become an unbearable inferno, but for now, Tobias lay still.
He thought about Jessi. He had murdered her. She had gone completely psychotic, and so he had drowned her. He kept seeing her face through the water, her eyes looking up at him. He didn’t feel badly about it, and that was actually what was worrying him. He felt no remorse. She had tried to kill Abby, and they were pretty sure she had killed Cillian.
Cillian. They had looked for him up and down the river for as long as they could, but they saw no sign of him. Cillian had been floundering in the river, his heavy clothes dragging him down. Abby said she saw him go under, and he never came back up. Tobias had wanted to look longer. He thought that if they had just looked a little longer, they would have found him. Abby kept pleading with him to go. She was worried about more of those pigs showing up. Those things were fucking scary.
Abby also looked afraid of him. Although she kept pleading with him, she wouldn’t get within arm’s length. She kept her distance. Even now, she had insisted that Cender be the one to lie in the middle.
It was Cender who finally got Tobias back to the car. He h
ad hobbled over on his crutches and given Tobias a good whap on the arm with one. He said that if Tobias didn’t come right then, they were going to leave without him.
Once they were moving again, nobody said a word. They drove in silence. When Tobias had glanced in the rear-view mirror, he saw that Abby was crying silently, tears running down her face. Tobias didn’t like that he had made her cry. Even though Jessi was insane and had tried to kill Abby, they had become friends. Just like he and Cillian had become friends. Going through what they had gone through together had forged a tight bond. Now they had both lost their friends, but Tobias didn’t have to look at the person who had murdered his.
He had been falling for Abby. She was pretty and had a charming smile. She seemed shy, but she had a good sense of humour and came across as being rather intelligent. Then he found out that she was a lesbian. He hadn’t known; it hadn’t come up. And why would it? Tobias had once heard that relationships forged out of traumatic events never lasted, so in the end, it probably wouldn’t have mattered. Although he may have heard it in a movie, and they weren’t always right. Either way, she wasn’t into men, and he had killed her friend.
Tobias didn’t know what to do. He didn’t know what was next or even how to approach that question. He tried to think of a plan, but nothing came to him. He just lay there looking at the slightly fuzzy carpet fabric.
Cender stirred next to him. With the extreme closeness, even the slightest move was felt.
“You awake?” Tobias whispered.
“Yeah,” Cender replied. He didn’t sound sleepy either; he had probably been awake for a while like Tobias.
“I’m awake too,” Abby also replied. Although this meant that everyone was awake, she had whispered as well.
“What are we going to do?” Tobias kept up the whispering. He felt if he spoke aloud the world would crash down upon him.
“There’s still juice left in the battery, right? Even a little gas?” Cender must have had the same idea. Whispering was the way to go at the moment.
“Yeah.” Tobias didn’t really know the exact amount, but there had still been some gas left when they shut the car off.
“Then we hope it has enough to get us to a gas station,” Cender decided.
“And if it doesn’t?” Abby asked the question before Tobias could.
“We’ll cross that bridge when we come to it.” Cender clearly didn’t want to do a lot of thinking either.
Despite having made a plan, none of them moved. No one wanted to break the peace that currently inhabited the car. They all lay still for several more minutes. Finally, Tobias couldn’t take anymore. It had gone from comfortably warm to unbearably hot, his leg was cramping up, and now he needed to pee. He sat up, brushing the clothing off his head and shoving a bag off his side and toward his feet. It was so much brighter above the clothing. Tobias looked east at the rising sun. It was coming up over a farmer’s field, bathing it in a soft golden glow. Unlike that last farmer’s field, which was tall corn, they had chosen this one for its emptiness. It was probably growing potatoes, cabbage, or maybe even pumpkins. They couldn’t tell in the dark what was growing, but they liked how much they could see around them.
Tobias looked out through all the windows scanning for threats. When he didn’t see any, he opened the door next to him and got out on stiff legs. He didn’t bother walking away from the car, just unzipped and relieved himself right there.
“That’s a nice sound,” Cender half joked as he sat up. “My mouth tastes like ass.”
“What are we eating for breakfast?” Abby sat up and asked just as Tobias zipped back up.
He frowned at his hands; he didn’t have anything to wash them with. He didn’t want to use their drinking water and the only puddle he could see was the one he had just made. He rubbed his hands on his pants, although unhygienic, it was the only thing he could do.
“What do we have?” Tobias opened the passenger side door and grabbed the list off the dashboard. Cender had been smart enough to bring the list with them, so that they knew what they should have in each bag. He skimmed the list quickly, then handed it back to Abby. He wasn’t actually all that interested in what they ate. In fact, he wasn’t all that interested in eating, period, but he would. He couldn’t help but remember how Jessi was refusing to eat before she went nuts. He didn’t want to become like her. He didn’t think he would, but he didn’t want the others to think he was becoming like her either.
“None of this sounds very appetizing. At least not cold. And I’m still unsure about theses MRE things.” Abby sighed. “How about we go with cans of Zoodles? One can each?”
“Sounds good to me.” Cender swung his legs out of the car and rubbed his knees. He also checked out the skin around his cast. “Which bags are they in?”
“Let’s start with the higher numbers, the ones that we have extra. Bag five has some in it.” Abby started looking around the car.
Just last night, bag five had not been an extra. Since then, they wound up with two extra bags of supplies. Tobias recalled that he had been assigned bag three, but he couldn’t remember who was bag five. It might have been Abby, but it could have just as easily been Cillian or Jessi. All he knew was that it wasn’t Cender. Cender was bag one with most of the medical stuff.
“Do you mind taking a look at my shoulder?” Tobias asked Cender. Jessi’s pounding on it had been excruciating and then sleeping all cramped up had not made it any better. His knuckles also hurt from where she had cut him with the knife, but Cender had said the cuts weren’t actually that bad. They didn’t even require being bandaged unless he wanted them to be. He had declined. Still, they stung worse than the worst paper cut he had ever had.
“Sure.” Cender leaned backwards and dragged a bag toward him. He opened up a side pocket and pulled out a pair of gloves from a box that was in it.
Tobias stood in front of him and pulled up the sleeve of his T-shirt. It was crusty with blood. Cender started unrolling the bandages. The closer he got to the wound itself, the redder they became. He got them off and then gently pulled off the gauze that covered the actual wound. Tobias pulled in a sharp breath through his teeth; it stung about as much as his fingers did. He looked down at the wound, which looked pretty bad, but he had been expecting worse.
“Well this gauze is useless, but the bandage we should hold onto in case we need to suddenly tie something up,” Cender said to no one in particular. He tossed the gauze into the field and rolled the bandage up into a neat bundle. “I should clean this up a bit.” Cender said peering at the wound.
“With what?” Tobias frowned. “I don’t want to waste any drinking water.”
“I was going to use iodine, actually.” Cender reached for his bag again.
Tobias blanched. Just having the gauze removed hurt like hell. Iodine straight to the wound sounded extra unpleasant.
“Eww.” Abby sat behind Cender in the car and looked at Tobias’s shoulder.
“How did this happen again?” Cender turned back to him with the disinfectant. “I was kind of drugged up when you told me, and I don’t really remember.”
“I fell down an escalator,” Tobias told him through clenched teeth as Cender started cleaning the wound. It burned as if a hot pipe was being pressed to it.
“What were you doing on the escalator that caused you to fall?” Cender was probably trying to keep him talking to keep his mind off the pain.
“Being chased by a horde of zombies.” It wasn’t working. “Cillian and I had this bright idea to try and lure them to one side of the mall while we ran across the top floor to the other side.”
“I take it, it didn’t work so well?” Cender grinned.
“Some of them are a lot faster than they look,” Tobias nodded.
Finally, the cleaning was done, and Cender pressed a fresh gauze pad on the wound. He then took out another bandage and wrapped it around Tobias’s arm. Tobias noticed he used fewer bandages to wrap it than he had before. He must be limiting
himself to how much he used. He didn’t want to risk running out before they reached their destination. It then dawned on Tobias that, although their destination was likely to be stocked, supplies like bandages would still run out eventually. He made a mental note about that. In fact, if they had a constant water supply where they were going, they could probably just wash the bandage that he had on earlier. He wondered if Cender had thought of that and just didn’t say anything.
“I got the cans open,” Abby told them as Cender stripped off his gloves. He kept them as well, placing them in a ziplock bag with the used bandage.
“Thanks,” Tobias accepted the can she handed him. She also handed him a small spork to eat it with. “You know, if I’m infected, those gloves probably won’t protect you. You know, considering you slept next to me and all.”
“The gloves weren’t about the zombie virus,” Cender laughed. “Okay, well maybe partly. I wear them to keep myself from infecting your wound. Regular infections still exist, you know.”
“Right.” Tobias felt some heat in his face. Things like the flu, colds, and even gangrene weren’t very high on his list of things to worry about anymore.
They ate their cans of food in silence after that, each to his own thoughts. Tobias was thinking about supplies. He wondered how well stocked the place they were going to was and how long it would all last. It was a useless thought because he wouldn’t know until he got there, but he thought about it anyway. If it were anything like Cender’s friend’s house, then it would be extremely well stocked and prepared.
He finished eating and wondered whether he should keep the can or not. He couldn’t think of a use for an empty Zoodles can, so he tossed it. Cender tossed his as well but it looked like Abby stashed hers away somewhere. Well, if they needed one, they would have one.
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