Divided We Rot (One Nation Under Zombies Book 3)

by Raymond Lee

  Desperate to parch her thirst, Sky took the bottle, untwisted the cap and downed the liquid inside in big gulps. Once she finished she rested her back against the closet wall and studied the wolf now lying down in front of her. It wasn’t a wolf at all. It was a white German shepherd very similar to one they’d had years before. It had been Raven’s dog and she’d loved it very much but it died when Sky was a toddler so she had no memories of it other than pictures and the stories Raven and her parents would tell. Apparently the dog had guarded over the girls until she’d taken her last breath, as this dog was guarding over her now.

  “Or are you going to eat me?” Sky asked, her voice a hoarse whisper. She looked down at the bottle. “You dragged me here. You brought me water. Who told you to?”

  The dog stared back at her, its body on guard, but not threatening. It whined as it rose up and licked her face, then pawed at her before pressing its nose against her, coaxing her back to the floor in a position better suited for resting. Sky’s eyes teared up, not from fever this time, but from the knowledge the dog was taking care of her and she would kill it as soon as she turned. She reached for the gun at her hip, determined to make sure that didn’t happen but her hand only found her jeans. “Where’s my gun?”

  The dog growled.

  “You took my gun.”

  The dog let out a soft bark, not loud enough to draw trouble their way, but enough to respond, or at least it seemed that way. Sky shook her head. It was the fever. She was imagining things, or maybe she was already dead. Maybe the zombies were eating her flesh at that very moment and she’d dreamed up the dog as a way to deal with the horror. That must be it she thought as her eyelids grew heavy and the dog snuggled in next to her, protecting her with its own body as the sickness drew her back down into the dark, burning pit.

  She woke again when the heat growing inside her became too hot to allow the comfort of sleep. Outside, everything was cold. Sweat beaded against her skin, tiny little slivers of ice causing her body to shake violently despite the raging fire seeming to char her from within. Something whined close to her followed by tapping on the floorboards. She focused her eyes through the pain-filled haze to see the tail end of a white wolf skittering away. No, it was a dog, she remembered. It was Raven’s dog. What was its name? Ghost… No. Something similar.

  “Spirit?” She gasped as white-hot pain seared her throat, the simple act of talking too much for her disease-ravaged body to take. Warm tears slid over her cheeks. She imagined them either sizzling from the heat inside her, or turning into icicles as they mixed with the ice covering her body.

  The dog returned to drop another bottle of water in front of her. It angled its head to the side, whining as it watched her.

  Not daring to speak again, Sky shook her head, just barely, instinctively knowing any faster movement would cause more pain. She needed the water, her mouth was so dry she couldn’t form spit, but her throat ached so much. She feared even the water would hurt her.

  The dog nosed the water closer to her and barked. Again, the bark was soft enough not to draw monsters to their location, but forceful. She wondered if the dog was a mother, if it viewed her as one of its own children. It pawed at her, whining. Its nails scraped along her arm, scratching lightly through her clothing. Sky winced from the dog’s touch and grabbed the bottle, anything to keep it from scratching her harder and hurting her more. She knew it didn’t mean to, but it appeared to be a wild dog and its nails weren’t trimmed.

  Her wrists ached as she twisted the cap off the bottle and slowly raised it to her chapped lips. The water felt great as it filled the inside of her parched mouth but felt horrible as it went down her throat. It didn’t even feel like water. It felt like she was swallowing cotton with tiny barbs inside. She forced herself to drink the whole bottle, hoping it would give her strength so she could get up and find her gun, or at least leave. The dog was helping her, not knowing she would be changing into a monster. She couldn’t allow herself to become the thing that would kill the kind animal. “Go away,” she whispered once she’d depleted the bottle’s contents, wetting her mouth and throat enough to make talking less torture. “Please go.”

  Ignoring her plea, the dog nosed around the coat she’d discovered and pulled protein bars out of one of the pockets. Sky rested against the wall, groaning. She’d forgotten all about the food she’d stuffed into her coat pockets under Torres’s order. She’d meant to leave everything for him, to keep him from having to scavenge during the harsh weather. She didn’t need food or water. She didn’t need the dog to help her. She just needed to find her gun so she could take herself out and guarantee she wouldn’t come back to harm anyone else. As the dog dropped the protein bars in front of her she sent up a silent prayer that someone in need of the food and coat would find them.

  “There’s chocolate in those bars so don’t eat them,” she whispered to the dog as it watched her. “Go somewhere with food for you. Leave me alone. Please.”

  The dog tapped its paw on the bars and nudged her with its nose before licking the sweat from her face. It gave another soft bark and nosed the bars closer to her before it started whining.

  “Geez,” she muttered, ripping open one of the bars. Every time the dog whined a jolt of pain ran through her head. She half suspected it knew this and used it against her, forcing her to take care of herself. Her mouth was moist from the water, but eating the protein bar was still like eating sawdust, made worse by the virus coursing through her system. Everything hurt, even her gums. She started to set the bar down but the dog growled. She sighed and forced herself to break off another piece and endure the discomfort of chewing until she fell back asleep sometime before she reached the last bite.

  Her body no longer hurt. She felt nothing at all, actually. She looked down to see only clouds below her naked feet. She wore a long white gown, way too clean for the dirty world she’d been in the last couple of months. Everything around her was white and pristine, even the light shining from the end of the long hallway was a brilliant white. She peered closer but couldn’t see beyond it, but she could hear. The faintest sound of music drifted up the hall. One Direction, she realized, one of her favorite songs. She started to move forward, fear and pain completely gone from her body. Something waited for her in that light, something wonderful. A dark shadow moved out of the light and held its hand toward her, palm out.

  “Stop,” it said, its voice female and familiar. “It is not your time. Go back now.”

  “What?” Sky looked around her, seeing nothing but endless white. There was nowhere to go back, only the blinding light in front of her. “Where?”

  “Go back!” The voice grew stronger, something about it niggling in the back of Sky’s mind. She knew this woman. She wanted to be with this woman. Tears flowed from her eyes as her chest filled with love.

  “Mommy?”

  “Go back, baby. You have to go back.”

  “Why?” She started walking faster, her heart swelling as her eyes filled with water.

  Another shadow stepped out from the light. “Stop right now, Sky Marie!”

  She froze in place, her father’s stern voice effectively making her do as told. “Daddy?”

  “We love you, sweetheart, but you can’t come here yet. You have to find your sister. Find Raven.”

  “How?’

  “Stay alive. Guardians are all around you. All you have to do is stay alive.”

  “Why?” Her bottom lip trembled. “I’m tired. I want to stay with you. I miss you.”

  “We are always with you,” her mother said. “You will come back here again someday and then you will stay, but not now. Raven needs you. Find your sister, baby. Save her.”

  “No,” Sky said defiantly as she moved toward her parents. Raven had left her. She refused to stay in a world of monsters to find her when she could be with her parents. She hadn’t had many years with them. She wasn’t leaving them.

  “We’re sorry, baby,” her father said. “You can’
t come here now.”

  “Be brave,” her mother added. “We love you!”

  The light vanished, taking her parents with it. Sky felt her body being sucked backward into a vortex as the clouds fell away below her. “No!” she screamed as the whiteness faded away, leaving her to fall into nothing.

  She came in and out of consciousness, sometimes on fire, sometimes freezing. Hunger and thirst clawed at her belly, but every time she came awake the dog was there with something to eat or drink. She never saw anyone else, just the dog sitting there watching over her. It licked away her sweat when she burned with fever, and cuddled against her, giving her its warmth when her body shivered with chills. Time was lost as she fell in and out of the blackness that seemed to keep trying to drag her away from the world. Sometimes she woke to see slivers of light along the floorboards. Sometimes she woke to pure darkness. She never saw her parents again and no one ever checked on her.

  The virus ran its course, leaving her weak, but alive and unchanged. She woke to the putrid smell of urine and feces, and realized it was from her. She’d been laying in the closet on top of a pile of coats for an undeterminable amount of days, most of that time lying in her own waste. For the first time since she’d fallen ill, the dog was nowhere to be found. “Spirit!” She called out to it, using the name of her sister’s dog that it favored so much, but she didn’t get a reply. She sniffed herself and thought she’d have left too. For a moment she wondered again if it had all been a fever dream, but the floor outside the closet was littered with empty water bottles and food packages. She certainly hadn’t gathered the supplies herself, and if there had been a person in the house with her they hadn’t responded to her call either. She certainly hoped a person would have given her an actual bed, not a pile of coats in a small closet.

  She stood and stretched, grimacing as she felt the wetness of her soiled clothes against her skin. She stepped out of the closet and surveyed the room, seeing it in full for the first time. There was a fireplace with a stack of logs next to it. Two couches, a recliner, and a coffee table covered in dust were the only furniture. To her right was the small kitchen, all the bottom cabinets opened and discarded food boxes along the floor. A door led into the attached garage which had no car. A large bag of dog food had been torn into and still contained a small amount. Anger burned through Sky’s body as she wondered if the dog that had cared for her belonged to the owners of the house. Had they just left the poor thing to fend for itself? Where was it now? As the smell of her own nastiness wafted up to her nose she realized she needed to clean herself up before she spent any more time worrying about the dog.

  She searched the rest of the house as quickly as her weakened body could manage, finding a small bathroom that wasn’t too messy and two bedrooms. One belonged to the adults and the other appeared to have belonged to a boy a little bigger than her. Using the knowledge she’d gained from her time with Torres, she started a fire in the fireplace and used pots to collect snow from the backyard. She filled the bathtub with snow then melted some over the fire to pour on top of it. It took some time but eventually she had enough hot water for a bath she wouldn’t freeze to death in.

  She was clean with her hair braided and dressed in jeans a size too big and an even bigger sweatshirt when she stepped out of the bathroom to find a heavyset man with a full beard aiming a shotgun at her. A skinny woman with long, stringy hair stood just behind him in the small hallway.

  “It’s just a little girl,” the woman said, twisting a strand of dishwater blonde hair around one of her narrow fingers. Her pale green eyes studied her. “Can we keep her?”

  “Sure,” the man said, lowering the gun. “We didn’t find anything else in this house worth keeping. What’s your name, sugar?”

  Sky stared at the man, her heart beating rapidly. Her parents had told her there were guardians all around her, but she didn’t get the sense these two were guardians. Between the way the thin woman cowered at the man’s back, and the way he looked at her like she were a sparerib he wouldn’t mind picking every piece of meat off of, she didn’t have a good feeling about them at all. She looked beyond them for Spirit but the dog wasn’t anywhere to be found. Her knees shook and she wished she hadn’t been so quick to leave Torres. She didn’t even have a wound where she’d been bitten, just a scar.

  “You deaf, girl? I asked for your name.”

  She looked back up at the man, noticed the red flush to his skin under all the facial hair. He didn’t appear to be a man who liked waiting. “Sky,” she whispered, her voice wanting to disappear almost as badly as she did.

  “Fucking hippie name,” the man said, gripping her upper arm. “It’s your lucky day, girl. Sadie’s been wanting a kid and you’ll do as long as you keep your yap shut and don’t cause me no trouble.”

  II

  DIVIDED

  March 2015

  “Where’s Leah?” Damian asked, keeping his voice low as he scanned the large room where the members of what they’d started calling the compound gathered together for dinner.

  Hal looked around the room. It was filled with long tables you’d find in any mess hall. They’d filed in along with everyone else, collected bowls and spoons, and went through a line where a vegetable stew with big chunks of meat had been ladled into their bowls. They were given glasses of tea at the end of the line and directed to sit in the first available seats as they followed the people in line before them. It reminded him of lunchtime in elementary school except instead of teachers standing nearby with paddles they were watched over by men with guns who patrolled the building. Hal saw their shadows as they passed the frosted glass windows. The building itself was nothing spectacular. The walls were white, the floor wooden planks, and the only décor was a large panoramic print of The Last Supper which took up most of the wall behind the area where the food was served. A stage lined the back of the room, giving Hal the impression the room was used for meetings as well as for breaking bread together. Most of the people in the room greeted each other cheerily although some seemed to stick to themselves. A few cast curious glances their way. The women all wore shapeless clothes. None wore makeup. The men dressed in jeans and various types of long-sleeved shirts. Hal glanced over all of them as he searched the room. Leah wasn’t among any of them.

  “That woman, Elsie, didn’t look too happy when she found out Leah was gay,” Elijah said softly as he sat on Hal’s opposite side. “Did you know she was?”

  “No,” Hal answered, also keeping his voice low.

  “You think they’re going to kick her out because of it?”

  Hal shook his head. He was afraid they were going to do something much worse than kick her out of the compound. He’d seen their kind before. He loved the Lord with all his heart and soul, but there were certain people who seemed to confuse the love of the Lord with the love of religion. Those people were dangerous, especially to people like Leah and Damian. “I think we shouldn’t talk about her … preferences here.”

  “Oh.” Elijah stirred his stew, glancing at the people filling the rest of the seats in their row. He leaned in closer to Hal. “Is that why Damian is trying to act all manly now?”

  “I’m always manly,” Damian said, his voice a harsh whisper.

  “These strict religious types don’t tend to care for people like Damian and Leah,” Hal explained as quietly as he could. “We didn’t know about Leah in time to warn her, but we know about Damian. No one else here needs to know about Damian. Understand?”

  Elijah nodded. “Should we just get Leah and leave? They said we were free to go.”

  Hal stirred his stew, not very hungry despite all they’d been through that day. “Pimjai is having complications with her pregnancy. We can’t just leave her here with these people. It wouldn’t be right. We’re a team. Hell, we’re a family. Let’s eat, even if we don’t feel like it, and then we can go to the hospital and visit Pim. Maybe we’ll see Elsie and find out where she took Leah and why she isn’t here.”


  Elijah nodded. Hal shared a look with Damian, both of them feeling it in their guts this place wasn’t as holy as it wanted people to believe, and waited for the rest of the seats to fill up. The tables were narrow and chairs were only on one side so everyone faced the stage at the end of the room. By the time the last people had finished going through the food line, Elsie was on stage with David and a man wearing a light blue dress shirt and a blue and black striped tie. His hair and beard were gray and his glasses were big for his face, making Hal wonder if they were his original prescription or a random pair he’d found after the outbreak and had been forced to adapt to.

  The man stepped toward the microphone in the center of the stage and cleared his throat. The murmuring throughout the room stopped as all eyes locked onto him.

  “Good evening, brothers and sisters. I am pleased to announce we have new people with us today. Every day we find God’s children alive and well is a day of celebration.” He paused as the people in the room applauded. “One of our new people is in the hospital being cared for by our Doctor Reed. She is with child, which we all know is a special blessing indeed, especially in these troubling times. As we give thanks for our blessings let us also pray for Sister Pimjai who is in need of great blessings herself, and give thanks to the Lord for bringing her and her friends to us so we can help them all. Let us pray.”

  Every head in the room bowed. Elijah followed along instinctively, and Hal elbowed Damian to do the same. The pastor recited a prayer, thanking the Lord for their food and shelter, and threw in a request to bless Pimjai and her child, and all the new brothers and sisters who had found their way to the farm. He finished with an “Amen” and received a multitude in return.

  “Can we eat now?” Damian asked.

  Hal nodded and ate a spoonful of stew, frowning.

  “This beef tastes weird,” Elijah said.

  “I doubt they’d kill off their cows,” Hal said, remembering the pasture he’d seen during their short tour. “It’s probably deer meat, or whatever wild animals they have around here for hunting. Whatever animal they can’t get milk or eggs from.”