On Our Own

by Silver, L. D.

  “Come sit down,” she said. I knew something was up when she didn’t even respond to my tone, just patted the couch beside her. I sat down hard, bouncing the couch, but she just hugged me to her body.

  I looked at the TV screen and it took a few minutes to absorb what was happening. “Another terrorist attack?”

  “Yes and no. Watch,” she instructed without even looking at me. Rolling my eyes, I turned my attention to the TV.

  There was a bombed-out building with big chunks of concrete everywhere. Bodies lay on the ground and I saw an arm underneath one of the blocks. There were women in flowing saris with blood on them, wailing and crying. The camera moved through the crowd and focused on two people in the middle of the debris. A woman in a beautiful gold and red sari knelt over the body of a man, her feet flexed in her sandals so I saw the soles. God, I hated feet. The camera shifted again, showing her from the side. The man beneath her hands was clearly dead; blood was everywhere, and his black eyes were open and empty.

  As I watched, his eyes moved. I gasped, mesmerized as the corpse grabbed the woman’s arm and pulled her fiercely to his mouth. Blood spurted from her throat. The crowd screamed and moved back while the cameraman desperately angled for a view. Finally things settled down, revealing the man’s body facing the crowd with the woman clearly dead at his feet.

  Behind the man, I saw a hand reach out and push the concrete slab up and over, revealing another male. He was dressed in white, his neck was twisted to one side and a part of his skull was crushed in. He raised a hand and moaned, that haunting moan that hasn’t left my ears since.

  I screamed.

  My mom jumped. She put her hand to her chest and glared at me with her warm, brown eyes.

  “Don’t do that,” she scolded.

  “Is this a movie?”

  “No, honey, this is CNN. This is live from India.” She got up, went to her purse across the room, and pulled out her cell phone as I watched the screen.

  The camera was now panning the crowd. I saw something that surprised me, although not as big a surprise as the one I’d just had.

  “Hey, Mom, there’s a Marine.” I pointed at the screen.

  “Shhh, honey, I’m on the phone.” She waved her hand, telling me to hush. I shrugged and continued watching. The camera had continued moving and the soldier was no longer there.

  “Eric, are you watching TV?” Mom was talking to Dad. “Turn on CNN.”

  She looked at me with the phone to her ear and her eyes filled with horror. “I think this is serious.”

  I come back to the present with a start. I’m biking down a country lane. The sunshine is bright and the trees lining the paved road on both sides wave gently in the wind. It looks almost normal. But it’s Cassie ahead of me on a bike instead of Tonya.

  My mom was right. It was serious. But it was, and wasn’t, a terrorist attack.

  Chapter 16

  Firmly back in the present, I pedal hard and catch up to Cassie.

  “Hey, Cassie, how did you first hear about all of this? Did you see it on TV?”

  “Yeah, I saw it on TV,” she replies, but her eyes slide away from mine. Something odd about that.

  “Saw it on CNN. India.”

  “Yeah,” Cassie says. “And then all the others.”

  “And then America.”

  “I don’t want to talk about this, okay? Let’s talk about something else.”

  “Something else…” I repeat, trying to think about a topic. Normally I’d ask her about her family, but then I’d have to talk about mine, and the painful hole in my chest isn’t up for that yet.

  “What do you like to do for fun?” I ask.

  “Play video games, silly.” She rolls her eyes at me.

  “Anything else? Do you like to play pretend? Maybe be a princess?”

  She smiles at me. “Yeah, but not a princess. I like to be a doctor, or a scientist, or a geneticist.”

  “Really?” I smile. Cassie’s blonde hair glints in the sun and her eyes sparkle. I can imagine her getting dressed up in a white coat and performing all sorts of experiments. “Ever blow up your house?”

  “No.” She giggles. “My dad won’t let me have the real stuff yet. I just get to play with safe stuff and some colored liquids.”

  “Is your dad a scientist then?”

  The smile slips from her face. “No, he’s more of a doctor. My mom’s a marine biologist.”

  “Wow, that’s pretty cool.”

  “Yeah, this summer my dad was going to get me started on biology.”

  “Aren’t you kind of young for that?”

  She makes a noise. “Hey, I can keep up with you.”

  “I don’t doubt that.” I use my peripheral vision to glance at her. “You went to private school, didn’t you?” I ask.

  “No, I was home-schooled. My tutor came three days a week.”

  Just as I thought, she was friggin’ rich and had her own tutor to boot. What does she think of a kid like me? We were middle class before Dad left, but after that money was scarce. I grip my handlebars a bit tighter.

  “My mom had me go to soccer for a while, but I sucked at that, so then I went to ballet. I liked it and even made a few friends. Mom said when I first meet people I should just go right up to them, extend my hand, and say ‘Hey, I’m Cassie. What’s your name?’”

  In my school, she would have gotten beaten up for something like that. We never had money for dance classes, or sports for that matter. Not that I was any good at sports. Unless you count running, but I just think it’s fun.

  “That’s cool,” I respond.

  “How about you? What do you do for fun?”

  “Read, watch movies, hang out with friends. Boys.” I smile.

  “Boys!” She grins at me. “What books do you read?”

  “Horror, sci-fi, some fantasy, some adult mainstream. I really like Laurell K. Hamilton, but my mom only let me read a few of those. Something about them being too adult, whatever that means.” I roll my eyes. “I really like this series by Rachel Vincent. She writes about werecats, and there’s this great love story between the main character and her on-again-off-again boyfriend, Marc. They’re deeply in love but she doesn’t want to get married.”

  “Why not?”

  “She wants to stay free and young for a while. Really, would you want to get married in your early twenties? No way, that’s fun time!”

  She shrugs. “Sounds old to me.”

  Our talk tapers off and we ride in silence. I feel better after talking with Cassie for a bit. She’s a cool kid.

  It’s a beautiful day. The sun shines through the trees, but the leaves shade the road just enough so I’m not hot. It’s so nice just to see nature and not see dead bodies everywhere. We’re in the rich areas now, so I guess not a lot of people wandered out here. Hopefully Zombie Central is behind us.

  I stand up and pump the pedals for a bit, then sit down and coast, turning the bike in wide arcs. Cassie rides next to me, one hand guiding the bike and the other hand on her knee. She looks relaxed.

  Together we follow a curve in the road, and after the turn the land on the right clears of trees and has a large green swath of grass. As we get closer, I see a large fenced area full of movement.

  “What is that?” Cassie asks.

  “I don’t know.” I shake my head and stand up again, hoping to see better. Unfortunately, I do see more. I sit back down and slow my pace.

  “What?”

  I’m close enough now that I can see it easily, so I just stop my bike, put both feet on the ground and point. Cassie follows my lead.

  The fence consists of very small silver chain links with that curly barbed-wire at the top. It encloses an area probably about half the size of a football field (hey, I’m not good at measuring distances, okay?).

  It also imprisons about thirty zombies.

  Chapter 17

  “Who would cage zombies?” Cassie asks.

  I shrug, still amazed by the sight.
They’ve figured out we’re here, of course. As I watch, an empty-head in a bright pink skirt suit shuffles toward us. There is blood all over the front of her and a chunk is missing out of her neck. Her panty hose are torn. Her gait is awkward because she’s still wearing one pink high-heeled shoe while the other foot is bare. She reaches for us and moans.

  Cassie rolls backward on her bike but I reach out and stop her because I have this odd gut feeling. The pink lady reaches the fence. Her fingers grip the chain links while her body jerks wildly. That’s what my gut feeling is about: the fence is electrified. In a few moments, the pink zombie starts to move again, but all she manages to do is shift her fingers a bit and keep frying herself. There are more bodies around the chain links but most of them aren’t moving anymore. I guess eventually they either learn to stop or there’s a limit to how much electricity even a zombie body can take.

  “Come on.” I gesture to Cassie. I get off my bike and walk it into the fancy yard, circling to the left around the giant cage. I look over one shoulder and notice Cassie is following me, her mouth a bit open and her eyes focused on the zombie prison.

  I walk slowly over the nice grass, leaving a little trail from the bike’s tires. By the time I walk around one side of the cage, I see something that makes me stop again, with my mouth wide open.

  There’s a set of metal bleachers on one side, just like you would find at a middle school football field; a place for parents and friends to sit and watch the game. I look from the bleachers to the cage, and it clicks.

  “Oh my God,” I say.

  “What?” Cassie asks.

  “Oh my God, do you get what was happening here?”

  Cassie comes to my side and sees the same two items I’m looking at.

  “I think they were feeding people to the zombies and watching,” I state.

  “What?” Cassie asks loudly. She shakes her head. “No way. They were probably just observing them.”

  “You could do that with plastic chairs and maybe binoculars. Why the bleachers, Cassie?”

  She walks closer to the bleachers.

  “Oh God,” she says.

  Chapter 18

  Cassie points to something I can’t see, so I walk quickly to her side and look in that direction.

  There’s a small wooden pen, similar to the one they put bulls into for a rodeo, which feeds directly into the cage.

  “Oh God,” I echo and sit heavily on the ground, filled with sadness and sickness as we both realize I’m right.

  I watch the zombie pen, fighting back tears. Who were these people? How did they wind up here? How and why were they fed to the zombies? Why were they entertainment?

  A lump forms in my throat and I open my mouth to breathe past it. All of them are dressed nicely: the women in skirts and jackets, the men wearing suits. They could be on their way to church or to work.

  As I’m watching, I notice one zombie in particular. He’s white, with sandy-blonde hair and pale blue eyes, shuffling very slowly and a bit aimlessly. He wears the remains of a very nice suit, with the sleeves torn off and the bottom of the pants brown from mud, or maybe blood. One of his arms is chewed to bits as if he used it to fend off his attacker. He looks sad, like he knows what has happened to him.

  He’s also wearing one of those orange bracelets from The Shot.

  The Shot (it has some scientific name but nobody calls it that) was developed to decrease the impact of the zombie virus. The goal was to allow people to live and function with the illness, similar to the way the AIDS cocktail works.

  “Look! That one had The Shot.” I point him out to Cassie. She shoots a glance at him and then goes back to digging into the grass with a twig.

  “Did you get it?” I ask her. Neither of us is wearing the orange bracelet. I thought they were ugly, even though with my regular black outfits it gave me this whole wonderful Halloween vibe.

  “Yeah.” She turns away from me. Okay, not the thing to bring up apparently. But then The Shot was a sore topic with a lot of people, so I let it drop.

  I look back at the pen full of zombies and then at the bleachers. The fence is still electrified, so does that mean the people who created this hell are still around? A shiver ripples through me. A zombie I can kind of handle, but these people I really can’t. How could they be so sick and so callous?

  Cassie throws the stick on the ground and walks to the mansion.

  “Cassie, no!” I shout and jump to my feet, running after her. I grab her arm – for once not caring about touching someone without their permission – and stop her.

  “What?” she asks.

  “That fence is still electrified. Do you really want to take the chance that those people are still around?”

  “No,” she says quietly, and that’s when I notice the tears silently falling down her face.

  “It’s okay, Cassie.” I let go of her arm. God, she was sheltered before, and I led her to this whole nightmare cage and explained it outright. Couldn’t I have figured out a way to hide what this was?

  I know an adult would just tell her this is the way the world is, but I don’t want to tell her that. And looking at the zombies, I realize I no longer have to. I clench my fists.

  “Cassie, in the old days I would have told you what adults told me – this is just how the world is, honey.” I know that last part sounds bitter and angry, but I can’t help it. “They always said the world wasn’t fair. But you know what?” I pause.

  She looks up at me, waiting for me to finish.

  “That’s no longer how it is. We can make it better now. We can make it fair.”

  Her tears stop and she wipes her face. She grabs my hand and I take her out of there.

  #

  We’re back on the tree-lined road, making slow progress because we’re both kind of bummed. The day doesn’t seem as pretty or as bright as it did before. Cassie’s quiet until we come to a road which branches to the right. She’s a bit ahead of me, and she shoots a glance at me over her shoulder then rises up on the pedals to give it all her might as she speeds onto the new road.

  “Cassie!” I shout. “Where are you going?” But she ignores me and just keeps up this insane pace. I want to pull out my map and show her this isn’t where we’re supposed to be going, but I realize she already knows that.

  She is way ahead of me as I turn a bend in the road. I reach another bright green lawn, this one smaller than the other one and with a bit of a hill. Cassie’s bike lies at the top and she’s nowhere in sight.

  Chapter 19

  “Cassie!” I yell again, but I don’t get any kind of response. I hope there aren’t any zombies in the area because they’re definitely coming otherwise.

  I reach the top of the hill and dump my bike next to Cassie’s. Straight ahead of me is the back of a large, white two-story house with blue trim. She’s left the back door open, so I race past some nice metal patio furniture and then I’m inside.

  “Cassie!” I call again, but it’s just a waste of time. I’m in a long hallway that runs the length of the house and the front door is open at the other end. I hope she went out that way because this is a huge house to search one room at a time. I pass a kitchen on my right, which is half the size of my mom’s apartment, and then just past that is a living room which would finish out the other half. Near the front door is a staircase on the left, with the steps painted white and the rest of it done in the same wood as the floor. It’s all very pretty, and very expensive, and it all looks like none of it should be touched.

  I run out of the front door and down three white steps. There’s a half-circle of cement at the bottom of the stairs, leading to a sidewalk and a graveled driveway. I stop, hands on my hips, breathing hard through my open mouth. Halfway across the green expanse of lawn to my right, Cassie is staring at a lump on the ground.

  “Delilah?” she asks, and her voice is quiet, shaky. God, she sounds scared. This is my brave friend, who runs into potentially zombie-infested alleys with a whoop, and she is
scared.

  “Delilah, will you please go look at –” she stops for a moment – “go over there and see who that is? Will you please see if it’s a man with a gold ring on his hand, with an inscription?”

  And then it all clicks. This is Cassie’s house and that might be her father out there.

  “Sure,” I answer softly.

  I know she’s watching as I walk slowly out to the body. The grass here is torn up and trampled on. As I get closer, I slide my knife into my hand, trying to hide it from Cassie, but getting it out just in case. I stop just out of range and wait for movement.

  The lump is a man dressed in tan pants, a blue shirt and reddish brown shoes. He’s white with blonde hair like Cassie’s. He’s lying on his side and he looks battered, with one leg and one arm at odd angles. Something about his face doesn’t look quite right, either. Slowly, I move to where his eyes should be able to see me, but there’s no movement in response. They’re filled with blood and have tiny pinpricks of blue in the middle. I take his wrist and lay him on his back, even though it takes some work. There’s a huge bullet hole in his forehead and he’s covered in gore.

  Except for the hole, he looks a bit like Gina, our neighbor from the apartment complex across the street who my mom and I helped ‘disappear’ one night into a woman’s shelter. He looks battered.

  I glance back at Cassie then kneel on the ground next to the man. From the condition of the grass and his body, I think he was beaten up and then shot. Someone murdered him. Crap.

  I notice the gold band on one of his fingers, and although it weirds me out to do it, I slide the ring off. There’s an inscription inside: “Love is family, family is love.” I wrap my hand around it and walk to Cassie.