On Our Own

by Silver, L. D.

  “You were busy,” she answers, but she stares at the floor.

  “Why did you come here?”

  Her eyes flick to Sam and then back to the ground. “I was looking for something.”

  “What?”

  She looks at him again but still doesn’t answer.

  “I told him about your dad and The Shot,” I admit. She glares at me and crosses her arms.

  “What?” I raise my hands and then let them drop. “You ran off without telling us anything. The only place I could think to look for you was the labs, and how was I supposed to explain that?”

  She kicks the legs of the table in front of her. “You should have asked.”

  “You should have told me where you were going.”

  She glares at me again. “You’re not my mother.”

  “No, I’m your friend.” I cross my arms. How could she not realize that I would worry?

  “Okay, guys.” Sam steps between us with his hands up. “There’s a whole bunch of zombies behind us, so let’s just get what you came for and get out.”

  The anger building on Cassie’s face slips away. “Zombies? There are zombies free?”

  “Yeah. What do you mean by free?” I ask.

  She gestures to the left with her head. “Go check out the zombie zoo.”

  There’s something in the way she says it that tells me she’s still a bit mad at me. I’m mad at her, too, so that works. Let Sam help her with what she needs. I leave the room and go to the left.

  I walk down a long, white hall with white tiles. Halfway down, there’s a window into a room on my left. Something slams into the glass and I jump a bit.

  It’s a zombie, its bloody hands streaking blood all over the pane. Its blue eyes are cracked but there’s a film over them, giving the eyes a cloudy look. The flesh has a bit of that cracked look as well, but overall the empty-head seems doughy, like the flesh was soft and flat before, and then becoming a zombie made the whole body swell. Its eyes don’t even seem to follow me; it’s more like it sort of sensed my presence and slammed itself against the window. The rest of the room behind it is dark, but I see shapes moving behind it. My best guess is that there are others in there but they’re not bright enough to even sense that I’m here.

  I watch its open, gaping mouth, letting my heart calm down and my breathing even out, and then I move on, walking much slower this time.

  The next room is lit, and is filled with zombies in the slow range of what I’m used to. They notice me and shuffle to the window, slamming themselves against the glass, their eyes staring at me the whole time. There are three men and two women. The men are all dressed alike in khakis and white, button-down shirts while the women are wearing white lab coats, slacks and pretty blouses. One of the women has glasses on a chain hanging down her shirt. Her eyes are brown, so it’s harder to see the virus in them, but her brown skin is cracked like Texas mud in the summer. There’s a whole chunk missing out of her neck and blood down her front.

  Her hand slams the window.

  The glass holds, and I decide to walk further down the hall.

  I see now why Cassie called this a zombie zoo. I pass room after room filled with different types. I reach a room holding a bunch of fast ones; they rush the window and hit it so hard it shudders. I watch it and the wall for a bit, wondering if they will give, but everything holds. They pound on the window and then I see one of them glance at a door to his left. He’s wearing a brown sweater, nice dark-brown pants and a white lab coat. He’s younger, probably in his thirties when he died, and his eyes still snap with some intelligence. Yes, there’s definitely still a spark in there.

  He runs to the door and actually turns the knob. I grip the gun stuck in the front of my jeans, ready to shoot if necessary. The door doesn’t move, and he slams his fist against it. I jump a bit. He runs back to the window, as if to see if I’m still there. I walk away, but I can still feel his eyes on me as I go down the hall.

  I pass a lot more rooms like that, until I come to the end of the hallway and there’s just one more room left.

  It’s lit inside, revealing cabinets and a black countertop against the far wall and a black table in the middle of the room. There’s a female sitting on the table, facing away from me. She’s in one of those white hospital gowns with an open back, and I can see her pale white skin leading down to her white underwear.

  I take a step closer and she turns, almost like she knew I was there. Did she hear me? Could she hear me through the glass?

  She turns in a really neat maneuver, so her legs are still closed and she doesn’t flash me. She pulls the gown tight and looks up at me.

  The front of the gown is decorated with little red apples. She has black hair, with flashes of blue glinting in it as she moves. Her black eyes reveal only a tiny bit of the virus. I step closer and that’s when I see her skin isn’t cracked. Instead there are silver lines, cool threads showing through her skin. It’s almost like her veins or arteries are showing – with that same random trace of lines – but the colors are silver instead of red or blue.

  I realize then that she hasn’t rushed the windows like the others. She isn’t desperately trying to get to me.

  Her black eyes burn with intelligence. She notices my open-mouthed stare, and this closed-mouth smile spreads slowly across her face. Her hands grip the edge of the table and she starts swinging her legs.

  She is a zombie, and yet she is completely, totally aware. Her intelligence is intact.

  Chapter 64

  My heart’s pounding as I slowly raise my palm to the glass, just to see if she will respond.

  “Delilah!” Sam shouts and I jump. “Come on! We’re ready to go!” He stands at the far end of the hallway and waves me toward him.

  I take one last quick glance at the girl as her smile deepens and her legs swing. I have an odd thought then. She isn’t concerned about reaching me at all. Does that mean she isn’t hungry? Does that mean she could last forever in there?

  “Delilah!”

  Reluctantly, I turn away and jog to Sam. “Did you find what she needed?”

  “We found one thing and I think I can find the rest back home.”

  “Really?”

  “Yeah, just a little bit of hacking.” He shrugs.

  “Cool.”

  We reach the lab and find Cassie waiting for us. “Sorry,” she apologizes, glancing quickly at me and then back down at the floor.

  “Me, too,” I say, and surprise myself by giving her a quick hug. She squeezes back as I pull away.

  “That’s great, guys, but now we’ve got to get past the zombies.”

  “There weren’t any the way I came in.”

  “Which way?”

  She points in the opposition direction of how we came in.

  “Great. Lead the way,” I tell her.

  She steers us down another white hallway, this time without any labs or empty-heads, but just classroom after classroom. She takes a left and heads up a small concrete stairway. At the top, she hits the panic bar on a brown door to the right and then we’re outside.

  “Ah.” I breathe in fresh air. “That was much easier.” We head back to the living area.

  “How did you guys come in?”

  “There are a couple of doors open on the other side. We came in through those, went down some stairs, went past a Jeep and then found a bunch of zombies in a cafeteria.”

  “Wow.” Her eyes widen. “Hey, Sam, I thought the compound was empty of them?”

  Sam shrugs. “We checked out the area where I’ve been living, but I didn’t explore the other buildings yet. Kind of glad I didn’t now.”

  “We?” I ask.

  “There were three of us. My friend James, me, and Steve. Steve was in the military. He knew about this place.”

  “How did you know him?”

  “We met him through an outreach program – you know, one of those things where they try to get bad kids to go straight and do good things when they grow up.�
��

  “You were a bad kid?”

  “Poor, troubled, whatever.” He shrugs again and looks away.

  Cassie, who’s been skipping ahead, races back and grabs a hand from each of us. “Come on. I want to find this stuff out.”

  Sam grins, and we let her pull us back home.

  Once we’re back inside, Sam leads us to a room past our bedrooms. It looks like it was originally a bedroom, but now it’s filled with computers. He plops down in a chair at a desk, hits the keyboard and two screens come to life in front of him.

  “So, what did you find?” I ask Cassie. She reaches into her back pocket and pulls out a rumpled piece of paper.

  I smooth it out and read. It’s like an acceptance letter or something – full of sentences like “we’re so happy to work with you” and “we think we’ll accomplish great things on this project”. It’s signed Consortium Pharmaceuticals but the letterhead at the top reads Pharmaceux.

  “What’s Pharmaceux?” I hand the paper back to Cassie.

  “It’s a drug company.”

  We sit down on the floor while Sam pounds frantically on the keyboard, occasionally swearing.

  “Drugs, huh?” I think it over. “Does this have something to do with The Shot?”

  “Exactly.” Cassie smiles. “Sam’s looking for more evidence.”

  “Evidence of what?” I glance at Sam.

  “It’s okay.” She waves her hand and takes a deep breath. “I don’t think my Dad fully created The Shot.”

  Chapter 65

  “What do you mean by fully?” I narrow my eyes.

  “I don’t think he started from scratch. I think he was given something to start with.”

  “Why do you say that?”

  “They just gave him vials of blood. It all started before India. They said they wanted him to look for a cure for a virus. That’s what he told me. But what if some of those vials were what they had developed as a cure? What if they could only get so far and needed him to step in?”

  “What would it matter if he created all of The Shot or only some of it?”

  “My dad was one of the best in the world at this, Delilah. Yeah, he didn’t have a lot of time to work on it, but The Shot was a complete failure. That’s not like him.”

  “You want to clear his name.”

  “Yes.”

  I don’t point out that there are so few people left that it doesn’t matter. It matters to her, so it’s important. Then something snaps in place in my head. “You led us here, didn’t you? You never wanted to go to Garden of the Gods.”

  She looks down at the carpet. “I’m sorry. Please don’t be mad.”

  “Why didn’t you just tell me?”

  She picks at the rug. “What if he really was a failure?”

  Before I met Cassie, I’d blamed her dad for The Shot’s false promise. But after knowing her, I gave him the benefit of the doubt. I mean, how likely was it that anyone could create something that would protect us from the virus that quickly? But thinking about it now, and seeing the hurt on her face, I realize I wouldn’t want to talk about it, either. If he was my dad, I wouldn’t want to do a side trip that risked our lives only to find out he did really fail.

  “He raised a good daughter. He protected you and saved your life. Whatever else he was or did, he was a good guy.”

  She hugs me, squeezing my arms against my sides. I gently pat her with my fingers. “So, what’s Sam doing?”

  “He’s trying to find out if he can locate anything in the system about the project and my dad’s involvement.”

  “Cool.”

  We’re there for a while, eventually pulling out a deck of cards and playing gin rummy until Sam slaps his hand on the desk, startling me.

  “Pay-dirt,” he says.

  “What?” Cassie jumps up and leans over him, peering at the monitor, and Sam frowns and pushes her back away from him.

  “We’ll all have laptops in a bit – we’re going to need it. The main set of servers had a butt-load of security on them. It took me a while, but I eventually found a development server – a computer used for testing – which looks like it has a ton of email archives and documents from a whole group of people in this research area. I can set up a few computers with this information and then we can start digging through, if somebody will make some dinner?” He grins.

  “I will.” Cassie jumps up and down.

  “We will,” I correct, because I want to have more than cereal.

  “Great.” Sam turns away and starts madly typing.

  Sam has set up two more desks with computers by the time we return with plates of macaroni and cheese, chicken nuggets and beans. He takes a few minutes to show us how to look at everything, and then we start digging.

  Well after dinner, Cassie says, “Hey, I found something.”

  We both rush over to look over her shoulder. It’s a welcoming letter to her dad, similar to the printed letter we found.

  “That’s a few months before India,” Sam points out.

  “Who wrote it?” I ask.

  “Michael Cavendish,” Cassie responds.

  “Start looking for him, as well,” I reply. Sam and I sit back down again and we all get back to work.

  I keep thinking about it, though. If these people came to Cassie’s dad to help with The Shot, why did they have it in the first place? Did they find the first zombie? How and why did India happen?

  Chapter 66

  I don’t know what’s up with my section, but it’s all boring stuff, with a lot of notes and agendas from meetings. Before I can totally fall asleep Sam puts on a random mix of songs, and that and a Coke wake me up a bit.

  Hours later my eyes hurt, and I rub them a bit and look up. Sam catches my eye, puts a finger in front of his lips and motions to Cassie, who’s fallen asleep with her head on the desk. He points to him, then me, and then to the door.

  I nod and close another document, my eye catching a phrase at the last moment: the Amelia project. I make a mental note to look further into that when I get back, and quietly get up and meet Sam outside the room.

  We go up to the roof and I sit down on the edge, swinging my legs off the side and sipping from my Coke. Sam sits next to me.

  “That is boring –”

  “As shit.” He cuts me off and we grin at each other.

  “Yeah, but it’s important to her.”

  “Man, I never realized how boring corporate life was until now.”

  “Tell me about it. I’ve been reading through meeting notes.”

  “Find anything interesting?”

  “Not really. Just one thing I need to look into: the Amelia Project. How about you?”

  He shrugs. “All mine is military stuff. I think I might be getting close, though.”

  “Military? What does that have to do with a drug company?”

  “Army needs drugs, too.” He grins.

  “Yeah.” We fall silent, listening to the random zombie moans and a few crickets. It’s warm and peaceful. If I totally block out the empty-heads, we could just be up on the roof of the mall, hanging out after a long day of shopping. Well, except for the fact that Sam is a guy, and I’m not sure how often guys spend all day shopping.

  “You did really well today,” Sam says. “You were really brave, looking for Cassie and getting her out of there.” His fingers lightly trace up and down my arm and I shiver.

  “You were there, too.”

  “Yeah, I was,” he agrees and leans in for a kiss.

  I kiss him back and everything else slips away. I forget there are zombies wanting to kill me, I forget about looking through the computers, I forget about everything but the warm night and Sam.

  We stop to breathe and he’s just smiling at me, and I feel beautiful and special with him looking at me like that.

  “And now the reward for our bravery.” He reaches into his back pocket, taking out a little piece of paper and filling it with little bits of green.

  “I’ve never s
een anyone roll their own cigarette before,” I say.

  “Yeah.” He grins, seals it and lights it. He takes a deep drag, closing his eyes for a moment, and then slowly lets the smoke out.

  “Oh, yeah,” he says again and hands it to me.

  I get it up to my mouth and stop. I can feel the heat between my fingers, and I’ve smelled this scent before.

  Time slows down and I remember this smell. I remember this smell coming out of Mike’s room a lot, months before he changed. I remember the giggles when I would walk into his room, from him and his friends. I remember that after I learned this smell my brother stopped hanging out with me.

  With this smell, everything changed.

  I hold this burning thing in my hand and wonder what I’m going to do, even as the first tear slides down my face.

  Chapter 67

  I shake a bit inside. Sam’s been so nice to me, and we get along really well. I want to please him, I do. But oh, God, I can’t do this again. I’ve been through this before; I lost someone through this before.

  Might as well lose him early.

  I lean forward and open my fingers, letting the cigarette that’s not a cigarette fall, over the edge and into the darkness. Tears flood down my face, and Sam is already shouting as I reach around him, grab the bag of weed and then that sails into the darkness, too. Then everything catches up to me again.

  “What the fuck are you doing?” Sam shouts. He’s standing up, leaning over as if he can follow the marijuana over the side safely. I hunch into myself, like I used to do when my dad yelled, but then I remember that Sam’s not my dad. I roll away and come to a stand, hugging myself.

  “That was weed.”

  “Exactly,” Sam says. “Why the fuck did you throw it off the roof?”

  “Weed’s bad.” I swipe at my tears and feel sick inside my chest.

  “Weed’s bad? Really? What are you, five?”

  This fire rushes through me, burning away the sick, weak feeling in my chest. “Five? You think I’m five? We’re surrounded by zombies and you’re doing something that alters your perception of reality? Really?” My arms drop to my sides.