“Nah,” I said as Dave clicked the remote entry and the doors to our SUV unlocked with a pleasing chirp. “I’m not really in the mood to shop.”
Dave stopped midway to opening the back of the cargo hold and stared at me. “Were you bitten?”
I blinked. “What?”
“Were. You. Bitten?” he repeated slowly and evenly.
I shook my head. “No. The clawing zombie didn’t get close enough before you hit it; you saw it. Even that last one would have had to gnaw through my boot before he got to my skin.” He continued to stare at me, both eyebrows slightly lifted as if he doubted me. Bad in these end times. “What? Why are you looking at me that way?”
He popped the cargo hold and started putting weapons back in their designated areas. “I don’t know. I’ve just never known you not to want to shop.”
I stared at him. His lips were twitching with laughter and his eyes sparkled in the dim light.
“You asshole.” I laughed as I swatted him.
“What? I’m just saying!” he said as he dodged my playful slaps and shut the cargo hold door.
We walked around the SUV together and my smile faded as I flashed back to the horrible day just a few weeks ago. When Dave had been bitten. I shivered as I put on my seat belt.
“You’re funny,” I said, trying to soften my tone with another smile. “But we don’t joke about getting bitten. Not anymore.”
Dave’s own laughter faded as he got into the driver’s seat. When he looked at me, the humor was gone from his eyes, too. “I know. Sorry, Sarah, couldn’t resist.”
“It’s just that—”
He interrupted me with a shake of his head. “I know what it is, baby. I was there, too. I felt infection changing me and it was the worst thing I’ve ever gone through. I knew I wasn’t going to be able to stop myself from hurting anyone who was near me. From hurting you, even though I didn’t want to.”
He shivered before he continued. “But it didn’t happen. I didn’t turn, mostly because you’re a badass and you found the cure for me in the lab. You risked everything to save me. And you did. So if we can’t joke about that, I don’t know what we can joke about.”
I shrugged. I got what he was saying, but the whole thing was still a little too… raw for me. Maybe in another month or two I’d be able to crack wise about my partially zombiefied husband or start calling him Scarhand or something… but not yet. It wasn’t funny quite yet.
“Besides, look what that did. Because of it we got this.” He reached out and pulled on the heavy necklace I wore around my neck. From beneath my shirt flopped a vial with purple liquid inside. The cure.
“Yeah,” I agreed reluctantly. “But I have to say… not worth almost losing you.”
He leaned forward and kissed me. Long and hard. When he pulled away, he grinned. “It will be if we can save the world. Think about it, we’ll be famous. We probably won’t have to pay taxes anymore or anything.”
I laughed as he started the car. “To be fair, we don’t exactly pay taxes now.”
“Only because all the IRS agents in this part of the country are drooling zombies intent on eating our brains.”
“And that’s different from before, how?”
As he laughed, I looked out the window. The rain was starting, light and cold against the window. It was December and even this far down south, we felt it. I didn’t have a coat yet, just long-sleeved shirts and heavy sweaters we’d picked up as we got farther north, but already I was starting to want a jacket whenever we went outside. Much farther north, I was going to need one in order to stay alive.
“Maybe that mall isn’t such a bad idea after all,” I said.
“Why?” Dave asked as he maneuvered us back onto the main road for a short jaunt south before we headed east. Dead cars rusted on the side of the road, turned over and burned from accidents or just abandoned by zombie drivers.
“Coats,” I said softly. “We’re going to need them if we get much further north this time of year.”
He nodded, but his mouth had thinned. See, the outbreak had started in August, when malls and other stores were still clearing out their summer gear and getting in light fall items. To be honest, we hadn’t seen any heavier coats yet in all our “shopping” (translation: looting). And that meant that, like the scavengers we’d become over the past few months, we might have to start searching homes next, going through the closets of the dead and undead for their stuff.
Only every time we did house sweeps, we almost always found zombies. The ultimate “going out of business” sale of zombie apocalypse wasn’t the draw you’d think it was. Turned out more people went home to hide in the face of death than went to the mall, no matter what Romero wrote.
Plus, I’d rather fight zombies in a Wal-Mart than a house any day. Stores were laid out in really easy to understand ways. They had big aisles and not a lot of hidden areas. They “flowed” so that people would buy, buy, buy and then get the hell out.
Houses… well, you wander into one place where a hoarder used to live and all of a sudden you’re fighting in a narrow hallway surrounded by some creepy collection of garden gnomes. I don’t know about you, but that’s not how I want to go out.
So we hadn’t had much luck finding winter gear, but I wasn’t about to go on any house-to-house search until we got a bit farther north. Might as well put off the inevitable.
“Well, the mall is about ten miles down from Guthrie,” Dave said as he eased along the thoroughfare. He was slowing down because we were coming up on what looked to be about a fifteen-car pileup. “So that’s what… about an hour or two on the road? We can stop off there for a bit and then get going east!”
If he sounded excited, it was probably because we’d be that much closer to Illinois. And Illinois was supposed to be where we’d find this Midwest Wall. Not to mention my mother. Before the outbreak she’d been living in a town called Normal.
Yeah… Normal. We hadn’t yet started to place bets on whether it still was or not. I think it was one of those “off limits to joke about” topics, despite how easy it was to make puns with the town name.
“It’s crazy that it takes so long to get from one point to another,” I murmured as I looked out the window at the burnt husks of the wrecked cars. Some of them had been nearly welded together by the heat of the fire. “We had it so good B.Z., and we didn’t even know it.”
B.Z. = Before Zombie, by the way. Speaking of stupid clichés…
“Yeah, well, it’s getting worse, too,” Dave said, his knuckles whitening as he edged our SUV between two vehicles. There was a light scrape on the back passenger side as we bumped the other cars, but then we were out and he was able to raise his speed up to a frisky thirty… at least for a minute.
“I noticed it, too. Ever since we started hard north there are more zombies and more devastation. Why do you think that is?” I asked.
He shrugged. “I guess it took longer for the outbreak to get here than it did along the coast. Think about the news coverage in Seattle in the first twenty-four hours, then multiply it by another two days.”
I shivered as I thought of just that: reporters getting turned on live television, the first glimpse of the horde, limbs torn and laying in gutters. It had been mass hysteria in Seattle, and that coverage had convinced us to run like hell.
“They must have been terrified,” I murmured.
He nodded, solemn. “If people had an extra day or two knowing what was coming… that meant a couple extra days to get on the road and try to run from it. A couple extra days to panic and start acting like fools and cause fifteen-car pileups. Not to mention a couple of days to gather up and become zombie chow.”
I shivered as I glanced at the wreck slowly disappearing in my side mirror. “That must be it.”
“The closer we get to this Wall, if it even exists, it will probably get even tighter and uglier. I mean, we’ve both seen I Am Legend and Resident Evil enough times to know that any promise of ‘safety’ tr
anslates to mass hysteria.”
“Not to mention we lived in the camps for a while. They draw zombies like crazy and I imagine the Wall would be the same way. We’ll have to be really careful.”
I shot Dave a glance. He was staring straight ahead, his mouth a thin line. We didn’t talk about this shit very often and this was why. There was no comfort in thinking you might get all the way to the Wall and then get eaten by a huge group of zombies waiting for you there. In fact, that was even more depressing, in some ways.
“Okay,” I said with a shake of my head. “That’s our cue to lighten up. How about we play some I Spy?”
Dave groaned, but there was laughter to his tone and that’s what I’d been going for when I suggested it.
“God, Sarah, you and your travel games.”
“Well, license plate bingo is probably out, so I Spy is the best alternative. At least for now.” Dave was rolling his eyes and I reached out to pinch his side playfully. “Come on! You know you want to. Okay, I’ll start. I spy, with my little eye… something black.”
“The only thing I can think of that is black that you might be able to see is sludge?” Dave said with a laugh.
“No. Strike one. Want another clue?”
“Sure.” He sighed but I could see he was starting to relax a little.
“I spy with my little eye, something small.”
His brow wrinkled and he scanned the horizon for whatever I was describing. I smothered a smile. He was never going to get it considering I was looking at a cockroach that was crawling on the edge of our dashboard (what they say is true, by the way; cockroaches survive everything).
“Small… black…” he mused. “Still don’t know.”
“I spy with my little eye—” I began, but before I could give a third clue to the puzzle he’d never solve, I caught a flash of movement from the corner of my… er, little eye. With a yelp, I braced myself on the dash.
“Woman!” I screamed.
Dave looked at me. “Well, that doesn’t make any sense with the other cl—” Then he saw the same thing I did and gripped the wheel. “Shit!”
He turned hard to avoid hitting the woman who was running up onto the road and right into the pathway of our car. And behind her? Four zombies, doing that dead jog they do in her direction. Their arms flopped at their sides uselessly and their moans were load enough to echo even in our closed-up SUV.
Despite the cooler weather, the woman was wearing a pair of jeans that had been cut off above the knee and a green tank top. Not exactly battle gear. She was armed, though. A gun was strapped across her chest, but it jangled against her back and she made no attempt to grab for it despite the gang behind her. Which either meant she was empty… or she’d been bitten and was no longer in her right mind enough to think about protecting herself by using her weapon.
Either way, we were about to find out because Dave screeched the vehicle to a jarring stop and we both flung open our doors to face our new friend… who we might just be killing in a matter of minutes.
Make connections with like-minded people. Support groups are a good way to stay fit, improve your life… oh, and survive a zombie apocalypse.
Dave dove out of the driver’s side and in one smooth motion used the hood as a rest to fire off the first two shots from his shotgun. The zombie closest to the woman (close enough that when he stretched his arm out toward her, he almost touched her) fell, his clenching fingers tightening into a fist as he collapsed in a heap behind her.
She dove flat against the road and slid toward us, heaving in a huge sobbing breath as I braced against my half-open door and fired off the next round of shots. Between Dave and me, the second and third zombies tumbled in a lifeless pile.
The fourth was a little slower. Actually he was also a lot uglier. Apparently he was an older zombie. His flesh drooped sickeningly around his bones and he was missing an ear, an eye, and three fingers from his left hand. He dragged a battered and torn leg behind him and groaned almost painfully as he reached toward us.
“Not worth wasting the ammo,” Dave grunted.
He came around the truck and, stepping over the girl as he marched toward the zombie, used the butt end of the gun like a bat and took a looping swing. He connected with a sickening crunch and the zombie staggered back, tripped over the edge of the highway, and went tumbling head over feet into the berm on the shoulder. Dave followed after him, flat-footed and rather terrifying as he lifted the butt again and pummeled the pathetic creature into oblivion.
I shook my head as I reloaded, then stepped out onto the pavement. The girl was still crouched near the front passenger wheel of our SUV, holding her hands over her head. She shook like a leaf. I almost felt sorry for her. But not enough that I didn’t carefully lift my gun and level it at her trembling form.
I wasn’t stupid, you know. Maybe kind of bitchy sometimes, but not stupid.
“Hi,” I said softly.
She tensed and then slowly rolled over to face me. She looked at me for a minute, then her gaze slipped to the gun pointed in her face. She stared at it, then her attention went back to me.
“H-Hey,” she managed to stammer. “Thanks for your help. I ran out of ammo with those four left. I thought I was dead for sure.”
I nodded, but didn’t lower my weapon. Upon quick first inspection, she seemed okay. Her voice wasn’t garbled, her eyes hadn’t turned red, but she was also covered in blood and I wasn’t sure how much of it had come from zombie bites and how much from… well, something else. I wasn’t about to take any chances until I knew for sure.
“Mind standing up?” I asked, motioning her to her feet with the barrel of the pistol.
She nodded and grabbed for the SUV to drag herself to her feet. As she moved, she winced and I couldn’t help but relax a fraction.
Zombies didn’t register much pain. It was something that died along with their brains. It was part of what made them so hard to fight. You could hurt them, bad… like cut off an arm and both legs, and they just kept coming. Coming and coming until they got to you or you took their heads.
“You’re awfully bloody,” I said softly. “Want to show me that you weren’t bitten?”
She took a glance over my shoulder toward Dave, who was starting up the embankment back toward the SUV. “Does he have to watch?”
I glanced at him. The butt of his gun was covered in gore.
“Why don’t you clean that thing up while I take care of her?” I called to him.
“Take care of her?” he repeated with mild alarm in his tone. “You mean she’s bitten.”
“No!” the girl burst out with a wild look that said she knew what would happen if she was bitten. “Your… uh… whatever she is to you wants to check me and I don’t really want you staring while she does it.”
Dave hesitated for a minute, but then he shrugged. He knew I could handle myself. “Works for me. Tell me when it’s safe to come out.”
The woman’s face relaxed slightly. Once Dave had gone to the other side of the SUV and turned his back, she lifted up her shirt. She had road rash something fierce from her slide on both her arms and her stomach, not to mention her knees. It looked like it hurt like a son of a bitch, too, since there were little rocks and pieces of glass clinging to her skin and filling the wounds.
But no bites.
“Turn around?” I said, continuing my inspection. She had a big cut on her back, but there was no black sludge. “How did you get that?”
She grimaced as she unbuttoned her shorts and tugged them down so I could see the rest of her. “I had a motorcycle. Veered to avoid a zombie and bashed the hell out of myself.”
“You were riding a motorcycle in that outfit?” I wrinkled my brow as she covered back up and faced me.
She shrugged as she glanced down at herself. “I was coming up from Mexico. It was hot down there. I didn’t want to weigh myself down with too much gear.”
“Mexico,” I said.
To be honest I hadn’t put muc
h thought into our neighbors in the South or the North since the outbreak. Free trade and immigration weren’t really the issues they’d once been.
“Is it bad down there?”
“Well, there were a lot of damn zombies, if that’s what you’re asking.” She frowned. “This thing, whatever you want to call the infection, well, it didn’t seem to pay much attention to Border Patrol.”
I dipped my head briefly. I guess I’d thought of this outbreak as an American problem for so long. Now I had to wonder how global it had gotten. Was it just North and South America? Or had the entire world been wiped out in the last few months all Stephen King’s The Stand style?
“Well, you look okay, I mean besides having the shit kicked out of you,” I finally said and lowered my pistol. As I holstered it, I continued, “I’m Sarah. Babe, you’re okay to come out.”
Dave came around from the back of the SUV with his shotgun freshly cleaned. He put it in the sling so that it lay flat against his back and approached us.
“And this is my husband, David,” I continued.
“Hi,” the girl said with a cautious smile. “I’m—”
But before she could finish, Dave sucked in a harsh breath. “Holy shit! I know who you are! Holy shit!”
I stared at him and then looked back at the girl. She did seem kind of familiar, now that I was actually looking at her face and not for evidence of zombie attack on her banged-up body. She had blonde hair, or at least it would be blonde after she brushed the dirt and blood out of it. And she had really striking blue eyes. She couldn’t have crossed thirty yet, either (not that I had).
She was the kind of girl that when guys saw her on the street, they looked over their shoulder once she was past them. You know… your basic nightmare.
“Oh, you’re so sweet,” she said with a blush and a girlish… giggle (one I might have called fake, except it was adorable). “It’s always nice to meet a fan, especially out here.”
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