by Megan Berry
“I just threw a couple more logs on the fire,” Ryan tells me, and I allow my body to relax bonelessly back against the couch. I want to get up and help, but maybe another small rest might be better first…
“Good,” I mumble, glad that Ryan is at least feeling well enough to get up and take care of things.
“Do you know where Silas went?” Ryan asks, completely out of left field, and my eyes pop open again in surprise even as I struggle until I’m able to sit up.
“What are you talking about?” I demand, focusing on Ryan’s face. There isn’t even a hint of a smile around his lips. He isn’t joking, not that Ryan ever would.
“He’s gone,” Ryan tells me gently. “I’m not sure where, but he took the truck.” I grab Ryan and pull myself up, nearly pulling us both over in the process.
Ryan has to be mistaken. I move drunkenly to the front door and walk outside onto the front porch in my sock feet. Ryan isn’t lying or mistaken. The truck is gone.
Ryan comes up behind me and tries to get me to come back inside the house.
“No!” I tell him, yanking my arm out of his grasp. I need to find out what happened to Silas. He can’t be doing any better than me right now. He was getting just as sick as me when I fell asleep. He needs to be home with us.
Ryan doesn’t grab my arm again or protest, so I turn around to see what he’s doing. He’s staring down the road, squinting. “Something’s wrong,” he says, and for a minute I’m sure he’s talking about Silas.
“Do you see him?” I ask, but he shakes his head.
“There isn’t any smoke coming out of Jack’s chimney.”
Chapter Eight
“What?” I ask groggily, my mind still too worried about Silas to comprehend what Ryan is saying.
“There isn’t any smoke coming from Jack’s cabin,” Ryan says again, already heading back inside.
I hobble to keep up with him, and he beats me by a couple steps. When I finally wheeze my way into the cabin and shut the door, he’s already grabbed his coat and is trying to get it on with shaking fingers that don’t seem willing to cooperate.
“What are you doing?” I demand.
Ryan turns around and looks at me, worry evident on his face. “There is no smoke coming from Jack’s cabin,” he tells me again, like that should make total sense. “There is no smoke because his fire is out, and I can only think of one reason that his fire would be out…” he explains further and, I let out a gasp.
“They’re sick too!” I say, finally filling in the blanks, and Ryan looks grim. Holy hell! We all have this horrible illness, but at least we’ve managed to keep our fire going and work in shifts to help one another. A stab of terror hits me right in the center of my belly. I hope Jack and Naomi are okay.
“I hope they haven’t caught this, but I haven’t seen anybody since the night before you guys left,” he tells me, pulling his gloves on without missing a stride.
I reach for my own coat, and Ryan holds up his hand to stop me. “What do you think you’re doing?” he asks.
I give him a look as I step around him. “I’m coming with you,” I tell him. The total effect of my rebellion is marred by the hoarse cough that I can’t keep in. Ryan shakes his head.
“You’re too sick,” he tells me, punctuating his own lecture with a cough of his own. He looks at me sheepishly after he’s hacked up a lung, and most likely his liver too.
“We are both too sick,” I admit, “but there isn’t anyone else.” Ryan looks around at the others, sprawled out all around the room and helpless as kittens. He finally he nods.
“You’re right,” he says. “I will probably need your help.” I reach over and pass him the keys to the older truck that Megan, Abby, and I use for hauling wood. Then we each grab a flashlight from beside the door on our way out. On any normal day, we could easily walk the distance in five minutes or less, but today we are barely staying on our feet. Plus, we might need the truck to transport Jack and his sister. If they are as sick as the rest of us, they shouldn’t be alone over there.
The walk to the truck is torture, but I keep myself together so Ryan won’t change his mind and send me back to the house. From the look of him though, he has his own problems. We are both out of breath, sweaty, and shaky by the time we manage to walk to the truck, though neither of us admits it to the other.
Ryan puts the truck in drive and hunches over the wheel as he guides us around the little bend in the road that leads to the cabin where our friends have been staying.
We park out front. Ryan gets out first and starts knocking like crazy on the front door. I follow him more slowly. By the time I reach the top step, he is already looking concerned. “They should’ve answered the door,” he tells me, trying the door knob. It’s locked up tight.
“What are you going to do?” I whisper, leaning heavily against the rough wooden exterior of the cabin. Instead of answering, Ryan surprises me by turning around and using a fireman’s kick against the door. It stubbornly stays put, and he has to kick it several more times before it flies open, slamming against the wall behind it.
“Hello?” Ryan calls, but the room is completely black and still. It kind of gives me the creeps, and a shiver of foreboding races up my spine, joining the other shivers from this illness that is playing havoc with my body.
I lift my flashlight. The effort makes my arm shake and wobble with the strain, but I doggedly ignore it and shine the light all around the room. The cabin has a pretty similar layout to our own, but it is a little bit smaller. Jack and Naomi have similarly blocked off every room except the living room with the stone hearth. I miss them the first time, but on my second sweep of the room I spot two body-sized lumps laying on the floor in front of the empty fireplace.
“Ryan…” I whisper. He follows the beam of my flashlight, and his face goes another shade whiter.
“Shit,” he murmurs. I reach over and grasp his hand as he slowly starts off across the room to check out the situation. I need him for support, both emotionally and physically, just as much as he probably needs me.
‘Please be alive, please be alive, please be alive…’ I repeat to myself, over and over in my head, like my pathetic little mantra will be able to do anything.
We creep up to the two lumps buried underneath a mound of blankets, and I’m frozen with fear about what we’ll find underneath. I hear Ryan take a ragged breath. After a millisecond he shines his light down and pulls back the blankets, and I gasp.
Jack and his sister Naomi are so still they look like cadavers. Jack’s eyes are shut, but Naomi’s are wide open and staring blankly at the dark ceiling above. Ryan reaches down and feels Naomi’s neck for a pulse. I stand guard with my breath held, hoping for the best. Ryan looks up at me and shakes his head. “Fucksakes,” he says plainly to no one in particular, and my heart drops into my boots.
“What about Jack?” I ask, even though it seems unlikely that he’s alive either. Ryan moves the blankets out of the way and feels his neck; after a minute, he looks up at me in surprise.
“He’s still alive,” he tells me. My jaw drops. “We have to get him out of here,” Ryan instructs me, and I nod. This cabin is freezing, and the cold and isn’t doing any of us any good.
“What do you want me to do?” I ask, willing to do anything I can.
“Help me drag him towards the door,” Ryan instructs, reminding me a bit of Silas when he takes charge. The reminder of Silas makes my heart beat painfully in my chest, but I know I can’t dwell on his disappearance right now. Only one problem at a time…
“Grab his feet, and I’ll take his top half,” Ryan volunteers as he reaches down and gropes Jack underneath his armpits.
I reach down too, without needing to be told twice, and I grope Jack’s sock-clad feet. He’s so heavy that he nearly pulls me over right on top of him. Ryan is grunting with the strain as well, and we haven’t even managed to move him one foot.
I start a vicious coughing fit and have to drop Jack’s feet
as I double over. Sinking down to my knees, I try to catch my breath. Ryan also drops Jack, grabbing onto the blanket that’s already wedged underneath his body instead.
“You okay?” he asks, panting as he begins to tug the blanket by himself. I nod, sucking air down my dry throat until I finally feel like I can talk again without spluttering.
“Yeah,” I tell him, reaching down and grasping the corner of the blanket that Ryan is now using as a sled. The moose on Silas’s travois flicks through my head and I pull with all the might that’s left in my body. Thankfully, the army issue wool blanket starts to slide against the hard wood of the floor, but it also has a lot more resistance than it should.
“Jane,” Ryan says awkwardly amid a grunt of exertion. “We need to roll Naomi off the blanket. Her weight is making it harder than this has to be.” I look down at the corpse of Jack’s sister and tears prick my eyes. A ragged sob escapes through my cracked lips as I bend down and push Naomi off to the side. I push too hard and fall forward on top of her cold, stiff body, and I jump back in horror.
She looks terrible sprawled out on the floor like that, so I grit my teeth and make myself lay her arms back by her sides. I lift up another blanket and cover her from head to toe with it, like you see on movies. Then I scoop up the rest of the blankets lying in the pile and tuck them underneath my arm. We are going to need all of them.
I rush back to Ryan and help him drag Jack across the floor. Under normal circumstances, it wouldn’t be so hard. The problem is our energy—it’s flagging. It takes us five minutes to reach the door, where we realize we have another problem. Neither of us has the physical strength to lift him into the back of the truck, even without this illness plaguing our bodies. Jack is a big guy. We both sag against the door frame, exhausted and nearly out of willpower. It makes me wish that Silas was here…
Thinking about Silas makes me think about his travois again. “Silas made a sled!” I blurt out, and Ryan turns to look at me.
“Where?” he asks, not even questioning me. He gives me his blind trust and is already walking back towards the truck.
“The backdoor,” I yell after him, and he turns around long enough to shoot me a grateful look. I watch him struggle through the snow towards the truck and realize with a sick feeling in the pit of my stomach that he’s leaving me. I want to run after him and scream for him to take me with him, but I know I can’t. I don’t have the energy, and even if I did… Jack needs me here with him.
I hover awkwardly in the middle of the doorway. I don’t want to look back into the room because Jack’s sister is in there and it’s incredibly sad, but I don’t want to look out into the darkness either. I know the zombies are frozen, but it seems like a bunch of crazy shit has happened to us lately. It isn’t beyond the realm of possibilities that they could all just randomly decide to unthaw.
My hand strays down to my hip because touching my gun has become a sort of security blanket. My fingers close around thin air though, and I realize with a wave of nausea that I’ve broken the most cardinal rule of survival. I went outside without a weapon. I don’t even have a knife.
The discovery makes my pulse hammer even harder. All I want is to sink down and let the blissful comfort of unconsciousness carry me away, but I force myself to fight off the creeping darkness that wants to engulf me. I’m not sure how much longer I can last though.
Across the road, I see the lights of the truck backing out of our driveway and heading towards me. I finally allow myself to sink down beside Jack, but I don’t pass out. I tuck the blankets up around his chin a little higher and wait while the cold seeps into my bones in a way it never has before.
“You okay, Jane?” Ryan asks as he steps onto the porch, dragging the travois behind him. I manage to rally enough to nod and struggle to my feet. Ryan is no better off than me. It wouldn’t be fair to make him deal with all this stuff alone.
“Let’s just use the blanket to drag him on top,” Ryan says, and I nod my agreement even as I grab the blanket and start tugging. Jack feels way too heavy—this can’t be right…
“Almost there,” Ryan tells me encouragingly, straining to lift Jack as well. I glance up at him through blurry eyes, and he’s looking back at me with concern written all over his face.
Jack lands on the travois with a dull thud that has me wincing on his behalf, and together Ryan and I pull him across the porch. The sound of the branches scraping against the dry deck boards has me cringing, but I do my best to ignore it. I’ve always been squeamish about certain sounds, things like nails on a chalkboard or forks scraping a plate. Wood dragging on wood ranks right up there in my opinion.
“Are we dragging this thing all the way home?” I ask, and Ryan shakes his head, thank God. He reaches into the back of the truck and pulls out a coil of rope that he’s thrown there. I watch him loop one end around the travois and the other end around the truck’s rear differential. Usually this is where I would protest that this isn’t a good idea, but Ryan and I are both ready to collapse and Jack could very well have hypothermia already, or worse… we have to risk it.
“I’ll ride back here with Jack,” I volunteer, my words slurring a little with the effort it takes to speak. Ryan looks at me for a moment and shakes his head.
“You need to be inside where it’s warm,” he argues. “I’ll ride back here to make sure Jack doesn’t fall off or slide underneath the truck, and you drive us across the road.” I barely hesitate before agreeing. I’m so cold and tired now that all I can think about is collapsing inside the warm cabin and passing out.
“Okay,” I agree, and Ryan nods his approval. He probably expected me to argue.
“Just make sure you take it easy,” he tells me. “No stopping too fast or giving it too much gas.”
I nod to show that I heard him and trudge towards the truck, nearly tripping on thin air. In the side mirror, I see Ryan hop on the travois with Jack and give me the thumbs up to get going.
I’m halfway there when I start to feel worse, which I didn’t even know was possible. I have to fight off the urge to vomit; I gag back the bile that wants to come up, even as black spots dance in front of my eyes. I blink rapidly to clear them, but they just keep getting bigger until I can barely see the road in front of my face, and panic sets in.
The realization that I’m about to pass out, and there is nothing I can do about it, hits me much too late. I open my mouth, meaning to call out to warn Ryan, but all that comes out is an avalanche of stomach bile and beef broth. I gag on my own throw up, even as the last of my vision clouds to black…
I come to slowly. I am aware of certain things around me: the familiar hum of voices, the smell of something cooking, the crackle and pop of the fire, and someone’s hand in my own.
“I think she’s finally waking up,” I hear someone say, but the details are too much for me to piece together right away.
“That’s it, sweetheart, try and open your eyes,” I hear another voice say. It’s male, and his voice cracks at the end.
I finally manage to fight myself awake to full consciousness, and the room around me comes into sharp focus. I am now aware of two things. I have a splitting headache, and my dad is the one holding my hand. I can tell he’s been crying, even though he quickly wipes his eyes when he sees me watching him.
I try and speak, but I can’t. Someone presses a bottle of water to my lips. It’s painful to swallow, but I finally get some down. I splutter a little and the bottle is removed.
I look around the room and see everyone staring back at me. Silas is back and he’s on my other side. I see Ryan, Abby, Megan, even Regg…only one person is missing.
My voice cracks so many times that I’m not sure anyone can hear me as I whisper my burning question. “Where’s Mom?”
I know she would never leave me when I’m sick. I crane my neck and wonder if maybe she’s somewhere else in the room.
My dad can’t hold it back this time. He starts openly sobbing at my bedside, and I get a horrib
le feeling of premonition. I look around at everyone else, and they all have the same expression on their faces—pity.
“Mom?” I try and yell, but my voice is still barely a whisper.
“Jane,” Dad starts to say, but I shake my head, causing a streak of pain to pierce through my skull.
“Don’t say it,” I beg him, but my dad can only shrug helplessly. He doesn’t want to say it any more than I want to hear it.
“Your mom is dead.”
Chapter Nine
My entire world shifts on its axis. I want to scream at everyone, that they're lying, but they aren't. I know it. I can't explain how, but I can feel it in some fundamental way. My mom is really gone.
Tears leak down my face and the salt of my tears stings my lips. I lift my hand in confusion to prod at the source of the pain. Silas gently reaches out and grabs my hand, keeping me from touching it.
"Tell me?" I whisper, my voice getting stronger with every word.
"You crashed the truck," Silas tells me in his perfect no nonsense way. "You hit a tree and the airbags deployed." I listen to him with zero expression on my face. I'm a little curious about what happened, but I'm here so obviously I survived. The rest doesn't really matter, but Silas keeps talking. "The force of the airbag put your teeth through your bottom lip. I had to sew you up when I got back."
It comes back to me in little pieces. The last thing I remember is being in Jack’s cabin with Ryan—no, that isn't right. We got Jack out and I was driving the truck...
I turn stiffly to search out Ryan in the crowd. He doesn't look hurt. "Is Jack okay?" I ask, and Ryan nods, a guilty expression crossing his face.
"I'm so sorry, Jane. I never should’ve asked you to drive!" he blurts out, looking sick over the whole ordeal. He glances at my dad, still sobbing uncontrollably beside me, and swallows visibly. "I'm sorry for everything."
I nod, still trying to process everything. “It wasn’t your fault,” I tell him honestly. “I shouldn’t have gotten behind the wheel.” Ryan’s face crumples at my apology, but he doesn’t argue.