“At least you gave them the chance,” Anna replied and hugged her friend. The tears flowed freely for a few minutes as she comforted Michelle. She was so grateful that they had arrived safely. She couldn’t imagine making the trek that they’d been forced to make.
As Michelle wiped away the last of her tears, she leaned back on the couch. They shared with each other the latest of what they had heard from their husbands and expressed their mutual concern for their safe return home.
“It took you nearly two days to get here and you live less than five minutes away,” Anna said despondently. “It could take them weeks to fight their way from downtown.” She had kept her emotions in check around Camille and Damon but fully let her guard down with Michelle.
“Listen, they are the two most stubborn, hardheaded men I’ve ever known,” Michelle said. “If anyone can do it, it’s them.” She refused to believe in any other possible outcome. “Besides, I told Jesse that I’d beat the shit out of both of them if they didn’t make it here in one piece.” She laughed.
Anna burst out laughing. One of the many things she loved about her best friend was that even though she was a tiny, petite little thing, her temper was like wildfire. She wasn’t afraid of anyone, and Anna had seen grown men cower after they’d set her off. She was even scarier when she started yelling in a mixture of English and Spanish. “Yeah, I could see Max heeding that warning as well,” she laughed. “He knows to stay away from you when you’re pissed about something.”
“Hey, you’re a little scary yourself,” Michelle laughed. “You’ve just got to up your game and yell in Spanglish!”
As the laughter died down, Anna wanted to tell Michelle about what had happened earlier with her son. “So Damon threw me for a loop today,” she said. “He helped me check the perimeter and ended up killing three of the dead. He didn’t have to either. Mr. and Mrs. Wright next door and their granddaughter. He wanted to make sure they didn’t draw in any of the dead.” Anna shook her head as she replayed it through her mind. “Our boys are growing up overnight,” she said solemnly.
Thinking of all that Joey had done since they’d left their house, Michelle agreed. They sat quietly for a moment, both lost in thought. Anna shook her head as if to clear it then turned to Emily.
“So Emily, what happened? Where did you come from?” Anna asked. Michelle wondered the same, but they hadn’t had a chance to talk safely before now. “Who was the man in your car?” Michelle added.
Emily began to tell them her harrowing and devastating story.
Chapter 26
Day 2
Emily had been at the beach of all places when everything started. It was midafternoon before the first sign of the dead had arrived. She had been lying out on her blanket on the sand but was in the water cooling off when she heard a scream. She’d looked all around in the water, thinking that someone was drowning. Then she noticed that all of the people in the water were looking toward the beach.
She waded in closer to shore and saw a woman being attacked. Her initial thought had been ‘How stupid could someone be to attack a woman with so many people around?’ But as she got closer she saw that a scrawny, thin, shirtless and bloodied teenage boy was literally pulling chunks of flesh from the woman with his teeth. He had a small white bandage on the back of his shoulder. Emily only noticed it because the stark white patch stood out amidst all of the smeared blood.
All fight left the woman’s body as she succumbed to her wounds. As Emily watched, the woman’s body twitched, and she started to sit up. Next to the woman, her friend was being viscously attacked by the same teenager who’d killed her. The dead woman slowly and clumsily struggled to get to her feet, stumbling a bit in the sand.
At the same time, several men nearby rushed over to help the women. The newly dead woman bit the first man’s hand as he reached for her. He let out a started yell and looked down at his mangled fingers.
The dead woman’s friend began to rise next. The teenager lost interest in each woman as they died and moved on to the next closest body. He was able to infect at least five people in under two minutes. To Emily’s horror, she watched two more of the dead rise to their feet in search of their next victim. The man with the mangled fingers was still alive and rushed away from the group of zombies.
Each of the zombies attacked more of the living as people ran for their lives. More and more screams filled the air as the dead found new meals. They moved very slowly and were clumsy in the sand, but they had strong grips. Once they wrapped their hands around someone, they didn’t let go.
Emily had never felt more helpless in her life. She watched as a woman grabbed a preteen girl by her shoulder and bit down into the delicate spot where the top of her shoulder met her neck. The girl’s garbled scream went unheard as the dead woman went for a second bite and tore a golf ball sized chunk from her throat. As if watching in slow motion, Emily saw the skin tear away as the woman pulled out her second mouthful. Stringy pieces of bloody flesh hung limply from the girl’s throat while an impossible amount of blood squirted from her neck. The girl’s body dropped to the sand suddenly and silently. Within seconds, the dead girl opened her eyes and her teeth started snapping. She struggled to get up, but her head hung off to one side with very little flesh and bone supporting it. Emily watched as the girl repeatedly attempted and failed to sit up, yet her jaw continued snapping.
All around her in the water, Emily heard people screaming. They were the screams of terror and disbelief, not the screams of pain. The dead weren’t entering the water. She watched as a few tried, but they couldn’t stay upright in the small waves that lapped the shore. Some remained stuck as the water knocked them around. Others found their way back to dry sand and looked for their next meal.
Some of the people in the water made their way to the shore, quickly darting around the zombies who were stuck in the wet sand. Others swam further out, as if they could wait out the dead from there.
All Emily wanted to do was get to her bag which held her phone and car keys. She was in good shape and thought that she could make it to her car by running and dodging the slow moving dead. As she got to the edge of the water just where it lightly washed up across the sand, she saw a group of zombies shuffling across her blanket. One of them was unable to maneuver in the fabric and fell to the sand with the blanket wrapped around its foot. A girl happened to be running by at that exact moment and the dead man grabbed the girl by her ankle. The girl went down hard, the fall knocking the wind out of her. She tried to roll away from the dead man tangled in the blanket but only managed to roll on top of Emily’s bag before the zombie bit into her leg. The girl continued to struggle and fight to no avail as the dead man ripped her abdomen open with only his hands. Blood spurted and pooled around the girl’s midsection and into Emily’s bag as the zombie leaned down and started to feed on glistening ropes of intestines.
With her belongings out of reach, Emily grabbed the first pair of sandals she saw and forced her feet into them. They were a size too small, but they would protect the soles of her feet while she ran. She watched the entire immediate area for a moment before spotting a clear opening off to her right.
She ran through the sand as fast as she could, weaving around and dodging some of the zombies. They moved slowly and the sand seemed to further trip them up. She rushed toward a set of stairs that led to the parking lot and street above. At the bottom of the short run of steps was the man whose hand had been mangled. He had become one of the dead. He was tottering on the first step and when he saw Emily he tried to turn toward her, which led to him losing his balance and face planting the sand.
Emily ran up the stairs and started through the parking lot. She glanced wistfully at her car as she passed by it. The parking lot had dozens of zombies scattered about, so she ran clear of them to the street. On the two lane road, she immediately saw several small car accidents where each car had rear ended another. There was movement in some of the cars and there were dead shuffling abou
t in the street. ‘Shit, shit, shit!’ she cursed to herself. She felt like screaming her frustration but saved her breath as she ran.
Her small home was about a mile away on a little side street that sat just off one of the main roads that ran through the suburb. She continued to dodge the dead, who were plentiful. She was dumbfounded as to what had happened and how it had spread so quickly. Her feet hurt in the too small sandals but she was grateful that her soles were protected as she darted across streets and through yards.
In her fear and haste, she had completely forgotten that she was wearing nothing but her tiny, red string bikini until her top came undone. There was no time to be concerned about nudity. Her entire focus was set on getting to her house and the perceived safety it would provide her.
Emily wasn’t sure how long she ran, dodged zombies and even hid a couple of times before she was finally within sight of her street. With the last bit of energy she had, she hurried around the corner. There were no dead between her and her house which was just the third one down on the left, so close to the main road. She dashed around the first two houses cutting between the second house and hers to her backyard. She kept a key hidden inside a planter on her back porch. She unlocked the door, went inside, locked the door behind her and nearly collapsed on the kitchen floor from exhaustion. She steadied herself for a minute and took some deep breaths before downing a bottle of water from the fridge.
Topless and wearing only a tiny bikini bottom, she kicked off the too-tight sandals, and moved to her room to put on some real clothes. She splashed some water on her face then pulled on a pair of shorts and a t-shirt, her feet screaming at her. Her feet were covered with blisters, most of which had burst and left painful and raw bloody spots. She sat on the side of her bathtub and poured most of a bottle of peroxide on both of her feet, let them dry, then padded them with band aids before pulling on a pair of socks.
She grabbed a small duffel bag from her closet and tossed in a change of clothes. She picked up her comfortable running shoes and set them next to the bag on her bed. She dumped her menial supply of first aid items and picked out what she thought might be useful, figuring she would need them to treat her feet again later. She had a feeling she would have to leave her house soon but didn’t know what else to pack. She was still trying to process what had happened at the beach and the zombies she had seen on her way home.
Emily wasn’t sure what to do next. Her adrenaline rush now all but gone, all she wanted to do was lie down and take a nap, but she knew that wasn’t an option. She needed to find out what was going on and wished desperately that she had her phone. She went to her front windows to see what was happening on her street and saw that a few of the dead were shuffling around aimlessly in the street and on a few of the front lawns. She pulled her curtains closed then closed the blinds and curtains throughout the rest of her little two bedroom house.
She grabbed an apple and a bottle of water from the kitchen and went to her bedroom at the back of her house. She felt a little bit safer there than she did in her living room which faced the street. She turned on her TV and watched one horrifying news report after another. She read the looping banner at the bottom of the screen twice before she fully understood that the dead were dead, that bites were fatal and that their brains had to be destroyed. She also learned that they were attracted to sights and sounds. She was glad she’d closed all of her curtains and blinds and sat at the rear of her house, but she turned down the volume on her TV anyway.
Emily’s house was a small cottage. The only saving grace in her current predicament was that all of her windows were fairly small. If any zombies tried to get in, there wasn’t a big picture window they could smash and come lumbering through. Her windows could easily be breached but if it happened, there wouldn’t suddenly be a crowd in her living room.
One thing she knew for certain was that without her phone or her car she was fucked. She quietly stepped to the kitchen to gather what little water and food she kept in the house. Looking in the fridge, she sighed as salad ingredients weren’t going to do her any good if she had to leave. She put apples, bananas, peaches, granola, energy bars and bottled water into her bag. She didn’t have any kind of weapons in her house. She thought about it for a minute, and then grabbed a long, sharp pair of scissors from her junk drawer and a couple knives from the block on the counter.
Emily had no immediate plans to leave but instinctively knew that she would be forced to. A shrill scream interrupted her thoughts and she quietly moved to her front door to look out the mini decorative glass panes that were near eye level. Across the street, zombies were stumbling through a broken picture window at the front of a house where a senior couple lived. The screaming stopped, but she could only guess that the dead had either infected or killed the people within. She looked around and saw that more than a dozen zombies that were scattered on the street had turned toward the noise and approached the old couple’s house.
She decided to hunker down in her bedroom with the news on mute while she formulated a plan of what to do next. She thought of just staying in her darkened house but heard too many screams from her neighbors to go that route. Without a car, her options were limited. She had a nice bicycle in the garage, and thought she’d have no choice but to either ride her bike or go on foot. The biggest problem was that she didn’t know where to go.
She briefly considered the medium sized brick church that sat two blocks down on the main road but thought it too likely that others would have already gone there and that they would be hesitant to bar the doors to protect those inside. They would want to remain a sanctuary that didn’t turn anyone away, and people often turned to church in times of desperation. If even one person was bitten, everyone inside could be infected or killed within minutes.
She thought about the large high school that sat back from the road a few blocks away. The side entrance was small and surrounded by trees, but the front entrance sat wide open and highly accessible to the dead. However, it was a very sturdy building with windows that were elevated, just out of reach to any zombies outside. If the dead hadn’t already overtaken the building, it might be a safe place. But she didn’t know how she would secure all of the entrances by herself and could find herself trapped in a classroom while zombies surrounded the door.
Emily kept brainstorming. If she’d had her car, her options would have been numerous, but going on foot or bike left her with little to choose from. Then she thought about taking one of her neighbor’s cars. It would be creepy as hell to enter one of their houses after the dead had plowed through, and there could still be some zombies left inside any given house. She would have to kill them as all of the houses on her street were too small for her to be able to outrun the dead indoors. Then she would have to search the house for car keys.
She decided that taking a neighbor’s car was her best bet. It was getting dark out, but she planned to wait until later in the night in hopes that the full cover of darkness would offer her some protection. As the sun finished setting, she made herself a salad and downed more water to keep her energy levels up for what lay ahead.
A quick look out the little glass panes on her front door revealed none of the dead within her immediate sight, particularly around the senior couple’s house. Theirs was the one she’d chosen because their car was easily accessible in the driveway and surely well maintained given the pride the couple had taken in both their home and their once beautiful landscaping that had been trampled by the dead. Zombies had already been through so many houses on her street that she didn’t think any one of them would be safer than another.
She moved to a side window from where she could see the main street just two hundred feet away and she froze in fear. There were so many zombies in the street that they stood nearly shoulder to shoulder as they shuffled around.
Emily wondered whether she should still attempt to take the car or if she should wait until morning to see if there were still so many zombies so close by. If she took the
car now, she wouldn’t be able to drive through the crowd. She could wait quietly in her home to see if the dead would leave the area. On the other hand, she might be best off going to the house under the cover of darkness just to get the keys. Once she had the keys, she would have options and would be able to leave whenever an opportunity presented itself.
Emily decided to get the keys. She pulled a pair of jeans on over her shorts and a loose black sweatshirt over her head. She slipped her sore feet into her comfortable running shoes, and then grabbed the scissors and one of the knives from her bag. As an afterthought, she pulled a small flashlight from her junk drawer. She didn’t want to use it and possibly draw attention to herself but didn’t want to leave it only to wish she had it once she was inside the neighbor’s house.
Her street wasn’t brightly lit as the main road was. The first streetlamp sat eight houses down. Her backyard was nearly black in the darkness with no porch or garage lights turned on. Emily silently crept out her back door and waited a moment for her eyes to adjust to the darkness. Seeing and hearing nothing in her yard or her neighbors, she silently walked down her driveway to the front of her house. To her left there were a handful of the dead scattered down the street. To her right, the main road still held more zombies than she could count.
She kept low to the ground as she covered the short distance from her house to the street and ducked down next to a car parked at the curb. None of the dead noticed her quiet and deliberate movements. She ran in a crouch to the house across the street then ducked behind the car she hoped to take. She still hadn’t caught the attention of any of the zombies, but knew that one false move or noise, however slight, would bring all of them straight to her.
Chronicles of the Undead | Book 1 | Urban Gridlock Page 19