“What did you find?” Torrance asked when they walked in. “Did you kill it?”
“Negative,” Mark said.
“Any idea as to where it came from?”
“There were footprints leading back into the woods,” Alice told her. “Maybe it lives in there. We aren’t sure. We definitely know it stays nearby, at least. We’ll go back out tomorrow and try to figure out where it’s hiding and how we can catch it.”
“Kill it," Kyle corrected. “I don’t have any interest in catching and keeping this thing.”
“Nor do I,” Mark said.
“Kill it,” Alice agreed. “And we’re going to set some traps and alarms so if we can’t find it and it does come back, or if any of its friends come back, we’ll be ready.”
“I have some ideas about that,” Torrance said. “I’ve been working on a couple of things while you guys were gone.”
“Good,” Kyle sat down across from Torrance. “Let’s see what you’ve got.”
Chapter 3
It was nearly two hours later when Kyle helped Torrance upstairs to bed. There were bedrooms on the first floor, but they all felt better sleeping upstairs. The second story of the lodge provided a small amount of protection. At the very least, they’d have a little bit of warning if any Infected managed to break in.
After she was in her bunk, Kyle secured the staircase. He and Mark had manufactured a weird little rope with silverware tied to it. They hung at the bottom of the stairs so if anyone tried to come upstairs, they would either trip on the rope or get caught on it. The noise would alert the little group that they were no longer alone.
A few steps up, Kyle placed a board that had nails sticking out of it. Would stepping on nails hurt an Infected? Kyle couldn’t know for sure. He wasn’t sure how much pain the creatures actually felt, but it was better to be prepared than caught off guard. The board covered the entire step. He and Mark had made it together. The little board worked well as a deterrent to be placed on the steps and was easy to clear up in the morning so they could use the staircase normally.
At the top of the stairs, Kyle hung another rope. This one also had noisemakers on it. It was loud as he set it up, tying it to either side of the staircase. The noise echoed in the otherwise quiet lodge. Alice and Mark were already in their room for the night and Torrance wasn’t about to make noise while she was alone.
By the time Kyle finished, he was tired and anxious. The alarms they set at night wouldn’t keep an Infected out of the house. Hopefully, the boarded up doors and windows would do that. No, the purpose of these traps was simply to let them know they were no longer alone.
Kyle knew they were all light sleepers. Even if they’d been able to sleep through noise and chaos before the Infection began, those days were over. He, for certain, could no longer crash and sleep soundly throughout the night. He felt exhausted, like he was always on the verge of deep sleep, but could never quite reach that level of relaxation.
He was too scared of being killed while unconscious for that sort of thing.
If an Infected somehow made it into the lodge without them knowing, it wouldn’t be able to get up the stairs without alerting the little crew to its presence. Kyle and Mark each slept with guns beneath their pillows, ready to shoot at a moment’s notice. Torrance and Alice each had their own favorite weapons. Alice had her bat, and Torrance was handy with her crowbar.
They were an unlikely crew, the four of them, but somehow, they were learning to get along and make their new life work. They had a common goal: survival. None of them wanted to succumb to this terrible infection. None of them wanted to be the one to fall first. Kyle certainly didn’t, although with his asthma, he knew that realistically, he would likely be the first to die.
Still, he’d made it this far without death reaching him.
Maybe he could hold on a little longer.
He finished securing the stairs and went to the bedroom where Torrance was.
“Still awake?” He peeked quietly into the room.
“Yeah,” she whispered, and Kyle went into the bedroom. He closed the door behind himself and went to join her on the bottom bunk. “I don’t know if I’ll be able to sleep for awhile.”
“Scared?”
“Tired. Anxious. All of the above.”
“It was a long day.”
He felt Torrance shudder beside him. There were no curtains on the window in the bedroom upstairs, and the moonlight streamed in. He could make out her face, but not much else. The space was still dim, despite the light.
“What do you think is going to happen, Kyle? Do you think you’ll actually be able to find the watcher?”
“We have to,” he said.
“But why? Why can’t we just let nature take its course? There’s no guarantee it’s going to come after us here. It didn’t follow Mark back. He’s a little crazy, you know. Maybe he was wrong. Maybe he didn’t see what he thought he did.”
“Mark knows what he saw,” Kyle said.
“Does he?”
He reached for Torrance’s hand. It was cold and damp. She was nervous, stressed. Kyle squeezed her hand gently, and she relaxed.
“You don’t trust him.” It wasn’t a question.
“It’s not that I don’t trust him,” she said slowly. “But I don’t know him. Not like you do. He seems like a nice enough guy and I know you really care for him, Kyle, but what if he’s wrong? Even heroes are wrong sometimes.”
“He’s not wrong about this. I’ve seen the watcher, too.”
“Why do you want to hunt it, Kyle? It’s a dangerous game.”
“It’s not like we have a choice anymore.”
“There’s always a choice.”
They sat in silence for a long time. Kyle knew she was wrong, but he didn’t want to fight. Not tonight. Not with Torrance. There wasn’t always a choice. Sometimes there was just living. You did what you had to do to survive no matter what the cost might be, and chasing the watcher was definitely going to have a cost.
Kyle just didn’t know what the price tag was yet.
Eventually, Torrance adjusted her position and reclined on the bunk, but Kyle continued to sit. He stared at the window, at the moonlight streaming in, and he stroked Torrance’s hair as she slowly drifted off to sleep.
Things would look different in the morning.
They had to.
Having unpredictable zombies around was dangerous, deadly even. They needed to get rid of them. Their group was moving from “surviving” to “living.” They weren’t going to be running anymore. They were going to be staying, to be standing up, and what they were doing by hunting this creature was saying, “No more.”
No more would they let him terrorize their place.
No more would they let fear of the zombies keep them running.
No more would they let the horror they had seen prevent them from living full lives.
No more.
Kyle still didn’t know if they’d actually be able to catch the Infected. He just knew that if they didn’t try, if they weren’t able to stop the watcher, they were going to have bigger problems on their hands than they could possibly imagine.
They would be facing their own deaths before winter was in full swing.
Chapter 4
Torrance groaned when she woke. Her leg was stiff and when she stood, putting pressure on her ankle still hurt. Fuck. So she was still going to be on bed rest. That was just what she needed.
Torrance wasn’t dumb. She had seen how Alice and Mark looked at her when she wasn’t moving around very much. They thought she was being sneaky, somehow. They thought she wasn’t pulling her own weight. That was a dangerous position to be in. She needed to prove that although she was hurt, she wasn’t going to be a liability to the group.
And she needed to get better fast.
If shit hit the fan – and that was inevitable – Torrance knew she’d be left behind. Alice, Kyle, and Mark might think of themselves as a little family, but that mad
e Torrance the fifth cousin twice removed. She still wasn’t really an integral part of the group.
She could be replaced.
She could be forgotten.
Torrance climbed out of bed and hobbled downstairs. Mark and Kyle were awake and sitting in the living room.
“You should have called for me,” Kyle said, hopping up. “I would have helped you with the stairs.”
“It was no trouble,” Torrance said. “Besides, I’m feeling a lot better,” she lied. Mark narrowed his eyes at her as he glanced toward her ankle, but he didn’t say anything. Torrance took a seat next to Kyle.
“We were just discussing our plan for today,” Kyle said. “We’re going to head into the woods across the lake and scope the place out.”
“That makes sense,” Torrance nodded. “When you saw this watcher before, it was on the other side of the woods, near the city office buildings, right? And you know for sure it’s the same one?”
“From the way Mark described it, I’d say it’s the same one,” Kyle confirmed. “Besides, how many of them could there be?”
Torrance didn’t even want to think about that. She didn’t want to consider that there could be dozens of them: hundreds, even. She had killed an uncountable number of zombies and she knew Mark, Kyle, and Alice had, too.
How many more would they have to kill to be safe?
Ten?
Twenty?
A hundred?
A thousand?
“Be careful,” Torrance said. Her mouth had suddenly gone dry. She didn’t want to think about what might happen to them if things didn’t go their way.
“We’re just going to scope the area out,” Mark said gently. His eyes met Torrance’s, and the calmness in his eyes helped her relax. Mark wasn’t scared to go. He’d done this a million times before when he was in the military. She knew. “We aren’t going to do anything crazy, all right?”
“It’s just that these zombies are different,” Torrance said. She felt like she was a broken record, replaying the same song over and over and over.
“They’re fast and smart. We know. That’s why we’re bringing the big guns today,” Mark motioned to the weapons they had spread out on the table.
“And I’m bringing my bat,” Alice said, entering the room. She was swinging her baseball bat, which was tricked out with nails and bits of glass and razor blades. Torrance wasn’t sure what had inspired Alice to make such a horrible weapon, and she didn’t want to know. She imagined it must peel the flesh of the zombies it struck, but she didn’t want to think about it too much.
When Torrance killed an Infected, she was able to put it out of her mind. They were just monsters, she reasoned. They were imaginary monsters that had been hiding under the bed her entire life, but they’d come out to play. Now she had no choice but to kill them. They weren’t real. They weren’t real unless she let herself believe that they were.
And she wasn’t about to do that.
If she thought too much about this new reality, though, Torrance began to think about the fact that these monsters had once been human. They had once been alive. They had once been very much like her.
They had had families.
They had had homes.
They had had jobs.
And now they were just flesh.
“I added some more nails,” Alice said, pointing out her modifications to the guys. Kyle and Mark ooh’d and ahh’d over the adjustments Alice had made. Torrance tried to smile, but she knew the gesture was forced. Could the others tell? Could they understand how nervous she was about this mission they were taking on? Could they consider things from her perspective?
Torrance liked Kyle.
She didn’t want him to die.
His friends weren’t too bad, either, but mostly, she wanted Kyle to be safe. She wanted him to come back alive and well and in good spirits. She didn’t want him to be injured.
Or worse: taken.
Torrance had lived in Raven a long time and though she hadn’t voiced her concerns to the others, she was working on a theory about where everyone had gone. Surely the entire town couldn’t have simply vanished overnight. The number of survivors should have been much higher than it was.
So where had everyone gone?
Surely they hadn’t all been turned into zombies the first week of the Infection.
Surely some of them had fought back.
Surely some of them had stayed, hunkered down.
Country folk, and the people who lived in small towns, were resilient. They weren’t going to sit around and just let their homes be taken by zombies. They were going to fight with everything they had. There was no way the entire town of Raven should have vanished the way that it did.
Not unless there was more going on than just an infection.
Torrance had been devastated when she lost her son. Losing a child had changed her and she knew she would never be able to recover from that, but she had let her grief cloud her perception of what was happening.
People had gone missing in Raven.
People had disappeared.
And it had nothing to do with running to safety.
Chapter 5
Alice watched Torrance carefully. She didn’t know the woman well, and she didn’t trust her very much, but she knew something was a little off about her. Torrance spoke of Raven and of the zombies like she had some sort of insider knowledge, and maybe she did. Torrance had lived here a long time. She knew the city better than any of them possibly could.
It was unfortunate she had gotten hurt, and Alice hoped she healed fast. They could use another body to help prepare for the cold months coming. They would need food and supplies and stuff to do. Alice wasn’t planning on sitting inside staring at the wall for three months while it snowed. No, they would need to get books and board games and craft supplies. They would need things to keep them from going crazy and murdering each other.
Alice knew enough about people to know that friendship wasn’t going to mean anything when they’d been reading the same books for weeks, when they’d been sitting around twiddling their thumbs.
“Let’s go,” Kyle said. “I’ve got food and water for the day. We can look until sunset. Then we’ll come back.”
“Ready?” Mark looked at Alice and raised an eyebrow, but she shook her head.
“What is it?” Alice asked Torrance.
“What?”
“You just realized something. What?”
“Nothing. No.”
“Yeah,” Alice said. “Torrance, whatever it is, it’s not stupid, okay? If you know something about the town that you think we should know, just tell us. Even if you think it’s not that important, any information you can give us could prove to be helpful.”
“Torrance?” Kyle asked. “Is everything okay?”
Torrance sighed and shook her head. “I just feel so useless,” she motioned to her leg. “Not being able to walk much. I know it’s just a sprain and it’ll be better soon, but I feel completely vulnerable. I feel like I can’t help you guys when you need me most. I hate that feeling. I hate knowing I’m letting down my team.”
“Not your fault. It could have happened to any of us.” Mark’s words were firm with no room for argument.
“Because I can’t walk around, I think I’ve been spending too much time with my thoughts,” Torrance admitted. “And I just can’t help wondering what the deal is with these watchers. What if there’s more to them than we really know?”
“What do you mean? Of course there’s more to them than we know,” Alice said. “We literally know nothing about them.”
“I mean,” Torrance continued. “What if they’re not just watchers? What if they’re hunters?”
“Hunters?”
“What if they’re taking people? You guys weren’t here before the infection, but this was a pretty vibrant little town. Oh, it didn’t have the numbers of the big city or anything, but it was still full of people enjoying their lives and helping their community
. For the entire town to vanish overnight? It seems strange to me.”
“The infection hit fast. We’ve found plenty of people dead in their homes, Torrance,” Alice said gently. She didn’t want to tell Torrance just how bad it had been. She didn’t want to explain exactly how many bodies she and Mark had found during their time exploring Raven. It wasn’t a pretty thought or a nice thought.
Then again, the universe was no longer sanitized the way it once was. When Alice worked at the legal firm, she constantly had to watch her mouth. There were certain things you just couldn’t say to clients because it might make them uncomfortable. It didn’t matter how true these things were. You had to respect the client’s feelings and their emotions and their hopes.
Well, that entire world was dead now.
Now you could say what you wanted, how you wanted, and no one could stop you.
You could be as impolite as you liked, and what could anyone do about it? Tell your mom? Have you fired?
No.
There were no longer consequences, but Alice still didn’t want to open her mouth and spill all of the horrors she’d seen. She didn’t want to tell Torrance because Torrance had already lost everything. Did she really need to find out that people in Raven hadn’t been taken? Did she really need to know just how many people had killed themselves and their families out of sheer hopelessness?
No.
“I think they were taken,” Torrance said.
“By the watchers?” Kyle asked quietly.
Torrance nodded. “I can tell you all think I’m completely nuts, but think about it, you guys. The people are gone. They’re just gone. Shouldn’t there be more survivors here? Shouldn’t more people be walking around killing the Infected? Why is it just us?”
“Torrance,” Mark said slowly. “Alice and I saw a lot of bodies while we were searching houses. When Kyle was gone, we did a lot of looking around in Raven. You’d be surprised at the number of bodies we found.”
Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse (Episode 7) Page 2