by Dayna Ingram
The voice calls out instructions on a loop, and I look up to see the large box-like speakers hanging over the sides of the circling helicopters, and back at the barricade, where they are also set up in the beds of trucks. There’s some complaint among the crowd, but everyone is eager for answers so we all clamber into our cars and tune to the station and wait.
Carmelle shares the passenger seat with me again. It feels comforting to have her next to me, pressed into me, holding me. I want to tell her I forgive her, but I don’t know how she’ll take it, so I keep my mouth shut.
Finally, after some minutes of static, a very officious male voice crackles over the radio waves and joins us on the Beetle’s tinny speakers.
“Citizens,” the voice begins, “This is Sergeant Elmer Dunnigan of the National Guard. I will be guiding you through our evacuation procedures. Your bravery and cooperation in this matter is fully expected and appreciated. Do exactly as instructed and we will all make it out of here safe and sound.
“The terrorist situation as of now is at Orange, and we are taking steps to insure it is under control. We plan to evacuate as many of you as possible before quarantine becomes necessary.”
“Terrorists?” Carmelle asks. “But they were dead! They were dead, and walking around, and….”
“You really want to hear him say the word ‘zombie’?” I ask. “They’re trying to keep people calm. ‘Terrorist’ is less scary. Terrorists they can deal with. Zombies?” I shake my head. “Forget about it.”
Carmelle’s skin sprouts gooseflesh, and she huddles against me for warmth. “I’m still scared, Devin.”
It’s my turn to be reassuring, comforting, brave. “We’ll make it out of here. Let’s just listen to the sarge’s plan.”
“Officers will be coming around to each vehicle and evaluating you individually for evacuation. Once you pass your evaluation, you will follow the officer to the gate we’ve set up at the barricade, and they will process you through. Please have all forms of identification ready. We will start with those nearest the barricade and move our way back in waves. Remain in your vehicle until an officer approaches you. Do not exit your vehicle. Remain calm and follow your officer’s instructions. This message will repeat.
“Citizens, this is Sergeant Elmer Dunnigan of the National Guard….”
Carmelle reaches out and twists the volume dial down to turn the Sarge’s voice to a low background hum, easily tuned out. She rolls the passenger window down and sticks her head out. “We’re not too far back,” she says back to me. “I can see the officers going up the line, checking IDs.” She pushes back into the car and looks at me, smiling. “You’re right, we’re going to get out of here.”
I start to cry again.
“Baby, what is it?” Carmelle puts on her concerned-girlfriend face, the one she’s pretty much worn permanently since we started this little road trip, and wraps my head in her arms, hugging me to her face.
“I can’t go,” I snot into her neck. I’m not sure she’s catching any of what I’m saying through the wetness of my speech and how closely I’m speaking into her neck, but I keep talking. “He said they’re doing evaluations. Evaluations! They’re gonna see I got bit. They won’t let me out. I’ll be quarantined. Carmelle, don’t leave me here, okay? Don’t leave me here alone.”
“I can’t hear anything you’re saying,” Carmelle says sweetly, and backs my face up. She looks at me and wipes my tears away with her thumbs. All the crying and trying to talk has brought on the coughing fits again and I double over. Carmelle rubs my back until I’m spent.
Finally, I look back up at her, feeling like shit and looking twenty times more terrible, I’m sure. I hold up my hands, stained red with the blood I just coughed into them. “See? I won’t pass their evaluations.”
Slowly, the realization shadows Carmelle’s face, deepening her concerned wrinkles. Her eyes scan my body, lingering over my wounds. She moves her hands as if to lay them over my bandages, but curls her fingers back into her palms and pulls her arms into her chest. She struggles for a minute to come up with something to say, and I struggle to keep down more tears and pleas for her to stay with me. Finally, she says, “Don’t tell them.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t tell them what happened. Just tell them…tell them you got trampled in a riot or something. Or…. Wait, see?” She seizes my wrist and holds it up, looping one finger through the loose hospital bracelet I forgot—or never even noticed—I’ve been wearing. “You were at the hospital, prior to all this shit. Tell them it was a pre-existing circumstance. A dog attacked you. You have evidence. I’ll back you up.”
Despite how flimsy it is, I am very close to being convinced it will work, dangerously close to the kind of hope that could destroy me. I smile at Carmelle, a hard smile to hold but she deserves it.
“Good idea,” I tell her.
She squeezes my snotty, bloody face between her palms and kisses me flush on my snotty, bloody mouth. “I told you, we’re gonna get out of here.”
“I thought I told you that.”
“Then it must be true.” She takes my hand and entwines our fingers and holds it in her lap.
With the passenger window still rolled down, we can hear the officers ahead of us, but it’s impossible to tell just by sound how far ahead they are. Car doors are slamming, various voices are intoning, babies are crying and kids are screaming, women are crying and men are yelling, but nothing extreme, nothing riotous. So far, it seems everyone is passing their evaluations. Above us, the helicopters circle, gunmen leaning out behind their turrets, and the jets make frequent loops to pass over us higher up. The Sarge drones on in the static of our radio.
“Hey,” I nudge Carmelle, nodding at the window. “Can you see if Renni’s out there?”
She looks at me for a second like, Who’s Renni?, then she remembers. She leans out the window and scans the view down the line of cars. She comes back in. “I don’t see her, but the officers are only a couple cars up.”
Sure enough, two uniformed National Guardsmen approach the driver side and passenger side of the truck in front of us simultaneously. One officer carries a rifle, held in both hands at his stomach, while the other carries a clipboard, and asks the driver of the truck to step out.
“She probably already got out,” Carmelle says, petting my arm reassuringly. “She and Bambi are probably already over the state line. I’ve been meaning to ask you, how did you come to be fighting zombies alongside Renni Ramirez, anyway?”
“Oh, good.” I quirk a smile at Carmelle. “You can see her too. I’m not entirely convinced she isn’t a hallucination.”
“She looked pretty real to me when she was breaking Bambi’s nose.”
I remember the feeling of Renni’s own nose giving out under the force of my misguided elbow. “She’s just paying it forward.”
“What do you mean?”
“I kind of broke her nose earlier.” Carmelle stares at me. “It was an accident.”
“She is going to sue you so hard.”
“Yeah, well, you can’t sue a dead girl.”
“Shut up.” Carmelle wraps her arms around me and we sit in weighty silence until two officers approach the window.
“Could you step out of the vehicle please, ladies?” The officer who addresses us is young, maybe even as young as me, fresh faced with no traces of five-o’clock shadow or razor burn, hair buzzed at the sides and back to give him a flattop. He wears wire-rimmed glasses and he pushes them up to the bridge of his nose constantly, even though they never slide down. His partner is a woman, slightly overweight but pretty, even with the light blonde mustache she didn’t have time to bleach away this morning.
“Can I see some identification please?” Carmelle scrambles in her pockets and pulls out her drivers license. I don’t move for mine; I’m looking this kid up and down, trying to evaluate how he’s evaluating me. He hasn’t even glanced at my wounds once. He keeps his eyes on my face, and on Carmelle
’s ID when she hands it to him. He copies down her information to his clipboard and hands the license back to her. “And yours, miss?”
Carmelle takes charge, telling them my full name and explaining to the officer that I lost my purse in all the panic, and apologizing for my distant stare. “She’s been through so much, even before all this.”
“I was attacked by a dog,” I blurt out. Carmelle grabs my hand, and pinches it.
“I was in the hospital with her when this all started,” she goes on, much more convincing than me. She really is a great actress, a natural. This thought stirs up some bitterness in me and I have to swallow hard to keep it down. “It really freaked us out when we heard about all the terrorist activity. I knew I had to try to get her out of here, to some place safer, a different hospital. The one we were in lost power.”
“Saint Mary’s?” The female officer asks.
Carmelle brightens at her suggestion. “That’s the one,” she says.
“My aunt was in there for appendicitis,” the female officer goes on. “She barely made it out. Said it got real ugly.”
“Oh, well, we must have missed all that,” Carmelle says quickly, stroking my arm protectively. “But I’m glad to hear your aunt made it out safely.”
“Thank you,” the officer says.
The male officer looks our bodies over, starting with Carmelle. “Have you suffered any injuries?”
“Oh, no,” Carmelle says, shaking her head. “Like I said, we were in the hospital when all this got going, and we went straight for our car, and then ended up here. We never even saw firsthand anything that’s going on. But I won’t bother you with questions about any of it; I know you have a job to do.”
He seems a bit relieved to hear her say this, but then he turns to me and his brow narrows. “You’re injured,” he says matter-of-factly.
Again, Carmelle speaks for me. “Yes, she was attacked by our neighbor’s dog. A German Shepherd, improperly leashed. Believe me, we will be pressing charges, as soon as things settle down.”
“I need to examine the bites, if I may,” the officer says, trying to sound stern yet unable to invade my privacy without at least the pretense of my permission.
He starts with my leg, unwrapping the bandage cautiously. The female officer grips her gun a little tighter and discreetly points it at me by angling her body a little to the left so it still appears she’s just casually holding it. When the air hits the wound, I wince a little.
“Does it hurt?” The officer asks.
“Like a bitch,” I say. I haven’t actually looked at the wound since being admitted to the hospital, and I’m too afraid to look now. The officer rewraps the bandage and comes up to undo the one at my shoulder.
He holds up a piece of lacy lingerie. “All out of Ace bandages?”
I can’t say anything, and Carmelle just looks distressed. Shit.
He doesn’t even unwrap the whole thing, just replaces the lingerie and goes back to jotting things down on his clipboard. He excuses himself for a moment and steps back with the female officer to confer. I watch them pull out a walkie-talkie and talk into it together.
All around us, officers are knocking on windows and leading people pleasantly and professionally to the barricade. The helicopters circling overhead have become just like the wind to me. I look beyond the two officers in front of me, to the barricade, and watch a group of five people in bulky yellow hazmat suits start up the line. Somehow, I know they’re coming for me.
“Carmelle,” I turn to her. She’s crying already. “They’re not going to let me through. But they’ll let you go. So you should. You should go.”
She shakes her head, grabs my hands. “No, no. I won’t leave you.”
“You don’t have a choice,” I say. “See those hazmat guys down there? They’re coming to quarantine me. They’ll probably…. I don’t want to think about what they’ll probably do to me. But you can’t come with me. So, it doesn’t really matter, you know? You have to go. I want you to go.”
“But, Devin, I….” She can’t even finish her sentence, her words are swallowed by her sobs. The two officers are done conferring. The boy with the clipboard turns to us with sorrowful eyes, and the woman levels her rifle at me.
“I’m sorry, Miss Julian,” he says to me. “You’ll have to follow Officer Briggs. Miss Soufflé? You can follow me.”
“Wait,” Carmelle says, holding out her arm to ward them off, even though no one has moved toward us and the hazmat guys are still some yards off. “Just fucking wait. Wait. Devin…. I can’t believe this.”
I hug Carmelle to me, even though the pressure on my shoulder drills up through my bones and needles my brain. I kiss her ear and tell her the thing I’ve been too afraid to say since the day we met, even though it’s the only thing I’ve wanted to say, the only thing I think that’s ever really been true: “I love you.”
We cry into each other for a minute, until the young officer coughs politely. Carmelle pulls away from me, pulls away for what I know in my heart to be forever, and goes to follow the young officer, looking back at me the whole way. They pass the hazmat suits, and Carmelle trips one of them, which makes me laugh.
“You don’t have to lie anymore,” the woman with the rifle pointed at my chest tells me. “You were bitten by one of them, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I say. “The terrorists bit me.”
“I’m so sorry,” she says, sounding genuine, but it’s hard to tell with my heart beating so fast, the blood rushing in my ears.
I look at the hazmat team, getting closer. A couple of them have handguns, one of them has handcuffs. “What are they going to do with me?”
Before the officer can respond, I hear the roaring of a familiar engine speeding up from behind me. I turn just in time to almost shit myself as Renni Ramirez screeches to an angled stop mere inches from my ankles. She rips the helmet from her head and shouts at me, “Get on!”
She doesn’t have to tell me twice.
The female officer moves her weapon back and forth between us, trying to decide what to do. “Dismount the vehicle!” she screams. Behind her, the hazmat guys have started running.
Without a word, Renni pitches her helmet at the officer. It hits her weapon and she fires, the bullet skimming the asphalt. Mustering up all my strength, I climb onto the bike and cling to Renni’s back like she’s my last lifeline—which she is. She pivots the bike and takes off down the line of stalled cars, away from the barricade, away from Carmelle, away from safety, and back into the heart of the undead city.
Chapter 6: A Midsummer Night’s Dead
Renni Ramirez takes me back to her hotel room. Damn, how many lesbians out there wish they could say that? If I live to make it to my ten-year high school reunion, that’s all I want my little blurb to say: Devin Julian, Class of ’07, voluntarily taken back to Renni Ramirez’s hotel room. I’d win some kind of silly award, I’m sure.
Unfortunately, the hotel room is pretty much where the fantasy ends. Well, okay, that’s not exactly true. Renni Ramirez does tell me to take off my clothes, but it isn’t super sexy or anything, considering how bloody and gross and kind of covered in my own urine I am. I’m not even embarrassed to undress in front of her—I think I became immune to embarrassment sometime between elbowing her in the nose and peeing all over her dress. It takes me a little while to get the dress off, because lifting my arms over my head is nearly impossible. Renni helps me slide the spaghetti straps off my arms and pull the dress down over my hips instead, which stretches it out but at this point the dress is a lost cause anyway. I take off my underwear and Renni puts all my clothes into a plastic Kroger shopping bag. She leans into the tub and turns on the hot water.
“I’ll find you something to wear,” she says, and goes out, closing the door behind her.
We should have gone to a hospital, but we noticed on our way back through the city that some major changes were underway, namely that everyone was getting the fuck out of town. We saw a
few pockets of zombies chasing down pedestrians, and Renni stopped when she could to fire off a few bullets into their heads to give the people some more time to escape. Some people decided to loot, as will happen in moments of crisis, so Renni decided to abandon any urban centers. I told her the National Guard woman’s story about her aunt barely escaping Saint Mary’s hospital, and we both agreed it was safest to stay away, even with the extent of my injuries. Renni told me she was staying at an EconoLodge near the highway, which I thought was kind of ridiculous, but she reminded me of her original plan to keep a low profile. On the way to the hotel, we swung by a pharmacy that Renni had to break into while I sat on the idling bike, white-knuckling her rifle (most of our other weapons were abandoned back at the porn shop, or left in Bambi’s car) and looking around me at the barren streets with something bordering on hysteria. Luckily, Renni didn’t take too long grabbing up disinfectant, more painkillers, some antibiotics, and proper bandages.
In the bathroom, I reset the water’s temperature to cold, because my wounds are already making my whole body hot. I take a moment before stepping into the shower to finally examine my body. My shoulder is the worst, being the freshest. It’s stopped bleeding, the blood grown sticky, like a film over Jell-O, and the mouth-sized hole really doesn’t look too deep. It’s about as round as my fist and there’s bruising all around the teeth marks. As for my leg, the nurses stitched it up while I was unconscious and it looks pretty good, some slight bruising, but it’s clean. It still throbs painfully and my muscle aches all around it, and this makes my mind go back to tetanus, like maybe I have it. But what can I do about that now? I swipe my bangs away from my sticky forehead and press a pinky finger to my hot skin. There’s a bruise forming here too, where my head hit the dashboard, but it’s the least of my injuries. All over my arms and feet, I see tiny sparkling bits of glass, but I don’t feel them.