Alive

by Ashley Shannon

  “If we go after your mom, then we’ll have to extend the same to everyone’s family within city limits and that becomes a big problem.” Frankie tried to get through to the Hispanic siblings, but it wasn’t taking.

  “We should. Who has family here? Sada what about your parents? Or anyone else from your group?”

  Sada’s head fell, her eyes on the ground. Eli didn’t have to ask her anything else. He knew that look, the look of loss.

  “I’m here for school. My mom is in Rhode Island. But I think Frankie and Palen are right. We don’t have time to track down everyone’s family members,” Becky said, voicing her opinion amongst the group. No one else spoke up, leaving Kimber to assume she was the only one worried about her family.

  “Then just our mom.” Kimber wasn’t about to let this go. “We know where she is and that she’s safe with the family she works for. We can just go across town and get her and then we can leave.”

  “That’s insane and unfair,” Palen interjected.

  “This isn’t a dictatorship,” she said, walking over to Palen until she was toe to toe with him. Kimber may have been quite a bit shorter than the solider, but that didn’t matter. She wasn’t scared of him or anything, Eli knew this.

  “You’re right,” Frankie interjected, trying to diffuse the situation. “So we vote. You want a democracy, you’ve got it.” Confidence surged through him, a cheeky smile on his face. Frankie had no doubt that he would get the votes to leave Dubuque and Kimber’s mom behind.

  “So all for leaving first thing tomorrow morning, without searching for anyone else, raise your hand.”

  Frankie, Becky, and Palen raised their hand. Johnny looked at Sada, waiting for her to follow suit with their group, but she didn’t. Kimber was her friend and she wasn’t going to vote against her. If she could go out and find her own mother, she would do the same thing Kimber was, so her hand stayed firmly in place and Johnny’s did too. Levi’s fingers began to twitch, clearly going over the odds, but he didn’t raise his hand either.

  “The odds of us finding their mother and leaving town safely are not good, but I can see that it is more of an emotional issue.” Talking about emotions sounded weird coming from Levi’s robotic monotone voice. “I understand the need to reach out to one’s family in a time of crisis and it does present an opportunity.”

  “What do you mean Levi?” Frankie was clearly frustrated. He couldn’t believe that his own group was voting against him. After risking his life for them, getting them out of East High School alive, this was how they repaid him. At least he could count on Palen, but the two of them couldn’t run make the others do what they felt was right.

  “We’re going to need another car.” Levi said, “There isn’t enough space for all of us and supplies in the two vehicles that we have.”

  Frankie looked at Palen, who nodded. There went the one person who had his back. Restlessly, Frankie pushed his hand through his hair, trying to plan a workaround for this whole crazy idea.

  “What if we go and look for her for two hours. When the time runs out, whether we’ve found her or not, we leave, get another car and come back here.” Eli said, assuming that he wouldn’t have to go and do this alone.

  “It’s not a bad idea Frankie,” Palen said, trying to reason with his friend, “Levi is right, we’re gonna need another vehicle and we would have to go out and try to find one anyways. They get what they want and we get what we want. It’s a perfect compromise.”

  Palen watched his brother in arms, trying to figure out what was going on in his head. He knew that Frankie wanted to keep them all safe, but this behavior wasn’t helping the situation. His normally warm and happy friend now seemed distant and cold, and he was pushing away the new group members. If they were going to make it out of this together, they had to trust one another and have each other’s back, and right now Frankie was coming off as a power hungry dick.

  “Yeah, alright.” Frankie finally caved, shifting in his stance, before putting his hands on his belt. “Two of us should go and you should take the hummer. Probably first thing in the morning.”

  “I’ll go since she’s my mom.”

  “Me too,” Kimber spoke up right after her brother. Eli let out a sigh of exasperation. He didn’t want to take his baby sister with him. It would be easier to go with one of the guys, knowing that they would each be able to protect themselves. If Kimber went, Eli would be worried the entire time, his mind distracted, putting them both in danger.

  “No, Kimber. Not this time.”

  “She’s my mother, Eli.”

  Everyone in the group was silent while the siblings fought.

  “Not this time, Kimber. I can’t go out there and worry about you getting hurt. I need someone who can take care of themselves out there, so we can get mom back her safe.”

  Any other girl would have broken down. Tears would have welled up in their eyes and run down their cheeks. They would sob about how they were strong or maybe cave and say Eli was right. But not Kimber. There was a fiery passion that burned inside of her and she didn’t get sad or feel like crying. Anger pulsed through her, threateningly.

  “I can take care of myself. Don’t forget, that while you all were locked in classroom, I care to rescue you. I’m not helpless, Eli.” Her voice was seething, laced with a poisonous tone that gave Drew chills. She’d heard Kimber talk like this before, on the night Drew cheated and the day after. It was a side of Kimber she rarely saw, but when she did, it was actually scary.

  “As much fun as this is to watch,” Frankie said, stepping in-between the brother and sister spat, “It should be one from your group and one from ours. You’ll have to take the hummer and it's not exactly easy to drive or something we want to lose.”

  “Are you saying you don’t trust our group?” Eli said, forgetting the argument with his sister, and turning to the solider between them.

  “No, just that it only seems fair.”

  Eli had a terrible feeling, deep his gut. Maybe combining with this group wasn’t a great idea. He had trusted them right away at first, but maybe that was just because Sada was with them. A familiar face was had been a sight for sore eyes in the midst of everything that was going on around them, but now Eli was rethinking their decision. They were running the show and because their two leaders were soldiers, no one batted an eye.

  “One of us should go with you.” Frankie walked up closer to his friend, facing Eli.

  “No.” Levi’s voice sounded from behind Eli. His hands were moving like crazy again, twitching and twisting, pressing against the knuckles without cracking them. “It’s a risky endeavor already, without sending two of our strong members. It should be a girl.”

  “What is this kids deal, are you sexist or something?” Kimber said, in a fighting mood and ready to direct it at anyone.

  “Suggesting a girl go is actually the opposite of being sexist. It implies that I feel a female should have just as much right as a man to go, but it has nothing to do with that. It’s about preserving the integrity of group should something happen to those who leave.”

  “Nothing is going to happen to them,” Kimber’s voice was combative. The anger she had towards her brother was now being directed towards whoever disagreed with her.

  “You don’t know that. In fact, the odds of nothing happening to them are very low.”

  “Would you stop talking about odds?” She turned to face Levi, moving forward to him. Levi’s face was hung down, his eyes skittering across the floor and surrounding areas, but refusing to meet Kimber’s gaze. Conflict made him very uncomfortable and he hated fighting even when he knew he was right.

  “I’ll go,” Becky said, causing the members of both groups to turn and look at her.

  “That will work,” Frankie said with a smile meant to make it seem like everything was okay, but Eli could see it his eyes, that not all was well.

  Chapter Five

  The wheel on the shopping cart Drew grabbed from the front of the store w
obbled as she pushed it. It made a weird clinking noise as they moved through the aisle of canned vegetables. Somehow when each girl grabbed a cart, she got the broken one. Well not broken, but wobbly at least.

  “I don’t understand why we have to grab all this gross stuff in cans, we have a whole store to choose from.” Kimber had done nothing but complain since Frankie had handed out the jobs to everyone. She took issue when he sent her, Drew, and Sada to get food. Drew knew Kimber was anxious about Eli going to find their mother and was expressing it by complaining about being treated like little women.

  “Because canned food keeps longer. We could fill the car up with fresh fruits and vegetables and be out of food in a week.”

  Drew knew her explanation made sense and that it also didn’t matter to Kimber. When her complaining about the food wasn’t getting her anywhere, she switched subjects, back to the way Frankie was treating them.

  “He’s clearly sexist, sending only girls to go and gather food. I bet he thinks we’re all just helpless little girls who can’t do anything but cook and cater to them.”

  The three girls stopped in front of a section of vegetables and began filling the cart with various types of canned goods. Kimber’s face shown with disgust, scanning the shelves.

  “I don’t think it’s like that,” Sada said, “Frankie never struck me as sexist. He’s more protective and he understands that people have different strengths.” She continued to put cans of carrots in the metal cart. “It would be silly to send you to go pick out weapons and ammunition. You don’t know anything about those things. Food is simple, to the point. Plus,” She smiled at her friend, getting a good idea, “We can go through and pick out some extra stuff. Like chips and candy.”

  It wasn’t the most enticing thing, but it did make Kimber crack a smile. If they were picking out candy, chips, and other types of junk food, she could think of it as planning for a sleepover instead of preparing for the end of the world. It made it a little more fun and not so daunting. The three of them had attended many sleepovers growing up together, though not as many in the past year. Drew’s dad started to get weird about her staying over with other girls after she came out.

  A lot of people treated Drew and Kimber different after they came out together. The surprising part was that her fellow students and friends didn’t seem to care. In a small right-leaning town like Dyersville, Drew assumed at least some of her friends would be weird about it. It was mostly their parents who took issue with their sexual preference.

  After filling Drew’s cart with cans, the three friends turned to get more canned goods down a different aisle, each pushing their cart and trying to find a way to make this shopping experience seem better than it was. Nothing seemed to help and the silence is unbearable.

  “So what happened to you? How did you end up here?” Kimber asked, looking at Sada and hoping the questions weren’t too much. While Kimber had hoped to spend time with her girlfriend and friend pretending to be planning for a party, she was failing, and there were questions that she wanted to be answered. Now seemed as good a time as any. There wasn’t really anything else to talk about. She started pulling canned pasta and ravioli into her cart.

  “My parents,” Sada stumbled, somehow thinking it would be easier if she started at the beginning. It wasn’t easier, in fact, it was arguably harder, thinking about her dad waking her in the middle of the night. But these were her friends, if she could talk to anyone, it was them. “Woke me up at like, three in the morning. We packed some things and left Dyersville.” She searched her friend’s faces, looking for comfort. Kimber stopped pulling low-end Italian food off the shelf and offered her embrace to Sada. As she did when they first saw each other in the parking lot, Kimber hugged Sada. Her arms wrapped around her friend, squeezing her tight, both feeling and giving comfort. The two friends hugged, with their eyes closed, lost in the emotions and the tiredness that came with fighting for their lives. Sada and Kimber parted. Tears had fallen down from Sada’s eyes, brought on by the thoughts of her parents. She quietly wiped them away and turned back to their task.

  “Anyways, we went to Dubuque and when we got there, they sent us to the school.” She kept putting cans in the cart, over and over while she talked. “We should have just kept driving and not even stopped. Then,” she stopped, trying to find the words, “They’d still be alive.”

  She thought about to the last time she saw her parents. The classroom seemed so far away when her father was doing everything he could to protect her and her mother, but he didn’t know how. Watching the intense stress invade her father’s usually stable state of mind, cause him to make rash decisions, had been painful. For someone as careful and gentle as her father had been, seeing him turn into a scared man who couldn’t think straight broke her down in a way she would have never imagined. Her rock, the safest person in her life, was gone, pulled from her by the infected and eaten alive.

  “You don’t know that.” Drew’s voice was unwavering, “Honestly, you don’t, and you can’t think you had anything to do with them dying. It isn’t your fault.”

  “I don’t think it’s my fault at all,” Sada said, “He mad a bad choice. The only thing that was my fault was that I went back for my phone charger. I didn’t make it to the door in time and the other’s shut it.”

  “That isn’t something that is your fault. If you would have followed them, Sada, you would have died.”

  “Maybe that’s what was suppose to happen. Maybe I shouldn’t have let them die alone.”

  Kimber shook her head, watching her girlfriend trying to reason with her friend. It was hard to imagine losing both your parents and boyfriend in one day. Kimber could understand why Sada was upset, why she was talking this way, but as her friends, they had to find a way to pull her out of this.

  After filling the three carts with nonperishable food items, the three girls pushed the carts to the back of the store. Carefully they arranged the food in the back of the van. Next to the stacks of food, they placed packages of bottled water. The girls wandered through the store until they found thick sleeping bags, one for each of them. Sada thought of her dad, loading their sleeping bags in the back of the truck before they went to Dubuque, unrolling the sleeping bags and folding them. Then they stuck them over the food and water, hiding them from view, just in case.

  As the three of them walked back to where the group had made a makeshift place to sleep, Kimber was struck with an idea. She motioned for Drew and Sada to follow her, turning towards the home decor section.

  “Kimber, what are you doing?” Drew asked.

  “I have an idea.” She began pulling comforters and pillows off the shelf. “This is our last night here, right? We should make the most of it.”

  Drew and Sada stood still, doing nothing, not understanding what Kimber was talking about.

  “What do you mean?”

  “We should have a slumber party. Make beds and junk food, watch a movie.” Looking at her girlfriend and her friend, she continued. “This might be our last chance to feel normal. We don’t know what’s going to happen when we leave.”

  “Life may never be the same,” Sada said, understanding exactly what Kimber was trying to do. She grabbed a white and pink comforter off the shelf, realizing that she didn’t have anywhere to put it. “Drew you should get another cart.”

  Drew smiled, a genuine, happy smile. Getting on board, she went and got a cart, leaving Kimber and Sada to plan out the evening’s festivities. It was the perfect place to plan the ultimate slumber party. The girls literally had everything they would need at their fingertips. After picking out blankets and pillows for everyone, Drew went to find Jasper hoping he could set up a movie. Kimber and Sada started gather junk food and sodas.

  Jasper, king of Wal-Mart’s technology department set up a projector and a movie screen. He was all for the idea of a normal night even though he was sure Frankie and Palen would object. They were too busy packing up all the weapons and gear needed to take with
them. After the meeting, they had given everyone a job, besides Rion who had her hands full with Cash and needed to rest.

  Eli was mostly tending to Rion, getting the things that she needed to care for Cash. Levi was sent with Johnny and Becky to guard the door at the front. Each of them would have to do a shift, but Frankie wanted to pair them with the right people, one who knew how to shoot and one who didn’t. Part of the time spent at the door was also meant as a time to teach everyone to use a weapon. They couldn’t shoot the weapon, but they could at least learn how to aim and hold it properly. Jasper and Carin had been sent to get survival gear, like flares, tents, and first aid kits.

  Jasper and Kimber could complain about the way Frankie and Frankie were running things, but they couldn’t say anything bad about their plan. They had thought about every detail, knew what to get and how to pack it. Each person would also be allowed to pack one bag of personal items, Rion getting two, one for her and one for Cash.

  Carin and Drew brought beanbag chairs and sat them down in front of the screen. It was starting to look like a real slumber party.

  “You know, the soldiers probably aren’t going to like this,” Jasper said while he set up the laptop that was connected to the projector.

  “Honestly,” Kimber said, stacking pillows to make comfortable places for everyone to lay down, “I don’t care.”

  Jasper smiled, coming over towards her with a stack of dvds. “So what should we watch? I left out anything too scary and all the seasons of the Walking Dead.”

  Kimber laughed out loud, smiling so hard her cheeks hurt. It felt good to laugh because something was truly funny, and it was funny to think about all of them sitting around watching the Walking Dead when they were actually living it.

  “My vote is for something dumb and funny.” Jasper noticed that her eyes sparkled when she smiled and seeing her smile made him feel warm inside.

  “That sounds perfect.”

  “What are you guys up to?” Palen asked as he and Frankie came back from loading the weapons and their personal bags into the vehicles.