The woman scowled. "Oh, don't say that."
"Please," Sarah said. Her eyes grew red from the tears. The woman wiped her with the rag again and gently cooed to her.
"There will be none of that," she said.
"You don't understand," Sarah said.
"Oh, I do understand. You're not the only one who lost children."
Sarah's sobs were cut short. "You lost your children?"
The woman nodded. "All three of them. My husband too. My parents, my brothers and sisters. Everyone I ever knew or loved died."
"Oh my God," Sarah said, trying to bring a hand to her mouth.
The woman frowned at the sight of her trying to do this and said, "Here, it's against the rules, but let me undo this for you." She leaned over to the side of the bed and undid the straps, pulling them out from their loops and letting them hang over the sides of the bed.
"There," she said, "does that feel better?"
Sarah rubbed the top of her wrists where the straps pressed against them, then wiped the tears away from her eyes with her hands.
"How did it happen?" Sarah asked.
"How did I lose my kids?"
Sarah nodded.
"My husband and I were running with our children through Raleigh. We were running away from some bandits who were trying to kill us, and we were in this building that had been damaged by a truck crashing into it. As we hid in one of the rooms, the floor gave out below us, and we fell to the story below. We were all knocked out, and when I woke up, zombies were eating my family. I was at the back of the room, so they hadn't gotten to me yet. I was so scared, and I didn't know what to do. I just kneeled there in the back of the room crying, watching it all happen in front of me. One of them started coming after me and I got scared and ran. I ran through the streets and managed to find an old clothing store to hide in. Then I finally ran into Kenny—you'll meet him here later—and at first I thought he was a bandit, but he told me he was from Noah's Ark and he brought me in. Noah welcomed me into here and we've been like family ever since."
"That's horrible," Sarah said.
"It's a big, horrible place out there," the woman said. "I know it's the hardest thing in the world to get past, but time heals all wounds, even these ones. Not completely, but with time, you'll come to understand, I guarantee it. All the folks around here have seen loss, whether it's their kids, their siblings, their friends, their husbands and wives... very few people here have any family left at all, and it takes a heavy toll on all of us. I know it seems like you want to end all your pain right now, but that's not the answer, I promise you. We have a real good thing going here. Noah has a real gift as a leader, and he has a great vision for the future. He's a good man."
"Noah runs this place?" Sarah asked.
"Yep. You've already met him."
"I have?"
"Mhmm. He's the one who..." Her eyes faltered and looked at the floor. "Well... he's the one who pulled you off your son, as I hear it."
Sarah never even got a good look at him; all she felt were his strong arms wrapped around her as he dragged her away from David.
"Hold on a minute," the woman said with a smile. "I'll go fetch him."
Sarah opened her mouth to protest, but the woman already turned and left the room.
A few minutes later, she returned with a very handsome man behind her who looked to be in his late thirties. He had wavy brown hair and the most piercing blue eyes she'd ever seen. He walked in the room with a smile and came right up to her bedside, cupping her hand in his.
"It's so good to see that you're awake," he said in a very soothing voice. "I'm Noah."
"Sarah," she said.
"I'll let you two introduce yourselves," the woman said, leaving the room.
"Why don't you sit up?" Noah said, helping arrange a few pillows behind her. He bent down to the bottom of the bed and undid the straps covering her legs.
She bent her knees and her legs cried out in joy at the ability to bend and move around for the first time in a while.
He helped her shift up in the bed so she could sit up against the pillows, and he sat down on the bed next to her and held her hand in his, brushing the back of her hand with his thumb. It felt so good to her, and it was the only pleasurable feeling she felt in a long time.
"I'm so sorry about what happened to your son."
She stared down at the bed.
"I know you're going to need some time to yourself to process all of this," he said, "but when you're ready, I'll tell you all about this place and show you around."
She nodded. The last thing she felt like doing was getting out of bed, and she just couldn't bring herself to be excited about this place if her son wasn't there with her.
Noah patted her hand and stood up and turned to leave the room.
"Is this really a safe haven?" she asked. "Is it really the kind of place that everyone talked about?"
Noah stopped and turned around. "I think this place has become a bit of a legend among people outside of it. One person tells the story, and then they turn around and tell the next person a more exaggerated version of the story. I don't know exactly what you heard about this place or what you think it is, but it's safe here. We've got food and water, we've got shelter, and we're safe from everything outside our walls."
She nodded again.
He smiled and left the room.
A couple days later, Sarah finally felt up to leaving her bed. The woman who tended to her had trusted her and kept the straps off, and she was grateful for it. They brought her food and water, and it was all fresh food, not like the canned stuff she was used to eating over the past week. It reminded her of the garden that she and David tended to; fresh vegetables and fruits, and they even had fresh eggs. She thought about David every waking moment of every day, but somehow, like the woman said, even the deepest wounds could heal in time. She sat alone in bed for a long time, contemplating suicide. But there was something inside of her that told her not to do it. She didn't know why she didn't—she knew there certainly wasn't any reason for her to live anymore—but she just couldn't do it.
She came out of the room after changing into some clothes that they had left her for when she was ready, and she walked out onto a metal catwalk overlooking Noah's Ark.
They were in a big compound, surrounded by high metal walls made of corrugated sheet metal, just like the ones that the bandits had surrounded the city with. The walls had to be at least twenty-five feet high, and there were tall, wide piles of sandbags behind all of it, reinforcing it. A set of wide gates sat off to the far end of the compound that looked like they could be dragged open for people to enter or exit the place, and there were little outposts along the top of the wall with heavily-armed men sitting in them, looking over the land beyond, just like the bandits. But all of these men looked clean and well-fed and groomed, and they all looked like decent men. And off in the distance, above an overgrown, grassy hill that spanned in front of them, she saw the big boat ride sitting at the edge of the carnival.
Various boxes and supplies sat organized in the compound in front of her, and there were a couple of fire pits, with some people of all ages sitting around talking to each other. Children were running around playing with each other, and tears rolled down her face again, knowing that it was David's dream to come here. But somehow watching the children run around playing comforted her and made her feel like David's hope was alive after all, even if not for him.
She walked down from a set of stairs leading from the catwalk down to the ground below. She took a few steps back and looked at the building that she'd come from. Their whole operation was obviously a makeshift setup in the middle of an abandoned field, but a huge two-story building sat in front of her, and it looked like a modern house. Instead of being built from broken scraps of whatever material they could find, it looked like it was made properly from all the right cuts of lumber. It was finished and painted, with a solid roof that was fully shingled.
A set of
wide doors were open on the ground floor of the building, leading to what looked like a big dining hall inside. Tables sat side-by-side in long lines, with candles all along them for the nighttime when it got dark. It was all immaculately clean, and she could see the edge of what looked like a small kitchen off to the side through a doorway.
She looked at the second floor of the building again and saw all of the windows spanning the side of it, and she wondered what was in there. She moved along the grounds to the side of the building near a set of metal sheds. She passed some groups of people on the way and they looked at her and smiled. She tried to smile back out of courtesy, but it felt forced. She walked around behind a metal wall and saw Noah standing there, talking to two men.
He glanced over at her. "Sarah! I'm so glad you joined us. Let me introduce you to Kenny." He motioned over to a mountain of a man, who was very tall and easily two hundred and fifty pounds, in equal parts fat and muscle, with a big mustache and a long mullet. "He was one of the men with me when we found you."
Kenny nodded at her.
"And this is Wayne," Noah said. The other man said hello in an Australian accent. He had a thin frame with well-toned muscles and looked to be in his late forties or early fifties, and had black hair that was just starting to turn gray.
Noah turned back toward the two men and said a couple words to them, then excused himself from them.
He came to her and put a hand on her shoulder, guiding her out to the main grounds. He gave her a tour of the whole place, showing her the dormitories, the lavatories, the infirmary that she was already familiar with, the kitchen and cafeteria, the greenhouse, the vegetable gardens and fruit trees that they had for the summers, the wells that they had dug into the ground for fresh water, and even the chicken coops where they produced fresh eggs. They finished off the tour by taking a walk all around the inside of the perimeter, and then climbed up a ladder onto the outer catwalk that led to all of the outposts spanning the top of the perimeter wall.
They both stood on the catwalk, leaning on the wall and staring off at the carnival up the hill to the north.
"So I think I can guess why you call this place Noah's Ark," she said, looking at the boat ride in the carnival that drew her and David there.
He laughed. "Yeah, that wasn't my idea, so don't blame me if it's corny."
"I like it," she said with a soft smile.
"Well then it was my idea," he said.
They looked at each other warmly for a moment, then turned their gazes back to the carnival.
"Don't the bandits ever try to attack you?" she asked.
"They did in the beginning, because they didn't know who they were messing with. They thought we were just another small camp of people that they could terrorize, but we gave them a rude awakening. Ever since, they've always given a wide berth to this place. Quite honestly, I'm surprised they chased you all the way to the carnival. Usually they don't come within a couple miles of this place."
"How can they have the whole city closed off?" she asked. "It seemed like they controlled this whole place."
"Well, that was their intention. It's a big city and there are a lot of supplies and a lot of useful things in it, even still to this day. They slowly walled off most of the city and tried to claim it as their own, but all of us here were already in the city and sort of formed our own refuge within their prison."
"So you're stuck here?"
"Yes and no. They haven't walled off the whole city. They love to scavenge anything they can, but even that's a lot of material for them. There are holes in their perimeter with no wall that they don't even patrol. Back roads, ways with no real use to them, even if someone else comes or goes through them. Controlling the main highways and roads into the city are the most important to them, because they know that's where all the fresh travelers will come from."
Noah looked at all the cuts and bruises that covered her skin, which were now starting to heal. "I'm real sorry you had to go through them. You're lucky to have survived."
"It was thanks to my son. He helped me escape from them."
"He sounds like he was a brave boy."
"He was." She broke down into tears and he put an arm around her. "It's so hard without him," she said. "I don't know what I'm doing anymore."
"I know it's hard," he said, "but we're all here for you. There are lots of people around here that I know would love to make your acquaintance. I'll introduce you to some."
She wiped the tears from her eyes. "So what's the point of this all? What's the point of living in a place like this at all? Me and David lived in a set of townhouses, just the two of us. All of the townhouses surrounded this courtyard that we built fences around. It was a safe place where no one bothered us, where we could grow food, just like this place. We traveled all this way, and I lost my son, just to trade it all for a bigger version of the same thing. What's the point of it all?" she asked again.
Noah considered her words before answering. "There's so much more to it than that, though," he said. "Are you familiar with the story of Noah's ark in the Bible?"
"Sure I am."
"Well Noah's Ark isn't just a silly name to use for this place. It has a similar meaning. I know it doesn't seem like much now, because we're just getting started. But we're working to save all of humanity."
She looked at him as her heart skipped a beat. "What do you mean?"
"In the Bible, Noah built an ark and collected two of every animal and kept them safe inside with his family as floods covered the entire planet, washing away the evils of the old world so that life could be restored to the way it was originally intended.
"I believe I'm being given a similar opportunity," he continued. "We're not content to just live in a shelter until we all die of old age; we want to rise up and be held safely aloft above the floodwaters to see the new world, the world that was back before it all went wrong. But this time, we are the floodwaters. We're the agents of change that are going to strike down this plague of zombies and these evil men, and restore order and balance to the world, and start humanity again back to the way it was before we lost everything. Don't be fooled by us hiding behind these walls. We're very much an offensive force too, and we're going to wipe out these bandits and these zombies, and rebuild. History will remember us as the founders of this movement. There's so much out there that you haven't seen yet and don't even know about, and a lot of it is scary, but I'm here to help you through it if you want to take my hand and accept this call to you. We could use a good person like you to help us in our mission. Do it for your son. Do it for everyone else who lost a son. I know he would be proud of you."
Sarah smiled at him. She'd never expected this place to be anything more than a safe haven, which it was, and she never thought that she would be able to help get the world back to the way it used to be.
As she looked out toward the horizon, she thought of her husband and her son. She thought of them both walking hand-in-hand, in their brilliant white glow, watching over her. Her fingers ran along her necklace, turning the beads and feeling the warmth that it gave to her. She knew her son would be proud of her.
She slowly moved her hand along the top of the wall and found Noah's. He looked down at it for a moment, then smiled at her and held her hand in his as they both looked out to the horizon.
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Other books in the Zombie Apocalypse Series:
A Rising Tide
Ashes in the Mouth
In Shadows
; Coming soon:
Scourge of Evil
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Jeff DeGordick is a horror and post-apocalyptic novelist currently living in southern Ontario, Canada. Writing stories was his first passion as a child, but he's also had forays into testing and designing videos games for a living, and a very brief career as a cook.
He began writing in 1994 at age seven, embarking on a long journey of spinning strange and sometimes gruesome tales, penning many short stories and partial novels as a hobby, including a published novel and short story on Amazon under a pen name.
Currently, he's continuing work on the Zombie Apocalypse Series and sowing the seeds for a new horror series in the not-so-distant future.
Table of Contents
Copyright
Foreword
1. The Fall of Man
2. Eight Years Later
3. Travelers' Tale
4. Lurking in the Dark
5. David's Gift
6. On the Road
7. Checked Out
8. Refuge
9. Back on the Trail
10. Roadblock
11. Out of the Frying Pan…
12. …And into the Fire
13. School's Out
14. Hillsboro Blues
15. A Late-Night Snack
16. Durham
17. The Bridge
18. Guardian Angels
19. Jailbreak
20. A Warm Welcome
21. Confessions
22. David's Army
23. End of the Line
24. Noah's Ark
Afterword
About the Author
Zombie Apocalypse Series (Book 1): The Fall of Man Page 23