How to Start Living (in the Zombie Apocalypse)

by T. L. Walker

  "I'd better go in first." Luke adjusted the strap of one of his bags and knocked softly on the door, which my mother opened moments later. I saw her step aside to let him in, and I gestured for our new acquaintances to follow.

  The next thing I heard was Mom's stern voice. "What's all this? Where are Mike and Charlie?"

  "We're here, Mom." I squeezed into the foyer, Mike at my heels.

  "Cheryl, this is Daniel and Lauren and their daughter Mabel. They showed up at the gas station while we were there. They had nowhere else to go, no car, and Daniel is almost out of ammo for his gun. I thought it would be best to bring them back with us, at least for now."

  "It seems mighty convenient that they would appear out of thin air in the short time you were at the station." Mom looked at me out of the corner of her eye; I shrugged.

  "I've got his gun, and they've got a child. Plus Luke insisted." I flashed him a sarcastic smile. He frowned at me and turned away.

  Mom's expression – and voice – softened immediately. "Of course he did."

  I rolled my eyes. Is everyone but me under his spell? Of course, as soon as I asked myself this I remembered the feel of his hands roaming my body, his solid arms supporting me, the way he looked at me when he was amused, or didn't look at me when he was frustrated with me... Oh for fuck's sake, Charlie, pull yourself together.

  "We have plenty of room here," Mom continued. "If you want your privacy, you may want to sleep in the basement bedroom, but we can figure that out later. First let's get you some food."

  By the end of the day we had inventoried our new supplies and Daniel, Lauren, and Mabel had made themselves at home. I suppose I'd known that the moment Mom laid eyes on that child, she'd never be able to insist that these people leave – not soon...and not later, either.

  That evening we fired up the generator and allowed ourselves hot showers – all of us – while Mom cooked a big dinner. Vegetarian still, but at this point I wasn't sure I'd be able to eat meat again anytime soon.

  And when dinner was over, Mom whispered something in Luke's ear. He nodded, smiling, and disappeared from the kitchen. I heard him rummaging around somewhere, and when he came back he had a bottle of wine in each hand. "There's plenty more where this came from," he announced. "Cheryl thought that we should celebrate our successful run today, and our new friends."

  "The more the merrier, at times like these," Mom piped up. I raised my eyebrows – my mother had never been one to surround herself with people; in fact, she generally liked being alone. And the wine...well, that was an entirely different matter. Our father had been something of a teetotaler, and I was vastly curious as to whether Mom had started a wine collection before or after he'd passed away.

  Why do you even care? Just enjoy yourself for once! Even as I told myself to do so, though, I wondered whether drinking this wine would really be celebratory, or merely a way to attempt to forget everything that had happened in the past few days.

  Not that I let that stop me from accepting the large glass of the Veramonte Cabernet Sauvignon that my mother poured for me. We drank and talked, drank and boarded up the windows, drank and played cards. As the night wore on, one by one the others went to bed – Mabel fell asleep in her father's arms, and soon after that Daniel and Lauren said their goodnights. Mom was next, clearly tipsy from the two glasses of wine she'd enjoyed. Mike stayed up until I called him out for nodding off, at which point he grumbled at me and went upstairs.

  I had lost count of how many glasses of wine I'd drank when Luke suddenly excused himself to help Joey to the room they were sharing. I leaned back on the couch and closed my eyes, losing myself for a moment as I scratched Holden's head and breathed deeply, wishing that I could calm myself down enough to meditate. But the sound of footsteps startled me out of my reverie, and both Holden and I sat up straight, peering into the darkness. The candles had long since been put out, and my eyes weren't adjusting fast enough. The thought that it could be Daniel crossed my mind, and I called out softly, "Who's there?"

  "It's just me, Charlie."

  Luke. Basically the last person I expected it to be...but if I was honest with myself, the only person I wanted it to be. "I thought you'd gone to bed."

  "No. Just helping Joey. His ankle - "

  "Is probably fine. He's milking this for all it's worth."

  "I'm actually worried it's broken. He doesn’t want to worry your mom, but he's in more pain than he's letting on. I'm thinking about fixing up a splint for him. If it doesn't heal properly..." I felt the couch cushions shift as Luke sat down just a couple of feet away.

  "Too bad none of us is a doctor...unless Daniel or Lauren is holding something back."

  "I had some medical training when I was in the service. It'll suffice so long as nothing really over the top happens."

  "Well aren't you just Mr. Perfect." The words were out of my mouth before I realized that yet again, I was saying something I shouldn't.

  Maybe the alcohol had loosened Luke up a bit, though, because he just snorted and said, "I've got my good qualities, even if some people don't want to see them."

  "And you understand the art of sarcasm. How endearing."

  "Shut up, Charlie." I felt him move toward me, and suddenly his hand was on my shoulder, turning me to face him. "What you said yesterday – about me being the only available guy – did you mean that?"

  "Well I’m sure as hell not about to put the moves on my brother or a fifteen-year-old boy," I replied weakly. I knew that this wasn’t the answer he was looking for, but then he hadn’t really asked the right question, either.

  "You know what I meant. But if that’s the way you want to be, then just forget it." Exasperated, Luke released me and leaned back into the couch. I could see his outline as he balanced his elbows on his knees and leaned forward, pressing his fingertips to either side of his head and massaging his temples.

  I bit down on my lip. I knew what the truth was, but I just wasn’t sure if I should – or even could – say it. It had been a long time since I’d dated, if that’s even what you could call this…but Dave and I had played coy games with each other for nearly a year before we finally buckled down and had the "we like each other and should be in a relationship" discussion. And how in hell did a discussion like that even factor into this world, anyway?

  "What do you want me to say?" I finally asked.

  "Huh?"

  "I need to know what you want me to say."

  "Jesus, Charlie, you’re ridiculous. I want you to say what you want to say." He paused and drew a deep breath. "I just want you to be honest with me, is that really so much to ask? Especially now that we’ve risked our lives together not once, not twice, but three times?"

  He has you there. I squeezed my eyes shut for a moment. "No, I suppose it’s not too much to ask. The thing is, though, I’m really not sure what to say. I mean…we barely know each other." Silence. Apparently he really was going to refuse to give me any guidance. "Fine. You’re attractive, I’ll give you that. I don’t really know much about your friendship with my brother, but he seems to trust you, which is a pretty big deal – Joey…has a hard time trusting people. And whatever you did for my mom, she’s smitten with you as well."

  "I’m not asking about how Joey or your mom feels about me, Charlie. I’m asking why you…wanted me. Or rather, asking you to clarify what you said about wanting me."

  "Yeah…I know," I admitted. I grimaced, glad that the darkness hid my expression from him. "The problem is, things aren’t the way they used to be, and they’ll very likely never be that way again. If I saw you pass by on the street in my old life, sure, I would have given you a second look. If I’d gone down to visit Joey – which in and of itself probably wouldn’t have happened – and he introduced you to me, and we talked, I’m sure I would have known that you were the type of guy I’d like to get to know better. If my brother had brought home someone else, someone who wasn’t you, who I maybe wasn’t as attracted to, or who was kind of an ass, then…
well, I guess I probably wouldn’t have thrown myself at that person. But he brought you, and…well, here we are."

  "Yeah. Here we are."

  The silence between us stretched for several long moments, until finally I couldn’t take it anymore. "Was that a good enough answer for you?" My voice was so low that when Luke didn’t reply for quite some time, I wondered if he’d even heard me. I had just about resolved to go to bed when he finally spoke.

  "For now, yeah, I suppose it was. "

  "For now? Luke, I’m sorry, I just – "

  He kissed me then. He was so quick about it that I hardly even noticed that he’d moved toward me, but then his mouth was hot on mine and our embrace lasted so long that when he finally pulled away – just a bit – I was practically gasping for air. I reached for him again, and he laughed softly, holding me back just enough so that my lips couldn’t find his. "Does your offer from yesterday still stand?" he whispered.

  "Yes. If you’d like to come upstairs – "

  "I would."

  I groped for his hand, found it, and we stood. Holden followed us up the stairs, but when I shut my door behind the three of us I said, "It’s the floor for you, boy. At least for a little while." I fumbled to light the candle on my nightstand, and when its flame was casting flickering shadows on the walls Luke sat down on the edge of my bed and pulled me into his lap. "Will you stay with me tonight?" I murmured into his ear. I felt him nod, and then I searched for his mouth again.

  This time, he let me kiss him.

  Never pass up the chance to collect supplies.

  PART TWO

  Three

  Months

  In

  Chapter 5

  Farm Life

  "We have to leave." My chest was heaving, my arms shaking with exhaustion. "We can barely go outside anymore, and there are no stores left to raid around here, anyway. If we don’t go soon, we’ll be overrun."

  "Mom’s not going to like it."

  "She’s right, Joe. Every day we stay here is one day closer to us not being able to leave at all." Luke sounded as tired as I felt. I wanted to lose myself in his embrace, I wanted to sleep for a day or a week or a month, I wanted to never have to leave my bed again. Of course we didn’t have that luxury...not that I believed that either one of us would put up with just hiding away and waiting for death – or was it undeath? – to come find us.

  "If you hadn’t always agreed with her before you started sleeping with her, I’d wonder about you, Luke," Joey sighed.

  "Not in the mood, Joey," I warned.

  "When are you ever?"

  I knew that he was teasing and I forced myself to smile at him. Before I could reply, though, Lauren rushed into the room with a bucket of water and some cloths. "Better wash up. You know how Cheryl feels about the smell of those things."

  "It’s pretty much permeated the entire house by now," I pointed out. "Not that I won’t try to get rid of it, anyway." But what’s the point? The question went unasked, but it was there nonetheless, poisoning the air between us as much as the stench of the zeds did.

  So much had changed in the past few months that I barely remembered the person I’d been or the life I’d lived before this. I mean, I’m no idiot – of course I’d known that when the dead began to rise and shuffle around looking for people to eat, things would never be the same again – but as time had passed, we realized more and more how little we knew about what was going on. We were sheltered here on the farm, so when the first of what we now called ‘super zeds’ showed up, we didn’t know what to do, or how to handle it.

  I guess I need to backtrack a bit. After all, a lot can happen in three months, and in this world it seems like any and everything can happen, period. So let’s see…where did I leave off…

  Oh, that’s right. The farm was safe, we had plenty of food and water and fuel, and our original group of five had grown to eight. And there were still eight of us now, but with every day that passed I wondered more and more how much longer that was going to last. You see, we were out of fuel except for what was in the vehicles, and we knew better than to siphon from that. We’d had to start rationing food, though thankfully we were still getting just enough to eat. We were okay with water, thanks to the natural springs on the property, but collecting it had become a pretty big hassle. In fact, that was what we were just doing outside – filling up on water – and let’s just say that it didn’t go so well.

  But didn’t you have the zed problem under control, at least on the farm? you ask. Well, sure we did – until they started learning.

  Sounds crazy, doesn’t it? I mean, I’m still not sure that ‘learning’ is even the proper word for what they were doing. They hadn’t started talking yet, anyway. But in the beginning they were slow, stupid, quick to lose their focus – if you could even call it that. What they had now, three months later, may still have only been motor function, but it was certainly far more of it than they had right away. It appeared that when they first rose from the dead, they were almost like infants – it took them hours, at the very least, to even pick themselves up, to move from whatever position they’d been in when they died.

  And after that they stumbled and shuffled like – well, like toddlers, I suppose. This phase seemed to last days, possibly even a couple of weeks. As we didn’t know where they’d all come from in the first place, or how long ago any of them had died, it was hard to tell when they stopped being toddlers and became, in a sense, ‘adolescents’. We figured that was the best way to refer to this particular stage, if only because it was when they were most easily distracted. Faster, steadier on their feet then they’d been at first, but still generally, well, stupid.

  The problem was, about a month and a half into things, it was like a switch went off. Suddenly we started encountering zeds that moved nearly as fast as we could. Not only that, but they could figure out stairs, and then fences. Eventually it was ladders, simple doors, how to use their feet and fists to break through glass…

  So yeah, there’s really no other way to describe it other than to say that somehow, some way, they were learning.

  We started calling them super zeds right after the day we made a run to the closest supermarket and saw one of them look at its hand, make a fist, and punch the glass window separating it from us. Especially when the zed right next to our ingenious buddy followed suit and took its fist to the glass as well.

  We barely made it out of there alive that morning, and what we were able to gather in terms of supplies was meager at best. Still, we assumed it must have been some sort of fluke. We allowed ourselves a day off to recoup, and then we – quite stupidly, mind you – returned to the same supermarket.

  Did they know that this was the type of place that would attract the living? I don’t think it had gone quite that far, but we couldn’t deny that the parking lot and the store itself were both crawling with zeds, far too many for us to handle. "We’re okay on food. We should go," Luke said, obviously regretting our decision to attempt another run, period.

  I nodded my agreement, and in the backseat Joey and Mike remained silent...but we all knew, in that moment, that things had changed. That the balance was no longer in our favor. The scales were tipped the other way.

  Not two days later, the farm saw its first zed in weeks. Luke and I took care of it, but by the end of that week there were more, and more, and no matter how often we killed them, there were always new ones to take the place of the ones that we got rid of. We killed off the chickens, then, wasting more meat than I’m willing to admit...but it was our only choice, what with the noise they tended to make.

  And now here we were – tired, above all, and more often than not hungry, thirsty, dirty, smelly. "It’s not worth it anymore," I grumbled as I wiped the zed goo off my skin. "There’s got to be some kind of shelter or home that wasn’t overrun. I mean…what about the military bases, or the National Guard? What about FEMA? The Red Cross? Something, anything…"

  "I’d like to think that the milit
ary was able to get things under control somewhere, but I just don’t know if we can trust that to be the case," Luke admitted. "And FEMA is worthless." His lip curled in disgust.

  "Fine, whatever. I still think we should pack up and try going back to the city. We’re just too exposed here, and at least up there if we want to go on a run there are plenty of stores within walking distance."

  Luke took hold of my arm and gently pulled me out of the room and down the hall a bit, so that we were away from the others. He bent his head so that his mouth was right next to my ear. "You know I agree with you, Charlie, but this is something we need to discuss as a group. You and I promised that we would stop making decisions without consulting the others, and we need to stick by that. If we don’t, things will fall apart."

  I tucked my chin into my chest and mumbled, "You mean faster than they’re falling apart now?"

  "I heard that, and yes. Now come on, let’s get upstairs and enjoy what little daylight we have left. " Today’s water run had taken longer than we’d expected. It seemed like every ten feet there was another zed stumbling toward us, and now that they were quite a bit faster than they’d been at first, dispatching them took more time and effort. On the rare occasion that we met with a newly-turned zed, it was practically worth a celebration over how easy they were to take out. Not that any of them had been that easy today.

  "We can’t go another day without talking to them about this. And by ‘them’, I mean my mother. She seems to be the only one who is oblivious about the fact that we need to leave the farm."

  Luke ran his hand through my hair, which I still insisted on keeping cropped close to my head, and pulled my face close to his. "She’s stubborn. Just like someone else I know," he murmured, and then he kissed me.