by M. E. Betts
I think the undead were north and west earlier, not east...Jesus, what could have happened? I was only in there for ten minutes, tops. The words resonated flatly through her lonely mind, as if from the inside of a quiet car being pummeled with fat raindrops.
She reached the street, peering eastward as she searched for some sign of her companions. As she began to circle the building, she wondered about the people she had met inside the radio building, pondering their intentions. Should I have trusted them? she thought, edging into full-blown panic as she rounded the southwest corner, having nearly encircled the building.
As she neared the front entrance once again, she began to doubt that her new acquaintances were to blame for Daphne and Hugo's absence. Wouldn't explain where my horse went, she thought as she raked her fingers through her hair, oblivious to the fact that she had ripped out a couple dozen strands in the process. She turned toward the intercom beside the door, formulating an idea as she pressed the buzzer.
"Phoebe?" she began. "Professor Hewett?" After a moment, she heard Phoebe's voice in response.
"Yeah," Phoebe said, "we noticed you're still here. Where are your friends?"
"I don't know," Shari said. "I was hoping your sniper did, though."
Phoebe scoffed. "He didn't do anything to them."
"No," Shari said. "That's not what I meant. I mean, did he happen to see where they went, or what happened to them?"
Phoebe was silent for about twenty seconds before she responded. "No, he said he didn't see anything," she said.
Shari brought her hands together, touching her lips, and gazed toward the sky, letting out an apprehensive sigh. After the better part of minute, Phoebe spoke up again. "So...uh, what are you gonna do?"
Shari shook her head as she surveyed the area around her, her eyes dazed and her pupils dilated. "I don't know," she said, barely loud enough for Phoebe to make out through the intercom. "But I have to find them."
"You're looking a little...rough," Phoebe said. "You sure you're okay to go off looking for them?"
"Time's a-wastin'," Shari mumbled as she spun on one heel and started toward the road.
Hugo slammed the door of the trailer, locking Eva safely inside. "We won't have to worry about her," he said matter-of-factly, "as long as she doesn't starve or die of thirst."
"We won't be leaving her for long," Daphne said. "We should hurry back to Shari, though. She'll probably be done in there pretty soon."
"Don't you think she'll be mad that we left her horse here?" Hugo asked.
Daphne shook her head. "She should have thought about that before she left us with her horse while undead were closing in around us. I don't know about you, but I didn't feel like riding around on that thing trying to evade zombies. You and me, we can go into the radio building if we have to. That horse, on the other hand, would've been zombie shit if we got surrounded." She started toward the radio building, leaving Hugo standing, momentarily puzzled, behind her.
"Do zombies shit?" he muttered to himself. He shook himself back into the present, turning to jog down the street after Daphne.
Shari reached into her inner jacket pocket, producing a cigarette case and lighter.
I just need to relax, she tried to convince herself. I'm sure there's some explanation for this. I just need to keep calm, keep it cool, and I'll find them.
She inhaled long and deep as she strode down the brick road in front of the radio building. She heard the dragging and scraping of undead all around her, but from the sound of it, she was guessing they weren't very fresh. She quickened her pace, ejecting twin plumes of smoke from her nostrils.
As she made her way east, she heard the unmistakably human sound of a cough coming from her left. She stopped cold in her tracks, turning toward the sound as she produced her .357. She ducked behind an abandoned box truck, peering through the back window at a side street where she suspected the sound had come from.
"Who the fuck's there?" she demanded. She sat for two minutes, frozen still, as she waited for the unknown survivor to reveal itself.
"I should warn you," she said, her arms shaking and her face sweating as she pointed her revolver in the direction of the sound, "I'll take your unwillingness to show yourself to be a sign of hostility."
Her threat was met with silence, other than a slight quickening of the undead as they made their way toward Shari's voice. She crept out from behind the truck, revolver raised, and began to make her way down the narrow side street north of her. A large group of undead was nearing the intersection about a block ahead of her, advancing from the west.
She cocked her head in confusion as her gaze seized on a man with jet-black hair approaching the intersection from the east, heading directly toward the cluster of zombies. He smirked at Shari as he ambled nonchalantly down the street, hands in his pockets. Shari frowned. What the fuck is he doing? The mystery man raised his right hand, his index finger pointed at Shari like a gun.
"Bang, bang!" he mouthed tauntingly as he pointed his index finger with his thumb raised, mimicking a gun, and pretended to shoot Shari twice.
She experienced a sickening sensation as she was faced with a sudden realization. Holy shit--it's that sadist from the Kentucky border. He got away, and he's back. With that, he cackled and vanished behind a building on the opposite of the intersection, disappearing from Shari's view.
Jesus, Shari thought as she hurried toward the intersection, did he just commit suicide in the worst possible way? She saw no sign of the sadist, and she realized, much to her bewilderment, that the zombies who clogged the narrow street didn't seem to notice that a human had just mingled with them. They only marched, steadily but slowly, in her direction. She shook off her confoundment, realizing that the immediate task at hand was to put as much distance as possible between herself the the odorous, decaying army which was now mere meters away from her. She turned and fled eastward, the sound of her boots echoing through the dead streets as she ran.
"I know there was an Army surplus store around here somewhere," Daphne said as she and Hugo made their way eastward along the wall of the reeking, overrun settlement. "I saw a sign for it on the way here."
"What are you looking for in there?" Hugo asked.
"Lots of stuff that might be useful," Daphne replied. "Compasses, magnesium sticks to start fires more easily, clotting packs to stop bleeding...I could go on and on. Lotsa small stuff that we can squeeze into our packs."
Hugo nodded. "You know a lot about survival, huh?"
"I guess you could say that," Daphne muttered.
"How did you learn all that?" Hugo asked.
"I taught myself," Daphne said. "When I was a kid."
Hugo nodded, his expression inquisitive. "Oh." He wanted to ask more, but he could sense Daphne's reluctance to go into details. "Well," he continued, "I'm glad I found you and Shari. You two seem to know a lot of useful things."
"So do you," Daphne said. "It seems like you're a quick learner. I wouldn't be surprised if you get to know more than Shari and me before too much longer." She glanced over at Hugo, who was grinning sheepishly and beginning to blush.
"Yeah," he said. "I guess I pick things up pretty fast." They walked on in silence for a few minutes, the early afternoon August sun beating down on them and casting shortened shadows of their forms to the east ahead of them. Hugo stopped to pick up a weathered notebook that lay on the road in front of him. "English lit," he read from the words scrawled on the front cover, opening it to thumb through the pages. The first dozen or so pages were standard college notes, but the topic seemed to diverge from there.
"Hey Daphne," he said, nodding toward the walled encampment to their right, "I think this belonged to someone in that settlement."
"What does it say?" she asked.
"Uh...." Hugo paused. "It says something about blowing up the stadium." He went back a couple of pages to read more.
Daphne frowned. "I guess some nutjob never got to carry out their plans, huh?"
"Hold on...." Hugo said, still reading. "No. They're not talking about a terrorist act. I think this was after the zombies."
Daphne's eyes lit up with curiosity. "What?"
"It says here they locked everyone in town into the stadium the day after the zombies hit."
Daphne let out a low whistle of distress at the thought. "That's not right," she murmured. "Why sentence them all to that?"
"Yeah, it's messed up," Hugo concurred. "They're saying that everyone in there has been dead for awhile."
"I bet they have."
Hugo continued to peruse the unknown survivor's journal. "So...everyone in the stadium is dead--"
"Or un-dead, at any rate," Daphne corrected.
"And they wanted to blow it up," Hugo continued. He gazed briefly at the settlement to their right. "I wonder whose this was, exactly. They're probably not around anymore."
He and Daphne stared solemnly at the ruined settlement of former survivors as they continued their eastward progression down the street.
"I don't want to go in there," Daphne uttered in a low tone. "I really don't want to step foot inside that place, but I can't help but wonder...."
"Wonder who they were, and what they were about?" Hugo asked.
Daphne nodded. "I think we need to go to go get Shari, and then make a trip to the stadium."
Shari climbed the ladder of the water tower, hoping to get an eagle's eye view of the area.
Daphne was right, she thought. She was right...something happened while I was in there, they had to run, and now God knows what's going to happen to them.
For a split second, she toyed with the idea of just letting go, just swan diving from the watertower's upper platform down, face first, to the brick road beneath her.
I can't do that. I'll never find them if I'm dead.
She raised her assault rifle, gazing through its scope at the cityscape around her. She only saw the dark, hazy outlines of clusters of undead as they stumbled through the otherwise uninhabited streets. Shari sighed and lowered the assault rifle, noticing a particularly rotted, androgynous zombie trying to scale the ladder in a futile attempt to feed on her.
Not sure how that one's still moving, she thought, wrinkling her nose in distaste. She descended the ladder, taking her frustration out on the zombie and kicking it in the face as she neared the bottom. Its head ripped free from the neck, spinning as it sailed through the air, torn muscle and tendon trailing it like a jellyfish.
Shari uttered a dark laugh. "Ooh, that's a first!" she cried, sighing as her grin gave way to a grimace. She hopped down from the ladder, strolling languidly eastward. She was about a quarter-mile from the radio station when she heard a faint nickering.
Eva?
She looked around, sure at first that she had imagined the sound. She surveyed the area, making sure there were no undead in her direct vicinity, and clicked her tongue a few times. A moment later, she heard a loud snort in response. She gazed down the street, noticing a horse trailer on the next block. Shari began to jog toward the trailer.
I'm not gonna get excited yet.
As the thought crossed her mind, she threw it aside and broke into a full run, an sensation of relief attempting to overwhelm the corners of her mouth into a giddy, childlike smile. She reached the trailer and peered in cautiously. Upon verifying that the trailer contained only her horse and nothing more threatening, she flung the doors open.
"Eva!" She hugged the horse around the neck. "Eva, I lost our other friends, but at least I've got you back." She led the horse out into the street and mounted her. "I bet you're thirsty, aren't you, old girl?" She paused for a moment. Did I eat or drink today? She couldn't recall. "Let's get us some lunch,"she muttered, setting off down the street.
Daphne reached into her pack, taking out a small crowbar.
"I'm assuming the zombies aren't smart enough to reach their arm in and unlock this thing," she told Hugo as she shattered the glass of the army surplus store's front door with the crowbar, breaking out each remaining shard before she put her arm through the window. The window of the door was roughly the height of her head, and at one foot by three feet, it wasn't big enough for most zombies to crawl through.
"Just don't get close enough to the door for them to grab you," she told Hugo. She attempted to reach down the inside of the door to unlock it from the inside. "Can't quite reach," she muttered.
"Let me," Hugo said. "I've got at least a foot on you." He slid his arm in through the broken window, easily reaching the lock and pulling the door open. "After you," he said as Daphne slipped into the building's dark interior.
Once they were both inside, Hugo closed and locked the door. He hunted through his backpack until he found a small but powerful LED flashlight. He panned the beam of light across the building as Daphne stood at the ready, her titanium knife raised in case the building was occupied. They conscientiously stalked each square foot of the place, relaxing slightly when they were certain they were alone in the building.
"Now that we've found our treasure chest," Daphne said, her eyes lit up like a child on Christmas morning, "let's see what treasures it holds." She walked down an aisle, sliding her fingertips across the merchandise stocked on the shelves. "Oh, I'll be taking one of these, for damn sure," she said, picking up a wristwatch-style compass. "Come to think of it, one for each of us." She picked up two more, handing them to Hugo.
"Good thinking," he said.
"You may as well pick up the most comfortable-looking backpack or bag you can find," Daphne told him. "We'll be filling it, and it'll be for you to carry. You've only got that one backpack so far, and we'll all be getting way too much stuff to fit it in the bags we're already carrying." She continued down the aisle, more giddy than Hugo had ever seen her.
"Wow," he said, "this kind of stuff is really your thing, huh?"
"Yeah," Daphne said. "The way the world is now, it should be your thing, too."
"I'm sure there's a lot of useful stuff here," Hugo said, "I'm just not as sure as you are exactly what I should be looking for."
"You might want a survival knife," Daphne said. "I'll look for that. I've got my own light." She dug through her pack, pulling out a flashlight. "You just look around...if you see anything interesting, let me know. I'll have a look at it, see if it's worth having or not."
"Okay," Hugo mumbled, illuminating the row or shelves before him as Daphne stalked off in search of the knives. "This bag should work," he said, picking up a large duffel bag. "Looks big enough."
He perused the selection of wares, picking up a package to examine it more closely. "Hey Daphne," he said, "I found some emergency blankets...they look like they're made of foil, or something. They're really small, though, and light--think I should grab some?"
"Yeah, stick some in your bag," Daphne said from across the room. "Those could come in handy for a lot of things. They may not look like much, but they'll trap heat like you wouldn't believe. I'd say take about a dozen or so."
Hugo nodded, stuffing the packages into his newly acquired duffel bag. He continued browsing the aisles.
"There's a surplus of surplus in this place," he said, performing a drum roll against his legs.
Shari rode westward as the sun coasted lower toward the western horizon. She had spent the afternoon fruitlessly attempting to find Daphne and Hugo, and she was ready to concede for the evening. When she returned to the trailer where she had discovered Eva earlier in the day, she dismounted the horse, which reluctantly allowed itself to be led back into the trailer.
"I'll be back first thing in the morning," she promised. She closed the trailer, turning the handle into the locking position. She lit up a smoke as she began walking back toward the radio station. As she walked, she focused on trying to be optimistic. The recovery of her horse had raised her spirits considerably, but she was still exceedingly distraught by her inability to locate her two human companions. It was around nine o'clock when she reached the radio building, crossing the lawn to the front d
oors and pressing the buzzer.
"It's me again," she said. "I still can't find my friends, and I was hoping I could stay here for tonight." Her request was met with silence, and she uttered a sigh as she sank down against the wall beneath the buzzer. She supposed they either didn't trust her, or they were sleeping for the night and didn't want to be bothered, or perhaps both. She took a bottle of water from her pack, guzzling half of it down without pausing for breath. She stood and began to walk away when she heard the professor's voice come over the intercom.
"Well, Shari," he began, "we don't feel right turning you away. I just hope you're as trustworthy as you seemed to be. Don't give us reason to regret helping you. Come around to the west side, we'll send the ladder down for you."
She took a deep breath, relieved to have shelter for the night, and made her way to the window through which she had entered the building earlier. She saw a light come on in the second story room, and a moment later she saw the professor's hands lowering the rope ladder which was her salvation from a menacing night in the dark, dead streets of Champaign. She climbed up gratefully, pulling the ladder in after her once she was safely inside the building.
"I was afraid you guys were asleep for the night," she said, turning to address the professor. "Sorry if I woke you up."
Henry shook his head. "Nah," he said. "We're relatively safe, but even so, our sleeping schedule isn't exactly regular these days." He smiled, his eyes sparkling with warmth. "I'm sure you can understand that."
Shari nodded. "I'm pretty sure I can. I guess it'll be a long time before any of us can rest easily, if ever."
"You're damn right," Phoebe muttered as she entered the room to join them, another male of about thirty by her side. Shari presumed he was the sniper whom she hadn't previously met in person. "I see you haven't had any luck finding those two, huh?" Phoebe continued.