Neil turned back to stare at the house. It was a modest cabin, maybe two or three rooms, and there was a dilapidated barn, the kind you’d expect to read about in a horror novel, the kind that held ghosts and ghouls and axe murderers.
“It’s empty,” Robert called from the back. “No car’s been here in a while.” He could tell just by looking at the dirt driveway, Neil knew, and he thanked the stars once again that he had found Robert outside that fucking base.
Forrest felt like years ago: not weeks. They had all been lucky to get out of there alive. Once they’d crossed the Colorado border into Kansas, they’d met groups of survivors who had heard all manner of rumors about what had really happened.
Government experiments gone wrong, people had said. Others whispered about something in the water. Neil had his suspicions though. After what he had seen that morning, he knew what had caused this. Fucking side effects. He’d had all his shots, except for that one. The others in his group had all missed theirs, too. There had to be a reason for that. Fate, maybe. Maybe just coincidence. Either way, none of them had taken Artovax and none of them had been turned.
Not yet.
None of them had been bitten, though, and there was always time for that.
They got out of the truck and walked to the little cabin. The front door was locked.
“Check the windows,” Neil said. “Before we break in, let’s see if we can weasel one open or something.”
“You thinking this is the place?” Butter came up to Neil and stood next to him, hands on hips, looking around the area. He knew Neil wanted a place to call home as much as all the rest of them. They’d been traveling for a month. They were tired.
“Seems as good as any,” he commented. He ran a hand through his hair. Long. It was longer than he’d had it in years. Eight years in the Air Force and he’d gotten a haircut every three weeks the entire time. Now it had been almost six since his last cut and he felt shaggy and strange. In a world when everything was in chaos, it would be nice to have something stable, something reliable, something dependable he could count on.
“Not visual from the road,” Butter commented, looking around. “And we can put the truck in the barn if we like.”
“It’s not big,” Neil said, turning back to the cabin. “And one story.”
“Don’t matter. We don’t need much room.”
Kari and Cody came over. They had been walking the grounds, looking around the barn and the trees.
“There’s a creek,” Kari said. “I could hear it from over there,” she pointed to the trees on the north side of the property. “Fresh water, probably. If we’re going to set up house, this could be as good a place as any.”
“We’d have to build a fence,” Butter said. He had been talking about it for weeks: his fence. He wanted a tall one: five feet high, at least. He wanted barbed wire on the top or razor wire, if he could find it. Butter had big dreams for his fence, but Neil didn’t care. Butter could do what he liked.
They heard the sound of a lock sliding and turned around to see Robert standing in the doorway to the cabin, a wide grin on his scarred face. No one had asked Robert where the scar had come from. Neil doubted he would tell them, anyway. Robert was the kind of man who held secrets close to his heart and he would take them to the grave. He didn’t care to hear whatever story Robert had fabricated for do-gooders or curious old women who wanted to know about the handsome man with the broken face, so he left Robert to himself.
“Bathroom window was unlocked,” Robert said. “Welcome home, sweetheart.”
Chapter 3
Emily managed to get a restless night's sleep before scouring the kitchen for food. She took some crackers and shoved some dried fruit in her backpack. Between shelves of rotten vegetables and moldy leftovers, she found a bottle of water and a can of soda in the fridge. The previous owners were gone, but they hadn’t left in a hurry. They had probably been at work when the infection first hit. Most people were. That's why there were still so many empty houses: no one could get home.
Emily didn't leave the house the same way that she came in. Instead, she grabbed a set of car keys off a hook on the wall and left through the front door like a civilized person. She even closed the door behind herself. She could be civilized.
She could be normal.
As she slid into the driver's side and started the engine, the tiny car roared to life. The previous owner liked ska music. A Reel Big Fish CD was blaring. Emily turned off the music, much as she missed it, and tried to focus. The gas gauge was at half a tank. It would be more than enough to get Emily home if she could find a road leaving the city that was still clear. While this part of town was fairly easy to navigate, quite a few roads had been blocked with people panicking. Once everyone realized what Artovax really did, they weren't going to sit around the house and die. Instead, entire cities of people tried to leave town at once, causing massive traffic jams and essentially turning towns into death traps.
Emily wasn't as familiar with Grimsby as she should have been. It was close to where she lived, sure, but the tiny roadmap in her backpack was crumpled and difficult to read. She realized far too late how dependent she had become on her cell phone's GPS system. Cell phone reception had lasted an entire day before going out. The electricity had made it three.
She drove around for awhile, failing to find a way out of town that wasn't completely blocked. Finally giving up, she ditched the car. It had been nice while it lasted, the air conditioning a welcome reprieve, but it would have been too easy. Nothing was easy anymore.
She found a road that seemed to lead away from the heart of the city. According to her compass, it headed east. That was good. That was where she needed to be. A line of cars blocked the road, making it impossible to drive through but not impossible to climb over. Surely there would be undead here. Holding her gun in hand, she stayed as close to the edge of the road as possible, never letting her eyes stray from the cars.
Each step felt like it took an hour. Her boots crunched on bits of broken glass mingled with blood. No matter how many cities she went to, no matter how many roads she saw, the sight of bodies never seemed real. It never seemed to get any easier. You had to detach yourself from it if you didn't want to go crazy. Susan hadn't been able to. She had gone crazy. Seeing your husband blow his brains out in front of your 7-months-pregnant self would do that.
Emily took another step.
The sun was up now, shining brightly. She wanted to close her eyes and imagine a better world, imagine a more beautiful place. She wanted to pretend that she was anywhere but here, but she couldn't. She had to be alert. She had to be awake. She had to be completely on top of everything that would happen between here and the end of the road.
She needed to make it to the highway.
The world was surprisingly silent as she climbed over a tiny Volkswagon Bug that was sandwiched between two SUVs. As her boots hit the ground on the other side, she ignored the feeling that she was being watched. Emily always felt like she was being watched. Before the end of the world had come and gone, she hadn’t noticed the way silence was eerie. She hadn’t noticed that without the normal sounds of traffic or people, the world seemed scary.
She was almost to the end of the road, almost to the first stretch of the freeway, when a moan let her know that she wasn't alone. Emily whirled around, urging her eyes to locate the Infected that was there. She knew he was there. She had heard him. No matter how quiet the creatures tried to be to fit in with the silence around them, the undead couldn't help but get excited when they saw fresh meat.
Their low moans were what gave them away.
Emily heard those sounds in her dreams. She had a feeling that when she was an old woman, she would still be having nightmares filled with the sounds of the undead.
If she managed to make it that long, that is.
At this rate, she’d be lucky to make it to next week.
Suddenly, she saw the Infected. He was there next to the buildi
ng. Emily glanced forward. There was nearly a block left of townhouses before she'd be in the open, before she'd be able to ditch the road and just run. Between her and her freedom there were at least a dozen cars she'd have to make her way around. Turning back, she sized up the Infected. He was tall and lanky. In a former life, he'd probably been a high school quarterback. All the girls had probably loved him. Now he was just flesh.
She raised her gun and aimed. She didn't want to waste the bullet, didn't want to let the others nearby know where she was, but she couldn't outrun this one. He still looked fresh. With a loud bang she pulled the trigger and the boy crumpled to the ground. Immediately, moans from the surrounding streets and possibly from inside the townhouses began to fill the air. Emily started to run. She climbed over cars and squeezed between them until she was at the end of the street. The highway stretched ahead, still covered with cars, but now there were open plains on either side of the road.
She ditched the road and started running through the dead grass. The brown blades crunched as she squished them. She didn’t bother to look back. She couldn’t waste time with that. They knew where she was, so the only thing she could do was move forward and hope she was fast enough today.
The sound of her heart pounding in her chest drowned out her heavy breathing. All she could do was run. She headed toward a clump of houses, hoping it would give her a place to hide. They all looked abandoned and worn. Most of the windows were broken on these ones. Emily skipped the main houses. If the windows had been broken, someone had probably been inside. Who knew what they had left behind? Who knew if they had been infected?
The growls stayed strong as she tried her luck at opening car doors. She couldn't hope to hotwire a car. That wasn't in her cards. Finally, though, a back door of a minivan slid open and Emily collapsed inside, closing and locking the door behind her. She crawled to the back row and lay quietly on the floor of the van. She was breathing so heavily that she just knew someone would find her. Something would find her. This was the end. She knew it.
She tried to stop gasping for breath. She needed to stop. Nothing could make things different. Nothing could change her world now. In and out. She stared at the worn ceiling of the minivan, trying not to wonder what the different stains were from. It smelled old and rotten. Not rotten in the way a corpse rots, but more like someone had been eating macaroni and forgotten to finish the bowl. Maybe the family who owned the car had been busy when the apocalypse happened.
Maybe they hadn't been so hungry after all.
The world spun around her as Emily remained perfectly still in the back of the minivan. She heard the Infected growling. They were on the street now. They were looking for her. She wished suddenly that the windows were tinted, but they weren't. Reaching onto the back bench, she grabbed a dingy blanket and pulled it over herself, hoping it would buy her a bit of protection, hoping it would mean that they couldn't see her right away.
When she closed her eyes, all she saw was Melanie. Her sister's smiling face was all Emily had wanted to see. It was all she wanted ever, really. She had never been a good big sister. She'd never really been there for Melanie. It wasn't a surprise to most people. After all, there was quite an age gap between them. But that hadn't stopped her from chasing her sister down when the infection had hit. That hadn't stopped her from trying to save Melanie.
But she couldn't.
She had been bitten too soon, lost too quickly. Emily would have done anything to save her. Anything. But she couldn't.
She hadn't been strong enough to save her sister.
Emily felt like she had been running for a million years, fighting the same fight for as long as she could remember, even though it had only been a few weeks. Things were different now, more different than they had ever been. And the world was no longer the beautiful place that she had once thought it was.
It was impossible to make herself feel comfortable in the car.
So she focused on breathing, getting through one moment at a time. The groans of the Infected grew closer. She wondered if they would be able to sense her fear, to pinpoint the terror that ripped through her soul. Emily had never been the type of girl to worry about what was going to happen, not until now. She had never been afraid in the way that she was now. She didn't want to die, not really. And when it came right down to it, she did feel afraid. She felt afraid that they would catch her. She felt afraid that they would tear her apart. She had seen enough people being eaten that she knew it wasn't the way to die. But what was the alternative? When you really thought about it, nobody grew old anymore. Nobody went to a nursing home anymore. You could be killed today or you could be killed on a different day, but it was almost a guarantee that you would be killed.
It was just a matter of when.
A shadow fell over the minivan, rendering the insides darker than they had been before. They had found her.
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Just Another Day in the Zombie Apocalypse_Episode 8 Page 5