Lost in the Apocalypse

by Mortimer, L. C.

  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.

  Chapter 4

  Though the zombies walked by the minivan, none seemed to figure out that Emily was nestled safely inside. She lay flat on her back and tried to close her eyes. She was tired and hungry and sad, but none of that mattered. None of it ever did anymore. The only thing she really cared about these days was finding a way to keep on living, finding a way to survive.

  To be honest, though, she supposed it didn’t really matter if she lived or died. Not anymore. Not without Melanie.

  Her sister had always been the glue that had held the family together. Long after her parents died, long after the sad looks and pitying faces disappeared, and long after the hushed whispers could no longer be heard, Melanie had been strong when Emily couldn’t. Emily would cry herself to sleep, thinking about the way her life had turned out, and Melanie always would promise her that things would be okay someday.

  They weren’t now.

  They were so far past “okay” that Emily wondered why she had ever tried to believe her.

  None of it mattered anymore.

  She listened until she was sure that the infected creatures were gone. When she could no longer hear the sounds of their growls or see shadows cast over the little family vehicle, she got out of the minivan and kept walking. There was nowhere to go but home, though she wasn’t sure she even wanted to be there anymore. What was the point? She had managed to make it through the first few weeks of the infection simply because she wanted to save her sister. She had managed to make it through more than she ever thought possible just because she needed something to strive for.

  Now that was gone and she was alone.

  Emily kept walking.

  She could hear them in the distance: the Infected. She could hear their moans and their noises and their rustling, but still, she walked on. There was nothing else to do, nowhere else to go. She kicked a rock as she walked along and listened to it bounce along on the cement. The sound was much louder than it should have been and for a second, she was worried that they would hear her, that they would come after her again, but they didn’t, so she just kept walking.

  ***

  Emily had lived just outside of Howe, Kansas for nearly two years. She had quit her job to be a writer and with her first few royalty checks, had purchased a small cabin and the accompanying land. It was cliché, she knew, but she loved the silence that her little farm afforded her. She loved being able to slum around her two-bedroom cabin in her pajamas and write stories about anything she wanted to.

  She loved the solitude.

  Now, as she approached her home, she only hoped that she would find it as empty as when she left nearly a month ago. She worried that others had found it, destroyed it. She worried that the Infected had somehow managed to break in and make themselves a nice little home. She worried about a lot of things, but most of all, Emily worried that she was going to drink her entire bottle of hidden scotch the second she walked through the door.

  That was all she needed.

  When she got close, she saw tire tracks at the edge of her dirt driveway. They weren’t hers. She had been gone long enough that any tracks her car had left would have been washed away by now. No, these were new, fresh. They were from the last day or two, at most.

  She peeked around the corner, but wasn’t completely surprised to see a truck parked in her driveway. It wasn’t hers. Of course. She hadn’t been gone long, not really. In zombie world, though, she knew she had been gone for a lifetime. She wondered if the new residents had found the scotch. She wondered if there would be any left.

  Emily hid behind some trees at the edge of her land and cautiously walked around. She knew her woods well. When she wasn’t writing, she was exploring her property and trying to come up with story ideas.

  Now, though, wasn’t the time for idle daydreaming. Emily needed to figure out what was going on. She counted four people mulling about in the yard, acting as if they owned the place. Fuck. One or two people she might be able to take, but four? There was no chance. A millions scenarios raced through her mind. Should she try to kill them in their sleep? Should she try to burn down the cabin? The idea of destroying her home made her chest tighten. She couldn’t.

  Three men stood in the driveway, talking about something. Who knew what the hell they were going on about? A woman stood in the doorway to the cabin, leaning against it. Her arms were crossed over her chest. She looked upset about something. Emily wondered what it was.

  “You already took my damn house,” she mumbled under her breath. “What next?” She was on a bit of an incline that overlooked the house. She sat down, peeking over the hill. She peered at the scene before her. What were these people doing? More importantly, were they there to stay? If they had only just arrived, perhaps they would leave just as quickly.

  Aside from the unwelcome visitors, her home appeared to be unharmed. Trees surrounded the sides of the cabin and led into a huge forest. Emily owned fifteen acres of it, but the rest was all owned by some reclusive old billionaire who lived in another state and never checked on his property.

  Basically, it was all hers to use as she saw fit since no one else ever came out here. Now that the zombies had come, the area was even more secluded. Part of her was surprised, when she thought about it, that the group had been able to find her home. She was a few miles from the main road, which meant most people didn’t wander this far. It was just her luck that this group had, though. Just her luck. Her sister was dead and now she couldn’t even go home and get super, completely, totally drunk.

  Emily kept watching, trying to choke back the tears that made their way to the edges of her eyes. She couldn’t cry. Not now. She feared that if she started, she might not stop again. There wasn’t time to mourn Melanie. She couldn’t. And she really shouldn’t be such a wuss about something as ordinary as death. This was the world now, she silently chided herself. This was her life.

  The road was to the west of the cabin. To the east of her house was a small garden, one she had tenderly worked on and slaved over. A few of her plants were
starting to come up, which she was grateful for, because to be honest, she was pretty damn sick of eating canned food. On the north side of her tiny garden was a huge, old barn. It was falling down in places and Emily never went inside. It had been there when she bought the property and though she didn’t plan to use it, she liked to take pictures of it, so she left it.

  A few stray cats used to live in the barn, but after the infection, even the cats had disappeared. They had vanished quickly. Emily had waited only a few days to go find Melanie, but the cats were already gone by then.

  The house was four miles from the edge of town. She hadn’t seen zombies this far out of town, but she wouldn’t put it past them. You could never be too careful.

  The men continued to talk in the yard. Their voices were growing louder. Emily could hear part of their conversation now. She leaned forward, straining to listen to what they were saying. Even if she couldn’t hear the entire conversation, any information she gained could help her figure out a way to get her house back. She couldn’t fight them off, but maybe they were planning to leave. Maybe she’d be able to wait them out. At the very least, maybe she could sneak inside and grab a few essentials before she wandered off and found a new place to live.

  Or before she gave herself over to the zombies.

  “We should stay,” one man said firmly. “It’s perfect.” He had brown hair and a scar running down the left side of his face. If she didn’t know better, Emily would assume it was from a zombie attack, but it looked old and healed. She wondered how he had gotten it. It gave the man an aura of danger. None of the men looked weak, by any means, but this one looked especially deadly. If the electricity ever came back on, maybe she’d use him as inspiration for a character in her book. Fucking computers. Why didn’t she write on a typewriter like all the classic authors did?

  “Best to keep moving,” the next man protested. He had green hair. “Maybe stay for another day or two, at most. Yeah, this place has a garden, but what?” He glared at the produce. “We just gonna eat blueberries for the rest of our lives?”

  “I like blueberries,” Emily mumbled out loud, glaring at the men from her spot between the trees.

  “Me, too.” A voice said from behind her. Emily jumped and tried to turn around to see who was talking to her, but just as she started to, she felt the barrel of a gun being pushed against her head.

  “Don’t move,” the voice said. “You have thirty seconds to explain who you are, why you’re here, and why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  Emily gritted her teeth. This wasn’t what she signed up for. She didn’t need crap from some stranger, someone who had stolen her home. When the infection started and she decided to go try to save her sister, she knew it was a risk. She understood there was a chance this would happen. Survivors or zombies, people were all the same. Dangerous. What she didn’t need was this. Any of it. She wished her sister wasn’t dead and that zombies hadn’t come and that this asshole didn’t have a gun pointed at her.

  “Get your fucking gun off my head,” she spat, unable to pretend to be nice. “And then, since this is my house, maybe you should explain to me why I shouldn’t kill you.”

  She felt the gun slowly being removed from her head and she turned around. She blinked several times and then sucked in a gasp when she saw the man standing in front of her. If ever there was a face for “tall, dark, and handsome,” this was it. He was taller than her, but not by much. She guessed he was maybe 5’10, 5’11. He was fit, though, and toned. He worked out; that was for damn sure. Though she had lost weight since the infection started, she didn’t think that this man had. He looked good. Really good.

  Fuck. She thought. Am I seriously getting turned on at this? It had been months since she’d been with a man romantically. Nearly a year, almost. Writers weren’t really known for their social skills and Emily’s were particularly poor when she was in the middle of writing a book. The last date she had been on was so bad, she wondered if she should try dating women. Maybe then things would be different, she had thought.

  Maybe, but probably not.

  “Well?” She asked. “Aren’t you going to say anything?” She tried to look fierce as she hissed the words at him, tried to look menacing. She had already gotten him to let her turn around. She wasn’t about to let the jerkwad shoot her, too.

  He put his gun down and took two steps closer to her, pinning her against the tree. Then the man placed his hands above her head, locking her in place. Before Emily knew what was happening, his mouth was pressed against hers, and she was getting the best kiss of her life.

  Chapter 5

  “What are you doing?” She managed to ask quietly through the kiss, but she didn’t want him to stop. She didn’t want any of it to stop. It had been a long time since Emily Starken had felt alive, but she felt alive now, pressed against this tree by this stranger. Even when she had actively dated, trying to find someone to share her life with, kissing had never felt like this. Not ever. She had been doing something wrong, she realized. Either that, or everyone else had.

  “Kissing you,” he said, stopping to smirk at her. “I should have thought that much was obvious. Were you raised in a barn or something?” His dark eyes flashed with a hint of amusement as he stared at her curvy body. The apocalypse hadn’t emaciated her, but she was much thinner than she used to be.

  The moment gone, she slapped him and stood up, glaring down at him. Her own gun was a few feet away with her backpack, and she didn’t dare look at it. She knew that if she did, he’d grab it quickly, then she’d not only be without her house, but she wouldn’t have her weapon, either.

  “What are you doing at my house?” She asked him, frowning. “Are those your friends over there? Can you make them leave?” She tried to keep her voice even, level. She tried to act like she hadn’t just been making out with this stranger like a horny teenager.

  He cocked his head as he looked at her, the way a dog might look as it observed a kitten for the first time. The man didn’t seem afraid of her or angry with her. He didn’t look particularly excited about her, either. He just seemed interested, curious. That was good, Emily thought. At least this way, he might not kill her. If she kept him curious, he might keep her alive.

  “I could make them leave,” he said, after a moment. She let out a sign of relief when he said it, and he smiled. “But I won’t,” his voice a deep whisper. He stared at her intensely, waiting to see what her reaction would be.

  “What the hell is wrong with you?” She asked. “You can just move in and take my house. That’s illegal.” The man only laughed.

  “Yeah, that’s rich,” he said. “It’s a little late to quote the law at me, sweetheart. In case you haven’t noticed, there’s not exactly a working legal system anymore.”

  Emily frowned, feeling more frustrated than she’d ever felt in her life. This guy wasn’t going to back down. He wasn’t going to leave. He was going to sit here, staring at her, pushing her buttons, until she left. She could tell.

  Well, that wasn’t okay with her. Not now, not in the zombie apocalypse, and not ever. She headed for her backpack and slung it over her shoulder. Then she picked up her gun and tucked it into her jeans and started walking toward the house. He trailed closely behind her, not saying a word. She didn’t know what he was thinking and she didn’t really care. She was tired, she’d been walking for days, and she wanted to sleep in her own bed, dammit.

  When Emily got close, the men and woman standing around her house stopped talking and turned to her. The men raised their weapons, but the man behind Emily motioned for them to put the guns away.

  “It’s okay, boys,” he called out. “She’s harmless.”

  “Fuck you!” Emily said to him, turning to glower at him again. This only jeered him on more, and he laughed as she marched past his friends, pushed her way past the woman, and went into the cabin.

  “Where do you think you’re going?” The woman asked.

  Emily ignored her and darted inside. She
looked suspiciously around the room. Her couch was in the same spot against the left wall. Her tiny living room was now full of backpacks and guns, but seemed to be generally unharmed. The bathroom and two bedrooms were straight ahead, at the back of the cabin, and she would get to those shortly. To her right, her kitchen was just as clean and empty as it had been since she left, although the twin barstools had been moved to the living room. Obviously, someone had been having a pow-wow in there and needed more seating options.

  She heard arguing coming from outside, but ignored it. Emily hurried to the back of her cabin and peeked in the bedrooms. The bed in each room had been slept in and there were backpacks and clothes on the floors, but she didn’t care. Her laptop was still there, unharmed, and her notebooks were still on the shelf.

  She may have lost her sister, but at least her stories were okay. She realized with just how shitty that really was, but it was the truth. She had nothing else to live for but her writing. Even that would never be read by anyone.

  Part of her wondered whether it was even worth it to write anymore. Probably not.

  Emily went back to the living room. The voices were louder now and more determined. The woman was screeching that she couldn’t believe someone called Neil had just let Emily come inside. Neil must have been the one kissing her.

  She grabbed one of the guns from the living room and, after making sure it was loaded, headed outside. If these guys thought they could just barge in and take her house, they had another thing coming. She lifted the gun and took a deep breath at the door. She was a strong, independent woman and she could defend her property. Yeah, the gun was a bit pathetic and her hands were shaking a little, but she could do this.