Shore Haven

by Reynolds, Jennifer

  Chapter 2

  ~~Jason~~

  “Shit. Samantha,” I screamed, taking aim and shooting the monster who’d launched himself at the woman. Blood covered the former man, and his clothing was torn. He crashed into her just as my bullet hit the back of his head. His body collapsed on top of her, hiding her body from the other zombies for that second. I shot two more, smashed another in the face with the butt of my gun, and tried not to get in the way of the bullets coming at me from the direction of Shore Haven.

  Tera, Russ, and Kayla quickly took down enough of the zombies surrounding us to allow me to get to Samantha. I flung the big man off her and froze. Blood covered the entire front of her body. My suit should protect me from the blood, but there was a chance I could get infected…a possibility that if I brought her inside Shore Haven that she would infect others. I should have left her where she was. The probability that the blood of the dead had gotten into her leg wound was too high to risk taking her inside with me, but I couldn’t leave her out there to die alone.

  “What the hell are you waiting for,” Russ called from a second story window. “Get your ass inside. Leave her. She’s dead.”

  That was all I needed to hear. People who thought as Russ did at times couldn’t inherit the world. I bent down, snatched Samantha up, and slung her over my shoulder.

  “Stupid bastard,” I heard Russ say before I took off toward the building. I couldn’t go through the main door looking the way I did, so once I got close enough, I veered to the right.

  “He’s headed to the decontamination rooms,” Kayla said, pulling the door closed behind her and Tera.

  When you entered the main door at that section of the complex, you entered a long hallway that led to rooms where you could begin freeing yourself of weapons, clothes, and the like before going into the actual building. Double doors toward the backside of that section brought us to a set of decontamination rooms where we would go through a deeper cleaning. Unfortunately, Samantha and I would have to go through those showers before I would be able to tend to her wounds.

  Once you entered the decontamination rooms, you couldn’t leave until you or someone else scrubbed every inch of your body and your blood work showed that you were not infected. I wasn’t a doctor, but I could take care of our immediate needs. Samantha was breathing. I could feel her stomach pressing into my shoulder as she did so, but the breaths were coming in rare spurts.

  The doors opened seemingly on their own when I reached them. Someone had hit the button to allow me inside the building. I’d been afraid they wouldn’t. An infected hit the door behind me just as it was closing. I flinched and nearly dropped Samantha.

  To my left was a glass door. Tera and Kayla were arguing on the other side. I stopped to catch my breath and heard them fighting over whether they should open the door and assist me.

  “No,” I shouted, getting their full attention.

  “But…” Kayla whined.

  “Stay where you are. I have this. Go rest up. If we aren’t infected, we’ll be out in three days.”

  “What if you are?”

  “Then you know what to do.”

  Kayla looked angry and scared but didn’t push things. I was a little too young, I felt, to be the girl’s father, but she’d been friends with my niece for most of her life, and I’d been my niece’s guardian. I could understand how she saw me, the only living person she knew, as a father figure and her lifeline to her old life.

  Tera pulled Kayla away as I pushed the button to open the doors to the first quarantine room. The second we were inside, the overhead communications speakers squawked, and my uncle’s voice came over the line.

  “Give me an update, son,” his deep voice demanded.

  “I’m uninjured. I can’t say the same about the woman we found.”

  “Was she bitten?”

  “Not that I can see. Samantha has a gash in her leg and a head wound. An infected did fall on her, and she has lots of blood on her, but I don’t know whose blood it is or if it has gotten into her bloodstream?”

  “And you?”

  “The same. I have the blood on me, but as far as I can tell, I’m not infected. I’m going to clean us and draw blood for testing.”

  “You know you have to stay in there three days no matter what the blood work says, right?”

  “I understand. I’ll need access to the medical equipment so that you can see if Samantha’s had any brain damage.”

  “After your three days are up.”

  “But…”

  “We can’t risk you contaminating the machinery. If you go in there, we’ll have to seal off the room for nearly a week to be sure the virus in the blood dies. That’s too long if someone else gets hurt in the meantime.”

  “But she might die before then.”

  “Then she dies. You knew all of this before bringing her here.”

  The man could be an ass, but he wasn’t wrong. I could clean us both up and leave. Find the nearest hospital and use their machine if the place still had power. In Samantha’s condition, though, we’d never make it without a horde getting us. The clean rooms were our safest place, but I couldn’t stand letting a possible life-threatening injury go untreated.

  I laid Samantha on a table and began to remove our clothing. There was a slot on the wall facing the outside of the building that I shoved every bit of clothing we had into after I’d removed them. The slot led to a furnace.

  Once our clothes were gone, I sprayed us down with hot water to rinse off as much blood as possible. Next, I laid out the medical kit, changed the bandage on her leg, and wrapped the wound in plastic to make the area waterproof, before I took blood from the two of us.

  The vials of blood went into another slot on the opposite end of the wall.

  After putting away the medical kit, I hit a button to turn on the overhead showers that cleaned the room. The water would be hotter than usual, but it would spray the entire room and us. I lifted her off the table so that the water could reach every inch of our bodies. We had special soap I had to use to scrub us down with that left her skin looking red and irritated. I hoped she wasn’t allergic to it.

  When the water shut off, I laid her back on the table and rolled it to a door that led to an actual bathroom with a regular shower. In there, I scrubbed us both from head to toe with a milder soap and washed our hair. I tried not to let my gaze linger on anything it wasn’t supposed to or to scrub any longer on any specific parts of her body so that no one could accuse me of doing anything inappropriate. I did note that she had two tattoos, one on each shoulder. The right had a Compass Rose Celtic knot, and the left had the Celtic symbol for air. They were both black and dainty and looked perfect where they were.

  What the hell had gotten into me, I didn’t know. I’d never in my life thought something was dainty. Until that day, I didn’t see myself risking my life for anyone. I might have risked it for Keisha. My niece had been my only family aside from my uncle when everything started. I had made my brother a promise to take care of his daughter when he went off to the east coast ten years ago to help build dams and bridges. He never came back.

  I’d stayed home to help my uncle build Shore Haven and to care for Keisha.

  After the shower, I dried us and moved us to a holding area that looked more like a small apartment. The tiny area had a section for a kitchen, a living area with a sofa, chair, and TV, and a full-size bed.

  Once I had her on the bed, I hit the communications button to request clothes.

  “Tera is on her way with jumpsuits and food for the both of you,” my uncle Jasper’s disembodied voice said.

  “How’s Kayla?” I asked.

  “Not talking to me, but she’ll get over it. She’s strong.”

  “I know she is.”

  “She’d be better if she knew why you took such a risk.”

  “You know why. You sent us out to find survivors. We found one.”

  “That woman can’t be considered a survivor. She’s a
liability. What if she’s infected and you aren’t?”

  “Then I’ll kill her. I take full responsibility for her.”

  “She must be a beautiful woman for you to risk your life like that. Russ doesn’t seem to think so, but he can be an ass.”

  “I think she’s lovely, yes, but that isn’t why I saved her.”

  He snorted.

  “I’m not shallow like some people. I’d have saved her no matter what. Her being pretty is just a bonus.”

  “Be careful, son,” Jasper said, letting a bit of fatherly concern seep into his voice.

  “I will.”

  Chapter 3

  ~~ Samantha~~

  —Inside the clean room an hour or so earlier.—

  My eyes flew open the instant I felt searing hot water hit my face. I was lying naked on a metal table. Jason was standing over me, equally naked. We were in a sterile room, sparsely furnished with medical equipment, and the hot water was pouring from the ceiling.

  I opened my mouth to ask where I was and what had happened, but I couldn’t make my mouth move. My last conscious thought had been about my sister…or had I been dreaming. My head was fuzzy. I blinked a few times to clear the images from the past few days that had merged with ones of my sister turning and trying to attack me. I remembered zombies attacking Jason and me, and I remembered him having two others with him when he saved me. Had I hit my head?

  Words tried to escape me again. Jason had moved, though, and water hit my leg. The pain was unbearable. In an instant, I was out with the sight of my smiling sister following me into unconsciousness.

  ~~~~~~~~~~

  —Sometime before the outbreak.—

  “Oh my God. Are you serious? Are we truly going?” Maddie—excuse me, Madeline, as she insisted we call her once she was a proper adult—said, jumping up and down in the living room of her tiny apartment and waving the printed sheets of paper that detailed our trip in the air like a five-year-old who’s discovered that they were going to meet their all-time favorite cartoon character.

  “Yes, we’re going. Just you and me. No Mom and Dad. No David, though he’s behaving like a snot about it.”

  “Oh, who cares about him? He’s been an ass for the last year or so. I don’t know how you put up with him.”

  “That’s not fair. You know the company David works for has been jerking him around for a while. He works in three different departments due to layoffs. They haven’t given him a raise for all he does, and they keep giving him shit when he gets behind. It’s enough to put anyone in a bad mood.”

  “I understand, but I dread being around him these days, and he used to be one of my favorite people in the world.”

  “I know, and his attitude is why we’re leaving him. The company wouldn’t give him the week off, so he can’t come. I did ask and try to include him in the trip. I didn’t try to include the parents but don’t tell them that. They’re butthurt enough over you getting this apartment so soon after graduation…like you haven’t been living in a dorm for the last four years.”

  “They’re so cute. I can’t believe we’re going. Do you think it’ll be as amazing as people make it out to be on television?” Maddie—crap, I had to stop calling her that—Madeline said, flopping down on the sofa to reread the papers.

  “I hope so. I got us a hotel at the Liberty Inn, right in the center of the island, so we should be able to walk to nearly every place you want to go. I’ve marked which days we should go to specific places based on their hours and what is going on that day. I set the zoo on the first full day. It’s large, and I figured it would be the most exhausting of all the things we want to do. Mind you we’ll be on a budget, so we’ll have to be careful not to spend any extra money if we want to do it all.”

  I sat down next to her and leaned over to point at a few things on the map she was examining. Liberty Island was the largest city in what remained of the United States. The island was now not only our nation’s physical capital, but also its financial headquarters. It sat in the middle of the Iowa territories, and it was a popular tourist location. Madeline had wanted to see the island since she was sixteen-years-old. I was happy to be able to fulfill that dream for her.

  “I have money too, you know. I can help with some of the expenses,” Madeline said, hugging me tightly.

  “I know you do, but this wouldn’t be much of a graduation gift if I let you pay for things. You know I’m proud of you, don’t you?”

  “You act like getting a college degree is hard and very few people do it,” she said, but I could see the blush rising on her cheeks.

  “Over a hundred years ago it was easy, but after the quakes and floods and devastation, we’re all lucky to have universities to attend let alone the money to attend them. I didn’t get a degree, remember.”

  “Thank you for that as well.”

  “Why are you thanking me? Mom and Dad paid.”

  “Yeah, but the only reason they could afford to do so was that you didn’t go to college.”

  “They told you that?”

  “Nope. I figured it out. Why didn’t you go?”

  “I wasn’t college material. You know that. They would have wasted the money if I’d gone. Besides, I do okay now. I’m lucky. The world has finally recovered enough that being a fiction writer is profitable. People have the disposable income to buy books.”

  “I have to assume by this trip that your new release is doing well.”

  “Better than the last, and yes, it’s paying for this vacation, or at least the advance I got from my publisher is paying for it. That’s another reason David is so pissy. I didn’t have to ask him for any money for the trip, which has hurt his feelings or pride or something, and…” I stopped myself from saying the last part. Today was a happy day, not a sad one.

  “And? What?”

  “Nothing. I forgot what I was about to say. Never mind.”

  “You didn’t forget. I can tell by the look on your face that something is wrong, so spill.”

  “Really. Don’t worry about it. Everything isn’t great, but it’ll get better. I have a feeling.”

  “Are you pregnant?” she asked, turning to me in excitement. “Wait, I thought David wanted a baby. I know you’ve had two miscarriages, but I thought he still wanted to keep trying.”

  “I’m not pregnant. I was. Only for about eight weeks. I didn’t know until I lost it. That’s another thing that has David upset. He blames himself as if the pollutants we’ve been drinking for the last hundred years or so hasn’t affected us all. Most people are lucky to have one kid let alone two as Mom and Dad did.”

  “Does your doctor still hold out hope that you can carry full term?”

  “Right now he does, but I’m thirty-one, I don’t know how much longer I want to try. My age can cause more problems than the toxins the embryo will endure after conception. I don’t think I want to do that to a child.”

  “David’s pushing you, though, isn’t he?”

  “Yeah, but look, that’s a worry for a different day. We have a week to plan this trip. You’ll take that long to pack your cosmetic bag. We should start planning this thing.”

  -----

  Our parent’s dropped us at a small airport two towns over a week later. Their sendoff was so dramatic that you would have thought we were never coming back. Little did we know. David and I had said our awkward goodbyes that morning before he’d left for work.

  We’d met in David’s second year of college. I was working in my mom’s antique shop, and he’d come in looking for a present for his mother. A year later, we married, and life had been good until we lost our first child at six months in utero two years after that. We hadn’t stopped loving each other, but the grief had put a strain on us, for a while. Once the sorrow had worn away, we’d reconnected, just in time for us to start losing it again almost three years later when we lost the second one at four months. Our relationship hadn’t been the same since. Each pregnancy had ended earlier and earlier, and I was sure
we were going to be one of the many unlucky couples not able to have children.

  Oddly enough, I was okay with that. The first miscarriage had been emotionally damaging, and I hadn’t wanted to try again. I only did so for David. I loved my husband, even then, maybe not as much as I did when we’d first met, but I did love him. I feared I’d never be enough for him.

  My sister talked non-stop as we waited for our flight to arrive, while on the small commuter plane, and throughout our cab ride to the hotel. I collapsed on my bed the second we were in our room, but she rushed straight to the large double windows and flung open the curtains.

  “I can’t believe we’re here,” Madeline said for the millionth time. “What are you doing? Get up. We have lots to do,” she said, turning to see me curling into the top covers and trying to take a nap.

  “I’m old, fat, and tired. Leave me be for a bit, please.”

  “You’re none of those things, but okay, we’ll rest and unpack, but then I want to go out and see the city.”

  “Fine. I’ll nap. You unpack and find a restaurant.”

  “I’m not touching your underwear or whatever else you might have in your suitcases. You want your stuff unpacked? Do it yourself,” Maddie said, hefting one of her large bags onto her bed.

  “I promise that my underwear is in a Ziploc bag and anything that may vibrate is in a case as well, just don’t snoop.”

  “Gross. Please don’t use that thing when I’m in the room with you. I wouldn’t be able to look at you ever again if you did.”