Shore Haven

by Reynolds, Jennifer

  I only nodded and wiped my face. I couldn’t take my eyes off the house. They had to be in there. They just had to be.

  They weren’t, though. The house was full of bodies. Actually, there were about seven bodies in all, but not one of them belonged to my mother or father. I recognized a few people from the neighborhood, but not all. The bodies weren’t that old either.

  From what we could surmise, Lidia, as her body was there, and a group of survivors had holed up in the house. Someone must have turned and attacked the others. There appeared to be a struggle but not a big one. Most people had probably been asleep.

  We spent the better part of the day searching the neighborhood and other places my parents might have gone. Jason even took me back to their house so that I could see for myself they weren’t there. Some of their clothes and belongings were missing, but only a few things. They hadn’t packed for a long journey or extended stay away from home.

  “They didn’t plan to be gone long,” I said to Jason, showing him my mother’s full jewelry box. “But there’s no sign that they’ve been here in months either. What do you think happened?”

  “I don’t know. Is there a place the townspeople go in case of emergencies? Maybe they went there.”

  “There are a couple of shelters in the area. Some families even have underground ones in their backyards,” I said, feeling renewed hoped that my parents might be alive.

  “We’ll check them if you want,” he said, leading me out of the house. And we did. And they weren’t anywhere.

  By late afternoon of the second day, I was worried. My parents couldn’t have disappeared. All of the shelters were empty and had been for a while, though. We saw notices at a few of them stating that the military, the government, someone was moving as many survivors as possible to other shelters in other cities, but I felt sure my parents wouldn’t have left Ashlyn without leaving Maddie and I some sort of clue as to where they were going.

  “Do you want to search those cities,” Jason asked, as the four of us sat on the steps of the house a few blocks from my parents’ home having a snack. The storm shelter we’d just searched was empty.

  “No,” I answered. “It’ll take too much time.”

  “We don’t mind,” he said, speaking for the others before they had a chance to say anything. I knew they would mind. Even I was starting to miss Shore Haven, and I was home.

  “I mind. We’re just chasing ghosts out here. I want to stop by my house and grab a few things before we head back.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, leaning my head on his shoulder and thanking him for everything he’d done for me.

  “You’re welcome,” he said and kissed my forehead.

  “Are you ready?” he asked me as we finished eating. Our next stop wasn’t going to be easy.

  “Yeah,” I answered and took his hand.

  I didn’t live that far from my parents, but the walk to my apartment was long and nerve-racking. I prayed my husband wasn’t there…that we couldn’t find him either. I didn’t wish him dead…or at least I refused to admit that I wanted it. I understood that wishing and thinking such a thing made me a horrible person. I also knew how much easier on Jason and I things would be if he were.

  I wanted nothing more than to be able to go back to Shore Haven and be with Jason if he wanted me. I felt confident that he did, but there was still a lingering bit of doubt in the back of my head that said he only saw me as another survivor he had to take care of…another person to protect.

  The apartment building looked rough. Many buildings had, but the trash, glass, and other debris that littered the yard around it surprised me. My apartment was on the fourth floor and looked to still have most of its windows unlike the apartments below me.

  The main door of the building was missing, and a few rotting bodies blocked the walkways and stairways. Having to clear the bodies slowed our movements, which upped my anxiety.

  “What’s wrong?” Jason asked when I paused at the door. I only stood there staring at it.

  “I don’t have the key. I think it’s still at the hotel. I haven’t thought about it since the outbreak.”

  Katrina started laughing. Greg looked away smirking. Jason raised one eyebrow at me.

  “What?” I asked confused by their responses.

  “What do we need a key for?” Jason asked in return.

  “To get into the apartment,” I said, pointing toward the door.

  “We don’t need a key sweetheart,” he said, chuckling.

  “We do if we want to get inside.”

  “No, we don’t.” Jason gently pushed me aside and turned the knob. The door opened a crack.

  “First of all, we’ve yet to run into a locked door. Most people were too panicked to think about locking up behind them. Second, if it had been locked, we could have broken in,” he said, turning to look at me.

  I felt a little foolish. For a brief second, I’d forgotten that we were in the middle of the apocalypse. The foolishness faded as fear began knotting my stomach. I no longer wanted to see what was behind the door.

  Jason saw my expression change. He stepped toward me and cupped my face. “We don’t have to do this if you’ve changed your mind.”

  “I know. I want my photo albums. I don’t care if David is here or not, but I am terrified of seeing him if he’s alive.”

  “If he were alive and in there,” Greg said, pointing to the slightly opened door, “he’d already come out. I think you’re safe from that.”

  I glanced over Jason’s shoulder and into the darkened room. Greg was right, but David was also smart enough to be hiding in the shadows waiting for us to come in before making his presence known.

  “Besides, we’ve got your back if he tries anything,” Katrina said, patting my right shoulder.

  I looked back to Jason, who smiled and nodded in agreement with Katrina.

  “I’ve got you,” he said, then kissed my forehead. I longed for the day when he could kiss my lips. That time was very near. I just had to go through the door.

  I nodded, took in a deep breath, grabbed Jason’s hand, and turned us toward my apartment. If David was on the other side, I wanted to be the first person he saw. Jason was on my heels, and Katrina and Greg were on his.

  The sight before me took me by surprise. The wider I opened the door, the more light from the hall and the open kitchen window lit the room allowing me to see a dead, at first unfamiliar, woman sprawled out on my kitchen floor. She had turned, but she also had a few bullet holes in her. She’d attacked someone, and they’d fought back.

  I stood looking down at the body for a long time, while Jason, Katrina, and Greg fanned out around the kitchen, bracing for an attack.

  “Do you know her?” Jason asked me.

  “I don’t know. The face is all…” I said as I bent down to turn her, hoping to get a better view, but the virus, the bullets, and time had distorted her too much.

  “There’s a purse on the counter,” Katrina said, approaching it. “I guess it isn’t yours.” She fished out the woman’s wallet and I.D. Haley Rogers was the woman’s name.

  “She worked with David. She’s the woman Maddie said she saw him with…she’s his mistress. I thought so,” I said without emotion. I’d thought that even at that moment I should be mad, but I wasn’t.

  “You think he’s still here?” Katrina asked.

  “Maybe,” I said. “This place isn’t that large. We’ll know in a minute.” I stepped around Haley’s body and headed toward my bedroom.

  Sure enough, David was there. He was lying across the bed. From the way the scene looked, it appeared that he’d taken his own life. I couldn’t tell if he’d been sick, though I figured he had been. He did have a large bit of flesh missing from his arm. A chunk I was certain Haley had taken out of him. The bite wasn’t what killed him, though. The shot to the head had. He’d saved the world from having to deal with another zombie by killing himself before he turned. He was
n’t a total douche.

  I didn’t burst into tears when I saw him. I merely took in the sight of his body for a minute before going to him and shifting his body so that he was lying across it correctly. Jason helped. After that, I went to the kitchen and asked the group to help me carry Haley to the bedroom, so she could lie with David.

  I didn’t know if they loved each other or not. I didn’t know if the woman was one of many for David, but in case he did love her, I thought the couple should lie together in eternity. Once we had them positioned, I grabbed a quilt out of the closet that David’s mother had made and covered them with it.

  In the closet, I found one of David’s rolling luggage cases. I drug it out, emptied it of the few things of his he’d left in it, and began packing the stuff from the apartment I wanted. There wasn’t a whole lot, but more than would fit into my pack. Jason watched over me without saying a word, while Katrina and Greg kept a lookout for any stray zombies or people.

  An hour later, we were leaving the apartment building. The day had turned dark on us while we’d been inside my apartment. My stomach was also growling with hunger.

  “We should camp somewhere tonight and head out in the morning,” Jason said to the others as he squeezed my hand. He could tell that the past two days had taken their toll on me. I was exhausted.

  They all agreed but were quiet for a second when I suggested we stay at my parents’ house. They had a completed basement apartment that we could stay in overnight that no one or thing could see from outside. We’d be safe. They reluctantly agreed. I guess they feared that they’d have to deal with a bawling me all night if we stayed in my childhood home. They were probably right, but I really wanted to stay there one last time.

  Chapter 28

  ~~~Samantha~~~

  I wasn’t the blubbering mess they thought I would be once I was back in my childhood home. Hell, I didn’t bawl as I thought I would staying one final night at my parents’ house.

  The basement already had a sofa with a pullout bed in it, so we drug the queen size mattress off my bed downstairs and set it up in one of the back corners. Jason and I tried to offer Katrina and Greg the pullout, but they insisted on sleeping on the mattress. The two weren’t a couple—that I knew of anyway—but none of us had seen a reason to drag another mattress to the basement when the queen size was big enough for the both of them.

  We separated early after eating and barricading ourselves downstairs. Katrina and Greg went to one end while Jason and I went to the other. The others discussed our route for our return trip home while Jason let me show him pictures of my family and talk about my life in Ashlyn.

  I wasn’t entirely selfish during our discussion. I asked Jason about his childhood and parents, and he would answer, but then he would shift the conversation back to me. He didn’t do it because he had a bad childhood and didn’t want to talk about it. He did it because he wanted that night to be about me.

  The two of us fell asleep curled up together for the first time since the night he’d returned from the first lab they’d went to searching for a vaccine, but he didn’t kiss me anywhere but on the forehead, nor did he make any other advances toward me. There would be plenty of time for that later, I hoped.

  The next morning I left a note on my parents’ fridge telling them that Maddie was gone, but that I was living in Shore Haven. I’d try to come back in a few months to see if they’d returned to Ashlyn if they didn’t turn up at Shore Haven. I didn’t know if I’d ever be back, but I had hope.

  Our journey out of Ashlyn was uneventful. We were seeing the end of the zombie apocalypse, I thought. We didn’t seem to be on guard every second of every day. The zombies might not be the threat they’d once been, but that didn’t mean the humans were no longer one.

  I was amazed at how quickly so many people turned feral. We didn’t run into any of them as we moved, but on two different occasions, we ran into evidence of their brutality.

  In one town, we saw two men hanging from trees with signs around their necks that proclaimed them thieves. I don’t know that hanging was an appropriate punishment for theft. On the other hand, as I didn’t know what kind of men they were or what they’d stolen, I couldn’t say which party had gone feral.

  In another town, we found more evidence of cannibalism, which I didn’t get at all. The outbreak had been swift and consuming. Yeah, the cold and frozen stuff would have gone bad, and animals and rodents had probably gotten into a lot of the boxed stuff, but that still left a lot of food lying around with so little of a population to consume it. Not only that, but we had been a people who’d survived one end of the world scenario already. More than one family and town had stockpiles hidden in underground shelters. Those wouldn’t be hard to find.

  I’m not saying the planting and preparing we were doing at Shore Haven wasn’t needed, but there should have been plenty of food to get us through at least the first year or so of the outbreak. Long before then, you’d think other countries would start sending aid once they knew the zombies were gone. Perhaps I saw the positive side of things because my mind couldn’t or wouldn’t see the bad, but I couldn’t imagine anyone being so hungry at that moment that they’d eat another living person. Even if they couldn’t find food in a store or home, the outbreak hadn’t affected the animals, and the zombies didn’t seem to see them as a source of food, so there was plenty to hunt.

  We did pick off a zombie or two, but we didn’t meet any hordes. In the bigger cities, we saw where many had died on their own. The doctors Tera and her group had met hadn’t said anything about the lifespan of the zombie or had any ideas as to what allowed them to reanimate or what eventually killed them. After the first few days of the sickness and it was clear that the world needed a vaccine or a cure more, they had focused on that and not much else.

  None of us cared about the why, we were just glad it was so. There were books, movies, and television shows from the old world that showed those things living for hundreds of years. I couldn’t imagine living in a world like that. I could never commit suicide unless it was to prevent myself from turning, but I think I would beg someone to kill me if I believed that world was the one I’d be living in forever.

  Jason got upset with me when I’d told him that.

  “You have me, and we have Shore Haven,” he’d argued as we walked. We were a three day’s walk from Shore Haven and coming upon our first large metropolitan area. There weren’t many in the world after the floods, but there were a few. That one was about the size of Liberty Island, though the buildings weren’t as large. If we were going to come upon a horde, it would be there.

  “I know, and you’re the reason I didn’t ask you guys to kill me after Maddie died,” I admitted, telling him for the first time how long I’ve had feelings for him. What I felt wasn’t love at first sight, but from the moment I’d seen him, truly seen him, I’d felt something for him. “But I don’t think I could live day-to-day in fear for my life. There’s no guarantee that Shore Haven will be safe forever.”

  “Shore Haven will last. Even if it didn’t, I’d want to live, especially if you’re still here. I think we could live in a world full of them now that we have a vaccine,” he said, lifting the arm Katrina had injected.

  I melted a little at his words about wanting to live with me but didn’t say anything. Katrina and Greg weren’t close enough to hear our conversation, which was a good thing. I wasn’t in the mood for them to tease us.

  “We don’t know if it actually works,” I pointed out, though the zombie ambling in our direction, didn’t seem to sense us, and probably would have walked right by if Jason hadn’t moved into its line of sight to decapitate it.

  I didn’t think that was proof that we couldn’t catch the virus. I also didn’t see it as evidence that the zombies can’t sense us. I was sure that the zombie’s ambivalence of us had more to do with the fact that it was barely alive—if you could call them alive—more than anything else.

  Our conversation died after th
at. The closer we got to the city, Larkin, it was called, the more zombies we saw. No horde came charging after us, but the number of stragglers increased.

  The city looked about as bad as Liberty Island with burned buildings, bodies everywhere, but the main difference was the makeshift camp on the north side of town that the military had built. The site was empty, but considering that a large chunk of the south fencing was missing and rotting zombies lay everywhere, we suspected that an outbreak occurred inside, probably killing everyone.

  We searched the area but found no information that explained what was happening. We did find a manifesto with the names of all the people who were inside the camp up to a week after the outbreak, and my parents’ names were on it.

  I burst into tears when I saw the handwritten words.

  “What’s wrong?” Jason asked, rushing over to me. I wasn’t crying silent tears. I was bawling like a baby, which had the potential of bringing a horde down on us. He wasn’t trying to shush me, though. He was trying to understand what had made me burst into tears.

  I pointed to my parents’ names in the book and cried harder. If they had been one of the last people to arrive, they’d probably gotten there about the time the outbreak happened inside the camp. If the zombies hadn’t killed them, then they were probably one of them.

  Jason pulled me to him and let me cry. I buried my face into the crook of his arm to muffle the sound.

  Katrina and Greg rushed to us to see what was the matter. Jason explained the situation, and the two offered to search the bodies, but I shook my head.

  “It’ll be a waste of time. My parents are most likely dead; either zombie-dead or dead-dead. The likelihood that they got away is slim. Even if they did, a city this large would take us a week or more to search, and I doubt they are even still here. They would have fled the city if they’d escaped.”

  I looked toward the mound of bodies along the south gate and knew in my gut that they were inside the pile somewhere. I should want to find them, to bury them, but I was tired and ready to get home.