Emma’s grip on her fork was so tight her fingers were aching. “It’s hard to put into words. I guess maybe I just wanted to feel hope. Even if the dream was bullshit and the Fort didn’t exist, trying to find it was a more positive, hopeful thing than putting a bullet in my head.”
Rosie sighed, her fingers fiddling with the gathered hem of her apron. “I came here to talk to you because my grandson, Troy, likes you a lot. He won’t stop talking about you. I just wanted to make sure you’re the type of person he should be attaching himself to. Listening to you speak, it helps me understand who you are and what you’ve been through.”
Emma fought the urge to chuckle. Here she’d been convinced Rosie was interrogating her for the powers that be when she was only a concerned grandmother. “I understand.”
“If he bothers you, just let me know. I told him to let you get used to living here before he starts to pester you.”
“He’s sweet.”
“So do you, Emma,” Rosie replied, her expression warm and kind.
“I’m just a mom who lost her kid who hopes to help other people not lose theirs.”
As Emma spoke the words aloud, they became her mission and purpose for living. There had to be more than just mere survival in this dead world and she’d found it. It was natural that her thoughts would drift to someone she already knew was in dire circumstances.
“The mother with the child from yesterday…”
“Yes?” Rosie tilted her head, curious.
“Is she still outside the wall?”
“Sadly, yes. Juan says Travis talked to her over the walkie-talkie he gave her, but she is refusing to leave her poor dead son behind. Juan says she’s convinced we’re holding out on her.”
“Has anyone gone over to talk to her face to face?”
With a sad sigh, Rosie shook her head. “She’s moved locations. We don’t know where she is now. We can’t make her come into the Fort. Everyone has to make their own choices in this world. As cruel as that may sound.”
“It doesn’t sound cruel. People should be allowed to make their own decisions, even if those choices don’t make sense to us.” Emma remembered her own despair and the ghost in her dreams, urging her to find a new life. “Maybe she just needs to speak to someone face to face. Someone who understands.”
“You?”
“I’m not sure yet. Maybe.”
“If I can help,” said Rosie, “let me know.”
“I definitely will.”
An idea was starting to brew in Emma’s head, but she wasn’t sure it would work. There was only one way to find out.
It was time to get dressed and leave the comfort of her new room.
9
The Newcomer
The roar of bulldozers pulled Emma’s attention out the window of her room. The activity outside the Fort was in full swing. The construction vehicles were in a final cleanup of the area in front of the hotel, removing any signs of the zombie horde. Two big trucks rumbled down the street, packed with the corpses of zombies. She watched until they disappeared down another side road. The battle against the horde must have been epic in scale. Observing the approach of the horde must have been frightening. The good news was the Fort was still standing, and inside its walls was hope for the future.
Which brought her to her mission…
Freshly showered and in her new clothing, Emma stepped away from the view to finish getting ready. She tightened a leather belt around her hips then hooked the buckskin holster she’d inherited from her grandfather onto it. She’d leave her rifle in the hotel room for now, but slipped her pistol into the holster. Tucking two loaded backup magazines into her back pocket, she glanced at the clock. It was a few hours until dinner when most of the population of the Fort would descend on the dining room, but she’d rather not wait until then to track down the person she needed to speak to.
Monica had given Emma the cowboy hat she’d been wearing yesterday. It was woven straw with a longhorn concho bolo around the crown. “You’ll need this since you’ll be out and about during the day,” she’d said.
Emma tucked it onto her head and was satisfied with the fit. Glancing into the mirror over the dresser, she marveled at how different she looked in her new clothing and hat. With her chestnut waves secured in long braids, she looked like someone different. Someone new. That thought appealed to her.
Snatching her denim jacket off the bed, she headed out on her mission.
Unlike the preceding night, the lobby was much quieter when the elevator doors opened. The afternoon sunlight poured in through windows that opened to a view of the high wall that spanned the front of the hotel. The golden rays gave the area a dreamy feel. A few of the elderly residents were reading, crocheting, or doing puzzles. The younger people were missing from the mix, probably out on duty. The imposing check-in counter didn’t have anyone behind it. Flowers in a vase, a few prayer candles, and hand-written notes and cards created a memorial to the deceased city secretary and her son.
Emma found her way out through the back of the hotel, nodding to the few other people she passed by in the hallways. Everyone she saw was a stranger, so she kept walking. It was a little unnerving to be around so many people after so much time alone and it was hard to work up the nerve to do more than nod in greeting.
Outside, there were a few people gathered at a folding table laden with large orange water coolers, red plastic cups, and a basket full of protein bars. Without a ton of people milling around, the hard-packed red earth looked barren. The memorial garden was empty, the flowers the brightest color on the block. There were stakes roping off a section near the portable office, a sign announcing it was a future vegetable garden. Yet, overall, the area felt empty.
The back door to City Hall slammed open just as Emma reached the bottom step. Lenore appeared in the doorway, closely followed by a skinny black guy in an Atlanta Braves cap. In the rear was the redheaded man named Arnold. Emma swiftly stepped to one side, letting the heavyset woman pass.
“You couldn’t have picked up the pace and gotten here like a month ago?” Lenore groused.
“I don’t get why you’re angry,” the newcomer snapped, pausing on the steps.
“You could’ve gotten here faster! And then Ken wouldn’t be dead!”
“Is she making sense to you? Because she is not making sense to me,” the skinny guy said to Arnold.
“Lewis, she’s upset because her best friend, who was gay, died alongside his unrequited love,” Arnold explained. “She thinks if you’d gotten here earlier he wouldn’t have died because you’re gay and he wouldn’t have been chasing that other guy.”
“Who said I was gay?” Lewis protested.
Lenore swerved around on her heel to pierce him with a disbelieving look. “Really? Really?”
“Fine! I’m gay. But just because you put two gays in the same space don’t mean they’re going to fuck,” Lewis shot back.
The unwavering incredulous gaze of the irate woman bore down on Lewis.
“Okay, maybe they will, but that don’t mean he’d be alive. You can’t put this on me! I just got here!”
“I can put it on you because if you’d been here earlier he wouldn’t have been pining for that mountain man!”
Arnold raised a finger. “Which is my point, babe.”
“Lenore,” she corrected. “I ain’t your babe.”
“Fine! Lenore, Ken was into buff dudes. Lewis ain’t that.”
Lewis was clearly offended. “Excuse you!”
“You’re as skinny as a blade of grass,” Lenore snorted.
“She means no offense,” Arnold interjected. “But you’re definitely not Ken’s type.”
Lenore glowered, but didn’t deny what Arnold was saying.
Feeling distinctly uncomfortable, Emma waited for a break in the conversation to speak to Lewis. He’d arrived with the mother and child. Maybe he’d be able to give her insight into how to reach the distraught woman and bring her into the Fort.
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Raising his hands, Lewis’s attention swiveled back and forth between Lenore and Arnold. “I’m just trying to make friends here. I’m new here. I saw a sister and-”
Lenore grunted. “I ain’t your sister.”
Lewis drew himself up and met Lenore’s angry gaze with an equally indignant one. “Really?”
“Babe, give him a break.”
With a furious sigh, Lenore’s shoulders sagged. “I get what you’re sayin’, okay? Both of you. I’m pissed off at the universe right now because Ken wouldn’t have been so lonely if you’d gotten here weeks ago. He was so lonely.” Tears welled in her eyes and she stalked off.
“It’ll be cool, man. I promise.” Arnold clapped Lewis on the shoulder. “She’s just having a rough time of it. I’ll put in a good word for you. It’s all good.” The tall redhead scampered after Lenore.
Pivoting about, Lewis caught sight of Emma lingering nearby. “Is everyone around here crazy?”
“I just got here myself, so I can’t speak to that,” Emma answered.
Lewis shot her a suspicious look. “But I saw you on the wall shooting the zombies yesterday.”
“I got put to work right away.” Emma shrugged one shoulder. “I guess they wanted to test me.”
“Will they do that to me?” Lewis didn’t look too happy at that thought.
“I killed an entire town of zombies, so I think they wanted me to prove myself.” She might as well get the topic of her legendary status out of the way.
“A whole town? You’re so tiny! What did you do? Drop a bomb?”
“It took over a year.”
“Oh! So slow-like. That makes sense.”
Emma nodded.
He extended his hand, an open and friendly look on his face. “I’m Lewis.”
“Emma.”
They shook hands, exchanging smiles.
Crossing his arms over his chest, Lewis eyed her cowboy hat for a second. “You’re from Texas, huh?”
“Yeah. A few hours from here. You’re from Atlanta, right?”
“How’d you know?”
Emma pointed to the cap.
“Oh, yeah.” Lewis laughed, embarrassed. “I’m sleep-deprived and a little shook up right now.”
“Totally understandable. Especially after yesterday.”
“That was some shit, wasn’t it? I can’t believe that happened. Just when we thought we were safe, Rickie got chopped to pieces by that trap. Shit. I can’t shake that image out of my head.”
Emma grimaced. “It’s stuck in mine too. I had awful nightmares.”
“The worst. Plus, I think I might still be in trouble for crashing that sweet Mustang. That lady who runs the garage keeps giving me the stink eye.”
“It was...a choice to take the car,” Emma said, trying not to straight up tell him it had been a dumb move.
“I know. I panicked. I just wanted to save my people. This is why I like taking orders, not giving them. I panic.”
“We all do at times. It’s normal.”
Lewis shrugged beneath his spotless white t-shirt. It must be new. “I do it all the time. It’s like my default setting.”
“Do you mind me askin’ how you and your people got here?”
His eyes sparked with eagerness, giving the impression he was anxious to speak about his misfortunes. “Nah, it’s cool. I’m fine with sharing. I can tell you it was some crazy ass journey. We started out in a big caravan of cars, but it got bad on the road. Zombies, crazy people, wildfires, tornadoes…we saw some bad shit out there.”
“It sounds bad.”
Leaning his elbows against the railing, Lewis gave her a somber nod. With the flair of a storyteller, he said, “We started out with a hundred. Lots of people gave up when things got rough. They wanted to just find a place to hunker down and wait it out. It was tempting, but hope kept us going. The idea of a cure! It drove us forward through all the bad shit. When we reached Texas, we thought the worst was behind us. We were trying to get here as fast as we could, especially once we got past I-35. That was some serious shit, I tell you. Cars everywhere. Zombies everywhere. We thought once we got past it, we could just haul ass here. Then everything went wrong. Car broke down, ammo ran out, and we barely avoided a fuck-ton of zombies by hiding in a warehouse. Once the zombies cleared the area, we humped it the last few days on foot. Then we get here and the street starts exploding and there’s traps and...” Lewis shook his head in disbelief. “I can’t believe some of us made it here alive after what went down. When we started out from Atlanta, we thought it would take a few days to get here. Not months.”
“So it is true you were looking for a cure.”
Sagging with sorrow, Lewis nodded. “Yeah. For my cousin.”
“The little boy with the mask?”
Lewis visibly shuddered, his gaze dropping to the ground. “That’s him. Julian got bit by another kid. We were holed up in a high school and these people showed up. A big family. They didn’t tell us that the daughter got bit earlier in the day. Julian was trying to cheer her up by showing her his teddy bear when she turned. She grabbed his arm and bit down. He was wearing long sleeves, so she kept at it like a rabid dog, trying to get to his meat. It was fucked up. Can you believe her family didn’t tell us she was bit?”
“Yeah, I believe it. Sometimes people go into denial when bad shit happens.”
Dark eyes glimmering with tears, Lewis pressed his lips together, composing himself. “Seen it with my auntie when Julian got the bite. It was a small one. We weren’t even sure it broke the skin all the way, but I knew we couldn’t chance it. So I told him we were going to play ball, put the mask on him, and duct-taped it on his head. I told him it was because it was too big for him. Had to make it secure. We were playing and then he said he was dizzy. He laid down on the ground and...and…”
Emma reached out to touch the young man’s arm when he choked on the words. “You don’t have to tell me if it hurts too much. I understand.”
“My auntie wouldn’t let anyone put him down!” The words tore out of Lewis mouth, angry and desperate. Emma got the feeling that he needed to share his story. “We locked him in a janitor’s closet. Ain’t that crazy?”
What if Billy had been with her when he’d been bitten? What would she have done? She didn’t have an answer. “No, no. Not really. It’s hard to know what you’ll do when you’re faced with something that awful.”
“People got so mad at her, but she held her ground. Now she’s out there right now. With Julian. Still hoping for a cure that ain’t here.”
“I want to help her. That’s why I came looking for you. Maybe you can tell me something that would help me convince her to let go of Julian and come inside the walls.”
“Oh, no! There ain’t no convincing my Aunt Macy. I’m telling you right now. I’m stubborn, but she’s way worse. She came here because there is supposed to be a cure and now everyone is saying there’s not. There’s not even a lab! We were told there’s a lab here! It was so much bullshit!”
“Who told you?”
“A voice on the ham radio. A dude telling everyone there was a cure in Ashley Oaks, Texas at a fort run by the government.”
“You told the leaders here about that, right?”
“Oh, yeah. The moment we got inside they were asking us a bunch of questions. I kept hoping they would tell us they did have a cure and we had to pass some tests, but that wasn’t the case.”
“I can’t imagine why someone told you to come here. If any place would have a cure, it’s the CDC. You were in Atlanta, right?”
“We’re from outside of Atlanta. Seventy miles east. It’s not like anyone could just go up to the CDC building and demand a cure. Atlanta was nuked anyway, so it wasn’t an option.”
Widening her eyes, Emma found herself speechless.
“You didn’t know? They dropped a bomb on Atlanta and Houston on the same day.”
“No, I had no idea. We only had local stations on our television and the cov
erage went dead within two days.”
“It was about a week after things got really bad that they started taking out the big cities. New York City was first. Then Washington D.C. and Los Angeles. The idea was to kill the outbreaks in the big cities and save the rest of the country. Didn’t work. The bombs didn’t stop it from spreading.”
“But it could’ve killed millions of zombies, which is better for us survivors.”
“Maybe.” Narrowing his dark eyes, Lewis leaned toward her. “Why are you interested in Aunt Macy?”
Emma didn’t see the point in not being truthful. Her pain would always be a part of her. “I was a mom too.”
“Was? Oh, wow. Shit. Sorry.”
“I was the one giving her cover yesterday and when I saw your cousin in that condition, it broke my heart.”
“You know what’s sad? We told ourselves that because he had such a small bite, they could cure him. He wasn’t ripped up like other zombies, you know? My aunt clung to that the whole way here. But it was for nothing. I don’t think there’s a damn thing you could say to her to convince her to give up hope. I tried yesterday. I begged her to come inside. That dude, Juan, he tried the same. I even tried to pull Julian out of her arms. She wouldn’t let me. I love her, but she’s gone crazy with grief.”
“I can’t say I blame her.”
“Look, Emma, you seem like a nice lady.” Pressing a hand against his chest, Lewis said, “It touches my heart that you care about my aunt. It’s been months since he died and she’s still got hope because some asshole on the ham radio said there’s a cure here. I just don’t know how you can change that. I love her, but I’m not going to go out there and die with her. And she’s gonna die. I hate it, but that’s the truth.”
“I understand why you feel like that, but I had given up on life when someone saved me. I can’t give up on your aunt.”
The vision of the dark haired woman in the red sweater reappeared in her mind. Jenni sitting in the shadows, urging Emma to live.
“So whatcha gonna do to save her?” Lewis asked, genuinely curious.
A ghost had saved her, so maybe a ghost was the answer.
As The World Dies | Book 4 | After Siege Page 8