She would say that living without people is no way to live at all. She would talk about love.
But she isn’t here, because living with me and my brothers is what got her killed in the first place. Because she could have taken refuge at the military camp and not been expected to fight because she was over forty, but she chose to stay because she was worried about us.
My mother may have died from a gunshot wound to the head, but the real horror happened the day she looked at her sons and didn’t know them, the heartbreak as Jonathan’s eyes blackened and turned vacant while Ben’s turned red and bloodshot.
When I pulled the trigger, I put the end to misery that could have been avoided had my mother been as selfish as I’m being right now.
Malia takes my comments like physical blows, shoulders tense, looking down at the ground.
Finally, she looks up. The dying sunlight makes her eyes gleam green. “Then pretend.” She says. “Pretend that you care, pretend that you want to fit in here.”
I feel a tightness in my chest again, and I want so badly to believe her. I want so badly to think that I can act like I’m normal until I am, that pretending the world will ever go back to the way it was before is anything but a futile exercise meant to distract me from the death that will surely come, whether a bullet or a bite, coming fast and hard and inexorable. Forward, forward, forward.
Mason’s speech plays in my mind, but the words that sounded so brave and defiant just sound foolish now.
“What the Hell is the point of pretending?”
She looks away.
The trees seem to beckon, and I want to run. To move, faster than she can stop me, take off and disappear in to the shadows the leaves cast on the ground and get away, away so far and fast that they have no hope of finding me. Running is only thing I have left, to finish what I started when I left my house with blood on my face, when I crashed through the trees with Ben’s mocking laughter echoing in my ears. I have stopped running for Malia, and Mason, and the euphoria of the rooftop, but I shouldn’t have.
The trees call me, I can be gone and out and before she understands what’s happening.
My legs coil under me, aching from the day but quivering with the adrenaline that has started to race through my veins. My arms tense, ready to launch me off the edge of the porch and onto the grass. I roll my ankles to make sure that the impact won’t hurt them.
But Malia is turning to look at me, seeing the tension in my posture and the way my breaths are coming quick and shallow. “You can always run,” she says. “And it’s the easiest thing in the world to do when something like this happens.”
I sink back, leaning back on my arms. “I’m not going to run,” I raise my chin and look her in the eyes.
Malia smiles, a slow, sardonic grin that starts at the corner of her mouth. “I always ran too, Rogue. I know what it looks like. And so do you.”
She stands. “But I’m not going to make you stay. If you want to go, fine. I’ve only known you for five minutes; what authority do I have to dictate whatever life you have left?”
She walks to the door, and I start double-checking the laces on my sneakers, making sure they’re not broken and that I won’t fall in the dash that is coming. My heart speeds in anticipation of the run, and I feel the giddy joy of running sweep into me as I stand and stretch, waiting for Malia to close the door.
The door shuts quietly, almost imperceptibly. But it’s enough to set me off, a pistol at the starting blocks. I throw open the porch screen door, and I’m running, flying across the grass, taking great leaps over tussocks on the ground, careening forward and to the trees.
And then Perce is next to me, striding along easily, like he’s out for a pleasant stroll. His hair is held back with the same red bandana, and his black shirt strains against his arms.
I stumble, distracted, the smooth rhythm that I’d slipped into falling into discordance.
“What—are—you—doing?” I gasp out, trying to regulate my breathing again.
Perce looks straight ahead, but his lips are curled in that infuriating grin. “Malia thinks that she’s gonna teach you a lesson by letting you run away. Me, I think you’re just gonna run away and never see us again.” His voice barely shows the strain of talking.
“And why would you care if I never saw you again?” I snap out quickly, then take a breath. We duck for a moment as we go into the trees, and Perce doesn’t reply.
We run on in silence, apart from the steady rhythm of our breathing. I try to speed up, leaping over a few logs, veering quickly to the left, trying to lose him in the undergrowth, but Perce has longer legs than me, and he doesn’t seem to tire.
Finally, we break out of the trees onto a dirt road, overgrown with grass now, our shoes sinking slightly in the reddish dirt. I can’t go any further with him next to me,
I stop. “I’m leaving. I don’t know what you’re doing, but I’m not going back.”
Perce puts his hands on his hips. “You’re leaving? I had no idea. “He rolls his eyes.
“Seriously. Stop following me.”
“Maybe I’m not following you. Maybe I just wanted to go for a jog.”
I take a step toward him. His eyes flick into mine like a challenge, like he knows exactly what I’m thinking and wants me to try it. “Leave. Me. Alone.” I say, struggling to keep my voice low and even.
“I’m not going to stop you from leaving, Rogue,” Perce says, raising an eyebrow. “This isn’t Twilight.”
“Then why are you here? Why do you care if I stay or leave?”
He looks down, suddenly embarrassed, a flush further reddening his heated skin. “I don’t know, Rogue. I just— “
“What? I don’t mean anything to you. I don’t know how you can honestly expect me to believe that you actually want me to stay, when you’ve got a million other girls you can do whatever you want with.”
Perce raises his head, eyes narrowed. “You’ve heard about me.”
“I didn’t have to. I saw it with my own eyes.”
He blinks. “I need to explain. Please let me explain.”
I shake my head. “I don’t care, Perce. Do whatever you want. But I’m leaving.” I start to jog up the trail, toward the setting sun. Maybe if I run long enough, I can get to California, bury myself in the ocean, fall beneath crashing waves and let them dash me against the shore again and again, until I just drift off, calm and peaceful. A cold, watery send-off instead of a hot, dry slash of blood and horror.
“I don’t know why I want you to stay,” Perce says, and I hear the slip and crackle of his feet on the road behind me. “It’s not like I’m in love with you or anything—I like kissing you, but I like kissing a lot of people.”
Suddenly, he’s in front of me. I skid to a stop to avoid running into him.
“And one of the things I’ve learned since all this started is that feelings are just there, and you need to go for it instead of overanalyzing them, or overthinking, or wondering what they mean beyond right now. And as soon as I kissed you on the roof, I had this feeling like I was supposed to be there. Like in some way, we are supposed to be together for this part of our lives.”
I snort. “The rest of our lives?”
He doesn’t laugh. “I don’t know. I just know that I’m not letting you go without a fight.”
There are a lot of things I want to do right now, a lot of ways to run, but I can’t seem to do any of them. I can’t do anything that moves me past him.
He stands there, sweat sticking his hair to his head, still full of that same sense of devil-may care confidence, but his expression is earnest, desperate.
He really doesn’t want me to leave.
I want to push him aside, whirl past him and disappear into the woods before he can react. I know that if I keep going, he won’t try to follow me.
And it sounds so stupid, what he’s saying. That he has a feeling about us. What the Hell is the point of feelings now, when every single person I loved before
this has died in front of me? Wouldn’t it be so much easier if I left now, and wandered around in numbness, waiting to die?
But I’m striding towards him, grabbing the front of his shirt and pulling him down to kiss him, because maybe this is stupid, maybe I shouldn’t be getting attached to anyone, but kissing him is like the rooftop all over again, plunging into the water when we got here, and I feel. And it’s making my entire body shake, but not the way it shakes when I panic and run and run and run until I collapse, the way I couldn’t stop shaking after the first night with Ben and Turk, when the screaming started.
I feel like I’m shuddering apart and coming together, and Perce’s mouth is warm and firm on mine, and he’s holding onto me like he can’t let me go.
When we break apart, our hearts beating against each other’s chests, I let him walk me home.
September
Levi
The day I found out about the zombies, I was making my 8th sandwich of the day, trying to figure out how to nicely tell the kid on the other side of the counter to stop staring at my chest. I slapped butter on both sides of the toast and threw it on the grill to brown, and that’s when I heard the rumble.
It sounded like a thunderstorm. I looked out the window to see it, because I’d always loved the rain and the chaos and the way it disrupted everything mercilessly and fearlessly, but I saw a different kind of chaos when I looked out the window.
A mob of panicked looking mothers holding their children close to them, teenagers who looked strangely excited, kids demanding to know what was going on or just crying, jostling and bumping into each other, moving towards the doors of the grocery store. And me, watching them come with a sense of irritation and exasperation, but not fear, not devastation.
The first thing I thought, when the panic of the zombie apocalypse set in, and the clock to the deaths of my Mom and my brothers and everyone I had ever met started ticking down, was something along the lines of, That’s so many sandwiches.
And even later that night, after I’d fled work when people started climbing the counters and grabbing food and waving guns around, when we boarded up the windows and Mom disappeared into the darkness and came back with batteries and water and a huge trash bag full of food, forbidding us to ask questions, I was still calculating how much pay I’d be losing, how far it would set us back with our bills.
On the eve of the zombie apocalypse, when every city in the world became a death trap and people died or turned not in the dozens but in the hundreds and thousands, I still thought about things like rent and the bills and the repercussions of missing work.
I still thought in terms of ‘when this is all over.’
***
After two weeks with the Hunters, I’ve fallen into the rhythm of routine so easily that sometimes I’m not even thinking about zombies. In the daylight, I don’t think about blood, or Mom, or Ben and Jonathan and what will come after, even though I still wake up at night screaming, knowing that none of this is going to last forever.
In the daylight, I think about Mason’s right hook, and how I can use his size to my advantage. I think about the way Malia made me laugh, as we sat on the porch and watched Mason go up against a new guy who must have spent the last few years playing tight end for the Cowboys, yelling catcalls and cheering like we were at a football game.
Even now, as we’re going into this old office building, a four-story brick monolith where I used to go to dentist appointments, and Malia swears she saw some humans moving around earlier, lost people who might need our help, I’m thinking more about the look Perce shot at me before I left, telling me to be careful with that intoxicating mixture of innocence and mischief that makes me keep talking to him, even though he hasn’t sought me out since that first night, when he chased me into the woods and brought me home.
My mind keeps flashing back to the memories that have happened every morning for the last fourteen days, so consistent and comfortingly predictable that I can’t seem to remember which day one of them happened. The way Malia and Mason are always racing to finish their cereal in the mornings, huddled over a single bowl. Malia always ends up winning. She says it’s from coming from a family of eight kids, where those who ate slow ate last. Mason says it’s because she eats like a truck driver who just realized he needs to turn the wheel. And then Malia smiles and smacks him on the shoulder.
If I’m busy enough, I don’t have time to think.
Anderson and Associates are a small-town corporation, owned by someone who wanted to dabble in all aspects of health care, from acupuncture to dentistry. My dentists’ office, Dr. Gretel Hansen, DDS, is in a small corner of the fourth floor. I glance up at the window as Malia and I walk to the front doors, wondering what happened to her. Maybe she put those ridiculously painful dentists’ tools to good use. More likely, some infected kid bit her.
The front door has been thrown off its hinges, lying in the grass among broken glass. Our boots crunch on our way through the entrance, and we freeze, but nothing moves.
A long counter with a glass partition faces rows of squashy-looking armchairs, all in a sickly shade of green. The walls are bare, but I can see the imprints of picture frames. The door that leads to the exam rooms is closed. Malia tries it, but it’s locked.
“Wait here,” she says. She steps outside, and I can hear her calling to the others. Lisa is here, along with Jeffrey, Traina, and a couple others. Malia and Lisa, the ones with the most experience, are the leaders, and Malia gets her attention, waving her arms in a circle. Lisa nods, barks at the others, and they fan out, manning the side entrances and windows.
Malia skips back inside, stomping to a halt next to me. “Alright, Rogue. Lead on.”
I roll my eyes and point at the door. “Do you know how to pick a lock?”
“Yes, actually, but I was thinking we’d just— “she vaults over the counter and walks around to the door. “Dr. Anderson will see you now,” she says in her creepiest assistant-voice.
“Hilarious.”
“Were you afraid of the doctor as a kid, Rogue?” She doesn’t wait for me to answer before going on: “I was, completely out of my mind with fear over it. I have no idea why; never came in for anything worse than a broken finger. The nurses always gave me candy and played with my hair, and the doctor was this big nice man with a white coat who told me how healthy I was, how tall I’d be. But I hated it.”
I stop, halfway down the hall. Something moved in the examination room next to me. Something too big to be a dog or a wild animal looking for shelter.
“Yeah, I think it was the smell,” Malia says loudly, practically shouting in the direction of the door.
“Smelled like,” she sniffs for effect, “Rubbing alcohol and rubber. Metal and cold, if cold had a smell, you know?” Her eyes gleam, and I shake my head. I know that look, and the person hiding from us could be a kid, or hurt. We shouldn’t startle them.
She just shakes her head and takes a step closer. “Smelled like…DEATH.” She throws the door as hard as she can against the wall, and we hear a muffled thump and a cry.
“Are you okay?” I ask, holding a hand up to keep Malia from rushing forward. I inch around to the other side of the door.
He stumbles forward with one hand in front of his face, trying to stem the flow of blood from the wound on his forehead. His blonde hair, cropped short and close to his head, is sticky with blood, and it stains his camouflage uniform.
Great. We just wounded a soldier.
I back out of his way, next to Malia, who’s looking at him suspiciously, gun in hand. “Help me,” he says, and his voice sounds young.
I start forward, pulling a bandage out of my pocket, but before I can get close, Malia’s arm shoots out and shoves me back. Then it returns to gripping the gun. “No, don’t,” she whispers, all trace of humor gone.
“He’s bleeding. I need to put pressure on the wound,” I raise my eyebrows at her. We’ve done this same thing dozens of times, come into abandoned buildings
and found people with bloody heads or severed hands or worse, and Malia has never looked as sickened as she does now. She jerks her head. “Go.”
The one time I didn’t listen to her, I ended up getting six stitches in my leg, after the kid we’d been taking to ‘find his mom’ pulled a knife out of his pocket and laughed about ‘clean blood instead of zombie blood for supper.’
I should be backing up, bringing in Lisa and Jeffrey and the rest, covering the exits while Malia watches him from the front, but I can’t shake the feeling that something is different this time. Where even the child gave me a hint of impending threat, the whisper on the back of my neck that danger was close and real and coming for me, the overwhelming urge I have right now is to make sure this zombie-killing solider doesn’t bleed to death in front of me.
So instead of taking a step back, I push her arm out of the way and hold out my hand with the bandage on it. “Are you okay?”
He scrabbles for it for a second, fingers scraping across my wrist. When I finally take my hand away, he has the bandage, but his blood stains my hand and wrist with red fingerprints. “Thanks,” he breathes a sigh of relief as he presses the bandage to the wound on his head. “You have no idea how annoying it is to have blood in your eyes.”
I offer a small smile, and he grins back. His eyes are the only part of his head that don’t have any blood on them, and they stand out, bright green.
` “Rogue, get back from him,” Malia’s voice is low and even, still exhibiting the signals that have kept us alive all this time. “I’ve got a really, really bad feeling about this,”
I stop smiling.
Call Me Zombie: Volume I: Rose Page 7