All Our Tomorrows

by Peter Cawdron

“Come on,” Olivia cries, repeating her mantra over and over again, slowly building to a crescendo as she yells above the report of the rifles. “COME ON, DAMN IT!”

  I’m numb with pain, which is a contradiction I never thought I’d experience. I can’t feel my hands or my feet and yet my body is in agony. I’m shaking.

  A couple of the women in the barn try to keep me from watching, trying to keep me out of sight. I guess they’re afraid Zee will see me, but I doubt even my mother would recognize me with all the matted, tangled hair lying over my face. I have to see if my friends make it into the open.

  The crowd of zombies thins after about fifty yards, and I watch as David leans forward, dragging Jane with him as a zombie hangs on to her. David kicks with his feet and sends the mare into a gallop. Already, the horde is wheeling toward them, smelling the scent wafting from the backpack. The zombie grabbing ahold of Jane falls away, shaken free by the terrified, charging mare. Jane hangs from the side of the horse, clinging to David’s thigh, desperate not to fall beneath the thundering legs of the horse. David has one hand on her back, grabbing at her shirt and pulling her up while his other hand grips the reins. The mare gallops away from the pack at breakneck speed.

  David rides hard. Several other marauders are out there on horseback. There’s James and Ahmed, two of the older boys from our class, and two other men circling Zee. They must have come in from the outlying houses. They shoot at the closest zombies, culling the herd around David and Jane.

  At the top of a rise, David brings his panicked mare to a halt, allowing Jane to clamber back up behind him. Two of the marauders open the main gate. The padding on the mare has been torn to shreds. Blood has splattered across the flanks of the horse. Jane throws some clothing on the ground, baiting the horde, and then they charge out through the gate with the marauders on horseback providing escort.

  A large tree has fallen across the ditch about a hundred yards further along the fence, marking the point where the zombies breached our defenses.

  Olivia stands beside me whispering the words I cannot bring myself to say.

  “Please come back. Make it back. Please.”

  Chapter 03: Forgotten

  Ferguson has astonishing resilience. With the bulk of the zombies gone, he organizes work crews, sending out groups of four to start mopping up the stragglers inside the compound.

  Horse-drawn carts come down from the outlying houses and survivors start piling dead zombies onto carts. There are hundreds of bloody bodies lying scattered on the grass. It’s going to be a long day.

  Olivia brings me some grits for breakfast and arranges for one of the girls to fetch some clothing for me from one of the untouched homes. Just a few bites and my strength comes back. I’ve still got the heavy woolen blanket wrapped around me like a towel. It’s itchy as hell, but it’s all I have.

  Sitting in the loft with my legs hanging over the edge of the open barn doors, I can see bodies stretching for hundreds of yards, but most of them lie hard up against the barn or in the ruins of the smoldering homestead. We’ve won, but our victory is hollow. I’m not sure how many of our people were killed. The problem with zombies is their ranks never thin, and even in death they’re dangerous. Get some Zee juice in an open wound and you’re a goner. As miraculous as those tablets were, they went up in the fire. All our effort—wasted.

  A young girl of not more than seven years old comes up to me carrying a bundle of carefully folded clothes. Her boots are muddy and stained with blood. She smiles at me. She’s innocent, intelligent, curious. For me, it’s sad. The apocalypse is all she’s ever known. I hate that. She deserves better. We all do. She should be playing on a park swing, slipping down a slide, or digging in a sandbox, not wandering between bloodied zombie corpses while running errands.

  “Are these for me?”

  She nods. She’s shy. I’m not sure why.

  “Thank you.”

  She hands me the clothes and runs back to her mother standing by the ladder leading down to the barn floor. Her mother smiles at me, and I get the feeling she put her daughter up to this. I’m trying to place both the mother and daughter, but they must have been part of the new intake along with Olivia. There’s too much change. Too much death. Too much heartache. I’m not sure what her mom told her, probably something like, that’s the girl that was bitten and lived. I must be quite the novelty. I wish reality was as glamorous. They climb back down from the loft, leaving me alone.

  Sorting through the clothes, there’s some underwear but no bra. I know a few girls out on the back acres that will have some spares. A good fitting bra is a rarity these days. Mostly we use patched hand-me-downs, keeping the underwire frames and replacing the fabric every few years.

  The shirt is baggy and the jeans are a bit long, so I roll up the sleeves and cuffs. The young girl’s mother must have suspected these clothes would be too big for me as she’s given me a couple of pairs of thick, woolen socks. Wearing double socks will prevent blisters as my feet slide around in boots two sizes too big for me.

  Sitting there, I swing my legs back and forth, amused by the oversized boots. They’re not that big, but to me they feel heavy and cumbersome. I feel like a kid again, stomping around in my dad’s clodhopper boots in the garden shed.

  Zombies crawl through the grass. Work crews chase them down, raising six foot long pry-bars high overhead and then bringing the cold steel down hard, plunging it into the back of the skull. It’s backbreaking work, but it’s effective. The odd gun fires, breaking like thunder on a cloudless morning, and another zombie dies.

  Steve, Jane, David—they’re family. Brothers and sisters I never had in the apocalypse. I want to go back to the old days, sitting on the rocks and looking out across the valley. Oh, the crap we used to talk about. Our worries were confined to school. Zee was a faceless monster hidden behind a chain link fence. A black widow spider or a cottonmouth snake seemed equally as dangerous, and there was nothing keeping them out of the compound. But now Steve’s gone. I’m not sure what I feel. We barely knew each other and yet I have a profound sense of emptiness inside. Part of me has died. I miss his smile. I miss the warmth and kindness he showed me. I miss his laugh. He may not have had the physical prowess or athleticism of David, but Steve is the most courageous man I’ve ever known. And yes, man—not boy, not teenager. Out there in the city, we grew up overnight.

  David and Jane are still out there somewhere. I don’t want to think about what could happen to them. They’re on horseback. They’ll outpace Zee, I tell myself.

  Is Steve still alive? Am I being silly hoping he somehow survived?

  I lose myself in the warmth of the sunlight streaming in through the barn doors. Life moves on. I go back to eating my breakfast.

  Grits never tasted so good, and I find myself scraping the metal spoon around the dented aluminum bowl trying to savor every last morsel. Funny, but to be alive is to enjoy the little things. Dead zombies stink like rotten fish. Ordinarily, the stench would put me off eating, but chewing on warm grits is somehow a celebration of life.

  “How are you doing?” Olivia asks, walking over and sitting down next to me.

  “Much better,” I reply, licking the spoon clean.

  Olivia looks tired. I doubt she got any sleep. Dark circles shadow her eyes. She’s aged a decade in one night.

  “Will we ever win?” I ask.

  “Huh,” she replies, almost in a dream. “Win? I’ve never thought about winning. I guess I’ve always assumed the zombies have already won. All we can do is survive.”

  I cannot think like that. I can’t give up. If there’s no hope, why go on?

  “No one wins in the end,” Olivia says as though she’s read my mind and is responding to my thoughts. “There’s only one end awaiting all of us. It’s all we can do to live gracefully and try to make the world a little brighter while we’re here.”

  She’s right, but I’m young. I don’t want to hear this. As far as I’m concerned, I’ll live forever. T
here’s something primal within me that refuses to surrender.

  “I think we’ll win,” I say, ignoring the aches and pains in my body that argue otherwise.

  “I hope you’re right.”

  There’s a subdued undertone in her words. She doubts winning is possible, and although it’s unspoken, I understand why. Life isn’t fair. Life isn’t a game of soccer with two nicely spaced halves, clearly defined rules, and a referee to keep things fair. Winning is a naive concept. There’s an entire world out there overrun with zombies. I want to think it’s possible to win, but I understand Olivia’s doubts. We’re a long way from winning on our own turf, let alone turning the tide against Zee. Like Jack and his magic beans, I was silly enough to think those tablets would solve all our problems. If anything, they’ve made life worse. And now, they’re gone. Consumed by fire.

  “You should get some sleep,” I say, turning to Olivia.

  “What about you?” Olivia asks.

  “I can’t sit here while everyone else is working. I need to help.”

  “Marge doesn’t want you down there,” she says as I get to my feet. “She’s afraid you’ll bring them back.”

  I don’t care.

  I don’t say that, but I want to.

  I care about the commune and the survivors, but not Zee. If he comes for me again, so be it. I’ll go. Without Steve, life is pointless. No one else should have to die to keep me safe.

  Over by the gate, a team of eight men work on the fallen tree, hacking at it with axes and working to mend the fence where the zombies poured through last night.

  “I should leave,” I say, my mind still reeling from the loss of Steve, wondering if he’s out there somewhere on the run. “I’m endangering everyone by being here.”

  “Where would you go? There’s nowhere to go,” Olivia replies, and she quickly adds, “You’re still thinking about the boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes,” I say. “You saw him. You know he’s not dead.”

  “I don’t know what I saw,” Olivia concedes. “I saw him from a distance. I saw dark shapes struggling in the moonlight. And whatever I saw, it happened over twelve hours ago. He could have been dead before they got him to the fence. And by now? He must be dead. He has to be.”

  “But you don’t know that,” I plead.

  “Why would they keep him alive? That makes no sense. That’s not the way zombies operate.”

  “None of this makes any sense,” I reply, looking out over the bloody bodies staining the grass. “There was a time when all of this seemed impossible, just the stuff of fiction and films and the worst of our nightmares, and yet here it is.”

  “What are you going to do?” Olivia asks.

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t do anything stupid,” she says.

  “Oh,” I reply, unable to suppress a laugh. “Stupid is what I do best.”

  Olivia smiles faintly.

  “Talk to Marge,” she says. “Before you do anything rash, be sure to talk to her. Talk to Ferguson. Talk to your Dad. Okay?”

  “Okay,” I say, walking over to the ladder with my humongous boots plodding on the wooden floor. “Oh, and thanks.”

  “For the beauty treatment? Or for breakfast?” Olivia asks, knowing how much the scrubbing must have hurt and how embarrassing it was for me.

  “For both,” I call out, working my way down the ladder.

  Straw, mud, blood and bile line the floor of the barn. Walking outside, I feel renewed. The warmth of the sun on my face and the cool breeze reminds me of what it means to be alive, while the carnage strewn across the grass tells me how important our lives are. We must go on. We have to win. I have to believe Steve is still alive. Anything else and I would crumple into a heap. I have to find him.

  Smoke drifts from the ruins of the old homestead.

  A cart rumbles past with dead zombies piled on the back. Bloodied arms and legs hang over the edge of the flat wooden deck. A couple of men grab another dead zombie and heave it up, swinging the carcass on top of the pile. The body slides a little, and someone pokes at it with a pitchfork, angling it toward the back of the deck so it won’t fall off.

  It’s only now that I’m outside that I realize how lucky we were. Blood drips from the barn. The press of zombies was so intense those up against the barn were crushed against the wood. The whole barn could have collapsed.

  Bodies lie in piles in the sunlight.

  Torn intestines straddle the edge of a concrete horse trough some twenty feet away, staining the water bright red. Crows peck at the dead bodies, picking flesh from the bones. Flies swarm through the air. Death always wins, or at least death likes to think he wins, but I know different. Life exploits death. One of the advantages of having a geeky dad is I’ve learned a lot about life. Life has thrived on Earth for billions of years, having endured dozens of extinction events ranging from poisonous volcanic traps spanning hundreds of miles to gigantic meteorites raining fire from the skies. Death tries, but life wins, and one generation leads to another. Life is unstoppable.

  A zombie wearing a torn track suit crawls out from behind the trough, working hand over hand through the grass.

  “Over here,” I yell, pointing at the zombie.

  A couple of men jog over with a long pry bar. One of them positions the bar above the zombie’s head when I cry, “Wait!”

  The zombie stops and stares at me. Bloodshot eyes lock with mine. Matted hair and rotten green skin leave the zombie looking more monster than man, and yet once he was human. Once, long ago, he fled from Zee. He fought and died trying to run from this nightmare. And then he became one of them.

  Having been through the transformation and felt my senses go numb, I have some idea what he went through in those final few minutes, and I wonder what thoughts are bouncing around in his head. His teeth chatter, but not from hunger. There’s a rhythm to the grinding, snarling clatter. I think he recognizes me. Perhaps I’m reading too much into the moment, but I feel as though he’s calling to me.

  “Hazel,” a voice says from behind me, snapping me out of my lethargy.

  It’s Dad.

  My eyes cast up at the man holding the pry-bar and I nod. His lips tighten. In an instant, he brings the pry bar down, piercing the back of the zombie’s skull and sending the tip of the steel bar thundering through the zombie’s brain and out the other side into the dirt. Blood and brains soak into the soil. Zee shudders and lies still.

  “What are you doing?” Dad asks. “You shouldn’t be down here. It’s too dangerous.”

  “It’s dangerous for everyone, Dad.”

  “But, Hazel.”

  I know what he means, but I’m not special. I have no more right to protection than anyone else. I need to pull my weight. This is all my fault. Zee followed me back here. If it weren’t for me, none of this would have happened. I can’t hide.

  Dad takes me to one side, walking me away from the barn and up the hill toward the houses by the granary.

  “Just take things easy,” he says. “You’re taking too many risks.”

  We walk away from the barn, away from the charred ruins of the homestead and the bloody mess scattered across the ground. The contrast before us is stark. Lush, green grass gives way gently underfoot. Pine trees dot the distant hills. Nature is at peace. It’s too easy to turn our backs on the carnage.

  “Don’t you see, Dad. We can’t ignore what’s happened to our world. We live our lives in isolation, trying to pretend Zee doesn’t exist—planting crops and raising families. But nothing changes. He’s always out there. Waiting. Watching. Stalking us in the dark.”

  “Nothing can ever change,” Dad says. “We lost the war a long time ago.”

  This isn’t my father. My father would be gathering samples. He’d be experimenting, looking to learn more about these creatures, as he calls them. My dad would refuse to resign himself to fate. But the loss of his right hand has changed all that, and not just because of the physical trauma or the loss of dexterity
. Deep down, this horrific, debilitating injury has forced a change in his persona. Gone is the drive he had just a few days ago. His curiosity has waned. Like everyone else, he just wants to survive.

  I want my old dad back, but I won’t say that to him. That would be cruel.

  “But the tablets,” I say.

  “They’re gone. And even if we had more, all they would do is buy us some time. They’re good for prevention. They’re not a cure.”

  “Those tablets change everything,” I cry. “Zee knows it. That’s why he came for us!”

  Marge and Ferguson sit on the porch of one of the old homes easily a hundred yards away, looking at a foldout paper map sprawled before them. As we walk lazily up the long, sloping hill toward them, my dad speaks in an even tone.

  “Even if we could retrieve more of those tablets from town, we have no idea about the dosage. No idea about possible side effects or complications. I swallowed a handful, you probably had more, far more than was needed, but we just don’t know. There are over three hundred people in the commune. How many tablets do you think we would need for all of them? How long will each dose last? The effect may only last a few days.”

  “But Dad!” I cry, as though pleading with him will make any difference to reality. For once, I want him to be wrong.

  “We’re crippled, Haze. And I don’t mean me. From a technological standpoint, we’ve been thrown back two or three hundred years by the apocalypse, if not further.

  “Even if I knew how to manufacture more tablets, I couldn’t. The technology just doesn’t exist anymore. And if I could, getting them to other survivors around the country is nigh on impossible. We’ve gone from flying across the entire Continental U.S. in a day to being barely able to get to the outskirts of the nearest town. Take zombies out of the equation entirely, and there’s still disease, wolves, bears, bandits. Every glass of water we drink has to be captured from rainwater or distilled over a fire. How far do you think we’d get? Honestly?”

  I don’t like what I’m hearing. Body language is a bitch. I can’t help but look down at my boots, which betrays my thinking to my dad.