The Remnants of Yesterday

by Anthony M. Strong

  I reached for the gun without thinking, pulled it from my belt, held it aloft in shaking hands. I pointed it at the insane, maniacal thing that was our friend just minutes before.

  Darwin flung his arms up as she descended upon him, and pushed her back, briefly winning the battle.

  He twisted his head and looked back at us, his eyes widening with terror when he saw the gun in my hand.

  Clara stood frozen in fear, her hands over her mouth as if she were trying to stifle the small whimpering sounds that escaped her lips.

  I released the pistol’s safety.

  “Don’t. For God’s sake don’t do it.” Darwin pleaded even as Emily dropped down, heavy, onto his chest, straddling him.

  She gripped his hair and slammed his head back into the ground. His skull made a hollow thunk when it impacted the hard rubberized floor. He let out a squeal of pain.

  “Do something,” Clara wailed. “Stop her before she kills him.”

  “How?” I knew the answer. I was holding it.

  Emily dropped down, biting, her teeth finding Darwin’s neck. He howled in pain, his feet thrashing, hands smacking at her back, trying to dislodge her, but she ignored the blows.

  I aimed the gun at the exposed top of Emily’s head, my hand trembling, and willed myself to squeeze the trigger, but nothing happened. My finger refused to do its work, rebelling against me.

  “Do it.” Clara screamed the words. “It’s not her, not anymore. Do it.”

  “I can’t.” A tear fell down my cheek.

  Darwin was moaning now, the sound soft and pathetic. His legs stopped moving and he lay there, either too damaged to fight back, or giving up the will to survive.

  “Then I’ll do it.” She reached out for the gun, tried to take it from me.

  “No.” I pushed her hand away. I could not let her take the responsibility, could never do that to her. If anyone was going to do this, it would be me.

  “Hey. Bitch.” I bellowed the words, a sudden resolve gripping me. I could feel the adrenalin pumping through my veins. “Look at me.”

  Emily paused, raised her head.

  Drops of Darwin’s blood dripped down her chin.

  I fired the gun.

  A flash of bright yellow flame spewed from the muzzle, followed by a curl of blue smoke. The sound was deafening within the confines of the bus, momentarily robbing me of my hearing. Clara’s screams faded, replaced by a high-pitched ringing.

  The bullet smacked through Emily’s shoulder, sending a spurt of blood backwards. The impact twisted her around, knocked her clean off Darwin, and sent her sprawling down the aisle. She came to rest, unmoving, near the driver’s compartment.

  Realizing he was free, Darwin struggled to his knees, his neck a glossy sheen of blood. He looked woozy, dazed. He tried to stand, but instead fell back to the floor, then pushed himself up onto his knees once more.

  Behind him I saw Emily struggle to a sitting position, then stagger to her feet. She fixed me with those wild, mad eyes, and charged forward, flying past Darwin, heading straight for the cause of her pain.

  Without thinking, I pulled the trigger again.

  The gun bucked in my hand.

  A hole appeared in Emily’s forehead, above her left eye, clean and round as if someone had taken a drill to her skull. It looked much too small to be of any consequence.

  But it was.

  She faltered, staggered. One leg buckled, then the other, and she fell backwards into the aisle. Her dead eyes stared up toward the roof, the sparkle within them fading. Her hand twitched once, twice, then lay still.

  Darwin let out a howl of anguish.

  He crawled toward Emily, reached out, held her hand. He raised his head, his eyes finding mine, accusing me. “What have you done?”

  He lifted her shoulders, cradled her in his arms, bending low to touch his head to hers. A small cry escaped his lips.

  “What have you done? What have you done?” He repeated the words over and over until they were lost within the sobs that wracked his body.

  I stood there, the gun still clutched in my outstretched hand. I was numb, cold. The words fell on my ears, and in them I heard his bitter accusation. I knew very well what I had done, and it sickened me.

  60

  FOR THE SECOND TIME in a week, our world changed.

  The immediate threat over, we took care of Darwin, patching up his wounds as best we could with the first aid kit – the very same one Emily had used on him a few days before – and laid him across one of the seats.

  His wounds were bad. The cut he’d gotten back at the motel had opened again, the stitches unable to withstand the attack by the very same person that had stitched them. It didn’t look infected, so we did our best to emulate the job Emily had done, but neither of us knew what we were doing, so it ended up a little wonky, and nowhere near as tight. It was better than an open wound though.

  As for the rest of his injuries, he was cut up and bruised, with a fair sized chunk of flesh missing from his neck. How Emily had missed the jugular was nothing short of a miracle. We also suspected that he was suffering from a concussion, thanks to the number of times his head hit the floor of the bus. He really needed a doctor. The best we could do was to keep him comfortable, and hope there were no injuries we couldn’t see.

  With Darwin, our most pressing concern, taken care of, we turned our attention to other matters. J.T. was missing, and we needed to do something with Emily, who still lay in the aisle, her dead eyes watching our every move.

  We took the body between us, Clara at one end, myself at the other, and struggled to carry her from the bus. There was a shovel behind the general store, an old thing with a worn wooden handle, but it was good enough. We dug a hole near the side of the store, and placed our friend into it, then covered her with earth, and finally, found a rock to serve as a headstone. I used a smaller stone to scratch her name on the surface of the rock, and the date, then collapsed next to the shallow grave and cried for what seemed like an eternity. Clara knelt next to me and held me tight, her hand stroking my head, her tears mixing with mine.

  We stayed like that for a long time, neither one of us willing to move, and then, as if reaching an unspoken understanding, we got up and walked back toward the bus.

  61

  WE FOUND J.T. about an hour later among the trees on the other side of the road. It was hard to tell exactly what had happened, how he’d come to be lying dead on the forest floor, but I could guess.

  His body was covered with bite marks, his neck now nothing more than a raw, open wound. It looked like he’d been half-eaten by wild animals, but I knew it was not animals. The small indentations where teeth punctured the skin, human teeth marks, left no doubt who was responsible. The forest floor was wet with blood. Unlike Darwin, she’d found his jugular. He must have bled out in seconds.

  It didn’t seem right to bury him next to Emily. She was our friend. J.T. we barely knew. So we buried him where he lay, using the same shovel that dug our friend’s grave.

  Afterward, our grisly chore complete, we went back to the bus and climbed aboard. Clara went to work cleaning as much of the blood from the floor as she could with a roll of paper towels from the store. I watched her for a moment, then I knelt down and helped, removing all trace of the events that had occurred that day.

  I found the pistol on a seat near the back. In my daze, I must have dropped it after shooting Emily. Or maybe I put it there later, still in shock. I weighed it in my hands, looked at it, and pondered what to do next. Then I went to the front passenger door, and threw the gun as far from the bus as I could. It landed somewhere among the undergrowth and disappeared from view.

  With nothing left to do, I slumped down, exhausted, into a seat. Clara took the seat opposite. She looked over at me and spoke for the first time since we buried Emily.

  “Is there any point in going on?”

  I glanced toward her. “Of course there is.”

  “How could things have chang
ed so much, so quickly?”

  The question hung in the air. I was not sure if it was meant to have a reply, or if it was rhetorical, a statement upon our current situation. In the end I mumbled, “I don’t know.”

  After that, we lapsed back into an uneasy silence until the day transitioned to night. Long shadows pushed their way into the bus, crept along the aisle, fingers of darkness that seemed to clutch at the seats and transform them into barely recognizable shapes in the gloom. I wanted to turn on the overhead lights, cast the darkness away, but that would drain the battery, and we could not risk losing the only transportation we had. The bus was more than just a set of wheels. It was our castle, our shelter from the elements, our defense against whatever might be lurking in the darkness outside. So, I kept the lights off and let the night claim the bus.

  On and off throughout the evening, I checked on Darwin. He slept most of the time, a fitful sleep punctuated by bouts of incoherent words snatched from whatever bad dreams plagued him.

  Eventually, an aching tiredness overtook my body. I took a seat, and settled in for the night with a blanket pulled up to my chin. Clara took the seat next to me and wordlessly worked her way under the blanket, her body warm against mine. I closed my eyes, and was asleep in a matter of seconds.

  62

  I WAS IN AN open field, running.

  My legs felt like lead.

  The horde of Crazies was almost upon me, gaining ground every second, but I could do little to pull away. It was like I was wading through air as thick as mud. I risked a glance behind, knowing what I would see, dreading it.

  Emily was there. She led the charge, her face contorted with rage and something else. Hunger.

  I willed myself onward, cold fear clutching at my heart. Up ahead I saw the tree line, the entrance to a dark forest. If I could just make it there, I might stand a chance of losing them.

  “Hayden.” Emily called out to me, her voice soft and gentle, belaying the truth of what she intended to do when she caught me. “Join me Hayden. I forgive you.”

  Not a chance. She would never forgive me if I could not even forgive myself. I took a deep breath and battled on, the constant fight to move my heavy legs sapping my energy. Even so, somehow I reached the trees.

  “I need you Hayden,” Emily said, soft and gentle, and somehow I heard her even though she had not yet reached the forest.

  “No.” I shouted the word. “I killed you.”

  “And you are forgiven.”

  I could hear them now, crashing through the undergrowth, searching for me.

  I had to keep moving.

  Suddenly I realized that Crazies were not the only ones in the woods. There was someone else. A figure, wispy and fleeting. It appeared in the corners of my vision, a haunting shape that ebbed in and out, sometimes there, others not. I turned my head, the figure fading, only to reappear just out of focus on the other side of me. Again, I turned toward it, and once more it vanished.

  “Who are you? What do you want with me?” I called out in vain, my eyes darting from side to side in a futile attempt to locate the figure once more.

  It was then that I noticed that my pursuers, Emily and the other Crazies, were almost upon me. I mustered all my strength, channeling everything into a fresh burst of speed, but my legs refused to obey.

  I glanced down, horrified to see that I was caught in some sort of bog. Each time I took a step, my foot came away with the ground clinging to it as if I had stepped into the world’s biggest piece of discarded bubblegum. Only this sticky gunk wasn’t pink, it was a rotten, dirty brown, and it smelled like rotting corpses. I gagged as the odor assaulted my nose, and fought to hold my vomit.

  “Be with us, Hayden.” Emily taunted me, her voice much closer this time. I was losing the race.

  “Go away.” I didn’t want to listen to her anymore, didn’t want to hear that sweet, soft voice calling to me after what I had done to her. How she could even be here was a mystery. Shouldn’t she be laying in a shallow grave next to a dilapidated general store off route Twelve in Vermont? I remembered burying her myself. I remembered killing her.

  “It’s no use. You can’t outrun us,” she said, and I knew she spoke the truth, for at that moment I felt a cold, dead hand on my shoulder.

  The Crazies overtook me, surrounded me, and dragged me to the ground. Hands clawed at my clothes, my face and arms. Now I was sinking into the soft earth of the forest floor, with the Crazies all around me, pulling and tugging, scratching and biting. I opened my mouth to scream but a watery mix of dark sludge filled it instead. I could not breathe. I was drowning.

  My vision collapsed to nothing more than a pinhole, and in that bright pinhole surrounded by the unending darkness, I saw Emily looking back at me, and hovering behind her a vague, opaque shape that seemed very much like the white ghost I’d seen so many times recently. Then there was nothing but blackness.

  63

  I OPENED MY EYES, suddenly wide awake.

  The bus was still dark. Clara snored lightly, the rise and fall of her chest barely perceptible as she slept next to me. Farther back on the bus, I could hear Darwin mumbling in his sleep.

  Something moved toward the front of the bus, drawing my attention. For a moment I thought I saw something, a barely perceptible shape against windshield, and the night sky beyond. Brief and fleeting, the glimpse was enough to cause concern.

  I lifted Clara’s head, ever so gently, and placed it against the back of the seat, then stood and slid out past her as quietly as I could. I brushed her leg in the confined space as I passed, but she barely stirred.

  I padded down the aisle, my eyes searching for the cause of the movement. The air inside the bus was cold, frigid. I would not have been surprised if there was a white mist escaping my mouth as I breathed, but it was too dark to know. I wrapped my arms around my body to keep warm and pressed onward, but I could see nothing. All was still and quiet. Whatever had roused me from my slumber was gone now. Maybe it was a holdover from my nightmare, a bleed through from the deepest recesses of my subconscious.

  Still, I continued down the bus just to make sure, reaching the passenger door and checking to make sure it was still secure. As I turned back toward the rear of the bus, I felt a familiar vibration in my pocket. I reached down and pulled my phone out. The screen was lit up, and there was a new text message.

  My finger hovered over the icon. I hesitated for a moment. I was becoming increasingly convinced that it was not Jeff sending the messages. I’d had time to think about things since the last one, and they just did not sound like something he would send. The tone, the serious to-the-point nature of the texts just did not fit with his personality, even if we were in the middle of the worst crisis the world had ever faced. There was no concern, no questions about my safety, no comforting ‘things will work out’ platitudes. He was always so positive, even in the face of adversity. Were we following the advice of a caring brother, or were we headed toward a trap? I didn’t know, but I was starting to form an opinion.

  I punched the icon with my finger.

  Two words flashed up on the screen.

  KEEP MOVING.

  64

  KEEP MOVING? What kind of advice was that? Did we have any other choice? Of course we were going to keep moving.

  I felt bothered. How did Jeff, or whoever was using Jeff’s phone, know that we weren’t moving? This raised a disturbing question. Were we being watched? As much as I didn’t want to think we were, it was the only logical way to explain how the sender of the text knew that we had stopped.

  I pressed the button on the top of the phone, watched the screen went blank, and then pushed the device deep into my pocket. I made my way back to the rear of the bus and slid past Clara, retaking my seat.

  She opened her eyes and looked at me. “What’s going on?”

  “Everything is fine,” I said. It was a white lie, but I didn’t want to worry her. “Go back to sleep.”

  “You left me alone, I was scared.
” She sat up straight. “Where did you go?”

  “I thought I saw something move.” This much was the truth. “I went to check it out.”

  “Crazies?”

  “I don’t think so. There was nothing there.” I put my arm around her.

  “Are you sure?” There was an edge of nervousness to her voice.

  “Yes.” I stroked her hair, running my fingers through it. “It’s still early. Go back to sleep.”

  “I’m not sure I want to.” She pressed against me. “I had a bad dream.”

  “Me too.”

  “I dreamed about Emily.” Her voice cracked when she said the name. “She was coming for us, trying to kill us.”

  “She can’t hurt us now.” I stopped short of emphasizing the fact that Emily was nothing more than a corpse with a bullet hole in her forehead. Some things were best left unsaid. “We’re safe.”

  “No, we’re not,” Clara replied, her voice low. “We haven’t been safe since you first walked into the gas station last week. Since it happened.”

  “Don’t think about that.”

  “What went wrong?” Clara asked. “What made her flip out like that?”

  “I don’t know.” I wished I could provide a rational explanation for the sudden transformation from a sweet innocent girl, to a crazy person. “She just did.”

  “We weren’t gone very long,” She said. “All we did was pick up some provisions. We were away from the bus for Twenty minutes at most.”

  “The text message we received at the barn on the second night warned us that the virus was spreading.” It seemed like thin evidence for what happened to Emily, but it was all I had. “She was complaining about a headache when we left the bus. She was probably already turning.”

  “Don’t say that.”

  “What?”

  “Turning.” Clara shuddered. “You make it sound like she became some kind of zombie.”