“Now!” Ken yelled.
All around them was melting flesh and confusion. Ken was the first to the car - the paint job of which had been scorched on one side in the explosion - and quickly dove under the dashboard to jam wires together. Greg was right behind, tossing bags into the back seat. Nancy took up the rear, slow because of the ache in her leg; she jabbed her blade clean through the eye socket of a zombie that came wandering out of the flaming mass. She tried to pull back to attack two more zombies that were coming in from the sides, but her kill fell backward, taking her sword with it. She couldn’t risk going after it with Sarah in her arms and had no time to grieve the loss of the weapon that had served her so well all this time. Instead she leaped for the car with the zombies at her heels and Sarah shrieking in her ear.
Greg yelled as a zombie took him from the left, fire-blackened hands grasping him around the throat and ripping the skin on the sides of his face. Ken was out of the car immediately, but seemed to realize too late that he had no weapon. In a mad panic he curled his hand into a fist and punched the zombie square between the eyes. The zombie’s head, half rotted and half melted from the fire, exploded beneath Ken’s fist, sending blood and gore splattering all over both of the men. Greg almost retched, but managed to recover enough to twist his body into the car behind Ken.
“Quick!” Nancy was screaming, her voice in competition with Sarah’s wails. “Get moving before they beat their way in!”
Ken was jamming wires together madly, unable to remember the proper combination under the stress. The car was filled with the smell of burning as he shocked himself again and again.
The window next to Nancy’s head imploded. A leathery hand, knuckle bones showing through the blackened skin, reached in and snatched a fistful of her hair, pulling so hard that she thought the flesh might rip from her skull. “Help!” she shrieked. Greg ripped something out of his shoe and jumped forward. A moment later the zombie went toppling backward with the chunk of Nancy’s hair and she saw that Greg was holding a scalpel, stolen from the dental surgery equipment.
The car’s engine whined sickeningly and then suddenly roared to life. “Got it!” Ken cried in relief. “Got it! Got it!” He twisted himself into the driver’s seat. A fist came through the windshield at him. In a smooth motion that might have been equal parts reflexes and blind panic, he snatched the scalpel out of Greg’s hand and stabbed it through the eye of the zombie that was trying to crawl through the window. Greg wiggled forward and slammed both of his feet into the zombie’s face; it went sprawling over the hood of the car.
“DRIVE!” Nancy shrieked.
Ken yanked at the gear shift and slammed the pedal to the floor. The car took off as two zombies fell through the broken windshield. Ken screamed profanities that Nancy hadn’t known existed. Greg pelted cans of soup at the zombies’ heads to throw off their lunge for Ken’s face and then swung himself around again to kick them back through the window. More tried to follow the same path, but by then Ken had gotten the car moving with some speed and they were thrown back instead. For a few painfully long moments it seemed like the wall of zombies was never going to break, but then all of a sudden they were through. Mostly-clear road lay before them. Ken squealed on the breaks just in time to avoid an abandoned truck, twisted the car sideways, and took off like a madman for the highway.
As she sunk back down in her seat, trying to comfort a thoroughly distraught baby, Nancy looked back to the apartment building across the road to see that the stoic woman was still standing there, watching them drive away.
Several hours later, tired, hungry, and more than a little sore, Nancy began to wonder where the hell they were. They hadn’t come across any more towns, and Nancy didn’t recognize any of the names on the signs they drove past. Ken had ignored several off-ramps. Nancy suspected that he was scared to leave the highway, which had been mostly clear. They had passed cars in ditches, and the occasional tipped transfer truck with several demolished cars surrounding it, and they’d passed bodies - lots of bodies. But they hadn’t passed any zombies.
What they were seeing a lot of were signs of insanity beginning to plague the survivors, wherever they were hiding. On a billboard screaming the words, “What’s for Dinner?” alongside a picture of a delicious-looking pizza, someone had spray-painted the words, “YOU, MOTHERFUCKER!” in huge letters. At the site of an enormous car crash that took them several minutes to navigate through, someone had erected a large sign made from the ripped-off hood of a truck and a great deal of red paint - or was that blood? It read, simply, “Repent!”
Nancy offered to drive through the night. Ken examined her leg first - her stitches had oozed a bit during the fight - and then accepted gratefully. Greg sat in the passenger seat and insisted that he’d help keep an eye out, but he soon drifted and both men were snoring. Nancy stroked Sarah’s hair from where the baby was snuggled up on Greg’s chest. She smiled for a moment and then felt something running down her face. She realized that she was crying. She spent the next hour sobbing quietly to herself, unsure of what exactly had caused her to start, but completely unable to stop.
As darkness began to fall, Nancy began to shiver. During the escape from the dentist’s office their windshield had all but been destroyed. They’d spent the day dealing with the wind and noise that resulted from driving down the highway without a barrier in front of them, but now darkness was falling and it was getting cold. Soon Nancy had to slow down and blast the heat to try and balance out the wind in her face. It didn’t help enough. It wasn’t long before the men had woken from the cold and Sarah had started to whimper and try to burrow herself into Greg’s chest.
“We’ve got to take an exit,” Nancy informed them. “And try to find somewhere to spend the night.”
“Do you really think that’s a good idea?” Ken asked. He himself was shivering half to death given the state of his shirt after he’d cannibalized it for wound wrappings.
Nancy gestured toward herself. “Look at us, Ken,” she insisted. “Even if I slow down to almost nothing I’m going to end up with pneumonia driving around with no windshield in a tank top in the middle of the night. And you’ve got even less on. Not to mention that we’re starting to run out of gas again.”
“She has a point,” Greg agreed. He was rearranging Sarah so that she was under his shirt to keep her warm.
Though Ken looked like he had more to say, Nancy decided that she was going to take the lead on this one. She took the next exit she saw, down a dark road that eventually opened up into wide, empty fields. Though she stood behind her decision she soon regretted her timing because the road seemed to go on forever and lead to nothing. They were all chilled to the bone by the time a structure came into sight. Nancy drove toward it with relief and watched as the dark shadow became a sturdy-looking farmhouse and a barn. There was a large, ornate cross hanging over the front door, and a beat-up red truck sitting outside the barn.
“Think there’s anyone in there?” Greg asked.
“If there is, I hope they’re friendly,” Ken replied. The tone of his voice said that he wasn’t expecting much. “With the luck we’ve been having I wouldn’t be surprised if they tried to shoot us through the door.”
Nancy hushed him with a glare in the rear view window as she pulled into the long driveway. The place looked warm and that was all that mattered to her at the moment.
Ken was twitchy as they poured out of the car, but they didn’t hear so much as a leave rustle anywhere nearby. Nancy stepped up the chipped red steps to a thick white door, took a deep breath, gulped, and knocked.
No answer. She knocked again, louder this time, and called out, “Is anyone in there! We’re survivors looking for a place to stay the night!” Still no answer. Greg walked to the edge of the step and peered in the living room window. “I don’t see anything,” he announced. “Is the door even locked?”
Nancy turned the handle and found that it actually wasn’t locked, but it was barred. Greg handed her
the baby and the two men stepped forward to put their weight into it. There was the scraping sound of something heavy sliding across the floor. They huffed and heaved, and after about ten minutes they managed to move the door far enough for them to squeeze into the porch and see that it was an enormous bookcase blocking the path. Nancy saw that the door had no lock and imagined what it must be like to live where you didn’t worry about locking the doors...unless there was a zombie outbreak, of course.
“Do you smell that?” Greg asked, crinkling his nose.
Ken took a deep sniff and scrunched his face in dislike. “What is that?”
They retrieved the supplies that Greg had managed to drag with him in the escape and slid the bookcase back into place before turning to wander the house, searching for the source of the strange stench. It reminded Nancy of something, but she couldn’t quite put her nose on it. She wasn’t entirely certain that she wanted to find out what it was.
“I think it’s coming from the basement,” Ken whispered. Nancy opened her mouth to ask him why he was whispering, but decided against it. They didn’t know what they were about to walk into, after all.
The basement stairs were long and narrow, and may have been extremely difficult to traverse, had there not been a light shining at the bottom of them. They filed down single-file, Ken in the lead and Nancy in the rear with the baby. Ken paused at the bottom, took a deep breath that caused him to crinkle his nose again and gag a little, and then leaped around the corner. Greg followed right at his heels. Both their faces turned white immediately.
“What? What is it?” Nancy whispered. The men didn’t answer; they were shell-shocked, staring with all the color drained from their cheeks. Nancy’s morbid curiosity got the best of her. She pushed past the men and almost dropped Sarah in her shock.
It was a family. A mother and father, a grandmother, and four children ranging from what looked to be about 6 to about 18. All but the father had been restrained. The grandmother was latched to her wheelchair with belts, the children tied together in a macabre bundle around a load-bearing beam, and the mother - who was in a pile on the floor - had her arms and legs wrapped tight with fishing twine. They were all dead, shot clean through the head. All but the father. He was slouched by a workbench, a hunting rifle at his side and his head blown apart from his jaw to the top of his skull. It was obvious how the situation had played out. All of the bodies were beginning to decay. It looked like they’d been sitting stagnant here for at least a few days.
Greg recovered from his shock just fast enough to run up the stairs with his hand over his mouth. Ken eventually tore his eyes away, saw the look on Nancy’s face, and began leading her back to the upper level. Sarah gurgled into Nancy’s chest, unaware of the horror they’d just discovered.
Ken sat Nancy down on the plush sofa in the living room and left to find Greg. The younger man had run to the kitchen sink and was hanging over it, heaving. As Nancy sat there in shock, trying not to play out the scene in her head, her eyes fell upon a sheaf of papers laying upon the fire hearth. She placed the baby amongst a pile of throw pillows and walked over to pick up the papers.
To You Whom Have Come to My Home, it read:
I am sorry for what I have done. I am not a strong man, and this is a harsh new world. Know that I tried to wait it out. I thought that if we could hold out here long enough it would blow over or someone would come save us, or, I don’t know.
I have gone for supplies this day, as we were running low. I left my oldest son to protect the family and I drove into town and raided old man Cullen’s grocery store. During my raid old man Cullen himself came at me from his office, dripping blood from every inch of his body and clawing for my face. I shot him through the head and he dropped, but something changed in me at that moment. I realized that this isn’t just going to blow over. No one is coming to save us.
I came home. I greeted my family. I tried to push the thoughts from my head, but I just couldn’t. This is our world now, and I don’t want my family to have to suffer in it any longer. I love them too much to let them go through this hell we’ve been thrown into.
I have them tied up in the basement right now. My wife is screaming mercy and the children are weeping. My mother cries silently. She knows from the look on my face that my mind is made up. I will make sure to shoot them all through the head so that they do not come back. I wouldn’t wish that existence on my worst enemy. It will be the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do, but I believe it is the last thing I will be able to do for them. I only pray that the good lord sees fit to take me to heaven along with them, but I will understand if I have to go to hell in order to save my family.
I am so sorry. Please understand that.
- John Jeremy MacAskill
Ken moved like a ghost behind Nancy. He read the confession letter over her shoulder and then reached to gently remove it from her shaking hands. She turned and buried her face in his chest, weeping openly for the world and what had happened to it.
“How?” she sobbed. “How could anyone do such a thing to the people they love the most?”
Ken patted her on the back, empathetic. He sighed. “Some people can’t handle a disaster as well as others, Nancy. Some people snap and do strange or awful things. I’m sure that, in his heart, he thought he was doing right by his family.”
“Well that’s bullshit,” Greg’s voice came from the doorway. He stumbled in, his face still green, and threw himself on the couch next to Sarah. He offered his hand to her and she grabbed his fingers to play. “Anyone who would think that was ‘doing right’ deserves to rot in hell.”
Nancy nodded, flinging tears on Ken’s chest. He opened his mouth to argue, to tell them that they shouldn’t say such things because you never knew what might change your outlook on life, but he couldn’t find it in him. With a heavy heart he led Nancy back to the couch where she snuggled up on the other side of the baby. There he left her to set about the house, using whatever he could find to block up the windows and doors.
Chapter Thirteen
Nancy spent the next two days mostly moping around the house. It was a large farmhouse with half a dozen bedrooms, so there was no lack of places that she could hide out with Sarah when she didn’t feel like talking to anyone. She wandered mostly through the children’s rooms, examining their belongings and trying to get a feel for what kind of people they might have turned out to be. The youngest girl’s room was filled with toy ponies and drawings of her riding a horse through the sunset. Nancy imagined that she may have become a world famous rider. The eldest boy’s room was home to a very nice acoustic guitar and a shelf full of school books, most of them on the topics of biology and anatomy. Nancy fancied herself that he was studying to become a surgeon one day.
The parents’ room, however, was the biggest shock. At first Nancy didn’t bother with that room, but after fully examining every other room in the house she decided she’d like to know what kind of person the mother had been. What she wasn’t expecting was to find a small nursery set up in the corner off to one side of the bed. A few folded receiving blankets and fuzzy teddy bears lay waiting on the tiny mattress of a beautiful oak crib. A pair of knitting needles with a tiny, half-finished sweater hanging off of them lay on top. A small day planner lay on the bedside table. Nancy picked this up and flipped through the pages of dates and appointments, taking note of one in particular which had been circled in pink marker and had the words “Due Date” scrawled across it. Nancy quickly counted backward in her head and determined with a lump in her throat that the woman who had been hog-tied, thrown in her own basement, and shot clean through the head by her own husband, had been almost four months pregnant at the time.
Sarah wiggled and fussed in Nancy’s arms and made a noise to indicate that she wanted down. Nancy placed the planner back where it had been. She lowered Sarah into the little crib, handed her one of the teddy bears, and grieved for the little unborn child who would never get to use these things.
Ken
and Greg, in the meantime, risked venturing outside in order to remove the dead family from the basement. Greg argued against it at first, until Ken pointed out that they’d already been decomposing for quite a while and eventually the house would be full of lovely gasses that couldn’t possibly be safe for any of them to be breathing in. They hauled them out into the backyard and stacked them in a pile. Fighting all the while with their gag reflexes, they used some fire-starter they’d found in the house to set the family ablaze. Greg insisted on separating the father’s body from the rest, as his own personal “fuck you” to the man who’d murdered his entire family. Ken talked him out of it by pointing out that they might need the fire-starter and shouldn’t waste it by making two separate fires. Nancy watched everything from the kitchen window by pulling back the thick blanket Ken had draped over it. She felt that she needed to watch for herself as the bodies were being returned to the earth.
The one thing that they could thank the murderous father for was that he had gathered a decent amount of supplies before losing his mind. He’d stocked up on fuel to run the small generator in the basement, and in the kitchen they found milk, eggs, and bread, along with jugs of clean water, cereals, cans of soup and fruit, and even some vegetables that were just barely keeping. Nancy used these right away, whipping up a stir-fry with some noodles that she found in the cupboard. Even with her limited cooking skills it was the best thing any of them had eaten in quite a while; even the baby seemed to enjoy gnawing on a few of the cooked veggies.
“That was delicious, Nancy,” Greg praised her after they’d eaten.
Ken nodded his enthusiasm. “It really was.”
Nancy smiled, but she could see through the looks on their faces. “I know, I know, it needs meat, right?” she guessed.
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