The men looked at their feet.
“It really was delicious,” Ken insisted. “I guess we’ve just been starved for some good protein for a while.”
“I understand completely,” Nancy told them. Her own stomach was begging for some kind of cooked animal, which seemed almost weird and morbid under the circumstances. “But I searched the entire house and couldn’t find any meat or chicken or anything.”
“That just doesn’t seem likely,” Greg said with a frown. He got up from the table and started rummaging through the kitchen. “Wasn’t there a deep-freezer in the basement?” he asked while peering into the empty freezer compartment of the fridge.
“There is,” Nancy assured him, “but all that’s in it is frozen veggies and some ice cream.”
“Oh for Christ’s sake,” Ken exclaimed suddenly. Nancy and Greg blinked at him. The baby dropped her carrot chunk and shot him a lippy look. “The barn,” he groaned in explanation. “We’re on a goddamn farm!”
Snatching up a cleaver from the kitchen, Ken shoved his way through the barricades on the main door. A quick glance across the lawn later and he made a mad dash for the tall red barn. Nancy and Greg waited by the door with bated breath. When he hadn’t returned after five minutes they began to panic. They were just thinking of going after him when he emerged from the large barn with a dead chicken in his free hand.
“There are cows, chickens, and sheep,” he told them when he’d squeezed back through the door and replaced the barricades. “A few have died from malnutrition, but quite a few are hanging on so I gave them some feed and water to try and perk them up.” He held up the chicken, which Nancy examined with some level of disgust. Its feathers were falling out. “I think this one just died recently,” Ken explained. “If we skin and cook it now we might be able to save the meat instead of cooking another one.”
“How will we know if the meat is still good?” Greg asked. He was looking at the dead creature with hesitance and a bit of a pallor in his cheeks.
“We’ll know,” Nancy told him, though she was hesitant herself. “Bad poultry gives off a sour smell.”
“So...” Ken asked nonchalantly, “who, uh, wants to skin it?”
Greg and Nancy answered his question with looks of incredulity.
In the end they performed the task together, since none of them by themselves had any idea what to do. Ken hacked the creature’s head and legs off with the cleaver, creating quite a mess and eliciting gags from everyone. Greg made a comment about how, after all they’d seen, you wouldn’t think that a little chicken blood would cause such a reaction. Nancy’s glare cut the end of his sentence off.
Sarah watched with interest from a highchair as Nancy held the bird over the kitchen sink and the men plucked out the feathers one by one. By the time it was devoid of plumage Nancy began to feel a little more comfortable with the task. It was beginning to look like any fresh chicken bought from the supermarket. That was, until she realized that the heart, stomach, liver, and other assorted innards weren’t going to be neatly confined to a little package to do with what you wished.
“I don’t think I could ever do this all the time,” she moaned as Greg held out a garbage bag for her to throw the guts into. “It’s goddamned nasty.”
“All the heads you’ve been stabbing and this is nasty?” Ken scoffed in a playful voice. Nancy stuck out her tongue at him.
The bird had less meat on it than it might have due to not being fed for quite a while, but once it got roasting in the oven and started giving off that delicious scent, all that mattered was that there was something on the creature worth eating. Nancy let it slow-roast all day. When it was getting close to done she began chopping up some potatoes that were still good, and whipped up a stove-top stuffing from a cookbook she’d found in the bookcase. As she found herself humming a tune that she couldn’t quite remember the words to, it occurred to her very suddenly that she was enjoying herself. She peeked into the living room where Greg was making a giggling Sarah walk across Ken’s face and she couldn’t help but smile. She realized that she wouldn’t mind living like this, just the four of them together, sharing the responsibilities, being a family.
But soon she found herself frowning again. This couldn’t last forever, she reminded herself with a heavy stomach. They had a barn full of animals, sure, but what about the other essentials that they didn’t have easy access to? Eventually they’d have to go searching, and that was a risk. Not to mention, if this situation continued to last they’d eventually run out of fuel, and by extension, electricity. None of them were survivalists in the natural sense. They had no skill for lasting the winter without all the amenities they’d come to rely on. And, of course, there was always the concern of the zombies finding them again and either trapping them in the house or forcing them to flee.
Nancy sighed to herself as she watched the men entertaining the squealing child. With a heavy heart she returned to the kitchen, lamenting for the family life that would never be.
A week passed. With the threat of impending doom fluttering around in the back of her mind all the time, Nancy found it difficult to enjoy the quiet time she was having with her ‘family’. She tried to keep herself busy playing at being the mother of the group, taking care of the baby, cleaning up after the men, and doing most of the cooking. The men, armed with two hunting rifles and a shotgun that they’d found on the gun rack in the basement, trekked out to the barn to feed the animals and choose the ones to go to the slaughter. Greg came back from one trip to kill a cow looking extremely nauseous. He loudly expressed his relief that one cow would feed them for a good while because he wasn’t looking forward to ever doing that again. In the end Ken was left to cut up the beast himself, lending Nancy to the task of teasing Greg for his constitution.
“I can’t tell which parts are what,” Ken announced when he finally traipsed into the kitchen with armfuls of zip-lock bags. “But in any case, it’s beef and there’s a lot of it.”
“Give it here,” Nancy instructed, and she couldn’t help the way her mouth began to water at the sight of the meat. Loath though she’d been at the idea of slaughtering a cow, she’d been craving some real, well-cooked red meat for weeks and already had a delicious-sounding rub from one of the cookbooks prepared on the kitchen counter. She snatched one of the bags out of Ken’s arms, almost sending him into a hilarious spill with the rest of the meat, and set to work immediately. Greg laughed from the kitchen table, where he was feeding some mashed peas to Sarah. She was getting more of it on her than in her, so he left her to her own devices with the bowl and got up to help Ken drag the meat down to the deep freeze.
Nancy smiled a little over the kitchen counter, then frowned almost at once. More and more she found herself wanting to feel relaxed, safe, and comfortable here in this farmhouse. They’d seen no activity for a week, after all, and they had no one to worry about but each other. But whether it was paranoia or just good sense, she couldn’t help but feel that all of this would be coming to an end at any second. There was simply no way, she thought, that they were going to be allowed to continue on, happy and together.
Her fears were confirmed shortly after dinner the following night.
She was sitting in the armchair in the living room, playing peek-a-boo with Sarah while the men lounged on the sofa in appreciation of two nights worth of fine meals. Ken had stoked a small fire in the hearth, not because it was particularly cold, but because it felt so cozy. They were all comfortable in clothes they’d taken from the various closets in the house - Nancy had even found some new jumpers in the nursery that fit Sarah. They were very sedated from the food and were possibly even on the cusp of drifting into a nice, mid-evening nap together, when something from outside caused all of their ears to perk up.
Dread in his voice, Greg was the first to ask, “Do you hear that?”
Nancy ground her teeth together as she listened. It was a weird noise, a din really, that was getting louder as they began to recognize it.
Ken’s face went hard with a mixture of frustration and fear as he ran to the kitchen window, closely followed by Greg, and then Nancy with the baby held close to her chest. From here they could distinguish the sound - or rather, the mixture of sounds - much better. It was the combined bleating, mooing, and clucking of dozens of terrified farm animals. The question was what had suddenly terrified them so?
Ken peeled back the blanket across the window just enough for them to peek out. What they saw was not a hoard of zombies, but it was enough to send their hearts racing.
A young girl, maybe twelve or thirteen, dressed in a pretty pink party dress, her blond hair in pigtails tied with white ribbons. She was standing precariously on the peaked roof of the barn, and she was staring at the roof of the farmhouse.
“Ken?” Greg whispered nervously. “Is...is there even a way to get up onto the top of that barn?”
Ken’s reply was a simple gulp and the subconscious way his face began to pale.
“What is she looking at?” Nancy posed.
They watched her stare for several moments before realization dawned on Nancy like a slap in the face. She shoved Sarah into Greg’s arms and took off running for the living room, chiding herself, wondering if there were any stupider people left on the planet. Greg and Ken followed and found her furiously trying to snuff out the fire in the hearth. “The smoke!” she groaned, smothering the flames with a throw blanket from the sofa. “She sees the smoke coming out of the chimney!”
Ken’s face went pearl white as he realized his incredibly foolish mistake.
“Hold up,” Greg laughed. It was a strange sound, completely devoid of humor. “Why are we so worried?” He grinned in a mad way, desperate to absolve the situation. “It’s just one little girl! So what if she’s hanging out on the roof? She’s not hurting anyone.”
Nancy’s face was pained. “Greg, just her presence is making the animals scream,” she pointed out. “They can’t even see her, but they’re crying out like they’re scared for their lives!”
“Not to mention,” Ken barely whispered, “that whenever one of those creepy people has shown up, we were inevitably attacked by a hoard soon after.”
“Don’t say that!” Greg argued. His voice was hitting a high pitch. “That was a coincidence! She’s not going to bring zombies here! She’s not!” In his distress he began to squeeze Sarah a little too hard and she promptly started sobbing. Nancy rushed to take the baby from Greg’s arms, not mad at him, but full of pity.
“We can wait and see,” Ken suggested quietly. “She sees the smoke, but she hasn’t seen us, so maybe if we stay out of sight...” His voice trailed off.
Nancy nodded, though she immediately saw the problem. Even if they separated themselves from her completely, made absolutely certain that they didn’t allow her to see that they were here, their previous experience had shown that these people seemed to be able to stand their vigil - without food or water - for days. How long might she stand there? Long enough for them to run out of food? Probably. Long enough for them to become too weak to enact an escape if necessary? Likely.
“We’ll keep the windows shut and avoid any more fires,” Ken was mumbling to himself. “We won’t make our presence known at all and maybe... Maybe she’ll go away.”
Greg was squeezing his hands into balls and then flexing them over and over again. His eyes had a haunted look.
That night they had no rest. They gathered together in the master bedroom, sitting on the bed together, blankets wrapped around their shoulders. The only sound between them was the soft, carefree breathing of a sleeping Sarah, blissfully unaware of what was happening around her. Ken in particular sat up against the bed’s headboard, his knees up to his chest, gently rocking back and forth like a crazy person.
“Don’t blame yourself,” Nancy whispered to him at one point, but he shook his head and buried it in his arms. Nancy let him be after that.
Several hours later Nancy awoke with a start, surprised that she had drifted off. It was dark, but someone had lit a candle on the bed stand. Greg was out cold, his legs hanging off the side of the bed. He would surely be very sore when he woke, but for the time being it was worth it that he was getting a bit of sleep. Nancy hoped he was having good dreams.
She noticed that Ken was missing and felt her heart rise in her throat. She slid off the bed quietly, careful not to wake Greg or Sarah, and crept off in hopes of locating their missing teammate.
She tiptoed through the house, whispering his name. Every step made the floor creek, which made her twitch and grimace. She assumed the girl outside didn’t have superhuman hearing, or else she’d already know for sure that they were in here, but she still felt tense and frustrated to be making any sort of noise when she was trying to be as silent as possible. “Ken?” she hissed a little louder. She had just reached the top of the staircase when a voice whispered back from the older girl’s room. “In here,” Ken called. Though she’d been waiting for the response, the sound caused Nancy to jump and clutch at her heart.
In the bedroom, which was decorated in the style of a not-quite-teenager who desperately wanted to be all grown up, Ken was peering through what looked like a secondhand telescope. He’d cut a hole in the curtains of the window and poked the scope through so that he could see outside without the strange girl being able to see in.
“What’s up?” Nancy inquired.
“Found this in one of the boys’ closets,” he explained. There was a tangible level of fatigue in his voice. Nancy noticed that he was shifting back and forth on his feet as though trying to keep himself awake. “I thought we should probably be trying to keep an eye on her in case she does anything suspicious, you know?”
Nancy nodded, though Ken didn’t see because he refused to take his eye away from the scope. “Why don’t you take a break and I’ll watch for a while?” she offered.
“That’s okay,” Ken answered immediately. “I can go longer, no worries.”
Nancy’s shoulders deflated. She shimmied closer, leaned her head against Ken’s back, and put her arms around his waist. “It’s okay, Ken,” she told him quietly. “We all make mistakes. You didn’t know.”
He finally removed his eye from the scope and turned to look at her. He looked awful, like he’d been awake for several nights already and had spent them crying his eyes out. “It was a stupid mistake,” he replied miserably. “We didn’t even need a fire. It’s not even cold out yet. I just thought it would feel cozy, and... I fucked up, Nancy. I fucked up royally.” His voice was cracking. “We had a good thing going here and I’ve ruined it.”
“Shhh,” Nancy said as Ken turned and moaned into her chest. She stroked his hair and scratched his back to comfort him. “It’s okay, it’s okay. We’ll get through it.”
It took a while, but eventually she managed to lull him off to sleep by rubbing his head and cooing softly to him. She maneuvered him down onto the bed and pulled a furiously purple comforter up to his shoulders. For a little while she watched him sleep, twitching and making funny noises in what looked to be an unpleasant dream. Once he’d calmed down and seemed to have fallen into a deep sleep, she moved herself over to the telescope and took her first watch.
She could see the girl, but she wasn’t very well magnified. Examining the telescope, Nancy realized that Ken had been looking through the device without actually attaching any of the magnification lenses. She fingered through the options attached to a small rack suspended between the legs of the tripod and chose one that looked like it wouldn’t magnify too much. She slid it into the eyepiece and peered through again. What she saw made her jump back in surprise, her heart leaping along with her. She took a few long, deep breaths before she put her eye back up to the scope.
The scope was aimed directly at the girl’s face. She was stoically staring at the roof, her eyes facing a few degrees away from the angle of the scope, but not angled enough that Nancy couldn’t see every single detail of her face. They’d originally wondered whether these
people were human or zombie. Now, seeing her up close like this, Nancy was beginning to wonder if they were either. Her pretty face was extremely pale, unnaturally so, lending to the theory that she was dead like the zombies. Her eyes, however, were full of color, just not a color that was generally associated with the living or the dead. The frightening eyes, which never blinked or twitched in any way, had no pupil, no cornea. The entire eyeball was one color, and that color was a dark, swirling red. As Nancy stared at them, her mouth hanging open, she thought they looked just as though they were made of glimmering orbs of blood.
Nancy was mesmerized by those eyes. Strange, frightening, hideous...and yet somehow beautiful. It was almost like staring into the eyes of a wild cat - so majestic - even though you know it’s contemplating whether or not it wants to eat you.
“What do you want with us?” Nancy whispered to herself as the moon rose high over the farmhouse.
Nancy had developed the ability to recognize when she was dreaming.
She was perched atop her apartment building, peering down on a silent city. There were no signs of movement, neither live nor otherwise. There was no sign that the apocalypse had ever happened; cars were neatly parked along the sides of the roads, windows remained whole and shiny in the sun, buildings looked as they once had. But the city was empty. It was as though someone had come here and built up this entire civilization, but forgotten to put the people in. Even the birds were suspiciously absent.
“It’s so lonely,” Nancy whispered to herself. Her voice carried along the wind, the only sound for miles upon miles.
“It is, isn’t it?”
Nancy didn’t bother to turn her head. Gramma Sarah sat down on the ledge next to her.
“What’s wrong, sweetie?”
Nancy didn’t speak for a while. She was busy staring out at the city, trying to remember what it had looked like with people wandering through it, busy in their daily lives, completely unaware of the insanity that would destroy them all. Eventually she pulled her knees up close to her chest and rested her chin on them. “They’ve found us, Gramma. I don’t know who they are or what they want, but they’ve found us again. No matter where we go they find us. Bad things are going to happen soon.”
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