LZR-1143: Evolution

by Bryan James

  I thought I might love her for that.

  I stopped walking as the thought hit me, and behind me her footfalls approached. Her hand was on my shoulder, and she asked softly, “What’s up? Time to stop?”

  I simply shook my head, turning and smiling at her dirty, beautiful face.

  “No, not yet. Just ... realizing something.”

  She smiled back and then gestured forward, throwing back to me as she took the lead, “Good then; let’s go. Race ya to the next coffee shop.”

  Letting the sudden warmth I felt take over, I simply walked forward, following.

  We walked for two hours. After the first hour, the corn fields ended, graduating into fallow fields, devoid of crops. Although we couldn’t see the road we were paralleling, the tree line on the far side was fairly clear in the moonlight. We crossed a small dirt road as we moved west, and decided to follow it in the hopes of finding a barn or a small house, hopefully abandoned and zombie-free. If the last few experiences with the undead were any indication, they did indeed seem to be traveling and congregating as groups. This was bad news when they found you, but rendered decent odds on finding larger swaths of land deserted.

  The road wound through farm land, more corn on one side, empty fields on the other. We stayed close to the corn so our silhouettes weren’t so clear against the moonlit background. Although the creatures didn’t see very well, humans would be especially vigilant for ambling forms in the darkness, and I didn’t feel like an extra bullet hole.

  When I saw Kate stumble on a large clod of dirt, I knew we needed to stop for the night soon. In the distance, a single building stood. Alone and dark, it was the only evidence of human habitation in the vicinity. We sped up, eager to find shelter and the scant safety of a roof and walls.

  As we approached, we were relieved to discover that it was a fairly decrepit home, with a large barn in the back and a deserted driveway. The front door waved in the wind, and a discarded suitcase lay open in the front yard. Clothing still hung on the tattered line in the side yard, and the large form of what appeared to be a long-dead farm animal lay close to the post and rail fence lining the property.

  Although my body was begging me to sleep, my stomach was speaking louder. We hadn’t eaten for what seemed like years, and it seemed that our newfound strength came with a metabolic price. I didn’t think I had ever been so hungry.

  I flicked on the flashlight I had scavenged from the Humvee, and Kate followed me silently to the open front door. I gasped briefly as a rat scurried into the house from the porch, and cursed my first reaction.

  You are some action hero, weren’t you, I thought. I could hear the voice of the hardened drill sergeant who had prepped me for my last military film.

  “You can’t make a cake without killing Charlie,” he would say.

  Or maybe that wasn’t right.

  It didn’t sound right.

  Maybe there were eggs involved. Or you had to break an egg with Charlie?

  Crap, I was tired.

  Kate nudged me forward and I started out of the daze, crossing the threshold and panning the flashlight through the living room. It was a simple one-level farmhouse, and the living room opened into the kitchen in the rear, separated from one another by a waist-high partition. To the left, a hallway led into what I assumed were the bedrooms. Kate pealed off to that side of the house as I cautiously moved past the partition and into the kitchen, making sure to pay attention to the darker corners in the back of the home.

  Barely a minute later, she emerged from the back of the house and shook her head.

  “Empty,” she said simply, raising her hand to her neck and rubbing it briefly before passing her hand over her eyes.

  I breathed a sigh of relief and started opening cabinets.

  “I’ll get the steak, if you can find some potatoes,” I said absently, rooting through baking soda, dish soap and cheap metal silverware. I opened a second cabinet as I heard her open the fridge.

  “Oh, Jesus ...” she said, before slamming the door again.

  I chuckled.

  “Yeah, can’t think that a couple weeks of rot helped whatever lived in there before, huh?”

  “Smells like roadkill,” she said, laughing in exhaustion.

  “Wrapped in crap,” I added.

  We laughed together as we searched the cabinets. The search was coming up dry until she opened the full-length vertical cabinet next to the fridge. Several cans of canned stew, a box of diet soda, an unopened bag of corn chips, and the freaking motherlode: two bottles of red wine.

  Cheap? Yep.

  Disgusting? Most likely.

  Welcome? Oh dear lord.

  You try surviving a zombie holocaust without a drink someday and see how you like it. I was about ready to tap a battery and suck the acid through a garden hose.

  We eagerly stuffed the food and wine in my pack and looked out the back window.

  “Beds in back?” I asked, thinking that canned stew and bottle of wine sounded like a good pre-nap snack.

  “Yeah, but I’m not sure about staying in the house. If those men come by while we’re sleeping, that’s the first place they’ll look.” She glanced out the window, leaning forward to get a better look.

  “How do you feel about barns?”

  Chapter 24

  We found clean linens in the hall closet of the home, and grabbed some pillows from the beds, careful not to leave any sign of our presence. I even opened the door again before we left through the back.

  The barn, unlike the home, was fairly clean. The ladder to the second story was solidly built, and the hay was neatly stacked. Both front and back doors stood open, and after a brief discussion we decided to keep them both open to disguise our presence, but to pull the ladder up to the second floor in case any curious folks—zombie or living—decided to come by.

  With relief, we shrugged out of our packs and dove into the stew, simply drinking it cold from the can. It was a moderate-quality store brand, but tasted like a New York strip steak to me. If Kate’s murmurs of approval were any indication, she agreed.

  A multi-tool I had found in a drawer inside was a welcome addition to our meager supplies, and I used it with great pleasure as I opened the wine.

  “Ever think you’d be on the second floor of a barn in Delaware with a movie star, drinking cheap wine out of the bottle to wash down cold beef stew?” I asked, passing her the bottle as she took a long drink.

  She coughed briefly, wiping her hand across her mouth as she smiled and handed me the bottle back.

  “It’s every little girl’s dream, didn’t you know?”

  “I assumed, but had to check. I have a tendency to think highly of myself.” I smiled at her before taking a long drink. “Or didn’t you pick up on that?”

  “Oh, I picked up on that all right. Loud and clear.” She paused, voice calm and quiet.

  “Do you really think she’s alive?”

  I paused, considering my answer.

  To be honest, I did think she was alive. I don’t know why. God knows there was no reason in heaven or on earth to think it, but I did. I suspected myself of stacking the deck—of believing what I knew to be the easiest and the most convenient to my own piece of mind, and to hers.

  But I did believe that Kate’s daughter had survived, and I believed that she was my motivation for trying so damn hard to make a difference.

  “Yes, I do,” I said quietly, looking at her as I took a drink. “But I’ll be honest with you, I don’t know how we’re going to get to the West Coast to find her.”

  Kate’s eyes had tears in them as she smiled. “We?”

  I was surprised she had to ask. Not only was she my permanent partner in this insanity, but she had saved my ass more times than I could count. I owed her this, and much more.

  Besides, she was crazy hot.

  “You wound me with your doubt, my lady,” I said dramatically, smiling and passing her the wine bottle. She wiped her eyes with her sleeve and said si
mply, “Thanks.”

  “My pleasure, of course. We’ll talk about my fees at some later date.”

  She leaned forward, crossing her arms around her knees and looking at me seriously.

  “Mike, I’ve got to say, you are an interesting person.”

  “How so? I mean, other than the whole super-attractive ‘crazy ass movie star that killed his wife and escaped from a loony bin into a zombie invasion’ thing I’ve got going on.”

  She smiled and took a drink.

  “Well, I think you’ve probably got some arrogance down there somewhere, and I think it probably wants to come out and play, but there’s also a refreshing willingness to be honest, and a real smart ass, that makes you close to normal. It’s hard to believe that under this unique person lies a shallow movie star.”

  I leaned back on the hard wood, looking at the ceiling, unsure of how to respond.

  At one point, I had been that person. I had been the shallow, careless star, who didn’t care about anyone but himself. That seemed like a lifetime ago. It was a lifetime ago; if not in time, then in circumstance.

  “I was that person. Once, a long, long time ago, in a galaxy far, far away. But you are the person that life allows you to be. When I was a star, I acted the way I was supposed to act. I said what I was supposed to say, and I played the game I was intended to play. I got used to that world and that mindset. That’s one of the reasons I was so blindsided by the whole ... thing ... with Maria,” I said, still staring at the ceiling.

  I took a swig of the wine from the bottle, letting it settle in my stomach before continuing. She was silent.

  “When I got home and found her, when I saw what she had become, I had no way to cope with what I was seeing. It must have made what they did to me easier.”

  “When I woke up, and when I started to remember, it was a shock to the system. I didn’t have the time to be who I was—I needed to be different. I needed to be real.” I sighed once, lowering my gaze to her soft, attentive eyes.

  “I’d like to think that who I am now is who I always was, and the other guy was just a facade.”

  She leaned forward, voice soft.

  “Maybe we all get to hit a reset button once in our lives,” she said quietly and sincerely.

  I heard in her voice the implication she was making. She was mentally preparing to reset as well. She would never surrender the hope that her daughter was alive, but she was determined to live and to survive.

  I passed her the bottle, and she took it, eyes never leaving mine. She carefully set it aside and moved closer, sitting next to me and taking my hand.

  “I’d like to think I know the real you,” she said, squeezing softly and leaning in.

  My pulse quickened as I touched her face gently, brushing a small tendril of beautiful hair back from her eyes and moving my hands to the back of her neck. I pulled her toward me and met her as she leaned into the kiss and closed her eyes.

  I did love this woman.

  That much I knew.

  Outside, the wind brought the faint sound of trees, leaves and branches moving together in the night. In the barn, the bottle of wine was forgotten.

  Chapter 25

  The next morning dawned clear and early. As the sun shot through the wide-set slats of the barn wall, I squinted and overcame the brief disorientation, frowning into the bright, early morning sun. A tickling sensation alighted on my forehead and I slapped at it as hard as I could, cursing at the smear of a fly in my opened palm.

  Next to me, Kate sat up, laughing as I rubbed my eyes.

  “You’ve never worked or lived on a farm, have you?” she asked, standing up and stretching languidly. I watched her get dressed, in no hurry to leave this time and place.

  “I did a movie on one once. But in the interest of full disclosure, I will admit that the farm was destroyed because it was harboring brain-infesting space-worms that were trying to take over the world through organic produce.”

  She rolled her eyes and pulled her hair back from her face into a pony tail.

  “Doesn’t count, city boy.”

  I sighed and rolled over onto my side, following her as she sat on a bale of old hay and picked up the map.

  “I was always a proponent of letting people do their thing. Farmers farm, and I buy the product. It was a perfect system.”

  She grunted once, smiling as she stared at the map.

  “Yeah, except now that all the farmers are dead, you have to eat shit from a can.”

  Well that was a bleak analysis, I thought.

  True, but still totally uncalled for.

  I stood up, getting dressed quickly as I scoured the floor for my pistol.

  “We have about two more miles until we start heading back to the Southwest, around the far side of the town,” she said, folding the map.

  “Which means we really need to find a ride at some point,” I said, massaging my neck with a grimace. The barn floor had not been a comfy bed.

  “Unless you want to walk to D.C..”

  We split the last of the canned food and stuck the extra bottle of wine in our pack. Before we left the farm, we checked the water in the house, which tasted fairly metallic, but potable. We filled our borrowed canteens with as much as we could, and drank to near exploding before leaving. We didn’t know where our next drink would come from, and couldn’t be too careful.

  The sun was strong on our backs as we crossed the road, again staying close to the line of trees and cornfields in the event that we had to jump for cover. We moved quickly, refreshed on several levels from our night’s stay.

  We passed more farmhouses, similar to the one from which we had procured our meager dinner and breakfast. They were all in various levels of disrepair, and fairly good evidence of the financial condition of the area.

  Thankfully, we passed no more displays on telephone poles as we had the day before. Apparently, the road into town required decoration, but the ancillary roads didn’t make the cut.

  Once, we heard a vehicle, and we quickly bolted into the corn, laying down to reduce our profiles, but the large flatbed truck with wooden railings passed without slowing, its cargo difficult to identify from our position. It was packed with some sort of livestock, or maybe even passengers, who moved slowly and aimlessly in the back of the truck.

  We passed two vehicles during the morning. One, an old SUV with a flat tire, sat in the front yard of a two story home. The doors and windows were open to the air, and a large red cooler sat on the driveway ground, amongst weeds and gravel, an odd ornament in the otherwise bleakly colored scene.

  The SUV was empty, and it lacked a spare. We discarded it as a possible escape vehicle and decided to check the house for food. Quickly realizing that it was empty as well, of food and people, we moved on after drinking copiously from the water faucets again.

  The second vehicle was more promising. Parked on the side of the road, the doors and windows shut and locked, was a simple sedan with Delaware plates. Fifty feet away from the car, a large portion of dead corn had been pressed to the ground, making a wide swath into the crop, and disappearing into the distant field. A single, fairly large smear of what appeared to be dried blood was pressed into the pavement near the side of the road. The countryside was silent, but for the sounds of our boots crunching the gravel on the shoulder.

  Peering into the cabin of the car, we saw that it was empty. I shattered the glass of the driver’s side window and opened the door from the inside. As I sat in the front seat, intending to look for keys, I heard a loud thumping noise from the back seat.

  I whipped my head around, searching for the zombie that I was sure had somehow snuck into the back seat while I sat.

  The sound repeated, and I realized with some degree of surprise that it was coming from the trunk.

  “There’s something in the trunk,” I yelled outside to Kate, who was keeping watch on the road.

  “What is it?” she asked, peering down the road as she spoke.

  “Wel
l, I don’t know, do I?” I said, irritated.

  I got out of the car, and rounded the back to the trunk. I tapped the trunk lid with the butt of my pistol.

  “Hello? Anyone in there? Anyone alive in there?”

  I knew what I expected to hear. The shambling, thoughtless bump of an undead fist meeting unyielding metal in a comical, yet thoroughly satisfying, exercise of futility.

  What I heard instead was a surprise.

  “Hey, man! Easy on the pounding! That shit’s loud!”

  That was certainly a shocker.

  “There’s someone in here,” I shouted back to Kate and she turned to me in surprise.

  From the trunk, the voice interjected, “No shit someone’s in here, man. Let me the hell out!”

  I rolled my eyes and said simply, “Get away from the lock.”

  I waited several seconds, then used one of my valuable last rounds of ammunition to pop the lock. The bullet pinged loudly off the thin metal, and I stepped back cautiously. As the trunk lifted, exposing the dark space underneath, I was surprised again. The small form of a young girl appeared, curled in the fetal position in a trunk full of food, water, and an assortment of car accessories. She held what looked like a crossbow in her hand, eyes blazing despite the squinted glare into the bright morning sun.

  “Back off, man. I ain’t afraid to use this.”

  I smiled despite myself, raising my hands in mock surrender and backing up.

  “Kate?” I called out, half amused, half wary of the weapon. “You’re gonna wanna see this.”

  She jogged over as our new friend uncurled herself from the trunk and sat on the edge of the dirty car, flexing her feet and legs. She was probably around twelve years old, and wore a dirty pair of jeans, a black tee-shirt, and some scruffy sneakers. An equally dingy backpack was clutched in one hand, and the weapon in the other. Her pitch black hair was drawn up in a pony tail, which reached down to her waist. Smudges of dirt, and what looked like oil, were smeared on her small, pale face.