Race to Refuge

by Craig, Liz

  I ran inside one more time to get my wallet. I had a feeling I didn’t need it anymore, that we were heading in a direction where driver’s permits and cash wouldn’t get us too far. But I’d just gotten my permit. I’d only, in fact, driven by myself twice. It wasn’t going to be the smoothest ride for Ginny, but it was going to serve its purpose.

  I locked the door leading into the house—just in case someday I wanted to come back home. I didn’t want it overrun with zombies. I got in the car. I started it up. I locked the doors. I…yes, I put my seatbelt on. Then I took a deep breath and I hit the garage door opener.

  It was an instant attack. Four or five of the things, a couple of them who used to be related to me, ran at the minivan. They put their bloody faces right up to the glass, scratching the panes with their fingers. And I put the car in reverse and backed up just as fast as I could, running over one or two of them as I did.

  I drove off, wondering if that was going to be the last time I saw the house I grew up in. If the last sight of it was going to be my parents, arms reaching out for me hungrily.

  I put it behind me. The next step was to get to Ginny’s middle school. And since there were police cars, ambulances and fire trucks whizzing by me, I figured the roads weren’t going to be too easy to drive. I pushed the accelerator, forgetting how sensitive it was. I zoomed past, almost into, a woman who stared at me as if I were a zombie myself. Hadn’t she ever seen a fifteen year old behind the wheel?

  I fiddled with the radio to see if the news was picking up any stories about the zombies. The last thing I needed was for the middle school to go on lockdown. I could barely hear the radio over the sirens, so I turned the volume way up. “…some reports of a virus of some kind that may be spreading rapidly. It’s been suggested by a law enforcement spokesman that it could be related to rabies.”

  Not. They only thought it was rabies because they couldn’t think of anything else that might make people attack and bite other people. Anybody could see it wasn’t rabies. Nobody was foaming at the mouth. And people got sick right after being infected—not like rabies, where it took a while.

  I get to the middle school and pull right up to the front of the building, I fumble in the glove compartment for the notepad and pen that Mom always kept in there. I was still shaking so it took three tries for me to write: Please release Ginny Parsons to her brother for an orthodontist appointment. Thanks, Shelia. I hop out of the van, and run up to the school, clutching the note.

  I took a deep breath, pushed my hair out of my eyes, and tried to look older. Old enough to be driving solo, old enough and responsible enough to have my sister released to my care. When you’re fifteen, this isn’t easy.

  The office staff was already sort of looking sideways at me as I walked in. I remembered one of the women from when I was in middle school. She had short, blonde hair and wore a lot of makeup and was kind of staring at me as if she remembered me too … and didn’t think it had been that long ago either, even though I was already much taller than they were, and was a beanpole. So the very tall, very skinny look wasn’t helping me look older.

  I cleared my throat and tried for a deeper pitch than my natural one. “Hi, I’m Ty. I’m here to pick up my sister, Ginny Parsons, for my parents. She’s a seventh grader.”

  The blonde woman narrowed her eyes at me, thoughtfully. “Didn’t your parents send in a note with Ginny this morning? Usually they send in a note and then we have the student come to the office and wait for their parent.” She put a lot of emphasis on parent.

  I nodded understandingly as if this were the most natural thing in the world. The whole time I’m thinking about how I probably only have minutes to get Ginny out of there—but that there’s no way they’re going to release her if they have any suspicion at all.

  “Mom and Dad usually would send in a note at the beginning of the day. But they’ve been having sort of a rough time lately.” Especially today. I took a steadying breath. “I’ve been trying to help them out. They did send me with this note.”

  I handed over the one I’d just written and the blonde woman scrutinized it, probably looking for shady grammar or misspelled words. But English was my best subject so I knew she wouldn’t find them there. She pursed her lips, looking at me thoughtfully. And the whole time it felt like my heart was going to beat its way out of my chest, I tried to look as if I couldn’t be less interested in taking my middle school kid sister to her orthodontist appointment.

  The blonde woman exchanged glances with the other woman in the office, a woman with large red-framed glasses and a ponytail, and then back at me. “Let me make sure that you’re an authorized person to pick her up. Your parents would have had to sign a form at the beginning of the year that you were authorized for us to release your sister to you.”

  My breath caught in my throat. Because there was no way that my parents would sign something like that. Why would they when I wasn’t even driving on my own yet?

  But the woman with the ponytail said to the blonde lady, “Hey, I’ve been in this situation myself. The nerve of the doctor’s office to charge for missed visits! We should charge them for making us wait so long in their office. Our time is just as valuable as theirs. I’ll buzz her on the intercom. What’s her name again?”

  I told her and she picked up a phone, punching some numbers. “Mrs. Thomas? Could you send Ginny Parsons to the office, please? She has an appointment. Thank you.”

  I tried to keep my face from showing the relief I felt.

  The blonde woman was looking pretty sour that I’d gotten my way. “You’ll need to sign your name here to authorize her being released. I don’t suppose you know your sister’s student ID?”

  Was she kidding? I was doing well to know my student ID. Was this the kind of stuff Mom and Dad were expected to know? No wonder they kept forgetting everything … there was no room left in their brains. Then I remembered the last time I saw Mom and Dad. I immediately took out my phone to look at Twitter and to forget my parents.

  Twitter was full of messages about zombies. I scanned them fast to see if any of them were from people I knew or from our area. Which was when I saw something about the state house being attacked by ‘people who appeared to be suffering from a strange virus.’ And the state house was just a few blocks away.

  Ginny cautiously entered the office, a large backpack on her back. It’s not a place middle school kids really like hanging out. She had a look on her face that said that she thought she had forgotten something and maybe was in trouble. Then, when she saw me, her expression changed to total surprise.

  “Ty? What’s going on? What are you doing here?” she asked. She was small for her age and wasn’t much into fashion. With the pink tee shirt she’d picked up at the beach last year, the denim shorts she was wearing, and her blonde hair pulled back into a braid, she could be an elementary school kid. It was just the braces that showed she must be older.

  I briskly started moving her to the door. “Ginny, it’s okay. We’ve got to get you to your orthodontist appointment.”

  I used a commanding voice that I was surprised I even had. But it worked because she hurried along beside me out the door. “What’s going on?” she whispered to me as we quickly left.

  I grabbed her arm and started running as soon as we hit the door. “Ginny, do me a favor and ditch that backpack. It’s just going to take up room. Actually, even better, just dump the stuff out of it and let’s keep the backpack.”

  “What?” she kept jogging along beside me, but now I could see she was really concerned about me. “What are you talking about? I’ll get in trouble. That’s all my books for school and my homework.”

  “Not needed anymore,” I said a little breathlessly. The sirens were closer now and I squinted to see through the trees toward the direction of the state house. I couldn’t see anything, but I heard what sounded like cops yelling. I bet the school was going to go on lockdown at any time.

  “What?” she asked again. Now there we
re tears in her voice as she was seriously getting worried.

  I grabbed the backpack from her, unzipped the top, and dumped everything out in about five seconds. Then I grabbed her arm again and hit the key fob to unlock the car. “Ginny, do you trust me?”

  It was a rhetorical question. I knew she did. I was her big brother. What’s more, we had the kind of relationship where she looked up to me. I’d never ragged on her, never done any of that stupid sibling stuff. We were good, Ginny and I.

  She nodded.

  “I’m going to explain everything to you. There’s something bad going on. But right now, we’ve got to get in the car and get out of here, okay?”

  As we got into the car, I could see a group of people walking toward the middle school and it felt like something big was stuck in my throat. Because they weren’t people at all—they were lurching and silently munching as they walked to the school.

  “Ginny, can you call the school?” I asked, pushing my phone at her. “Tell them that there’s a report of some dangerous armed men heading toward the school and that lockdown is recommended.”

  Ginny took the phone, looking up the school’s phone number. She hesitated as I sped to the exit. “But they’ll think I’m pranking them. They’ll know I’m a kid. They might even know who’s calling. And I don’t see any armed men.”

  “They won’t believe me if I tell them the truth. It’s better to give them something more believable…like armed men. Besides, it’s not a prank, and we might save a bunch of lives.” Probably not, but at least I wouldn’t feel guilty about not having tried. “If you dial the number, I’ll talk to them,” I said. I was driving as fast as I could now.

  “Shouldn’t we just call the police?” asked Ginny. Her voice was thin with stress.

  “They’re busy.” Police cars, ambulances, and fire trucks were passing us on the right and the left as we drove, sirens blaring, lights flashing. Busy, and completely overwhelmed.

  She took a deep, shaky breath and dialed. Then she put the phone on speaker and wordlessly held it toward my face.

  I cleared my throat, trying for that deeper voice again. As soon as the woman from the school office picked up, I said steadily, “Please put the school on lockdown. There is a group of armed men approaching the school. This is not a joke.” Then I hung up.

  Ginny looked at me with wide eyes. Then she gave a shaky laugh. “You sounded so grown up.”

  “I keep telling you that those weekly vocabulary words you get for homework are the most important thing to learn.” My voice was light but I pressed harder on the accelerator. Everywhere around us I saw wrecks, emergency vehicles, and more lurching strangers.

  Chapter Six

  Charlie

  The main problems with driving the ambulance around were that it was impossible to maneuver in heavy traffic, that these poor victims kept trying to flag me down for help, and that the thing sucked down gas like a Slurpee. I needed to ditch it. Ideally, I needed to ditch it and trade it for my motorcycle. That thing would zip through traffic like a song, use a fraction of the gas, and nobody would be trying to get me to help them.

  It was killing me not to stop and help. That was the whole reason I changed jobs and became a paramedic to begin with. Right now, right here, I was in no position to help. I had no weapon. Plus, we were all quickly becoming vastly outnumbered in a short period of time. The city was no place to hang out during a zombie outbreak.

  I drove up to my street. I’ll admit that there are some neighbors that I’m not wild about. The guy that leaves his dog outside to bark all day while he’s at work—that’s very annoying. And then there’s the neighbor who leaves his trash dumpster out on the street for days after the garbage man has emptied it. Just roll it back to the house, dude. It’s not that big of a deal. People are lazy.

  But even though I wasn’t crazy about these neighbors to begin with, I definitely liked them a lot less when they’d turned into zombies. Maybe they disliked me too, because when these neighbor-zombies spotted me in the ambulance they immediately eyed me with a gleam in their eyes with arms outstretched. Wanting to welcome me to their corrupted clan.

  I had other ideas. First of all, I needed to get my dog out of there. I love Mojo like a brother—a big, furry, German shepherd brother. He trusts me and loves me and I couldn’t leave him shut up in my house to starve or dehydrate. That wasn’t fair to him. It also wasn’t totally fair to just open the door, let him outside, and allow him to be consumed by zombies. I didn’t know for sure if the zombies would attack animals, but I didn’t want to take the risk with Mojo.

  The only problem was that I really needed my motorcycle. Could I throw the bike in the back of the ambulance along with Mojo? The bike was a couple of hundred pounds, though, who was I kidding? Even with adrenaline pumping through my body, I wouldn’t be able to lift that much weight. The only choice left as I saw it was to see if a German shepherd and a nearly two-hundred pound, forty year old man could fit on a motorcycle.

  Besides Mojo, all I wanted was my bike. Sure there was a lot of other stuff in my house that I could use or would like to have, but it all mostly boiled down to my bike. Besides, if I took off on my motorcycle, I wasn’t exactly going to have the space to put a bunch of things. No. The idea formulating in my head was this: get out of town first. Then next maybe I could scavenge around for supplies. Maybe by then, I’d even get rid of my bike and hotwire a deserted car or something.

  This was all going through my head as I sat in the ambulance and watched my former neighbors stagger toward me on lurching legs. Did they have any intelligence, these things? No. Very likely not. They honestly didn’t have any intelligence back when they were human, so why would that have changed now that they weren’t? I put the ambulance in reverse, slowly luring the two zombies after me. They eagerly followed, clothes splattered with blood—theirs—some poor victim’s?

  Once we all got to the very end of my street, I quickly changed gears and punched the ambulance’s accelerator as hard as I could. The ambulance shot forward and I steered it to my house at the other end of the street. I jumped out of the rig and then promptly dropped my keys in the driveway as if I were in some kind of B-movie. Glancing up, I saw the things start to stagger my way from several houses down. I took a deep breath, got myself together, ran up to the house and let myself in.

  Mojo was at the door, as usual, to greet me. But this time his fur was standing up on the back of his neck. He knew something was up. And his large nose was working overtime, which made me wonder…could he smell the zombies? Did they put out a particular, distinctive smell? I reached down and gave Mojo a quick rub. His amber eyes were worried and I patted him, and then stood up quickly.

  “We gotta get out of here, Mojo,” I said.

  Mojo continued staring steadily at me as if he understood what I was saying, or at least agreed with the intense feeling behind it. As fast as I could, I opened the coat closet and grabbed a backpack and dumped the contents out on the floor. I zipped it up and put the empty backpack on my back. I gave Mojo a whistle, but he was already ahead of me and heading to the garage door.

  I’ve never been more grateful for a garage in my life. It gave me time to figure out how the heck to get Mojo on the bike. He’d never gone riding with me before and the bike didn’t have a sidecar. I absently fastened my helmet as I thought about it…because, hey, a head injury wouldn’t exactly help my situation, would it? Then I reached in my car and grabbed the garage door opener, being very careful not to hit the button.

  Mojo would need to sit on the bike as if he were a human passenger—that is to say, he’d need to sit either behind me and put his arms on my shoulders (and this is a big dog, you know), or else he’d need to sit in front of me, leaning right up against the windshield, and me sitting behind him. When I realized that I didn’t have any dog goggles and the wind would be bad, I figured I’d put him in front of the windshield, at least for now.

  And all the while, Mojo growled softly, fur ra
ised on his back as groaning noises and shuffling sounds came from the driveway in front of us.

  I squatted down to look at Mojo. I know my urgency translated to him because he looked intently at me like he would do anything in the world that I asked him. “Mojo,” I said, “come.” And I stood on the other side of the bike, holding it steady as hard as I could and bracing myself. Because a German shepherd was going to try to land on a motorcycle and I didn’t want to have to pick it up off the floor afterward.

  And I snapped my fingers over the motorcycle’s seat.

  Mojo leaped carefully at the bike, landing awkwardly on the seat and looking quizzically at me as if to say, so, how are we going to fix this, boss? I snapped my fingers again toward the front end of the bike and he scooted up. I got on the bike behind him, my arms around him and my hands gripping the handlebars. “It’s going to be okay,” I said to him. But my voice wasn’t quite as strong as I wanted it to be and I wasn’t sure it provided much comfort.

  I started the bike in the garage with the door down, which is definitely not standard safety procedure but better than being eaten by zombies. I putt-putted over to face the garage door. “It’s going to be okay,” I said again to Mojo, but this time my voice was firmer and I was starting to believe it myself. I was on a bike that was fully gassed up. Those things were slow. Very scary, yes. But slow. And they were hopefully going to get the surprise of their zombie lives.

  I hit the garage door button. The only bad thing about this garage door is that it goes up and down very, very slowly.

  As it was going up, I heard those things snarling. And the snarling was edging closer.

  Mojo snarled, too. His whole body was poised to spring, which is not what I wanted. I whispered soothingly to him in a soft voice.

  As soon as the garage door was up enough for Mojo and me to go through without ducking, I revved the bike motor. At that same moment, the creatures shuffled into the garage, lurching toward Mojo and me with mouths agape.