by Craig, Liz
Unless you were out in the country. As I was. Fewer zombies to defend against, although they were clearly still here.
“Although currently some areas do still have power and other utilities, there are already reports of scattered outages. A spokesman from the power company stressed that these utilities were dependent on human monitoring to keep working. It is expected that, in time, the utilities will no longer be available to citizens. The spokesman reiterated what the authorities have been urging: that residents should, when they can safely do so, travel to one of the official shelters set up by the military, in order to stay abreast of developments and to receive supplies.”
Still didn’t sound appealing. And when the anchor started repeating much of what he’d already said, I turned off the television. Clearly they didn’t have any other news. I wasn’t really sure what I’d hoped to hear when I tuned in. That the CDC had invented a vaccine in, what? The last three days? That the authorities had found a weapon that eliminated the zombies and were gaining the upper hand? I snorted at my optimism.
The only really good news was that the zombies hadn’t returned to the house. I made one more check to make sure all the doors and windows were locked and then I lay down in an impossibly tidy room that surely must have been a guest room. Little did they know the type of guest they’d be hosting or the circumstances their hosting would fall under. I figured if I could just get some solid sleep, maybe I could plan clearer. I set the alarm on the clock radio that was on the nightstand next to me and quickly fell asleep.
When I woke up, once again I wasn’t sure where I was. But at least this time I was comfortable, although my body was tense and fragments of a nightmare were popping in and out of my mind.
And then I realized the source of the nightmare as I heard groaning and scratching outside the house.
It appeared that my zombie family had returned from their travels. Or, to continue my analogy, the three bears had returned to find Goldilocks sleeping in their bed. Did they know I was here, though? How would they? It’s not like humans have fantastic sense of smell and on some level they were still human. No, maybe they were just trying to get back into a familiar place. In which case, maybe this wasn’t the best location to bed down, after all.
I lay frozen in the bed. After a few minutes of listening, I realized that these zombies, besides being very slow, were also not endowed with superhuman strength. Which made a lot of sense. Why would what was basically a corpse suddenly be as strong as Superman?
The zombies also couldn’t seem to reason their way into the house. They weren’t using rocks to smash the window in. This was oddly comforting.
The only problem, then, with these infected people, was that they seemed to be on track to vastly outnumber the rest of us. And that was a problem. They weren’t fast, they weren’t smart, and they weren’t stronger than us. But there were scores of them and they were determined hunters.
I decided that I’d take a few things with me in a backpack that I’d found in the master bedroom closet. I might very well return, but I didn’t think I wanted to return today. I would find Mojo first, and if we came back here and those zombies were hanging around, I didn’t think Mojo would take it very well. And I wasn’t in the mood to chase after him for the second time in a day.
I stuffed in some of the husband’s clothing, canned goods and bottled waters, and then cautiously peeked out one of the windows. It was a window on the end of the ranch house where I thought I could see what was going on without being close enough to have them see me.
Sure enough, there was the happy family, scratching repeatedly on the back door of the house that led to the garden. They appeared strangely intent on their scratching.
Since they didn’t seem able to work entry to the house out, I decided I should lock the front door after me once I’d slipped out of the house. I searched for the keys. After all, it seemed as if this family was attacked at home, right? So both sets of keys should be floating around.
Finally I found a set—very neatly hanging on a key holder near the garage door. But the garage door was, I felt, too close to the zombies at the back door. So I walked to the front door, peeked outside just to be sure there were no more undead lurking around, and then carefully locked the front door behind me.
I didn’t want to pass within view of the zombie family at all, so I took a long route around them. I headed to the portion of the woods that was directly ahead of the front door, although that wasn’t the direction I wanted to go in. But it would give me an opportunity to search for Mojo and keep me covered by the brush, as well.
I decided that Mojo had probably just headed back to our makeshift campsite. That seemed very much like something a dog would do—get back to where the stuff was and just wait for his owner. At least I hoped like heck that was what he was doing. I wanted my dog back.
After twenty minutes of walking with no sign of Mojo, I was finally in the section of the woods where I needed to be … the section directly behind the back door of the zombie house. I squinted over and saw the zombie family still scratching with determination at their back door.
I walked and walked. I was heading generally in the direction of the campsite, but I was also taking short detours from time to time to see if I could find Mojo along the way. That dog had such an attuned sense of hearing, that if we was in earshot, I was sure he could hear me coming, no matter how quiet I might be trying to be.
There was no sign of him anywhere. As I walked closer to the site, I felt my neck and shoulders bunching up with tension. Was he at the site? Was he okay?
I stopped dead when I reached the site. Because it was the site. That I knew for a fact. You could even see the bent grass where I’d slept. But the duffel bag and all my stuff was gone. And there was no sign of Mojo.
Chapter Sixteen
Mallory
When I woke up this time, I knew exactly where I was and what was going on. I was in a hotel. I’d just watched my car basically get rendered unusable by looters. My few possessions were strewn around a parking lot populated by roaming zombies. I felt numb. But I also felt refreshed. I squinted at the clock and saw that I’d been able to sleep a couple of hours
Still, I lay in the bed. I stared at the ceiling as I tried to figure out what my next move should be. Staying at this hotel was definitely not a good longterm solution. There were obviously zombies in the area. I still had a tough time thinking of those infected victims as zombies, but it certainly made it easier than thinking of them in a sympathetic way as former moms, husbands, and children.
In the short term, I decided I needed to take advantage of the amenities that I did have. I needed to get cleaned up. I needed to see how much food those looters had left in the hotel. Then I needed to get away. The problem part of the whole plan was the getaway. I didn’t much like the idea of driving a car that had broken windows. Not with zombies trying to get in. So maybe I needed to find another vehicle, although even thinking about taking someone else’s car made me feel like a thief. From what I could tell, though, I was the only living inhabitant of the hotel. It was dead silent in the building and the front desk certainly hadn’t been manned. The uniformed zombies that attacked the looters must have been the front desk staff for the hotel and they clearly wouldn’t be needing their keys or their cars any longer. I rooted around behind the front desk to see if I could locate any keys.
Next I would need to recover as much of my stuff as possible from the parking lot and throw it into the “new” car while eluding zombies.
Maybe I needed to check and see if the mini-bar in my room was stocked.
My entire plan both scared me to death and made me very determined and focused. I did have a tiny bit of beer (because who knew the next time a cold beer might come my way?) from the mini-bar while I took a hot bath and got completely clean for the first time in days.
Then I headed downstairs to check out the ‘complimentary breakfast’ area. Usually it would just have cereal boxes, milk,
eggs, sausages, oatmeal packets, coffee, and things like that. It looked like the looters had eaten up a good amount of the breakfast foods that had been put out by the staff so I went down a short hall to see if I could find a pantry or a storage area where the hotel kept its food. Bingo. And it looked like the looters hadn’t made it that far. They’d probably been too busy trying to find rooms to break into.
The hotel front door wasn’t secured and, upon quick inspection, didn’t seem to really be able to be easily secured. I guess that made sense, since when the business was operating normally, people likely would have been coming and going at all hours. But it didn’t make me feel safe. I pulled out a clean, clear garbage bag from a box in the storage room and put as many items as I could in it. Making sure the coast was clear, I took the bag up to “my room,” which I’d been careful to leave unlocked so that I could get back in if I needed to. I was so paranoid by this time that I even checked around the hotel room and bathroom to make sure there were no looters, no zombies, or just anything I didn’t know about in there before carefully bolting the door behind me. Being on the run like this must have done something to my mind.
I sat down at the desk in the room and started opening cereal boxes. I ended up eating a lot more food than I thought I would. I hadn’t even realized I was hungry before I started eating. I didn’t even want to think about how much sugar I was downing as I kept going through cereal boxes. Ordinarily, my diet would have been something I spent more time considering. Right now, I was just glad to have something to eat that I didn’t have to catch or grow myself. Because, if Joshua was right, that was going to be the next step.
After I finished, I stood up from the desk and pushed the curtains very gently aside to peer out. A quick check satisfied me that, as of right this second, there were no zombies wandering around near my car. My caution with the curtains made me wonder again if I was starting to lose it. I knew that these zombies were probably not staking out the hotel and looking for movement inside, but…maybe they were. I didn’t know anything at all about these things and I wasn’t sure where I could find any source of information. I remembered that an area downstairs near the lobby did have a couple of computers for travelers to check their email. I wondered if I felt brave enough to sit down there with my back to the room and try to find news stories on this epidemic.
There was always my computer, but I was guessing that was probably one of the things the looters flung from my car. I squinted across the parking lot. There was something black peeking out from underneath a quilt my grandmother made in a parking space next to my car. I had a feeling it was my laptop. And laptops didn’t do so well when they were flung onto asphalt.
Belatedly, I remembered my phone. Maybe I could find out some information by pulling up a news site. When I fished it out of my purse, though, I saw it was completely dead. That’s when discouragement set in. It was bad enough being alone. It was even worse being alone with no information about a frightening epidemic. Were there safe places to go? How widespread was the problem? Could I book a plane to Canada? Would they even let me in, or were they protecting their borders? Was Annie okay? Did I even have a shot at making it to their haven in the middle of nowhere? Were there zombies in the middle of nowhere?
Then I had a brainstorm. Surely there were chargers in some of these rooms. Right? Or maybe even at the front desk. I could take a charger, charge up my phone while sitting in a locked room, and check the news before … well—basically before stealing a car and trying to leave with at least some of my stuff.
I picked up my garbage bag of food, unlocked my door, and poked my head out. I saw no one and heard nothing from any of the rooms. I figured this probably wasn’t the best hall to find a charger on—the whole reason I’d chosen it, after all, was because it looked like no one had really been staying here. I headed down the staircase and back down to the second floor, peeking out the door to look down the hall. Again, I heard nothing and saw nothing. The eeriness of the empty hotel was scary in itself. I felt as if I were in a ghost town.
The first room that was open and had been inhabited by a guest didn’t have the right kind of charger for my phone. It took me a while to even find the charger because the looters had flipped the suitcase and I’d had to dig through the contents.
The second room had a charger plugged in. The charger had tape on it, as if the cord had some kind of a short. I figured beggars couldn’t be choosers. It looked too fragile to be able to successfully moved so I decided to do my charging in this room. I locked the door and used the chain, just to be on the safe side. I carefully put my phone on the charger, making sure it was charging before walking away from it.
The view was different from this window and I froze as I looked out—zombies. The perspective showed me a different section of the parking lot and gave me the opportunity to see it a lot closer, too, since I was on the second floor. I spotted the hotel employees in their uniforms right away. Now I also saw the looters—they were zombies themselves. I shivered. There were also about ten other zombies, wearing regular clothes, that I didn’t recognize. They must be guests. Maybe one of them even owned the broken charger I was using for my phone.
They were milling around, pacing back and forth in the parking lot. They didn’t seem interested in coming into the hotel. Maybe they realized on some level that they’d already cleared it of guests … one way or another. I hoped that some of the hotel guests had been able to get away. They must be looking for victims because they appeared to be scanning the parking lot, lurching forward and back as they went. I studied them. Some were in better shape than others. Some I’d have to look twice to even notice that they weren’t normal people. Aside from the fact that they were hanging out with a gang of zombies, there wasn’t too much about them to set them apart. A vacant expression in their eyes. A slack mouth. That was about it.
I watched them for about an hour as my phone charged. They were moving as a group and I was relieved when they slowly started heading down the road a little. Maybe they had given up on the hotel as a source of food.
I checked my phone. If the zombies were walking away, I wanted to take advantage of it. My phone was mostly charged. Quickly I pulled up CNN. The site was obviously overloaded, or else the connection here at the hotel was really bad. It was taking forever to load. Finally I gave up and pulled up a local news website to see if it would load any faster and was relieved when it popped up after just a short delay. The stories looked as if they’d been written on the fly, with no eye for editing at all. I skipped over the typos and the formatting and skimmed the text. My heart sank. It wasn’t just here. It wasn’t just the east coast. It looked as if it were spreading all over the United States and there were even early reports of the epidemic spreading into Mexico and Canada. It was going to go worldwide. There was probably nowhere safe to go.
The site also mentioned some shelters that were available and being guarded by National Guard troops and other military. Somehow, though, I just didn’t see myself going there. It was bound to be crowded. There were bound to be rationed supplies. I hated feeling trapped and was such an introvert that the idea of spending months or even years with wall to wall people wasn’t appealing.
I tried phoning Annie. No answer. I tried Jim. The same. I tried not to think what this might mean. Their phones were probably dead, just as mine had been.
I took the phone and slipped it into my pocket. A few minutes later, I picked up the garbage bag, slung it over my back, and hurried down the stairs.
I walked behind the front desk and started opening drawers. Had the hotel employees kept their keys in here? I didn’t see any on the desk and I had the feeling that the looters had likely gone through any purses that were around. I said a quick prayer that the employees didn’t have their car keys in their pockets. There was no way I’d try to get them that way.
Finally I found a box on a shelf where apparently female employees kept their purses out of sight. I rifled through and found a key fob on
a chain of keys in a black leather purse. The logo on the fob was Honda. Now I just had to figure out which Honda went with the key.
I headed out around the front desk. I caught some movement out of the corner of my eye and stifled a gasp as I dropped out of sight behind the desk. My heart pounded. Had they seen me?
I peered out from behind the desk slowly and saw a small figure with long, brown hair walking away from me. A child…a little girl. Waves of relief coursed over me. I stood up and was about to call out to her when she turned around and stared at me—with vacant eyes and a slack mouth. And moaned.
Pity, revulsion, and fear made me shake. I grabbed my garbage bag of food, clutched my key in a suddenly-sweaty hand, and took off for the front door. No time for subterfuge now. I’d planned on carefully stealing around the parking lot, trying the key on every Honda while watching my back and listening for noises. Now I was going to have to hit the alarm button on the key fob and make a run for the car as fast as I could. I had the bad feeling that the sound of the alarm was going to attract the band of zombies to me.
Either way, it was my only choice. I hit the car alarm as soon as my feet hit the parking lot. Right now, I wasn’t going to have time to get my things. A means of escape was the most important thing. I heard the alarm coming from the back of the hotel and ran harder. It made sense that the hotel employees would park the farthest away, but it sure wasn’t helping.