With a dainty flick of the button she turned the radio off. Somewhere in the ruined living room a clock ticked in a comforting rhythm. She thought of any number of classroom tests over the years where she heard that same gentle clicking.
A loud noise in the kitchen brought her back to reality.
6
Little Susan dropped her bag of canned food on the linoleum floor. She scurried to clean up the mess, and Victoria stooped down to help. The girl's chubby hands wobbled.
“Heya, can I help you?”
Susan was choked up, but she tried to hold steady as she responded. “Will my mommy come back? The radio said ... ”
Victoria looked into her eyes, trying to fathom all that she had seen since coming to the farmhouse. She probably wondered why there were so many bad people in the world after living a dream life in a comfortable home with a loving mom and-by all accounts-some wonderful sisters. If she and Liam hadn't come along, what might have happened to her?
“Don't worry about the news. Your mom is very brave. Did you know that? I think she is one of the bravest people I've met since ... ” she drifted off, not sure how to phrase it so it didn't sound end-of-the-world scary. “Since I started traveling with Liam.”
She swiveled to where Liam was grabbing another load of bottles to take upstairs. “Do you and him have a little girl, like me?”
“No. We aren't married, yet,” she winked at her.
“But does he get on top of you like that fat man tried with mommy?”
“Whoa! No, let's not talk about that. It's all over, m'kay? You're safe now. Do you understand?”
She fired up her distraction protocol-something she'd learned with her niece and many second cousins-to get the young girl working on the task in front of her. Together they cleaned up the spilled cans, and she walked Susan up the steps and to the window leading to the roof. They deposited the food on the flattest part of the roof over the front porch. She also put the radio there and wondered what they'd do if it rained. There were a few clouds on the horizon, but it was otherwise hot, dry, and dusty.
The day marched wearily toward evening and each trip up the steps reminded her how exhausted she'd gotten. Even the shingles invited her to lay down and take a quick nap, but the horde below was too unsettling to consider it. The giant crowd continued to walk itself toward the sirens in the east, as if drawn by them. The constant hum of their combined moans, groans, and something that sounded like crying would not subside.
On her way back down the hallway on the second floor, she excused herself from Susan, so she could take care of a couple of things. She dragged the reverend into his room and shut the door, then did the same to “the fat man.” A big key to maintaining the distraction protocol was to remove the unwanted stimuli. She couldn't very well remove all the zombies outside the house, but she closed those doors.
Zombies had long since filled in the empty space created by the explosion, and a few stragglers came in the broken back windows on the lower floor of the house. After reloading it with ammo from the pantry, she used the lone shotgun to knock down those intruders while the others carried the goods.
The howling sirens seemed to overrule the zombies' instinct to attack living people on sight, and she spent several tense minutes watching the crowd walk by after each shotgun blast, but they did not pursue the sound.
After she and Liam decided they had enough supplies, they all went out and sat on the roof above the porch. It felt nice to be in the open air rather than the stuffy old house. She held the little shotgun on her lap like a security blanket. She'd rather have the bigger shotgun, but the smaller twenty-gauge was better than nothing.
Not long after taking a seat, Susan crawled into her lap, so she had to put the shotgun next to her. However, she had to move it again when Leah wanted to be close to her little sister.
“Is that mommy?” Susan asked each time she saw a vehicle in the distance.
The dust fouled everyone's vision but every so often the wind would clear the air and they could see the line of trucks still on the main road.
“No, Suzy, I'll tell you when she's coming back, okay?” Leah replied.
“Okay,” Susan answered each time.
Besides eating the canned food and consuming bottles of water, they had nothing to do but watch the zombies walk away. Late in the evening the wind picked up and shifted to the east, so it created the impression the great crowd was walking into the dust storm and out of their lives. She was positive they were being drawn to the distant sirens near the river.
The big rig trucks kept coming, and they all headed toward Cairo, the same as the crowd of infected. When night fell, the string of head and tail lights was the only earthbound landmark she could make out. A faint aura of illumination came from the river, as if there was a great party taking place on the other side of the dusty cloud.
“What do you think is happening there,” she eventually asked Liam, while looking his way.
He nodded to her, like he was coming out of a reverie himself. “Elsa said this wasn't about the zombies from Chicago, it was all about the zombies from St. Louis. I've been trying to solve that riddle. The zombies we saw here today were all the same, did you notice that? There were no runners, no jumpers, no dreamers. And thank God there were no Alphas. Just plain old zombies. I can't figure out why.”
“Wait up. You think there are different kinds of zombies?” Leah spoke softly while stroking Susan's hair. “They do different things?”
She looked at Liam with a knowing grin because he loved telling people the secrets they'd picked up, especially when he could data dump about the origins of the different types.
“Oh, yeah, I do, and they do,” he answered.
He became animated as he explained each type and where he first identified them. The “dreamer” zombie once fooled him into thinking he saw Victoria in a nightgown on an early night of the disaster. The “climber” zombies that he'd first seen in the experimental corral at Elk Meadow research station. The “Alpha” zombie he'd encountered several times. That one seemed to combine many zombie skills into one deadly predator.
“But you don't know about these zombies?” Leah pointed to the horde out in the darkness.
“No. The only thing that comes to mind is they are extremely average. They will bite you in the neck, arm, or leg looking for blood, but every zombie does that. I thought maybe they were the first type to dismember their victims because at least one kind does that.” She knew he was thinking of that foot he'd found in the car he used to escape with Grandma. “But we haven't seen them do that, here, so I guess they're just regular zombies. Maybe that's what I have to call them.”
Before it got too dark, Susan climbed off her lap and pulled something out of her pocket. “I found this in the bathroom. Can I paint your nails?”
She looked down at her fingernails and cringed at how mangled they'd become. Several were scratched from clawing the rocks at that riverbank and she'd spent many an hour biting her nails over the past few weeks. The free edges had absolutely no length.
“I don't know. My nails aren't very ... ”
“Please, please, please, Vicky, I want to,” Susan interrupted.
“Don't call her--” Liam snapped back.
“No, it's okay, Liam.” She turned to Susan who didn't seem like she heard Liam anyway. “You can call me Vicky.” She found it impossible to refuse the little girl. “And you can paint my nails. I'd love that.”
She smiled at Liam to assure him everything was good. She once bit his head off for calling her Vicky because it was the nickname used by her no-good ex-fiancé. Normally, she hated it, but nothing Susan said could upset her.
“I'm going to paint your nails, then I want to fix your ponytail, okay?”
“Do your worst,” she replied.
Susan was an expert with the cherry red polish and took her time to get each nail just right. The sun set just as she finished on the nails, so she hurried to untangle Victoria's m
essy ponytail and put it back in a tight weave. It was very dark by the time that was finished, but she wanted to pay the girl back.
“Tomorrow, I'm going to paint your nails, kiddo.”
“Oh, goodie. I can't wait.”
“Me, either,” Victoria said as the girl slid over to be next to her sister.
Activity on the roof died down as the nightfall became total. Clouds moved in and blocked the stars and the moon. It wasn't long before the two sisters drifted to sleep. Susan pulled her sister's arm around her like a seatbelt, as if she feared someone would toss her off the roof. To the zombies. To the bad men. To the sad woman who let her house descend into a freakshow.
The zombies shuffled to the east and the line of truck lights went with them. Victoria was so happy to be back with Liam, even if they picked up the two girls in the farmhouse. She was relatively safe on the roof and had more supplies than she ever dreamed possible, but the radio broadcast and all the running of the day left her more worried than ever.
She finally drifted off to sleep, but like so many nights over the past three weeks, she woke up when someone screamed.
Orange Crush
Cairo, Illinois. While Liam and Victoria approach the farmhouse.
Marty Peters woke up to find herself in the passenger seat of a large, comfortable pickup truck. She sat up as straight as her 104-year-old frame could tolerate.
“Where am I, Robbie?” she said with a groggy voice. “I have to find Liam.”
“Shhh,” a woman replied. “Marty, wake up,”
“Oh, heavens. Chloe, is that you?”
The young woman nodded from the plush driver's seat. She was dressed in tan pants with strange patterns, like camouflage with computer-generated colors and shapes. A similarly colored long-sleeve shirt was slung over the back of her seat, and her white tank top was splotched with dirt and blood. She'd seen the same splotches on lots of people during the fighting in Cairo.
“Yep,” Chloe said matter-of-factly. “You awake now? You talk in your sleep, ma'am.”
“Did I say anything interesting?”
Chloe looked at her across the big center console of the truck and pointed to the dozen bottles of water on the floorboard under her short legs.
“No, I'm fine, dear,” Marty replied.
Chloe's look became a glare.
“Oh, okay,” Marty said with relief. “I guess I could use a sip.”
“We have a lot of running to do to get out of Dodge. You'll need your strength.” Chloe took a swig from her own bottle.
She wanted to ask the woman again about whether she heard her talk in her sleep, but Chloe was already looking out her side window as if on high alert.
What do I remember from just now?
Her body may have seemed like it was sleeping, but her mind was floating somewhere else inside a giant computer where she also met up with her great-grandson Liam, his girlfriend Victoria, and a man who looked like her late husband, Al. Unlike any dream, she remembered every detail about the meeting. Al had said he was a kind of gatherer of operators and that the three of them comprised a triad of special people who could get inside it. To her it was all magic, but Liam and Victoria seemed less impressed, like it was all a game.
The last thing she saw with clarity was that the computer itself was in Colorado. Liam had asked it that all-important question because it requested they all go there, together. That would be wonderful, except she now had no idea if the kids were dead, alive, or trapped in that computer. In the real world, the last thing she remembered was when Major General Jasper entrusted her safety to Chloe. Chloe drove a huge red pickup truck with large tires, two ridiculous smoke stacks behind the windows, and a bumper sticker that said, “Rolling Coal.”
There had also been a large explosion and endless waves of infected.
“Are we alone?” Marty asked. The town was overrun with zombies, and Chloe's state of high alert made her suspect they were near.
“No,” Chloe replied while scanning from window to window.
Marty was too short to easily see over the dashboard, but the truck was parked under a roof, so she figured they were inside a garage.
“I've got a skeleton crew of Zombie Killers with me,” Chloe went on. “We're trying to. No, I'm trying to make good on a promise I made to the general.”
That got her attention. She made a best effort to sit up in the spacious front seat. “He put you in charge of me, didn't he? Oh, dear. I could slap that man. I really don't like people risking their lives for me.”
Chloe gave her a slideways look. “He said you were special.”
“Oh, my stars. I'm no one special.” Marty did a double take. “Your hair!”
The pretty woman had short hair that reminded Marty of someone in the military, but now it was bright orange.
“Hemi orange. Found some in the garage, so I painted my head.”
“Yes, dear, I can see that. But why?” Marty giggled despite herself.
“Don't want to get shot. Me and my team all painted our heads, so we would stand out among the thousands of men and women zombies in our neighborhood. You can't be too careful around guns, you know.”
Marty bobbled her head but then had a terrible thought.
“You aren't going to paint mine, are you?” She'd come well outside her comfort zone the last three weeks since the arrival of the zombies, but she had to put her foot down somewhere.
Chloe held a reply as if to keep Marty in suspense, but then laughed. “No, you'll always have one of us orange-heads at your side. We'll spare you the paint.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
Chloe seemed to get right back to business. “The general also said there were dangerous people after you.”
“I, ahh ... Hmm. I don't know, truthfully, who is after me. I've met the woman who ran the town, and she did put me in a terribly hot hotel room, but ... ” Though she wanted to be totally open with Chloe, Liam cautioned that some people were double-agents working for the government. He thought Marty was in danger of being whisked away to another hidden lab where they would experiment on her special blood. So, she didn't mention anything about a conspiracy. “But I was in a car accident on the levee and my mind's been scrambled ever since.”
Chloe's expression was hard to read, but her tone was one of defiance. “He said it was a personal favor. I'm to take care of you. Hide you. Keep you safe.”
“Hide me,” she echoed with a mix of awe and disappointment. Her first priority was finding out where Liam had gone. Did he get his information and head off to Colorado? Wouldn't he need her if they were all to access the computer? She had many questions, and no way of finding answers. Not to the important stuff. “Where can we hide that those things won't get us?” The memory of millions of them outside the town clawed at her.
“I don't know. They, uh, digested the town over the last few hours. I'm waiting to see where they go next, so we can make our move. I want to go before nightfall. My lookouts are up on the roof. They'll let us know when it's time to go.”
“The town is still here?”
“The town, yes. The people, not so much. Most left before the levees were breached. The general at least gave them that. Some fought to the death behind the water-filled moat so the rest of us could escape, but that didn't stop the horde for long. Once it filled up with dead they just walked across. Then it was a race into the buildings and houses of the town. I was able to get what was left of my team out in time, but the general assigned me for this special mission. I then grabbed the few that were left and here we are. Lots of people are still holding out. The zombies are strong but some of these old buildings are made of stone or steel. They'll survive for a while. Each zombie delayed here in town isn't swarming over the next town or swimming after the ferry carrying the general's tanks and men to the south.”
“That's very interesting, dear. Can you tell me, please, if that means you've given up your own escape so you can take me in another direction? That seems ve
ry dangerous and I'm not happy about that one bit.” She smacked her dentures as an exclamation point of her emotions.
“Ma'am, I'm sorry to say this: we gave up our seats on the lifeboat to get you somewhere else. General Jasper believed someone had infiltrated his unit and he couldn't trust anyone but me to take care of you. Part of it, I think, was that he didn't want to be burdened with you. I know it sounds harsh, but I watched him talk about you, and he really seemed distracted. Another piece of it was that he told me you were important to finding the cure. That other powerful people were closing in to get you. He put his trust in me to get you to safety, and anonymity, so that's what I'm going to do. You don't have a choice in that.”
“Oh, my dear, we all have a choice,” she said with resignation. She thought again of ending her own life but brushed it aside quickly. It may save Chloe from the burden of protecting her and give the woman a better chance of surviving in the near term, but Al-the computer-made it clear she was part of something larger now. The computer program she, Liam, and Victoria had opened. A computer that may lead them to the cure. Her choice now was to make good on the belief she was a key part of saving everyone on Earth.
She gulped loudly at her own revelation. “I ... ” Ready to explain where she needed to go, she and Chloe were interrupted as two orange-haired men ran up to the truck. They jumped into the bed of the pickup and sidled up to the rear window, so they could talk to Chloe.
Chloe waited for her to finish for a moment, but then turned around when one of the men knocked on the window. “Here comes the news.”
2
The two men, both about the age of her grandson-Liam's father-started talking at once.
“They're almost through.”
“We have to go.”
“Whoa, one at a time,” Chloe replied. “Craig, what'd you see?”
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