She’s sawing off my arm.
I lay my head back against the table. I’m not sure if she’s a cannibal or if she’s trying to save my life, but I’m at her mercy. Slowly I close my eyes and listen as she takes my arm away, my body slipping back into the shock that it’s come to know too well. Maybe it’s the tranquilizer, but I’m feeling tired, so very tired. My eyelids are heavy and when they close, it’s harder for me to open them. I close them one more time and listen as she continues working, until sleep and darkness take me.
-End
LEFT ALIVE
Book Two
Chapter One
Life. I open my eyes to the hazy world around me and contemplate the gravity of the word with a heavy heart. I’m still alive. I’m not supposed to still be alive. I blink and look up with uncertainty at the light glaring down on me. Maybe I’m not alive. Maybe I am dead after all. I blink again and stare into the light sitting in the darkness. Everything is different now. Everything had changed. Do I want to still be alive?
I blink once more and see Val’s face flash before I open my eyes and see the light again. She’s smiling, the great wide, emotional smile that filled my heart with warmth and light every time I saw it. I blink again and this time it’s Lexi with her sweet, soft smile. It was the eyes that made Lexi’s smile so potent. She had her mother’s eyes. They were the eyes of someone who knew exactly what she wanted and how to get it. Those eyes had haunted me after Tiffany had died, but that was long ago. So much had happened since then. The entire world had died. I had lost my girls. I had lost everything.
Perhaps death isn’t what we make it out to be. Over the past year, everything that humanity has ever known about society, government, hell, even civilization; was brought to its knees with one loud, earth-shattering bang. As the world we knew toppled over and dissolved around us, we watched life itself extinguish its flame and turn into nothing but pale wisps of coiling smoke. We had reached for the stars and realized how truly far away from the heavens we were. Salvation had been our destruction. From the elixir of life, we were poisoned. Now, all that was left was death.
I remember the news reports. ‘Miracle fertilizer discovered’. It had promised so much to us and we had been so eager to gobble the lies up. They told us that they could save the planet—that everything we had destroyed could return to us in ten years. The Amazon and all the other rainforests that we’d lost could blossom and return as healthy as they had ever been. We had all longed for that future. Those optimists had also promised us that world hunger was going to be an extinct story that we would imprison on the pages of history books. So we spread the fertilizer across the planet in euphoric hope that we had finally crossed the horizon once and for all. Plenty. The cornucopia of the gods. It was ours at last.
But then the cold reality of what we had done sank in. First it was the Amazon that started withering and dying, then the bread basket of America, and then India. While we still had the taste of victory upon our lips, the shadow of death eclipsed our future. Before we knew what was happening, harvested feed and produce had been shipped all across the planet, from Europe to Africa. Everyone had been tainted with the fertilizer that unleashed an agricultural plague to end all plagues across the planet. I had watched on the news as they showed us the devastation. They showed us the quarantines and the evacuations. There were the food strikes, the hunger and fear that drove average citizens into hostile frenzies. They took up arms and marched on those who attempted to establish order among the growing chaos. War erupted on a nearly global scale. Every country in the world felt the ripples of collapse all around them and where civilization once stood, anarchy now reigned supreme.
Those who weren’t interested in controlling what food remained, sought only to flee to those few, precious places yet unaffected by the plague. They tried to escape to islands and mountain tops. But wherever civilization tried to take root, there were those disinterested in the old ways of life. War and fire ravaged those places and the world slipped helplessly, kicking and screaming into the void of death.
We all lost everything in the collapse of the world we once knew. I had been in Michigan, expecting that someone would rise up, someone would take control. I had sat behind my desk and given my lectures, watching my classes deteriorate and dwindle until only a few terrified souls remained, hoping to gain some sort of safety from their dedication to routine. When the time came and the riots reached the University of Michigan, I had called my daughters and told them that I loved them and that I would be coming for them when the time permitted. I fled to my cabin out on Lake Huron. Now, I know that it was a mistake. I know that seeking sanctuary in seclusion had been the wrong move and I am bitterly resolved to never allow myself to be so distracted and misguided again.
That’s how I got here. I took to the road. I made it as far as I could before I was robbed of my Jeep and supplies, and forced to head into Detroit on foot. I saw the ravaged landscape, the ruins of war that have forever marked the planet. I witnessed with my own eyes the power fire has over the land now, as Detroit burned to the ground. I saw what humanity has devolved into. I fought off the packs of ravenous, flesh-hungry cannibals who have taken to the streets, hunting in packs as they track the enduring scavengers in search of a new tomorrow. I also saw those who hunt the living with cold, merciless brutality, reveling in it as if it was a hunt. But I had seen others. I had seen those who sought to save the planet, those idealists and dreamers who grasped onto humanity and ingenuity all the way to the end. I remember Dayton and the outskirts of Cincinnati. I remember the alleyway with the cans. I remember the bear trap. I remember my arm. I remember killing him.
But I don’t remember escaping. I open my eyes once more and look up at the light, focusing on it, trying to see what it is. If I am dead, then why have I not passed on? What was God—or whatever divine being still cruelly lingered—waiting for? No, I blink and look at the light. I am still alive. Focusing on the light even harder, I realize that it’s an LED light. In fact, it’s my LED light. It’s taped to something that is hanging over me in the darkness. I move my arm, trying to break free and escape, but I’m stuck. At first, I fear that I am paralyzed. I fear that something must have happened to me in all of the commotion of my arm. I have to get out of here. I can’t be paralyzed. I have to get to Florida.
“Hold on, girls.” I grind my teeth together and try to move, but it feels like something is holding me down. I struggle to the point of exhaustion before I realize that I’m tied down. I’m tied into what looks like a dentist chair.
The ropes aren’t mine. I used the last of my rope to tie a cannibal to a tree and left him for dead out in the dead forests. I don’t know what happened to him and I don’t care. The only thing that concerns me is that I’m bound to a dentist chair in someone else’s rope. I push and I try my hardest to reach for the ropes, to feel them. Trying to grasp the rope, I figure that I can try to stretch them or slide them down my wrists some way. I don’t know what I’m doing. I just have to get out of here. Whoever did this knew what they were doing. I look at my right hand gripping to no avail. And then I remember.
The bear trap. My paralyzed fingers. My ruined arm.
My eyes dart to my left arm and see for myself the wrapped stump, and horror fills me like a bolt of lightning right to my heart. My breathing turns quick and shallow as my eyes widen and the air feels dry and cold against them. I can feel it. I can feel my hand. I can feel it gripping and flexing, but there’s nothing there. Halfway down my forearm, there is nothing. There is nothing but a white bandage that is wrapping my arm all the way up to my elbow with blood soaked all the way through. I stare without words. I let out a sharp, quick scream at first. More of a shout, to be honest. It escapes without consideration, without thought. It’s rushing up from the primitive, terrified part of my brain that is computing what’s happened here. The rest of my brain is still processing the sight. I don’t understand. Only that small fraction of my mind understands. I’m just st
aring with disbelief and denial swirling and dancing through my head.
I scream again and the reality hits me like a semi crashing through the front of my glass house. I’m fucked. That’s the reality here. That’s the fucking semi-truck. I’m fucked beyond belief. There’s no hope for a one-armed guy out here in the world. How am I supposed to shoot a rifle? How am I supposed to defend myself? How am I supposed to tie my fucking shoes? I scream again. This time it’s long and deep and filled with all the horror and regret and paralytic fear that I contain. I don’t know who took my arm, but they might be near and I don’t give a shit. I scream as loud and as long as I want before tears start to run down my cheeks and my throat is raw and bloody so there’s nothing left but the sobs. Who did this? Why would they do this?
Where is it? What did they do with it? I think that there still might be a chance to reattach it if I can find it, depending on how long I’ve been here. If I can stitch it back on and wrap it in something hard like a cast, the tissue and the bones might heal back together. I might be able to salvage my hand. Fuck, I’ll take a paralyzed hand over no hand at all. I look around me at the darkness, realizing that I’m completely tucked away in some sort of surgical area. Curtains surround me, blocking me out from the rest of the world.
My God, what if they ate it? The thought scuttles into my mind and demands all of my attention. The fear stings my worries and drops it flat into the abyss of my mind so that the fear is all that remains for me to dwell upon. I think back to all the flesh-eaters that I’d seen on the road. No. It couldn’t have been one of the shambling, gaunt horrors that roam the world now. It had to have been one of the survivors that still knows what they’re doing. It had to have been one of the hunters. Maybe they saw me passing out in the alleyway and thought that I might be an easy target. Maybe they figured that they could keep me alive and use me as some sort of living buffet. I look around with paranoid, terror-stricken eyes at the curtains. I’m afraid that there are demons behind them, waiting to cut off another part of me and start consuming me. What if they’re just a footstep away and they want something else? Maybe they want a foot this time, or maybe my ass? No. God, no. I have to get out of here.
How am I going to get to Florida? The thought returns without mercy or care for anything else that I might be experiencing. It breaks me without a moment’s hesitation. I’m not going to get to Florida. I’m going to get an infection and I’m going to die. Even if by some miracle I survive the inevitable infection that will undoubtedly turn to gangrene, how am I supposed to survive in the wasteland of America? The shambling hordes of mindless killers are waiting for me beyond this curtain. I’m done for. There’s nothing left for me in this world. I close my eyes and see their faces.
“Tiffany, I’m so sorry,” I sob uncontrollably, my body shaking and shivering. “Lexi, Val, I’ve failed you. I’ve failed you. Please forgive me.”
Movement. I can hear it and feel it in the air like a great ebb of oxygen rushing out of the room I’m in. The curtains slowly shift and then the loud bang, followed by things being rearranged and set in some particular order. Whatever is happening out there, they couldn’t care less about what I’m doing here inside this room of curtains. It’s come. This is the moment where they fling back the curtains and bring the machete down on me in several, painful chops before ending me. Or maybe they’ll drag the blade slowly across my throat, prolonging the suffering.
“Good God, that was a loud one,” a woman says as the curtain is pulled back in one whirling, rapid jerk, and light floods into my little den. I try to crane my neck to see her, but there’s nothing I can see. There’s a wall of glass sending sunlight through the darkness and illuminating her back, leaving her as nothing more than a shadow before me. “Last time you just cried a lot,” the woman said. “The other times you were really out of it. You just sort of muttered a lot.”
“Let me out of here!” I shout at her. “Let me out of here or so help me, I will end you.”
“Really? How exactly?” she teases with a giggle. I want to wrap my one good hand around her throat and slam it into her neck. I’ll teach her to laugh.
“Fuck you!” I scream at her.
“Guy, settle down,” she says, not joking any longer. “Calm down or you’ll tear the bandage.”
“Where is it?” I demand, not giving her any thought. “What did you do with my hand? Where is it?”
“I got rid of it,” she answers. “You’ve been out for days now. I think you’re on the mend, but you’re not out of the woods just yet.”
I’m silent. I’m not sure what to make of that. Did she not eat my hand? Is she not a cannibal? I’m not sure what to make of this. I have seen and been hunted by cannibals all along the way of my journey. It only made sense that she should be one, but why would she throw away my hand? She did take it after all. I try to remember what she means by other times. I don’t remember waking up any other times. I don’t remember anything other than opening my eyes a few moments ago. Before that, I just remember the alley and the blood and the pain.
“Who are you?” I ask.
“Who’s asking?” she fires back.
“I am,” I answer.
“Yeah, I got that,” she replies with annoyance in her voice. “Listen, buddy, I know you’ve just lost a hand and that tends to give anyone a stick up their ass, but could you please, maybe for a moment, just lay off. I’m getting third degree burns every time you open your mouth.”
“Sorry,” I answer.
“When I found you, I was too late,” she says calmly, working at something beyond my view. “You’d smashed some guy’s head into mush with a bear trap clamped down on your arm. The guy was a fucking animal, whoever set that up. Anyway, you weren’t going to make it, but you almost got the tourniquet on. I finished what you started and went searching for something to stabilize you. That’s when I found this place.”
“What is this place?” I interrupt. I’m still suspicious. Terror is the underlying current to my pounding heart. I’m not sure what to say to her. I’m just hoping that she’s not lying to me.
“Some tattoo shop,” she answers.
I suppose that makes sense. The chair fits and the light hanging over me is probably attached to an even bigger light for them to see what they’re doing. I try to see the woman, but she’s smart. She keeps her distance, just out of sight. “Why did you take my hand?” I ask, trying to picture my hand somewhere, lying in the dust, waiting for some creature to feed upon it.
“Sorry, honey, but it was a goner,” she answers with a sympathetic tone in her voice. “If I’d left it on, you would have certainly died. Luckily I stopped the bleeding and got rid of it before anything could happen. Infections are the biggest killers these days.” She sighs and keeps doing whatever she’s doing. It sounds like she’s rummaging through stuff, stacking things. “I swear I’ve seen more people dead from infections lately than starvation. But you’re doing just fine. That’s two you owe me.”
“What?” I grunt.
“I’ve saved your ass twice now, honey.” She stops working and chuckles. “Dear Lord, you have no idea, do you?” She pushes the LED light out of my eyes and stands in the darkness. The sudden, drastic change in lighting is hard to adjust to at first, but slowly, I begin to see distant light bring form to the black void of her face. I don’t recognize her. In fact, I’ve never seen this woman before. I don’t take in any of her features, I’m just looking for familiarity. I’m looking for a glimpse from my past, but there’s nothing. I stare at her with a ravenous gaze. I want to know her, truly, but there’s nothing. I shake my head. “I saved your ass in Bellbrook, genius,” she says.
Suddenly, I can see her. I hadn’t seen her face in the darkness of that horrifying night, but surely I was assuredly here and walking among the living by her hand alone. I look at her and stare with a wonderstruck fascination. Truly, whatever god still exists high above this dead world has an obsession with my survival. I look at her now with fresh e
yes, but she moves away. I try to follow her, but I’m just left with my memory. The thin woman atop the roof of the building next to the mechanic shop where I’d been trapped by the clawing, ravenous flesh-eaters. She had killed a handful of them with perfect shots that had opened a way for me to escape. I had never thanked her. I had never even said the words to her. In fact, I had written her off as just fine, and yet, here she was, saving me again.
“How did you find me?” I stammer.
“You know how many people I’ve seen that aren’t hunting survivors or eating pieces of each other?” she asks with a sharp, cunning voice. “I see some dumbass getting himself cornered by a bunch of freaks and I save his ass, after all, who knows how many of us are still left out there? Instead of running and not saying a thing, you stop and nod to me. Gratitude. Can you fucking believe that? In this hellhole. Someone has the decency to give me a nod. No one does that.” She continued stacking things. “So, I figured I’d see where you set up camp, see if you were a normal enough guy. But, I wasn’t the only one who saw you. I saw them tracking you south. So I started tracking them.”
The hunters. Cal and Denny. They had followed me out of Bellbrook and I’d gotten the better of them. I had left Denny tied to a tree trunk.
“I killed the one you left to die,” she informs me.
“Denny,” I mutter.
“Yeah,” she answers. “Didn’t get that out of him. Just that you’d continued south. So I followed you until I found you in that alleyway. I have to admit, I feel pretty guilty.”
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 18