“You two okay?” he asks us in a heavy voice. He’s trying to catch his breath.
“We’re good,” Lexi shrugs and looks over her shoulder at me. “Thinking about opening a bed and breakfast, how about you, Val? I’m looking for a partner.”
“Prime location,” I joke.
“Okay, fine,” Greg shakes his head. “Get out of there. We need to move before they come back. Do you have any idea where they went?”
“Two went back to the intersection,” I report to him, wondering where they might have gone from there. I grip the steering wheel and hoist myself up onto the seat, looking out the window and jutting a finger where they’d vanished. “They took a right and they vanished.”
“Okay,” Greg nods.
“But there’s one more out there, I think,” I say while he helps Lexi out of the passenger’s side.
“There was seven?” he asks me as he waits for me to slide across the bench to where he’s holding out a hand to help me down. I take his hand and slip out into the sunlight, feeling the dry warmth in the air that bitterly fights for supremacy against the stagnant cold of the night. “I thought there were just the six of them.”
“There was six,” I say to him. “I counted three got shot.”
“Oh no, babe,” Greg says to me before pointing a finger over to where Noah is towering over a writhing, squirming fanatic who is bleeding from the mouth as he grips his side. He’s leaning against a mailbox, which I think is weird. Who sends that much mail anymore that it warrants so many mailboxes in this town? It’s like this town froze and died off a long time before the whole End of the World scenario was unleashed upon all of us. I look at the man with a dusty face and a bandana hanging around his neck. He’s not going to make it.
I take a step forward and feel something under my boot. I look down to see the dead man that lost his face in front of me, the first casualty of this entire encounter. I look at the man’s destroyed face, the only thing that I recognize is his nose dangling from a tiny shred of skin and his slack jaw. There are teeth all around his head like a broken strand of pearls. I cringe and step away from him as the rest of us approach the coughing fanatic.
He’s been shot in the stomach by a high-powered hunting rifle. He’ll be lucky if he lasts the next few minutes. His blood-soaked hand tries to cover the gaping wound in his stomach as he looks past all of us, gazing into the ether, as if he can see the afterlife dangling right in front of his eyes. I walk toward him and look at him while his head sways.
“How many more are there of you?” Noah jabs the barrel of Henry’s hunting rifle into the man’s cheek. The man bats his eyes at the sudden assault upon his face, but he simply turns his head and looks away from Noah. “How many more are there of you back at Tifton? Are there others coming?”
The man barely holding onto life is number four, the man I’d been afraid of since I saw the two true survivors rounding the corner and vanishing down the street. I look at this man and take in every detail that I can from him. His face is covered in ash and dust, making it hard to pick up on a lot of features at first, but I notice his fat, crooked nose, his squinty eyes, and his beefy brow. He’s one of the few people that I’ve seen outside of the four I’m with for the past year. It’s like looking at an alien. His hair hangs in tangles in front of his face and I see that he’s whispering something, some sort of final prayer as the light fades from his eyes.
“Come on,” Greg says to Noah. “Let’s get inside before they come back.”
I turn around and see the dead woman that I’d listened to putting up her last stand in the back of the truck. She’s dangling over the tailgate, an enormous hole nearly severing her head from her neck. There’s a pool of blood on the ground just beneath where her dangling head is tilted at an unnatural angle. She died fighting, I’ll give her that. My eyes shift from her dead body over to the white truck where it is sitting in the street, tilting forward. I furrow my brow and inspect the vehicle, finding the cause rather quickly. The front passenger tire has been deflated, murdered in the insanity that took place in the firefight. I guess that explains the loud pop or boom that startled me there at the end. Noah must have been trying to finish off the dying fanatic who is now passing into the afterlife, or whatever is waiting for a demented soul like his.
“I think he’s dead,” Lexi says softly, staring at the wounded zealot whose head is now hanging limp and lifeless. I look over at him, waiting to see if his chest rises or falls. After thirty seconds, I come to the same conclusion that my sister has so astutely discovered. He’s dead as the mailbox he’s leaning up against.
“What do we do now?” I ask somberly, completely unsure of where we are or what we need to do. I know that they all look to me to be the leader, but I’m a fish out of water now. It’s official and all the votes have been tallied up. I look at Greg, hoping that he has an answer.
“We need to fix the truck,” Greg says with a disappointed tone in his voice. I know exactly how he feels. Marko screams in the depths of my mind, crying out as those things rip off his face in our last vain attempt to fix this giant hunk of metal. I look at it, sitting silently, taunting and mocking all of us. No one here has a clue how to fix cars, but somehow we need to figure out how to fix the gas tank—if that’s all that’s broken with it. How are we even supposed to do that? It’s not like there are any trucks sitting around with gas tanks that we can just pluck off and switch out. God only knows how heavy those things are. Besides, we didn’t bring Marko’s tools with us when we came. What were we thinking? Why wouldn’t we bring Marko’s tools with us? Sure, we’ll probably be able to scrounge up some tools to try and get the trick done, but again, no one here knows anything about cars, except that they go vroom and take you from point A to point B.
“And how exactly do we do that?” Lexi asks, rocking my nephew softly.
“I have no clue,” Greg shakes his head. “I think they shot out the gas tank, so we’d need to patch it up or fix it somehow.”
“Again, how, exactly?” Lexi asks, not making things easy for him. I can see that Greg is getting frustrated. His cheeks flush with a rosy red color that make him look like he’s blushing. I can see the lightning crackling behind his eyes as he looks at the truck with a deep sense of hatred and annoyance, not just with it, but with everyone around him. Lifting my hand, I reach out and place it on his elbow. He silently looks at me and we exchange a look. His eyes are filled with tears, glistening in the pale, deathly light of the world around him.
“We’ll find something,” I tell all of them.
“Yeah,” Greg nods and shoots a glance over to Lexi, holding my nephew while she watches him with loving adoration. Greg looks at the baby in her arms and then glances back at the truck, almost as if he’s ashamed of looking at the baby, like it’s distracting him from where he needs to be focused. “But there’s nothing we can do right now,” he says. “We’re running on fumes. We need to hole up somewhere, keep an eye on the truck, and wait to see if those other two cowards show up to try and scavenge our supplies.”
“So what exactly do you suggest?” Lexi looks around.
“We should use the truck as bait,” Greg says calmly. “We can hole up in that town house and keep an eye on it, stay out of sight, and figure out what we’re going to do.” Greg looks up at the sun and I see the glitter of a sweat drop on his brow. “It’s getting hot. This whole planet has turned into a giant desert. We should try to keep moving at night.”
“Greg versus the wild,” Noah announces bitterly. “I’d pay to watch that show.”
“Can it,” Greg growls angrily. He reaches down and checks the machine gun slung over the faceless fanatic at the base of the truck. Figuring out how to withdraw the magazine, he sees that it’s full and slings it over his shoulder. The rest of us fan out while Noah keeps his rifle pointed at the intersection, waiting for our unwanted friends to return and try to take us by surprise. I’m sure if they were coming from anywhere, they’d pick one of the 3
59 other degrees around us to attack from, but I keep that to myself.
Pretty much all of the weapons are nearly empty. We take everything we’re going to need for ourselves from the dead. They’re not going to have a need for any of it now, and I don’t want the fanatics returning and claiming any of their gear. I feel the weight of the stress and exhaustion of the past fleeting hours hanging over me like a millstone. My mouth twists into a yawn as I watch Greg grabbing a handful of the woman’s shirt and pulling her over the tailgate. She hits the ground with a meaty splat and thump that makes me think of a pig’s carcass at a butcher shop. Her eyes are barely opened and I try to avoid looking at them, but I can’t help it.
Greg vanishes inside of the truck and returns with one of our bags. I watch him unzip the bag and look inside of it, checking to make sure that he has everything that we’re going to need. As he hands the bag to me, I take it happily and sling it over my shoulder, feeling the weight of it pressing against my back. Looking back at the truck as he passes me, I feel sad that we’re leaving our mechanical slow poke behind as bait for the fanatics to come back for. I walk behind Greg as we pick up Lexi and head for the town house. As for Noah, he’s too busy focusing on the intersection to bother with us. I almost want to remind him that he’s using Henry’s hunting rifle, but I decide not to. No reason to bring up that rotting piece of shit.
While Greg peers in through the gaping holes that serve as windows to the front rooms of the town house, I look at the zealots’ truck. Its headlights are on and I feel like it would be a foolish thing to keep them on. It might attract attention if we end up falling asleep and sticking around just long enough to recover from the past twenty-four hours of endless travel and constant terror. I walk around the truck, peering inside and seeing that it has hardly any supplies. They were definitely expecting to overtake us and kill us. I think that if we’d kept up the chase as long as we could and if the gas tank hadn’t been shot, we might have shaken them in a few hours. Who knows, there might still be four more people in the world if they’d just given up. I step around the ajar door and drop down into the driver’s seat, watching Greg as he checks the front door and finds that it’s locked.
I smile as he backtracks to the front window. I’m proud of all of them. We pulled off something that none of us were trained for or ever wanted to do in our lifetimes. We survived a life or death altercation with deranged fanatics. I feel strangely proud of that absurd reality now. I flip off the headlights and close the door behind me.
Chapter Six
The front of the home is fairly well boarded up, as compared to the rest of the town whose windows have all been shattered and are now gaping mouths of darkness and blackness. There are boards across the windows, protecting glass that is still shattered. The boards look like a child’s puzzle, all haphazardly nailed across the window frames. I look at the doorframe where the numbers have all slanted or sagged over the months of abandonment. The tarnished, brass numbers mean nothing now. I look at the entire world now and wonder what matters anymore. There’s so much of it that just doesn’t make sense anymore. I look at this house as nothing more than a cave. It’s a fancy cave.
Greg steps down from the door, looking up at the three stories of shattered windows and dusty brick. There is something haunting and forgotten about all of this. I don’t know who lived here, or who walked these streets, but now I’m making it my own. I look at the two by fours that are stretched across the windows and notice that Greg is checking out the one window that’s covered in plywood. The plywood is old, enduring the months with as much strength and stubbornness that it could muster. It’s pretty much Styrofoam now, soggy and eager to break. Greg reaches out and grabs the corner of the plywood, pulling on it, and the board gives way almost immediately. With a cracking sound that reminds me of biting into toast, the plywood crumbles easily with the slightest pull. Greg tears it free, chunk by chunk, before tossing the jagged pieces onto the sidewalk nearby. I look at it and know that it’s not very smart to leave such an obvious clue as to where we are.
I look up from the pieces of plywood and stare at Lexi, who is standing next to it. She’s holding her son cautiously, looking at him with an expression of love and terror written in her eyes as she watches his every movement. She’s such an eager mother and I’m impressed by her strength. Maybe this is exactly what she has always needed to get her shit together. I look at the window that Greg is burrowing into right now and I see that it’s a little high for her. We’ll be able to get her into the townhouse, but it isn’t going to be pretty. Her body has just been through the most traumatic experience that a woman’s body can go through naturally, and the fact that she’s standing right now is enough to make me want to give her a blue ribbon or a reward or something to show her how impressed I am with her. I doubt I could be standing right now if I’d just given birth.
Glancing over my shoulder, I see Noah who is still standing over his dead fanatic who is slumped against the mailbox, already blending into the dead world. Everything about the scene looks so surreal to me. Noah doesn’t care, though. Or if he does, he’s staring at the intersection, waiting for those two killers to appear magically around the corner. He’s gazing down the scope of Henry’s rifle, watching for them. There’s something different about Noah. Since he’s killed men now, I feel like he’s changed. I think it’s a cliché, but I can’t help but feel it. It’s like a black aura hanging around him. I don’t recognize the Noah who had been scared in the truck with us just a few minutes ago. How could it happen so quickly?
“Okay.” Greg knocks down the last of the plywood. He steps back from his progress and looks at it with an admiring look in his eyes. He’s pleased with himself. I look at him, impressed by the fact that he is taking charge of the situation. “Let’s get inside. We need to get off the streets.”
Greg climbs in through the hole, putting his foot up on the window ledge and hoisting himself up into the window as gracefully as he can with his pack strapped to his back. I listen as he enters the darkness, clambering into the dark, gaping eye socket of the building. As he vanishes into the shadows, I look at Lexi, seeing that she’s also staring at Greg as he slips away from us. Looking at the hole, I holster my Sig behind my back.
“Let’s do this,” I say to Lexi.
She looks at me nervously, trying to keep my nephew comfortable while she wraps him into Noah’s sweatshirt as tightly as she can. Kissing his little, bruised forehead, she hands him over to me, letting me take him in my arms for the first time since he was born. I hold him and feel a tingling deep inside of my chest. I’m swelling, full of static and excitement as I hold him, gazing into his little face with such love and adoration. He barely moves in my arms. What little squirms or movements that he makes are muffled by the sweatshirt that he’s swaddled in. The only movements that I can see are his tiny little breaths as he sleeps through all of this.
Lexi clambers in through the hole in the window with the assistance of Greg who heaves her upwards and halfway through the dark gaping maw. There’s a moment where I’m afraid that she’s not going to be able to haul herself the rest of the way through the hole, but she manages. She grips the frame of the window and a hand shoots out to take her other, blindly groping hand. I watch Greg grip her wrist and pull her up like some sort of knight in shining armor. I watch Lexi vanish into the darkness as well and I wait for her to call back for my nephew. I look at Noah, wondering if he’s even aware that we’re slipping inside of the townhouse.
“Okay, hand him over,” Lexi’s voice calls from inside the hole.
I look back at the hole and can barely make out Lexi’s form in the darkness, a silhouette of charcoal nearly lost to the blackness within. Her arms stretch out into the pale light of the dying world. Holding my nephew in my hands, I reach up and hand him gently to my sister. She takes him from me and there’s something about letting him go that fills me with dread and terror. I never want to let him go. I don’t ever want to see him leave me.
It makes me nauseous just thinking about it.
As she vanishes back into the darkness of the house with my nephew, I look over my shoulder at Noah, still holding his vigil. “Hey, Noah,” I call back to him. He doesn’t move. “Noah?” I call, just making sure that he’s not completely lost in his thoughts. He flinches at my slightly louder tone. Glancing over his shoulder at me, it’s almost as if he can barely see me. “I’m going in next,” I tell him. It’s almost as if he’s not comprehending a word that I’m saying. “You’re last.”
Without saying a word, he looks back toward the intersection. I suppose that’s all I’m getting from him. Putting my hands on the sill above me, I prepare to jump. Scrambling up as quickly as I am able, I pull at the sill until I get a knee upon it. Slipping into the darkness, I drop down onto a table that’s coated with a thick layer of dust. I’m immediately absorbed into the darkness of the house, feeling blind and disoriented. I don’t feel like I’m in a house. I feel like I’ve fallen down a well.
It takes a moment for me to adjust, but once I get my grip on everything I start to take in the house for what it is. I’m standing in the middle of a home office. The walls are lined with black bookshelves holding musty, rotting books that the damp has officially ruined. The shelves are bowed under the combination of the weight of the books and their own lack of endurance against the humidity and the damp. Shoved over to the side of the room is the desk, flipped and jammed into the corner while the computer’s remains, which once sat upon it, are scattered across the room. A large impression in the wall points to someone having hurled it there. Everything smells like mold and dirt to me. There’s nothing friendly or homely about this place.
LEFT ALIVE (Zombie series Box Set): Books 1-6 of the Post-apocalyptic zombie action and adventure series Page 70