by Siara Brandt
“You had a job interview this morning,” he reminded her. “You’re going to miss that.”
“Screw the job interview,” she said, shocking him with her choice of words. It wasn’t like her at all. And then she leaned forward and shook her head again. “I’m not leaving you. We stay together no matter what is going on out there.”
“But- ”
“But nothing. Say it.”
“We stay together. No matter what.”
Chapter 7
The scene before her was deceptively calm. But from what she had seen that morning, Lauryn knew that the pale gray clapboard walls before her could be hiding anything. So she sat for a long time staring at the small diner and the woods behind it before making any attempt to get out of the car. Aside from a single red squirrel that scampered up a nearby tree, there was no sign of life anywhere. There weren’t even any cars parked outside the diner when there should be. With her heart pounding like a war drum in her chest, Lauryn finally got out of the car.
She had no idea what was happening. All she knew was that there was some kind of sickness or some kind of dementia that was making people attack each other, right in the streets. The paramedic had been right. It looked like hell was being unleashed on earth. In some places, at least. For a moment, without wanting to, she relived the terrifying moment when she saw the man who had attacked the police officer, if he could be called a man. He had looked anything but human. She closed her eyes for a moment when she recalled the screaming. The confusion. The terror. Both in her and everyone around her. Everyone had run away and she didn’t blame them. She had run, too. Suddenly finding herself on her own, her escape had been a desperate one. Never in her life had she been so afraid. Never before had she been forced to literally run for her life.
There was only one thing on her mind right now. She needed to get to her daughter. She had been forced to borrow a vehicle. Technically, since she had taken it without permission, she had stolen a vehicle. But she had been desperate.
Please let Maddy be here, she prayed. Let her be all right.
She did find Maddy alive and well, but completely alone. Lauryn pulled her daughter into her arms and held onto her tightly.
“Maddy, thank God you’re still here.”
“I was waiting for you,” Maddy said. She looked and sounded shaken up.
That’s when she saw the blood on Lauryn’s clothes and the blood-stained bandage around her hand. “What happened to you?”
“I’m all right,” Lauryn quickly assured her. “I was in a car accident. But I’m fine. I just have a small cut on my hand.”
“After everything that has happened this morning,” Maddy said. “I’ve been so worried about you.”
“I was worried about you, too.”
“What’s going on?” Maddy asked. “The electricity is out.”
“I know.”
“The phones are dead, too.”
“I know that.” Lauryn looked around. “What happened here? Where is everyone?”
“After what we saw on TV, everyone wanted to go find their families. When we heard the sirens going off and we knew that whatever was happening had to be bad. The customers left first and then everyone else went after they were gone. I stayed behind waiting for you to come.”
“I’m glad you did.” Lauryn didn’t tell her daughter how relieved she really was, how worried she had been that she would get here and find Maddy gone. She still didn’t know how to tell her daughter what she had seen. How was she supposed to tell her that their whole world had been turned upside down in the blink of an eye? But Maddy already seemed to know some of what was going on.
“I saw Mr. Lambert outside,” Maddy told her. “He was trying to get in here. I was so afraid of the way he was acting. He was covered with blood and he looked- ” She stopped and covered her face with her hands. “Oh, I can’t get it out of my mind. He looked just like something from a horror movie. I didn’t know what to do. I keep thinking that maybe he was hurt and that I should have helped him. But he looked so angry, like he wanted to hurt me. He kept pounding on the glass until I thought he was going to break right through it. I hid myself behind the counter and when he couldn’t see me anymore, he went away.”
Lauryn hugged her daughter again. “You did the right thing.”
“What did you see out there?”
For a moment, a shadow darkened Lauryn’s face. “Things are- chaotic.”
She didn’t want to go into any more details. Not right now. She didn’t want to frighten her daughter, even though she knew that Maddy would have to eventually know how bad things were.
“I saw enough to know that we need to find a safe place until we know what’s going on.”
“We were watching the TV before the power went out,” Maddy said. “The news people were saying all kinds of crazy things. They said people should go to designated shelters that are being set up. They were saying to go immediately and pack only what you could carry. How can this be happening? How can things fall apart so fast? Don’t try to protect me. Tell me what you saw out there.”
For a moment Lauryn held her breath. And then, forcing calmness, she told her daughter, “I’m not sure what’s happening. There’s some kind of sickness or civil unrest. But we need to stay focused and not panic. Panicking is the last thing we want to do.”
“What do you think we should do?”
“I think we should get out of here and go home,” Lauryn replied.
“Not to a shelter? How do we know that’s the right thing to do?”
“We don’t. But right now we have more questions than we have answers.” She placed her hands on her daughter’s shoulders and said, “We’re together now. We’ll stay that way. That’s all that matters.”
Maddy nodded. “What about Liam? If things are bad everywhere, he’ll come home, won’t he?”
“That’s why we have to go home. So he knows where to find us.”
“You’re right. We should go home and wait. Liam will come. And so will Rafe.”
They had to believe that. The thought of anything different was more than either one of them could face at the moment. So Lauryn, taking her daughter’s hand, said: “Let’s go home.”
But what suddenly appeared outside the glass doors brought them both up short and they knew that getting home was not going to be as easy as they had first thought.
Rafe shook his head dubiously when he looked down at the creek running far below him. The drop-off at his feet led straight down to the water’s edge. It would be a long, perilous climb down, one that Rafe had already decided they would not attempt in the darkness. Right now the sun was almost down and a storm was blowing in. Night travel in unfamiliar terrain in the rain was out of the question. In addition to that, there would be no way of knowing what was out there in the darkness. Besides, they had been travelling hard all day. They were both physically exhausted and needed sleep badly. They would rest here, wait for the sun to come up and then get an early start first thing in the morning.
For two days they had been making their way on foot. They’d been forced to leave the Jeep behind. A vehicle without gas was useless. By Rafe’s best calculations, it was only three miles to the nearest town. They could make that easily. They still didn’t know what they would find there, but they would cross that bridge when they came to it.
They took their backpacks off under the overhanging ledge of rock that made a kind of shallow cave. At least it would provide some shelter and they would be out of the rain. Mostly. He could already smell the approaching rain, could hear the angry rumble of thunder in the distance. Lightning began to throb behind the black cloud masses like an erratic pulse beat.
As the storm wind suddenly swept through the forest, all he could think about was finding Lauryn. Was she all right? Were things bad where she was? Was she waiting for him to come home?
A spattering of heavy rain drops fell, and then the sky opened up and the rain came down in a drenching deluge. Rafe str
etched out on his coat. The ground was hard and uncomfortable but at least it was dry and he was so tired he could have probably fallen asleep standing up.
They had enough food with them for another day at least, if they were careful. But he longed for a bath and a shave, and a change of clothes. Those things weren’t priorities right now. however. Staying alive was. And getting home.
The two men sat together in silence, haunted by the things they had seen in the past few days. The chaos. The panic. The bodies in the streets with what Ren was calling the undead feeding on them. Those who were still living were frantically trying to barricade themselves in buildings or sections of towns, with whatever they could find. It was a panicked population responding to with a knee jerk reaction to a heretofore unknown enemy. They weren’t up against bad guys with guns. They were trying to defend themselves against monsters that they still didn’t have a name for.
They had seen enough to know that things were bad everywhere. At least the areas they had travelled through. Ren’s theory about zombies seemed to be, in fact, coming true. Or the things out there were something like zombies. It didn’t matter what they called them. They were lethal no matter what they were. They wondered if Kyn, Trace, Gaut and the others had made it home safely or not. And if they had, they wondered what they had found there. And while Rafe worried about Lauryn, Ren was worried about his own family. They lived in the same town, so luckily that meant they were headed in the same direction or they would have had to make some hard choices by now.
Rafe had been trained to deal with worst-case scenarios. He had seen first-hand how quickly things could fall apart in third-world countries so he knew what to expect. There would be no burial for the dead and no sanitation. Food in the cities would already be gone and there would be no more deliveries. No one would chance it. People would hold onto what they had and not deliver it into the hands of a potentially-violent mob of strangers.
When things got bad enough, no one would go to their jobs. Schools would close down. Eventually, there would be no law, no getting to loved ones, no medications. They had seen that wholesale looting and migration from cities on foot had already begun.
It wouldn’t take long before people to begin to die off from starvation, lack of medical care, or outright lawlessness. People in today’s society would be especially lost because they wouldn’t have the basic skills to even feed themselves. The more hopeless people would look to suicide as a solution. In any case, when winter came, people would freeze to death
Only the strongest, most ruthless would survive, Rafe thought grimly. Or the people who were prepared. He kept telling himself that Lauryn was smart as well as being prepared. If anyone survived this, it would be her.
They had already learned a lot about what Ren was calling the undead. They had learned that a blow to the head was the only way to permanently bring them down. They had also already learned that they had an almost savage appetite for living flesh. Again, it bore out Ren’s theory about this being some kind of zombie apocalypse. But while the undead might be slower moving, it was not by much. Get a few of the together and you could be in some serious trouble. They were everywhere they went. And maybe the worst thing of all, was that they were regular people. Or they had been regular people at one time. They didn’t talk about it openly, but both Rafe and Ren had no idea if they were going to eventually turn into one of those things. If this was some kind of disease, there was no way of knowing if they were already infected. And how did they know if their loved ones-
He cut his thoughts short. He wasn’t going to let himself go there. Not until he had to. The only thing he did know for certain was that he had to stay alive. For Lauryn’s sake. He needed to get back to her. And that’s what he would do.
Chapter 8
Three weeks after the start of infection, Eymann Buckminster dove behind the group of mailboxes outside of the post office. He stayed there, huddled down behind the blue metal boxes, trying to make himself as small as possible as his worst fears were confirmed. There were two of them already visible and more were staggering out of hiding, drawn, no doubt, by the noise he’d inadvertently made when’d he’d accidentally knocked a stack of metal pans down a flight of concrete steps.
He was crouched now behind the mailboxes, terrified, his legs shaking so badly that he could barely stay upright. That had been close. Way too close. He vowed to himself that he was not going to take such chances again. For food, or for anything. He had seen other people take such chances and die terrible deaths right before his eyes. More than once. But that was not going to happen to him.
He pressed his body hard against the sun-heated metal that now held only long-forgotten, undelivered mail and struggled to catch his breath, trying at the same time to keep his breaths shallow so that they wouldn’t be heard. Who knew how animalistic these things were, how heightened their senses might be. Maybe their hearing was more acute than normal humans, if they could still be called humans. Turning his head slowly to look behind him, he felt the heat of the midday sun on his face even through the stubble of beard that now covered his cheeks and chin. He was still breathing hard when he dared to peer through the crack between two of the mailboxes and saw his chance. One did not waste chances in this world. Not if one wanted to survive. With his blood still pounding hard in his chest, he darted out from behind the mailboxes and ran down a short alley that led to another alley that ran parallel to Main Street. He didn’t stop running until he staggered into the back door of Emmer’s Bar and Grill.
Helice was waiting there and she turned quickly to stare at him with her mouth agape.
“We need to get out of here!” Eymann’s voice was low and urgent. “It’s not safe.”
For once, he didn’t try to hide the fact that he was frightened. He wouldn’t have succeeded anyway. Fear and adrenaline were still throbbing through his body with every beat of his heart.
But Helice didn’t move. She stood there staring at the front windows like she had just seen a ghost.
“What?” Eymann breathed in alarm as he whirled around to stare at the partially-frosted windows of Emmer’s. “What is it?”
“Out there,” Helice mouthed silently as she held one hand pressed tightly against her throat. In slow motion, she pointed with her other hand.
Eymann saw it then. The dark shadow moving just beyond the frosted glass. The slowly-shuffling silhouette that passed by the windows right before their eyes. There was no doubt in his mind what it was.
After the shadow had disappeared, Eymann let out a huge sigh of relief. In spite of his relief, he told himself once again that he had been an idiot to give in to Helice and allow her to come along with him. It had been against his better judgment from the moment she had brought it up. But to keep her quiet, as always, he’d had no choice but to agree to let her come. He knew from experience that once Helice’s mind was made up about something, she wasn’t going to change it.
If bringing her with him wasn’t bad enough, she had insisted on wearing her beige shoes with the heels. Didn’t she get it? Fashion didn’t mean a thing these days. Eymann? He was smarter. Though they had never been the latest style in footwear, he was wearing his poop shoes which were silent and fast and had non-slip soles. He could run very fast in them, which he had been forced to do on many occasions, and he could stop on a dime if he needed to.
He had talked himself blue in the face all morning, but Helice still didn’t seem to understand the danger of coming out of the house and into the open. She might be getting an idea now, after what she had just seen, but he still had no idea how she might react if she came face to face with one of them. He still didn’t know what to call them. The undead. The dead. Zombies. Everyone had a different name for them.
Whatever they were, the current state of affairs had definitely made Eymann rethink his priorities. Like having enough food to keep from starving to death. That was on top of the list. Right up there with food was finding enough clean water to drink. And not the lea
st of all was avoiding those living corpses out there at all costs. The last thing he should have to worry about was getting killed because of Helice’s stubbornness. Or her shoes.
“What took you so long?” she asked now that the immediate danger had passed. “It’s hot in here. And it smells.”
Surely she knew that he was aware of the heat. He was the one who had been out in the blazing hot sun while she had stayed inside in the shade. Couldn’t she see that he was dripping wet with sweat? And did she really think he didn’t know that the smell was unpleasant? All right, it was very unpleasant. But that was pretty much the case everywhere you went. The only thing you could do was to ignore it the best you could. Since she was the one who had wanted to come out here in the first place, he thought maliciously, she was just going to have to learn to put up with the smell.
He ground his teeth as he held back a nasty retort. He couldn’t help it. He had just risked his life trying to keep her alive and fed. The very least she could do was to be grateful. He understood that she was frustrated. He was frustrated, too. But there were some things that he wasn’t responsible for. One of them was that he wasn’t responsible for what was going on around them and he was doing his best to deal with it. Just once, couldn’t she cut him some slack?
“Did you find anything?” she asked as she fanned herself with a menu, her eager gaze quickly scanning his pockets to see if there were any bulges there.
Secretly smiling inside himself, he slowly pulled a can of peas out of one pocket and waited for her reaction.
“Peas!” she exclaimed, as disappointed as he knew she would be. “Not canned peas again.”
She was as hungry as he was. She would eat the damned peas and, if the past was any indication, probably devour most of the can by herself. He’d had to eat spaghettios and sauerkraut. Mixed together. He hated both of them, even separately.