Solstice: A Novel of the Zombie Apocalypse

by Donna Burgess

  Leila jerked away, her mouth drawing into a hateful snarl. “You’ve always been so weak.”

  Tomas stepped back from her. “Tell you what. Stay here if you want. I’m taking Christopher, and I’m leaving.” He stormed out of the bedroom.

  “Don’t forget to take your little dog,” Leila called. “All you have to do is call her.”

  ***

  There were things Melanie knew she should not think of, like the mad ones from the train, like the old man who still lay dead at the front door. Something had eaten at the flesh of the body while they slept. When Melanie ventured to look later, chucks of flesh were missing from his thighs and torso, and his clothing was shredded. The chunks appeared to be in the shape of human bite marks.

  No, Melanie. Don’t think about it.

  Several candles burned around Tomas’s office, giving off a wavering glow. Overhead, the skylight was a square of black peppered with silver. Melanie sat on the floor with Christopher on her lap, both of them wrapped in a woolen blanket.

  Christopher watched his father, wide-eyed. “Can I take my toys in a box, Daddy? Like you?”

  “You can take as many as we can carry,” Tomas said. “But remember, we’ll only be gone for a short while.” He kneeled and looked his son in the eyes. “Think about it like a holiday.” He kissed Christopher’s head, his face lingering in the little boy’s curls a moment too long. Tears glistened at the corners of his eyes. Melanie fought to hide her own tears.

  “Mommy says we’re going forever,” Christopher said gravely.

  “She only meant it’ll feel long,” Melanie offered.

  Christopher put his first two fingers into his mouth and crawled into Melanie’s lap. Shelves and drawers contained a life. Tomas was about to condense that life into one small box because that was all he could to carry. If you wish to travel far and fast, travel light. Who had said that? It didn’t matter, Melanie supposed. On the floor were stacks of vinyl record albums, most which Tomas had on compact disc or as audio files stored on his iPod.

  Melanie remembered asking him once if his idyllic fantasy life would be to live inside a Springsteen song. Purely American—boys in leather jackets and girls who worked as waitresses and lived to look pretty for their guys. Did he imagine a life in some small, blue-collar American town where gangs of toughs fought it out over turf and died pretty deaths?

  Melanie liked those songs, mainly because they reminded her Tomas. Unlike Leila, she didn’t begrudge him his musical taste. But then, Leila seemed to begrudge him anything that didn’t center on her. The lyrics were poetry, which Melanie appreciated, having tried to write poetry in her late teen years. The rhythm and the rhyme—it was no easy task.

  Contemplating Tomas’s favorite American music, she started as a surreal thought entered her mind. Christopher, asleep in her lap, stirred, but immediately settled back down, slurping on his fingers.

  Was there a United States anymore? Frantic images raced through her head. Springsteen, their president, and movie stars she knew by name and face better than people in her own town. She thought of the cute guy she watched on the American television show about the supernatural. She had sometimes caught the show on an Internet stream when she had nothing better to do. Were those people dead? Were they alive and afraid of never seeing the sun again? Were they… changed? Mad?

  Tomas slipped his laptop into a backpack, along with his iPod and an automobile charger for each. Melanie reached for a small stack of DVD movies, careful not to wake Christopher again. Most of the films were very old, and she had watched with Tomas, sharing big bowls of popcorn. Tomas had gone out of his way to make her feel welcome in his home when her parents had been killed. He had worked so hard to make up for Leila’s remoteness.

  Rebecca, the Hitchcock version with Fontaine and Olivier. How wonderfully creepy that one had been. She had watched it with Tomas the weekend before she left for university for the first time. His hand brushed hers reaching for the remote control, and she blushed for some reason, although he had touched her many times before. She stole glances at him, as if she needed to embed his handsome profile in her mind to get her through school until her next visit home.

  Leila had bustled through. “How can you sit through those drab old pictures? Look at them with their stupid clothes and silly dialogue.”

  Tomas said, “They’re lovely, my dear. Just as you are.” He gave Melanie a sly wink and when his wife had left the room. “Mrs. Danvers, I presume.”

  That scene seemed like a million years ago, when there had still been promise of things to come. University, someone to love, one day not thinking in terms of breaths and taps.

  A new dawn each day.

  “Do you think there’s anything else out there, Tomas?”

  Tomas glanced up, the candles casting tired shadows around his eyes. “We’ll see, I suppose.” He bent over, took the DVD from her, and slipped it into the pack with the laptop. “We have to believe there’s something. Without hope, there’s nothing.”

  ***

  The snow swirled, a windstorm of white against black. The Rover plowed through valiantly, Tomas’s driving steady and experienced. Bo paced the small area in the back before finally settling down with a discontented sigh. The wipers swished back and forth, a hypnotic rhythm that Melanie mentally counted, her fingers drumming in time. She got to one hundred forty-seven before she forced herself to stop. Five minutes later, she began counting again. At first, she’d used the counting trick to ease her asthma attacks, but it had become something for comfort when she was stressed.

  Leila sulked in silence, giving Tomas cutting glances over the flipped-up collar of her coat, her face blue in the glow of the dashboard. Melanie felt the sudden urge to hit the woman, but she would never do such a thing. Leila had never been a happy person, at least as long as Melanie had known her. Soon after the death of her parents, as Melanie was still settling into her new home with Leila and Tomas, she had overheard a telephone conversation that formed her impression of the woman Tomas loved.

  “Shall we meet at the coffeehouse, or go straight away to bed?” Leila had giggled—something that did not fit her character in the least. At first, Melanie wondered if Leila was speaking to Tomas, but even in the short time she had lived with them, Melanie knew that light, slightly flustered lilt in Leila’s voice was not something that would come from talking to Tomas. Melanie had slipped back to her new bedroom and tried to not think of it. She was young, but she wasn’t stupid.

  Later, when Leila became pregnant, Melanie couldn’t help but wonder about his paternity, but Christopher grew to become a miniature version of Tomas, leaving no doubt.

  The only thing good to come from Leila was Christopher. Did Tomas see something decent and loving inside the woman? Or had he been blinded by her beautiful face and challenged by her distant manner? Maybe none of that mattered anymore. Affairs were trivial things at the end of the world.

  Christopher slept in the child seat next to her. Melanie touched his soft hair and wondered how Leila could be so unhappy with Tomas.

  The Rover lost its traction for a few moments and skidded, as if in slow motion, toward a snow bank along the shoulder. Melanie clutched the back of the driver’s seat, flinching and waiting for impact. The vehicle straightened, and Tomas sighed, but said nothing.

  The headlights carved a yellow path in the snow-riddled night.

  Chapter 13

  London, England

  Much to Tana’s dismay, the Dockers seemed determined to drink every bit of alcohol left in the store. They weren’t the fanciest bunch, and Stu had admitted that he resented their drunken enjoyment of the situation. Besides, they’d finished off the last of the Stella.

  The little team consisted of a pair of burly men in their late-twenties, barrel-chested and thick-waisted, and a woman who could have been a professional wrestler. When it came to drinking and profanity, she held her own with her male counterparts. A feeling of tension surrounded them. Tana had never been
one to consider vibes, but bad vibes emanated from the smelly, drunken little group.

  Worse, she didn’t like the way the two men looked at her and the two female students. After forty-eight hours in their presence, Tana realized things could become dangerous if she let down her guard. She mentioned it to Ashley and Portia, warning them to be sure to stay together when visiting the toilet.

  ***

  A day ago, Tana decided she needed to return to her flat for a few things. She’d quickly learned that she could convince Stu to do what she wanted. She let him argue his side for a few moments, knowing in the end he’d give in.

  “I just don’t think it’s a good idea,” Stu whispered.

  Tana knelt beside Davis, who was playing on a battery-devouring Game Boy. The blue screen created a ghostly cast across his small face, and for an instant, she saw Aidan’s ghoulish face as they had fled from him on the darkened streets outside. “You need anything, baby?” She stroked the boy’s hair, shaking off the ghastly image.

  “No,” Davis answered without looking away from the game.

  “All right. Then you need to get ready for bed.” She straightened and glanced at Stu.

  “Why? How do you even know it’s time to go to sleep?” Davis grumbled. “It’s always dark. We don’t even really know what time it is now.”

  “I know what time it is, Davis.” Her brows drew tightly together, but she bit back her annoyance. Once a strict parent, she now treated him as if his emotions were made of glass. “For me, okay? You know I can’t sleep unless you’re beside me.”

  Ten minutes later, she emerged from the small pup tent she shared with her son. Her nightly routine had become climbing into the sleeping bag next to Davis, a quick story—usually something starring Davis and his departed brother as they attended wizard’s school at Hogwarts—then emerging to drink part of the assumed nighttime hours away with Stu and George.

  “I want to go while he’s sleeping.” She plucked a lager from the case Stu had liberated from the stockroom before the Dockers could get their hands on it. She held it out, and Stu popped the top with an opener emblazoned with a Guinness logo.

  “But why, Tana? What happens to him if we don’t make it back?”

  Tana looked up at him and smiled. “We?” she asked, knowing it would come to that.

  “Well, I can’t let you go alone.” He took a long drink of his beer.

  “But I just need to know why you want to go back there so badly.”

  Tana took his arm and led him deeper into the gloom of the store, out of earshot of their new residents. “Because I have guns. Okay? I have guns, and I feel like we’re going to need them.”

  “Oh. Okay.” Stu nodded. “How?”

  “My husband brought some back when he came home from Iraq. They found them in those palaces they ransacked, and instead of turning them in, they kept them.” She spoke rapidly, as if in a hurry to convince him.

  “Do you have ammo?”

  “Of course. Boxes of it, but I don’t know what’s what. Larry wanted me to sell the stuff if I ever needed the money while he was deployed.” She laughed softly. “How do you go about selling stolen guns?”

  Stu shrugged. “I have no idea.”

  Tana glanced back toward the front of the store. “Those Dockers. Something’s going to go down, and you feel it, too. You’ve already mentioned how uncomfortable you are with how they look at Ashley and Portia.”

  “You’re right. So why don’t we just shoot them?” He laughed.

  “Stu, c’mon. We can’t hide in here forever. Can we?”

  “It’s not going to be forever, Tana. Someone’s going to come. The military—”

  Tana threw up her hands. “What if there’s nobody to come? No military. No government. No bloody BBC news! You’ve seen what’s going on out there. In case you haven’t noticed, the sun hasn’t come up in over a week. There’s no sun, Stu. We’re drowning in darkness, just like in your dream. The dead get up and traipse around like they’ve woken from a catnap.” She began to cry, wiping hard at her tears as if her eyes had betrayed her. “This isn’t fixable. What we know is gone.”

  Stu grabbed her and pulled her into his arms. She struggled against him, then relented and allowed him to hold her. “Things will be fine, Tana. You need to have faith.”

  She pressed her face against the side of his neck. “Look what’s happened to me. My youngest child turned into a monster and fled into the darkness. What should I have faith in?”

  Stu sighed. “God? Mankind, maybe.” “Have faith in me, if those two don’t do it for you. I’ll take care of you and Davis. And my students. That’s not much. I know—”

  “No. That’s something. You are something.” She looked up at him, tears still threatening. Stu blushed and dropped his gaze. “I’m just an English teacher, four thousand miles from home.”

  ***

  Reluctantly, Stu ventured out of the market through the back warehouse entrance. Tana, Josh, and Brett followed close behind. George had discreetly passed over the keys to a decade-old Volvo, careful not to draw attention from the drunken Dockers, who lounged at the far side of warehouse. The Dockers stayed wrapped in down comforters, drinking cheap lager from tall cans and looking especially surly in the red candlelight. The old man assured Stu and Tana all would be well with Davis and the remaining students while they were gone. To make his point, he waggled a cricket bat.

  They bundled up in what Stu and his kids had packed in the bags they had managed to carry with them and a few cold weather items liberated from the lockers of employees who would likely not be returning to work. The market had no clothing on the floor; otherwise, Tana would’ve helped herself. She’d discarded the nightwear she’d shown up in, and Portia had given her a pair of extra jeans from her bag. They were roughly the same size in the waist, but Portia was at least five inches taller. She found a pair of galoshes in one of the lockers. Those would definitely work better than pink bedroom slippers.

  They crossed the parking area, moving in an almost comical huddle that Stu was positive resembled a scene from an old Scooby-Doo cartoon. He was much more afraid than Shaggy, however.

  Each of them held a flashlight in one fist and a makeshift weapon in the other. Stu had opted for a cricket bat after seeing the damage George had inflicted on the infected man. Tana followed suit with a bat, but the two younger men chose gardening tools. Josh carried a set of wicked-looking hedge trimmers, while Brett had a long-handled axe. Stu wanted to ask how many times they had seen Shaun of the Dead, but thought better of it. Instead, he led the way, not because he was tough, but because he felt it was his responsibility.

  Fires turned the sky pale orange, and Stu was somewhat grateful for the blazes. He wanted light, and he didn’t care where it came from. When he’d first noticed the fires, he was concerned they might rage out of control and the whole of London would turn to ash. He soon realized the almost continuous precipitation would keep things damp enough to hold back the fire. Explosions were another story, but he hadn’t seen any yet, aside from the tanks of the downed jetliner, which were ignited days ago.

  Rats and stray cats, creatures that loved the darkness, scurried through the streets, their eyes glowing ghostly white as his light touched them. In just over a week’s time, the creatures were already reclaiming the world.

  The air smelled strangely clean. After several days without auto exhaust, industrial pollution, jet fuel, or secondhand smoke—which Stu was happy to never experience again—the world smelled almost fresh. When the breeze hit just right, he caught the ripe, sickly sweet stench of rot, and wondered if it was garbage or something else. He didn’t want to find out. First things first, and the primary task was getting to George’s Volvo without becoming a lunatic’s next meal. Still, the crisp, clean oxygen revitalized him after so many hours of being inside and breathing everyone else’s recycled air. He took a couple of big lungsful, as a thirsty man takes water.

  It had recently rained, and the temp
erature had risen slightly. Although it was still cold enough for him to see his breath, much of the icy accumulation had melted. Stu wanted to ponder how and why the temperature had not simply continued to grow colder, since the sun no longer bothered to make its usual appearance, but speculation did no good. Anything could’ve happened.

  Their grinding footfalls echoed throughout the empty area. Overhead, clouds skated across the black sky like torn gauze. Stars twinkled, but the moon was not visible.

  “You think the moon’s gone, too, Mr. McCarthy?” Josh asked, his voice barely above a whisper.

  “The moonlight is a reflection of the sun’s light. No sunlight, no moonlight, I suppose.” Stu glanced back at the big boy. “Didn’t you learn this in science?”

  “I dunno. I hated science.”

  “And English, math, and social studies,” Brett chimed in.

  “Shut up,” Tana snapped. “We can’t be caught playing out here. One of those… others may be nearby.”

  “They’re zombies, I’ll bet,” Brett whispered to his friend.

  “All I know is they’re f—screwed up,” Josh answered, checking his language at the last moment.

  The parking area seemed a thousand miles wide, but once they reached the car, Stu pressed the button on the keychain and unlocked all the doors. He glanced back toward the store, where George stood, only a smudge of black against gray. Stu waved, and the old man waved back, then closed the door, leaving them to whatever they encountered outside.

  Stu climbed behind the wheel, which felt weird since he was accustomed to being on the left, and Tana slid into the passenger seat.

  “Do you think George can handle things?” she asked.