by Frank Tayell
“You can dry those in another room. Or throw them out,” Helena said, collapsing on the couch. “No water’s coming out of the faucet. There’s a chimney for a wood-burning stove, but that hasn’t been delivered.”
“Right.” He had a strong desire to close his eyes and sleep. “Can you start a fire?”
“Of course,” Helena snapped.
“Great. Do that. Boil up that water we got from the stream.”
“How? Because you know what we didn’t bring with us from Dr Ayers’s house? Pots, and there aren’t any here.”
“Oh.”
“It’s fine. I’ll figure something out. We can use the cans the peaches are in. Boil those up first, I suppose. I mean, hot food is hot, right? Warm peaches. It’ll be a new delicacy. What are you going to do?”
“Walk down the track, find out if it leads to a road. Maybe there’s a city on the other side of those trees.”
The track took a meandering path through the wood. When building the house, they’d chosen the route that would be easiest to clear. After half an hour, it ended at a two-lane road. A hundred yards away, a tree had fallen down, partially blocking one lane. Other than that, there was nothing to see. No signs, no mailbox, not even a conveniently addressed statement of ownership warning off trespassers. There was no clue as to where they were.
A ray of sun broke through the clouds, adding a shimmering glow to the water-filled pothole. He leaned against a tree, watching the shadows slowly encroach on that patch of light. They weren’t going to make it to Washington. Not on foot. They’d not seen any zombies during the day, but that didn’t fill him with hope. Quite the opposite. They’d crossed no roads, no logging tracks, and barely any hunting trails. The logical explanation was just as Helena had suggested. They’d walked in a large circle. No, they weren’t going to reach Washington on foot, but was there any point trying? Max might have left the capital. If he hadn’t, other than warning him of the conspiracy, what advice could he give that experts couldn’t? There were people who spent their lives planning for disasters and emergencies. Wasn’t it simply arrogance that made him assume his counsel had value? More likely he’d be doing nothing but wasting Max’s time.
Wouldn’t it be better to identify the conspirators first? He could imagine himself back in the Oval Office, pointing at one conspirator after another, presenting damning evidence against each in turn. But then what? They wouldn’t go quietly. Could the secret service be trusted if he suspected the FBI had been compromised?
Powell had come from somewhere around here, so didn’t it make sense to try to hunt him down? Of course, for that he needed information, weapons, and supplies, and the only place he knew he’d find them was hidden beneath his cottage in Maine. There was less chance of reaching there than the capital.
The clouds closed, the ray of light disappeared, and the golden water filling the pothole turned dark once more. He headed back to the house.
Chapter 19 - Trapped
February 25th, Elk County, Pennsylvania
A snuffling rustle cut through Tom’s dreams. It came again, louder, rudely tearing him out of a restless sleep. He opened his eyes. It was coming from the other side of the front door. Was it a bear? Did they have those in Pennsylvania? Then came a slow, rasping scratch. Fingernails. He stood. The plastic sheet he’d been using as a blanket crackled to the floor. There was a thump from outside. Then another. He knew what it was. Zombie.
It might have been due to exhaustion, but the mistake he’d made was clear. The house was a mile from the road. The undead were people. How would they get out here? Like Officer Williams, they would have driven. Bitten, infected, thrown out or left behind, they’d turned. The zombies they’d become had followed the road, chasing one passing car after another until—
There was an almighty thump from beyond the door.
Until they saw the light from the fire Helena had lit. Or perhaps they’d smelled the smoke, or—
Another thump.
However they came here, it didn’t matter. He found himself edging around the chair. It was foolish, a childish illusion of security.
Thump.
Was it they, or it? How many were out there? He concentrated, listening more carefully. There was a soft slap of flesh against wood, then a harder bang. One. There was only one. There was no comfort in the realization.
He grabbed the shotgun from the ground, raised it to his shoulder, and aimed the barrel at the door. Closer, he needed to get closer. He forced himself to take a step toward the unseen foe.
Thump. Slap. Sigh.
Another step. Another. He was eight feet from the door. Close enough. He breathed out, his finger curled around the trigger, and he realized what he was about to do. He forced his hand away from the stock. Blowing a hole through the door wasn’t smart. There might be only one out there now, but what if more came?
He had to open the door. He rehearsed the scene in his mind, but there was no way he could do it while keeping the shotgun aimed at the zombie. With his eyes on the door, he backed away until his foot banged against the bottom-most step. From outside, the thumping slap of flesh against wood became more strident. Walking backward, he went upstairs, not hurrying until he reached the landing.
Helena had taken the room with the mattress, and lay on top, curled in a nest of packaging paper and plastic sheeting.
“Helena,” he whispered as loudly as he dared.
“What?” she groaned.
“Helena!”
“What?”
“There’s a zombie outside.”
She sat up straight. “Just one?”
“I think so,” he said, though the dark demons of doubt questioned whether that was the case. “I want you to open the door so I can shoot it.”
It was a long minute before she replied. “You sure?”
“It’s now or in the morning, and will you be able to sleep knowing it’s there?”
“I could’ve, if you’d not woken me,” she grumbled, pushing her way clear of the paper.
He went first, shotgun leveled at the door, only realizing how foolish that was when he stumbled on a stair.
“Are you sure it’s a zombie?” Helena asked, slightly too loudly.
The creature answered for him, letting out a low rasping hiss before thumping a palm against the wood.
“Open the door,” he said, raising the gun high. “I’ll fire.”
“Be careful. Of me,” she added.
He breathed out, aiming the gun at where he thought the creature’s head would be. “Now.”
She pulled on the handle. The door opened. There, movement. He pulled the trigger. The gun roared, and the shot sailed over the diminutive creature’s head. It staggered into the room as he hurriedly chambered another round.
“Shoot it! Shoot it!” Helena called.
It was too close. He swung the butt of the gun into its face. It staggered back a step. He did it again, and again, until it was level with the door. Not thinking, letting the terrified, animalistic part of his brain take over, he punched the shotgun into its chest, and then at its knee. There was a dull pop, and as the creature took another stumbling step, it collapsed onto the porch.
“Shoot it!” Helena yelled. Tom didn’t hear her. He slammed the shotgun down on its skull, over and over, until the creature was still.
Slowly, he straightened.
“Back inside,” Helena hissed, dragging at his arm. He stood, immobile. “There may be more,” she said.
Those words cut through the fog. He looked around at the moonlit woods. All seemed still. A light snow had dusted the ground, but the sky was once again clear.
“There’s nothing there,” he said. His skin began to prickle in the chill.
“And no sound,” she said. “No animals. Get inside.”
He did, and she closed the door behind him.
She opened her mouth. Closed it. Opened it again. “I’m going back to bed.”
He stood near the door, listening t
o the sound of her feet going up the stairs. A door closed. There was silence. His racing heart began to slow.
He shifted his grip on the shotgun, touching the bloody gore coating the butt. In the kitchen, he found the bottle of paint thinner, and doused his hands. At first by firelight, and then by the light of the tablet, he cleaned the shotgun. Where he’d found white flecks of bone on his suit, he’d doused them in the corrosive paint stripper. The room filled with the odor of the flammable liquid so he stayed away from the fire, letting the embers burn low.
Knowing he wasn’t going to sleep, and not wanting to sit alone with his darkening thoughts, he turned the tablet back on. He wandered from window to window, trying to get a signal for the sat-phone. His mind began to still. The activity log showed Bill Wright had been accessing the files that the algorithm had scoured from the internet. There was a message from him, a request for advice regarding his evacuation plan. Tom didn’t trust himself to reply. He would be too likely to say something that should only be said in person. Instead, he brought up the satellite feeds of North America. Even accounting for cloud cover, the sleeping continent seemed darker than before. Maybe an evacuation would work for Britain, but it was too late for it to be tried in America. Even if Farley died today, would it matter? The world had been torn apart. Whoever remained, and whatever they rebuilt, it would never, could never, be the same.
He went back to the files on the remote server, and began clicking on them at random. Some he deleted, others he flagged for Bill to watch, though he was no longer sure why. He came to a video of a woman standing in front of a tool bench. She was demonstrating how to make weapons from items found in an ordinary home. There was a theme of heavy weights and sharp points attached to poles and broom handles, but it was something. Certainly, it meant more than nothing that this individual was taking her time to try to help others, even in this weird twenty-first-century way.
Another video contained a call to fight, and the more he looked, the more of those he found. People talking into the camera, saying goodbye to unidentified loved ones, before signing off. Too many of them closed with a variation on the election slogan, of choosing a place to stand, and doing so together. He felt his throat tighten at the repetition of a message he’d suggested not because he’d believed it, but because it looked good on a poster and had tested well with focus groups. These people believed it. In face after desperate face, he saw that they needed to. But these were individuals with only the resources they had to hand. He wondered whether the people in the videos knew that it was unlikely anyone would see their last testaments. He might not be able to help them, and the reality was that most of them were probably already dead. But he could ensure that if or when civilization was rebuilt, these messages would become the epitaph of the old world and the moral foundation of a new one.
He brought up a subroutine he’d created himself as an academic exercise intended to improve his programming skills. It remotely turned on the electricity supply to his cottage in Maine and then booted up the servers he’d installed in the hidden room beneath the basement. Another few clicks, and the files were being transferred from the cloud. If the server farms went down, there would be a copy. A few more keystrokes, and he had it set up so the power would turn off again when the server was full.
If the server farms went down? No, when. And he was assuming that he would ever get there. There was Nate, of course. He picked up the phone, but changed his mind. He’d call the kid in the morning and make sure he was going to leave. It would be a dangerous journey, but nowhere was safe, especially not Washington. As for himself?
The tablet beeped. There was another message from Bill. Tom stared at the screen. The man was complaining about being trapped in a warm room in a city where the power still worked.
“Doesn’t know how lucky he is.”
Chapter 20 - Surrounded
Elk County, Pennsylvania
“Tom? Tom. Tom!”
He opened an eye. Helena stood before him, her face drawn.
“They’re outside,” she said.
He blinked, only half understanding until he looked at the windows. Dawn had arrived, and it had brought company. With glacial slowness, his eyes fixed on the humanoid shadows visible beyond the semi-transparent plastic covering the glass, he stood up.
“Shh!” Helena hissed. A muscle in her cheek twitched with the effort of not saying anything more.
“Upstairs,” he mouthed back. She climbed the stairs with exaggerated caution, and at a speed he found frustrating.
“Stay here,” he said, pushing past here when they reached the landing. Ignoring his instruction, she followed him as he went from room to room, counting the undead.
“About ten out front,” he said. “Six at the back. Maybe some more in the trees. Call it twenty.”
“Twenty? Twenty. Okay.” Her head nodded, almost rocking back and forth. “We shoot them, right?”
Tom was still half asleep and took that as the reason he’d not noticed the pistol was clutched in her trembling hands. He took it from her. The safety was off. He slid it back on. “No. Sit. Wait.”
He sat on the bare wooden boards of the landing, his feet against the unpainted pine bannisters, and his eyes on the window at the front of the house. What were they going to do? It was the wrong question. Were they safe? Clearly not. Could zombies climb stairs? There was a movie, one he’d watched only three weeks before, in which they’d pushed and tumbled their way to the top of a tower block. But in the movies they could climb, fly, run, or do whatever else the narrative required and the budget could afford.
She crouched down beside him. “We have to do something.”
“The sound of the shotgun last night brought them here,” he said. “If we wait, they’ll go away. If we start shooting more might come. We’ll be out of ammunition and we’ll still be trapped.”
She slid down the wall. “Are you sure it was the sound of the gunshot?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said, though the answer was no.
Helena nodded. More time passed.
“What if they don’t go?”
He’d been wondering that himself. The twin fogs of fear and sleep were clearing, and he was beginning to realize how precarious their situation was. He pushed himself to his feet and crept into one of the rear-facing rooms. There were nine out back now. Had those additional three come from the front of the house? Then he noticed their clothing was all the same. Beige slacks, white shirt, a high-collared maroon blazer. Only one wore a scarf, and that creature was heading toward the trees. The rest were milling about the construction site. The zombie with the scarf suddenly disappeared from view. There was a damp thump as it landed in the waterlogged pit. Two zombies turned toward the sound. The others didn’t, but that gave him some hope.
He stepped away from the window. Helena stood in the doorway, her back against the frame, her head jerking back and forth between him and the front door.
“One of them fell in the pit,” he whispered. “Two more are heading that way. They’re dressed the same. Some kind of uniform. Maybe from a golf club or somewhere. They must have been stuck at work when the outbreak hit.”
“A golf club?” she asked. “Around here?”
He realized how illogical a conclusion it was, but couldn’t come up with a better one. “The clouds are getting thicker. Looks like a storm. Maybe snow.”
“So? What about the zombies!” she hissed.
“They came from somewhere nearby. Somewhere they could have lurched from. That’s where we have to head. They’d have driven there originally, right?”
“Are you asking? How would I know?”
“Right.” He thought of saying that he was as terrified as she was, that he was extrapolating from the same data available to her. He didn’t. Instead, he smiled. “It’s going to be fine.”
“You have a plan?”
“I’m working on it. Where’s the food?”
“In the kitchen.”
He h
anded her the pistol. “Safety’s on. Wait here.”
Rather than walking, he slid his feet across the wood, hoping that if they heard the sound, the creatures would think it was made by another of the undead. They didn’t attack each other, did they? He reminded himself that just because he’d not seen it happen, didn’t mean it hadn’t. He reached the stairs. One step. Another. He strained every muscle in his legs to balance his weight on the far edges of the staircase, gritted his teeth against every squeak and creak, and ignored the rasping, slapping, clawing, thumping from the other side of those thin walls.
When he reached the ground floor, he first went to the table by his chair and pocketed the sat-phone and tablet. He grabbed the shotgun and crowbar, and then went to the kitchen. It took two trips, one for each bag, but he wasn’t going to be unarmed, not even for a second.
He didn’t immediately climb back upstairs. He watched the silhouettes beyond the windows, ruling out one plan after another. They couldn’t block the doors and windows because it would make too much noise. They couldn’t escape through the kitchen door, as it was still padlocked from outside. They could try to shoot their way out, but then they’d have to run. He’d not seen any evidence of these creatures running. That didn’t mean they couldn’t, just that they hadn’t done it yet. He grabbed the bags, climbed upstairs, and felt better with his back against a wall once more.
“We could break the staircase,” Helena suggested.
“They’d hear it. They’d know we’re here, and we’d be trapped with…” He opened the backpacks. “A couple of boxes of crackers, five pints of water, and three cans of tinned peaches. Not as much as I thought. But it’s okay,” he added. “It’s going to be fine.”
“How is anything ever going to be fine ever again?”
“All we can do is wait.” Wait and hope the zombies would go away, shoot their way out if they didn’t. He closed his eyes and thought of ski resorts. He’d not enjoyed skiing, but he had liked the hotels. The warm fires, the remote locations, and looking at the snow. Of course, it was different when you had a centrally heated chalet to enjoy it from.