by Ponce, Jen
“Pretty,” they say, drawing out the word.
She counts to ten, counts as she slowly turns her head this way and that, trying to figure out where the hell they are so she can kill them, can blast their heads off, can watch their brain matter spray, can know for a goddamn fact that they’re dead.
There. One of them is standing by the far corner of the house. She sees his longer hair flapping in the wind. He’s slowly creeping out, his fingers clenching spastically, greedily, as if they can almost feel themselves tangle in her hair. Any hair, because he doesn’t know she’s here. He hasn’t seen her yet because she hasn’t moved.
They’re like T-Rexes, a voice says, reaching fingers from the past to torment her now. Like the movie T-Rexes. They can’t see us if we don’t move.
It isn’t that they can’t see. It’s that they aren’t interested in what doesn’t run. They like prey.
Maybe a fleshcicle wouldn’t thrill them after all.
The thought is dreamy as if she’s floating up and away from her body. While she floats away, her body swings the gun to one side and fire flashes. She imagines a bullet cutting through that cold air, slicing through snowflakes, melting them with its heat. When it impacts the man, his skin splits, his skull cracks then shatters, his brain rips as the bullet tears through.
Blood splatters and it is as satisfying as she imagined.
“You!”
She pivots and fires again. The bullet goes wide. She plunks gracelessly back into her body as the “You” charges at her. He’s seen her movement, he’s heard her noise, and he’s hungry. She fires again and then he’s toppling her, slamming her into the ground hard enough to knock the breath right out of her. She hasn’t even gotten the chance to get her arm up to brace under his chin and all she can think of are his teeth where are his teeth when will he bite her will he bite her face oh god her nose she can’t …
He’s silent. He’s still.
Her breath is gone, forced free of her lungs and for ten thousand million moments she is sure she will never draw a breath again. Sometimes, when children are horribly abused, they don’t grow. Psychosocial dwarfism is caused by extreme emotional deprivation or stress. Her heart, her lungs, her brain, perhaps they are done, stunted, unable to do one more thing because the weight is too heavy, the grief too much to bear.
Then she gasps bitter air that hurts, that reminds her she’s alive whether she likes it or not.
She shoves the man off her and staggers to her feet, a twinge in her side that’s more than a twinge, more like a sharp stab, but that she can’t think about it because it doesn’t matter what it is. She brings the gun back up and waits.
Better to be cold than dead.
Better to be cold than dead.
Better to be--
11
Then
Lana and I met at a soup kitchen. She was volunteering her time when I barged in, hot on the trail of a kid I was mentoring. Back then I didn’t have the best boundaries and I was pretty sure I could save the world one LGBTQ teen at a time.
My quarry was a fifteen-year-old kid named Jerri who thought she could find her father if she hunted through all the homeless in Seattle. Not only was this an almost impossible task but it wasn’t safe, not for a petite little thing like Jerri. But she had a face full of acne and five people’s worth of personality, a dragon in a Chihuahua body, basically, and no one, including me, was going to tell her what she could and couldn’t do.
I loved her to death. She also made me want to take up drinking.
That day it was hot and humid. Jerri had led me on a wild goose chase through Pike’s Place Market, down the waterfront and back again until we ended up in this tiny, hot building filled with unwashed bodies.
I was tired, my calves hurt from all the fricking hills, and I was ready to yell at this poor girl who had never had a stable moment in her life because I’d forgotten it wasn’t about me, it was about her.
Lana must have known something was up, had read whatever was on my face and interpreted it correctly even then, before she knew me, and threw herself between sweaty-faced me and Jerri. “Whoa,” she’d said, her gloved hands up in surrender before me, her chestnut hair in a net. She had a glob of potatoes on her right boob and beautiful, expressive eyes. “Everything okay here?”
I jabbed my finger over her shoulder at Jerri and to this day I could still remember my frustration that this girl was doing everything she could to get herself killed, or worse, still remember wanting to shake the shit out of her despite having never, not ever, laid my hands on any kid I’d ever worked with.
“It’s okay. Whatever it is, it’s okay.” Those words were like a pin to my anger balloon. I remembered that vividly too, that sudden de-escalation of all that stupid anger. I realized where I was, what I had been doing, and wondered how in the hell I ever thought I was good at working with kids.
Lana shifted so she could see Jerri. “You guys look hot. Would you like some iced tea?”
I’ve told her that story, the way she’d defused my anger with her calm interference, and she laughed at me. It hadn’t been momentous to her the way it had to me. So many things had shifted for me that day, not the least of which was my relationship with Jerri. I’d been chasing her out of a misplaced sense of responsibility, but she hadn’t needed a mother hen. She’d needed someone to help her see her own capabilities.
I thought about that day after Lana’s outburst because I didn’t want to be angry with her and whenever something she said or did pissed me off, that memory calmed me. Some days it worked better than others and this time I couldn’t help but wonder where Jerri was now, if she was dead and roaming the world looking for something to eat, or if she was scared and holed up somewhere in the city.
So many of the kids I’d helped were out there too. Some homeless, some in tenuous living situations … I guessed everyone was in a tenuous living situation now.
“Damn it,” she whispered as I slowed the car at yet another roadblock. This one was an accident, a UPS truck spilled sideways across two lanes, packages spread across a third, trucks and cars jammed around. There were bodies, some dead, some not-so-dead. One guy was trapped under the flipped package truck. He craned his neck to see us, his mouth moving like a dead-eyed fish in a tank. I didn’t know if he was saying anything. We had the radio on so we wouldn’t have to hear them.
“We’ll figure it out,” I said, though I wasn’t sure we would. We might have to go on foot if we wanted to get out of the city and oh, how that terrified the shit out of me. On foot with these things out there ready to kill us? Hell no. I turned us around and went through a nearby parking lot hoping we could exit on the other side of the jam but it extended farther than I expected. There was a grass median that wasn’t too gnarly, so I eased the car over it and into the next parking lot. We traveled that way until the road cleared and it looked like we might make it out of town after all.
“I wish we’d never come,” Lana said in a small voice. “Rod has screwed us over time and again and what do I do when he wants to make amends for the fiftieth time? ‘Oh, of course, Rod, whatever you need Rod. Forgiveness is important, Rod.’” She hit the door with her fist and when that didn’t satisfy her, she did it again. “And don’t you dare say, ‘That’s what you do, Lana,’ like I’m some fucking saint. I’m just an idiot. An idiot he walked over all his life and now look at this! Look at it!” She jabbed out the window at a group of them huddled together by a crashed truck looking for all the world like a prayer circle … until we saw the bloody remains they were passing around. “He lured us here with his bullshit and you called it. You knew. You didn’t want to come. Oh god. If I’d listened to you, we’d be with the boys now instead of halfway across the god damned country!”
After a minute, after I’d thought up and then discarded half a dozen things I could say, I ventured, “Are you saying that Rod wanted to screw us over so badly he engineered the zombie apocalypse?”
Her eyes, her lovely expressive eyes fle
w to mine and in them I saw the exact second the absurdity hit her and the bloom of hopeless amusement that made her want to laugh a little bit more than she wanted to cry. “Yes. Yes, I fucking am. If anyone would, it would have been Rod. The bastard.”
In that, I thought, we were in perfect agreement.
12
Then
We didn’t see the police until it was too late to back away unseen. Lana immediately tensed and I knew she was thinking of that man we saw shot in the road last night. Her hand snaked over to clutch mine as guns were raised and pointed in our direction.
An older man with silver-white hair made his way over to us, his face grim, his shirt speckled with red. He gestured for me to roll down the window which I did, though it made me nervous, not just because he had a shotgun in hand, but because I didn’t know if they were nearby. Surely they’d be drawn to the sound, to the people, but maybe they’d learned these particular people were dangerous. “There’s a curfew,” he said without preamble. “Why are you folks out?”
Lana was squeezing my hand so hard it hurt. I patted her with my free hand and whispered, “Ease up,” then said, “We aren’t from here. We’re trying to get home.”
He grunted. “Been on the radio about the curfew.”
“We don’t have a place to stay.” I didn’t repeat the out of town part because I didn’t want to piss the guy with the weapon off. “We just want to get out of Omaha and on the road.”
His steely eyes took me in, then he bent to look at Lana. “Either of you been bit?”
“No. We’ve been in the car all day trying to get around all the wrecks. Is the city quarantined?”
He didn’t answer, just straightened and spoke into his handie-talkie. “Two females, said they’re unbitten, wanting to head out of town.” The radio squawked and a voice came through, the words undecipherable to me. He put a hand on the car and leaned over again. “We’ll have you pull through, check you both for bites, and then you can get something to eat at the fire hall. You can decide from there if you want to stay or get on the road, though I’d advise you to hole up with us for a while. Especially if you don’t have supplies. Might be this’ll blow over in a few days.”
He didn’t sound like he believed that.
Lana scootched closer so she could see him. “Our boys are in Seattle with their grandparents. We want to get back to them.”
I wasn’t sure underlining the fact that we were lesbians was the best idea, though he’d probably figured that out by Lana’s death grip on my hand. I hoped he wasn’t one of those people who liked to be dicks just because or worse, who were dicks because their religion insisted they had to be.
“I have a kid in Arizona and one in DC.” His voice roughened. “So far the news from out east isn’t good.”
“I’m so sorry,” I said, and I truly was. Not knowing was the worst part. Not being able to call and hear the boys’ voices. At least we’d gotten some texts through. From the gravel in his voice, I guessed he hadn’t been so lucky.
“Captain Hart? One of them coming around the corner. A runner.”
Captain Hart straightened, the shotgun snapping up to his shoulder. From what I knew about shotguns, they weren’t great for anything long range. He’d have to let the runner get close to fire and that was risky business.
I caught the figure in the rear view loping our way and shifted the car into reverse.
“What are you doing?”
“Contingency plan,” I said, waiting tensely as the thing got closer.
It was singing, the words punctuated with each slap of foot on pavement. “Polly. Wolly. Doodle. All the. Day!”
Boom!
The crack of the shotgun startled me. Lana twitched, her hand squeezing tight again. When I looked back, the runner was down but his mouth was still running. “I went to town, singing Polly Wolly Doodle All the Day!”
Boom!
His face dissolved.
I shut my eyes but it was too late. The image was seared into my memory.
“Go on,” Captain Hart says, quieter than before. “I hope you get where you need to go.”
I did too.
I pulled the car around the barrier and into a parking lot they had blocked off in all but two directions. A younger man in a firefighter outfit directed us where to park and led us to a tented area where an exhausted nurse inspected us both for bite marks. She was respectful but thorough, and I was feeling prickly when she finally gave the okay for us to enter the hall itself.
A few dozen people sat at tables and sat on the floor, either on blankets or sleeping bags, and a few on mattresses probably moved from the firefighters’ sleeping area. The smell of onions and seared meat filled the room and my stomach growled happily even as I crowded Lana at the sight of all those people.
Too many people.
If one of them was bitten …
But no, the nurse had checked us and presumably all of the others in here, so I shouldn’t worry that the classic zombie movie trope of the hidden bite had happened here. Surely no one would be that stupid.
We got in line where a cute guy in a hairnet served us potatoes and chopped steak with onions, and green beans. A hearty meal and when I said as much, the guy said, “We were having our fundraiser when this shit went down. It’s why we had so much food. Lucky us, huh?”
“Yeah. Thank you.” We took our plates to a half-empty table and enjoyed every bite of the fundraiser meal. Lucky us indeed.
“This is unreal,” Lana said. She’d only eaten a quarter of her food whereas I had cleaned my plate and was contemplating licking the juices off. “So many people. That’s a good sign, right? That so many of them are okay?”
She was thinking of the boys and I wanted to believe that it was good, too, so I didn’t remind her that Omaha was a city with a population of almost a half a million people, not counting all the suburbs. I had to remind myself there was a curfew. Maybe a lot more survivors were in their homes waiting this thing out. Maybe it had only seemed like all of Omaha had turned into monsters because we’d been rather stressed out and terrified since this whole thing started.
An older woman with long, stringy hair sat down with us, her lined face friendly. “You gals just got in, I see. Come from inside the city?”
“Yeah,” I said. “You?”
“I was headed through. Some yahoo cut in front of my truck and all hell broke lose. My cab tipped clean over, left me spilled out all over the road. Weren’t for those nice fellers over there,” she nodded at the small group of men in orange safety vests, “I’d been monster food.”
“Sounds like you got lucky,” I said.
She snorted. “I wouldn’t call this shit lucky. Anyway, I’m wanting to get out of here, head west. I have family in Alliance. Don’t suppose you gals are headed that way?”
Something in the way she asked made me think she knew we were headed to Seattle.
“Safety in numbers,” she said when neither Lana nor I replied. “I have a rifle and I’m a good shot.”
I glanced at Lana, then back to the woman. “Dee Harper-Smith. This is my wife, Lana Smith-Harper.” We shook hands and the woman leaned her elbows on the table.
“You guys have kids?”
When we nodded, she said, “How do they do the last names? The kids, I mean.”
“They use Smith-Harper,” I said when Lana stayed silent. It wasn’t like her to ignore someone, but perhaps she was tired or still traumatized over the little girl or hell, over everything that had transpired.
“Nice to meet you. I’m Ivy Latske. Trucker by trade. Love ‘em and leave ‘em kind of gal, not that it’s pertinent to this situation, sorry.” She laughed at herself with a self-aware charm I kind of liked. “Anyway, I don’t know if you want another passenger, but perhaps I could help out. Three can look out better than two, right?”
I took Lana’s cold hand, worried about her silence and the way she sat so still. “Give us a minute or so to talk it over.”
“Sure, sure. I know exactly where you’re coming from. I’ll take a stroll around the hall, let you decide. For what it’s worth, I want to thank you for even considering it. Haven’t found anyone yet who’d say yes.” She winked, clicking her tongue at the same time, then got up and walked away, hands in her pockets.
I leaned into my wife and nudged her gently with my shoulder. “What’s up?”
“You want to take her with us, don’t you?”
The tone of her voice made me wary. She was angry about something and if I wasn’t careful, I’d step right in it and catch it too. I shrugged carefully. “I thought she made a good point about having another set of eyes. Are you thinking it’s not a good idea?”
She speared a piece of beef and smeared her potatoes around with it. “I feel selfish even thinking this but … I don’t want you getting killed saving that woman.” She hesitated, then said, “It wouldn’t matter what gender. A third person means our attention is divided. It could put one of us at risk if she got into trouble and we felt compelled to save her.”
She said ‘we felt compelled’ but she meant me. She knew I had a huge savior complex and while she’d never been selfish about that before, these were different times, weren’t they? Where a stupid mistake could get us killed.
“I totally get where you’re coming from,” I said, and then, miracle of miracles, I stopped right there.
I was dumb sometimes when it came to my wife, but other times I wasn’t so clueless. She was the one who had to decide Ivy was coming with us, which meant I needed to sit back and let her make her choice. If I pushed, Lana would double down even if intellectually she knew there was safety in numbers.
“You do? No ‘safety in numbers’ arguments?” She wiggled quote fingers and then studied me as closely as a detective would their suspect, searching for any prevarication.
I hoped my face was blank. I hoped to hell it was. “Nope.”
She huffed and popped the meat in her mouth, chewing as she glared at Ivy across the room. “You have to swear right now that you won’t save her if it means putting yourself in danger. Swear it.”