Impassable

by Ponce, Jen

  “All three.”

  “Is that necessary, do you think?” Gloria asks.

  “Think of all those dead things back there. We have to do something big. Really big,” Alex says. “We need something that can be seen for miles to clear them out from where we want to go. And we need an escape route. We need to plan that. I don’t want to get blown up. And maps aren’t good enough, either. I want us to drive the route, all of us.”

  “Not bossy at all, are you?” Peter teases, then they get down to work, planning exactly how they will blow the three gas stations without blowing themselves up in the process.

  40

  Now

  The explosion is … epic. It’s bigger than Dee’s, bigger than any of them expect, and they watch from their second hideout as fire and smoke billows up into the sky. The boom is so loud it rattles the windows where they watch and Dee guesses many of the houses nearby lost their glass when it blew.

  “Come on. The dead things will be headed this way. We need to get farther away before they clog the streets and trap us.”

  Dee takes one more look before letting herself get tugged away.

  They are all in a giddy mood. Once again, things have turned out their way and Dee fears this means the bad is barreling at them from the misty future. She almost tells Alex she wants to go back to the Complex, opens her mouth to say just that three or four times, but manages to keep it inside.

  “You okay?” Alex asks as they drive the near-empty streets.

  “No.”

  Alex doesn’t try to fix things and she doesn’t spout empty platitudes; she just squeezes Dee’s hand and leans her head on her shoulder. Dee shuts her eyes and prays.

  “This it, honey?” Grace asks after a few minutes and Dee opens her eyes to see her cul-de-sac.

  She can only nod.

  All this time. It’s been so long. She’s gone through so much to get here, lost so many people, and now that she’s here she can’t quite believe it.

  Peter eases the SUV around a couple of cars abandoned in the road, and then they are moving toward her home, toward the place where she and Lana raised their boys. So many memories flood her: teaching Jackson how to ride his bike in the big, empty circle in front of their home, racing RC cars with both up and down their driveway, watching Tucker try to handstand in the yard, planting flowers with Lana, hosting their friends for cards and barbecues in the backyard. They’d lived here forever, and the memories pile up and up until they threaten to choke her.

  “Just breathe,” Alex says. “You’re almost there. Soon you’ll have answers.”

  “I don’t want them,” she says, her voice small.

  “Yes, you do. You do,” Alex insists when Dee stares at her. “Everything you’ve fought for, what you’ve survived for is in that house. I won’t let you turn back now.”

  Dee almost argues. She almost says that if she turns around now, her boys will always be alive in her head. If she goes in and finds them dead, she thinks she’ll go mad.

  She knows she’ll go mad.

  They all wait and watch, but the explosion did its job; there are none of them around, at least none they can see. Finally, they get out of the SUV and walk up the sidewalk Dee walked many times in her lifetime. She’d never felt like this before, though. This feels like doom. It feels like hope. It’s terrifying.

  ‘This is it, Lana, my love. What we fought for since leaving Omaha. I wish you were here with me.’

  “If wishes were horses,” she murmurs.

  “What?” Alex asks, but Dee just shakes her head.

  She still has her keys. After all this time in the apocalypse, after all the hell she’s been through, she kept hold of her keys. She pulls them out now and fits the key into the lock. Her hands aren’t shaking; she isn’t sure why not. She twists the handle and eases the door open, heart thundering so hard in her chest it’s all she can hear.

  “Jackson? Tucker?”

  The house is silent. It has the smell of emptiness, of a place long-abandoned but it doesn’t smell like death.

  The living room is clean. The kitchen, clean. Whatever happened, they hadn’t left in a hurry. That’s good, right? She thinks it might be.

  Why is she relieved? Why is she happy?

  Because they aren’t dead. Their bodies aren’t here.

  She goes through the main floor with increasing joy mingled with despair. Not in the laundry room, not in the downstairs toilet. Upstairs, their rooms are empty, her room empty.

  “They’re gone,” she finally says. She sits on her bed and feels all the world settle on her shoulders. “It’s over. They’re gone.” She will never know what happened to them. She hasn’t seen a note anywhere. It’s as if they were never here.

  She puts her face in her hands and weeps. She weeps not only because the boys aren’t here but because there’s no spray painted D. Somehow, someway, she harbored the hope that Lana had made it here. That she would walk in the front door and Lana would be here waiting to take her into her arms.

  Instead, it’s a stranger who hugs her. A woman she slept with only nights before, a woman she doesn’t even really know. Someone who could never replace her wife, but Dee is too devastated to shrug Alex off.

  “I’ll be okay. I’m sorry.” The words wash over her, leaving her feel empty inside. Empty but for the pain that sits like a hard knot in her chest.

  When she dries up, when the tears stop falling, she straightens. “I need to get something.” She opens the closet and stands on her tiptoes to reach the album from the top shelf. It’s filled with pictures of their little family, one book of many but this one has a little bit of everything. She doesn’t look at it, not now. She’ll fall apart if she looks at it now, so she tucks it under her arm and makes her way back downstairs.

  When she gets to the kitchen, she puts the photo album on the kitchen table and digs through her backpack for her flashlight. “I have to check downstairs,” she tells Alex. She yelled down there when she first arrived, but now she realizes she must go down and take a good look around. The basement is dark, but not scary. It’s never been scary because they worked hard as a family to make sure the boys held no fear of it. Once again, it’s empty, but she already knew that when she came down. She isn’t here because she thinks they’re hiding, but because the boys have a place where they used to hide their treasures.

  She goes to the far wall and pulls back the baseboard. A small tin container sits there and she pulls it out. Opens it. Sobs again when she sees the envelope. “Mom,” it says.

  “Oh,” she whispers. There’s nothing else in the tin, but she clutches it and the letter to her chest and climbs the stairs to rejoin the rest of her companions. “Look,” she says, showing the envelope to Alex, to Peter and Gloria, before easing the flap out. It’s notebook paper, the ripped bits still on the side. Tucker then. He never tore off the ripped bits but his brother always did.

  Did that mean—? No, she tells herself. Don’t.

  She opens the paper and flattens it on the table.

  Dear Mom and Ma,

  We’re okay. We swear. We did like you said and stayed inside. Mom Mom and Pop Pop are fine too. We taught them how to kill the zombies—all those years of gaming paid off! Anyway, we have to leave. We have food, but the things keep coming around. We covered the windows, we’ve been careful but they know, Ma. I think they’re smarter than movie zombies. Mr. and Mrs. Peterson came over. They have their RV. We’re heading down to Eatonville. Mr. Peterson—Jimmy—says that they have old buildings, old tools, stuff we could use to survive this shit without electricity. Oh. Sorry. Stuff. Anyway, Jackson, Mom Mom, Pop Pop, the Petersons, me, and Natalie—you remember Natalie? From school? Okay, love you guys. Come find us soon. We miss you. We hope … Jackson says I’m supposed to be hopeful, but I’ve seen them out there, okay? It’s bad. I don’t know how you’ll get back here if this is what it’s like everywhere.

  I guess if you’re reading this you made it. Go Mom and Ma!


  Okay. Gotta go. Love you!

  Tucker

  She is sobbing again, this time happy tears. They are alive. Or they were.

  She flips the paper over, hoping to see a D written on it but no. Nothing. The tin yields no further clues either. If Lana made it here before her, she didn’t leave a note.

  “Do you have a pen? No, wait.” She gets up and goes to the junk drawer where Tucker always shoved every pen he ‘borrowed’ from his friends, his teachers, his mothers. She grabs one and flips the letter over, writing a note to Lana filled with all the desperation and love she’s been holding for her. Then she folds it back up, sticks it back in the tin, and tells them she’ll be back. She hides it where she found it, then rejoins them upstairs. “They’re alive.”

  Peter and Gloria exchange looks, then they hug her tightly. “We’re happy for you, Dee, we really are.”

  “I’ll help you get home, and then I’m headed south to Eatonville. There’s a living history place there. Took the boys a couple times when they were younger.” She turns to Alex. “I understand if you don’t want to come with me. And we can go check on your brother and his family. We’re close, right? And now’s the time.”

  “Okay,” Alex says, her smile a mixed bag of joy and terror. Dee understands. Soon Alex will know whether or not her family is alive or dead. There’s no way to prepare for those kinds of answers.

  It’s all Dee can do to keep from grinning like a loon. Her boys are alive. Only an hour away.

  She can get to them. She will.

  “Let’s go. Let’s find your brother. Come on.” She ignores their glances, their worry that the letter is another in a long line of false hopes. She can’t think that way now. Not after so long.

  Things will be okay. The boys are okay.

  Everything will be okay.

  They have to be.

  41

  Then

  We got into South Dakota before the weather stopped us again. The wind kicked up first, pushing the truck around on the already slick roads, and then the snow began, first lightly and then with increasing force. “We need to find a place,” I said, but it took thirty more minutes of increasingly bad weather before we were able to pull off.

  We didn’t get as lucky this time as we had before. It was a gas station, and a small one at that. Isaac killed two of them trapped inside, their wasted faces and half eaten arms making my stomach feel funny. Had they gotten bored and torn into each other? Or had they been killed by someone else? Something else?

  And where were they?

  “I don’t think we’re alone,” I said. The place was small and we’d checked the backroom, but both doors were shut when we got there.

  “Whatever did this probably left. Pushed their way out. We saw that one using a rock to try to break the car window, remember? It wouldn’t be hard for it to push its way out.” Dan let his backpack fall to one of two dining tables at the front of the store. The front window was soaped over, but I didn’t like all that glass. It wouldn’t be hard for them to break through it and then where would we be? I hoped the blizzard kept them away from us. I hoped we’d get out of here alive.

  “I suppose,” I said, but I made another pass anyway, looking inside cabinets with extreme, ridiculous caution. We were alone. But the idea that we weren’t persisted.

  There wasn’t room to put up our tents, but we still had several boxes of hand warmers and our sleeping bags. The gas station had pop in the cold cases, along with long-melted ice cream, and beer. We each got a beer and sat on the floor in a small circle, toasting the fact that we’d survived another day without getting eaten.

  Not getting eaten was a wonderful thing to celebrate.

  Isaac was first on watch and the rest of us cuddled up in our sleeping bags in the hopes we would wake in the morning to a brighter day.

  It wasn’t meant to be, of course, but we didn’t know that until I woke sometime in the middle of the black night, aware that nobody had gotten me up for my watch shift. Dan and Paisley slept on beside me. Isaac’s bag was empty.

  I grabbed my weapon and rose, fear a hot, tight band around my chest. I stepped over my companions and clicked on the flashlight I kept on a lanyard around my neck when I slept. The room was empty.

  I went behind the counter, certain I’d be grabbed, certain I’d feel the dull, biting pain of one of their jaws, but nothing happened. The small backroom was tiny and it, too, was empty. The door creaked a little as I pushed it open, thunked against the wall when I pushed it all the way to make sure there wasn’t anything hiding behind it. Just to be absolutely sure, I looked behind it as well.

  Still nothing.

  Had Isaac gone outside?

  Why?

  And why hadn’t he come back?

  I checked the back door, but it was locked, the deadbolt engaged. We’d found keys. Had he taken them? Why?

  Why would he go outside?

  I woke up Dan, putting my finger over my lips so he wouldn’t say something to wake Paisley. No reason to get her involved, not yet, not until we knew more about what happened.

  I realized I was already thinking in past tense, thinking in terms of incidents, of events.

  The keys were gone and the front door unlocked. It made me angry, very angry. He went without word to any of us and left us vulnerable. I hoped we’d find him so I could punch him.

  The storm was still raging, and I knew the minute we stepped outside that we wouldn’t find him, not in this. “Let’s try the truck and then we’ll have to go back in.”

  “Stick close,” Dan said, and he plowed ahead through drifts that were already almost up to my knees.

  Isaac wasn’t in the truck. For whatever reason, he’d left us.

  Dan slapped the door, then leaned on it for a moment, his look of despair evident even in the dark, even in the snow. Then we went back to the store and shut the door behind us. Without the keys, we couldn’t lock it, so Dan attached a tow rope we found in the back and secured it to the sturdy base of the counter.

  We crawled into our bags, our hands and feet numb from the cold. Neither of us woke Paisley. We didn’t talk. We just curled up tight and pretended to sleep until morning, when Paisley was the one who said, “Where’s Isaac?”

  Dan kept his eyes shut, putting the telling on me. I rubbed my forehead, still cold from the night before. “He left.”

  “What?”

  “In the middle of the night. He took the keys and left.”

  “What? He wouldn’t.” Her eyes went to the door where we’d tied it closed. “Why did you do that? What if he tried to get in and he couldn’t?”

  “He could have gotten in the back door. He has the keys. He left the door open, left us—”

  “I’m going to look for him.” Paisley got out of her sleeping bag, tears already falling. “I can’t believe you didn’t wake me up. We need to look for him.” She pulled on her boots, yanking her arm free when I tried to stop her.

  “We can’t. It’s a blizzard out there. And we did go out to look for him.” Not far, but we had. “It was too bad. Visibility is about zero.”

  “I’m looking.” She yanked on her coat, her gloves, and wrapped a scarf around her head until all I could see of her was her eyes.

  “Paisley, remember what you told me? That you weren’t going to risk your life for him anymore?”

  “This is different. He’s been different. He told me sorry. He said he wouldn’t do that to me again. Okay? I’m not letting him die out there alone.”

  “There won’t be anything you can do. He was out there all night. If he didn’t find a place to hole up, he’s probably—”

  “What? Dead? No! Stop giving up on him. You don’t know that.” She shoved past me and then knelt to undo the rope, cursing and crying when she couldn’t get it free. I didn’t help her; there was no reason for her to go out there and risk herself over Isaac. He’d made his choice. “I can’t get this! Why won’t you help me?”

  “Because you don’t need
to go out there.”

  “Let her,” Dan said. His voice was grim. “Let her go. Let her kill herself for that boy who cares for nothing but himself.”

  “Dan,” I started, but he cut me off.

  “No. Let her go.” He got up, his hair wild, his mouth set. He unfastened the tow rope and shoved the door, shoved it again when it wouldn’t open because of the snow. “There. Go. Go find the asshole who has been trying to kill himself this whole time. Go on.”

  She glared at him, at me, and then she shoved past him and into the snow.

  The snow gobbled her up in seconds. Without looking at him, I said, “You shouldn’t have let her go.”

  “Why not? She clearly wasn’t going to take no for an answer. Why not let her go running after her little boyfriend?”

  I shook my head, then went back to the table where I slipped on an extra pair of socks, my boots, coat, gloves, hat, yadda yadda. I ignored him as I pushed my way outside into the white nightmare. I could barely make out the truck and I couldn’t see Paisley at all. Wherever she’d gone, she’d gone fast. “Paisley! Isaac?” Whatever sound I made the wind stole and after a bit, I gave up and went back inside. Snow swirled in behind me and it took me several tries before I got the door completely shut. I retied the rope, then stripped down, rubbing my hands together and blowing on them. I ignored Dan and he ignored me.

  We spent fifteen days trapped in that damned gas station, and in those fifteen days, we said maybe twelve words to each other, neither of us wanting to be the first to talk about our two missing companions.

  Dan was pissed. So was I, but I was also sad. They were just kids, after all. Young things in their twenties. They hadn’t asked for any of this. None of us had.

  I remembered the way Isaac’s body had trembled when I hugged him. I’d thought he was feeling better too, thought he’d made his peace with losing his brother, but apparently, he’d been making a different kind of peace. I should have seen it. I should have suspected at least. I’d worked with enough suicidal kids to know when one of them had made the decision to end their life.