Seven people make a lot of dishes, and I dry as Tom washes. His forearms are muscled, tattooed with colorful though slightly faded images. I once asked to see them, had admired the leaves and greenery on one arm where beautifully shaded insects hide among flowers, the water scene on the other, where turquoise ripples and bright fish scales interplay. Afterward, he’d seemed almost embarrassed and pulled his sleeves to his wrists. They made me think there was more to him than he liked to present to the world, but I’ve since concluded that old Tom must have vanished long ago, leaving only the tattoos as a remembrance.
The last dish goes in the rack. Tom wipes down the counter around the sink, squeezes out the sponge, and sets it in the sponge holder. He’s thrown a dishtowel over his shoulder, and now he helps me dry, handing me the dishes to put away. When every dish, every utensil, is dry, he wipes down the dish drainer.
“You know that’s meant to be wet, right?” I ask, smiling. “That’s its entire purpose in life.”
The corners of Tom’s mouth dip. “Not if there aren’t dishes in it.”
I hang my dishtowel over the side of the sink. It’s fairly obvious I was kidding about the dish drainer. Instead of going through the rigmarole of explaining the existence of jokes to a grown man, I say, “Okay. Thanks for washing up.”
“Yup. I’ll see about helping your dad.” Tom carefully drapes his towel beside mine. He steps back, frowns, and adjusts my dishtowel so it’s perfectly straight to match his. Then he nods once and walks away.
I sigh. It’s going to be a long zombie apocalypse.
12
Rose
I watch Jesse, Pop, and Tom carry the wood from the shed toward the house while Willa trots around on the end of her retractable leash. The large shed is in back, about forty feet from the patio, and that’s as far as anyone is traveling if I have anything to say about it. Earlier this morning and against my wishes, Pop knocked on the door of our neighbor to the right, but Mr. Gustafson wasn’t home. Maybe he never will be. I strike that thought from my mind. He’s likely at his kids’ houses in town. The house across the street is empty as well—my neighbors Kayla and Michael took their boys on a spring break camping trip in their RV a couple of days ago.
Nothing lurks in the woods to the rear and left. The fence is unbroken. We checked every inch of the property through the windows before going outside, but the mental image of a zombie appearing from nowhere and taking Jesse down is vivid enough that I step off the patio while I stifle the urge to scream at them to run.
Willa has already peed in seven different spots, and now, after turning in a circle fifty-two times, she squats. “How long does that dog take to crap, anyway?” Mitch asks, and I force a laugh. “Don’t humor me. They’re fine. Everything’s fine.”
“Everything’s fine?” I ask.
“You know what I mean.”
Mitch is taking this in stride, the way Mitch always does, but she’s worried about her parents. They live in Florida now, playing Mahjong and golfing with the other retirees when they aren’t asking if there are any grandchildren on the way. No matter that Mitch has made it clear there would never be grandchildren for years now. She’s child-free and happy as a clam about it.
I exhale when the men reach the patio with the wood, and the knots in my stomach loosen as I follow them through the sliding doors into my bedroom. Pop sets down his half sheets of plywood and pats my shoulder. “It’s hard work keeping the universe going through sheer force of will, isn’t it, Rosie?”
“Shut your trap, old man.” I kiss Pop’s cheek and notice Tom watching. “He makes fun of me for worrying.”
Tom absorbs that information with a nod. “Should the wood go in the front?”
“Bring it to the basement,” Pop says. “We’ll measure and cut it down there, where it’ll be quieter.”
Tom lifts his load and heads that way. “The guy’s not a laugh a minute, is he?” Mitch asks me.
I snicker. Guilt rolls in a second later, though Tom didn’t hear. Clara told me the details of what happened last night before she cried herself to sleep. His wife and son are gone, and he had to finish them off. Even if this is regular Tom, there’s an excuse for it today. “We’re being mean. He’s had an awful couple of days. I can’t even imagine.”
“It’s okay, Rosie,” Pop says. “The universe knows you don’t have a mean bone in your body.”
That’s patently untrue. All he’d have to do is spend five minutes in my head and it would be obvious. “I have plenty of mean bones.”
“Maybe a pinky bone.” Pop winks and brings his load down the hall.
Before Jesse can do the same, I touch his hand. “How are you?”
“Okay.” Jesse shrugs. “I don’t know.”
“Same here, baby. Thanks for helping out.”
He nods and picks up his wood. I watch him leave and sit on the edge of my bed. Tom made it this morning, and it’s neater than before he slept in it, which is not surprising.
“You have mean cartilage,” Mitch says, sitting beside me. “It acts like bone until it bends.”
“That doesn’t sound like a compliment.”
“It’s not, but it’s not an insult, either.”
I lean on Mitch’s shoulder. “Are we going to die?”
“One day.”
“I keep thinking Ethan will come home any minute,” I say. Mitch is silent. “I do want him to be okay, you know.”
The thought he might not be makes me ill. Everything else aside, he’s the father of my children, and they’ll be devastated. So will I, once I get past the disconnect I rely on to stay sane. It hasn’t always been this way. Once upon a time, it was us against the world, and we held our own.
The positive pregnancy test was more than a surprise—it was a shockwave. We were young and invincible enough to get swept up in the excitement of having a baby. I was a bit too fanciful with my fairy-tale view of our future, and we had our share of lean times, but I hadn’t been far off in terms of happiness. Until five years ago.
“That cartilage is why I love you,” Mitch says. “Who else would love me the way you do?”
I’m about to argue how everyone would and should love Mitch, when Holly calls, “Mom!”
We dash down the hall to where Holly and Clara stand near the radio. Pop, Tom, and Jesse arrive, breathless from the run up the basement steps. The radio boys are back on the air.
“…and it’s fucked,” Kevin says, nowhere near as keyed up as yesterday. “My dad told me not to say that, but it’s true. They’re not telling him anything except to get everyone to someplace safe down here. He asked where that was, and they said, ‘Do the best you can.’ My dad and some of the National Guard are making a Safe Zone at the fairgrounds. If you need somewhere safe, and you can make it, come to the fairgrounds. If you’re safe, stay home for now. Don’t try to leave Oregon—they won’t let anyone through the roadblocks in Portland, and you can’t get across the mountains, so don’t even try.”
“The roadblocks were in Albany last night,” Mitch murmurs. Portland is far north of Albany, which means they couldn’t hold the roadblocks, and that doesn’t bode well for Portland. Or for us.
“They say to wait. Once they have us cordoned off, and the zombies die in a month, they’ll come in and rescue us. We have to make it thirty days. We can do that, right?”
The other kid chimes in, “Yeah, we can! Thirty days is nothing. If you have enough food and water, you’ll be okay.”
Thirty days seems so long and, then again, not long at all. It’s finite. Survivable. The party supplies mean we have more food than usual. With the kids away at school, and Ethan and I not sitting down to dinner often, I bought much of our food ready-made. The days of me cooking up a storm, of an overfull pantry, are gone—a fact for which I could kick myself now. But we’re lucky to have something. The people with bare cabinets, whether by choice or lack of funds, are not.
“All right,” Kevin says, “we’ve gotta go meet my dad, but
we’re going to leave you with a song for the apocalypse. Bye for now.”
The frenzied piano opening of “Apocalypse Please” swells. It fits the chaotic thoughts in my mind, and I close my eyes. Thirty days. Prisoners of war survive longer. The kids will live because I’ll ground them for the thirty days the radio promised. We’ll find more food somehow. I open my eyes at a growl from Willa, who leaps onto the chair by the front window and begins to bark.
I grab the dog and hold her mouth shut, then freeze at the view outside the glass. Michael and Kayla are pulling into their driveway in their RV, and I watch as seven zombies appear from the roadside woods at the engine’s rumble. Surely they know what’s going on. They have to know, must have seen, though if they came in on the wooded back road with few houses, there might have been nothing to see. Where they camp—a friend’s vacant land in the woods southwest of here—lacks cell service. And with no service anywhere now, panicked messages left by family and friends likely never made it through.
The RV rolls to a stop on its smooth concrete pad to the left of the driveway. The running lights cut out, the side door opens, and my body floods with a prickling horror. They don’t know. I toss Willa to the floor and run to the front door, a scream caught in my chest.
“Rosie!” Pop yells, but I race down the hill, sliding in my shearling boots through wet grass.
The air in Eugene often feels heavy, as it sits at the narrow southern end of the Willamette Valley, and now it carries the stench of rotting bodies and the first few drops of rain. I run to the right of the front gate, where they might see me before they leave the motorhome.
“Don’t come out!” I shout. “Stay inside!”
I hit the fence screaming. Michael, early thirties and friendly, steps to the pad. He stares at the man who’s turned the corner of the RV and raises his hands like back off, moving aside when the zombie advances. Kayla stands on the bottom step of the door with their younger child, Julian, in her arms.
“Go in!” I wave my arms. “Get back inside!”
Michael punches at the zombie, who lunges and takes him to the ground. Kayla spares me a glance, then sets Julian on the lowest step and runs for her husband as the other six zombies round the back of the RV onto the parking pad.
I bolt for the zombie I killed last night, reach into its open mouth to grasp the knife handle, and yank. It takes me only seconds to get around Pop’s truck, to notice everyone from the house racing down the incline, before I jump the fence to the road. Of the six zombies, two go for Kayla and four move to where Julian stands. Where his older brother, Elliot, has joined him on the step to watch.
It could be Jesse and Holly. For a moment, it is Jesse and Holly. I hear Kayla’s primal screams, register it’s too late for her, and go straight for the boys. If I can beat the zombies there, I can lock myself in with the kids. Protect them until the others call the zombies away.
“Go inside!” I scream. “Shut the door!”
The boys watch me with giant, terror-stricken eyes. The last of the zombies spins at my shout. It’s the woman from the driveway last night, her skirt stiff with dried blood and covered with moss and leafy bits from the woods. They’re even worse in the light of day, when I can see every detail of her veined gray skin and staring eyes. The smell is awful—shit, rotten teeth, lunchmeat two weeks past its sell-by date. I had my doubts that they were truly dead, but this is a corpse, an actual fucking corpse, coming for me.
I almost turn tail and run. I would, if there weren’t two defenseless, parentless boys in need of help. I garner my courage, recalling the way my blade bounced off the skull of the one by the truck. Eyes and mouths have to be easier. I take three steps forward and plunge the blade into her face.
It isn’t a perfect hit, and my knife scrapes something solid before it slides into the gelatinous orb. The woman falls to the ground, and now a man is closing in. Before I can react, a gunshot roars, the top of the man’s head disintegrates, and Pop is beside me, gun in hand.
Tom appears on my other side, gun raised, and fires at the zombie gnawing Kayla’s limp body. I duck and run toward the RV. We can’t chance a bullet so near the kids, and the doorway is obscured by three bodies. Though they lean inside, they haven’t made it up the stairs.
I near a man in a green windbreaker. Tom’s thick arm reaches past me, grabs it by its collar, and presses the gun to its temple. The report of the shot makes my eardrum squelch. A teenage girl turns and hisses through blood-soaked lips, and I swing my knife sideways, hoping that ears are soft enough to breach. They are, though the gristle is tougher than an eye. The girl drops as Pop’s shots ring out to the right. The last zombie at the RV turns my way, and I retreat a step at the sight of Pete Gustafson, my neighbor. He snarls, his white hair red with fresh blood and his neck chewed to a pulp. That’s all I see before his face is obliterated by Tom’s gun.
The two boys lie just inside the door on the RV’s kitchen floor, bright red blood pooling beneath cabinets and soaking into the carpet of the living area. The air smells like iron and shit. Julian is gone or close to it—eyes glazed and neck a gash of red tissue. Elliot breathes in sharp gusts. His chest jumps and blood runs from his mangled midsection.
I climb into the RV, kneel over Elliot, and smooth his brown ringlets from his forehead. His eyes move to me, so frantic and afraid that I drop to the floor and pull his upper body into my lap. I cradle his head on my arm, using my other hand to brush his cheek. “It’s okay,” I whisper. “I know it hurts, but don’t be scared.”
Elliot nods, chest hitching. His cheek is so soft, so cold. He’s dying, and I can’t bear to see him afraid in his final moments. “Just go to sleep, sweetie. It’ll be okay. I have you.”
Warm, wet blood soaks into my pants from his abdomen. It wicks up from the floor. Elliot’s eyelids lower. “I’m here.” My voice cracks. “I have you.”
This is a waste. A waste of two sweet children and their parents. We want to survive thirty days, and they didn’t last thirty minutes. Nothing can reach me in the RV—between last night’s zombies and these, it seems likely they can’t climb stairs—but I look to the door while I stroke Elliot’s cheek. Pop stands there, facing out. Tom watches me, his set features softened for once.
Elliot’s body eases in my arms. His mouth is lax and his chest motionless. But his little brother is moving. Julian’s chubby fingers twitch. His eyes flicker open and his head jerks. “Shit,” I whisper.
Julian struggles to sit up as I slide from under Elliot and scoot backward on my hands and knees. The handle of my knife is beneath Elliot’s leg, and I pull it free. We could lock them in here, but they’ll be kid zombies rattling around in their RV coffin. That thought is worse than what I have to do.
Tom steps up and into the RV. He has a gun, but common sense dictates he won’t fire it in here. Jesse shouts something from outside. “More coming,” Pop says. “Move.”
I slide through blood to where Julian has turned onto his side, press one shaking hand to his temple to pin him down, and push the knife under the base of his skull with my other. It takes two tries to pierce his smooth baby skin, and my stomach heaves at the give of flesh and the scrape against vertebrae. I thank the gods when his body slumps to the floor.
I don’t want to do it again, but, like his brother, Elliot won’t stay dead for long. I spin on my knees and do the same to him, all the while trying to distance myself from the awful coppery smell and the feel of the blade. I tell myself they’re only meat now, no different from a steak or a roast, but a sob still pushes its way past my lips.
“Rose!” Pop yells. “Now!”
I get to my feet and step to the door. Tom practically tosses me to the concrete from the top step, where Pop grabs my elbow and yanks me toward the road. Jesse stands in the middle of the asphalt with a knife, his gaze moving from us to a group of zombies two hundred feet away. Mitch and the girls are behind the fence, and Mitch drops her knife to assist Pop, who makes it over easier than I anticipate
d.
We race up to the house and into the living room. Once the door is closed and locked, Pop takes me by the arms, his face tomato-red and eyes snapping. “What the fuck is wrong with you? Don’t ever do anything like that again!”
I stare at him in shock. I can barely remember Pop ever yelling at me, and he’s absolutely livid. “I had to try to help them,” I say.
“No, you didn’t!” He shakes me, his fingers digging into the tender flesh of my inner arms. “You didn’t, Rose. And you didn’t help them. All you did was almost die!”
He releases me and storms down the hall. My anger at him for treating me like a child dissipates. He’s scared, the way I would be if Jesse or Holly pulled the same stunt. I’ve never hit my kids, but I might in this case, if only to smack some sense into them.
All at once, I’m terrified. My hands shake. It was insane to vault the fence and go after those monsters on my own, though I only wanted to lock myself in the RV. Watching two little boys die would’ve kept me up at night. The guilt would’ve tortured me. Maybe it was the right decision, maybe the wrong one, but it didn’t feel like a decision at all.
I let out my breath, then turn to the others with a rueful smile. “Think I’m grounded?”
Mitch guffaws. The kids crack up and Tom smiles, though he reverts to stern immediately. Holly turns from where she watches out the window. “It was pretty stupid, Mom.”
I shrug. Even that small motion hurts. “Sometimes you have to try.”
Holly lets the curtain close. “They’re going past. I guess they were too far down to tell where we went.”
Blood coats much of me and is beginning to dry on my hands. The backs of my thighs stick to my jeans where it’s turned tacky. I have to wash this off, am dying to do so, but my legs won’t cooperate. When I loosen my fist, my knife sticks to my palm. I pull it free with my left hand and hold the blade up in the daylight. Though it hit bone, it appears undamaged.
The Cascadia Series (Book 1): World Departed Page 9