“That’s a nice knife,” Tom says.
Under the blood, the handle is burled wood with a band of turquoise, and the blade itself is narrower than an average chef’s knife, allowing it to slide easily through smaller spaces. “It was a gift,” I say.
By a stroke of luck, one of my first listings was a million-dollar home. I thought it luck—Ethan said it was the way I put people at ease—and those clients recommended me to others. One gave me this knife after the closing, even with my large commission, because I’d gotten more for their house than they’d dreamed.
I once looked up the knife online. They’re custom made from the best steel and wood, used by both pathologists and serious chefs, and it likely cost five hundred dollars. Before zombies, it’s only ever cut vegetables and meat for dinner. I wish that were still the case.
“I should wash up,” I say, and tread wearily toward my bedroom. Sometimes you have to try, but that doesn’t make it any easier when you fail. That whole family wiped out in seconds. At least they aren’t walking around trying to eat people. That’s something. Not enough, but something.
When I’m almost out of the room, Jesse says, “Mom.” I look over my shoulder and find him smiling. “It was pretty stupid, but it was seriously badass.”
My laugh drains the remainder of my energy. “Thanks.”
13
Craig
Rose tried to talk me into coming to Eugene early, but I wanted to finish up work, maybe tack on another day or two at the end of the trip. It’s not the first decision I’ve ever regretted, but it’s taken the top spot on Craig’s List of Regrets.
And now, instead of safe with Rose and Mitch, I’m trapped in my condo in Oakland, staring out the window at a world I don’t recognize. I don’t want to recognize it. That would make it real, and it’s too fucking crazy to be real.
“Too fucking crazy,” I whisper. My forehead squeaks on the glass when I shake my head.
The sirens were insane, the lack of phone lines worse, but the dead bodies that walk around outside are unbelievable. I’ve watched them for days from the safety of my apartment, thinking I’ll wake from the nightmare any minute, but the nightmare officially became more nightmarish when the water went out this morning. Just a dribble from the faucet and then nothing. Last night, I had the idea of filling the bathtub, and it might have been the best idea I’ve ever had. My heart skips at the thought of no water at all. Of going out there.
Although I know it’s futile, I leave the window for my phone. It has battery left—plenty of it, since it charged all night—but that’s about to change. The power went out with the water, and that was likely its final charge. I lift the phone and swallow, hoping to quell my panic along with excess saliva. Still no bars, no data, no wifi.
No hope.
A soft cry escapes my lips. I clap a hand to my mouth, ear tilted toward the door fifty feet away, across my living room and past the open kitchen. There are three of them on the other side, wandering the hall. Neighbors I recognize, people I nodded at when we passed in the lobby or shared the elevator. Two of them let out the infected neighbor, and I listened to their screams while I huddled at the peephole. If I so much as attempt to open the door, they’ll be on me, tearing me to pieces the way the others tore apart people on the street. The people whose bodies still lie there. The ones who didn’t get up and stumble away to join their attackers, at least.
I want to cry, but I hold back tears for the first time since this started. My father always said that only pussies cry, thereby labeling me as a pussy without saying as much, until he did say as much. I clutch my phone and return to the window, my sole source of information. My hi-rise is the lone residential building on this corner, though I saw people looking out the windows of the hotel a block away. I haven’t seen them yet today, and I hope the screams I heard last night weren’t them.
It was only around a week ago that they began reporting about the virus in Vietnam. I paid a little attention—after all, it was a serious virus—but I figured it wouldn’t affect my life going to and from work. It seemed like SARS, like the threat of Ebola in the U.S. Serious but negligible.
Tuesday night, they said to beware of people acting erratically. I took my usual Uber home, and the driver said he’d seen a few wackos already. I’d been ready to assist with a 911 call, but the streets out of San Francisco, the Bay Bridge, and Oakland were business as usual, except for the increased number of emergency vehicles that raced past with lights flashing.
Be safe, Uber Man said when he stopped at the front door of my building. Maybe grab yourself some milk and bread like they do for snowstorms.
I laughed a little; I’m not good at talking to strangers. Then I thanked the man—I’m awkward, not impolite—and went into the building without giving it another thought. I’m paying for that now. I’ve imagined another scenario countless times: the one in which Normal Craig decides Uber Man’s idea is a good one, then goes to the store down the street and buys enough food for a week. Water, too. Or, better yet, the scenario where he rents a car or hops on a late flight to Oregon.
The takeout I ordered for dinner that night is gone. So are my cheese and crackers. I have three boxes of cereal, four cans of soup and a few of beans, a loaf of bread that’s quickly going stale, six frozen (now thawing) microwave dinners, pasta I can’t cook, peanut butter, a half jar of crystallized honey, blueberries, carrots, two apples, the can of water chestnuts for a stir-fry I never made, coffee, and sugar. After that, I have the large gourmet gift box sent to me a while ago by a happy client, which I brought home and shoved into a cabinet. I look over the stoneground crackers and cacao nib shortbread cookies, the pesto sauce, organic cheese spread, and artisanal jam. The gourmet pretzels enrobed in fair trade chocolate. The paper-wrapped salami. The dried fruit and seed trail mix. The burlap bag of macadamia nuts that were lovingly hand roasted and salted with fancier salt than the commoners use.
I’m used to this kind of food, but I grew up eating Planters peanuts from the can. Too many Planters peanuts. Not only was I a pussy, according to Dad, but I was a fat pussy. He said that one day—one of his mean days—when I was slurping the dregs of milk from my cereal bowl. Fat puss enjoying his milk?
“Not fat anymore, Dad,” I whisper. I haven’t been since my teen years, when I grew eight inches to top out at six feet tall. I watch through the glass as four zombies meander past the vegan soul food restaurant across the street. “Still a pussy, though.”
My half-crazed laugh fogs the window. You have to own up to your failings, Dad always said (though Dad never did), and I won’t deny I’ve failed this test of my courage. If I were with Rose and Mitch, maybe I’d be different. Stronger. They always promised to protect me when the apocalypse came. Of course, they were joking at the time, but I know they would anyway.
It happened so fast. The sirens woke me at dawn. The screams. The television’s local channels said to stay indoors until it was under control, that borders were closed so there was nowhere to go, while the national cable channels continued to play on as though the world wasn’t ending. I called Rose in a panic, but there was no service. I reached the building concierge on the phone intercom system to ask if I could use their phone, but all of theirs were down, too. It was only after Wi-Fi cut out moments later, along with the cable, that I thought to send an email. But, by some miracle—maybe a brief moment of service or an act of God—my voicemail transcription downloaded last night, and on it is a message from Rose.
The automated transcript contains the usual odd words and lack of punctuation. I’ve read it twenty times and could recite it by heart, but I lift my phone to read it again:
Hey craze calling to say hi the can of okra machine is waiting for your ask to get here and so am I I hope you haven’t been infected with the hazy virus and are too busy attracting people to answer call me back jerk love you bye oh also I made sure it has our songs so don’t go out partying and come to me all hungover or I’ll punch you in the face an
yway love you have a safe flight you will be safe don’t start thinking you won’t be safe now sheet you are aren’t you don’t you’ll be fine I’ll see you tomorrow if I don’t talk to you first wool love you okay I proms is I’m hanging up now bye
Rose rambles on voicemail—what should be a five-second message turns to thirty seconds or a minute—but I’m thankful for it now. It’s a voice from the normal world. A voice who loves me. In my mind, I can hear her: playful at the beginning, then filled with wry humor during her admonishment, followed by enthusiasm—wool is her saying woo! Excited about the karaoke machine, excited to see me. If she left the message yesterday, as my phone says, it means she’s fine. Oregon is fine. She doesn’t know about California. If she knew what it was like here, she wouldn’t have joked around. Rose is the mother of the three of us—the one who tempers Mitch and calms me—and the message would’ve been two minutes of her worrying about whether or not I was okay, with dire warnings to call her immediately lest she have to punch me in the face for not doing so.
I woke this morning thinking I might take a pill cocktail and lie down for an endless sleep. I don’t have enough of any one type of pill to do the job, but I played with enough mind-altering substances in the past to guess that my Xanax, the last half-bottle of tequila, the leftover pain pills from a toothache last year, and whatever else I can scrounge up would be enough. There’s always the hallway, too, if one is looking for a permanent way out. I shiver at that thought, glad my plan petered out with Rose’s message.
I spin away from the window and move for the short hall to the bathroom and bedroom. I’m peeing down the sink drain for now, saving the toilet tank for solid materials. The drain gurgles as I do my business, but when I finish, the gurgling continues. I stand for a moment, ears perked in the murky gray light, and follow the sound to the tub.
The bathtub. Your only water.
My panic is swift and merciless. I fall over myself running down the hall for the kitchen, where my single precious flashlight lays on the counter. I snatch it up and run back, sliding on wood floors and slamming a shoulder against the doorframe on my way in.
The water is half gone. A slow leak. I don’t take baths—lying in a pool of germs is not my cup of tea—and I never noticed the drain isn’t watertight.
“No, no, no.” I look around wildly for a container. No container. I grab the hand towel from the rack and push it into the water to cover the drain, murmuring denials to keep from screaming.
I race to the kitchen and pull out Tupperware containers. Glasses. A glass pitcher. The set of mixing bowls with lids. The pasta pot. Any and every receptacle. I bring as many as possible to the bathroom, return to the kitchen for more, and then race back to kneel at the tub. My breaths echo off the tile. Sweat pours from my cheeks. I scoop the water using a large rectangular container, dumping it into the other containers one by one. The flashlight, on the floor by my knees, illuminates the stray hairs that have collected by the baseboard. My cleaning lady is due. In five years, she’s never once been late or sick. If anyone’s alive, it’s Sofia. I imagine her showing up now, saying Hi, Mr. Craig in her Russian-accented voice, though I’ve told her not to call me Mister anything, and blowing past me to tsk at how I’ve cleaned for her visit.
I laugh. It echoes, sounding more psychotic for that, and I cover my mouth with one hand while I bail more water. At the very bottom is a quarter-inch of water the large container won’t capture. I use a smaller, bendable container until it becomes a shallow puddle. The drain still gurgles, though slower, and I go to the kitchen for a straw. I suck the water into my mouth and swallow. I do it again and again. Fear has dried me out, and it’s better to drink it now than to lose it down the drain. The last mouthfuls of water I spit into a glass container, then I wring the hand towel over top.
Once everything has a lid—whether matching or foil—I carefully truck all water receptacles to the kitchen. I can’t remember exactly how long you can go without water, but it’s not long. A few days. The news said authorities are coming. They didn’t say when, but if Oregon is okay, they’ll come for me, for survivors, eventually. I only need to stay alive until they do.
I stare at the gallons of water on the counter and kitchen floor, trying to assess it in days. Fuck all if I know. I know nothing except that I can’t leave, can’t face one of those things without my heart exploding in my chest. The very thought makes my hands shake until the rest of my body joins in. My lungs close, and I gulp for air as though I’m breathing through that straw.
“You can breathe,” I whisper-gasp. “You’re breathing. You’re okay.”
I have to calm down. Have to relax before I completely lose my shit. Back in the bathroom, I open my Xanax bottle. I can take one, since I’m no longer planning to take myself out. I dump a pill into my palm, add another, and swallow them dry before I return to the living room, breaths easing at the thought of the coming pharmaceutical calm.
I read Rose’s message again. Look over my food. Assess my water supply. It makes me edgier. One song. I need to hear one song while I wait for the pills to kick in. How much battery can one song use? I plug in my earbuds, sit on the couch, and cue up the only song I want to hear. The last song I might ever hear.
“I Know it’s Over” begins to play. Morrissey’s hushed voice is a time machine, taking me back twenty-five years. It was playing when I sat on a couch with Rose at seventeen years old, holding hands while I told her a secret I’d never told anyone. And she’d done what Rose always does: understood and loved me no matter what.
Ever since, it’s been our song. Depressing? Check. Hopeless? Hell, yeah. Melodramatic? You bet. But it makes me happy, and I need to lose myself in something good, even if it only lasts five minutes and forty-eight seconds. When the song ends, I force myself not to hit replay. Too much of The Smiths and I’ll be leaping headfirst from my fourth-floor balcony.
I shut off my phone and get to my feet, feeling just the right amount of loopy. First, I’ll make a sign and hang it from my balcony to alert the authorities. Then I’ll wait.
14
Clara
Five days at Holly’s feels like five weeks, but I made the right decision to come. Dad has shut down already, and being trapped in a house with just him to ignore me would’ve felt like five years. I have Rose, who lost her mother when she was young, to hug me and check in a few times a day. I have Holly to take my mind off things—things being my dead mom and brother, and the unknown of outside. I wish it were five weeks because it would mean the end of zombies. We’re counting down the days.
We have a routine: wake up, check the fence through the windows to be sure the yard is empty, walk Willa, eat breakfast. After that, it’s mainly keep quiet as much as possible and try not to die of boredom in the moments between a light lunch and dinner. We take turns sitting by the front window all day and night, watching for signs of living people and making sure no one dead comes our way. Because the windows are high off the ground, only an eight-foot-tall zombie would be able to see over the wood screwed to their bottom halves.
Holly and I sit on the high back of the easy chair to watch the road. A zombie is out there now, treading along in a single sneaker. “I still can’t believe this,” Holly says.
I know what she wants to say but doesn’t because of me: she’s worried about her dad. Ethan loves them more than anything, and his absence is not a good sign. Every time a new zombie appears, she takes a short breath then slowly releases it when it’s not Ethan.
“I bet your dad’s at the office, like your mom said.”
Holly’s hands twist together, though she doesn’t start picking at her fingers the way she sometimes does. “I’m tired of zombies. Let’s talk about anything else.”
“Like what?”
“Like…who’ll win the World Series this year.”
“Name a single baseball team.” Holly opens her mouth, and I add, “A team that’s not the Yankees or Red Sox. Or tell me anything at all about professiona
l baseball. Anything. One tiny thing.”
Holly knowing about sports is about as likely as me becoming a nun. She sticks out her tongue and lays her head against my shoulder. “I’m so glad you’re here to remind me of my failings.”
I laugh. “Like you’ve ever failed anything in your life.”
“There’s more to life than school.”
“What? Where’s my best friend? What’d you do with her?”
Holly pokes my side, her head still on my shoulder. It’s comforting, like everything in the Winter household. This was always my safe haven, my escape from the tensions of home. “Yeah yeah,” she says, “we all know I’m a teacher’s pet-slash-nerd.”
“It’s good. It makes me want to study.”
She snorts. “No, it doesn’t.”
“True.”
She jabs me again. Jesse enters the living room and comes to lounge sideways on the seat where our feet rest. The thrill of being in the same house with him hasn’t arrived. Exhaustion and grief don’t put you in a flirty mood. “Thought the zombie apocalypse would be a lot cooler than this,” he says.
“You mean being trapped at your parents’ house and essentially grounded wasn’t what you pictured?” I ask.
“Not exactly.” He smiles, his eyes as blue as the sky outside, and those absent stomach butterflies finally appear. “What kind of stories am I going to have? Oh, so you killed a hundred zombies and created a Safe Zone? Cool. Me? Well, I ate hors d’oeuvres and looked out a window.”
“We’re lucky Mom lets us look out the window,” Holly says. It’s true. Rose would wrap them in bubble wrap if she could. She’d probably do the same to me, which is more than I can say for Dad.
“What’d you picture?” I ask Jesse.
“I definitely had cooler clothes,” he says. Most of his clothes are at school in Washington, and he wears an older concert T-shirt over worn black jeans. “I had a gun, too. Several guns. Maybe a machete. You should’ve seen me. I was kicking ass and taking names right and left.”
The Cascadia Series (Book 1): World Departed Page 10