“We’re okay, and he might be, too,” I say, cupping her dainty cheek in my hand. At times, I marvel at how someone so delicate looking came out of me, but I’m positive underneath she’s as strong as she’ll ever need to be, even if she doesn’t yet know it herself. “It’s never stupid to hope.”
Holly nods and sniffs, then takes the tissue I offer and wipes her nose. By the time she’s done, she’s rearranged her features into her customary pleasant expression. “Pop told us to bring out some stuff from the back before we pack the desserts.”
“I’ll pack them,” I offer. She smiles before following Clara and Jesse to the shelves. I look over the stack of freeze-dried desserts, open one to eat myself, and then get busy taping a large box to throw them in.
Though we have food for now, the idea we’ll run out sooner or later has been a dark spot on an already dim path to the future. Now that path is paved with freeze-dried food, light at night, and a way to cook when the propane runs out. It makes breathing easier; the thought of the kids going hungry never fails to shorten my breath.
Mitch tosses a shitload of food into a shipping box she’s constructed, then examines my pile of desserts. “No lecture about going for foods with the most nutritional value?”
“Fuck that,” I say, and take another bite of my freeze-dried ice cream sandwich. “If I’m dying at any minute, I want dessert.” My diet days ended with zombies, but even when dieting, dessert was non-negotiable. More salad equals more dessert, and I ate a lot of salad.
“Amen.” Mitch saunters back to the shelves. “Chicken fried rice or rice and chicken?”
“Chicken fried rice. Or both. Get vegetarian stuff if you can.”
Though Holly is the official vegetarian, I prefer my meat un-canned or otherwise doctored. My pickiness is easy enough to work around when supermarkets and variety are the norm, but my choices grow more limited by the day. When it comes down to it, I’ll eat what I have to, but if I have options, I’m taking them.
The kids walk past with boxes labeled Meals, Ready-to-Eat as the pickups back to the open door. Mr. Gustafson’s truck has a cap that’ll keep smaller items from flying off as we drive, and bigger boxes will go in Pop’s truck, including the giant boxes we pack at the table.
Tom holds his list and marches between rows. He returns with full arms and sends the kids to the shelves with instructions they follow dutifully. “The man has a plan,” Mitch murmurs. “I like it.”
I smile and push stray hair from my face. Mitch and Tom getting together might be one of my more fanciful ideas, but crazier things have happened. He’s the right height for Mitch, who often dwarfs men—a fact she doesn’t mind as much as they do. I’d bet my life he wouldn’t be caught dead in cotton socks and Adidas sandals.
Tom isn’t hard to look at, and now that he acts like a human with a sense of humor, they could be a good match. Understandably, having lost Sheila only weeks ago, he isn’t on the market, but there’s no harm in letting things blossom naturally. Maybe subtly helping them along if I see the chance. If Mitch suspects I’m playing cupid, she’ll feed me to the zombies.
Pop dumps a load on the table and then helps pack. Once we decide what we want to bring home, Tom and Jesse break into a gutter repair company in the complex. We load the trucks with extra supplies and unload them in the warehouse, hiding the boxes behind stacks of rain gutter covers. After another load, the sun has arced across the sky, and we pack for the ride home.
By the end of it, the trucks are crammed as high as their cab roofs, and we have over three months of food, maybe more. Three months. Even if the zombies take three times as long to die out, we’ll be okay.
The ride home has more zombies to outmaneuver, which necessitates a bit of swerving on the two-lane road and results in a parade of zombies following the trucks. Down by the school, it’s quiet, and the woman hanging from the window still sways with the breeze.
“That boarded house is coming soon,” Holly says. “Should we stop?”
“It’s getting late,” Tom replies. “And we’ve got bodies behind us.”
I watch the gated lot as we pass. A person moves out front, quickly stepping around the side of the large gray house before I can make out details. “Wait a minute. Did you see that?”
Tom slows until he comes to a halt with Pop just behind. “What?”
“People. Someone ran behind the house when we got close.”
“Sounds like they don’t want to be seen.”
“What if they need help?”
Tom glances in the rearview. So far, the zombies haven’t caught up. “They can’t want that much help if they don’t want us to see them.”
He could be right, but he could be wrong. Whoever it is might be scared. Hungry. There are no cars in the driveway, only an old RV. My hands sweat inside my gloves and my mouth is dry. Maybe it’s foolish to risk it, but this house holds the only other people alive in the world, as far as we know.
“They have kids.” Holly points to the plastic toddler-sized playset on the lawn. “We should check.”
Pop pulls alongside and rolls down his window. “What’s going on?”
“I saw someone by that house,” I say. “They hid, but it looks like they have little kids.”
Pop examines the house and then me, his face creased with a frown but affection in his eyes. “Are you going to drive yourself crazy thinking about them?”
I smile. Pop is a soft touch—softest when it comes to me. “Probably.”
He motions for Tom to back to the driveway with him. Once there, Pop puts his truck in park and waves me out. “C’mon, then. We’ll go to the gate. They get one minute before we leave.”
I open my door and step to the road. “If anything happens, drive away. Don’t wait.”
Tom’s brow lowers. “Mom—” Holly begins, but I shut the door before I can hear the rest.
My legs tremble at being out in the open, from fear the people might be hostile, but I move to Pop’s side. He holds his gun and keeps a shoulder in front of me as we walk to the iron gate.
“Hello?” Pop calls. “We don’t want anything. Just wanted to see if everyone here is okay.” His words are answered by a whisper of breeze in the trees.
“We promise we won’t hurt you.” My voice sounds high, worried. “We didn’t think anyone else was alive.”
After thirty more seconds, Pop takes my arm. “There’s your minute, Rosie.”
My fear of a bad exchange has intensified, and I don’t protest when we make our way to the trucks. I climb into my seat and shrug. “We had to try.”
Tom waves Pop on first, then rolls after him past another two houses before he brakes, eyes on the rearview mirror. I spin in my seat. A woman stands on the asphalt, waving her arms. She spots a lone zombie coming from a nearby house and runs up the driveway.
Tom throws the truck in reverse, backs to the driveway, and steps out his door. The zombie is a man on the short side, and Tom finishes him off with a strike from his knife, then turns to the woman behind the gate.
“Watch the road and tell us if more come,” I say to the kids, and jump from the truck. “Anything happens, and you drive—”
“We know,” Holly and Jesse say in unison.
Pop and Mitch join us in the short driveway. The woman has both hands on the gate, her fingers clenched around iron until her knuckles whiten. Her brown hair is greasy, her face thin above a bulky cardigan sweater wrapped tight around her waist. She’s late twenties, but tension lines her eyes and mouth so that she seems closer to my age.
“Hi.” I smile, hoping to convey our peaceability. “We wanted to make sure you were okay. I’m Rose, and this is Tom and Mitch. My dad is Sam.”
The woman looks over her shoulder at the house and gives a quick shake of her head. Tom’s gun hand tightens. I’m sure Pop’s does the same, though I can’t see past Mitch. Just because people may not have shot us without warning a month ago doesn’t mean they won’t now.
“I’m Kar
a.” The woman sniffs, runs a hand under her nose, and whispers, “Did you see anyone on the road? Or a silver Ford Expedition?”
I wait for the others to answer because I pay absolutely no attention to cars and barely know one model from the next. If it plays music and runs, I’m happy. “We didn’t see anyone alive,” Pop says, sounding apologetic, “and I don’t remember an Expedition. Are you looking for someone?”
“My husband.” Kara peers over her shoulder again. “He left yesterday to get more food. We’re almost out. Our son is…he didn’t want to take us with him in case it wasn’t safe.” Kara’s chin doesn’t just tremble—it shakes vigorously with the effort of holding back tears.
“Do you know where he was going?” I ask.
Kara shuts her eyes tight. “He said he’d try Walmart first, since it’s close. Then he’d see from there. You didn’t see anyone at all? Javier’s five-ten, with long hair.” She points to Tom. “Same shade of skin as you. He was wearing a red shirt, jeans, and a blue coat.”
I don’t want to say Kara’s husband is likely not coming. That Walmart was a mess of bodies and everywhere else is probably the same. “We didn’t see anyone matching that description, and there was no one…alive at Walmart. Why don’t you and your son come with us? We don’t live far. We can leave a note for your husband to find you when he gets here.”
Kara gazes down the road, past trees and toward the distant hills, as though the answer to her conundrum lays in that direction. Her shaky hand pushes a clump of hair from her forehead. “What if he needs me when he comes back?”
“What if he doesn’t come back?” Tom asks, his voice gentle.
Kara swallows, eyes full of such despair that I choke back a lump in my own throat. “He wouldn’t leave us.”
“Of course he wouldn’t.” I put my hand over Kara’s, though I want to shake some sense into her. It doesn’t matter how much you want to get to someone—what matters is what prevents you from getting there. “How old is your son?”
“Three. Mateo is three.”
“You and Mateo really won’t come with us?” I ask. When Kara shakes her head, chin raised, I know it’s a lost cause for now. “Then we’ll give you food for while you wait. Do you have water and a way of heating it?”
A tear rolls down Kara’s cheek. She wipes it with the back of her hand and nods. “We have a camping stove and the RV.”
“Okay. Dad and Tom, will you get her some food? Enough for two weeks.” They leave quickly. I motion at the neighboring houses. There are a few, and all seem empty. “Are any of your neighbors around?”
“They’re gone,” Kara says. “Some said they were heading north. The others went looking for family.”
I point southeast. “Turn left at the corner, and we’re about three miles down on the right, in the blue house with the tall wooden fence. Will you come if you need to? Just knock on the gate or call for us, and we’ll come right away.”
Kara nods. I squeeze her hand and let go.
“We’ll check on you in a few days,” Mitch says, her brow creased. She might come off as curt, but she’ll always be a founding member of the Freak Squad Welcome Wagon.
“Mom!” Holly leans out the truck window, face flushed with alarm, and points toward town. Dozens of zombies walk the road, heading our way.
My pulse accelerates, and I pull my knife from my coat as Pop and Tom reappear holding three cases of MREs and a box of freeze-dried food—well over what two people need for two weeks. Kara unlocks the gate and swings it open. They race to deposit them by the front door and then return, weapons in hand and eyes on the zombies.
“We have to go,” Pop says. “You’re sure we can’t talk you into coming?”
“I can’t. I’m sorry.”
“We’ll be back soon,” I say to Kara. “Go inside before they see you.”
“Thank you,” Kara says quickly, then turns for her house.
A larger group of zombies crests the hill while we jog to our trucks. As we pull away, I pray Kara will have no reason to regret her decision. I struggled with fear in the early days with two young kids—what if Ethan died in a car crash, of an illness? Having to raise our children alone was enough to keep me awake at night. But there was always the assurance that even the most menial of jobs could be found and Pop’s babysitting help relied upon. Kara has nothing but what we’ve given her and little to no chance of finding more with a small child in tow.
“She should’ve come with us,” Holly says.
“I know. I wish we could’ve talked her into it.” I watch grass fly by, disheartened at having left a woman and three-year-old boy on their own. The odds of her husband returning are slimmer now that those zombies have arrived.
“We did what we could,” Tom says. “We couldn’t force her.”
He sounds as though he would’ve liked to. We pass sheep carcasses and the zombie trapped in barbed wire. One person. We’ve seen one person and so many dead people. And while I’m certain our situation is more promising than Kara’s, it doesn’t exactly make me optimistic about our own survival.
28
Craig
I’ve saved the cacao nib shortbread cookies for last. The first four were yesterday’s dinner. The four that remain are today’s brunch. I considered saving two—brunch and dinner—but then I’d think about them all day, fixated on how hungry I am and how, when they’re gone, I’ll be closer to dying than ever. Better to eat them, enjoy them, instead of meting them out.
I arrange the cookies in a perfectly straight line on my granite counter. Round, a creamy color spotted with flecks of dark brown. Delicious. Buttery. All the food I could have eaten in the past years tortures me. I’d give anything to sit on my mother’s hideous flowered couch and spoon frozen Cool Whip into my mouth the way I once did. I’d even put up with Dad’s comments for the chance.
I take a sip of water and screw on the lid, then set the bottle down carefully. Going by what remains on the counter, I estimate I have a few days’ worth. I would have more except for the half-gallon I accidentally dumped on the floor two days ago. I was carefully pouring the day’s allotment into the liter bottle when one of them in the hallway thumped against my apartment door. Down went the glass pitcher, shattered into a million pieces. By the time I used towels to mop it up and wrung them out, I had four ounces of water and multiple shards of glass in my hands.
Has it really been over a month since this started? I count the crossed-off days of the calendar on my kitchen wall. The calendar doesn’t lie, and every morning I draw an X over the previous day like clockwork. Surely, rescuers will be coming any day now. Any minute now. If not, I’ll plug in my earbuds, put on the playlist Rose made for me (which she titled It’s a Cray-Cray World) and take my end-of-the-world cocktail of Xanax, pain meds, and tequila. I have only the one flashlight that’s steadily dimming, and I’m not sure how many more dark, lonely nights I can take. I keep my phone off except for once per day, when I check for service and read Rose’s voicemail, and still the battery is down to six percent.
A clang of metal and a soft shout from outside send me running for the balcony. I keep the door open to hear any noises and for fresh air. Not that you can call the air fresh—between zombies and my body’s excretions that I toss over the railing, the sidewalk below is not fresh as a daisy. Neither am I; I haven’t showered for a month, though every week I shave with my cordless razor.
I burst onto the balcony and search the street four stories down. The diner across the way, a low-slung building attached to the modernized hotel a block over, has a large parking lot. Two cars have sat there since the day this happened, but the row of four bikes is new.
People. Living people. I watch, sweaty hands strangling my balcony railing. When the people come out, I’ll beg them to help clear the hall so I can leave. Maybe they’ll let me come with them. I have a bike I never use because I get nervous riding in traffic, but there isn’t traffic anymore.
After what seems like an hour but i
s closer to ten minutes, a burly man steps into the lot from one of the windows, his boots crunching on broken glass. He wears a full backpack and a multitude of things on his belt. An axe dangles from his hand while he scans the street.
I know better than to scream and alert any nearby dead people to the person who might be my savior. I hang off my balcony waving my arms, the only sound the whooshing of air. The man turns the other direction. Fuck. Think, Craig.
I’ve hung a sheet from the railing with old shoelaces. My lone Sharpie went dry mid-message, and I finished writing PLEASE HELP, PERSON INSIDE with shoe polish. It didn’t rain, but there’ve been a few foggy mornings, and now the sheet looks like a prop from a horror movie with the way the last two words dripped and bled. I wouldn’t rescue myself if I saw that sign.
I rip it off the rail and flap the fabric. The snapping sound has to carry across the concrete. It has to. A woman enters the lot, her pack no less full. She hitches it up and walks to the man, where they have a whispered conversation. I flap harder, and she spins around, combing the street until she spots the movement.
I flap one final time, then drop my sheet and wave. The woman keeps her gaze on me, smacking the man behind her on the arm. From here, she looks maybe in her forties or early fifties, with a buxom hourglass figure and bobbed brown hair that curls out from under her army-green hat. The man with her motions at the diner, and two more people appear, one a teenager and the other a big guy in a leather coat and cargo pants.
The woman and the first man pick their way across the street while the other two watch the surroundings. When they get near, the man’s foot slides a little and he curses, lifting up his boot and twisting to peer at the sole. He’s stepped in my shit.
“Fucking motherfuck,” he says. It carries clear as a bell to where I stand, as does the woman’s laugh.
“Sorry,” I whisper, praying it won’t hurt my chances of getting help.
When they’re below but outside my excrement-tossing area, the woman calls, “Hi! Whatcha doing up there?” She keeps her voice low so that it doesn’t echo.
The Cascadia Series (Book 1): World Departed Page 24