Four pairs of eyes regard me cautiously, and I flush with mortification. What was I thinking? They don’t want to go somewhere random based on the word of a person who can barely defend himself. I’ve killed a few zombies; I haven’t been crowned King of the Apocalypse.
I shrug and keep my eyes on the carpet. “I know it’s a long way, and you can probably think of a million better places to go. I don’t know, I just thought that people should stick together now, and Rose and Mitch are a lot more—they’re not…like me. Mitch doesn’t take any shit, and Rose is really tough. So, there’s that—”
I almost scream with relief when the timer dings in the kitchen, and I walk that way rather than look at the others. I pull the brownies from the oven, shaking my head at my well-meaning but illogical proposal, and almost drool at the chocolatey aroma and crusty dark edges along the sides of the pan. Mitch likes middles, but Rose and I love brownie edges. We had it down to a science in high school: cut out the center square for Mitch, then divvy up the outer portions for Rose and me. From what I remember, brownies need to cool in the pan a while, so I set it on the counter and turn off the heat.
Murmurs come from the living room, and I take my time before returning. Once I do, I grab my beer and pray they’ve forgotten the last five minutes. “The brownies are cooling,” I say. “Did you want me to bring them in?”
Troy waves a hand in refusal. “We’re thinking we’ll come to Eugene. Check it out, at least.”
“Really?” I almost drop my beer. “Why?”
Francis’ laugh rumbles, and the others join in. Lana winks. “Because, like you said, people need to stick together. Craig, it’s a good thing you weren’t a salesman.”
That sets everyone off again, including me. Maybe people are crafty and will be the biggest threat eventually, but I’ve fallen in with good ones.
34
Clara
Between the school and Always Ready, we have enough food for four months. Half of it lives in the house, the other half in the RV, as Dad proposed. Rose approved, saying that if the house burned down, we’d have a place to live and food to eat. Dad rolled his eyes and said the house wasn’t burning down, but it was a good idea anyway, and Rose laughed. I laughed along, amazed at how two total opposites have become friends—and don’t seem quite as opposite as I thought.
Though seven of us crammed in the RV would suck for sleeping, we’ve taken to spending evenings here in the past weeks. Sam’s fifth wheel has a TV, DVD player, and electric lights. The lanterns we looted work fine, but real lights illuminate the entire space rather than surrounding you with a pool of light and utter blackness beyond.
Holly rolls onto her stomach where she lies on the rug between Jesse and me, waiting for the movie to begin. Dad and Mitch sit in the recliners, Sam and Rose on the couch. As the kids we get the floor due to a lot of whining about old bones and aching backs.
“We’re past thirty days,” Holly says. “Shouldn’t they be disintegrating?”
“I doubt it’s an exact science,” Sam says. “Another month and I’ll start to worry.”
Holly sucks in her lower lip and says nothing. The zombies aren’t decomposing any more than they have. They aren’t slower. Rose, Dad, and Mitch drove to Kara’s a few days after we left her and couldn’t get close, and they tried again this morning. They said not a single zombie, out of the two hundred in the intersection by her house, looked ready to drop to the ground so far.
Dad drums his fingers on his armrest. “We’re good on food, and we know where to get more. If it takes a couple of months, we’ll be fine.” He says it in the voice that makes you sure he’s right, and I find myself nodding almost against my will.
“You may have to become a carnivore, though,” Jesse says to Holly. “We’re running out of squirrel food. But we’re no longer at the top of the food chain, so you don’t have to feel bad about that.”
Holly drops her forehead to the rug. “I have three weeks of food still.”
She sorted through the food and set aside the vegetarian meals. I love animals, but Holly wants to be a vet, volunteered at an animal rescue, and had a full-time job at a veterinary practice lined up for the summer. She has a soft spot for any organism that isn’t human, although that soft spot extends to most humans, too.
“You can’t not eat, sweets,” Rose says.
Holly raises her head and strokes Willa on the floor by Rose’s feet. “I’ll eat what I have to, as long as it’s not Willa.”
Maybe we aren’t planning to eat her, but what to feed her is an issue. Willa doesn’t mind eating people food one bit, but we mind the gas she expels when she does. She can stink up a room faster than a zombie.
Rose rises from the couch. “Let’s have a movie snack that isn’t Willa. How about kettle corn?”
A chorus of agreement greets her suggestion. Though we’re not hungry, snacks and junk food are portioned out along with everything else. Fortunately, Rose likes junk food, and since she’s taken on the role of chef most days, she always fits some in.
“You can make kettle corn?” Dad asks. “I thought you could only get it at carnivals and craft fairs.”
“That’s what they want you to think,” Rose says in an ominous tone as she heads for the kitchen. “Come watch the magic happen.” Dad follows with a chuckle.
“Come with me to pee?” I ask Holly.
“I will,” Jesse says. “I have to go, too.”
We try not to use the RV’s bathroom, since dumping the black water tank will leave a pile of poop and pee in our yard now that there’s no truck that comes by to drain it. Before, I thought RVs were cool. Now, I can help hitch it to the truck, fill and empty the tanks, and understand what an inverter is. Sam’s inverter isn’t working properly, but since most of the RV’s equipment runs on 12-volt, we’re able to watch movies, brew coffee, and use lights. The microwave is the only unusable appliance, along with anything that needs household voltage.
The neighbor’s camper now lives in the yard, and it washes the laundry we don’t do by hand in the bathtub—things like jeans and coats. You can barely hear the generator thanks to a special box Sam and Dad built. But it’ll be all bathtub washing if this doesn’t end soon; the generator needs diesel, and the camper’s tank is running low.
I put on my raincoat and shoes, then find a flashlight. I don’t like utter blackness. If you give me a nightlight, a flashlight, anything to keep the boogeyman away, I’ll take it gladly and clutch it until sunrise. I still have a nightlight in my room, and possibly my most hated thing about this new world—aside from zombies, death, and destruction—is the lack of that nightlight.
Jesse and I walk into the yard and swish through wet grass. Outside the camper is dark, since we cover the windows at night. The rain has turned misty, and a soft halo glows around the moon.
“I never said thanks,” Jesse says.
“For what?”
“For talking about my mom. For not telling Holly. I know you two tell each other everything.”
“Not everything,” I say, thinking of that kiss. “But close.”
He glances at me. I stare straight ahead as we step into the house. “Use my mom’s bathroom,” he says. “I’ll use the hall.”
After I’m done, I decide the yellow in the toilet has mellowed long enough. I flush it, then refill the tank from the water bucket in the corner. I wash my hands using the pitcher and enter the bedroom. The sound of a guitar whispers from the hall.
I walk to Jesse’s doorway. His room is the same as when he left for college. Music posters on the wall, books on the shelves, papers and pens on the desk. He sits in the desk chair playing a guitar with his new lantern on the dimmest setting. His fingers fly, seeming as if they barely touch the strings. This is classical guitar, and it’s always been my favorite. Jesse can also sing, but he doesn’t like to.
I lean against the doorjamb and close my eyes. The Winter family is all about music, which is one of the reasons I fit in so well. We’re al
l going through withdrawal with this imposed silence, maybe Jesse most of all.
The song changes from something I don’t recognize to one I know well. Holly and I begged him to play it a million times in high school, and he almost always did. “There is a Light that Never Goes Out” was the anthem of our teenage years. Rose joked that it’d been the anthem of hers, and she’d passed it down to us.
I open my eyes to find Jesse watching me, his lips just curved. The song holds so many memories of long talks with Holly, of being hopelessly in like with her brother, of laughter and sadness and being a teenager. Mostly, it reminds me of our kiss. It was playing in the living room of a house party while Jesse and I were down the hall in the party-thrower’s bedroom, looking for something that by now has faded from memory.
I leaned against the wall and said, Hey, it’s our song. When Jesse met my eyes, it was as though a switch flipped—his usual smile was replaced by something sweet and hopeful before he moved forward and pressed his lips to mine. The rest was a blur, of his lips and his tongue, of my heart swelling, of thinking finally, finally this was it.
After a few minutes—minutes in which I learned just how good a kiss could be and just how powerfully my body could respond—Jesse pushed my hair behind my ear and whispered my nickname. Then his stupid drunk friend busted in, dragging him off on a mission to hide someone’s car keys. When I saw him two days later, it was like it’d never happened. I wasn’t sure he even remembered, and I acted overly casual for a few weeks so he’d think I didn’t either. But I waited for a sign the whole time, reliving those few minutes while my hope ebbed and flowed, until it eventually withered into nothing.
I push the memory I’ve gone over a thousand times from my mind. In the desk chair, Jesse’s fingers dance, the music swells though still quiet, and I sing the end softly. He keeps his eyes on mine while the last notes fade away. “You have a great voice. I always thought so.”
“It’s passable,” I say, though his compliment pleases me more than a little. “I’m not about to compete on The Voice. We should probably get back.”
He sets down the guitar. “I thought one song would be okay.”
“It was a good choice.” I step into the hall, where it’s dark. “It reminds me of your family, you know.”
“It reminds me of you.”
I walk for the back without a reply, turning on the flashlight with a trembly hand. Jesse leans past me to open the door. It’s those little things he does—opening doors, making sure you’re okay, offering to bring you something from the kitchen when we actually have food—that make him special. Rose may have trained him, but I think he does it because he likes to.
“Remember when you peed your pants because you were laughing so hard?” he asks.
I step onto the patio, cheeks faintly warm. “It reminds you of me peeing my pants when I was thirteen. Great.”
“The song reminds me of you. Peeing your pants is a bonus laugh.”
I push him. “I really had to pee. It was your sister’s fault for choosing that moment to spill oil on the floor.”
One night, Holly dropped a big plastic bottle of olive oil on the kitchen floor, where it cracked open and glugged out into a puddle. As she tried to escape the spill, her feet shot out from under her. She froze in a half-split, attempting to get upright in a series of jerks and frantic tap dance-type movements, then went down into the mire, arms pinwheeling.
Between the look on her face and her laughter after the fact, I lost my shit. And the partial contents of my bladder. I could’ve stayed quiet on that fact, since it wasn’t a full-on pee, but I announced it to her and Jesse, which made us laugh harder. As much as I don’t want to be known for peeing my pants, the story is part of Winter Family Lore, and I like that I share in that.
“We’ll never speak of it again,” Jesse says.
“Yeah, right.”
He opens the RV’s door with a smirk that leaves no doubt I’m correct. Inside, Rose is dispensing kettle corn from a pot into bowls while Dad waits beside her. He delivers three of them across the room before he returns, where he inspects his bowl and slowly extracts a long strand of auburn hair.
“Lucky!” Rose says. “You won the prize.”
Dad’s solemn face fissures into a smile. The kind of smile I’ve seen on him more and more recently. His sense of humor is more than restored—it’s improved. “What do I get?”
“The hair is the prize.”
He lifts it high over Rose and lets it fall onto her auburn curls. She pats her head. “Fine, return it whence it came. One day you might want it back, though.”
“I doubt it.”
“Me, too.” Rose pulls a bottle of her kombucha from the refrigerator. “Sure you don’t want some?”
“Liquid sweat socks? No, thanks.”
“You’re not allowed to besmirch my kombucha until you’ve tried it.”
“After that, you can join our ranks,” Mitch says from her recliner. “We besmirch it all day long.”
Sam laughs. “That we do.”
“I’m one comment away from repossessing your kettle corn,” Rose threatens the two, then wiggles the bottle at Dad. “You know you want to.”
Dad wears his no way in hell face for a moment, but then he shrugs. “Fine.”
“Really?”
“Yup. Lay it on me.”
Rose pours some into a glass. Dad inspects the purplish liquid, then sniffs it like a wine connoisseur. Rose sets her elbows on the counter and rests her chin in her hands, eyes alight. She loves kombucha and doesn’t understand how someone wouldn’t, even though she’s disappointed more often than not. He sips carefully, then swallows and takes another taste, frowning in concentration. “Well?” she asks.
“Grape, with notes of sweat socks,” he announces. “Which is better than all sweat socks.”
Jesse snickers beside me. Rose leans across the counter to push Dad’s shoulder. “It’s good for you. And it cancels out sugar. If you drink kombucha, you can eat as much dessert as you want.”
His laugh rumbles. “I don’t think it works that way.”
“Killjoy.” Rose winks and drops a few pieces of popcorn on the floor for Willa. “That’s all, dog. I don’t like you that much.”
Willa gobbles them down. Dad crouches to pet her, and she falls belly up on the floor, snorting in ecstasy. “She’s a good girl. Aren’t you, Willa?”
This from the man who always said small dogs are oversized rats. I have no idea what happened the night they were gone, but somehow Dad turned human. A slightly stubborn human still, but he wouldn’t be himself otherwise.
Rose watches him rub Willa’s belly, and I imagine it’s hard to see this reminder of Ethan for many reasons. After a moment, her shoulders come down, and her half-smile is one of surrender. “She is a good dog. Are you even a dog, you odd-looking thing?”
Willa pants up at her, tail thumping the floor. Rose spots me and Jesse. “Oh, hey. We thought you got lost.”
“I started to play a song and couldn’t stop,” Jesse blurts out. “It was quiet. Nothing heard.”
“It’s okay. I wish I’d heard, though. I miss hearing you play.”
“Me, too,” Holly says through a mouth full of popcorn.
“Me three,” Mitch says.
We watch Sam’s DVD collection of movies and old TV shows, but always with the subtitles on and at a volume almost impossible to hear. Music carries, and it isn’t worth the risk.
“Maybe we can soon, in the basement or something.” Rose hands us our popcorn bowls, lifts her own, and turns off the kitchen light. “Movie time.”
I sit in my spot on the rug. Instead of returning to Holly’s other side, Jesse lowers himself to the floor beside me. He’s over a foot away, but I’m very aware of the rise and fall of his chest and the way his fingers scoop up a handful of popcorn to toss in his mouth. I envision him reaching for my hand instead, his fingers tracing mine the way they did that night in Holly’s room.
“Okay if I sit here?” he asks. “Am I too close?”
I shrug. “It’s fine.”
“We’re watching a comedy, and I don’t want you to laugh too hard and pee on me.”
Holly cackles. “Well, she did just pee, so we’re probably safe.”
“The two of you are assholes,” I say, and shove them both to the floor.
35
Rose
It’s been thirty-seven days, and dead people still stroll the roads, they still linger at the intersection where we left Kara and her son, and they still brush up against the wood fences, which never fails to stop my heart. The fences are sturdy. The fences are strong. We are invisible. It’s a mantra I repeat several times a day while going over the escape plan just in case.
Tom took charge of that, but not in a domineering way. Aside from the fact we needed a plan, he’s good at organization, and organization is not my strong suit. Always Ready had several pamphlets about what’s called preparedness, and one of the recommendations is to have an evacuation plan. We have two. One is on foot, carrying backpacks filled with a few days’ supplies—what the pamphlets call a Go Bag. For the second, Pop’s truck is hitched to the fifth wheel, and Mr. Gustafson’s has the honor of holding the gate closed.
In an emergency, we’ll all run to the RV. If we can’t exit through the front gate, and the ground is covered with zombies, we’ll escape through a wider fence panel Tom rigged to be removable from the safety of the pickup. I hope it’ll work, that we’ll get through the wave of whatever has entered, and that we can head toward Washington or the mountains.
We don’t have a specific place to go, but we’ll take it as it comes. Perhaps head over the mountain passes and see if we can get into Sisters, Oregon. Though Sisters is likely the same as Eugene, at least we’d have confirmation of that fact. Knowledge is power, and we’re powerless.
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