A particularly rowdy group of zombies passes on the road. Mitch and I listen to their angry hisses, their clomping feet, and the sound of something dragging along asphalt. God only knows what it is. Willa spins in a circle, tiny feet pawing the ground. I point a finger down, and she sits, looking up at me while her pink tongue licks her snout. It only took two hours to teach her that. At least Ethan gave me a smart dog.
Mitch cocks her head toward the house. “Let’s beat it.”
We trudge up to the well for the day’s water. I lower the PVC pipe bucket down the shaft while Mitch sits on an overturned five-gallon bucket. Willa drops by my feet and sets one paw on my boot. “I’m not running away, Willa. Promise.”
“You finally like your dog?” Mitch asks.
“It’s hard not to like something that adores you this much. Look at her.”
Willa’s tail bangs the ground while her wrinkled face and imploring eyes give her an irresistibly pathetic air. She sleeps on my legs at night, follows me around all day, and asks for nothing but a little attention in return. She still has the face of an alien lifeform, but it’s a cute alien lifeform.
Mitch glances around the yard. It’s only the two of us, but she leans in. “Are you okay? Really?”
I haul the water to the surface, dump it into a bucket, and send it down again. “I’m okay, which makes me feel like a terrible person.”
Sometimes I think it’s precisely because I don’t know where Ethan is that I’m able to be okay. Other times, I think I must be evil. Maybe it’s a defense mechanism. I’ve built up plenty.
“You are not a terrible person. How much shit have you put up with in the past few years?”
“Enough. More than enough.”
Mitch begins to whisper-sing “Enough is Enough,” and I crack up. “C’mon,” she says. “I’ll do Donna and you do Babs, like the old days.”
“And get eaten? I wish we had some of our mix tapes.” As teenagers, we mined our parents’ old records for the songs we’d grown up with, and we could be found listening to everything from golden oldies to disco to Barry Manilow along with our alternative music. I have all the songs in carefully curated playlists on my phone, but it isn’t quite the same. I’d take them, however, over the nothing I do have. My phone sits at my bedside, a treasure trove of books and music, but the key to unlocking it is electricity. Though we use the big RV’s generator to keep it charged in case of restored service or an emergency alert, I can’t waste car batteries or fuel for my own personal entertainment, especially since the kids haven’t once asked to charge their devices. I have to at least pretend to be more mature than them.
“We were forty before we were forty,” I say.
“You know it, baby. Seriously, though, you have every right to feel the way you do. One day, you’ll start crying over something ridiculous and it’ll all come out.”
“Looking forward to that,” I say. Mitch has been a trooper so far, but she’s never been one to bare her soul. “How about you? I know your cloak of inscrutability protects you, but are you secretly losing your mind?”
“You mean am I going to snap and murder all of you in your sleep? Not yet.”
“There is an in between, woman. Your mom and dad—”
“Maybe they’re sitting in their community center worrying about me.” Mitch shrugs and blinks a few times. “But you know they’re probably not.”
I keep my hold on the bucket rope and kiss the top of her head. “I’m sorry.”
“Me, too. I’m just glad I came over that night.” Mitch sighs and rests her chin in her hand. “Day thirty-seven.”
“Don’t remind me.”
“What if they don’t die? Or whatever the hell you call it when a zombie dies.”
“I don’t know.”
I pull the bucket from the well. It takes effort, but I need the exercise. I want to be strong. I want to be sinewy and dangerous and able to kick the world’s ass. Anything that will make me feel more prepared to handle that possible wave of zombies through the fence. What I want and what I am—a fairly slim but untoned forty-two-year-old—are two very different things.
I dump the water, splashing my feet and Willa in the process, and send the well bucket down again. The day is sunny, warm, and especially welcome after days of rain. I wonder what my surroundings would be like if we hadn’t left Brooklyn all those years ago, if the city is a wasteland, or if it escaped this. If anywhere has.
“In answer to your question, I guess we keep doing what we’re doing until we get close to running out of food,” I say. “We have a while, but Kara doesn’t.”
“That poor woman.” Mitch rubs her face. “Maybe she can make it last longer. How much can a three-year-old eat?”
“Not a lot, thankfully.” I yank the rope, pulling hand over hand. It might be easier than a week ago, though it’s hard to tell, since my arms still have the delightful bat wing of flab that sprang into existence two years ago.
“I can’t imagine being alone in this.”
“Me neither,” I say. “If you all were gone, I’d find a nice pharmacy, take thirty Valium, and drift off to sleep forever.”
Being alone in this world is a fate worse than death. I’ve already pictured the lonely days of trying to survive for nothing and the dark nights filled with the sounds of zombies, always waiting for one to finish me off. And to what end? A lonely end. I’ve never been suicidal, but that thought—that I could end it myself rather than have it end with teeth—is strangely comforting.
“Damn, woman,” Mitch says, jaw hanging. “You’ve planned it out?”
“Not planned, but what would be the point without anyone? If you all die and I don’t, I’ll see you on the other side.”
“Well, now I’m depressed.”
I dump the bucket and send it down again. I’ve filled two five-gallon buckets and have two more to go. Mitch flips over the one on which she sits, then lifts the two full ones. She turns, almost bumping into Tom, then shakes her head when he tries to take her load. He steps forward as Mitch moves for the house. “I’ll do that,” he says to me.
“I know you will. That’s why I’m doing it before you could. I need the exercise. Half-assed yoga and walking around the yard aren’t cutting it.”
“I used to teach self-defense years ago.”
“How’d you get into that?” I haul up the full bucket, doing my best to make it look easy. The truth is my arms are tired, but I’ll admit that over my dead body.
“I learned it for myself at first. But there were a few sexual assaults on campus when I was in college, so I started offering free workshops. If you want, we could go through some of the moves. It’s good exercise. I could use some, too.”
The thought of doing any sort of exertion near Tom, where he’ll get a front-row seat to my sweaty self, is not appealing. I’ve always wanted to take a self-defense course, but it involves being in a room with strangers, pretend-yelling at a pretend attacker, and I feel dumb even thinking about doing it, much less doing it in reality.
“Sure,” I say. “Sometime soon?” There’s no way to refuse his offer politely, and my hope is that I’ll be eaten by zombies before the day arrives.
“Sounds good.”
I turn back to the well and hear him humming. “Song stuck in your head?” I ask. “I keep getting ‘Wave of Mutilation’ stuck in mine. I know it’s because it’s fitting, but it has to stop already.”
“The Pixies. Great band.”
“You like The Pixies?”
The bucket hits the water with a distant splash, and I turn to find him watching me with arms crossed. “Yeah,” he says. “Saw them in ‘91 and ‘92.”
“Pre-break up? Nice. I always forget you’re an old man. I was still in high school, then I got knocked up and never had any fun ever again.”
Tom continues staring, arms crossed, but he’s amused. I’ve picked up on the signs: the slight uptick of a single eyebrow, the hint of a cheek crease, and a tiny light in his eye.
“Saw a lot of bands,” he says. “The Cure, My Bloody Valentine, R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr., Sonic Youth. Even saw The Smiths in ‘86.”
“Wow, you are old.”
Tom attempts to glower, but his laugh spoils the effect. “A friend’s older brother took us down to California for a couple of days. You’d best watch yourself, young lady.”
I grin as I bring up the bucket. This information doesn’t mesh with the Tom I know. Thought I knew. He likes good music, at least as far my taste goes. “If I ever get to use my phone, we could listen to a lot of that stuff,” I say.
Tom’s cheek crease becomes more pronounced. “I’d like that.”
“Cool.” I keep my smile small, though it feels wide inside. Why Tom changed into the stern, disapproving person he was a month ago is a mystery, but I’m glad he reverted. “What else did you listen to?”
“Misfits, Bad Brains, Black Flag, Social Distortion, that sort of thing. I was into the music scene down in L.A. for a while. Long time ago.”
I dump the bucket and set it at my feet. “So what you’re really saying is that you used to be cool. What happened?”
Tom’s grin showcases white teeth and twinkly eyes that make my stomach flip in a way that’s more than unsettling—it throws me off balance. I step back, fumbling the bucket before I send it down to water.
“I’m still cool,” he says. “I just don’t feel the need to broadcast it.”
“Is that so?” I shake my head, but I can’t shake the feeling. That feeling—the one where your stomach goes fluttery and warm with some sort of promise. With potential. Heat spreads from my chest to my face, morphing into a hot flash. Sweat blossoms everywhere. I didn’t know ankles and kneecaps could sweat until perimenopause, and I was quite happy to live in ignorance of that fact.
“That’s so.” Tom moves to my side and lifts the bucket from the well. “You look hot. Maybe take a break?”
Tom wears one of Ethan’s long-sleeved shirts. It’s a little tight on him, and it shows off the tapering of muscles to his waist when he turns to dump the bucket. I’ve seen Tom’s torture equipment, his bikes, and how easily he handles things like killing zombies, but I haven’t thought about what that means in terms of what’s under his clothes until now. It isn’t helping to cool me down. At all.
I step away, tongue-tied and heart thumping. This is crazy. Crazier than crazy. The only explanation is that I have a husband who was missing long before he truly went missing. Evidently, my hormones are glomming on to any stray testosterone that can go over three minutes without using an addictive substance.
Mitch appears with two empty buckets, and I quickly cut my eyes from Tom. “Filled the pitchers, sink container, and toilet tanks,” she says. “What’d I miss?”
I fan my face, grateful I can blame my discomfiture on a hot flash. They have to be good for something. “We found out Tom was once cool.”
Tom shakes his head in an amiable fashion, making clear he’s allowing this to go on only because he feels charitable. “Oh, yeah?” Mitch asks. “How so?”
“He likes good music. He even saw The Smiths in ‘86.”
“Get out. Color me impressed, Thomas.”
Tom glances over his shoulder. “If you call me Thomas, I’ll call you Michelle.”
“All right, Tom, that’s a deal,” she says, then asks me, “But does he lip sync?”
“That remains to be seen, but I doubt it. I don’t see him doing karaoke, either. Maybe dancing?”
Tom lowers the bucket down the well. “He does none of the three.”
“I guess he gets a six out of ten on the coolness scale,” Mitch says. “Not bad, considering he was a big fat zero before. He can raise it by showing off his skills at some point.”
“He’s okay with six,” Tom says.
Mitch laughs her big laugh. It wasn’t long ago that I thought they’d be good together. I still think so, and I snuff out the spark of envy that flares. This is the kind of thing you have to wait out. Silly hormonal crushes always pass, and then you realize how ludicrous they were in the first place.
36
Tom
I wake to screaming. Holly and Clara are on watch at the living room window, and I jump to my feet, thinking it’s them. The girls face me, mouths shut while the screaming continues. Now that I’m fully alert, it’s obvious it came from a distance, somewhere by the road.
I step into my boots, grab my knife and pistol, and throw on my coat. “Stay here,” I order the girls, then jog out the door.
A few drops of rain strike my face as I make for the neighbor’s pickup by the fence. It helps hold the gate closed, but it also provides a view of the road if needed—we removed the cap for just this purpose. I jump into the bed and lean over the fence to find a good number of walking bodies before the curve in the road, their edges softened by fog. They face the other direction and move into the woods. Damp air muffles their hisses, but they’re on to something, that much is apparent.
Whoever was screaming has gone silent. This is the right time to keep quiet, but there’s no way to tell where they are, if they’re still alive, unless they scream again.
“C’mon,” I whisper, quickly tying my boots.
Rose and Mitch climb into the truck bed, both semi-dressed. Rose wears boots and pajama pants, her hair in a limp ponytail and eyes still puffy with sleep. But they’re sharp, searching. “What is it?” she whispers.
“Not sure,” I say. “It stopped.”
My breath comes in short plumes of vapor, mixing with fog in the air and Mitch’s and Rose’s unsteady breaths. At these moments, I question why I’m alive in a world like this. It’s pure fucking crazy to watch dead people wander the road, to be unable to help someone who’s trying to evade those dead people. There’s no order, no plan, no future except to survive each day. To keep Clara alive until there’s some light at the end of this miserable tunnel.
The crack of branches comes from my left, across the road and down, and is followed by the rustling crash of something moving fast through the woods. Traveling our way. I lift my pistol. The times I took it to the range, I was thinking of a home intruder. It’s easy enough to hit a man in the chest at close range with a short-barreled .357. A headshot on a more distant moving target requires a level of accuracy—and, likely, weapon—I don’t have. I know that much, but what I don’t know about guns has become all too evident. Sam knows a good bit, but without weapons to illustrate his descriptions, it remains abstract.
Mitch points to the woods as the sounds grow louder. A figure materializes, flashing between trees and bushes. On the short side, running clumsily, maybe carrying something. Leaves shake as they push their way closer.
The person bursts from the trees fifty feet past the far corner of Rose’s lot. It’s Kara from down the road, with a child clutched to her chest. She trips on the incline to the paved surface and drops her son when she sprawls on the asphalt. Kara pushes herself up with both arms, gets to her feet, and lifts her crying son while she watches the zombies advance. The first are forty feet away and gaining ground. I put my gun in my pocket, stand on the edge of the truck’s bed, and lean against the fence, hoping it’ll hold all two hundred-some pounds of me.
“Run!” I call. Kara turns my way, mouth open. “Goddammit, run!” I hold out my hands to pull her over. She has plenty of time to make it, but she doesn’t move. Her eyes are huge, her face striped with dirt.
“Move the truck,” Rose says.
I would, but it’d take minutes we don’t have. “No time,” I say.
I catch sight of Rose’s shocked face, but there’s no time to explain, either. I scale the fence and land with a thump before I race for Kara. The zombies are closing in faster than I will at this distance, and I fire at the nearest one. Maybe it’s a headshot, maybe it’s not, but the force of the bullet drives it down for the moment. All the weeks we’ve avoided loud noise of any kind, and now I’ve just announced our presence to everything in a mile radius. But I’ll be damned
if I let another mother and child die if I can stop it.
I’m at the end of the fence when the first of the pack reaches Kara. They snatch at her clothes, yanking her backward. It knocks her out of her daze, and she rips free and spins for me, though she only makes it two steps before they catch her from behind. Her terrified eyes meet mine, and she holds out her son. Though kicking and crying, he’s a cute kid, with dark eyes and a mop of curly brown hair. He resembles Jeremy at that age, and it’s both horrible to look and impossible not to.
I put on a burst of speed I didn’t think possible. Kara releases an ear-shattering scream as a woman in a blue dress sinks teeth into her arm. A man grabs her head, twists it toward him, and bites into her cheek. She holds her boy aloft even as she screams, until they’re both swallowed up by the next dozen bodies.
I close the final feet and rip a man away, then a woman, firing point-blank into her head when she comes for me. Something moves to my left—Mitch swinging her axe, Rose her knife. Two zombies go down, then another two. I shoot the one that gnaws the back of Kara’s bloody head where she’s hunched over her boy. I shove three more zombies, sending them to the ground, and then flip her limp body. Her son is gone. Ten feet away, three zombies are on their knees in a widening pool of blood. A lone leg with a preschool-sized shoe emerges from the huddle.
More of the pack arrives. Rose hacks into a woman’s face, then kicks another with a well-placed boot. I take her arm, grab Mitch mid-strike, and pull them for the fence. Sam and the kids watch from the truck bed, and I wave them back before they come to the road. “Help them over!”
Jesse holds out his hands. Rose seizes them, feet slipping on fence boards as she fights for purchase to climb. I push her until she scrambles over top, then give Mitch a boost into Sam’s hands. I haul myself over and fall into the truck bed as the first zombies hit. The gate rattles on its hinges while I get to my feet, more thankful for the truck’s added defense than ever.
The Cascadia Series (Book 1): World Departed Page 33