“We’re rationing the stores in the basement—things we put up last summer. Canned fruits and vegetables. We’re sprouting some seeds, and just started growing some micro greens in soil we’re making inside from our scraps and waste and the help of some friendly earthworms, because we’re afraid to use the dirt from outside.”
Their malnourished appearance made sense now. They were eating, but not getting enough calories. It didn’t bode well for her plan to stick around Divine Sundaes for a while. On the drive down, she’d pacified her frayed nerves with the fantasy that she was headed somewhere safe from most of the world’s horrors—what a joke that was now.
Cheryl’s mind drifted back to Hannah. She was such a gentle soul. It was hard to imagine her going berserk and setting the garden on fire, but if the food was tainted maybe it had actually been an act of valor instead of insanity. She wanted to hear more about what had happened at Divine Sundaes and around the town of Sabre since her absence, but everyone began to bombard her with questions about what had happened in Sedona.
“So…where’d you get the Jeep?” Zach asked.
“It belonged to a member of the Resistance who…didn’t make it.” So many were dead. Hundreds, possibly thousands who’d been devoured by the Beasts that had run amok or who’d died in the explosion in Sedona. She wanted to blot out the nightmare of last night that kept reverberating through her skull.
Jeremiah walked over and clasped one of Cheryl’s hands with both of his. “Well…whatever went down, I thank the Lord that you’re all right. We really weren’t sure we’d see you again. When Zach and Diego came back and told us what happened to Mark…”
Oh…here it was again…that painful, stabbing wound in her heart. She’d tried to put out of her mind that stomach-churning feeling she’d felt ever since learning that her fiancé was no longer alive. Cheryl looked down at the dirt and blood encrusted sandals on her feet as her hand instinctively reached into her pocket and felt for the bloodstained cross. It hadn’t belonged to her fiancé—it had been a gift to her from Hannah, but Mark been holding it for her when he was killed, so it served as her last connection to him since she’d lost her engagement ring.
When she looked up, Jeremiah’s eyes crinkled as they looked deeply into hers. “I’m very sorry for your loss. After Zach and Diego returned and told me, I’ve been praying that you were okay and that you would be able to recover from your grief.”
He opened his arms like a fatherly bear, and she fell into them just before her knees began to wobble. “Please don’t give me the spiel about how he’s in a better place and all that.” She was still a doubter that there was any sort of divine being allowing all this misery to happen, and truth be told…if He did exist, she didn’t want any guilt from the idea that he could be watching over her from some celestial place above, judging her for her failures and for the erratic feelings and dalliances she’d had with Aidan.
“We’re very sorry,” Zach said to her when she parted from Jeremiah. “That couple we took with us from Sedona ran off, and right after that we were ambushed.”
“I know,” Cheryl said. “I heard what happened.” She hoped the words didn’t come out sounding too harsh, because she’d forgiven them for not preventing Mark’s murder even if she hadn’t said it out loud. There was likely nothing they could have done to prevent the attack. Maybe, she blamed Mark the most. After all, he was the one who’d given up after being such a rock for her during the beginning of the apocalypse.
She remembered once believing he was dead then finding him alive. There was no chance of that happening again—this time there were witnesses to his death. There was even more proof that his spirit was gone. Ever since that first awful night that he’d shoved her out in the cruel world in order to save her life, she’d heard his voice in her head. She later found out that it was some telepathic side effect of experiments that O.N.E. had been using on soldiers in Afghanistan—phase one of the rollout of their plan of population reduction and control. That voice was silent now. There was nothing in her head but her own random, disturbing thoughts.
“He’s in heaven now, my dear,” Jeremiah said. “Naysay all you want… but it exists…and it’s a better place than we live in now.”
“I’d like to believe that,” she said. “It would certainly make things easier.”
“Oh…I believe Mark’s up there now.” Jeremiah glanced towards the ceiling. “I bet he’s watching us continue this game like a player resting on the sidelines.”
“Game?” Aidan asked. “You think the world being taken over by some warped group that unleashed hordes of zombies is some sort of stupid game?”
Jeremiah’s gaze turned steely. “It’s refining by affliction.”
“Survival of the fittest then?”
“No. I like to think it’s more like a test to see where your heart is. When the chips are down, do you wither into something selfish and sinful or do you forge into something greater made of a stronger metal?”
“Ha!” Aidan laughed. “My chips are just crumbs in the bottom of the bag, man. I’m just getting by day by day.”
Cheryl could feel the tension starting to rise. Aidan despised religion almost as much as he did anything having to do with the military, but he’d never been cranky with Jeremiah. Maybe he was just weary from his head injury and defaulting into his naturally defensive mode. “Well…” she said, “as I said, I know Mark has passed on, and I’d like to believe that he’s in some safe, warm, sunny place like Heaven right now. You think they allow cigarettes up there?” she asked, trying to lighten the conversation. “If they do, I bet he’s enjoying a good smoke right now. They can’t be bad for you if you’re already dead, right?”
“Dead?” asked a tinkling, high-pitched voice. “You know someone that’s died?”
Cheryl looked at the young girl who’d just appeared in their midst. She stared, thinking she was hallucinating, because the radiant little being seemed to have just materialized right in front of her. She had hair as light as corn silk cascading down her shoulders like a veil of pure sunshine. When she brushed a few strands away from her forehead, her pale blue eyes shimmered and her cheeks flushed bright pink.
Everyone in the room stopped talking and looked at the angel before them as if they were also mesmerized by her appearance.
Chapter 2
“Who do you know that’s died?”
“Cassie…” Jeremiah scolded with a snap of his fingers. “Not now. Let’s let our guests rest a bit before you interrogate them.”
“I just want to make a picture,” the girl said, standing her ground with her arms folded over her chest.
Cheryl studied her as she was studied back. Cassie looked about seven which meant she’d probably been headed into the first grade when the epidemic began last summer.
Jeremiah chuckled. “We found her wandering down the road a while back. She won’t talk about what happened to her family, so we don’t know where she came from. We’ve kind of adopted her as our own and Hannah has been schooling her.”
Cassie looked at Jeremiah. Then, her thumb rose up to her pink lips for just a second. She dropped it just as quickly as if remembering that she’d almost succumbed to some infantile habit that she was supposed to have given up. Her gaze returned to Cheryl. “You’re very pretty. Your hair and your eyes…they’re like mine.”
“Thank you. You’re very pretty, too.”
The girl seemed to take the returned compliment as an invitation. She came over to Cheryl’s side and sat down beside her. “You know someone that’s died, don’t you? Everybody does.”
“Cassie!” Jeremiah snapped.
“It’s okay,” Cheryl said. “I don’t mind.” She took a breath then told her in brief detail about Mark, her fiancé, who’d passed on, and a couple of friends that she’d lost. She purposely left out details about her father. Given the circumstances that she’d left him in, there was no choice but to assume he was dead now. Even so, it was too painful to admit tha
t he was gone by talking about it to make it official.
“Come…” Cassie said, grabbing her hand and pulling her to her feet.
Cheryl looked at Jeremiah, bewildered.
“She wants to show you the wall. It’s all right…”
Cheryl followed the girl to the kitchen. The room had once been the serving area when the building was an ice cream shop, but it was remodeled after Jeremiah and Hannah turned the building into a church and their home. The kitchen had standard appliances that were unused, because there had been no electricity since the early days of the apocalypse. The space was used now as a food factory of sorts—sprouts and micro greens in plastic tubs lined the window sill, table, and counters. It was also apparently an art gallery. One entire wall was plastered with gruesome crayon drawings. At the very top, there was a row of pictures depicting skulls that had mouths with sharp, shark-like teeth. Drops of blood dripped down from them onto the images of the people below.
“She calls it her “Death Wall,” Jeremiah said, coming up behind them as he wrung his hands.” We tried to discourage her, but that seemed to cause her more distress, so we let her keep it as a sort of a therapeutic outlet.”
Cassie looked up at Cheryl, her wide blue eyes imploring. “If you tell me what your fiancé and your friends looked like, I’ll make pictures for them too.”
With some reluctance, Cheryl described the tall soldier that she’d been engaged to and the friends she’d lost. A couple of minutes later, Cassie had just started working furiously on her new drawings when the sound of a female cough made them all turn their heads. Hannah peered in the door frame, using it to support her fragile body. Her eyes were bloodshot, and there were streaks of dried tears cutting stripes through her soot-darkened face. When Cassie saw her, she ran to her, nearly knocking Hannah over as she wrapped her arms around the elder woman’s hips and buried her cheek in the folds of her skirt before looking up at her face.
“You okay, Grandma Hannah?”
“I think so,” she replied, smoothing the girl’s hair down with a grimy hand. “I’m feeling a little better.” Then, seeming to notice that everyone was staring at her, her body went rigid. “You’re all angry with me, aren’t you?”
“No one’s mad at you,” Jeremiah said. “We shouldn’t have eaten the food in the garden anyway. It was better to get rid of it.”
“We should have talked about it first. I’m sorry—I guess I just went kind of crazy after hearing that Brian and Allie’s family got infected after eating food from my crops.”
Kai was closest to her. He reached out his hand to pat her shoulder, but Hannah ignored it as she threw her hands up to her cheeks, noticing the new faces amongst the group. “Oh my dear Lord…Cheryl’s back! And Aidan! Why didn’t you all come tell me?”
With Cassie still clinging to her, she met Cheryl in the middle of the room, and they embraced. Cheryl felt lumpy bones through the back of her dress, and smelled the smoke permeating her skin. Aidan took his turn giving her a hug. After some more hugs and gleeful banter, they let Cassie work on her drawings while they retreated to sit amongst the pews and talk. Hannah excused herself for a few minutes to make herself more presentable then came back with a washed face and a clean dress. All of her attention was focused on Cheryl as she asked question after question about what had happened during her absence. Cheryl gave her a much sanitized version of what she’d told the others. After a few minutes of talking, she deflected Hannah’s questions by asking about Cassie. “Do you know anything at all about what happened to her parents?”
Hannah shook her head. “She just won’t talk about them. Whenever we try to bring the subject up, she just goes to her crayons and starts to draw. Although, some of her pictures she didn’t want up on the wall. They were just a mess of scribbles and shapes like circles and lines and random numbers. She broke a lot of crayons when she drew those.”
“We’ve been giving her extra rations of food and hoping that after she’d gotten to know us better and had some time to recuperate, she’d open up to us…” Jeremiah said. “… but it hasn’t happened.”
Cheryl shrugged. “It doesn’t really matter, does it? The past is the past. There’s no point in dredging that up for her. You’re her family now.”
That statement made both Hannah and Jeremiah smile as if the informal declaration of it was something they both needed, since there was no court around to verify the adoption.
After a moment of silence, Hannah hopped up and left the sanctuary. When she returned a minute later, she held out her closed hand to Cheryl. “I have something for you.”
When she uncurled her fingers, Cheryl felt both numbness and disbelief.
“Your engagement ring,” Hannah said, beaming. “After we buried that monster that attacked you, I found it sitting in the middle of the road. Can you believe it? Maybe some critter picked it up and dropped it there.”
“Thank you,” Cheryl said as she took the ring. She stared at the crusty gold and diamond band for a moment. Then, her eyes went to Aidan. He stared back, giving her a look with his one eye that she couldn’t read. She looked down again at the ring again. Instead of putting it on her finger, she put it in her pocket. “You know…the past is the past. I just said that, right?”
There were mumbles of agreement.
###
The rest of the morning and afternoon seemed to pass like water through a sieve as they sat around and talked, only stopping for a short while to partake of a meager meal of windowsill-grown greens and canned beans. That evening, after Cassie was put to bed in Jeremiah and Hannah’s bedroom at the rear of the building, Hannah came back to the sanctuary with an animated grin blooming from cheek to cheek and her hands clasped together. “One of the other survivors in the area gave us a gift a few weeks ago in exchange for some for some food. I hid it away and didn’t tell the others, because it felt like blood money after some folks got sick but I think…in honor of your return…it would be a good night to share it. Diego…would you be so kind as to help me a moment?”
He rose to his feet and they disappeared into the kitchen area. Cheryl guessed they were headed for the cellar to retrieve something. When they returned a few minutes later, they were carrying some more candles to light, several bottles of wine, and a half-empty bottle of whiskey.
Glasses were poured all around, and the mood lightened considerably. After everyone was on their second pour, the banter between Zach and Diego grew into a predictable volleyball of insults. Unlike their past arguments, this round of ribald jokes and braggadocio seemed immensely more lighthearted. Of course, it still turned physical. When pews were moved out of the way and they began a few rounds of bare-fisted sparring, it wasn’t anything like one of the serious fights like they’d had in the past that nearly turned into a death match. If anything, Cheryl thought, they were just entertaining the others with what seemed now like rehearsed lines about each other’s abuela—apparently the grandmother jokes never got old between them.
“Keep it down!”
The merriment stopped, and everyone turned and looked towards Jordan.
“You’re too loud. I’ve seen half a dozen Eaters out there in the last hour, and I don’t think any of us are going to sleep tonight if they hear us and start beating on the walls.”
“You’re a killjoy, amigo,” Zach said. “But, you’re right. We did get a little too noisy.” He waved Diego off. “I’ll kick your ass tomorrow, esse. We’ll make sure the coast is clear before I do, so when I yell timberrrr…your thunderous crash to the ground won’t attract the walking dead.”
“I look forward to it amigo, but you’re going to be the one kissing the floor with birdies dancing over your head.”
They both grabbed a bottle after that and decided to play nice.
Feeling a little fuzzy headed after just a half glass of wine, Cheryl wanted to find a place to lie down and rest. First, she decided to find Aidan, because he’d gone down the hallway a half hour ago and never returned. After c
hecking the bedroom and the bathroom, she peaked into a small storage area that also doubled as a sitting room. Aidan wasn’t inside, but she saw a tall ladder in the center of the room below an open hatch that led to the roof.
Looking up through the hole, there were stars twinkling back at her.
So peaceful…
She paused for a moment and stared, thinking it would be nice to imagine it was a pleasant night in a world that wasn’t so messed up. Then, she climbed up the ladder and poked her head through the hole.
The smell of the acrid smoke from the remnants of the garden made her nose wrinkle; she could see ghostly wisps of it still lingering along the ground in between some of the raised beds. Though she understood what had driven Hannah to light the fire, it had been a moment of madness that could have doomed the whole group—it was a wonder that the whole building hadn’t burned down.
Aidan was on the far right side of the rooftop “Shhh…” He pointed as she carefully made her way over and sat down beside him. “Over there…”
In the faint light of the moon, she could see a hazy figure hunched over behind an overturned wheelbarrow. It looked like it was digging with its hands as it made aggravated grunts and groans.
“It’s an Eater,” she said, quietly.
“Beast,” he said. “Eater sounds like someone sitting next to you in a diner, chowing down on a plate of chicken fried steak and mashed potatoes. And N.E.U.—necrophagus fucking eating unit—as the military so affectionately calls them just doesn’t represent something so vile it’d just as soon eat your entrails if it can’t get to your brains.”
“I’ll always call them Eaters. It suits them, because it’s all they do.” She smirked, glad that after everything they’d been through, Aidan was still showing some signs of humor. “Is that a trash heap over there? Compost?”
Eaters: Resurrection Page 2