by Glen Krisch
“Where is he?” Charlie said, seemingly fascinated by every detail.
“Someplace else, for good, is all I gotta say.”
“You killed him,” Kendra said weakly.
“I did nothing of the sort.”
“You slashed his tires before we took off.”
“Given the circumstances, that’s getting off pretty light.”
“Are you okay, honey?” Mom asked her.
Kendra nodded and started tearing up.
Mom grabbed ice from the freezer, wrapped it in a dish towel.
Kendra hesitated, staring down. “Thanks, Mom,” she said and finally took the ice pack. Their hands touched briefly in the exchange; in that instant, the hostility she normally reserved for their parents was gone, at least for the time being.
“How about we get you cleaned up?” Kendra asked.
“That’s a great idea, Norma,” Dad said.
“Yes, okay. Thanks,” Mom said.
Kendra held the ice to her face and together they left the kitchen. They were already chatting—Kendra pouring out her heart, Mom listening and consoling her—by the time they reached the bathroom.
Dad looked from one boy to the next and said, “I am just so incredibly sorry. I should have known better.”
“We made it through okay, Dad,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, that’s all that matters,” Billy added.
Dad shook his head and paced, staring down at the body of Dylan Primrose.
“So, is it true?” Charlie asked.
“What’s that, son?”
“Did you really slash Tanner’s tires? ’Cause if you did, that’s badass!”
Billy snorted, then waited to see their dad’s reaction. When he broke out into a fit of laughter, Billy joined in. His brother did too, but his voice was cut off by a shocked inhalation.
Primrose had reached out, took hold of Charlie’s calf. The dead man groaned and started crawling in an effort to sink his teeth into living flesh.
Charlie kicked away from the zombie, and a second later their dad fired a round into its skull from Tanner’s handgun.
“He wasn’t bit, was he?” Billy said.
“No, but maybe he doesn’t need to be,” Dad said.
“Maybe it’s something in the air,” Charlie added, wiping Primrose’s blood from his forearm with a dish rag. “Like an infection.”
“What was that?” Mom called out from the other room.
“Uh, just a sign that it’s time to get the hell out of here!” Dad replied.
“Language, Mark!”
“I’ll say a Hail Mary if you get your ass moving!”
“Mark!”
“Fine, I’ll make it two. Now, just hurry up, please.”
CHAPTER 25
Dad eased the car onto the campground’s inner service road. As they put more distance between them and their house, Billy’s fatigue seemed to multiply. So much had happened in such a short period of time that it felt like he’d already lived a thousand todays. He stared out his window, unable to stop his head from dipping with exhaustion. His eyes were heavy and about to close, but he became fully alert when something moved in the trees lining the road.
It was the slow, staggered steps of a zombie boy, no older than he was, wearing a red Cardinals’ jersey with the number 28 just to the left of his navel—Tommy Herr, Billy knew by heart. And he was followed by a half dozen other zombies emerging through the woods, then others, countless others following in their wake.
Inside the campgrounds. They were being overrun.
“We’re lucky we left when we did,” Charlie said.
“Yeah …” Dad said, sounding like he was going to say something else; instead, he merely repeated, “Yeah.”
Kendra cried softly in the middle of the backseat, her brothers on either side of her.
“You’re better off, Ken,” Charlie said.
“Yeah, you can date a million other guys,” Billy added.
“Please, God, no,” Mom said.
Dad laughed hard, and then they all did.
“Real funny, Billy,” Kendra said and elbowed him. There was a brief smile in her eyes. She gave him the slightest nod, and Billy gave her one as well.
We’re going to be okay, Billy thought. We’re all together, escaping together. There could be so many worse options. We’re the lucky ones.
“You know … Florida,” Dad said. “I don’t think that’s a good idea anymore. There are too many miles, too many risks along the way.”
“Where are we going?” Charlie said. “Where can we go? There’s no place.”
“We should probably check out Silas Falls since it’s so close,” Mom said. “They have a police station, the hospital—”
“No!” Billy said. He didn’t know why, but he felt that they needed to avoid Silas Falls no matter what.
“Yeah, Mom. Bad idea,” Charlie said.
“Why would you say that?” she said, turning around.
“Mom, please,” Kendra added. “Anywhere else. I don’t know what it is, but I know if we go to town, we’ll die.”
Their parents exchanged a knowing glance; perhaps they, too, knew the unsettling feeling they were all obviously sharing.
“I think I know a place,” Dad said, trying to sound cheerful. “It’s out on the Mississippi River. An island. Used to be a French Military fort two hundred years ago.”
“Sanctuary Island?” Mom said.
“Yeah,” he said. “It’s a stone fortress, mostly forgotten. I bet no one’s thought about going there.”
“I remember when you took me there when we were dating,” Mom said. “We went on the guided tour. I think it’s as good an idea as any.”
“That’s settled then,” he said, and looked at the kids in the rearview mirror.
“Dad, look out!” Kendra said.
A man stood in the road, waving for them to stop.
Dad slammed on the brakes, hard, and the front bumper came within a couple feet of the man, who looked like he wasn’t going to let them pass by without running him over.
“Whoa, that was close,” Dad said, pulling the car to the side of the road.
Billy thought it was a zombie, at first, but the man was obviously alive, and obviously scared out of his mind.
“Wait, honey,” Mom said, putting a hand on his forearm. “We don’t know him. He might be … dangerous.”
The man wore a once-white lab coat, a dress shirt with a black tie, black slacks. His hands were bloody. Sprays of gore and mud stained the front of him, as if his body were a Jackson Pollock canvas.
“Not everyone is dangerous,” Dad said.
“But we don’t know him,” Mom said, and glared with an intensity totally out of her character before today. “We can’t make decisions about anyone we don’t trust.”
“We don’t have any room, besides,” Charlie said.
The man approached and tapped on the driver’s side window. He looked over his shoulder, then back with terror in his eyes as Dad rolled down the window a crack.
“Please take me with you,” he said. “My wife … my Keely, she needs me.”
Billy spotted movement in the nearby trees. All around them, zombies were alerted by the noise of the vehicle, were honed in on them.
“Dad,” Billy said.
“Yeah,” Charlie said, “let’s just take off. Screw ’em.”
“Charlie, language,” Mom said.
“Please, mister, it’s just a couple of miles.” The man tried to open the driver’s side door, and when he tugged on the locked handle, his lab coat billowed open, revealing a long knife tucked into his belt.
“Mark, he’s got a knife!” Mom cried.
Zombies closed in around them, now no more than thirty feet distant. Their groans in
tensified, and the buzzing of their accompanying horseflies became a hypnotic static.
“I’m sorry,” Dad said, “I can’t help you.”
The man pounded on the window with his fist.
“I’ve come so far! I’ve never been so close. You cannot leave me behind!” He held onto the door handle, even as Dad started to pull away.
“You’re dragging him,” Kendra said. “You’re going to hurt him!”
“It’s not my problem,” Dad said, “All that matters is keeping us safe.”
The man’s feet juddered against the dirt road, and he screamed in pain before finally relinquishing his grip and tumbling away from the car.
All three kids turned to look out the back window where the man lay crumpled in the road, unmoving.
“I think he’s dead,” Kendra said. “He’s not moving.”
“There’s blood,” Charlie said. “And I think it’s from his skull.”
Billy could no longer watch, not as the zombies closed the distance and began to feed.
Dad held the steering wheel in a white-knuckle grip.
“It couldn’t be helped, Mark,” Mom said and patted his arm.
“That didn’t have to happen,” Dad said. “I could’ve done something. Anything. But, no, I decided to be an asshole and now that guy is dead.”
“Honey, while I will pray for his everlasting soul, I cast no blame in your direction.”
The terrible guilt in his face eased in slow degrees.
He drove through the open gate to a narrow surface road that wound through the state forest land, and when he reached the three-way intersection, he didn’t hesitate. He sped away, leaving both the Cherryhill Campgrounds and downtown Silas Falls behind.
CHAPTER 26
Dr. Soto: Becomes Tomorrow
Dr. Elliot Soto had never been so close to home, so close to Keely, since the whole disaster of stuck time and the bleeding-over of different universes had forced him through an endless loop of trial and error, death, and reliving the same horrible moments of today.
There was shuffling in the surrounding woods, but it wasn’t too close, and he’d already learned, countless times, that he could easily outrun the zombies. But he hoped to not have to run. Being exposed to the myriad dangers between the ruins of his laboratory, and his home three miles distant, only decreased the odds that he’d ever see Keely again.
Soto peered around the shelter of a tree trunk.
A car approached in the distance, a sedan tearing down the dirt road, sending up gouts of dust and stirring the surrounding zombies into a riled horde. They fanned out behind the car from the tree line, the grassy underbrush, the road in the far distance. And the car was bringing them right toward Soto’s hiding spot.
This might be his one chance to escape. If he could only put the woods behind him, he could perhaps find his own vehicle. It would at least bring him closer to home.
He stepped out from behind the tree.
The car—a Cavalier—barreled toward him at a breakneck pace.
If he’d had more time, he could have created some kind of temporary blockage in the road; he could have shoved a large tree branch or a boulder in the way, or something that would have allowed him to make contact with the person driving.
But he was out of time, and couldn’t let the car leave without him.
He would do whatever it took.
Soto inched closer, and as the car neared, he planned to step into the middle of the road, wave his hands like crazy, and force it to stop. If they could only hear his voice, to understand his plight, then they would understand. If they had any humanity, they would understand.
But then he suddenly knew—as he’d known what paths not to take over the course of today—that he couldn’t let the driver see him. No. If the driver saw him, it wouldn’t end well. And when it didn’t end well, Soto would then have to restart this morning and skirt every other obstacle in his path, once again, to reach this very point.
The car sped along, and at the last second Soto dropped to his belly in the grass. His heartbeat throbbed in his ears as the car zoomed past, and the engine’s rumble dissipated, replaced by the hungered cries of the undead.
He waited until he was certain the car wouldn’t return before getting to his feet. Dozens of zombies surrounded him, and with his presence now obvious, they keened in on him like a pack of predators set upon a wounded prey.
Soto removed the knife from his belt and made a break for a gap in the horde. He had no way of knowing if this path would lead him to Keely, but he was certain that if he didn’t take this path, he would have to try again.
No matter how many todays it would take, Soto would find his way home.
He ran past the horde, and as he reached the exit gate to the campgrounds, the sun began its dip into the horizon; night was falling—for the first time in so long that he couldn’t remember yesterday.
Soto neared the little ranch house on the outskirts of Silas Falls, prayed for tomorrow to come, for the ending of this cursed day of a thousand days.
The screen door screeched when he opened it, and he found the inner door unlocked. When he stepped inside his home, all was darkness, all was still.
He was insensate, drifting, intangible, matterless.
Then a voice greeted him, excited beyond measure and filled with heartbreaking warmth, echoing off walls made of brick and plaster.
“Elliot, oh my God! You made it home!”
Everything made sense; every today was well worth living and dying through, for just this moment.
Keely nearly knocked him over with her hug, and he kissed her hard, her skin a pale glow in the surrounding darkness. She was alive and well, and so was he, and that’s all that mattered.
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
A native of the Chicago suburbs, Glen Krisch hopes to add to his list of ghosts he’s witnessed (two), as well as develop his rather pedestrian telekinetic and precognitive skills. Besides writing and reading, he enjoys spending time with his wife, his three boys, simple living, and ultra-running.
OTHER WORKS BY GLEN KRISCH
Novels
The Nightmare Within
Where Darkness Dwells
Nothing Lasting
Arkadium Rising: Brother’s Keeper Book One
Little Whispers
Gleaners: Brother’s Keeper Book Two
Novellas
Loss
The Hollowed Land: A Brother’s Keeper Novella
Husks
The Painter from Piotrków
Collections
Through the Eyes of Strays
Commitment and Other Tales of Madness
No Man’s Dominion
Filth Eater
The Devil’s Torment