Now that we had fewer people in the cellar, I wondered why no one had brought down proper beds. As sleep took me, I decided I didn’t care. Even if they did, I’d probably have to share one with Mom and Grandma, and that wouldn’t be comfortable.
I must’ve slept longer than I planned because I woke to the sun going down and to the sounds of screams and gunshots coming from the kitchen.
14.
For a brief instant, I thought the noise from the gun battle below me was just a dream. I hadn’t been dreaming about firearms, but that didn’t mean that my brain hadn’t inserted the weapons. Odd things happened in my dreams all the time. I rarely remember them. When I did, I could only conjure up vague images. Yet, many times upon waking, I’d have this feeling that I’d experienced something strange in the night, or wake with the sounds of my dream fading in my ear.
That’s what I thought was happening when I first woke from my nap. Dreams that I had while napping always seemed more real. I guessed it was because I rarely fell into a deep sleep when resting.
It took my brain a half a minute to realize that the sound of the gunshots wasn’t fading but getting louder and more insistent.
“What the hell,” I said to no one and scrambled off the bed.
The light through Grandma’s window was fading. I’d been asleep for a long time, it appeared. While I’d napped, my world had imploded.
Like an idiot, instead of running away from the sounds of fighting, I ran toward it. As I bounded down the stairs, I saw that the front door was open, giving me a full view of the circle barrier on that side of the house and the nearly ten zombies dangling from spikes that stuck out of the fence line.
My first thought was that one of the creatures had gotten past the barrier and into the house. I was just wondering where I should run when I rounded the bottom of the stairs and saw my Uncle Jamie, my grandma, and three of my cousins standing in the living room. The five of them stood in the archway to the kitchen with their backs to me. Their guns pointed at a barricaded cellar door.
I froze. I could do nothing but stand and watch each of my remaining family members flinch every so often as something bumped the door.
It couldn’t be.
We were safe.
I looked out the front door again to make sure none of the creatures were crossing the yard to us. Those gunshots were loud enough to get the attention of zombies that were miles from here.
Nothing was on the porch or in the yard that I could see. In the distance, I could make out a few shapes, but at the slow pace that they were ambling toward us, it would be a bit before they got to the house.
I turned back to my family. No one had noticed me. All of them stared intently at the cellar door.
“What happened?” I asked.
My question came out shakily and a bit on the low side, but in the silence of the living room, the words were booming. All five of my remaining family members jumped and spun to look at me.
One of my cousins, Kayla, fired off a random shot when she jumped. Luckily, the bullet went wild and landed in the stairway.
“You scared the shit out of me,” Kayla said.
“Did you let Jace in the house?” my grandma demanded.
If she hadn’t had a gun in her hand and if noises from the cellar hadn’t drawn her attention back to the kitchen, I think she might have come at me.
“No. I haven’t seen Jace since he and his family left over a month ago. Why? Did he come back?” I asked, examining their terrified faces before returning my attention to the barricade.
“He sure the hell did,” Grandma said. “The little shit had a bite wound. He snuck back into the house, turned, and—well, you can guess the rest,” she said, pointing at the cellar door.
“Momma?” I asked.
I was too shocked by the implication to cry at that moment.
“She’s gone,” Grandma said, moving to pull me into a hug.
Grandma had said the words so calmly, but I could see the panic and pain in her eyes.
“How?” I asked, not hugging her back.
I didn’t think I could move my arms. They felt heavy and numb.
“We aren’t sure. All of us were on guard duty, and Grandma was at the coup, feeding the chickens. Everything was quiet one minute, and the next, we heard a scream from downstairs. The ones he bit must have turned rather quickly, though, if you were upstairs and the five of us were here, that didn’t leave many people for him to attack. What, six people?” Kayla asked, looking at each of us in turn and making a mental calculation of the number of people who were still alive.
“All Jace had to do was turn two other people, and he had a small enough army to take care of the rest. Most of the people down there were sleeping because they’d been on watch last night,” my cousin Chase said, looking at the door.
His father, my Uncle Carson, was down there, along with his mom. Luckily, his brother Sam was standing beside him with his hand on Chase’s shoulder.
“My God,” I whispered.
As I took in the number of people in the room, I realized that neither of Uncle Jamie’s sons nor his wife had made it out of the cellar. I looked at my uncle to see how he was holding up. His face was stoic, but his eyes shone with fear, anger, and sorrow.
No one said anything for a long time.
Grandma held tight to Kayla and me while the boys watched the cellar door, and Uncle Jamie walked the wrap-around porch, searching for a break in our barrier. When he returned, he looked puzzled but tired.
“What do we do now, Momma?” Uncle Jamie eventually asked, taking up watch by one of the living room windows.
By then, we’d all relaxed our stance some, feeling sure that the creatures that had once been our family weren’t going to be able to get to us.
“Wait for now. We need to regroup and rest. In the morning, we’ve got to take care of the bodies. We need those supplies,” Grandma said, pointing to the cellar.
“You’re going to kill them?” I asked, turning to her in shock.
Logically, I knew that was what we were supposed to do, but they were our people: our mothers, fathers, and children. I couldn’t fathom being able to kill someone I loved. Tears were streaming down my face. My mother hadn’t been the sanest person since the outbreak, but she was my mother, and everything she’d done was because she loved me and feared for me.
“Honey, they’re already dead, and we won’t be able to survive much longer without what’s left of our food, all of which is down there,” Grandma said, putting her hand on my shoulder and steering me to the sofa.
She was also crying, but she was thinking with her head, not her heart.
I couldn’t do anything more than stare at the cellar door and the furniture piled on top of it as we moved. My mother was down there, and she was dead—dead. My mind couldn’t grasp that concept. Even with all the death that we’d seen, I couldn’t reconcile the knowledge that my mother wouldn’t be hollering for me ever again.
“Where were you?” Grandma asked me, motioning for my cousins to take a seat as well. “Why weren’t you downstairs?”
Her tone wasn’t accusatory, but it was firm.
“I couldn’t listen to Momma anymore. When she started ranting again, I went upstairs to your room. I just wanted to see the sky. I took a nap in your bed. Your gunfire woke me. Oh, God. I could’ve been down there—I should have been. If I had been, maybe I could’ve...,” I said, realizing how close I’d come to dying and how I might have prevented my mother’s death.
“There’s nothing you could’ve done,” Grandma said, hugging me tightly.
“How did Jace get inside, is what I want to know,” Uncle Jamie said, staring at me as if he didn’t believe my story.
“I don’t know. I didn’t see anyone when I came up the stairs,” I said.
“Who was supposed to be watching the front door?” Grandmother asked, nodding at the door that was in plain view of the kitchen, living room, cellar door, and stairway.
“Fuck,” was all Uncle Jamie said.
We let the word hang in the air. It was the perfect sentiment for our situation.
15.
I wasn’t sure if Uncle Jamie believed the story of Julie letting Jace in the house or not. Probably not, because we didn’t have proof and Julie was dead, and I was alive. Throughout the afternoon and night, he watched me as much as he watched the yard surrounding the house. I guess I was someone Uncle Jamie could blame. If Grandma hadn’t been there, he might’ve questioned me further to try to force a confession out of me.
Despite the constant banging on the cellar door, we stayed in the living room late into the night. We barely spoke to one another, but no one seemed to want to separate. Every so often, Uncle Jamie would disappear outside to kill a zombie that got too close to the house. Eventually, Grandma sent us kids upstairs to bed.
We begrudgingly went.
The three of us found out the following morning that Grandma had sent us away because she, Uncle Jamie, and my cousin Sam weren’t going to wait until the next day to go into the cellar. In the early hours before dawn, while my cousins, Kaylie, Chase, and I slept upstairs in Grandma’s bed, the three of them removed the items covering the cellar door and crept down to face what was below. Only my Uncle Jamie and my cousin Sam returned.
Later, when asked, neither would talk about what happened to Grandma.
My cousins and I had woken to the sounds of gunshots and ran downstairs to the kitchen to find the cellar door open, and blood and body parts rimming the entrance. Screams floated up from the cellar, making the three of us cower in the living room.
More gunshots burst through the silent night, followed by a few more screams, and an arm sailed through the opening to roll across the kitchen floor. My cousin Kaylie shrieked, and Chase threw up. I think I fainted for a second. I’d seen a few things early on before Mom banned me from going upstairs and through the only window in the cellar the time or two when no one was guarding it, but the stump of the arm was too real. I guess that was because it belonged to someone we knew. Who, I couldn’t tell because it was too mangled.
A few minutes later, Uncle Jamie and Sam made their way out of the cellar, slamming the door shut behind them. They were covered in gore, trembling, and looking shell-shocked. I knew we were in trouble when Grandma didn’t follow them. I broke into tears at the thought of never seeing her again—alive, that was.
No one said a word as Uncle Jamie and Sam left the house and went to the well to draw water to clean themselves. Kaylie and Chase cleaned up Chase’s vomit while I merely sat in the corner and cried.
Later that day, after Uncle Jamie and Sam had rested from their ordeal, the two, along with my cousin Chase went back into the cellar while Kaylie and I cleaned the kitchen. I began crying again when Chase and Sam came up the stairs with Grandma in their arms. Luckily they had wrapped her body in a blanket before bringing her out. They’d done the same to all of the dead before allowing Kaylie and I to start bringing our supplies upstairs. None of us wanted to be in the cellar ever again.
I cried through the entire ordeal and wasn’t much help, but no one told me to be quiet, to go to Grandma’s room until it was over, or tried to comfort me in any way. That was the first time that I understood that despite how brave I’d felt in the cellar, I wasn’t at all prepared for the world in which we currently lived. Part of that was Mom’s fault for pitching a holy fit whenever someone even suggested I learn to use a gun or one of the many makeshift weapons my uncles had created or to take my turn at watch.
I couldn’t be angry at the lack of sympathy I received. The others were in just as much pain and sorrow as I was. If I couldn’t bring myself to comfort them, why should I think they would do it for me? Thankfully, cleaning the basement kept me distracted.
The field where we took the bodies used to be the one the cows grazed in, but not a single one of the animals was in sight.
“Some of these bodies are human,” Kaylie said, walking the line of the dead.
“Yes,” was Uncle Jamie’s only reply.
“You guys killed regular people?” she asked, bending over the body to get a better look at the person.
The stench was overwhelming, but the peppermint soaked rags we had covering our noses and mouths helped mask some of it. I didn’t recognize the person. Some of that was due to how bloated the corpse was. The rest was because it was a stranger. The fight it had been in before coming to the farm and decomposition had deformed the person’s facial features so much that I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman.
“When we had too,” Uncle Jamie said.
“If they were alive, why would you have to?” Kaylie demanded.
No one else seemed bothered by the fact that people lay dead in our field. She was the only one who didn’t seem to get it.
“Some of them were trying to force their way into the house to get to our food. Some had been bitten, like Jace, but hadn’t yet turned, which was why he should’ve never been let into the house, to begin with,” Uncle Jamie said, turning his head to glare at me.
“I didn’t let him in the house. So you can shut that shit down right now,” I said, leaping to my feet and starting toward my uncle.
He didn’t move.
I’d never sworn at an adult before, but I was tired, scared, and angry, and I was not about to have the only people left on the Earth who could help me survive the end of the world thinking I was the cause of the death of most of our family.
“I told you no one was on watch when I went upstairs. I’m not stupid enough to let anyone in the house without permission. I get that my parents sheltered me. That you all think I’m weak. I may not understand things right away, but I’m not stupid. Mom was. She was in denial. I’m not.”
“Okay. Fine,” Uncle Jamie said, throwing up his arms. “Listen up, all of you. He’s,” he said, pointing down to Jace’s body, “an example of why if any of us get bit, we have to tell each other right away. No one, and I mean no one, survives a bite. Don’t hide it thinking you’re the exception, and you’re going to get better. There’s no exception. You’re killing us if you don’t tell. If you don’t want us killing you before you turn, then you walk away.”
We nodded at his words.
The five of us stayed at Grandma’s for another week, but then the whole place caught fire when Chase tried to burn the field of bodies. I understood his actions. Wolves and coyotes were getting to the dead, and his and Sam’s parents were among them, but there had been a reason why Uncle Jamie hadn’t set the field ablaze. The ground was too dry, and we didn’t have access to a fire truck to put out the flames if the fire got out of hand, which he felt sure it would, and it did.
Chase apologized profusely for the fire and our need for a hasty departure from our family home, but I don’t think any of us were truly angry. Our families had been out there decaying. Also, I think we all knew that we were going to have to leave soon anyway. Our food was slowly diminishing, and the number of zombies flooding into the area was increasing. We understood that the bodies in the field could’ve been drawing them to us, but our attempt at digging a mass grave failed. The farm equipment made too much noise. Doing it by hand took too long, and our presence out in the open drew the zombies to the house.
Uncle Jamie had us taking turns on watch, and when we weren’t on guard duty or sleeping, we were training. Only he and Sam could aim worth a shit, though. The two had been able to keep us safe up to that point, but we worried that one day soon, the creatures would run us out of our home the way they had so many other people.
When we could get someone on the radio, all we heard were stories of groups wandering from one so-called safe place to the next. Something inevitably happened to make them leave. No one seemed to be able to stay in one place for more than a month or two. We knew we’d been lucky to make it as lo
ng as we did in Grandma’s cellar.
On the day of the fire, Chase was supposed to be guarding the back door, Uncle Jamie the front, with Sam and I positioned at the other two corners. We’d only seen a trickle of zombies that day, but Jamie wasn’t confident we were in the clear enough to let our guard down.
He talked about going on supply runs, discussed what we needed to do in the fields and when we should start planting seeds for next year, but he only reluctantly let us go to the old well to draw water for drinking and baths about every two days or so.
The most important thing we were low on was ammunition. When we spotted a creature that looked as if it might break through our barrier, we were supposed to let Uncle Jamie know, and he’d go out with a katana he’d bought for one of his boys during their Benny Imura phase. The weapon had hung on Kris’ wall in a locked display case until the day of the outbreak.
While Uncle Jamie had been to the north of the house, beheading a few straggling zombies, Chase had been in the cow field dousing the bodies. He’d asked one time before, shortly after the cellar incident, why we didn’t burn the dead, and Uncle Jamie had explained, but we should’ve known then that my uncle’s answer hadn’t satisfied Chase.
Uncle Jamie had gotten back to the house in time to see Sam, Kaylie, and I run out the front door with our “bugout bags,” as he’d called them, on our backs and dragging his and Chases’ behind us. We hadn’t known then precisely what had happened. We only knew that we’d smelled smoke and gotten out of the house. By the time Uncle Jamie had figured out what Chase had done, the fire had reached the Grandma’s family home.
To my surprise, Uncle Jamie didn’t scream or lash out at Chase in any way. He just took a look at the flaming field, turned, and walked away. He retrieved his bag from Sam and started down the long driveway that led away from Grandma’s house without telling us to go with him. The four of us followed in silence.
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