West was the direction the zombies were going. If I was going to be one of them, I might as well point my body in the right direction. Besides, my family would be moving east.
I finally crawled into a minivan to rest sometime before dusk. I made sure the doors were shut and locked before eating a bit of food and going to sleep in the backseat. The long bench seat wasn’t comfortable, but I was too exhausted to care. I passed out as soon as my head hit the hard lump that was the backpack I’d filled in the dollar store.
The reason I chose the minivan was two-fold. I hadn’t seen or heard a zombie since leaving the store. I didn’t know if that was because I was turning into one of them, and they no longer sensed me or if there simply weren’t any around. Just in case I was ahead of another horde, and I wasn’t changing, the size of the van would keep the creatures from smelling my bleeding arm. I hoped.
Secondly, Uncle Jamie said that the zombies that had turned inside a vehicle were trapped because they didn’t know how the door handles worked. I figured if I changed in the night, the minivan was as safe a place as any to spend eternity. Sure, if I were strong enough, I might be able to bust out a window, but I doubted, in my condition, that I would wake a strong zombie. The lack of real food would allow me to grow weaker over time.
To my utter shock, I woke human late the next afternoon. The air in the van was stale with a slight, sickly odor, but luckily, we were enjoying a mild winter, so it wasn’t freezing or sweltering. If I hadn’t known that I was human when the fog of sleep first started to lift, hitting the floor between the rows of seats when I tried to stretch, was a dead giveaway. I hit my head on something, cursed, and looked around dazedly before remembering where I was and why I was there.
“I’m still alive,” I said aloud to no one.
My voice was raspy and barely audible, but it was there and better than it had been.
The sound that came from my mouth made my head hurt, and I flinched from the pain. It was then I realized that I hadn’t spoken since screaming my voice away running from the zombies. I’d cried, but mostly silent tears.
Getting off the van’s floor was a bit difficult due to my hurt arm and cramped legs. After a few awkward moves, I was sitting upright in the seat I’d slept on and staring out the front window at an empty world.
“Well, fuck,” I said to drown my growing sense of fear.
I was alone.
I still hadn’t turned, which meant I probably wouldn’t. I’d left my family for no reason. I couldn’t remember the location of the military base that was still taking in survivors, so I had no idea where my family was. Hell, I didn’t even know where I currently was.
“Fuck,” I tried to scream and started to cry again.
Chances were high that I would’ve crawled into a ball and bawled myself to sleep if the urge to pee hadn’t gotten worse the longer I sat there. Grabbing my backpack, I left the vehicle.
I squatted just outside the van to relieve my bladder before surveying the area.
Yep, I was alone, and from the looks of me in the van’s mirrors, I was most definitely still human. A dirty, tear-stained human, but alive nonetheless.
“How can this be?” I asked the person in the mirror, pulling my lips back to see my teeth and opening my eyes wide to check their color.
I knew one of those creatures had bitten me. I knew they had. Hadn’t they? Only one way to find out, I guess.
I was unable to stifle the scream that ripped from my throat when I removed my bandage. Thankfully, I had shut myself up in the van again so that the zombies couldn’t get me if they heard me. The creatures could surround me and keep me trapped inside the vehicle until something else caught their attention, and I could die before that happened, but they couldn’t get to me.
The wound appeared to be just as nasty as it was the day before. Maybe, it wasn’t a bite. I thought as horrible as it looked that it had to be a bite. Nothing else happened during that fight—that I could think of—to cause it. I couldn’t see teeth marks, though. That didn’t necessarily mean anything. If the zombie had torn away enough flesh, it could’ve taken with it any hints that it had sunk its teeth into me. However, as large as the area was, it didn’t look deep enough or wide enough for a creature to do that much damage to me.
Uncle Jamie had said that some people took longer to turn. Maybe, I was going to be one of those people.
I hoped not.
The change was taking too long as it was. My nerves wouldn’t hold out much longer.
To distract myself, I cleaned the wounded area thoroughly, re-bandaged it, and took some pain meds that I’d found in the dollar store. If I somehow survived the next night, I was going to have to get more medical supplies. I was running out of gauze.
After redressing my arm, I forced myself to drink a bottle of water and eat another protein bar. I hated nourishing a body that would soon be dead, but my stomach growled too forcefully for me to ignore.
I thought about hitting the road again once I’d eaten. A voice in the back of my mind told me to go looking for my family. It reassured me that I wasn’t going to turn.
So many times that day, I started after them, but then I’d move, and my arm would hurt, and I’d chicken out and lie back on the seat. Mostly, what I did was doze.
When I woke the next morning still human, I was sure my wound wasn’t a bite mark. At first, the tears that came were of joy. Next came the realization that I’d left my family for no reason. I bawled out of anger, sadness, and fear. I cried so hard that I threw up in one of the van’s middle seats. The smell of which and my need to urinate again forced me out of the vehicle.
Despite knowing that there was only a slim chance of me ever finding my Uncle Jamie and cousins, I located a road sign that told me where I was, and I headed east. I only stopped when I needed to relieve myself. I cried for most of the day.
I ran or hid from the zombies that I met along the way, though I did have to kill a few. The faint scent of my blood made more than a couple seek out my hiding places.
My wound was on my left arm, but it still screamed every time I fired my gun, swung my knife, or did much of anything. I didn’t let the pain deter me from defending myself, though. If I wasn’t turning, I was determined to stay alive.
That night, I settled in a suburban brick house. I washed up the best I could in a small bathroom, cleaned my wound, changed my bandage, and ate a decent-size meal made from canned food that I’d found in the home’s cupboards.
I hadn’t wanted to admit to myself while I tended my arm, but I was pretty sure the wound was infected. I needed antibiotics. I needed my Uncle there to tell me what to do. I needed my mommy to hug me and reassure me that everything was going to be all right.
The house had been void of any medications stronger than Tylenol, which I knew would do nothing for the infection, though I took them anyway. The master bedroom had a large comfortable bed, so after I barricaded myself inside the room, I stripped, wiped myself down again, and crawled under the fluffy comforter.
The next morning, I found a few leftover antibiotics in a medicine cabinet of a neighbor’s house. I didn’t think they’d be enough to knock out my infection, but they’d have to do. I took a double dose, not caring what it might do to me.
Once I did my morning business and had breakfast, I scoured a few more houses on the block for anything useful before taking off in the direction in which I thought the trailer park might be. I knew that the chances my family would be there looking for me were slim. That didn’t matter. It was going to be my starting point in my search for them.
26.
I never located my family—not at the trailer park or anywhere else for that matter. It took me two days to find the park and a full day to wander through the rubble. I discovered no indication that we’d ever been there, let alone that my uncle and cousins had returned to search for me.
The next day, I tried following the route Sam and I had run in when attempting to escape the horde. Hones
tly, I’d been so scared at that moment, I don’t know in which direction we headed. I never found the first house I’d stumbled upon either.
The trailer park and its surroundings were unfamiliar to me, someone who didn’t live in the area. For all I knew, considering how much damage the park had suffered, I wasn’t even in the same one in which I’d gotten hurt. That place could’ve been an entirely different trailer park. I didn’t think so, but anything was possible.
On the third day, my fever was up, and I had no energy. I had to give up my search. My family could’ve gone anywhere, or they could’ve died.
After leaving the park, I moved farther and farther in the direction I hoped was east. Not once did it occur to me to look for a map in the hopes that it would give me instructions to the nearest military base. I grew up with GPS phone navigation. Paper maps weren’t on my radar.
Weeks later, when I was holed up in a grocery store and saw some on a spinning rack, I decided it was too late to bother going to the base. It was miles from where I was, and I doubted I would make it there on foot. I even doubted my family had found the place. If I’d lived longer, I might have sought out the facility.
Eventually, I don’t know how many days after I’d left the park, Tanner, a teenage boy of about eighteen, found me in the basement of a house in Alabama. Or more accurately, I stumbled upon him. Hell, I was so out of it, I don’t even know how I managed to get inside the house, let alone down to the basement.
We’d had the same idea to hide in the same house at the same time. I say Tanner found me because I’d gone too many days without antibiotics and was half-dead when I’d stumbled into the home and down the stairs to the basement to escape another horde of zombies passing through the area.
Tanner says he almost shot me when I nearly fell face first down the last three steps into the basement. The fact that I was crying and begging for my mommy was his clue that I wasn’t a zombie and that I wasn’t a threat to him at that moment.
Tanner caught me before I could do any more damage to my body by hitting the concrete floor—the basement wasn’t a finished one. He tended my wound and force-fed me meds that he’d found in the house. He’d also scouted the surrounding homes once most of the horde had passed through the area for more meds.
To my utter horror, Tanner had even changed my clothes and washed me when I’d pissed myself and the pile of blankets on which I slept. Thank God, in the few days I was out, I hadn’t had to shit. Tanner promised he wore gloves and masks and that the room was dark when he had to clean me, so he didn’t see that much or touch anything he didn’t have to.
I was grateful for that but embarrassed when I realized Tanner had put an adult diaper on me, though. I’m sure that made clean up simpler, and it made sense to do so, and it was something I would have to keep in mind for the future, but wearing one was no less humiliating.
The one thing Tanner hadn’t been able to get me to do while I was fighting off the infection was to eat. He said I even spit out baby food. That explained why I was starving when I finally came to and why I felt so weak. He told me that the owners of the house had some electrolyte and glucose tablets that he put under my tongue. One helped prevent my blood sugar from dropping, and the other kept me hydrated, though I hadn’t refused water that often.
Once the hordes of zombies passed, Tanner carried me from the house. He took me to the store he’d been hiding out in for the past few weeks. The stock room of the grocery was where I’d finally woken.
I’m sure I’d opened my eyes many times in the days since I’d fallen ill and talked some if I’d been asking for my mom. I even remembered some of it when I regained consciousness.
“Where am I?” I asked, not fully opening my eyes to see my surroundings.
The smell of the stock room and the feel of the hard ground under me told me that I wasn’t outside, which was where I was when I had my last coherent thought.
“You’re safe,” the boy that I’d learn was Tanner said, coming to sit beside me.
“My head hurts,” I said, reaching up to cup my forehead.
“I would imagine so. You haven’t had much to eat or drink for a few days. You’ve been running a high fever as well. When you can, you should sip some water and maybe take a few bites of bread.”
“Bread? There hasn’t been bread in a long time.”
“True. I found some rolls in the freezer. This place had a backup generator that only recently stopped working. Someone was probably staying here before I found it. There isn’t a great deal of frozen or cold food left, but there’s some.”
Tanner was talking too much and too fast for my foggy head to take in everything he said, so I merely responded with, “I have to pee,” before trying to get up.
“We have a facility for that. The bathroom isn’t the cleanest thing on the planet, but it’ll do. Here, I’ll help you stand,” Tanner said, all but lifting me to my feet.
He led me to the bathroom and left me to do my business on my own.
Water didn’t flow through the pipes anymore, but on a shelf, Tanner had a few jugs of what looked like clean water. I used some to wash my face in the hopes that the cold water would wake me. The washing helped, but I still felt a bit groggy when I stepped out of the restroom.
Tanner was dutifully waiting for me outside the door to help walk me back to my pallet on the floor.
I didn’t lie down to the boy’s noticeable relief.
“Do you think you could eat something as simple as chicken noodle soup?” he asked, holding up an unopen can.
I nodded.
“It’ll be cold. I hope you don’t mind. I don’t have a way of heating food in here. I have a grill outback, but it’s dark, and I don’t like being outside at night.”
“Cold is fine,” I said before taking a sip of the bottle of water he handed me.
Tanner opened the can and poured its contents into a clean bowl then gave it to me along with a few pills.
“What are those?” I asked, eyeing his hand with caution.
“An antibiotic and steroid. I can give you a pain pill, as well, if you think you need it.”
I shook my head and took the pills. I knew nothing about medicine, so I had to trust that the boy was giving me something safe. He appeared to have taken care of me for the last few days, so I didn’t think he would wait until that moment to hurt me.
“How long have I been unconscious?” I asked as I ate.
“Three days, I think,” Tanner said.
“You didn’t find me here,” I said, looking around the darkened room.
“No. I was hiding from zombies in a basement. You were attempting to do the same, except that you were sick. You nearly fell down the steps. I caught you, took care of your wound, and brought you back here with me once it was safe.”
“You could have left me to die,” I said, handing him my empty bowl. “I wasn’t your responsibility.”
“No, I couldn’t, and yes, you are. We are all each other’s responsibility no matter what some of those assholes out there think. Just because it’s the end of the world doesn’t mean we can let go of our humanity.”
Tanner didn’t offer to open more food for me. I was still hungry, but we both knew that one can of soup was all I needed to attempt to eat for the time being.
“It shouldn’t, no. And I’m grateful you haven’t. I don’t want you to think I’m not. I just find it new.”
I sipped more water and eyed my pile of blankets. I was growing tired, but I didn’t want to go to sleep just yet.
“Rest. We can talk later. I won’t go anywhere, I promise,” Tanner said, noticing my glance toward the makeshift bed.
“Thank you. I feel like I’m being rude, but I don’t think I can keep my eyes open much longer.”
“It’s not a problem. I’m a bit tired myself,” Tanner said, moving to the second pile of blankets on the other side of the room.
27.
“Have you run into many bad people?” Tanner asked late
r that afternoon once I’d woken from my nap and used the restroom again.
The two of us were sitting around a table, eating. I was sipping on another bowl of chicken noodle soup, and Tanner ate Tomato Basil. That time, I’d added a few stale crackers to the liquid.
“Not really, but in the beginning, my Uncles enforced a ‘we take care of our own’ policy. Back then, it didn’t matter. We were safe in my grandma’s cellar, and I don’t think many people came to the house seeking shelter or food. Those that did, my uncles turned away. We were at max capacity for the first few months. We couldn’t have safely taken them in any way. After a while, though...”
“People died, and you had room,” Tanner offered.
“Most left for one reason or another, but yes, some died. My uncles still refused to allow people in the house. Not that it mattered. Most of us died in the end anyway.”
“What happened?”
“One of my cousins who’d left returned. He snuck back into the house. A creature had bitten him. He turned and nearly killed everyone left in the cellar. Only a few of us kids survived along with my Uncle Jamie. Since then, we’ve been on the road. We haven’t met anyone who wanted to join us or help us or who needed our help. Granted, I don’t think we’d run into anyone hurt or sick like I was. We might have helped them then. We didn’t hurt people or steal from them.”
“How long have you been on the road?”
“I honestly don’t know—a month or more. We’ve found a few somewhat safe places to stay, but only for short periods. We lost my cousin Kayla to a zombie. I ran away from my family, thinking a zombie had bitten me. I don’t know where the others are now.”
We fell silent for a while. I thought about my family and the military base. I wondered if I should ask Tanner about it and if I should try finding it. I wasn’t even sure I should bother making the journey anymore. By the time I got there, chances were I’d be too late. Those creatures were everywhere, and any group consisting of more than three or four people would get their attention.
WILLA Page 12
