“Go, find us a place to rest and have lunch. I’ll drag what’s left to the shed,” Tanner instructed, seeing me look at the remaining dead with trepidation.
“Are you sure? I could help you drag the pieces—maybe,” I replied.
The distance from where the bodies lay to the shed wasn’t that far, but I was tired, hungry, and filthy.
“Nah,” he said, waving me toward the house we were behind. “I’ve got this. You go wash up and rest.”
“All right,” I said, wiping my hands on my jeans. The action didn’t help clean them. “I’ll try to have lunch ready by the time you’ve finished and cleaned up.”
“Thanks,” he said, before turning to wheel the pile of body parts to the shed a few houses down from where we stood.
I scanned the houses, looking for the one the teenage girl might have lived in, as the possibility of me finding something to wear in it would be higher. I pointed to the back door of the one I thought we should occupy for the day, waited until I got an acknowledgment from Tanner, and then went around to the front of the house.
Someone had left the front door unlocked, for which I was grateful. I didn’t want to break one of the sidelights to get inside. I also didn’t want to search for another house on the off chance someone my size lived there.
When I opened the large wooden door, the nastiest odor hit me in the face. It smelled like death. Someone had died inside the house.
For half a second, I thought about shutting the door and picking another house, but curiosity about the party in the backyard remained in my mind. I wanted to know who the party was for and, sadly, what kind of gifts she’d received.
Morbidly enough, I also wanted to know whom the body or bodies belonged to and if they were outbreak victims or if they’d died later.
I propped both the storm and wooden doors open to let the place air out before going inside. By the time I could enter the small foyer without gagging, I was too tired to search the home. Instinct told me to do it before doing anything else, but I wanted to get clean.
Besides, a voice in my head reasoned that the smell indicated that no one alive or undead was in the house. Everyone had been out back for the party. And no zombies had rushed out the door when I’d opened it in search of fresh meat.
Nodding my head at my logic, I dropped our packs on an end table and started removing my outer layer of clothing. The furniture was too lovely for me to plop my dirty ass on it. I flung my shirt and pants out the front door. I’d deal with them later...or not at all if I didn’t want. Clothes weren’t a challenge to come by right then.
“Speaking of...” I said, grabbing a box of wet wipes out of the backpack I always carried with me and headed down the hall in search of the girl’s bedroom.
The room wasn’t hard to find. A glance inside the second door to the right showed me a bed piled with presents. I went into the attached bathroom and cleaned myself the best I could with the wipes and bottled water when no water flowed from the faucet.
Once I was as clean as I was going to get, I dove into the gifts. I won’t lie. I pretended that it was my birthday and the presents were for me. I’d missed my birthday and would probably miss many more in the years ahead. Indulging myself one time wouldn’t hurt.
The girl had received hundreds of dollars’ worth of gift cards, which were useless to me. She’d also gotten a fair number of cute outfits that were a bit too loose, but I didn’t care. I tried on every single one. Between what I found on the bed and what was in the girl’s closet, I wouldn’t want for clothes for a while if we stayed near the house. A fair bit of it was impractical for the middle of the zombie apocalypse, but every once in a while, it wouldn’t hurt to dress like the end of the world wasn’t going on around me, I told myself.
“And today’s that day,” I said, looking at my reflection in a mirror.
I wore skinny jeans and a top that barely reached my waist.
“This will get Tanner’s attention,” I told my reflection.
When he’d first found me, I’d been too tired, too sick, and too upset about losing my family to think much about the boy. As the weeks had passed, I’d slowly realized that I was crushing on him. He hadn’t appeared to return the sentiment. Tanner couldn’t ignore the outfit I wore. His reaction would tell me if he was interested in me or not.
“Oh, shit, Tanner. He’ll be finishing with the bodies any second now, and I promised him that I’d have food ready,” I said to the mirror.
I rushed from the room, snatched our packs off the end table in the living room, and ran to the kitchen. Relief flooded me at the sight of the immaculate room. Once the smell, which was already nearly gone, had left, we’d be able to eat and stay in the house for some time.
Dropping our food packs on the kitchen table, I headed to the back door to open it. I mentally went over the food items we had. If the home had a gas stove, we could have something hot. The soup sounded good.
After propping the back door open, I raised the kitchen windows. I looked out one of them for a long moment until I saw Tanner dragging an obese body, man or woman, I couldn’t tell from my location, through the grass and over to the shed.
A part of me felt terrible for not being able to help, but my selfish side was grateful. I imagined that I was going to have to do many things in the future that I wouldn’t want to do, so I could be all right with not dealing with body disposal at that moment.
I found a bucket under the sink that I put wet wipes and other personal cleaning aids inside for Tanner to wash up with when he finished. I set it on the counter by the back door where he could see it when he entered.
Next, I turned my attention to food prep.
The house didn’t have a gas stove. We could start the fire pit out back, but I was growing too hungry to wait for that.
“Tuna and crackers it would have to be,” I told the empty kitchen.
Once everything was set out and waiting, I went back to the living room to open the windows in there. The smell was dissipating, but not quickly enough.
You probably should find the source of the smell and get rid of it, I told myself, feeling stupid for not doing it earlier.
I couldn’t believe that I’d been so caught up in wanting to know what the girl—Janie was the name on some of the gift boxes—had gotten for her birthday, that I’d skipped that part.
Well, whoever it had been was dead, and had been for a while, judging by the smell, so you hadn’t deemed it a priority. Besides, with your arm, there isn’t much you can do until Tanner gets here, my inner voice rationalized, and I thanked it for giving me a halfway decent excuse for being an idiot.
The source of the smell wasn’t hard to find. As I rounded the sofa to open a set of windows behind it, I found the body of a woman. She lay on her back. She was emaciated and was missing a chunk of flesh from her leg. She’d been dead a while, but not long enough to start to decay. Other than that, she looked peaceful.
The woman’s family must have lived in the house. She probably came to the home looking for them, gotten hurt somehow, and crawled behind the sofa to die.
“You poor thing,” I said, bending down to move hair out of her face so that I could see her better.
I didn’t have a chance to scream in shock when the woman jerked awake and bit into my neck. I didn’t have an opportunity to do or think anything else as she devoured me. She moved quickly for a creature that had appeared on the verge of decaying.
Epilogue
~~~Tanner~~~
“What’s for lunch,” I called to Willa upon entering the back door of the house clad only in soaked boxers. The rest of my clothes lay draped across the lawn furniture to dry.
Willa didn’t answer my questions. At that moment, I didn’t notice.
“Sorry it took me so long,” I said, going to the bag she’d left on the kitchen table. “I decided to rinse off in the river. Wet wipes weren’t going to get me clean. I hope I don’t ever have to do anything like that again.”
<
br /> I pulled a clean set of clothes and a roll of toilet paper out of the bag before realizing the house was still quiet.
“Willa?” I called again, setting the items down and leaving the kitchen to look for her.
I glanced at the living room, saw that the front door was open, and went to it. The filthy clothes Willa had put on earlier were piled just outside the front door.
“Willa, come on now. This isn’t funny.”
The two of us hadn’t known each other for very long, but Willa hadn’t struck me as a prankster, and not someone who would pull a joke like this in the middle of the apocalypse.
I went back into the house and searched the room. In one bedroom and bathroom, I found signs that she’d cleaned up and changed clothes.
The rest of the house was empty.
Fear bubbled in me.
Someone had taken her. Why they would have taken her and not our food or come looking for me, I didn’t know, but there was no other reason for her disappearance.
“Willa,” I screamed, rushing back to the living room and the kitchen to make sure I was correct that our bags were still in the house. Mine was.
I don’t know what made me notice or think it suspicious, but when I turned back to the living room after grabbing our bags from the kitchen, I saw that only one window was open, and the sofa looked a bit crooked.
“Willa,” I asked, stepping toward the sofa and thinking maybe she’d fallen and knocked herself unconscious.
The closer I got, the more my brain started figuring out that the blood on the wall and furniture was new. I’d become so used to seeing splatters and body parts that I hadn’t registered the sight as significant when I first entered.
“Oh, my...” was all I managed when I rounded the sofa and saw the remains of the body.
I turned and vomited onto the sofa cushion. Once my stomach was empty, I stumbled over to the love seat and sat down hard enough that I think a piece of wood under me cracked.
“Willa,” I said in a soft voice, burying my face in my hands and crying.
The body was missing most of its visible flesh, but that wavy brown hair was unmistakably Willa’s.
I sat in the living room crying for a long time, not caring if the creature that had killed her might still be around or not. A part of me hoped it was. I was tired and would welcome the end when it came.
~~~~~
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank all of AWAKE’s fans. Without you, I wouldn’t have wanted to keep the story going with these short stories and novellas.
I want to give a big shout out to La Priel, my editor for the AWAKE series, for helping me make all of these stories so amazing. Also, I want to send a shout out to Rose Holub, who gave this novella an excellent polishing. You both rock, and I love having the two of you on my staff. Hugs and kisses, ladies.
I would like to send love to my friends Jai and Tae, and my husband for patiently looking over every version of the cover I created for this novella. I know they were tired of looking at images by the time I finalized the cover, but their input was invaluable. MUAH!!!
About the Author
Jennifer Reynolds is a native of North Alabama. She has a Master of Fine Arts degree from National University and a Bachelor of Arts degree from the University of North Alabama.
She is a multi-genre author who focuses mostly on post-apocalyptic novels and paranormal romances. She does occasionally dabble in other genres, such as general fiction and suspense thrillers.
When she’s not writing, she’s a full-time caregiver of her mother-in-law, an avid reader, and the mother to two kitties, Lilith and Midnight.
If you’d like to know more about Author Jennifer Reynolds check out these informational brochures or one of her many social media sites.
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