by Anna Abner
“The men at the camp,” he explained.
I snapped out of my reverie. “No.” I rushed to reassure him, forgetting he’d been locked up, unable to see me or hear me or know what went on outside his room. “They were decent. Mostly.”
I told him about Malcolm’s rigid rules and regulations, about the MREs and Juliet, about Hunny’s fever and her stealing from Stein.
“But things started to feel worse and worse,” I clarified. “No one would let me see you or tell me what was going on. I got really worried.” I glanced at him, wondering what it must’ve been like to be strapped to a gurney for days with no awareness of the outside world. “Did they talk to you at all?”
He shook his head. “They talked to each other.”
An uneasy feeling reared up. “What did they say?”
“They were going to preserve my brain and eyes. And analyze my heart tissue under a microscope.”
My insides roiled. Those were not procedures a human being could survive. They planned to kill him. While Malcolm and Smart reassured me Ben was safe, they were arranging to take his life.
“I hate them,” I hissed, massaging my middle. “All of them. I’m glad Malcolm’s dead.”
Ben frowned. “He is?”
“A pack of Reds tore through the fence and killed him. Ate his throat out.”
He didn’t say anything, but I guessed he wasn’t sad, either.
Finally, he got out of the car and rummaged in the trunk.
“Looking for anything in particular?” I slipped my guitar strap over my head and joined him. In the trunk were jumper cables, liquid fix-a-flat, and a bunch of recycled totes like the ones my mom used to carry groceries in.
“Yes. One of these.” He chose a yellow bag. “For the first-aid stuff.” He dumped the contents of the cardboard box into the bag and then hung it from a clasp on the outside of the backpack.
Ben made me drink water, and afterwards attached both table legs to the back of our pack, crisscross.
“This is the last of our water,” I told him, draining the canteen.
“We need to forage,” he agreed, but he looked troubled.
And I knew why. Searching homes wasted hours, maybe all day, with no guarantee we’d find anything useful. We had outrun Devil Dog’s pack of Reds, but maybe we’d stumble across a different pack. An even bigger pack.
It was time squandered when we could be moving closer to Washington, D.C. and our friends.
“We don’t have a choice.” I didn’t want to pick through dead people’s homes that might have already been stripped of food and water any more than he did. I wanted to get somewhere safe. Somewhere permanent. The novelty of traveling the country on foot had worn off.
“We should have taken water from the York River,” I grumbled, angry with myself for not doing so. “We could’ve boiled it and drank as much as we wanted.”
“We were being chased,” Ben said. “There wasn’t time. But that’s a good idea. We should carry a jug for river water.”
Lesson learned. Water was water. We wouldn’t drive over any more rivers without taking advantage.
“Ready?” he asked, pulling the pack on.
“Ready.”
The land naturally sloped east toward the beach, but we strayed inland, deeper into cities in ruins and streets choked with vehicles. The longer we walked in the heat, the more I sweat through my clothes. It was a scorcher, unusual for late spring in Virginia. High eighties to low nineties, I guessed. And we were stuck moving around outside with no cover and no water.
“What about ocean water?” Ben asked. “Can we drink it if we boil it first?”
“No. We need fresh water,” I answered, wetting my dry lips. “Rivers, lakes…”
We hit the I–95 highway, and I got a new hop in my step when I saw a road sign for Washington, D.C. in less than forty miles.
“That’s not so much,” I said, calculating distance and speed. “We could be there tomorrow if we don’t find a car.” I gripped Ben’s arm and squeezed. “Today if we find a car and a clear path.”
“Let’s start looking,” he agreed.
We split up and searched vehicles. Since Devil Dog’s pack was so far behind I gained new confidence. A little Toyota pickup was a no-go. So were the gray mini-van and the black sedan.
“I can’t even find anything to drink,” Ben complained, slamming closed the door to a pickup with an extended cab. “It’s like they’ve already been cleaned out.”
Maybe they had. Maybe a large, organized community was holed up somewhere nearby and they had systematically stripped every vehicle and house and building in the area. It’s what I would’ve done.
With no other choice, we continued north on foot at a snail’s pace, every step an agony of pain, exhaustion, and dehydration.
Chapter Seven
My thirst was getting worse, making my mouth chalky and my head throb.
“Do you want to stop for lunch?” Ben asked.
I silently recalled the contents of our bag. Salted nuts. Cheesy crackers. Leftover cubed ham that may or may not have been rancid after sitting in a hot backpack all day.
The thought of forcing either of those things down without a sip of water made me sick to my stomach.
“I’m not hungry,” I lied.
At one point I pulled my guitar around in front of me and played a little, strumming with the thumb on my injured hand, just to pass the time and distract myself.
“There,” Ben said, urging me onward. “We’ll find something there.”
I followed him across a wide street onto a car lot that had once sold and serviced luxury vehicles.
“What are you looking for?” I jogged to catch up as he wove in and out of rows of cars.
“Something big,” he explained, scanning. “Something four-wheel-drive. Something to plow over smaller cars.”
There wasn’t anything that fit his specifications in the lot. Nothing obvious. It was all sports cars, long sedans, and a couple SUVs with features for families, not for surviving the apocalypse. We wended our way to the service bays at the rear of the building. All the rolling doors were closed tight, but Ben must have seen something he liked because he pointed and picked up speed, hurrying to the office entrance. I peered through the Plexiglas window on the bay door. The back of the massive vehicle read H3 Alpha, and it was more tank than SUV. It was perfect.
But the vehicle was up on blocks, all four of its oversized tires were piled on the floor, and its hood was propped up. It wasn’t going to D.C. anytime soon.
Inside the bay, the Hummer looked even worse. Its battery was also MIA. Ben’s eyes, however, shone as if he’d hit the jackpot. He dropped our pack and rifled through the garage’s tools and equipment cabinets.
“Can you fix it?” I asked dubiously. I understood next to nothing about how cars worked. I turned the proper key in the ignition, and if the car had gas in its tank, the engine started. If it got anymore complicated, I let professionals handle it.
“This used to be my job,” he said, his face glowing with an excitement I hadn’t seen before. “After juvie I got hired to clean up after mechanics, but they were teaching me to be a real grease monkey once I passed the exams and stuff. I learned a lot.”
I didn’t think I’d ever heard him talk so much all at once about his life before the plague, and I smiled, happy and proud of him. “That’s fantastic,” I said, and meant it.
“I wanted a better life,” he said, losing a bit of his sparkle as he rolled a giant tire under the Hummer and fit it onto bolts. “I made stupid mistakes.” He ratcheted the bolts tight. “I got sent away for six months.”
“Where you met Mason,” I prodded.
“He was an ass,” Ben said. “No offense.”
“He could be mean,” I agreed. Having grown up his twin sister, I had firsthand experience of his cruelty.
Ben moved on to the next tire. “But he kept your picture taped above his bunk.”
My picture that B
en had carried in his pocket for weeks before finding me outside my home in Parrish Meadows. I still couldn’t believe he had kept it, even after he’d been infected with 212R and become a zombie, he’d still kept it and used it to find me.
“I didn’t want to be a loser anymore.” He moved to the vehicle’s left side and worked on tire number three. “I wanted to be the kind of person you reminded me of. A good, decent, happy person. So, I stole your picture and I looked at it when I felt like loser was the only type of person I’d ever be.” He paused in his work to stare up at me. “I know you wrote on the back that you didn’t forgive him, but just the idea that you could someday. That you loved him, even after what he did to your mother.”
At Christmas I’d scrawled Mason, I can’t forgive you, but I still love you across the back of a copy of my junior year school photo and included it in a care package my dad sent Mason. And somehow, Ben had seen it and been moved by it. None of it seemed possible, but I wouldn’t change a single thing if it had brought us to this moment in time.
Ben capped another bolt and tightened it by hand. “I wanted to be someone that was worthy of forgiveness.”
My heart twisted in my chest, sending little lightning bolts of sympathy across my ribs. “I think you already are.”
He picked up the ratchet and finished tightening the bolt.
Being a good person was so important to him he’d carried the picture that had inspired him in his pocket for weeks. Had come looking for me like some kind of storybook knight on a quest.
“But how did you find me?” I asked. “How did you even remember about my picture or what it meant to you?” As far as I knew, once infected, human beings lost higher level thinking. So, how in the world had Ben used a photograph to find me? A girl he’d never actually met?
Someone slammed his or her hands on the closed bay door nearest me, and I jumped, my heart kicking into panic mode. Three filthy faces stared back at me through the Plexiglas window while even more approached from the car lot.
“Oh, no,” I groaned. A fourth Red appeared, and I recognized Devil Dog. “That’s impossible.” They must have run for miles and miles…
Ben leapt into overdrive. “Get a weapon,” he snapped. “And barricade the office. I’m almost done.”
I grabbed one of the table legs I had taken from the Governor’s Palace and bolted for the office. A pair of zombies pushed on the door, but before they broke through I shoved the desk against it, wedging it into the wall. Closing the second door leading into the service bays, I rushed to help fit the last two tires on the Hummer.
When one of the zombies pulled up on a bay door, I realized they were all shut, but none of them were actually latched.
“Hurry,” I said unnecessarily. Ben capped bolts as fast as he could, but unless we got the mammoth vehicle running, we weren’t leaving the garage. Ever.
I dashed and did a knee slide into the first bay door, yanking it flush to the concrete, but the Reds on the other side pulled up and they were stronger than I was. I shoved hard, pain screaming through my sliced hand, but they heaved harder, and the door rolled up about eighteen inches with me holding on for dear life. I couldn’t get it back down.
The Reds were so close I smelled at least three weeks’ worth of mud and blood and filth clinging to them.
Two grubby brown arms reached for me. Squeaking, I scuttled away, but not fast enough. Rough hands wrapped around my right ankle and before I could scream for Ben I was lying on the other side of the bay door staring up into six pairs of red eyes. I grabbed for my sword, but it wasn’t there. I was in my pajamas and the sword was strapped to our pack.
This was bad. Bad, bad, bad. For a brief moment my heart froze in my chest, and then kick-started with a painful thump.
I scrambled onto my belly and stretched for the table leg lying just inside the garage. So close…
As my fingertips made contact, a Red scratched broken, jagged fingernails down my back hard enough to tear my shirt and draw blood. Warm, sticky fluid rolled down my waist. Someone else bit me, and I screamed. I kicked out at the nearest Red as he dropped to his hands and knees to devour me like a roasted chicken leg.
I heard Ben before I actually saw him. He ducked under the bay door and knocked back the two Reds on top of me with my table leg, and then he attacked the others as I crawled into the cavernous garage feeling a little woozy. Behind me the door smashed down and locked, and then Ben hauled me to my feet.
“Get inside the truck,” he ordered, and I recognized the fear in his voice.
He tore open the passenger’s door of the Hummer and hefted me inside.
He’d finished with the tires, but the battery still sat on the ground. I watched him inspect the thing and then run back and forth from the engine to the tool cabinets getting the right equipment.
I felt like a witness to a dream.
Ben didn’t seem real anymore. The Hummer didn’t feel real. The whole garage was like a cheap stage set. It wouldn’t have surprised me to see everything melt away as I realized I was already dead.
But I wasn’t dead. My back hurt, which let me know I was still alive and kicking. Ben, too.
Devil Dog’s pack pounded on the bay doors so loud they vibrated the floorboards under my feet like the teeth-chattering bass in a dance club. Boom-ba-boom-boom. If they exerted enough pressure, those doors would crumple.
But Ben wasn’t done putting the Hummer back together. He poured oil down the vehicle’s gullet, wheeled a barrel of gasoline over and cranked a bunch into the tank, and then finally closed the hood and climbed into the driver’s seat.
He fingered the ignition. “No keys.”
I had never experienced two more depressing words in my entire life.
The bay door directly behind us screamed in protest as it was ripped from its track and collapsed to the concrete.
“I’ll be right back.” He opened the driver’s side door.
“Ben, please,” was all I could say. Please don’t leave me. Please don’t die.
He snatched the second table leg from our pack and ran for the key locker. There were three sets hanging inside and he seized all three, but when he turned around, four red zombies stood between him and me. More streamed through the bay door, surrounding the vehicle and pawing on the glass, leaving greasy handprints.
He’d never make it.
I unlocked my door and punched it hard into the faces of the two zombies directly beside me. Trembling, I stood up in the tiny space I had created and screamed at the snarling pack, pounding my fists on the H3’s metal roof. It wasn’t much, but it got their attention. Long enough for Ben to smash his way through. Swinging his club, he fought back to the vehicle and climbed in.
The first key he tried worked, the engine roared to life, and he reversed it so fast he crashed into a pillar, but then he got control and plowed through the pack and out onto the street.
With Devil Dog behind us, I could finally breathe again. I wilted in my seat as fresh blood pulsed beneath me.
Ben wasn’t calming down, though. His breathing came hard and fast, even minutes after we’d lost sight of the car lot and the pack. He clenched his jaw tight and gripped the steering wheel hard enough to leave indentations. He kept looking in the rearview mirror, paying more attention to the road behind us than what was coming up ahead.
“I’m okay,” I assured, reaching for his right hand. I couldn’t leave him like that. I thought of my panic attacks and I couldn’t let him suffer through one alone. “It’s just a scratch.” Such a lie. A little scratch wouldn’t bleed through my clothes.
He clasped my hand gently, but his entire arm, from fingertips to shoulder joint, quivered with barely controlled terror.
“Maya,” was all he said.
“We need a safe place,” I reminded him, hoping to bring his focus back on the present and out of the garage. “We need first aid, water, and then a safe place to rest.”
“God, Maya,” he breathed.
I sq
ueezed his hand in sympathy. “I’m right here.”
He squeezed back.
Chapter Eight
Ben drove fast and aggressively through town, weaving off road a lot of the time, taking us further from Devil Dog’s pack with every bump and rut.
“We’re on empty,” he said. “There wasn’t that much fuel in the barrel. Maybe a gallon or two.”
I leaned forward to double check, and he flinched against the driver’s side door. So, he wasn’t in control of his instincts.
I sat back fast, making my bite wound throb.
“We can’t run out of gas in the middle of a Virginia swamp,” I reminded him gently.
“We’ll have to stop somewhere.”
He turned off the highway and into an upscale subdivision even fancier than mine had been on Cherry Blossom Court. The houses were all two and three stories with elaborate landscaping. Through the shrubs and fences I spotted pool houses and tennis courts in extra large backyards.
Ben chose a house tucked within the center of the neighborhood and parked in the driveway. “Can you walk?”
“Of course.” I didn’t want to scare him, but the wounds on my back throbbed. Any movement, no matter how insignificant, burned.
I didn’t realize I had closed my eyes until Ben stood between the open passenger’s door and me, and I didn’t remember him getting out of the Hummer.
“Maya.” He saw the blood stain on my shirt, and his face turned gray. Then, as if he had made up his mind about something, he clenched his jaw tight and slid his hands under me.
Before I could argue I was in his arms. “I can walk,” I said, but halfheartedly.
“I know.” He didn’t even try the front door’s knob, just kicked the door down and swept me inside the big, beautiful home. Trembling in pain with each step, I clutched him closer.
It was quiet and empty and smelled stale and slightly sour the way houses stank after being shut up for a long time.
“We have to barricade the doors and windows,” I said. I’d feel a lot safer if Reds couldn’t walk right inside while we slept.
