Well, hopefully now it would be a place where Dennis and Velvet could stay overnight.
Velvet walked to the end of the hall. Most of the doors were closed, but a few were torn off their hinges. Maybe there had been zombies here once, years ago, but Velvet listened carefully and didn’t hear anything.
She didn’t take the time to clear the floor or to check all of the apartment units. She was perfectly happy to just hide in the last one, biding her time until morning. Then she’d figure out what she was going to do next.
She always had to figure out what she was going to do next.
The very last units at the end of the hall both had doors, and both of the doors were closed.
Velvet looked from one door to the next. They were identical, and they both appeared to be in pretty decent condition.
“What do you think?” Velvet asked Dennis. “Where should we sleep?”
Dennis blinked at her. She rolled her eyes and reached for the brass doorknob on the right-side apartment unit. The door opened easily, and Velvet stepped inside with Dennis.
Instantly, she knew it was the wrong choice.
Chapter Four
The room smelled.
Not like death.
There were no zombies there.
No, the room smelled like it had once been used by survivors who needed to vacate quickly. They’d left without all of their things, though, which meant the apartment now smelled like a rancid combination of sweat and spoiled food.
Velvet didn’t even bother walking around the apartment. She didn’t call out to see if anyone was still here. There were spilled liquids on the kitchen floor coupled with some sort of powder – flour maybe, or baking soda. There weren’t any footprints, though, which told Velvet that there wasn’t a zombie loitering in the apartment.
The smell itself was so terrible that no living, breathing human would be able to survive very long without vomiting.
Even Dennis looked like he was about to turn green.
“Come on,” she told him.
The two of them left the gross apartment and crossed the hallway to the other space. Velvet took a deep breath before she turned the knob. She listened for a moment, but she couldn’t hear anything. Nothing was lurking inside. Hopefully there wouldn’t be any weird smells, either.
She pushed open the door and stepped inside, breathing a sigh of relief when she realized that not only was the apartment empty, but the apartment didn’t stink, either.
“Here we go, Dennis,” she said. The cat pranced happily into the apartment, and Velvet closed the door behind them. As soon as the door was shut, she locked it. This door had a deadbolt, along with a door-chain at the top of the door. Even though she knew it wouldn’t do much, she went ahead and chained the door.
Dennis walked around, sniffing and exploring the apartment. Velvet grabbed a table that was turned on its side and lugged it over the door. Thanks to the soft carpeting in the apartment, the sound was silent.
She listened, but she didn’t hear anything. Either the zombies from downstairs were still working on the door, or they’d trampled up to the second floor of the building and gotten lost there. Good. She hoped they rotted.
For now, she had time. Plenty of time. Usually, Velvet had nothing but time. That probably should have bothered her, but she hadn’t grown tired of her free time.
Back in the before time, back before the apocalypse, her life had been a busy stream of work schedules, class schedules, and dating. Her personal calendar had always been full, and she’d always had somewhere that she needed to be. That was fine, but this was different.
This felt...good.
It felt good to be free. It felt good to have some time for herself where she could just do things. During the last ten years, she hadn’t limited herself to just exploring.
She’d done other things, too.
She’d learned new skills.
Now, she walked to the window and shoved it open. Velvet needed to know exactly what her escape options were if it came to that. She breathed in some of the fresh air before taking a better look around. The apartment seemed to be a studio unit with only one door: bathroom, probably. She walked over and tugged it open. Sure enough, it was a bathroom.
“Think the toilet still flushes?” Velvet looked over at Dennis, but he was sniffing around the different parts of the apartment. He wasn’t paying much attention to her.
Velvet raided the cupboards and medicine cabinet, taking the allergy pills she found in a little blister pack. Good. She could use them. She was tired, and they’d help her sleep, but mostly, she didn’t want to spend the evening sneezing.
Walking back out, she took another look out of the main window. There was a window in the bathroom, too, but it was too small to climb out of.
If the zombies from downstairs managed to make it all the way up here, the only exit would be this window. There was a fire escape that led both down and up. It looked rickety, but that was okay for someone like Velvet.
She hadn’t survived the last ten years by being scared of a little climbing.
Did she like heights?
No.
Did she torture herself and practice climbing regularly?
Absolutely.
She hated being high. Hated it. Her fear of heights had started as a kid and even though she hadn’t gotten over it, she’d managed to find ways to keep herself focused and centered when she did encounter a situation where she was up high.
For now, though, she had some time. She closed the window, walked over to the couch that was shoved to one wall, and plopped down on it. A poof of dust billowed from the couch, engulfing her.
“Bad choice,” she announced as she sneezed loudly.
Dennis mewed and kept walking around. He’d spend at least half an hour smelling the apartment and rubbing his cheeks on different things to mark them as his own. Dennis and Velvet went through this little routine each and every time they stayed somewhere together, which was fairly often. The two of them had gotten comfortable together. They’d managed to create a nice little world: a nice little life.
Still, sometimes Velvet wondered if there was anything else to look forward to.
She had a cat, and she had some new skills – like drawing, and she’d gotten to read a lot of incredible books over the last few years.
But she didn’t really feel like she had a purpose.
Sometimes, she missed that.
Sometimes, she wondered if there was going to be anything else in the world that could bring her happiness and spark her curiosity.
Right now, though, she looked over at Dennis, laid back on the couch, and closed her eyes.
She could use a nap.
Chapter Five
If you’d asked Eshe what she wanted to be when she grew up, she would have said a ballerina or a princess or maybe even a dance instructor.
She wouldn’t have said a survivor.
She wouldn’t have said a leader.
She never, not in a million years, would have imagined that she’d be leading a group of people who were searching for ways to find their place in the world. She never would have imagined that she’d be trying to find ways to stay safe or alive. She wouldn’t have ever considered that she might be single-handedly responsible for making sure that everyone in her tiny little community stayed completely healthy and that they didn’t do anything stupid, like start fights or get killed by monsters.
Never.
Now, though, a decade after the fall of humanity and the collapse of the world, Eshe walked through the remnants of the city with a ragtag group of survivors. Some days, she wanted to kill them all, but most of the time, Eshe just felt satisfied with them. She just felt happy.
Today was one of those days.
The sun was setting, and she was sitting on the rooftop of their building with Ambrose and Ryan. The two of them were making out every time Eshe turned her back, but she was pretending not to notice. Ambrose and Ryan had just been kids when th
e world had fallen apart. Now, in their early 20s, they were discovering who they were and who they wanted to be.
In that way, some things never changed.
The world might have died and come back to life, but humans still had to do soul-searching and introspection. They still had to figure out what they wanted to be and how they were going to grow.
That was what Eshe had been trying to do for the last year.
The first year after the zombies had come, she’d been horrified and angry. Just like everyone else, she’d tried to fight her way to answers. Those hadn’t come. A year had passed, and she’d lost friends. Another year brought more deaths. By the third year post-apocalypse, Eshe didn’t know a single person she’d known before.
Those people were all gone.
Dead.
Now she had new friends. Together, they formed a little community. They were a mish-mash sort of family. She always called them a blended family, and Ambrose would always roll her eyes and say, “my parents aren’t divorced. We aren’t blended.”
They were blended, though. All of them.
Now, Eshe pretended to ignore the fact that Ambrose and Ryan were kissing and just stared up at the stars. She always felt at peace up here. The top of the apartment building was one of the best places in the world. It was secure, after all. They’d completely cleaned out the entire building and reinforced it, making it a strong haven where they could gather supplies, keep their community safe, and stay alive together.
This particular spot, though, was extra safe because there were so many escape routes.
Eshe had insisted on keeping go bags up here. If anyone needed to suddenly evacuate, there were a couple of survival bags lining the roof. There weren’t a lot of supplies, but there were water bottles, a snack in each bag, and a few knives. People would be able to get by a little bit.
For just a little while, they’d be okay.
There were ropes, so if anyone needed to rappel off the side of the building, they could do that. Eshe wasn’t sure that was a particularly good idea, but it was a reasonable option. Of course, there was the fire escape, too.
Winchester and Grey had wanted to get rid of those, but Eshe had argued to keep them. Because she was generally considered the leader of the group, even when it didn’t feel like she was actually accomplishing anything, they’d kept them.
“Look at the sky,” Ambrose whispered. Eshe turned around.
“Done kissing then, are you?”
Ryan blushed and shook his head.
“We weren’t kissing.”
“We’re done,” Ambrose said. She knew better than to lie to Eshe. There was no reason for something like that. Lies were unsafe before the apocalypse, but sometimes necessary. Now, lies could be deadly.
All it took was for one person to lie about being exposed to the virus, one person to lie about being attacked, and everything you built could come crumbling down.
One little lie, and you could lose everything.
The thought was sobering, if not horrifying.
Eshe looked back up at the stars.
“Crazy that they’re still there,” she muttered.
“The stars?” Ambrose got up, walking away from Ryan. She took a few steps over to where Eshe was sitting near the edge of the roof and sat down. There were several different lawn chairs scattered across the roof. Ambrose plopped down in one that still had a cushion. Most of the chair cushions had disappeared or been destroyed: eaten by rats, mostly.
Everything was hungry now, including the varmints. Eshe liked to keep a couple of cats around the apartment building to keep the mice and rats away, but every once in a while, a couple of rats would show up and start chewing on things. It was annoying at best and destructive at worst.
“I just kind of always figured they’d sputter out eventually,” she said.
“Me too,” Ryan came over and joined the two of them. He stood behind Ambrose and started rubbing her shoulders. He stared up at the sky. Even though Eshe liked to flip him and Ambrose shit, the truth was that they were both kind people. They’d grown up in a horrible world full of fighting, hatred, and destruction, yet they’d both managed to be okay.
They’d managed to find each other, and they’d managed to make things work.
“When everything died, I thought the sun was going to fall out of the sky,” Ambrose shook her head. “I mean, I’d just turned 11. It didn’t make sense to me that everything would be destroyed except for the sky.”
“None of it made sense,” Eshe pointed out. It still didn’t make sense.
“I kind of hoped there would be meteor showers at the end of the world,” Ryan added.
“Why?”
He shrugged. He’d been in middle school when it had happened, Eshe knew. Then it hit her.
“Oh. You liked dinosaurs, huh?”
Ryan glanced over at her and nodded curtly. She didn’t want to embarrass him, but she thought that was interesting.
“So, it would be cool if we all died the same way the dinosaurs did, huh?”
“Nobody really knows how the dinosaurs died,” Ryan told her.
“There are ideas, though.”
“Lots of ideas,” he agreed.
The week before, the three of them had gone exploring. They went around the city on a regular basis scavenging items they might want or need. Most of the things they used were items they made themselves, but every once in a while, Eshe was pleased to find they’d discover something new and useful that they hadn’t seen before.
Every so often, they’d be able to discover something that made them happy...something that they could use in their building.
Ryan had recently picked up a bunch of science books. He’d spent three days straight reading them, emerging from the apartment unit he shared with Ambrose only to perform his duties when it was his turn to be in charge of security.
Now, Eshe found herself wondering what else he’d learned.
“What’s your favorite idea?”
“About the dinosaurs?”
“Yeah.”
“Most people think it was a meteor.”
“My mom always thought the big ones ate the little ones,” Ambrose piped up. She glanced over at Eshe. “I always thought it was a little goofy. Wouldn’t that mean we’d still have big dinosaurs?”
“Maybe,” Ryan agreed.
Eshe listened as the two of them started discussing ideas. Apparently, there had been some really strange considerations for what killed off the dinosaurs. Some people thought it was caterpillars. There was one theory that snakes and other creatures had eaten all of the dinosaur eggs. Ryan discussed one theory that there were simply too many male dinosaurs and not enough females.
Eshe was quiet for a long time as they talked. As Ryan and Ambrose discussed their different ideas, she started to let her mind wander.
Everyone had a theory about the dinosaurs. They were big news. Zombies were big news, too, though. What about them?
Over the years, Eshe had met a lot of people who had ideas about what had caused this infection. Some people didn’t even call them zombies. There was kind of this running joke among the survivors that you should call them anything else except “the z word.” Some people called them “infected.” Some people called them “creatures.” Eshe had met one person who was really, really convinced that the undead were simply demons.
What she hadn’t found were any true answers.
For a long time, that had bothered her. She’d never gotten a real answer as to how the apocalypse started or what had happened.
She also realized that they were never going to know.
They were never going to have those answers.
Whatever came next, whatever they learned about the world moving forward, it would forever be different than they expected, and it would forever be something they couldn’t explain.
When Eshe had been little, she’d had big dreams, but she wasn’t little anymore.
She was an adult, and n
ow she had to face the fact that how the dinosaurs died was the least of her problems.
Ryan and Ambrose kept talking as he started diving into some of the more unique and interesting theories about what happened to the dinosaurs. Eshe found herself spacing off as she thought about what they were going to do the next day.
They needed for almost nothing. They had water. They had food. They had a damn garden growing on the roof, so they had fresh vegetables and fruits whenever they wanted them. There were even a couple of chickens, but those were kept inside where it was safer, and where the weather could be slightly more controlled and monitored.
But they needed purpose.
They needed a reason to keep going.
Sometimes, Eshe thought they were never going to find one.
Sometimes, she thought about just walking away from everything.
And then she heard the scream.
Ambrose and Ryan stopped talking, falling silent almost instantly. They’d heard it, too.
“What the hell was that?”
Chapter Six
“What the hell was that?” Velvet hopped up from the couch and ran to the window. She pushed it up, cringing at the squeaking sound the window made. She didn’t think she’d been asleep for very long: probably no more than an hour or two. She still felt tired, but the zombies seemed to have quickly grown bored of waiting for her to appear because they weren’t huddled outside of the apartment building.
When she looked straight down to the ground, Velvet could see a couple of shamblers slowly making their way down the road, but there wasn’t anything or anyone trying to get her. She was facing the opposite side of the building than the entrance was at, though, so maybe there were still zombies on the other side.
Somehow, she didn’t think so.
The zombies that had chased her into the apartment building seemed to have all but disappeared, Velvet thought. She couldn’t hear them anymore. So, where had they gone, and what was causing the problem now?
She was certain – positive – that she had heard another human scream.
“What was it?”
Beautifully Undead | Book 1 | The Chasing of Zombies Page 3
