by Jenika Snow
He’d been on the team that helped create the initial vaccine, and that’s why he had such a sense of guilt after everything had fallen.
He had to help, in any way he could, no matter what the risks were.
3
Maya didn’t know what had woken her at first, but as she opened her eyes, her heart was already beating fast and hard. Sherman, who they kept in the room with them at night, started whimpering and scratching at the door.
Maya turned her head to the side, saw the spot her mother usually lay in was empty, and instantly sat up. Since everything had gone to shit, she and her mom had been sharing a room, wanting to stay close. They’d set up her father in another bedroom, something he wanted, and the smart way to go, given the fact that he was sick.
“Mom?” Maya called out. There was silence in response, but after a moment, the sound of something crashing came through, startling Maya.
Sherman started scratching on the door with more fervor, his growl low, threatening. She climbed out of bed, knowing something wasn’t right, and bent down to grab the baseball bat she had tucked underneath the bed.
It hadn’t been planned to use on her father if he turned while they were asleep, because they kept their door locked and were “relatively” safe. They kept the door locked in case looters, rapists, or the humans that had gone insane because of the anarchy decided to break in.
She crept toward the door, reached out with her hand not holding the bat, and pulled it open slowly.
“Stay,” she whispered to Sherman. He whimpered again but lay down, his face turned up toward her. “Good boy.”
She opened the door a bit wider, and the old wood creaked slightly. Maya winced at the sound and held her breath, her pulse skyrocketing. The house was dark, but the sound of a crash from the kitchen told her all she needed to know. Maya’s heart raced, her muscles tightened, and the flight-or-fight instinct ran high in her.
She looked at her dog again. “Stay, Sherman,” she said once more and stepped out into the hallway. Keeping her back to the wall, she tried to calm her breathing. She needed to be calm, to keep a level head. It wasn’t as though she was tough as nails or one of those women who could take a man down.
But Maya had grown up working on her grandfather’s farm and knew what it meant to stay strong in the face of a hectic, confused situation and had always prided herself on using her brain in these matters.
Rounding the corner, but still keeping her back to the wall, she thought maybe an infected had gotten in, or maybe it was a looter? But as she leaned around the wall and looked into the kitchen, her mouth parted at the scene before her.
It wasn’t a stranger in her house, or an infected who had somehow broken in. No, it was her father standing in the center of the kitchen, right over her mother, and dark liquid dripping from the front of him. It might be too dark to see exactly what that fluid was, but she wasn’t a fool. It was blood, her father’s and her mother’s blood.
And when her father leaned down, kicking glass that was on the ground across the room, and started to tear into her mother, eating her flesh, an involuntary gasp left Maya. The moonlight gave her a small glimpse of the carnage, and as much as she felt like losing it right now, just breaking down, she had to stay strong if she wanted to survive.
“Kill me if I turn. I don’t want to hurt you or your mother or anyone else. I don’t want to live as a corpse.”
Her father’s words played through her mind over and over again, tearing her up, making her wish she was living a different life.
Her father turned around swiftly, still huddled over Maya’s mother, and opened his mouth in a grizzly display of gore. He screamed out, a gurgling, distorted sound that had chunks and fluid spewing from his mouth and down his chin. They held each other’s stare for several seconds, the wheezing coming from her father a reminder of the pain he endured while alive and during his last moments on this planet.
She backed away slowly, survival taking over. She’d been prepared for this since her father came home with the bite, and although she dreaded this moment, she couldn’t back down. Maya had to do this for her father, to end his suffering.
Turning and running toward the bathroom when her dad rose and started shuffling toward her, Maya slammed and locked the door for good measure, went over to the closet, pulled open the door, and pushed the hanging clothes away. She dropped to her knees and instantly saw what she was going after.
Lying on the floor along with a box of shells beside it was her father’s shotgun. The rifle was in the living room, the center of the house. She had weapons stashed throughout the home for this particular situation or if anyone tried fucking with her and her family.
Maya grabbed the gun, checked the chamber to make sure it was full and ready to go, and closed her eyes, breathing out slowly. The sound of her dad coming closer, his feet dragging on the hardwood, had the tears coming fast and strong. Squeezing her eyes harder, telling herself she could do this, that she had to do this, she rose and turned to face the door just as the booming knocks came.
Thud. Thud. Thud.
She could picture her now dead father pounding a bloody fist on the door, smearing her mother’s blood over the wood, making it a grisly reminder of what the world had come to.
Maya moved closer to it, her hands shaking, her mouth dry, and her throat tight. The pounding continued, matching the beat of her heart. She was a foot from the door now, and taking a deep breath, she lifted the gun and held it steady with both hands. She had two shells in the shotgun, and she wouldn’t waste them, wouldn’t make her father suffer more than he might be already.
She didn’t know if the infected felt pain, if they even remembered anything of their former lives, but she did know one thing for sure—they didn’t get better. They decayed even more, their bodies rotting, slowly become nothing more than rancid, putrid flesh on bones.
“I’m sorry, Daddy,” she whispered to herself, and then aiming where she thought her father’s head might be, she fired a shot off. The bullet tore through the wood, blasting away a chunk of it, and only a millisecond later, she heard her father’s body slam against the opposite wall. She was shaking harder now, adrenaline pumping through her veins fast and hard, like a train about to slam right into a brick wall.
She waited several moments, waiting to hear if he’d get up, start banging on the door again if he was still alive… or undead. She was crying heavily now, her vision blurring, the tears running down her cheeks.
Wiping the wetness away, she lowered the gun to her side, took a deep, steadying breath, and looked out the door. But her vision was so blurry and so much smoke still seemed to be in her vision from her firing the gun that she couldn’t see clearly.
She reached for the handle. The brass was cold, a stark contrast to how hot her body felt. Without thinking, because she didn’t want her dad to suffer any longer if he was still moving, she opened the door.
Maya looked through the hole in the wood, seeing her father’s still body on the floor across from the door. Blood and chunks of his flesh were splattered along the wall, but as the seconds ticked by, she saw the small twitching of her father’s fingers. She started choking up when she heard him gurgle out, and then he lifted his hand slowly.
Even with half his face blown off, he was still somewhat alive, the infection making the dead rise until their brains or spinal cords were severed and destroyed.
Without postponing this, she lifted the gun, aimed it right between his eyes, and pulled the trigger. And just like that, he was done—his life, the infection, and everything that happened up until this moment snuffed out like a candle’s flame. She wanted to sink to the floor, to let her emotions claim her, but she had to check on her mother even though she knew what she’d find.
Swallowing past the lump in her throat, Maya moved away from her dad and back into the bathroom. She grabbed a couple more bullets, popped out the empty shells, and reloaded. She then moved back down the hallway and into the kitche
n. The electricity had gone out the first week the infection spread, so now she relied on candles and flashlights.
There was a flashlight on the counter, and she grabbed it and turned it on. But she didn’t shine the light on her mother’s body right away, needing to steel herself for what she’d see. After a long moment, she lifted the light and shone it on her mom.
The gag reflex was instant, and she turned and threw up, unable to keep down what little contents she had in her stomach. After she threw up, she wiped her mouth, her tears strong, her pain so monumental she felt like she’d die from it. Reaching out for a towel on the counter, she wiped her mouth, trying to force herself not to cry. Straightening, she turned and faced what remained of her mother.
It was disgusting the amount of flesh her infected father had eaten, and although her mother’s body was in ruins on the ground, her head was intact, and therefore Maya knew the infection would claim her eventually.
Aiming the gun at her mother’s head and closing her eyes, she pulled the trigger. The bullet being fired had her ears ringing, but it was the sound of her soul breaking that was the loudest.
She fell to her knees then, her sobs body-wracking, her breath stalling, and Maya wished fate wasn’t a scornful bitch. She lost the only family she had in this now miserable world, and the thought of facing the destruction of civilization alone was too much to even think about.
Sherman butted his head up against her arm, and she ran her hand over his smooth body.
“It’s just you and me now, boy,” she said and started crying harder.
“Even when the world is at its darkest, you have to remember you aren’t dead.”
The words her mother used to say to her rang through her mind, and she knew she couldn’t let this destroy her. There was already enough carnage in this world, and it would only be getting worse.
She had to stay strong, not just for the memory of her parents, but for herself as well.
4
Two weeks later
In the two weeks since Marius left the bunker and ventured out into the world, he killed a handful of infected. But it wasn’t the infected who kept him up a night, plaguing his thoughts.
It was the fact that he also had to kill a “healthy” human, one who tried stealing his pack while Marius napped in the forest after a long day of walking.
It was that death that had him exhausted, because he couldn’t sleep at night. Every time he closed his eyes, he saw the other man’s eyes widen as Marius plunged the blade in his gut. He didn’t have any other options though, not when a knife had been pulled on him too.
This was a new world, one in which it was kill or be killed, stay alive or be a corpse.
He set up camp in the middle of the woods, far from the road he’d been traveling on. It was safer that way, better to stay hidden from the infected and anyone who wanted to steal his shit and cut his throat.
The fire he started was small, the smoke slight as it rose up to the treetops. He sat on an overturned log and reached for his backpack. He was running dangerously low on supplies and hadn’t found anything to scavenge. The few houses he passed had been ransacked and all supplies taken. And the stench of death had filled them.
Things had gone downhill in the last two weeks, the infection spreading far quicker than any of the scientists anticipated. In the beginning, people hadn’t understood what was happening, hadn’t realized their loved ones who had the virus were not the same. They’d tried to help them, tried to bring them back.
There was no going back.
So, in the beginning, the infection spread like wildfire, especially in the parts of the city thick with population.
He grabbed a can of beans from his pack and pushed around the remaining supplies he had. He needed to find a place that was more secure, a place where he could live, grow his own food, survive.
Marius wanted to help people, to come to the surface and see if he could rectify, in some small way, the damage he’d been a part of, but there was no help he could give. The ones who weren’t sick were crazed, untrustworthy, and the infected were to the point their bodies were rotting at a frighteningly quick rate.
He took out his hunting knife, the one he sharpened every night, making sure it could cut through flesh like it was a scorching knife going through a stick of butter. Puncturing the top of the can, he cut enough of it that he could pry the lid open. With no utensils, because that was the least of his worries, Marius started eating the beans with his fingers, scooping them out and staring at the fire.
The wood crackled as the flames licked at them, and his thoughts moved to a world that had been clean, free of infection, where everything had been taken for granted. He’d taken so many things for granted. He was sure everyone had. The little things that he once had, the things he hadn’t really paid attention to that made life easier, seemed like a treasure now.
He wanted to do so much with his life, wanted to get married, have a family, and provide for them.
Family.
It had been the one thing he didn’t really have while growing up. It was one of the reasons he’d gone to school, saturated himself with everything scholastic. That way, he didn’t have to think about anything or anyone, didn’t have to realize he was really alone.
After eating, Marius made sure his shit was packed up in case he had to make a quick getaway, and then he laid out a blanket in front of the fire. Staring at the flames as he lay on the material, his head resting in his hand, all Marius thought was how maybe he should have stayed in the bunker with Brandon.
But no, he knew he couldn’t have stayed there. He would have been ready to tear out of his skin, and he and Brandon would have probably gone after each other because of cabin fever.
Closing his eyes, letting sleep claim him, Marius let the world vanish around him as the only peace he ever felt—the one he found when dreaming—swept over him.
5
It had taken Maya fourteen days and nights to finally reach where she’d been headed. Her car had run out of gas halfway through the trip, and it had taken triple the time frame it normally would have, because she had to walk the rest of the way.
But she kept to the back roads, not about to cut through the city even if it would have shaved some time off her trip.
The city was just too dangerous, and she heard, when the radio had still been working, that the cities were overrun with looters and infected. In those thickly populated areas, the disease spread quickly, taking the lives of those who used to be “normal.”
The road hadn’t been hard, and she had only seen one infected, but that was one too many, especially with the image of her father and lifeless mother to haunt her dreams. What she’d been more afraid of were the healthy humans who now had the run of a lawless land.
Rape was probably high, she assumed, given the fact that the population was diminished so much. Women had to be a commodity now too, or at least she figured so from any post-apocalyptic movies she’d seen.
The images in her head of women being taken as sex slaves, used by various men for their own personal sexual gratification, had everything inside her on alert, fearing everyone and trusting no one.
She stayed to the trees, walked during the day, and had camped at night in any “safe” place she could find. Maya was tired, her feet had blisters on them, and she was filthy. But she was alive and finally at her destination, and that’s all that mattered.
Maya had been deep in the woods for the better part of a day, and the wired gate that went around the house, which had been put up when she was just a child by her father, still stood strong. She needed that gate to help her in keeping this place, her new home, safe.
Before all this had gone down with the infection, her family’s plan had been to come to this exact place. They waited, stocked up on supplies, weapons, not knowing how long the infection would last, or if help in the form of their government—the ones who had unleashed this hell on earth to begin with—would come.
Th
ey bided their time until things calmed, were taken care of, or they hoped on the latter. But her father had then been bitten shortly after everything, and their plans changed drastically.
Everything’s different.
They’d come here when things had been okay in the world. The two-story log cabin had been built by her grandfather before she was even born, was sturdy, protected by the forest and gate, and was her new home.
She was high in the mountains, miles from the town below, from civilization, and she felt her safety rise tenfold. The house itself had a natural well, a fully stocked pond—or she hoped it was still stocked—and sat on three acres.
The woods surrounded all four sides of the house, and in the back, she knew there was a functioning greenhouse. Yes, this had been their retreat, where they needed to be in order to stay alive and wait everything out.
But she was here now, and she had to make things right if she wanted to see this through. She wouldn’t be someone’s whore, and she wouldn’t be a walking corpse. She’d stay alive.
Maya reached for the loaded gun strapped to her thigh and advanced on the house. She needed to make sure it was safe before she went inside.
Moving around to the side, she grabbed a handful of pebbles and crouched behind some thick foliage. She tossed them toward one of the windows and crouched even lower to the ground, waiting to see if a healthy human would come out or if an infected would stumble toward her because of the noise.
She waited for several minutes and then tossed more pebbles to the window. After silence and nothingness greeted her, she was confident the home was vacant but still held her gun at the ready. Standing, she adjusted her bag on her back and shoulder and sighed. She was here, her new home.
“Come on, Sherman,” she said and whistled for her dog, who came trotting out of the woods and stopped beside her. She reached down and stroked his head, knowing she could make this work, could survive.
