by Haga, A. H.
My grip on the handle was slick, and I almost lost the knife as the woman went suddenly limp, but I managed to jerk it out at the last second.
The man had fallen at my kick and was crawling toward me now. It made his head easier to reach, and I slammed the knife down just as he reached for my leg.
This time, when he fell, I let the knife fall with him.
I stared at the two zombies for a moment before looking at my hands. They were covered in the dark, almost dry blood, but my gloves were fine. There was no visible rip or tear, and I didn’t feel the sting of a wound.
Hands shaking, I looked over the rest of me. There were flecks of the dark blood on my jeans and jacket, but not the bloodbath I’d expected. How many times had I stabbed the man? At least five, but he’d hardly bled.
My sight grew blurry, and I almost dried away the tears, but I didn’t dare touch the blood to my bare skin. What if whatever made a zombie transmitted through blood, and I got it in my eyes? Would that be enough? Or the saliva of the woman that must be on my fingers, even if I couldn’t see it?
I realized I was still screaming, and had been screaming through the entire fight. I clicked my teeth shut so hard it hurt.
That’s how Shadia found me a few seconds later: my mouth jammed shut against the noises inside, my hands out in front of me, covered in dark blood and shaking, tears streaming down my face.
She stopped, taking in the scene, and she turn almost as white as those zombies I’d killed. I didn’t know Shadia could get that pale, and I didn’t like it. I preferred her warm golden skin. The thought was so random it almost made me laugh. I kept my mouth shut, keeping that in as well, but at least it ruined the scream that was stuck in my throat.
I let out a breath and finally looked up at Shadia. “See?” I said, voice barely shaking. “I said I could take care of myself.” Shadia only stared. “Any chance you found any towels?” I asked. “I would really like to clean this off.”
This made Shadia move. She took a couple of steps forward, dropped the two axes she was carrying, and stopped over me, looking down at the two zombies. Then she began to laugh. It was a tad too bright and loud, but I didn’t interrupt her. Just let her laugh it out.
When she was done, she turned and rested her head atop mine. I couldn’t see her face or even her neck because of the brim of my hat, but the contact calmed me and did the same for her. We stood like that for a long moment before she pulled back.
“Give me a second, habibi; there was a bathroom in the lobby.”
I nodded and watched as she walked away, strangely calm. It was then I realized why I’d had that dream about NAV and my denied request. I had felt so helpless at that moment, like I could do nothing right, and that was how I felt after our first run-in with the undead. Now, however, I had proven that I could kill them on my own. It might have been sloppy and messy, but I’d killed them both on my own. That feeling of helplessness no longer lay in my stomach like a rock.
The thought that something good had come out of this encounter almost made me laugh as well, but I kept it down. In doing so, I felt a bit more control return to my mind. I wasn’t helpless, and I could do this. I could keep Shadia alive long enough for us to get to Borøya. To get us to our safe haven.
5
I washed my hands with towels and water three times, then used antibacterial-gel on both my gloves and my skin. Finally, I let Shadia inspect my hands for any rifts or tears, but there was nothing there. I’d been lucky.
Adrenaline was still prickling under my skin when I pulled on my gloves, and we were ready to go. Shadia wanted to stay in the hotel, but I didn’t want to be anywhere near here. I just wanted to get out of town and to safety as quickly as possible. Mumbling and grumbling, Shadia agreed, and we left the bodies behind.
Barely a block away from the hotel, movement caught my eye. Two people were shambling their way toward us from the other end of the street. Even at this distance, I saw they were zombies by the way they walked. Slow and lumbering. They were both women, and both dressed in what looked like PJs. The one on the right was missing part of her cheek, the flesh within gray and decaying. The other had blood down the front of her shirt.
“We could turn around,” I said. “Head up and over.”
“No,” Shadia answered. “We should continue toward the road.”
“But what do we do with them?”
I felt it through the entire chair as Shadia changed her grip on the handle. “We try to go around,” she said. “If not, we push them away.”
I wasn’t sure how we would get around them. We were on the sidewalk, which was thin and bumpy, and the road was clogged with cars. If I could walk, we could have weaved through them and to the other side, losing the zombies long before we met them, but that wasn’t the case.
We met the women just past the halfway point of the street. Shadia had moved us to hug the walls of the buildings at our side, leaving a bit of room on the sidewalk. The zombies mirrored us, stumbling on the uneven bricks along the wall but never quite falling.
The woman with blood on her shirt moaned, her voice echoing inside my head and against the stone wall as she lunged forward, hands shooting out to grab at me.
Turning the ax, I pushed the blunt tip into her chest, pushing her back into the chest of the other woman. They both tumbled to the ground.
The chair jerked below me, and the armrest dug into my ribs as Shadia turned me to the side and pushed past the sprawling women. The one with the missing cheek reached out as we passed, her fingers getting caught in the wheel spokes and breaking off with a wet crunch.
“Whalla,” Shadia said in a low voice. I could hear the tears building in her throat.
I met the woman’s eyes as we passed her and saw nothing in them but hunger. Even as her fingers broke off, there was no pain there. But if Shadia was going to cry, I couldn’t cry. Then she would want to stop and comfort me, or she may think I was crying because I was too tired to move on and try to take me back to the hotel. I couldn’t let that happen. We had to move forward. I wasn’t sure if she heard it, but just at the edge of my hearing was the sound of moaning. Not that of the women we’d just left behind, but of a group of throats that must have noticed us despite being on another street. We had to get away from it.
So instead of crying, I looked down to make sure the fingers weren’t still stuck in the wheel. They weren’t; they’d fallen out, leaving hardly any evidence of what had happened. I sat back up again, trying to breathe calmly.
We reached the intersection the women had come from. The only way clear was to the left, but that would bring us back in a circle. Despite that, Shadia was turning me that way.
I grabbed the brakes and pushed them on. Behind me, Shadia almost tumbled over the chair.
“What are you doing?” she hissed. I could hear the tears behind the anger.
“We have to go over,” I said, pointing at the clogged road. “We have to get down to the water, so we know where to find the road.”
“But we can’t.”
I turned and met her eyes. They were wide, but not blank with tears or fear as I’d thought they might be. The set of her jaw told me she was holding it back. I reached up and cupped her cheek. “We have to,” I repeated.
She looked into my eyes for a long moment before nodding. “OK, I’ll carry you over first, then go back for the chair.” I wanted to argue. I didn’t want her to be on this side of the road alone, but I didn’t see any other way to do it, so I nodded. “Give me the ax; you are not going to sit over there defenseless.”
I only nodded again and handed her the weapon. She wrapped the ax-head with her jacket before kneeling before me. I climbed onto her back, and she shot upright, moving forward almost before we were standing straight.
The cars were parked so tight she had to move sideways past the first pair to have a chance of getting through. As she turned, I looked back. The two zombie-women were back on their feet and making their way toward us again.
They would be by the chair before Shadia got back to it. I wanted to urge her on but knew she couldn’t move any faster, so I looked into the cars we passed. They were filled with stuff–animal cages and bags–but no people. A few doors were left open, telling of the panic that had made the drivers and passengers run away.
There were only two lanes, but it felt like we’d crossed a freeway by the time we were over. Shadia had to move down two cars while in the middle of the street to find a way through for us, and now the zombie women had reached the cars. They were leaning over the hood and roof of a car, clawing at the metal to get closer.
The moaning I’d heard earlier was louder as well, and I knew Shadia could hear it too. I saw it in the way her eyes jumped toward the noise every now and again. Instead of saying anything, she set me down on a power box against the wall and headed into the road again.
Clutching the ax to my chest, I could do nothing but watch as she weaved her way back to the other side. The women followed her step for step, staying across from her all the time.
Shadia stopped before the opening that would lead onto the sidewalk. She was turned away so I couldn’t see her face, but I saw the set of her shoulders. They were determined but afraid. Her hands were knit against her thighs. After a long pause, she gripped the knife handle with one hand and supported herself against a car with the other. The women leaned over the hood in front of her, their fingers almost reaching her. If they took one more step to the side, they would find the opening and reach her, and Shadia would not be able to move fast enough to avoid them. I was about to tell her to just to come back, when she moved.
In one bound, she was on top of the car, stepping on the hand of the one with blood on her shirt. With the woman trapped, Shadia bent over and drove the knife into the woman’s head.
My hands spasmed, and my ax fell from my slack grip and to the ground. Before the woman’s body had fallen, Shadia moved on to the second zombie, making the same maneuver on her. As the dead body slipped out of sight, Shadia knelt on the hood of the car, her face turned away from me. Her shoulders and back were shaking like she was crying or throwing up. I wanted to go to her so bad I almost stumbled down from the power box. As if reading my thoughts, she turned her face toward me. Her eyes were dry and hard and met mine across the cars. I could see the threat in them. If I moved, she would be beyond angry. So I stayed put and watched as she climbed down from the car and grabbed the bags hanging on the chair.
She carried them over first, setting them by my feet. Then, without a word, she picked up my ax and handed it to me before going back for my chair. It took her longer to fold it up and maneuver it through the cars. In the end, she just pushed it on top of the hoods and roofs so it wouldn’t get in her way.
While she worked, the moaning drew ever closer, and I saw movement in-between the cars the way we had come. Three people–zombies, I had to start thinking about them as zombies–had gathered on the opposite sidewalk to the one we had been on. They hadn’t found a way through the cars yet and were trying to climb over the hoods without knowing they could climb. There was one making his way up the sidewalk on my side, black eyes glued on me, but he was far away.
Shadia finally got the chair to the asphalt and unfolded it. She didn’t once look at me as she put the bags back in place and reached to help me into it. I grabbed her face and lifted it. Her eyes jumped to my throat.
“Shadia, look at me,” I pleaded. I could hear the fear in my own voice and knew she could too. I saw guilt in her eyes at my words, but she couldn’t look at me. “I’m so sorry,” I said.
This made her look at me, a spark of anger in her set jaw now. “Why are you sorry?”
“’Cause you had to do that because of me. ‘Cause I can’t walk and take care of myself.”
“That’s nothing you should say sorry for. It’s not your fault you’re sick, so do not apologize for it, you hear me?” I nodded. She sighed and touched one of my hands. It was her left hand, not the one she had used to kill the zombies. “I would have had to do it sooner or later. Better now, so I know I can protect you.” I wanted to tell her that she shouldn’t have to protect me, that I should be able to do that myself, but she must have seen it in my eyes, for she shook her head. “You’ve already proven yourself. I needed to do that too. I needed to know if I could do it.” She turned and looked at the man shambling his way toward us, then up at the group trying to find a way through the cars.
I wanted to argue that she shouldn’t have to, that she was strong and kind, and killing zombies shouldn’t be anything she should have to worry about. But I kept my mouth shut despite the tingling of adrenaline in my lips. Our world had changed. It was kill or be killed. The fact didn’t make me any less sad for what Shadia had lost today.
When she looked back at me, I nodded, and she helped me into the chair.
Before either of the walking dead could reach us, we were on our way again.
Excerpt from Medical Notebook
No one knows where it started. The States blamed the Russians, and the Russians blamed the States. Great Britain and Asia blamed Europe, and Europe blamed Great Britan and Asia and Russia. In the end, it didn’t matter where it started. It spread too fast.
At first, the people in charge thought it was a pandemic of a fast-moving flu virus. It seemed to spread the same way and started with typical flu symptoms–fever and a sore throat, dizziness, and headache. Then came nausea and vomiting. Then excreting blood. At this point, it was too late.
The doctors found worms in the tests they took, disproving the theory of a virus. The people infected were… infected with worms. When autopsied, the bodies were riddled with them.
The parasite killed its host within a few weeks. It made them come back from the dead within a few days.
6
I was starting to get a bad headache from the sharp sun, not to mention my whole body was sore from being carried over road after road. I really shouldn’t complain, though. Shadia was the one lifting me up and setting me down. She was the one pushing me over uneven ground littered with people’s discarded belongings. She ran back and forth through the maze of cars to get everything across. I hated myself for being tired and hurting, and at the same time, I couldn’t help it. I would have loved for that to be our biggest problem. It wasn’t.
We had to take a left turn at one point, then crossed three more streets, before we reached a point where we didn’t dare cross anymore. The other side was teeming with the undead, groaning and moaning and clawing to reach us. Some of them were smaller than the others and found their way through the open car doors. They scraped their teeth against the glass, trying to get through. Some of the doors and windows were open, however, and the zombies crawled through and emerged closer to us.
If the zombies had just been in front, we could have crossed the road and continued along until we reached the freeway, but they weren’t. We’d picked up a trail of them. They weren’t smart enough to look for paths or fast enough to be any real threat, but we were now boxed in on three sides. Still not too close, not too dangerous, but enough that we were starting to panic.
“We can’t keep going like this,” I said and turned on the brakes of my chair. Shadia didn’t fall over me this time, but I could hear her breathing quicken. She’d killed seven more zombies to keep me safe. I had only been allowed to take out one. “Sooner or later, they’ll have us surrounded.”
“They’re not smart enough for that,” she answered, her voice muffled because she was turned away.
“No, but they’ll have more luck than us in this case.”
“What do you want to do?”
“Either we continue as far as we can get before we look for a place to hide, or we find a place to hide and wait for them to disappear.”
A silence fell between us, only broken by nails against metal and the sounds of the dead. It was starting to wear on my nerves, and I could feel frustrated tears coming on. Instead of letting them out, I found my pain pills and
took one with a new Coca-Cola. After two big gulps, I handed it back to Shadia without looking. She took it, and I heard her drink deep. When I got it back, there were only a few sips left. I chugged them and threw the bottle in a nearby trashcan.
“You could have kept it,” Shadia said. “Filled it with water or something.”
“We have enough water.”
It was true. We’d filled as many bottles of water as we could, only bringing the cola for me to drink as a boost when needed. The sugar and carbonate gave me a few extra seconds of a clear mind and feeling somewhat normal again.
“OK, we keep moving,” I said, turning to look up at Shadia. She met my eyes–as much as she could through my sunglasses. “But we don’t go toward the water. We need to get out of town and find a road that’s not clogged by cars.”
“And how do we do that?”
“I honestly don’t know, but we need to move, and soon.” A zombie had just found its way past a car on the other side, leaving just one car between us. As if he led the way, the other zombies started following. Sooner or later, one of them would stumble on an easy path through.
“Right,” Shadia said. “We move on and try to find a place in a few hours. You OK with that?”
I don’t really have a choice. “Yeah. Let’s go.”
I opened the brakes, and Shadia pushed me forward. Instead of going over the cars and toward the group of dead people, she pushed on until we reached the farthest side of the sidewalk. There were zombies in-between the cars in front of us, but none close enough to stop us from crossing. The most important thing was that the other side of the void was clear.
We’d made crossing a kind of science by now, so I was over on the other side and leaning against the brick wall of a shop within a minute. Shadia hurried back and got our bags, then my chair. One of the zombies was one car closer to me now than before, but I was back in the chair and being pushed away long before it found the gap it needed to get to me. I couldn’t help staring at it, though. It had been a young man at one point. Now he was grey and flabby, and his right hand was missing. It looked like someone had eaten it. The weirdest thing was the bright orange cross painted over his face, even covering his eyes, so when he looked at me, all I saw was orange. I wondered how he could see past that, or if they used their eyes at all.
