Survival Kit

by Haga, A. H.

  “We can’t leave him,” I finally said, fighting to hold back another sob. “Not like this.”

  “Habibi,” Shadia began, but I shook my head.

  “No. We can’t.”

  I could almost feel Shadia and André exchange glances behind my back.

  “OK,” Shadia finally said, kissing my neck. “We’ll bury him, but first, we have to take care of the zombies, OK?”

  “OK.”

  “And you can’t just sit here while we do that. You have to defend yourself, OK?”

  I nodded. Shadia squeezed me so tight I almost lost my breath before she stood. My hands shook as I dragged them through Max’s fur one more time before letting her help me up and into my chair. For a second, I thought about all the blood I was dragging into the chair with me and how I would have to sit in it and remember this day forever, but I let the thought go. That wasn’t important right now.

  André bent and picked up Max. The dog had been huge in life and was probably even heavier now that he was all limp, but André staggered to his feet and wobbled his way to the small garden plot beside the driveway. My heart went out to him as I saw how his arms were shaking, and fresh sweat burst out on his forehead. André wasn’t doing well, but he still thought about what would make me relax rather than what would be good for him. I wanted to do something for him in return, but I didn’t know what.

  We still had a little time before the zombies arrived, so while the others ate, I cleaned myself up. Again. My pink gloves seemed so dark I wasn’t sure they could be saved, and that made my tears continue flowing. I wasn’t sure I could stop them ever again.

  Shadia made sure her shoulder touched my leg the entire time, letting me know she was there, and it was a small comfort.

  It felt weird, just sitting there and waiting for the zombies to reach us, but right now, there wasn’t that much else to do. Shadia stood for most of the talking while André was focused on keeping his food down and staying out of the sun. He was squinting against it as if it pained him. Every time it seemed Shadia considered asking how he was doing, he would switch the conversation over to something else, and I’d see the relief in his eyes that Shadia followed his lead and let him be. I’d done it myself many times to spare her the details of my pain, and it worried me that André felt the need to do it now.

  Finally, the zombies came into view. There were only three, dressed in pajamas with blood on them. One was just a child.

  Shadia let out a deep breath at the sight of the child zombie and turned toward one of the two adults. She gripped her knife, that I’d given back shortly after making sure Max wouldn’t return, and headed forward. André glanced at the child, then at me, before he headed for the other adult, leaving the smaller zombie to me. I wondered why that was, and if it was really smart of André to go after one of the possibly stronger zombies with his body seeming as sick as it did, but I couldn’t dwell on it for long.

  The zombies all turned toward André, almost walking past Shadia, but she gripped the throat of her zombie and pushed it back.

  André grabbed his zombie’s shoulder and spun it around, making sure it saw only him. He let out a surprised yelp as the child zombie reached for him.

  The sound woke me from my thoughts, and I hurried forward. Pushing forward, I grabbed the ax with both hands and drove it into the side of the child zombie, pushing her away from André. I barely managed to keep her on her feet so she didn’t go under my chair, and she hit the side of the car. Pinned between my ax and the vehicle, she clicked her teeth and reached for me.

  OK, now what? How was I going to finish her off with my weapon, while using it to keep her in place?

  To the side, Shadia felled her opponent and turned toward me.

  I couldn’t let Shadia kill a child, even if it was already dead. It would ruin her. But how could I kill it? I may not want kids of my own, but that didn’t mean I hated or wanted to hurt them. Looking at the child in front of me, even as it clacked its teeth and tried to reach me, to hurt me, it was a child. Someone loved her, once. My eyes jumped from her mouth to her eyes. Those black eyes. Empty except for hunger. I’d made sure Max wouldn’t come back like this, controlled by this thing, and I would release this child from its hold as well.

  I pulled the ax toward me, gripping it with one hand. The child stumbled forward at the sudden release, almost falling to the ground, but I was close enough to support her. My hand was at her throat, holding her up, as I hefted the ax and brought it down on the zombie’s head.

  My eyes were locked on the child’s black pits as the ax bit into her head and brain. As blood bubbled up around the blade, I saw the pupils retract, showing the child’s usually bright blue irises.

  With a hiccup, I let her go and watched as she crumbled to the asphalt. The ax slipped from her head as she fell, and I sat there, staring at her. What had I just seen? Had she still been in there? The essence of who she was? No. The bodies of the diseased were well and truly dead. If they returned, whatever once made them human was gone. I was sure of that. So what did it mean that the pupils returned to normal size as the body died? Was the parasite somehow looking through the eyes of its host?

  “Kit!”

  The call jarred me from my thoughts, and I spun around to locate the source. Shadia was sitting on the ground beside two bodies. One was André’s zombie, spilling almost dried blood onto the ground. The other was André himself.

  “What happened?” I asked and rolled closer. “Is he OK?”

  “Do he look OK to you?” Shadia snapped. Her hand was at André’s forehead, the other under his chin, making sure his airway was open. He had passed out.

  “No,” I answered meekly.

  “Sorry,” Shadia said. “I didn’t mean to snap. I’m just scared.”

  She looked at me with big eyes, and all I could do was nod and say: “What do we do now?”

  “We have to get him somewhere safe. Fast.”

  I looked around as Shadia made sure André was in a more comfortable position. His mouth was open, gasping for air, and his eyes were closed, but I could see his eyeballs moving under the lids. His skin was shining with sweat.

  “He has a fever, doesn’t he?” I asked. Shadia only nodded. “I think the easiest is to get him into the house. The door is already open, and nothing else has come out of it. We’d be safe there.”

  Shadia nodded again. “OK. André? Can you hear me?”

  There was no response. No reaction.

  Shadia sighed.

  “Here,” I said and slid out of my chair. My legs and arms were filled with lactic acid, but I didn’t care. There were more important things to worry about. “Get him into my chair and up the stairs. It’s easier than carrying him.”

  “You sure?”

  I patted the ax. “I can take care of myself if I have to.”

  This only made the furrow in Shadia’s brow deeper. Finally, she nodded and helped me to the side.

  It was a battle for her to get André into the chair. While he was skinny, he was also completely limp and slippery, and he almost fell out of the chair on more than one occasion. But finally, he was in place, and Shadia leaned on the back of the chair to catch her breath. After a nod from me, she went to the stairs leading up to the door. I stared at the line of blood trailing after one of my chair’s wheels as she moved, not able to look at André.

  Shadia had to drag the chair up backwards, but she’d done it before, and I knew she had it under control. Instead of watching, I turned my attention to the street. The scent of the three zombies we’d already taken down was strong enough to mask the scent of any others coming our way. I hoped I would be able to hear them, as with the sun in my eyes I wasn’t sure I’d see them.

  It took Shadia a long time before she came out again, my empty chair in tow. She looked greyer, somehow. Her usually bouncy, dark hair looked flat, and her warm skin looked ashen.

  “André?” I asked, not sure what to expect.

  “In bed. Come on.�
� Shadia helped me into the chair and pulled me toward the house. “It smells pretty bad. The dog … he did his business inside for days, and there’s … there’s death inside.”

  I only nodded and let her pull me up the steps and into the house. The scent of rotting flesh and sick dog hit me like a sledgehammer, and my vision swam, but the door had been open long enough to let some fresh air into the otherwise stale house, and I felt a draft. Shadia must have opened some windows.

  The stairs to the second floor were just inside the doorway, and Shadia started pulling me up. As we moved, I looked at the pictures on the wall. A man and a woman. The woman and Max, the dog. Some family photos. Two teen boys, one goth and one jock. The teens and Max. The teens and the two adults. Then we were up the stairs, and Shadia rolled me to an open door.

  The room on the inside held a double bed with a cover over the two duvets and pillows. Shadia kept it on as she put our bags on it and rolled me out again.

  “Where are we going? Where’s André?”

  “We’re getting you washed up, habibi. I won’t let you crawl into a clean bed covered in blood.” I couldn’t argue with that. “And André is in another room, on a sofa. He needs a bath as well, but I’m hoping he’ll wake up and take care of it himself soon. If not, I’ll have to do it.” When I turned to look at her, she shuddered theatrically, but her eyes and voice were empty. “I’m a lesbian for a reason. Now, let’s get all that blood off of you.”

  19

  I didn’t see André again that day. He slept while I was awake and woke when I slept. Shadia told me she’d got him to eat something and clean up what she hadn’t dealt with during the night.

  After breakfast the next day, Shadia rolled me into André’s room. It looked out over the garden where we’d left Max the day before. Sitting at the window, I watched as Shadia dug a hole in the ground. I argued that it was too dangerous to be out and exposed like that, but she said she needed the air. And could I argue? The house still smelled of death, and André smelled of sickness. It made the air inside the house heavy and depressing. Once, she used the shovel to kill a zombie that came wandering into the garden, but other than that, she wasn’t bothered. Max was in the ground just before lunch, and Shadia built a cairn at the site with rocks found in neighboring flowerbeds.

  She returned to the house and cleaned up. The water was still running, though we had no idea how. Could the water plant run without power? Or maybe it had a generator? I mean, we did have water if the power went out regularly, so maybe it just ran on its own? I had no idea; I wasn’t an engineer. While the water wasn’t warm, at least we could shower and wash things off, so she did just that. While she was still in the shower, André woke.

  “Kit,” he croaked, almost making me fall out of my chair, he scared me so much.

  “Hey, dude,” I answered, turning to look at him. “How’re you feeling?”

  “Like crap, you know?”

  I nodded and felt his forehead. It was burning hot and clammy with sweat.

  Shadia had left the first aid kit, the notebook and pen, and the polaroid camera on the writing desk in his room, so I picked up the set and started taking his temperature. While the thermometer read him, I checked my watch and added a log to the book. Shadia had told me to do it before she went outside. She was afraid for him, or of him, I wasn’t sure which. Now that the fever was raging through his body, she didn’t want to miss anything. As I flipped through the book, I saw that Shadia had taken notes on his health from the time she took over the record. These notes were much more informative than what was in the book when I had read it the first time.

  The thermometer beeped, and I pulled it out of his mouth, reading the temperature before writing it in the book.

  “It’s bad, isn’t it?” André asked, his voice hoarse.

  “No,” I lied and put the book down.

  I helped him drink a little from the bottle of water on the nightstand.

  “You’re a bad liar, you know,” he said when I lowered his head to the pillow again. His voice was a little clearer now.

  “Too bad. Can I look at your shoulder?”

  He made a face but moved. He was shirtless, his chest shining with the sweat, but the wound looked as it had the other times I’d seen it. I took a photo of it anyway, just in case Shadia wanted it.

  “Hey, Kit?” André asked.

  “Yeah?” I answered, focusing on writing the time and date on the back of the picture.

  “When are we eating?”

  I stopped writing. “You hungry?”

  He smacked his lips. “Yeah.”

  “Well, that’s good. Having an appetite is good.”

  He looked away. “Yeah.”

  Shadia entered the room then, her hair still wet from the shower. She was dressed in clothes I’d never seen before. I didn’t ask where they came from. She’d looted the closets for clean clothes for all of us yesterday. She was carrying a tray with three bowls of something, a plate with bread, and three cups.

  “Oh, good, you’re up,” she said, putting the tray on the writing desk beside the notebook. “You hungry?”

  “Starving,” André answered, his eyes closed.

  I handed Shadia the picture. She read what I’d written on the back, mouthing the temperature and tilting her head. I nodded and turned away. Forty degrees Celsius was high. Too high.

  Shadia shook her head and tucked the picture into the notebook. Before she gave anything to André, we helped him into a sitting position. Then, she had him swallow two Paracet, hoping to bring his fever down.

  The bowls contained vegetable noodle soup. André was barely able to get down a few spoons before he put the bowl down.

  “You OK?” I asked.

  He nodded and leaned back against the wall, closing his eyes and pressing his hands over his stomach. Shadia shook her head when I opened my mouth to ask if he was sure, and I returned my attention to my own soup, frowning. If this frustration, this helplessness was how Shadia felt with me, I had no idea how she’d stuck with me for this long. It made my respect for her grow, even as my worry for André stayed at the front of my mind.

  The bread was hard and stale, but dipping it in the broth loosened it up and made it edible. The mugs contained juice. It was room temperature but still tasted of the fruity freshness of oranges.

  By the time we were done with our meal, André was asleep again, and Shadia carefully wheeled me out of the room and into the one we shared before returning to help André.

  “How was it?” I asked as she pulled the door to behind her.

  “Still forty degrees,” she said, shaking her head. “The Paracet didn’t work.”

  “How can it not work?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She shook her head again and headed down the stairs, leaving me alone in the room. I considered going back to bed, knowing it would be the smart thing to do, but I wasn’t feeling all that bad, surprisingly. Yesterday had been a mess of emotions and activity, but despite a somewhat short fuse on my temper and being more light and sound sensitive than usual, I was OK. Probably an adrenaline-high after yesterday. So instead of going to bed, I started looking around the house.

  The room Shadia and I were using looked to have been a guest room for some time. There were no pictures on the dressers or nightstand, and only winter clothes and spare duvets in the closet. The attached bathroom was as good as empty of anything personal and only had some standard soap and towels. André’s room had belonged to one of the two teenage boys. The walls were plastered with posters of girls in bikinis resting on the hoods of Ferraris. There was a football in one corner and a row of books standing on a shelf above the writing desk. They all seemed like books on health, and I hadn’t given them much attention. So what was in the rest of the rooms? And where was the smell of death coming from?

  I’d noticed the scent the day before when we first entered the house, but I’d been too emotionally used up to give it much thought. When I came out of the sh
ower yesterday, I was too tired to consider it, and I fell asleep the moment Shadia tucked me into the bed. The scent was still there when I woke today, but weaker. Now, awake and curious, I wanted to know where it came from.

  I opened the door beside the one leading to André’s room, and my first thought was that the walls were painted black, but they were actually covered in posters. Some of bands and mythical creatures, some of tarot decks and movies. They’d been hung above one another, from floor to ceiling, hiding whatever color the walls had originally been. The bed was made with red covers, and the desk was almost hidden under the many papers that littered it.

  Rolling closer, I lifted some of the papers. They were drawings. The artist had drawn the same group of creatures again and again. A hairy dwarf with a battle-ax, a hafling dressed in a hat, an elf with a bow, and a tiefling in full armor with sword and shield. It had been some time since I last played Dungeons and Dragons, but this looked like an adventuring party if I’d ever seen one, even if a Paladin tiefling was uncommon. I liked it.

  I looked through a few more of the drawings, seeing scenes from what I guessed were the party’s adventures.

  The next door was at the end of the hall, and as I rolled closer, the smell of death grew stronger. It wasn’t by much, but enough that I was prepared for what I might see in there when I opened the door.

  Someone, my guess was Shadia, had opened the window before they closed the door yesterday, letting the smell out, trying to hide it. But she couldn’t hide what lay on the bed.

  It was a mess of blood, bone, and maggots. There was dried blood almost everywhere, dragged around by dog paws. The bodies were mostly whole, but one of the legs had been gnawed off and pulled to the other side of the room, where Max must have eaten it.

  I stared at that gnawed on bone, not sure what to feel. Horrified, I was sure. Instead, I was empty and cold. Too shocked to feel properly.

  The rest of the bodies were liquifying and writhing with bugs and maggots. Something had oozed through the sheets and into a pool on the floor.

  I distantly wondered where the two kids were, for these were clearly the adults.