The Awakened

by Sara Elizabeth Santana

  “Is it locked?” he yelled over the noise that was right outside our door. The sound of raspy breaths and hungry wails filled the air, and it was impossible to ignore.

  “Yes,” I said, taking a step back and helping him push the piece of furniture in front of the door. We both stepped backward, waiting, and a moment later, there was a slamming noise, like bodies hitting the front door. “Oh god, what do we do?”

  “Shh, stay quiet,” he whispered. “They can’t get in. We need to fix your hand.”

  I remembered my injury, the small chunk of my flesh that Madison had managed to rip out before I shot her, and the pain came flooding back. I glanced down and saw blood dripping down my arm. “Damn, that hurts.”

  “Yeah, it got you good,” Ash said, pulling me toward the kitchen, and running the water at the sink. The sound of water hitting the basin barely masked the sound of the people pounding at the door.

  “It? That it is a person, Ash. She is a girl. She’s Madison,” I said firmly, wincing as the cool water flowed over my wound. Tears sprung up in the corners of my eyes, and I bit down on my lip hard.

  “Was. And that wasn’t Madison, Z. I don’t know what it was, but it wasn’t her. Madison wouldn’t attack someone, and she sure wouldn’t sink her teeth into you,” he said, leaning over the sink and washing the blood away. I inhaled sharply. “Sorry.”

  “It’s fine,” I said, through clenched teeth.

  “It’s not too deep,” Ash said, holding my hand closer to his face. “I mean, I’m not an expert, but it doesn’t look like it needs stitches or anything. Do you have a first aid kit?”

  “Under the sink,” I said, tired. I walked over to the table, as Ash rummaged under the sink for the kit. I collapsed in a chair, my entire body shaking. He came over and sat in the chair next to me. Carefully, he wrapped my hand in gauze and taped it down.

  “There,” he said, before placing a soft kiss on the bandage.

  I yanked my hand away from him. “Don’t kiss me, Ash.”

  “Sorry,” he said, but there was a tiny smile on his face. It was barely there, and after the probable deaths of his parents and the disaster that was taking place right outside my front door, I was surprised there was one at all. “Now what?”

  I shook my head, pressing my lips together, scared to say a word. I knew the moment that I said anything, I would start crying, and I wouldn’t stop. Ash stood up, gathered me in his arms and walked us down to the basement where he put me down on the couch. He grabbed a blanket from the armchair and placed it over me. He took a seat on the couch next to me and reached for the remote. The TV came to life, and he immediately switched it to a main channel.

  The president was on the screen, speaking gravely.

  “Turn it up!” I said, wrapping the blanket tighter around me. Ash obliged, and the president’s deep, reassuring voice came floating at me.

  “…unsure of how these victims came to be roaming our neighborhoods, but we assure the American people that we are doing everything in our power to find out where they came from and how to handle them. We urge all of you to stay indoors and to stay vigilant, and await instructions…”

  “Sounds like they have no idea what’s going on either,” Ash said, changing the channel. A scene of destruction filled the screen, and the caption on the bottom read, “Riot in Los Angeles.” People were running in all directions, and you could just make out the distinct blue skin of the…zombies. A few of them were bent over bodies, and I knew exactly what they were doing.

  Ash changed the channel again. This time we were looking at Chicago, and a scene so similar to the one we had just watched. Each time Ash changed the channel, we saw a different city under disarray: Los Angeles, Chicago, New York, Houston, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Dallas, Miami, Indianapolis, Boston, and so many more.

  “Turn it off,” I said, burying my head into the couch. “Just…turn it off.”

  Ash shut the TV off, and we were plunged into darkness, the silence enveloping us, the sound of sirens and screams closer than I wished. Brown eyes met blue eyes, and we stayed together, alone, waiting.

  I curled up in the corner of the couch, staring at the blank TV until I fell asleep again.

  I WOKE UP A FEW hours later, disoriented in the dark room. A bit of light was peeking through the curtains, casting a ray of light across the coffee table and onto the couch. There was something solid and warm pressed against my back, and an arm was thrown casually against my waist. I could feel a slight warm breath on the back of my neck and for a second, I wanted to just lie there, safe and cocooned. The arm tightened around my waist, and I shifted a bit to look over my shoulder.

  And immediately rolled off the couch. “God, Ash, what the hell?”

  He rubbed his eyes, sleepily looking up at me. “What?” he said, stupidly.

  “This is a cuddle-free zone,” I said, grabbing the blanket from him and wrapping it around me tightly. “You may be in my house but stay away from me.”

  Ash yawned and sat up, stretching his arms out. “You were warm, and I was sleepy. I’m a cuddle bug, what can I say?”

  I rolled my eyes. “Did you seriously just call yourself a cuddle bug?”

  “You know it, babes,” he laughed. I just shook my head, grateful for the fact that no matter what was happening, I could count on the infuriating nature of Ash Matthews. He glanced up the stairs. “Are they still out there?”

  I followed his gaze, and I felt my fear, forgotten in the escape of sleep, come creeping back and seeping through my veins. “I don’t know.” Our eyes met, as my fingers clenched tightly around the blanket. “Should we…” I cleared my throat, “Should we go check?”

  “Yeah, yeah, we probably should,” Ash said, looking around, as if waiting for a better solution to burst out of the closet and shout, “I’m here!”

  “We should go together,” I suggested, “To be safe, I mean.”

  He looked relieved that I had been the one to suggest it. “Sure, yeah, if you think so.”

  I resisted the urge to roll my eyes again and tried hard not to throw something at him. I reached for the gun on the coffee table and tossed aside the blanket. “Let’s go.”

  The two of us crept up the stairs, listening for any sounds that were coming up the stairs. We crossed the entryway, and I could feel my heartbeat vibrating through each step on the cold wooden floors.

  Ash grabbed the fireplace poker off the ground and snuck up to the door, pressing his arm to the wood. He then lifted his eyes to the peephole and looked outside for a while.

  “Well?” I whispered.

  He stepped back, and sighed. “They’re still out there. In the streets.”

  I moved across the entryway, my socks slipping on the floors, as I crept closer to the window. I peeked out the curtain, barely allowing a small space for me to look out.

  There were at least a couple dozen…zombies out in the street. If it weren’t for the distinct blue skin, it would be like any normal day. They were just milling around, not talking, just sitting on porch steps staring at street signs. They looked more like the zombies I had always pictured, from images I had seen in movies. “What are they doing? What are they waiting for?”

  Ash came from behind me, looking out as well. “I don’t know. But they’re all…congregated together. Like, they’re waiting for something.”

  The words had barely left his lips when there was a sudden movement. They all raised their heads in almost perfect unison and turned to face the east side of the street. Their eyes were wide as they watched something that neither Ash nor I could see. Frozen in place, captivated, they were insanely creepy to watch. I held my breath, waiting for something, any kind of movement.

  Then I saw our neighbor Carl, an older man in his early sixties, walking down the street. He was a nice man, if not a little weird. He had kept to himself ever since his wife had died and tended to go on long fishing trips without telling anyone, so the postman and the dry cleaners would get angry and leave all hi
s mail and clothes at our apartment. Now he was walking in front of my house, his dog Sandy on a leash in front of him.

  “Carl,” Ash said, sounding resigned.

  “Is he insane?” I asked, incredulous. I reached for the doorknob, but Ash yanked me back.

  “Don’t be stupid, Z,” he hissed. “You’ll be torn apart…” His voice faded away as the zombies finally made their move. They moved almost as one as they came barreling toward Carl, at impossible speeds. They were so fast. Several of them dove onto the small dog, tearing it to pieces in a matter of seconds. The others went sprinting to Carl, who looked surprised. He attempted to fight them off for a moment until they overpowered him, and the sidewalk was covered in bits of flesh and dark, thick blood.

  “I can’t, I can’t,” I said, tearing my gaze away from the scene unfolding outside and the screams that were coming from Carl’s torn face. I sunk to the floor, my back pressed against the wall and my hands covering my ears. “I can’t do this. I can’t handle this.”

  Ash bent down, his elbows on his knees. “Zoey, look at me.”

  I shook my head once, twice, three times, pressing my hands tighter against my head.

  He reached down and took the gun from my hand and placed it carefully on the armoire blocking the door. His hands came up to mine, and he gently pried them off of my ears and forced my chin up so my eyes would meet his. “We’re going to be okay. I don’t know how, but we’re going to be okay.”

  “I don’t want to be okay. I want it to be the same, I want to go back,” I said, rocking back and forth, my back slamming against the wall with each rock. “I don’t feel safe.”

  He held my hands tightly in his. “I know, I know. But you are safe. You’re with me, and I swear it to you, Zoey Valentine, I’m not going to let anything bad happen to you. I’m here, with you.” His blue eyes were bright, and I could see the very beginning of tears in the corners.

  I yanked my hands away from him. “I don’t want to be here with you,” I spat out viciously. “I’d rather be here with anyone else but you. Leave me alone.” I sprang up, stomping up the stairs into my bedroom and slamming the door behind me.

  If I had expected Ash to follow me upstairs, I was wrong. I paced back and forth in my room before reaching for my phone. There were a couple dozen missed text messages coupled with at least a dozen missed calls. I scrolled through my contacts searching for my dad, and pressed the call button when I found him. It beeped once long and loud, and “No Service” popped up. I typed out a quick text message, “Where are you?” and pressed send, but the same message came up again.

  “Great,” I muttered, tossing the phone back on the dresser, where it lay useless. I flopped onto my bed and tried to ignore the perpetual sinking feeling that was constant in my stomach. I tried to ignore the silence that was outside of my window. I expected screams, chaos, something, but it was eerily silent compared to earlier when they seemed to have descended upon the city.

  I was stuck inside my house with no phone, and no one seemed to know what was going on. I was scared, terrified, and felt completely unprepared. I was stuck with the last person I ever wanted to be stuck with, but I couldn’t get rid of him.

  IT HAD BEEN THREE DAYS since the zombies had appeared. We had no phone service, no internet, and I hadn’t heard from my dad. The television didn’t even work. Ash and I had scrounged up an old radio of my dad’s and some batteries and tuned it to find a local radio station, but there was nothing there at all. We were living in complete silence and complete darkness. There was no power. We ate as much as we could from the freezer, old pints of ice cream, frozen vegetables over the stove, to keep it from going bad.

  We didn’t talk much. Ash showed signs of wanting to talk had no desire to rehash anything that had happened. Instead, we just tiptoed around each other, trying to read books and magazines by the light peeking in through the curtains or by the flashlights at night.

  I spent a lot of time in the shower. It was the one place in the house where Ash couldn’t go. It was the only thing in the entire apartment that worked. I turned the knob, and water came out. I stood under the steaming hot water, trying so hard not to think about anything, except getting clean.

  Every time we looked out the window, it looked like more and more zombies had shown up; more of them were wandering the streets. They were always covered in blood, and sometimes they even had limbs hanging from their mouths, like a snack they were saving for later. It was revolting, especially when a fight would break out over the smallest bit of flesh. They all had raspy breaths. It sounded exactly like every worse nightmare I’d ever had. Sometimes, in the middle of the night (or maybe the day, it was so hard to keep track), you could hear them as they made their way down the street.

  The radio silence, the calm that seemed to have taken over the city, was unnerving. I was used to the sounds of the subway, cars honking at the kids playing soccer in the streets.

  That’s why, when the sound of gunfire reached my ear, I completely toppled out of my bed and landed on the hardwood floor with a crash. I lifted my head, and heard it again, the gunfire, and the sound of cars screeching by.

  “Ash,” I called loudly and uncertainly. “Ash!”

  I heard a loud crash downstairs that reverberated through the house; I turned on my heel and raced downstairs.

  “Zoey!”

  “Dad!” I cried, flying into his arms. He was an absolute wreck; his shirt was torn, and his jeans were dirty and covered in blood. There was a hefty gash across his forehead, and a nasty bruise forming right on his jawline. He caught me up, just like when I was a little girl. “Dad, you’re hurt.”

  “I’m fine,” he said, hastily wiping at the gash on his forehead, smearing blood into his hair. “It’s not bad. Where’s Ash?”

  “Here, I’m right here,” Ash said, coming out of the kitchen still armed with the fireplace poker. “What’s going on?”

  I could hear sirens in the distance, mixed in with the occasional scream. The sounds of fallen footsteps as people ran past our brownstone reached my ears, and I could hear the rattling breaths of the zombies, just as Madison’s had been. I wanted to cover my ears, to shut it all out. Instead, I grabbed the gun and retrieved the holster from the case that I had left open in the coat closet.

  “They’re all over the city,” my dad explained, as he reloaded his own gun and slid it into its holster. He passed me a box of ammunition without meeting my eyes. I knew we were both thinking that this was never the purpose of my gun lessons. “We weren’t sure what they were until people started reporting their dead family members alive, and that’s when you told me about Madison.” He took another gun out of the waistband of his jeans, loaded it and held it out to Ash.

  Ash balked. “I don’t…I don’t know how to use one.”

  “Take it, kid,” Dad said, his voice grave. “You just gotta aim.”

  He took it, staring at it for a moment before his grip tightened on it. He took the holster my dad was holding and strapped it around his hips. “Well, I do play a lot of Call of Duty.”

  I threw him an exasperated look but turned back to Dad. “So what’s going on? Why do you look so beat up?”

  “They attacked the station. They’ve been attacking all of them, all the major cities: here, Los Angeles, Boston, Chicago…at least eight or nine cities.” He reached into the closet, where the safe was and pulled out his extra gun case, the one I didn’t even have access to. He yanked out three more guns and his rifle and packed them in his old gym bag. “We didn’t know what to think. What do you think? But then they started attacking everyone, ripping them to shreds. They kept wailing on and on about being hungry.”

  “That’s exactly what Madison was doing,” I said, strapping my own holster around my hips.

  “Where is she?” he asked, looking up from his task and meeting my eyes. I looked down, unable to answer. “Oh, okay, all right. Well, we need to get away. We need to go. The Awakened are everywhere.”

 
“What? Awakened?”

  Dad sighed. “That’s what they’re calling them, the…eople. They’re not zombies, and no one feels right calling them zombies. Someone on TV said Awakened, and that’s what they are now. It doesn’t matter right now. Let’s go.”

  “Dad, they’re everywhere,” I said aghast. “We’ll never get past them. They’re fast…”

  “I know they’re fast, okay? And they’re incredibly smart. This isn’t like anything we ever expected. They’re aware and able to communicate, and they look exactly like the people we know, except they’re not. And they only seem to want one thing: us. So we need to go. Now.”

  I looked out the window and saw that there were even more zombies outside. There was a nondescript black SUV parked haphazardly on the sidewalk, and I immediately recognized it as a vehicle my dad sometimes used from the station. “There are just too many for the two of us, Dad.”

  “The three of us,” he corrected.

  I turned away from the window to look at him. “Excuse me?”

  “The three of us: you, me and Ash,” he said, grabbing a coat from the closet and shoving his arms in. “You’ve got five minutes to pack; we need to go.”

  “But Dad…” I protested, avoiding all eye contact with Ash, who was standing frozen in place.

  He wheeled on me, anger and worry and panic on his face. “Seriously, Zoey Elizabeth? We need to go, and we need to go now. Ash is coming with us. We’re not just going to leave him here.”

  I opened my mouth and closed it a few times.

  Dad stopped what he was doing for a moment and ran his shaking hands through his hair, taking a deep breath and letting it out slowly. “They’re bombing New York, and the surrounding areas.”

  It took a moment for this to sink in. “What do you mean?”

  “Just go upstairs and pack, now,” he said, firmly. “We don’t have much time.” He looked at Ash. “I’m sorry, but we don’t have time for you to go home and grab stuff.”