The Survival Pact

by Christy Sloat

  “What the ever loving hell was that?” Ida yelled at me. “Earthquakes don’t happen ‘round here.”

  I pulled myself up the wall and told her, “They do now, Ida. This is our new world. Best to take everything precious down and get underneath something sturdy next time, just in case the ceiling comes down.”

  Lou’s face was drained of color as she turned to Ida.

  “Ma you can’t stay here. You have to come with us.”

  Ida sat up and shook her head. “Alma Louise Wells, you get this through your thick red head right now! I’m not coming with you two. Now, I will be fine here. I got Black Betty and I will die in my bed, like I want to. I will not be on some road trip with you two misfits. My chances are better here anyway. Now get your ass on the road this minute before those dead things make their way to our house next!”

  Did I miss something? Our house next made it sound like they were close.

  Instead of asking them I let them say their goodbyes, not envying them in anyway. I walked to the front door and looked outside. It was still dark as the sun was coming up over the mountains in the distance. It was that time of the morning that I dreaded. I wished more than anything that I was still in bed sleeping. I had always been a late starter in the morning. I loathed my alarm clock and the six a.m. wake up calls.

  The sun hit the house next door and I saw the huge bonfire that they had last night was still burning slightly. People were crashed around the fire and no one moved even after the earthquake. I scanned the hillside and saw nothing strange.

  Wait…

  Those people couldn’t be that drunk that they slept through an earthquake like that. I looked at them again and this time I saw what I missed the first time. They were bleeding from fresh wounds. Their heads were distorted and misshapen almost like they had been bashed in by something heavy. Or something had beaten them until they died. I searched the yard for the lifeless, praying they weren’t lurking around the corner waiting for me. My heart pounded as I looked out every single window searching for the dead who so wanted to hurt me like they hurt the people up the hill. I didn’t see anything out there.

  “They moved down the street about an hour ago,” Lou said, as she snuck up on me.

  “Jesus, Lou! My heart can’t take you sneaking up on me like that. Cough next time.”

  I held my heart as it threatened to explode from my chest. I hoped my heart could handle this trip to the cabin.

  “I’m ready to go. If we don’t go now, I’ll never leave,” she said, as she wiped tears from her face.

  I grabbed her up in a hug and held her for a minute. I didn’t tell her it would be okay and I didn’t tell her I was sorry.

  I didn’t know if we would be all right.

  And I didn’t understand how awful it must have been to say bye to her mom.

  “I want to say goodbye to Ida myself, if you don’t mind,” I told her. She nodded and pointed toward the garage door.

  “I’ll be through that door, waiting for you.”

  I waited for her to walk away before I went into the living room. Ida was still sitting upright holding Black Betty close. Her face was devoid of fear. She looked almost happy to see me.

  I sat down on the bed next to her.

  “I don’t know how to say goodbye to you, Ida. My parents were never really interested in my life or what I did. But you, you always emailed me about my articles. You always asked me what they never did.”

  She smiled. “And what’s that?”

  “You asked me how I was. Not how Sam was, or how the job was, but how I was. I’ll never forget how amazing you are.”

  She leaned back and patted my hand. Her skin was dry and I knew that was the cancer. It was eating everything up until she had nothing left.

  “You know Lou needs you more than she will ever admit. And before you leave, I need you to do something for me,” she said with a smile as a tear slipped from her eyes. “Lou can’t do it ‘cause I’m her mother. But you, you are strong enough.”

  I shook my head not sure I was following her. I would do anything to help Ida, but I wasn’t sure what I could do that Lou wasn’t able to.

  “Anything.”

  “Good girl. See that bag over there,” she pointed toward her handbag. “Bring it to me.”

  I grabbed it and handed it to her. She riffled through it until she pulled out four small bottles of liquid and a syringe. I didn’t ask her how she got it or where it came from, instead I looked at the label and only knew that it was a heavy pain killer, not meant to be given in large doses.

  “I need you to place this in my I.V. bag. I can’t do it see, because then I’m killing myself. And God don’t let you into Heaven if you do that. I need to get to Heaven, Kamile. I gotta see my husband again.”

  She placed the bottles and the syringes into my hand and I realized that she was asking me to kill her.

  “But… that will be murder and won’t that be just as bad, Ida? I mean I sorta want to get inside the pearly gates myself,” I said with a laugh, even though it wasn’t funny. Not one bit. This woman was asking me to put her out of her misery and I was making it about me. Then I remembered what I did in self-defense the night before. I already murdered someone.

  I knew that if I didn’t do this, Ida’s death would be horrible and painful when the cancer finally took hold of her. Or maybe she’d fall out of this bed and die in pain. Or, the worst death would get her. The dead would break inside and bash her head in; she’d die in fear. No one deserved to be terrified in the end or to die by the hands of a mangled dead man.

  “You know it’s the only way, Kamile. You have to do it. I will die slowly and you won’t even have to watch. You don’t tell my girl anything about it, hear me?”

  I nodded and took the syringe and the bottles and did as she said. My hands trembled as I worked and when I was done, I regretted it instantly.

  Ida smiled and grabbed me into a hug.

  “You are an angel, Kamile. Thank you so much for doing this. Now go on and help Lou. You watch her back and don’t let anything happen to her.”

  She kissed my cheek and let me go.

  I watched as she reclined her bed back and lay with a smile on her face. I couldn’t watch her die. I had to leave. So I went through the door and met Lou inside the Jeep.

  Stubborn tears filled my eyes as I jumped up into the seat and buckled up. My throat burned as I fought the tears back.

  She wasn’t crying and it would look suspicious if I was.

  God, did she know what I did? Could she tell from my face that I killed her mother?

  “You ready for this, Kami?” she asked me.

  I nodded and swallowed the fear and regret down.

  “Yes.”

  She pressed the button and the garage door opened behind us.

  “We don’t stop for anyone no matter what. And we keep driving.” I nodded in agreement. She pulled the Jeep out of the garage and I expected it to be swarmed by a mass of the undead, instead we met silence. The light was brighter now and I could see all around me. I liked being in the morning light better than the darkness. Darkness held danger.

  We pulled away from the house and I didn’t look back. When we came around the bend in the road that led to the main street, I saw in the distance a mass of people running out of their homes and down the street. Chaos had taken over Lou’s once quiet hillside home in a matter of hours.

  But we weren’t driving through town and we wouldn’t have to see what these poor people were running from. We were going the back way; where the roads held no homes for the lifeless to flood, and no people to try to slow us down. Granted, it was the twisty highway through the mountains that made me sick to my stomach with motion sickness, but it was better than death.

  “What the hell?” Lou asked, looking at the mountains. “Do you see what I see?”
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  I peered up toward where she pointed and strained to see it. At first I just saw mountains and trees, wondering how Lou saw anything in that mess of woods, then I saw what she did; a girl was standing on a cliff with a large orange gun in her hands.

  “What’s she doing?” I asked, watching this crazy woman. Suddenly a shot fired from her gun and it sent up a huge flare into the sky. “Is that a flare gun?”

  “Sure to shit is. And I think she’s trying to get someone’s attention.”

  I felt bad for this girl. We weren’t stopping for her. We followed the trail into the mountains getting closer to her and I dreaded having to drive past her and leave her behind. How sad it would be to leave a girl stranded here to die.

  She waved her hands toward us but we didn’t stop. We kept driving and we didn’t look behind us.

  10

  “Can you grab that peanut butter back there?” Lou asked, motioning toward the backseat. It pained me that Emma wasn’t in that seat behind us. We still hadn’t heard from her and it was killing me. We were moving toward our destination without our third person. It left a hole in my gut to think about where she was.

  I grabbed the peanut butter and handed it to Lou without question. Lou had a love affair with two types of food: Cereal and peanut butter. I never asked questions, I just let her have her obsessions.

  I myself drank coffee like it was the nectar of life, which was why I had the shakes today. I hadn’t had a cup of coffee in two days. I was itching for a sip like a crack addict itched for their fix.

  I watched as Lou scooped a dollop of peanut butter with a spoon and sucked on it as we drove through the twisty mountain. We had begun our thirty five hour journey to Washington and I was already sick to my stomach; this was gonna be a long drive.

  I picked up my cell phone to check and see if I missed any calls and found nothing. After closer inspection I noticed I had no cell service.

  “Hey, you got service?” I asked Lou, pointing to her phone. She passed it to me and I checked it; nothing.

  “Is it normal to have no service here?”

  She nodded, “We’re in the mountains now, gal. You won’t have service for miles. Once we get out of these mountains we should be okay.”

  I couldn’t help but regret going this way. “What if Emma calls? We’ll miss her.”

  Lou bit her lip and rested her elbow on the window. “I know. I left a note on the garage door for her. I’m hoping she goes there and sees it.”

  I nodded but it didn’t make me feel better. We were driving without her and she was all alone. Granted she was a female Marine and could handle herself just fine, but it would make me feel better if she was with us.

  Since meeting Emma ten years ago I had gotten to know her well. She was one of my best friends. We would often text or have video chats when she could.

  Emma had turned nineteen the night after we signed the survival pact making her a bit older than Lou or me. She had entered the Marine Corp as a young woman and had turned into a total badass. She served one tour overseas, which made Lou and I sick with worry. When she came home we partied so hard that I could still feel the hangover all these years later.

  Then she surprised us all when she became one of the first female Marines to graduate and earn the title of Infantrymen. I had to admit, I had my doubts when she told us about going to the School of Infantry, but I wasn’t sure why I doubted her. She made history and blew us all away with her skills. When she went on her second tour, I didn’t worry so much about her. I knew if anyone knew their shit in war, it would be Emma.

  I also knew she was battling with whether to reenlist or not, but I wished that she hadn’t gone off to hide in the forest. I’d much rather prefer that she would have come to New York or to Tennessee instead, but fate was a cruel bitch.

  “Are you worrying about Emma?” Lou asked, as she sucked the rest of the peanut butter off the spoon. Normally I hated mouth noises, but being that the world was in peril, I didn’t even notice.

  I nodded. “I would feel better if she was with us.”

  Lou nodded. “I get it. I told her in the note to meet us in Kentucky. There’s this little bar off the highway that we snuck to on the weekends and hung out at. They didn’t check ID’s and she and I would get drinks and crash at a hotel nearby.”

  “You’d drive all the way to Kentucky to sneak into a bar?” I couldn’t imagine driving that far just to get drunk.

  Lou laughed. “Well if you saw the cowboys in Kentucky that hung at this bar, you’d drive that far too.”

  She and I had a difference of opinion when it came to guys, but a hot cowboy wasn’t one of the things we disagreed on. Still, Kentucky was far but I didn’t argue.

  I took Lou’s spoon, refilled it, and handed it back. I would help her as much as I could from the passenger side even if that meant feeding her.

  I picked up the map and grabbed a red pen. I drew a line from where we began and marked all the routes we would take finally ending at Lake Crescent, Washington where I placed a large star.

  The drive was seemingly endless, but I stayed busy writing a journal of what I had seen so far as a way to keep track of the end of the world. I hoped and prayed it wasn’t, but seeing the dead rise from their graves last night sure as hell seemed like the end to me.

  We finally came through a tunnel and we were out of the forest and off the mountain in minutes.

  Finally! No more twists and turns to make me sick. We only had to pull over once. Victory!

  “You feeling okay, gal?” Lou asked me. She always did worry about me.

  “Much better now,” I told her. “But I’m hungry.” My stomach growled at her to prove its point.

  “There’s a turnout up here that we can stop at.”

  I saw it up ahead and couldn’t wait to tear up a sandwich. I hadn’t had breakfast and since I puked, I didn’t quite feel hungry till we got off the mountain.

  As we pulled in Lou checked the area quickly for anything weird. I looked out my window and saw nothing to be warry of.

  “Watch your back, gal. Don’t go wandering off or nothing. I’m gonna call Ida real quick, can you make me a sandwich?”

  Ida.

  “Uh… sure.”

  Ida wasn’t going to answer the phone because I assisted in her suicide, making me the worst person in the whole world. I could never tell Lou what I did. She would never forgive me and I’d lose my best friend forever. I had to make sure to never tell her the truth, even if it killed me inside.

  I tried to forget Ida and went to work making two sandwiches on a nearby picnic table. The peanut butter literally made my mouth water even though I wasn’t a huge fan. I was so hungry I could eat the whole jar.

  I spread on the strawberry jam that we got from the cafeteria and noticed something moving in my peripheral vision. I slowly turned to the right, and even though it wasn’t a person or a Lifeless, it still scared me. I had always had a fear of wasps and bees. It wasn’t something that I was proud of, it was just my ultimate fear.

  Everyone is afraid of something to the point of sweaty palms and hyperventilating; for me that thing was wasps and bees.

  I was only stung twice in my life. My first time was playing soccer and I got stung by a bee on the hand. I swelled up so bad they took me to the ER. The second time I was at a BBQ with Lou in college. I was minding my own business drinking a beer when it stung me on the calf. It felt like I had been sliced by a razor it hurt so badly. It stung my right calf and then my left calf over and over until someone finally killed it. I realized that it would just keep stinging me until it felt like stopping or until it ran out of venom.

  I did go to the ER that day and I found out I wasn’t allergic after all. I’ve stayed very clear of them since then though. They were not my friends and I hated them.

  But as this wasp flew around me I fou
nd that I was simply not strong enough to deal with it. I slowly stepped away as it flew onto my sandwich.

  I let it eat my jelly because I was just that scared.

  “Kami, what’s wrong?” Lou asked as she noticed my face. I knew I showed that look that I normally got when I saw them and she probably thought I saw something worse.

  I pointed to the wasp as he rolled around in my jelly. Little fucker.

  “Kami, you’ve really got a problem,” Lou said as she, with no effort, killed the wasp with her hand. She flicked it to the ground and made me a new sandwich. “We have bigger problems than those.” She said pointing to the now dead bug.

  I nodded, feeling instantly stupid. I was proving to be no help on this mission.

  “Sorry, Lou. I don’t know how I ended up with that fear. I’ll do better.” I sat down on the picnic table and hung my head. I knew what was really wrong with me, but I couldn’t tell Lou about it.

  When you know you killed your best friend’s mother, how do you cope in life with that big of a secret?

  She sat down with me and ate her second sandwich.

  “We all have our fears. You aren’t letting me down one bit. You were really smart at the school when it came to shutting off the cameras and pulling the SUV into the mechanics bay. I would have never thought of that.”

  I shrugged my shoulders. It would have been brilliant if I didn’t almost get raped.

  “Ida didn’t answer me,” she said, changing the subject and killing me a little more inside. “Hopefully she’s just napping. Anyways, eat up. We have about an hour drive to the bar.”