I wake to the sound of pounding on the doors. Kevin opens them. He tells me he will take the wheelchair to Zane. I nod and drift to sleep.
My husband wakes me up a few minutes later. I ask him where we are. He tells me we’re parked on the road. “Why?” I ask. He stares at something in the distance.
“I didn’t know it got me.” He shows me a bite on his forearm.
“No. No. I can’t live without you. Gavin needs you, Rain needs you, I need you,” I say.
He hugs me. “I noticed it after I left the store. My arm started hurting and I saw it. the Paramedic must have bit me. It’s going to be okay. I’ll do it here; he doesn’t need to see this. Tell him I love him.” He gives me the key to the ambulance.
He goes around the ambulance. I sit on the edge of the ambulance. I don’t stop him. I can’t move. I’m frozen. My tears fall on my shoes. I can’t even think. I hear him shoot himself. I scream from the pain of losing them. I fall on the pavement. I stare at the stars. He’s up there. I’m down here. This is what’s left.
My scream attracts some Munchers. “Come on! You took my family away from me what more do you want?” I scream at them.
I close the backdoors. I get in the truck. How can I drive to them now? Should I wait for them to come home then tell them? I stare at the Munchers outside of the window. They bang on the ambulance doors.
I should go to him. I can’t abandon them. I have to go to them. I put the key in the ignition. I step on the gas. I think of the times we had together as a family. I think of when my sister lost her husband and when she told me she hoped I would never feel that.
I’m sorry she was wrong.
I drove to Pahrump. It was hard to see through the tears but I made it. I see a house with a sign on the gate. It says:
May we’re here.
I park in the driveway. I knock on the door. Xavier opens it.
“What’s wrong?” he asks.
“Don’t tell them, not now, my husband was bit,” I say.
He is unusually calm. “We have a cure at the community. I think we have enough but Carrie got bit, Dave drove her back.”
“There is a cure? He shot himself.”
The world becomes blurry. I fall to my knees; my legs can’t support me. He would have made it. Xavier gets me on my feet. He sits me at the table. He sits too.
He waits a few minutes then asks a question. “When will you tell them?”
I look at Rain who is asleep on the couch, then my son who is sleeping on the floor. “I don’t know. They lost so much. I lost so much. How am I supposed to take care of them when everyone else is gone? They don’t have anyone but me now.”
I can’t raise them alone. I can’t. How are they going to take this?
Xavier glances at Rain and Gavin. He meets my eyes with confidence, “You can raise them alone. You can do it. Your son is about eighteen, almost. He can handle himself. Rain too. My mom raised me alone. I’m fine. You can raise them.”
I start crying again. “No, it’s different now. How are you supposed to teach a person how to be living like this? What kind of future am I supposed to prepare them for?”
He just stares off into the distance without talking for a long time. I don’t think he will answer until he does.
“I can’t tell you because I have no idea what the future holds for us anymore.”
CHAPTER NINETEEN-RAIN
In the morning May is sitting at the table. Gavin is gathering food and water for us. May doesn’t look so well. I go to the table and sit down. “Is something wrong?” I ask.
“Don’t worry about it,” she says.
I don’t ask any more questions. Gavin tells me we will split up. When we find the girls, we meet at the house. We are only to search six places each. Nya with Jimmy and Drew, Gavin, Sarah and I, May with Xavier. I say goodbye to Xavier. He isn’t acting like he usually does. He barely said goodbye to me.
Nya’s group will walk while May takes her car and Gavin takes Earl’s car. I have no clue where they could be.
Would Alyssa pick an obvious place? Would she walk the way to Vegas to find her siblings?
There is an ambulance parked in the driveway. May must have brought it back. Why isn’t Kevin here? Nothing happened to him. She would have told me.
It’s going to be a wild chase before we get them, if we do. Pamela’s clock is ticking if it didn’t stop already. That makes me more anxious.
We start near where the house is. Gavin parks the car there. We don’t see any footprints in the dirt. There aren’t zombies or anything. There is a blood trail leading to the gas station then it stops. It could mean two things: one, Pamela survived the stab wound or two, she died.
If she did die they would’ve left her here, she would be too heavy to carry. She made it. She had to have.
There isn’t any more clues to where she is. No footprints, blood, killed zombies, nothing. I feel the frustration my group must have felt when they were searching for me.
I try to put my perspective into hers. Where would she go? Pamela was patched up but maybe they went to get medicine.
I voice my theory to Sarah who is helping me follow clues. She tells me that they wouldn’t go to the hospital here because it’s too far from the house. They would probably go to a Pharmacy.
The question is which one? There are three Pharmacies here that I know of. We better find them in one. If we don’t we have to go home.
I tell my cousin where I think they are. He drives to the first one.
While we are driving there I can’t stop thinking about how May and Xavier were acting. Her eyes were pink now that I think of it. What is she not telling me? Xavier had this look of pity on his face.
Maybe my uncle died in New Jersey and she told Xavier.
We park. I run inside without thought. I yell the girls’ names. A few zombies respond. Sarah shoots them. The shots attract more. The time investment in knives and machetes would be worth it.
I grab a cart and push it into them. They topple inside it and fall. They are dazed by it. We run to the car. Gavin steps on the gas.
He parks at the next place. This time I have common sense. I open the door while Sarah holds her gun like I’ve seen on cop shows. The high windows let sunlight shine in to light up the store. This place is filled with zombies. There are a few dead, again, zombies on the floor by the doors. We duck behind the counter to the left of the metal detectors.
At first glance I don’t notice any people, especially not my friends. I tap Sarah’s shoulder. I whisper to her that there are too many and that my friends aren’t here. She nods. I get to the metal detectors with Sarah following.
“Rain!” someone shouts.
The voice is met by all the zombies inside growling and moaning in unison to the sound. I turn, the girls are on top of the Pharmacy counter in the back. How lucky are we? How lucky are they? Their luck doesn’t last long. Zombies walk to them.
Alyssa has a shotgun in her hands. She shoots a few closest to them. Sarah stops what she’s doing.
“Follow my lead.” She says. “Hey! Are you hungry? Get me!” She waves her arms. She jumps on the counter. I follow her. That got half the crowd’s attention. We tip toe on the counters around the registers to the end. There is a cart filled with candy that has a sale sign on it. Sarah steps in it while I hold the cart still. She climbs the shelf from there.
I get in the cart and it slides away from me making me land in it on my knees. I grab Sarah’s extended hand and step on the shelf. From there is more shelves to hop across. Sarah leans with her right foot in front of her to get on the next shelf. She brings her foot down on the shelf. She balances.
“Screw it, we’re running. They’ll catch us just as fast if we do this. They can’t close in on us,” she says.
She’s thinking like a leader. Sarah’s grown up, so have I. She still has that sweet quality in her. She has a strong shell around her protecting what’s inside. I wonder if I could ever be the same Rain again. After not bei
ng yourself for so long you forget how you were. I like the bravery but not the harshness. Can you just change?
Sarah jumps down. I jump. We run and slide over the counter of the Pharmacy. Alyssa hugs me.
“I’m happy to see you,” she says.
“Me too. Where is Pam?” I ask.
I pull away from her. She points to Amber sitting with Pamela on her lap. Pamela is still pale and sweaty. She is responsive though. “How are you?” I ask.
She nods “I’m fine. It really hurts but I got medicine.”
“I’m sorry that I didn’t come back. There were so many people trying to kill me,” I say.
Alyssa grabs a duffel bag on the floor. It’s filled with guns. “There are more of them?”
“There was. They’re dead now.”
She folds her arms. “Blake, too?”
“No. He ran away.”
Her eyes are wide with shock and anger. “We have to kill him. He’s going to come for us.”
“Let’s wait until he does. We’ll think of a plan,” I say.
Sarah screams. I turn and see a zombie pulling her hair. She is hitting it with her gun blindly to get it off. Alyssa shoots the zombie. Its head blows to pieces. We head to the back door. Amber helps Pam to her feet. I shut the Pharmacy blind that was once used to stop people from breaking in after hours.
I tell them to run for the truck. Alyssa throws the bag in first then herself. I jump in. Amber puts the girl on her back then gets in the truck. I bang on the window. “Move it!” I shout. Gavin drives.
Our group is the first to get back from the run. We sit at the table discussing our next move. Hoping that the whole group returns, we discuss what to do with Blake. Do we leave him alone? Do we surprise him, return the favor? It’s not a discussion about being humane, it’s a discussion of what would be the best for everyone. We have three kids now to worry about.
My cousin wants to be civil, make peace. Not let anyone die. I’m all for that. It’s just that this guy won’t have it. He has no more people left to send to us. He will finish what he started. I wish things were different but we have no choice. My cousin has been a reasonable, honest person all his life. He would never change that. He has a problem with killing, I can tell that. We’re not comfortable with it either. There are just no options though.
“I don’t like this.” Sarah says. “We could go home, forget about this.”
“We can’t go home. I don’t like this, there aren’t choices. I don’t want to see anything happen to those kids,” I say.
Amber has been silent since we got here. She is sitting slumped in her chair. The sunlight shining through the window illuminates her face. She raises her hand. It reminds me of when I used to do that in school. It is a distant memory.
“Yeah?” Gavin says.
She sits straight. “I was held there for years, passed from father to son as if I was a family heirloom, kept to do their work for them. He needs to die. He isn’t going to leave you alone. Fred would harass my family all the time,” she says.
The group is surprised by what she said. It’s hard to understand how someone could be missing that long and never be found. It happens though. She was afraid of Blake. She was brainwashed into staying there.
I have sympathy for her parents or siblings if she had any. They spent years waiting for her to come home. Do they still wait? Are they waiting now?
I think of what my parents would do in my shoes. They would protect me. They would make sure I was safe.
“This decision should be made with everyone,” Gavin says.
I blurt out. “Where the hell is Dave?”
There are grumbles and shrugs from the people at the table. Gavin speaks up. “Maybe the worst happened with Carrie, she…” he trails off.
May and Xavier walk through the door.
May closes the door. “We didn’t find them…” she trails off when she sees the girls. “Good, you did.”
She still looks sad. I need to know what is wrong. “Why are you so sad?” I ask.
She stares at the floor. Xavier looks at Gavin. I connect the dots. “Uncle Kevin’s dead?” I ask. May is crying. She hugs her arms. Gavin hugs her and starts crying. He asks her if it’s true. She nods. I sit in the chair.
“How did it happen?” Gavin asks through tears.
She cries into his shirt. “Blake’s people shot the leader of my group in the leg, his other ankle was sprained and we had to go get a wheelchair. The hospital was crawling with them. He was bit. He shot himself,” she says.
I can’t cry. I’ve cried so much that I can’t. I go in the kitchen. I grab a plate from the cabinet. I break it against the counter. It shatters into a million pieces. I grab a cup and throw is against the wall. Pamela has buried her head in Alyssa’s arms. She’s scared of me. Xavier hugs me from behind. We both fall on the floor.
“We are going to fix this. He will pay for what he’s done. We’ve made our decision,” he says in my ear.
I’m in the passenger’s seat of the Magician’s truck. May is driving. The three girls are in the truck. We decided to drive to the first house where I was held.
I guess they came because they all wanted to see him die.
Nya is with some of the others that decided to come. Gavin isn’t among them. It wasn’t a surprise to me.
We think that Blake could have went back to the house. He could have gone to either one. The one where the teens were or the one where the adults were.
One of the houses could hold clues to where he is.
I get out on my own for the first house. The smell of death and the buzzing of flies makes it hard to focus. I go into a room that I think is Blake’s. I open the door slowly. It’s completely empty aside from a king bed in the middle of the room, a dresser on the left side of the wall and a trunk in front of the footboard of the bed.
I open the trunk. There are just clothes in there. I pull them out piling them on the floor. I get to the bottom and I find an address to a house here in town. It’s got to be where the other group was holding the girls.
I probably overheard Blake talking to the other group of men that day he was speaking into his walkie talkie at the table.
I get to the car and I show May the address. She drives there.
The whole time she is driving there she doesn’t say a word. She is completely frozen.
If it wasn’t for Blake, my uncle would still be alive. It’s all his fault.
Everyone decides to go in except for Amber, who is watching Pam.
The others in the car decide to stay outside.
All the girls walk in the house. It looks very much like the house we were in. The same living room set up the same. The same corridor with rooms we find on the right.
“The girls could still be here,” Alyssa says.
After she finishes that sentence there is a bang down the left side hallway. I walk slowly down the hallway holding a gun that I took with me. I kick open the first door to an empty room. I kick open the second to find Blake taking weapons from the closet to pack up a gun bag. He has his back to me. I aim at his head.
I consider taking a shot. Maybe I don’t need to ask questions and I can just kill him.
“Rain, did you find anything?” Alyssa asks.
Blake spins around with a shotgun in his hand. “Well, well, you found me. You have that gun. How long were you standing here trying to work up the courage to shoot me? You won’t pull the trigger.”
I shoot him in his shoulder. He screams and drops the gun. I step inside the room. I kick the gun backwards into the hall.
“You were wrong to think I wouldn’t shoot you. I do have questions first.” I hit him in the head with my gun. I knock him out cold.
Amber walks in the room. We both watch a drop of blood roll down his temple where I hit him. She crosses her arms. She kicks him in the stomach once, twice, three times. I pull her back.
“Kill him,” she says.
“I need to ask questions first.”<
br />
There is another bang down the hallway. “This time you come with me.”
Amber nods. She grabs Blake’s gun. “With this.”
The sound is coming from a door at the very end of the hallway. I try to turn the handle but I can’t because it’s locked. I kick the door hard once. I kick it again with more force. It opens so fast that it hits the wall.
Kay and Dave are tied back to back in chairs. She has a cut on her shoulder. They both have duct tape over their mouths. I start untying Kay first. I rip the duct tape off her mouth first. She tells me to hurry up. I get her untied. She unties Dave.
Amber drops her gun.
“Why are you here? Where is Carrie?” I ask.
Kay help Dave up.
“Carrie is cured. She’s going to be fine. We were headed back and that psychopath grabbed us.”
Dave locks eyes with Amber. “Marina?”
Her eyes light up. “Dave.”
They hug. They both start crying. Dave says over and over that he missed her. That he never stopped looking for her. They part finally. They see the confused expressions on kay’s face and mine.
“This is my sister. Fred too her. It’s a long story,” Dave says.
I don’t need an explanation now. “Blake is unconscious in a room. We need to tie him up and when he comes to ask him questions.”
Dave picks the gun Marina dropped up. “Tie him up? He needs to die.”
“He will. I need to ask questions first.”
Dave nods. “Okay.”
We tied Blake to a chair with rope in the room where he held Dave and Kay. They have girls here. I want to let them out when I’m finished. They deserve freedom even though the world is the way it is.
Dave is standing next to me. “How did you get captured?” I ask.
“I got Carrie to the community, she’s alive and well. We were on our way to you guys. He ruined another damn car of mine. Picked us out of the wreckage,” he says.
Everyone but May is in the house. She decided to stay in the car.
Blake wakes up. Dave has his gun in his hand. “Answer the questions we ask,” he says.
We Are The Survivors Page 24
