by Boye, Kody
“You think Jamie will really be there?” Steve frowned. “I mean, I get the reason behind going, but it’s kind of a longshot to assume that’s where they’ll go.”
“He’ll be there. Jamie and I always told each other that if shit went down, we’d meet up back home. That’s Idaho.”
“I trust you.”
The venom in his chest still hadn’t died down. Nearly three days after being abruptly separated from the rest of their group, Steve still couldn’t quell the feeling of helplessness in his chest. He wanted so desperately for them to be together, for them to be safe and away from all the wrong in the world. Most importantly, though, he wanted to know that Dakota was safe.
“It’ll be good,” Erik said.
Steve sighed. “I miss him.”
“Who?”
“The kid.”
“I miss him too,” Ian said.
“He’ll be fine,” Erik said, slapping Steve’s shoulder. “Jamie’ll make sure he stays safe.”
“I don’t doubt that. He is the kid’s boyfriend, after all.”
“So,” Ian said. “Who all made it?”
“Other than us, Dakota and Jamie?” Erik asked. “I don’t know. Probably no one.”
“I heard Desmond yelling from the second floor,” Steve said. “That’s where Jamie took off with Dakota, so I’m sure he’s safe.”
“So that just leaves Dustin, Michael and Alexis,” Ian said. “Anyone know what happened to them?”
Both Steve and Erik shook their heads. “Wish I did,” Steve said.
“I’m sure they’re better off than we are,” Erik said. “If not, we can’t worry about it. I hate to say it, but I hardly knew any of them anyway.”
“No harm in the way you feel.”
“I feel the same way,” Ian confessed.
Steve sighed. He tilted his head back to look at the ceiling. At that moment, all he wanted to do was sleep.
We’ve been going for three days, he thought. You can’t expect yourself to be any better off than you are now.
“Our first priority after we leave is to get a vehicle,” Erik said, drawing both Steve and Ian’s attention toward him. “I say after we get some rest, we go down to the office and see if we can score a set of keys off a secretary’s desk.”
“You really think there’d be some there?” Ian said.
“There were cars in the parking lot, right?”
“That doesn’t mean someone left their keys.”
“With all the commotion that had to have been going on, I’d be surprised if there weren’t any.”
“This school wasn’t on the safe list,” Steve said, his words more a statement than anything. “I heard it on the radio.”
“That’s good to know. At least there won’t be a bunch of zombies.”
“Kid zombies,” Ian shivered. “Ugh.”
“Not a good thing to think about,” Erik agreed. His eyes sought out a single wardrobe in the corner of the room. “Let’s just lay down and get some sleep. We’ll think more about what we’re going to do in the morning.”
Night seemed to pass quickly. A moment, a second, a brief inhale and a strong exhale—you could live your whole life and no one would even begin to notice, let alone care what had just happened after you stopped breathing at twelve AM. Time is measured in math, not moments, and those few moments worth measuring are often reduced to numbers and lost in the back bins of some old closet.
Were someone to measure the moment three men woke in a high school teacher’s longue and prepared to make the flight of their life, they would have calculated their number, their age, and the statistics for how likely they were to survive the next three weeks. When they finished crunching the numbers, they would find that their chances of survival were little to none. Regardless, numbers had never stopped miracles, nor had there ever been a shortage of miracles in this world. Miracles didn’t need statistics. They just happened.
“This is what we’re going to do,” Erik said, pressing a finger to a fire escape diagram on the wall. “One of us is going to go up this long, center hallway and make a left once we find the janitor’s closet, then make our way down this corridor until we hit the front office. If we can’t find anything there, we’re going to start hitting classrooms one by one until we find something.”
“And if we don’t?” Ian frowned.
“Like he said,” Steve smiled, “there was too much commotion for anyone to be in their right mind. Someone had to have left their keys here.”
“I’m just sayin’, don’t get your hopes up. We might not find anything at all.”
“No point in having a pessimistic attitude,” Erik said, cocking his revolver and passing it over to Steve. “Who wants to go?”
“I will,” Steve offered. He took a moment to acquaint himself with the weapon before him—a classy, bronze-colored and red-handled gentleman’s revolver—before looking back up at the two of them. “What’re you guys going to do?”
“Ian and I are going this way.” Erik traced a loop near the bottom of the map. “There’s a cafeteria here. We should be able to find some supplies.”
“How do you plan on getting it out to the parking lot?”
“Other than carrying it? They should have a pulley, I suppose.”
“We’ll figure it out,” Ian said.
Steve shrugged. “I guess we’ll go then.”
He leaned forward, opened the door, and slipped out without another word.
Pale light seeped through frosted glass windows, casting the hallway in faint shades of grey and yellow. As Steve made his way down the hall, his heart in a less-than-stellar place and his mind in a heightened state of alert, he sighed when he found a classroom and couldn’t look in. It seemed ironic to think that such frosted glass was once used to keep someone from looking in at the people inside. Now with nothing to look in at, he wondered why anyone would ever feel uncomfortable knowing that someone was always watching out for them, especially at a school.
That’s the way the world used to work, he thought, letting his gun hang at his side. But not anymore.
Shaking his head, he readjusted his grip on the revolver and continued down the hallway, already well aware that his journey was much shorter than he had initially anticipated, though whether it was from the warped sense of distance on the teacher lounge map or the brief span of the hallways, he couldn’t tell.
“Doesn’t matter,” he said to himself. “Makes it easier for me to make it back if something goes wrong.”
A shadow flickered in the corner of the room.
He paused, raising his gun.
The light flickered once more and revealed a child’s poster dangling off the wall.
Thank God, he thought, sighing, reaching up to wipe the single bead of sweat off his forehead. Just a poster. A goddamn poster.
His relief was short-lived, however, when a thought struck him.
How could there be a draft if there was nothing for the air to come in through?
It’s a vent, Steve—get a hold of yourself. You know it’s a fucking vent.
He didn’t bother to dwell on his thought. He simply turned left and made his way down the hall.
She jumped him just as he pulled a key from the very back drawer in a secretary’s desk. Nails jagged and screams harsh, she grabbed his arm and spun him around, giving Steve just enough time to kick her away from him before he collapsed back onto the table.
“FUCK!” he cried, raising his gun.
A single swipe from her bony hand sent the revolver flying into the office windows.
The gun went off.
“Got it,” Ian said, loading the box up onto the pulley.
“Thank God,” Erik sighed, shaking his head.
“At least now we won’t go hungry.”
“Right about that.”
A gunshot went off.
Both men froze in place.
“You think Steve ran into trouble?” Ian asked quickly.
They b
oth started running.
“Fucking BITCH!” Steve screamed, kicking her in the face as she came in for another attack. She flew back into another desk and went soaring over it, the momentum of such strike and impact sending her first onto the table, then back over it. This pause in activity gave Steve just enough time to throw himself from the desk and onto the floor.
Where the fuck is my gun?
The bronze metal glinted in the pale light.
He lunged.
A hand wrapped around his leg and began dragging him backward.
Kicking out with his opposite leg, Steve struck the corpse in the ankle, then brought his other foot into her crotch. She screamed—not in pain, but frustration—and tried to jump, but he braced his ankle against her leg and slammed his foot into her knee.
Bones cracked under pressure.
Both opponents screamed.
Her leg bowed back and sent her tumbling to the ground.
Steve rolled into the threshold, grabbed his gun, and fired three shots into her head.
“STEVE!” someone called. “STEVE!”
“I’m ok,” Steve gasped, heart thundering in his chest. “I’m ok, I’m ok.”
“What happened?” Erik asked, falling to his knees.
“She jumped me,” he said.
“You’re bleeding.”
Steve looked down. Fresh blood slicked through his fingers and onto the floor. He uncurled his fingers to find the key still in his grasp, the jagged tip embedded into his palm. “Fuck,” he laughed. “I still fucking have it.”
Ian hoisted Steve to his feet. “Can you get it out?”
Steve pulled the metal object out with a simple tug. He grimaced as a fresh bolt of pain bloomed in his hand.
Erik clapped Steve’s back. “We’ve got some stuff. Let’s go get it and get the fuck out here.”
Minutes later, they were loading the contents of the pulley into the back of an SUV when Ian gave a cautious glance back at the school.
“What?” Erik asked.
“I thought I heard something,” the big man said, muscles tensing in his upper arms.
“Was that the only one in there, Steve?”
“I don’t know,” Steve said, grimacing. His hand was still bleeding, despite the makeshift bandage Erik had made out of a piece of his torn shirt. “If there were more, I didn’t see them.”
“I don’t like this,” Ian said, heaving the last box into the back of the vehicle. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”
“Agreed,” Erik said.
Steve gave the pulley one mighty shove and watched it roll off into the deeper part of the parking lot, then as it curved along the incline in the hill and stopped, only for it to begin to slowly turn.
Its front wheels shifted. The pulley reoriented itself, then began to slide down the hill, toward where a group of brand new cars sat parked in front of the school.
“Oh fuck,” Steve said.
“What?” Erik asked.
The pulley slammed into the back of a car.
The alarm went off.
A zombie long-rotten from the effects of the sun peeked over the back seat and screamed.
“FUCK!” Ian screamed. “FUCK!”
A chorus of screams went up into the air.
“Shit shit shit!” Erik said, running around the side of the car. “GET IN! GET IN!”
Steve threw himself into the backseat. Ian slammed the passenger door shut.
A group of infected came around the corner and threw themselves at the screaming vehicle.
“Shit,” Steve said, breathless at the sight before them.
“They didn’t see us,” Ian laughed. “The fuckers didn’t see us.”
“They’re gonna see us in a minute,” Erik said, sliding the bloodied key into the ignition. “We have to get out of here before more of them come.”
A second car alarm went off, followed by a third. Steve caught sight of the infected bouncing into the cars in their struggle to attack the first one, only further adding to the chain of events that drew dozens upon dozens of infected. A zombie would try to attack one car, get pushed back by the horde, then fall back into another, triggering its alarm before one of its brethren would repeat the same process.
In the front seat, Erik twisted the key in the ignition and the truck fired up.
Almost all of the infected in the lot raised their heads to look at them.
“Shit,” Erik breathed.
The mob roared as one.
Erik changed gears and slammed on the gas.
The first wave of infected bounced off the vehicle. The second lurched around the rear and started clawing at the bumper and back windows, while the third threw themselves behind the second and lurched the vehicle forward. Erik barely had time to switch gears and slammed into drive before two more waves tried to hurl themselves at the vehicle.
The SUV sped forward.
Both opposing waves of undead slammed together, knocking each other to and fro.
The vehicle slid forward, skidded, and slammed into another car, triggering its alarm before Erik tore out of the parking lot and onto the road.
“Shit!” Ian cried. “Those stupid motherfuckers!”
“No kidding,” Erik breathed, face pale as a sheet.
“You ok?” Steve asked.
“Y-yeah. I’m good.”
They sped past town and toward the interstate.
A sign reading I-90 winked back at them.
CHAPTER 8
Dakota, Jamie and Desmond rolled their vehicle into a parking space outside a massive log cabin and exited the vehicle with a sigh of relief. Behind them, the Native American who’d introduced himself as Eagle slowly made his way up the road, occasionally pausing to look behind him and back down at the wooden gate that marked the property line.
“We got lucky,” Jamie said.
“Very lucky,” Desmond agreed.
Dakota swallowed a lump in his throat. He couldn’t remember ever being in a place so dark.
Don’t let this get to you. You’ve gone through too much hell to be scared of the dark.
A hand fell on his shoulder. He jumped in response.
Dakota laughed to hide his nerves. “I’m fine,” he said, anticipating the question before it would be asked.
“You sure?”
“I’m sure.”
Eagle stepped forward. Dakota wouldn’t have even known he was there were it not for the pale beam of light piercing the darkness at waist-level. “Just makin’ sure nothing followed you here.”
“Have you had problems before?” Jamie asked.
“No. We’re too far out from the city to have anything just stumble upon us. I do worry about them following people though.”
“They wouldn’t have followed us here. I mean, I don’t see how they could have—we were making too many turns for anyone paying attention to keep track.”
“It’s easy to lose yourself out in these woods,” the Native agreed. “I’m surprised you made it here.”
“It was an accident,” Desmond said. “We saw your light.”
“As did I, but I thought my eyes were deceiving me.” Eagle reached up to finger a spread of grey stubble on his chin. “It’s bad luck to conjure such things upon yourself.”
“Sorry?” Jamie asked.
Eagle shook his head. He gestured them to follow him up the slight path that led to the front porch. “Don’t worry yourself over it. Come, let’s get out of this weather. It’s too cold and miserable for us to remain here any longer.”
Taking place alongside Jamie, Dakota mounted the steps and followed Eagle to the front door. He turned the knob, pushed it open, then leaned into the cabin to speak with someone in a hushed tone before stepping inside and beckoning them in.
“Gentlemen,” Eagle said. “This is Mr. Kevin Partridge. He’s the one who owns this farm.”
“Welcome,” Kevin Partridge said, offering his hand.
“Jamie,” Jamie smiled, accepting the bon
y man’s grip. “This is Dakota and Desmond.”
“Where did you come from?”
“South Dakota. We’re trying to make our way to Idaho. The interstate’s blocked off.”
“As we noticed,” Kevin said. He looked over his shoulder at three boys sitting in the living room, who each watched the newcomers with wary eyes. “These are my boys. The oldest there is Jessiah. You’ve probably already seen him though. He went out to check on Eagle when he didn’t return.” Jessiah nodded in response. “This one,” Kevin said, pointing to a red-haired boy, “is Arnold. Mark’s my youngest.”
“Hi,” the boy said. He couldn’t have been any older than thirteen, if not eleven or twelve.
“Hi,” Dakota replied. The boy turned his eyes down almost immediately. The oldest of the children—Jessiah, who looked to be around his own age—sought his eyes out and considered him for a moment, but turned his eyes toward the fire when Dakota’s gaze lingered for too long. “Sir,” he said, looking up at Kevin. “We don’t mean to intrude on your family.”
“You’re not intruding at all,” Kevin replied. “Eagle said you were lost.”
“Our map was wrong,” Jamie said. “We couldn’t find any of the roads that were marked on it.”
“You wouldn’t know the map was wrong unless you lived here,” Kevin said. He brushed up along Jamie to lock, bolt and chain the door, then to draw the curtains over the windows. “I’d hate to send you on your way in the dark.”
“We don’t have to bother you. We’re trying to catch up with friends.”
“It’s nice to know that people still care about each other in this day and age,” Kevin smiled. “Did you get separated?”
“Yes, back in South Dakota. We told each other that if anything ever happened, we’d meet up back home.”
“There’s no place like home,” Kevin smiled.
A tremble of unease snaked up Dakota’s spine.
We’re not in Kansas anymore, Toto.
The oldest boy coughed. He reached for what appeared to be a pack of cigarettes sitting on an end table, but Eagle slapped his hand away and set a cup of tea before him. “Here.”
“I don’t want it.”
