“I believe in you. We’ll make it. We have to. I owe you a dance.”
Her words push me. I run harder than I thought possible and it’s all I need. The extra burst puts us neck and neck with the open door of the bus. I have to grab hold of the railing. But that means letting go of Felecia. I don’t want to let go. I can’t protect her if I’m not holding her.
A flurry of friendly hands flash into my line of sight, hoping to bring us in. This is my chance. I finally peel my fingers from Felecia’s leg and grab onto the silver railing.
My hand immediately slips, sliding down the curve of the rail until it catches on the end. Felecia reaches over me and someone grabs her, it’s either Tyrone or Darius. Then someone touches my hand. The soft skin lets me know that everything will be alright. Caylee’s waiting for me.
With one last pull, I make the jump. The world stops the second my feet leave the ground. But it’s alright. Someone has Felecia and they’ll be able to pull her in even if I fall. My hand is slippery on the metal railing but I can make it, Caylee’s touching me. Besides, Felecia owes me a dance.
The engine roars. We pick up speed. Wind rushes all around us as we hang from the door. Dangling. The claw-like hands of death reaching for us, summoning us into the eternal blackness visible in the eyes of the undead army.
My foot lands on the first step and we fall in. There’s so many hands grabbing at us that I doubt we could fall even if we tried. My back presses against the wet glass of the open door. The bloodthirsty militia fade into the distance. The wind dries my tears. I look at Felecia sitting across from me and I don’t know how it happened, I don’t even remember it happening, but we’re holding hands. She mouths ‘thank you’ as Tyrone and Darius pat me on the shoulder. Marty’s yelling something from behind the wheel. Caylee’s just looking at me, shaking her head, smiling and crying, I don’t think she sees Felecia holding my hand.
“Alright everybody,” Marty yells. “Take your seats and hold on, this ride is about to get bumpy.”
They help us up and seem a little surprised that Felecia’s able to walk, probably assuming she had a broken leg and that’s why I was carrying her. She didn’t tell me to, she didn’t make me, she actually told me not to. But if I listened to her I would have been making the biggest mistake of my life. We made it through hell together and without one another we both would have died, numerous times.
The door snaps shut the second we’re out of the way. We all plop down in the first seats we come to, Caylee beside me, Felecia in the seat behind us. Tyrone and Darius sit across from me. Blake stays where he is, as do the other kids I don’t exactly recognize. I know I’ve seen some of them before. Is that Ms. Higgins? What the hell’s she doing here? Neil hops up a few seats and slides in next to Felecia.
“Hey, what happened to your shirt?” he asks, kindly like he’s some sort of gentleman. “Take mine.”
“I wouldn’t be caught dead in that.” There’s the Felecia I know. “And if you don’t stop staring at my tits, I’ll rip your testicles off and feed them to zombies.” Such a sweet girl.
“Here,” Caylee says, sliding off the cotton vest she’d had on over her shirt. “You can wear this.”
“That?” Felecia snorts as if it were covered in her own vomit but I shoot her a glance that softens the disgusted look on her face. “Thanks.” She takes it reluctantly and throws it on over her soaking wet bra, intentionally elbowing Neil as she does so. He’s had a thing for her since, well, ever since he took her to the eighth grade dance she was supposed to go to with me. I didn’t let him beat me in any races for quite some time after that. Asshole.
“So I see the princess can magically walk again.” We all turn at the sound of Blake’s voice from a few rows back.
Felecia lets out a loud laugh and snickers a little. “So says the guy who ran like a bitch the second he could. Remind me again what you were doing when I rescued your sorry ass. And did it involve urinating oneself?”
“And you wonder why I cheated on you, you stuck-up bitch. You’re just lucky Noah was willing to carry your fat ass.”
“Well you know what? Maybe he actually gives a shit about me. He carried me because I had their blood on my feet. You just ran. Some Dad you’ll be.”
“Destiny’s dead,” he spews coldly. That pretty much stops the argument in its tracks. We all know what that means, either they ate his future baby mama until she was unrecognizable, or she turned into one of them. Either way, she’s not having his baby.
I look at Felecia, who is by no means anything close to fat, trying to gauge her reaction. Why would he call her fat?
“Alright, look here ya bunch of pansies,” Marty yells from behind the wheel, “you can cry about the people you lost later. Right now we gotta get the hell outta here and the driveway’s blocked. Hold on tight, we’re going over the front lawn.”
As we turn off the school’s driveway and over the curb, Caylee’s hand wraps around mine. The feeling of relief that washes over me makes everything alright. I made it. I really made it. I didn’t think I’d ever get to touch her. It feels incredible.
“You guys came back?”
“Yeah,” she whispers sweetly. “We couldn’t leave you. I had some of their blood on me, but it didn’t make me turn. We had to come back. After everything you did for us. We would have come back anyway.”
Off-roading gives way to smooth pavement as we pull onto the street. I squeeze Caylee’s hand and smile at her. They drove back into hell just for the chance to get me out. The thought of it makes me tear up but before I can say anything, Marty calls out to me.
“Hey, Noah, get over here man. We need to talk. Now.”
Caylee let’s go of my hand with a smile. I switch seats and slide into my normal spot behind Marty.
“I can’t thank you enough for coming back for me.”
“Don’t mention it. It was a no brainer, you know I couldn’t leave you behind. Look,” he says quietly, “I’ve been listening to the radio and this shit doesn’t sound good.”
“What do you mean?”
“I mean it’s spreading, and spreading fast. They’ve already called for a statewide evacuation. There ain’t no help comin’. This is every man for himself and by the looks of it, there ain’t many men left.” The words take a second to sink in but when they do, I finally understand, this is the end of the world. “Hey, we just survived the zombie fuckin’ apocalypse. We’re not dying. Not you, and not me. Not now. Look, you know these things, what they’re capable of, their weaknesses. In your expert opinion, what the fuck do we do now? What’s our best bet? Because I’m fresh out of ideas.”
“Wow, okay that’s not a lot to put on my shoulders.”
“Well hey,” he laughs, “I know it’s not some smokin’ hot blonde like you’re used to but come on, we gotta figure something out here.”
“Alright, well, first we need to get away from these things, find someplace safe where we can rest and think for a minute. Regroup. And we should get supplies.”
“Hey, we got a whole bus, we can fit a lot in here. Go raid PriceCut or something?”
“It’ll be crawling with them. We’ll need weapons first.”
“Right, right. Okay, so, what works best on these sons of bitches?”
“Fire,” I say without hesitation. “They don’t last long when they’re going up in flames. Chopping their heads off works, anything to stop them from moving.”
“Okay, well, I doubt PriceCut carries what we need. Where the hell do you buy a good flamethrower these days?”
“Do they even sell flamethrowers? Are they legal? That blowtorch you gave me seemed to work. We’ve got those at Harry’s Hardware. You know what, that medieval shop downtown, the one with the knight in the window.”
“Oh yeah, swords. Those’ll chop off heads.”
“Chainmail,” I whisper.
“What?”
“If we wear chainmail, they won’t be able to bite us as easily. Not through the metal.”<
br />
He smiles over his shoulder at me. “I like the way you think. We should write a book together, ‘How To Survive The Zombie Apocalypse For Dummies’. I guarantee that bad boy would be a number one bestseller right about now.”
“How about we survive it first, then write the book. We need to stop somewhere to wash up too, we can’t have their blood on us. One cut and it could get in our bloodstream. For all we know it’ll seep through our pores and we’ll be eating each other in an hour. Fuck,” I mutter more to myself.
“What? What is it?”
“Norwood, he’s back at the school.”
“Oh you can’t be serious. How many friends do you have? We can’t go back there.”
“I know, I know. He thought he was infected too, because their blood got on him. I don’t get it, he said Seth turned because of it. Mr. Adams turned but that’s only because their blood touched his. He’s there fighting these things, waiting to become one.”
“You can’t save everyone, kid. But I’d say you came pretty close. Ya gotta move on now. There’s no going back. First things first, let’s get everyone cleaned up and into fresh clothes. We’re gonna need to eat and arm ourselves. Then we get supplies. We just gotta figure out where to go.”
“Marty, you’ve been listening to the radio, level with me here, is this something they can contain?”
His sorrowful sigh says enough. “California, Oregon, half of Washington, already infested with them things. It’s spreading too fast. It hasn’t even been an hour. It’ll hit New York before nightfall.” He looks at my reflection in the rearview mirror and shakes his head. I’m afraid he’s right, this is the end of life as we know it.
CHAPTER 18
No more words need to be exchanged. We flash each other a gravely smile before I head back to Caylee. The roads are eerily quiet. If someone were to wake up right now and look out their window, they’d know something was horribly wrong. You can feel it in the air, like the raindrops are tapping it out in Morse code. Even on the bus, everything is too silent. When we speak, we whisper, and no one says much. I’m sure they all heard my conversation with Marty. I know they did, I can hear it in their silence.
Caylee rests her hand on mine and gently pushes my phone down the second I pull it out. “Don’t bother. We’ve been trying. The towers are all jammed. Too many people calling.” She stares at me with a frightened look that begs me to somehow fix all of this. “Noah, what are we gonna do?”
All eyes turn to me like I have the answers. I wish I did, but I don’t. I’m no leader, they shouldn’t be asking me these things. Neil is a leader. Felecia is a leader. The kid with the mohawk in the back of the bus with his head pressed against the window is probably more of a leader than me. I’m just the one who got them here. In a way I’m responsible for bringing us together.
“Marty’ll find us a place to get cleaned up. Then we need weapons, supplies. Try to find someplace safe to wait it out, I guess.”
“And where do you propose we do that, Captain?” Mohawk shouts from the back of the bus. “You got some zombie-proof tree fort we can all live in?”
“I don’t know where we’ll go. So if anyone has any ideas, speak now or forever hold your peace. We’re just taking this one step at a time. Until then, be glad you’re alive.”
Silence washes over us again and I’m honestly relieved. I don’t have the answers they want. I’m just enjoying the fact that Caylee’s head is resting on my shoulder, fingers intertwined with mine. I’ve wanted this for so long and now that I actually have it I can’t stop smiling, regardless of the circumstances.
She gives my arm a tug and peels her eyes from the window to look up at me. “Where are we going?” She’s rightfully confused, this place looks more like a war ravaged third world village than the pretty chunk of suburbia we’ve always known. Cars are randomly scattered about, human remains line the streets, windows and doors are smashed, the freshly cut grass of the perfectly landscaped lawns has been stained red. No amount of rain will ever wash that away. If you didn’t know any better, you’d think this place was bombed.
“He’s taking us to the most desecrated area he can find. Hopefully they’ve already left, searching for food.”
Tyrone clears his throat and leans across the aisle. “By food, you mean us?”
“Yeah. They’ll be everywhere we go but if it’s only a small number, we should be able to kill them before they kill us.”
“Noah man, I never killed nobody before.” Tyrone’s baritone voice is deeper when he whispers. I still don’t know why we’re whispering.
“Just keep telling yourself they’re already dead. They want you to put them out of their misery. Otherwise…” I trail off, shaking my head.
He leans against the seat and closes his eyes. He’s nervous, knees bopping up and down repeatedly, hands folded like he’s praying. I don’t have the heart to tell him it’s no use. I feel like ripping the little cross from his necklace but I can’t do that to my friend. I suppose having faith in anything is better than believing in nothing. Whatever he needs to tell himself is fine with me, just so long as he doesn’t try to get me to join in on any prayer circles.
I look down and see the gold cross on Caylee’s necklace as well. It never bothered me until today. My family went to church back when we were still a family. It’s not like I blamed god for letting my parents split up and getting us stuck in the middle of it, we just stopped going. Dad still takes my little brother and sister to church every Sunday. I’ve never talked to Mom about it but I get the impression she only did it because Dad wanted to. Maybe none of this has anything to do with god or the armageddon but it sure does make it hard to believe there’s someone up there looking out for me. This is on us.
“It gives me hope.” Her whisper catches me off guard, she must have seen me staring. “My mom gave it to me on my first day of school. She said since she couldn’t be with me every step of the way, protecting me, she would give god the honor of looking out for me.” She looks down at the necklace longingly while rubbing her slender fingers over it. “It reminds me that someone always loves me.”
“It’s beautiful,” I lie. I’m actually telling her that the story is beautiful, but by the way she’s looking at that cross, I can’t bring myself to tell her that if there is a god, he doesn’t love her. And I hate him for that. “You’re worried about her?”
“Yeah. Mostly because I know she’s worried about me. My parents are, well, let’s just say overprotective is an understatement. They’ve spent their whole lives trying to shield me from all the bad stuff in the world. And then this happens. I’m just praying god will protect me when I really need it.”
I take the tiny golden crucifix in my fingers. It’s colder than I’d imagined. “If he doesn’t, I will.”
We drive by a van. Its doors are ripped off, laying on the ground nearby. Most of the windows have been broken. Shattered glass blankets the pavement. The rain has washed away most of the blood but a small stream still drips from inside. The carcasses have been scraped clean, there must have been a lot of them to devour all those bodies so quickly. The bones aren’t very large, they couldn’t belong to anyone older than ten. The driver’s side door is still attached, barely, hanging off its hinges, black letters emblazoned on it. It was a church youth group.
I look back at Caylee. “I’ll protect you.”
A tear rolls down her gorgeous cheek. It may be nothing more than water mixed with whatever chemicals make up our tears, but I know it’s something more. It’s going a lifetime believing something, only to have it ripped away in a single moment. Belief is such a fickle idea. It’s the confusion in that divide which separates reality from belief. In our own way, we each thought some greater power was watching over us. That it would protect us. Turns out, all it did was watch.
CHAPTER 19
Marty turns to face me when he stops the bus in what was once a quaint residential area before it became this, this bloodstained battlefield. A human he
ad sits awkwardly in a decorative bird bath, pale and lifeless, his horrified facial expression frozen in time to warn us of the gruesome demise we all face.
The small issues shouldn’t bother me but they do because in my heart I know what they mean. Little things, like the front door being left open. The car sitting diagonally in the driveway, its back tires on the lawn. The sheets dangling out the second story window which could be nothing more than some grounded teenager’s gateway to freedom but today of all days, I know better. Just like I know the random articles of torn and blood spattered clothing beneath the window are proof that the escapee found no freedom.
“Alright, this looks good!”
“How do you figure?” Neil apparently disagrees. “This place is a dump. It looks like a tornado tore through here. They destroyed this whole frickin’ area.”
“Hey, someone give this kid a gold sticker,” Marty yells, clapping sarcastically.
“Dude, you’re a bus driver. Who the fuck put you in charge?”
I stand up, having heard enough out of Neil. “If they were already here and moved on, there shouldn’t be many left. We’ll probably only have a few stragglers to contend with. Remember, one bite and you turn. Their blood touches yours, you’re done for. We need to be careful.”
“Okay.” Tyrone nods at me. “So, what do we need here?”
“Oh this isn’t happening,” Ms. Higgins says, mistakenly thinking she still has any authority whatsoever. “No, I don’t like this one bit. No one’s getting off this bus.”
“Yes, we are. Me and Felecia need to clean up, decontaminate. We’ll bring stuff back for everyone to wash up with, I’m sure we all have blood on us. We’ll need medical supplies, just in case. We should probably look for food, weapons, anything useful.”
“Like what?” asks the younger kid from a few rows back. Neil shoots him a dirty look that finally makes me recognize him, he’s Scott Buckley, Neil’s little brother, just not so little anymore.
Blood Type Infected (Book 1): No Future For Man Page 11
