by Mark Lukens
“You look exhausted,” Ted said. “Why don’t you get some shut-eye? I’ll keep watch for a little while.”
The streets six stories below were pretty quiet now, the horde of rippers having moved on a while ago. And there were no other sounds: no cops on megaphones trying to keep order, no gunshots, no vehicles driving around, no aircraft in the sky. For just a moment it felt like she and Ted were the last two people on Earth.
“I might just do that,” Kate said.
She crawled into Ted’s lean-to a moment later, thanking him again for the use of his shelter. It smelled a little musty inside, but either the air freshener had helped a lot or she was just getting used to it. She worried that Ted might try to climb into the blankets with her later on, but she didn’t think that was going to happen. He seemed like a decent and kind older man. Of course dire circumstances could change anyone, and she would keep her guard up.
A few minutes later Kate was nearly drifting off to sleep. She found it strangely comforting having Ted out there watching over her as she slept. It had been a long time since she’d slept in the same place with someone else. John was the last one, John who told her she was too cold for him, John who told her she had no sense of humor, John who said she wasn’t any fun.
Well, maybe she wasn’t fun. So what? She’d been fine with John leaving. She’d felt better on her own. And she had liked being alone. But not now. Now she had to admit that she liked having Ted outside the wooden shed he’d built, patrolling the top of the roof with his rifle slung over his shoulder.
Moments later Kate fell asleep and she began to dream.
CHAPTER 15
The dream began where it usually did these last few nights, in Kate’s house. The house was pitch-black and she was trapped in that darkness. She knew the shadowy man, the Evil One with his shining eyes, was somewhere in the darkness with her.
But this time the darkness faded away and she was in some kind of a small town, a barren town, an abandoned town. The sky was a ceiling of thunderstorm clouds rolling by, the wind whistling down through the streets, trash and papers blowing around.
And there were dead bodies everywhere.
Some of the dead hung from streetlight poles. Others had been staked to the sides of wood buildings. Others were tied spread-eagle on their backs on top of the roofs of abandoned cars. Some of the dead were naked; others were partially clothed in soiled rags. Some of the dead might have been rippers, but Kate didn’t think so; for some reason, a reason that made sense in the dream, she thought some of these people were the uninfected, like her and Ted.
And the Evil One was here. He was watching her from some dark corner as she walked down the main street of the town, the cold wind toying with her hair, her breath forming a mist in front of her face. She knew he was watching her and she knew he wanted to torture her, hang her body up from one of the light poles, degrade her, let her die while she twisted in the freezing wind.
A light flickered at the edge of her vision. She turned to it. The blond woman was back again, dressed in a white gown with the warm glow around her that drove back the grayness of the town, driving back the shadows where dark and terrible things lived.
“Come find us,” the woman said. She was rushing her words like she didn’t have a lot of time.
“Who are you?” Kate asked.
The woman wore the same dark glasses as before, but even with her dark glasses, Kate could tell the woman was afraid. She could also tell the woman wasn’t going to be there long before fading away.
“You have to go west,” the woman said. “Go west and you will find us.”
“How do I find you? I don’t even know who you are. Or where you are.”
A howl echoed through the town, a scream of rage. The Evil One was coming. He was rushing toward them from the gloom somewhere.
Kate looked back at the blind woman, but she wasn’t there anymore.
“No,” Kate yelled. “Come back! Don’t leave me alone with him!”
The Evil One was rushing toward her, running at her—a living shadow with shining yellow eyes.
Kate’s eyes popped open and she sat up on the blankets. It was so dark. She couldn’t see anything.
A light appeared a few feet in front of her, a hand covering the end of the flashlight, the fingers turning into a bloody glow from the light. “You okay?”
Ted was in the doorway of his handmade shed, watching her.
She sighed, relieved to see Ted there. She swallowed hard. Her throat was so dry, she wasn’t sure she could answer him. “Yeah,” she croaked.
“Sorry to wake you up,” Ted said. “But you were talking in your sleep. Moaning. Getting louder and louder. I was afraid you were going to start screaming.”
She nodded. She understood. “Just a bad dream.”
The flashlight flicked off and Ted moved out of the doorway. As soon as he was gone Kate noticed that she could see the night beyond the doorway of the shed; it was a lighter shade of black with the faint pinpoints of stars through the haze.
Kate crawled out of the shed. It was cold. She still had her coat on. She stood up and looked around, spotting Ted sitting a few feet away, his back against one of the air-conditioning units. She smelled the cigarette smoke before she even saw the burning ember light up when he inhaled.
“Smoke?” he asked.
“No, thanks.” She’d never smoked in her life, never even considered it. “Where did you find those?”
“Cigarettes aren’t too hard to find. Rippers leave them alone.”
“Was I sleeping long?”
“About ten hours.”
“Wow. That long?” That would make it around two or three o’clock in the morning. “What about you? Did you sleep?”
“A little.”
They sat there for a long time in silence while Ted smoked his cigarette.
“How long do you plan on staying up here?” Kate asked him.
Ted didn’t answer right away. He stubbed out his cigarette, seeming to consider her question, really thinking about it. “I don’t know,” he finally said.
“I need to leave,” Kate said. There, it was out. If Ted had some warped ideas about keeping her here on this roof, then she wanted to know about it right now. “I need to go west. I need to try to find my family.”
And find the others, she thought, the words sounding like the blind woman’s voice. But she dismissed that voice in her mind. The blind woman wasn’t real. The other people she’d seen: the man and his son; the long-haired, tattooed guy; the muscular guy with the crew cut—none of them were real; they were just figments of her imagination created by her stressed-out mind.
She looked at Ted, making out his shape in the darkness. “You understand, don’t you? I need to leave.”
Again, Ted was quiet. He was scaring her a little with his silence. And then he spoke: “I want to say something to you, but I don’t want to upset you.”
Oh God, here it comes. From the sound of his voice, she could tell he was staring straight ahead and not looking at her. He had his rifle right beside him, and he probably had his handgun on his hip.
Even though he was an older man, Kate knew she couldn’t outfight him. But maybe she could outrun him. If she got enough of a head start, she knew she could outlast him. But then she remembered that he had locked the door to the stairs with a chain and a padlock, and he would have the key on him somewhere.
“You need to prepare yourself for the possibility that your family might not have made it through this,” Ted said.
Kate relaxed, blowing out a held breath. Ted wasn’t about to tell her he was going to keep her here against her will, his “roof woman” in the End Times. No, he was worried about her going all the way to Astorville to find out that her family was gone, or worse, that they had become rippers.
“I’m not saying that it’s true,” Ted continued quickly, maybe thinking he had offended her. “But it’s just a numbers thing. Look how many around here turned into rippers. E
veryone I know. It seems like only the smallest percentage were immune to whatever kind of disease this is.”
Kate felt a little bad assuming the worst about Ted. “I thought that maybe the cities were the only places that were infected. I thought maybe smaller towns, rural places . . . maybe the plague hadn’t reached them.” But as soon as she said it, she knew it wasn’t true. Just like when she’d tried to convince herself that the rippers she’d seen on her way home from the supermarket had just been drugged-out men or that their minds had snapped. But Ted was right, she needed to be realistic; the chances of anyone else in her family—or anyone in the entire town of Astorville—being immune to the plague were miniscule.
“Yes,” Ted said. “Maybe it’s possible the plague didn’t reach the smaller towns.”
“But you don’t believe it.”
“I don’t know what to believe,” he said. “I just look around at this city, how bad it’s gotten in the last few days.” He left it at that.
No helicopters. No military. No police. No help coming. And they weren’t the only city that had been affected by this plague, Kate was sure of that. This thing was all over the country. Maybe all over the world by now. But maybe the battle had been lost here—maybe there were other places where the military had gained some kind of control. Maybe camps and bunkers had been set up, sanctuaries.
She had to go west. She had to try. What else was she supposed to do? Live on this roof with Ted until they both starved to death? “I still have to try,” she told him. “If there’s the smallest chance that anyone there survived, then I have to try.”
Ted was quiet again, and she swore she saw him nod in the darkness.
“Why don’t you go with me?” she told him.
She thought Ted might be considering it, but then he said, “I’m sorry. I can’t go with you.”
“Why not? We could watch each other’s back.”
“I hope you understand,” Ted said. “I’m sorry. I just can’t go.”
But she didn’t understand. Not at all. Would he rather live on top of this roof for the rest of the days he had left?
“But I’ll help you get to a truck,” he said. “I know where there are some keys in a house across the street. I hid them in case I ever needed the vehicle.”
CHAPTER 16
Ted wanted to wait until just before dawn to leave the building. He lay down for a few hours, sleeping heavily inside his shed. Kate waited outside by the AC units, watching the sky until she saw the first signs of dawn, faint blue streaks beyond the tall buildings in the distance. She watched one of the skyscrapers, the dark tower silhouetted against the lightening morning sky.
She needed to wake Ted up. It was time to go. She was afraid he was sleeping too soundly and that he wouldn’t want to get up, but he sat up before she even got to the doorway of the shed.
“It’s almost dawn?” he asked with no grogginess in his voice.
“Yes.”
“Okay.”
Moments later Ted had his rifle over one shoulder and his duffel bag in his other hand. He told her he planned on making another run while he led her to the truck. This was the best time to do it. As long as they didn’t hear the sound of a horde coming, they should be okay. It was a tough situation, because he wanted to go out while the rippers were least active, but he wanted to wait until it was light enough to see.
They ate a quick breakfast of protein bars and drank a bottle of water each. Then they headed to the door that led to the stairwell. Kate followed Ted down the stairs, his flashlight beam lighting the way. He didn’t cup the front of it with his hand until they were on the ground floor, walking through the gigantic room with the machinery in it, dinosaur skeletons in the darkness, relics from an already distant age that would never live again.
They left the building through the same door that she had entered yesterday. Ted went out first, looking around with his rifle ready in his hands. He told Kate that he hoped to find a machine gun in one of the military vehicles as soon as he made his way deeper down the blocks. Maybe today would be that day.
The coast was clear so far. A car alarm was still blaring somewhere far off in the distance. Kate hadn’t heard it from the roof, but she could hear it down here now. Maybe someone had just set it off. The smell of smoke was still heavy in the air, an acrid smoke, almost like a chemical smell. It was cold and Kate shivered, but she was sure some of the shivering was from fear.
They darted across the street in the early-morning gloom, the sky to the east beyond the tall buildings beginning to lighten up by the minute. Kate followed Ted down the street and into the yard where her car was run up onto the lawn, looking like so many other abandoned and useless vehicles.
Kate and Ted crouched down beside her car. He held his rifle as he looked around, then he nodded at her.
She kept low as she went to the driver’s door. It wasn’t closed all the way and she eased it open to reach inside for her car keys dangling in the ignition. She could have used the button to pop the trunk, but she thought the slight thumping sound might be too loud out here in the silence. She pulled the keys out and gripped them in her hand so they wouldn’t jingle.
Then she was out of the car again. She stared at the front yard of the home she had nearly crashed into. Papers, food wrappers, and debris littered the yards and street, the cold wind blowing the trash along the street, papers scuffing the asphalt. Broken glass littered the grass from the shattered windows, jagged pieces of glass sticking up around the wood frames. The front door of the home had been kicked in, and it was halfway open right now, only darkness beyond it. She kept her eyes on that doorway, sure that someone was watching her from the darkness as she crept to the trunk of her car.
Why was she doing this? Were the clothes in her suitcase this important to her? The food in the boxes? She couldn’t carry it all. She would leave the food for Ted, give him her car keys.
He was beside her a moment later, looking over her shoulder. She was sure he was studying the goods she had in her trunk, possibly deciding if the rest of the journey to this truck was worth what she had. He nodded at her and she took her small, cloth suitcase out and closed the trunk lid as gently as she could, the latch catching and sounding amazingly loud.
They were hurrying up through the yard after that, trying to stay close to the house but away from the windows, away from the broken glass.
Ted stopped at the rear of the house, his duffel bag slung over one shoulder, his rifle in his hands. He peeked around the corner, looking around for a few seconds. Kate was right behind him, listening for any sounds. She felt exposed right here, sure that rippers in the street would spot them soon. She hoped Ted wouldn’t see any rippers, hoped he wouldn’t have to shoot. If he had to shoot, the sound of the gunshot would wake any rippers up nearby and bring them running.
A moment later, Ted hurried across the open backyard to the next lawn. The fence was torn down in some places and Ted waited by a fallen section, surveying the next lawn and the back porch of the home. More trash and debris littered the backyard in front of them, trees and shrubs providing cover for them, but also providing cover for any rippers that might be hiding.
They were across the lawn in a few minutes, trying to be quick, but also silent. The dead leaves were a little soggy from a recent drizzling of rain, so that helped a little.
Soon, they were on the next street, crossing it, and then crouching down near some bushes at the front corner of the house. Both of them were breathing heavily from their run, both of them looking around. There were some cries and screeches from the rippers, but they were pretty far off, nothing close by.
She looked at Ted, hoping that her eyes were saying: Where’s the truck?
Ted just nodded at her, his light blue eyes answering: Be patient.
And she knew she needed to be patient. She knew Ted was taking his time, moving from one hiding place to the next. This was probably how he’d spent every morning so far, slinking along in the early-morning
shadows, pacing himself, not making any noise or doing anything to attract attention. He couldn’t panic; he had to go about it slowly. She wanted to calm down and trust Ted, she was really trying to, but she could feel the panic boiling up inside of her, like a soldier under fire who should stay down, but bolts out into the firefight in panic.
Ted was moving again. They crept down the side of the home, through two more backyards until they came to a driveway where a car was parked. An SUV was parked right behind the car. The SUV was an older model Ford with maroon paint that was fading in some areas. But it was a large vehicle with tinted windows and big, meaty tires.
They crouched down together in the small space between the front of the SUV and the rear of the car, and Kate felt oddly safe in this little cubbyhole of space even though they were still outside.
“This is it,” Ted whispered, nodding at the grill of the SUV right beside him. “It’s got nearly a full tank of gas. Battery was still good last time I checked, which was two mornings ago, so it should still be good. All the windows are intact. All the tires are inflated.”
Kate nodded. She felt that panic worming through her again, not wanting to let Ted go, not wanting to be alone and driving through this nightmare world again. “Go with me,” she whispered to him, touching his arm gently. “It will be so much better away from the city.”
Ted smiled at her, and he almost looked like he felt sorry for her, pitying her naïveté.
“You could stay,” he said.
His words froze her.
“Maybe just for a while,” he said. “For a few more days, maybe.”
She shook her head no. “I have to go.”
“It’s going to be dangerous out there.”
She knew that. It was the reason she wanted him to go with her. But he had his mind set on staying, like she had her mind set on leaving, neither willing to bend to the other.
